I’m afraid I’ve not been that close a follower of the CRI&P so my apologies in advance if I am overlooking something(s) obvious-but over the course of many threads I have gathered the impression that the Rock Island, though seemingly always an also-ran, had decent routes and, until the 1964 merger application at least, a decent physical plant. Where did I come up with such a conclusion? Well…several things, any or all of which may be wrong. What I seem to recall is:
A majority of RI route miles are still intact (though not all in service). If that is correct, it suggests to me that there were economically viable routes.
The RI did considerable upgrading of it’s track and equipment in the late 30’s. If so, I don’t know what routes-to Tucumcari, Colorado Springs, Memphis, Saint Louis or Saint Paul. That tells me there was good fixed plant on those routes.
At any rate, that they were able to field Rockets to all these places says that there was competitive service on those tracks. Also, didn’t the RI invest in some new 4-8-4’s for freight service around 1938?
The CRI&P was profitable through 1964 but deteriorated rapidly thereafter. Again if so, that would suggest to me that there was still enough maintenance work being done up to that point to keep things together.
What got me thinking about this was a comment on another thread that I have not been able to find suggesting 1953 as the year the Rock Island passed a tipping point-a point of no return, as it were (RWM, was it you?). Based on my limited (mis)information above, I was curious. If things were improved in 1938 and still holding together in 1964, what was going on between those two dates to lead the RI into irreversible decline midway between the two?
Someone once said something to the effect that the problem the Rock Island had is that it usually arrived last and in the most round-about way. That is, they tended to be the third for fourth railroad to serve and area, so the most direct routes and best places for yards and such in the towns they were going to were already taken.
Here in the Twin Cities for example, they were able to find room for some freight yards but they didn’t even really make it to the cities - they had to use trackage rights to reach their yards. They had some freight customers on the west bank of the Mississippi south of St.Paul, but only a few. On paper they “served” the major market of Mpls-St.Paul, but in reality they were a minor player.
They put a push on to modernize from the 1930’s to early '50’s, adding streamliners and freight diesels, but I think by the mid-fifties they were starting to slip financially and it just kept getting worse and worse.
The Rock Island had the world’s largest fleet of 4-8-4’s, retiring the last one in 1952.
J.D. Farrington’s Rock Island invested heavily in the physical plant after WWII, including several expensive realignments. They also built the massive “Sampson of the Cimarron” bridge on the Tucumcari line. 1949 marked the year Kelly Yard (hump/classification) at Silvis (Carbon Cliff) opened. It was very state of the art for the time. The old classification yard at Silvis then became mainly a receiving yard. Seems money wasn’t a problem back then.
In the 1950’s, the Rockets used to blast through Illinois at the state-imposed speed limit of 90mph, but the track at this time could reportedly handle passenger trains up to 120mph.
Indeed, the Rock Island’s major routes remain extant to this day. The biggest exceptions would be the Memphis-Tucumcari line, which only exists in pieces (BNSF would have loved that line today) and the line west from Council Bluffs, IA, to Colorado, which only exists in pieces.
The line from Kansas City to St. Louis is mostly unused, but not officially abandoned. The line from Limon to Colorado Springs is gone. The old BCR&N main from Cedar Rapids, IA to Burlington is gone. The line between Ainsworth, IA and Allerton is gone, but closely parallels the old Milwaukee line still in use today.
The Rock Island had some superior routes. Kansas City to St. Paul is one example. They also had a superior route across Iowa. But once they decided to let the physical plant decay, anticipating a U.P merger, it became economically impossible to bring these lines back with the Rock’s lack of cash flow in the 70’s. The bad track led to less money, and it snowballed. ‘An ounce of prevention’ should have been their motto. The strikes didn’t help. I remember it seemed like the Rock Island was always on stri
There are a couple of excellent articles on the Rock Island that come to mind. About three years ago there was a Trains article (cover article) called Fast Train. That was an excellent overview of the Chicago - Omaha and beyond mainline, as seen by their premier fast train, an auto parts hotshot. A second article, perhaps by the same author dealt with the operation at Culver Tower in Muscatine, Iowa. This was in a special issue in 1985 that dealt with the state of Iowa.
I am no expert on the Rock Island (actually not an expert on anything, but i do like trains) but it sure seems to me that the RI’s problems was they simply didnt have a footing on any solid traffic patterns. Some of their lines were strategic (Chicago - Omaha, Chicago/Memphis - Tucumcari) but they faced big competition and seemed to miss on originating much traffic. There didnt seem to be much in the way of minerals or coal and grain was seasonal.
There were 7 routes to Omaha in the mid 60’s and UP’s decision not to merge was a disasterous turn of events to a very promising proposal ten years gone.
If you come to town on rights, access to existing rail users is not easily obtained.
I have heard claims that in the 1970’s, Muscatine, IA provided more orginating Rock Island industrial tonnage than anywhere outside of Chicago. A lot of this was probably processed agricultural products. I can not verify the claim.
One long dead Rock Island employee who remembered the Reid Moore Syndicate laid a lot of the blame on them.
Some odds and ends: Years ago TRAINS had an article about RI’s fleet of 4-8-4’s. The decision to buy them seemed questionable to me, because at the time of the purchase many of the road’s bridges couldn’t support the 4-8-4’s. Some of these were strengthened later.
The RI suffered greatly from control by the Reid-Moore (I think) syndicate from about 1916 to about 1930. This group of vultures bled the RR white by taking the profits for other things and not keeping up the physical plant. When it finally escaped control by the syndicate, RI had a lot of catching up to do. There was a TRAINS article about this too, not as long ago as the one about the 4-8-4’s.
The Santa Fe considered buying the Choctaw Route (Amarillo, I think, to Memphis) at the time of the RI quitting, but needed Government money to make it happen. The money wasn’t forthcoming, so the line moldered. Personally wished the sale had gone thru, since I lived near the line (central Arkansas) from 11/82 to 9/89.
As always, corrections and additional info welcome.
Interesting. I would have guessed something like the DRGW. They must have been turning some kind of profit on the narrow gauge tourist stuff, right? Otherwise, why did they wait so long to sell the D&S and C&TS lines and abandon the rest?
When you look to see what happened to a railway, good or bad, look first to the traffic. For a granger, that consisted of coal, animals and animal products, grain, merchandise, and overhead business such as lumber, autos and autoparts, merchandise, and perishables.
Coal left first. Rock Island and all the other grangers until post WWII had a great coal business, from mines in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Indiana, to myriad points on their systems as well as to industrial centers such as Chicago. But with the loss of market to natural gas for home and commercial heating, substantial efficiency increases in industrial coal consumption, as well as their own conversion to diesel, the coal traffic dried up. Utilities in the granger territory did not become major consumers of rail-hauled coal un
First, leave out the C&TS. The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad wasn’t a passenger service until the states of Colorado & New Mexico created one in 1971. Regular passenger service from Alamosa to Durango ended in 1951. The last excursion operated in 1966, with abandonment filed in 1967, and sale to the states of the Antonito-Chama portion in 1970.
I think the annual reports would show a loss on the Silverton service up to sale in 1981 (and they’re in a box somewhere), but on purely a cash-flow basis, not including depreciation, I think the Silverton service at least wasn’t losing much money. The service lasted late for a combination of reasons. Most important, it gave the Rio Grande a political chip in its regular dealings with the Colorado PUC and Colorado politicians, who were loath to see something that generated tourism and inflow of dollars to the state in an area that economically was depressed following the decline of mining. That in turn gave the Rio Grande things it wanted, such as less costly regulation on its core rail and truck freight business. It was also good tourism marketing for the state as a whole, and Colorado was, and remains, a early and very successful practicioner of tourism; losing the Silverton was not something a successful politician could ignore. Second, the Rio Grande had a lot of closet (and not-so-closet) railfans working for it such as Jackson Thode, and they found creat
The concentration of meat production in mega plants located far from the population centers on the coasts should have been favorable to rail movement. These facilities produce a large, steady volume of product that isn’t all that difficult to transport. (Yes, California has some beef slaughter capacity. But its two “Major” plants are relatively small; on the order of 1,800 head per day each. Combined, that’s less than half the capacity of one mega plant in Kansas or Texas.)
The product is not shipped directly to grocery stores. It goes through distribution centers that break down full truckloads into
I’ve never completely understood how it worked, but Amtrak was designed to take over passenger trains of railroads that were losing money, so there was some deal that if a railroad’s passenger trains were making money, they had to pay a fee to the government or something to get Amtrak to take them over. Since the Rock Island had some lines that made money (I’m guessing the Chicago commuter lines for example?) it worked out that the money they would have owed Amtrak was more than what it would cost to keep running the trains. So they kept running them while petitioning the ICC to let them abandon the trains, since I guess if ICC allowed you to abandon the train, you didn’t have to pay if Amtrak decided to take the train over.
My understanding is that RI stayed out of Amtrak because it couldn’t afford the entrance fee, based on losses suffered in 1970. That year the Rock still ran, in addition to the 2 Illinois runs that lasted another decade, an unnamed Chicago-Council Bluffs day train that connected @ Des Moines (both trains, both ways) with the Twin Cities-Kansas City “Plainsman”, a remnant of the Twin Star Rocket. These trains lost their mail contracts, and a lot of money, prior to their discontinuance. The 2nd Peoria Rocket, which ran on an opposite schedule, may have lasted long enough to hurt, too. Commuter losses were not figured into the Amtrak entrance fee.
That’s correct. A railroad that wanted to join Amtrak had to pay 2 years (if I recall correctly, or perhaps it was 3) of the losses it would have incurred otherwise. Rock Island decided it was cheaper to continue to run its two trains on a cash-flow basis (perhaps it had been overstating its losses by loading it up with amortization?) or perhaps it simply didn’t have the cash at all. D&RGW decided that the operating loss of continuing to run its one train was less than the loss of fluidity it would have on its main line, and was put out that Amtrak picked its limited-capacity railroad to run over rather than UP which had plenty of capacity.
Actually, this was the result of one of the first “de-regulation” initiatives. The trucking industry managed to have the ICC’s Exempt Commodity Provisions, by which ICC would allow certain commodities to be subject to unregulated carrier charges, extended in 1953 to a variety of non-farm items. In particular, this included processed and packaged meat.
The “Iowa” railroads suffered disproportionately and, along with coal, the loss of the packing house business can be seen as part of a process of the gradual weakening of Midwest railroads; partly from changes in the US economy as it related to coal, and partly – and ironically – a result of a partial deregulation. By the end of 1958, MOW budgets began their long declines.
The Milwaukee Road, which had more packing houses on its lines than any other railroad in the country, lost, for instance, in the two year period of 1954 to 1956, nearly 81% of its packing house traffic between the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, while trucking traffic in that commodity increased several hundred times.
The “modern, efficient” packinghouses that sprung up were the result of deregulation of rates, no
The article in the 1985 Trains about Culver Tower in Muscatine made the claim of Musky being the biggest shipper on the RI line. If you have ever been to Muscatine, you will find it was and is a very interesting small city with a very large Fortune 500 company (Hon Industries), an ex Fortune 500 company (Bandag) and a private company which is a ag processor (name escapes me, but they also had a division called Kent Feeds).
In addition there was some sand mining done near the river.
During the traveling days, it was one of my favorite communities to visit. I still get there about once per year, always stopping to eat a tenderloin sandwitch.
Somewhere I have a book or magazine article that discusses why RI stayed out of Amtrak. The RI had enjoyed some success in removing trains. The Chicago-Council Bluffs and Twin Cities-Kansas City trains were gone by mid 1970. IIRC, they decided the losses incurred on the remaining Peoria and Quad Cities trains was less than the cost of joining Amtrak. Especially since scarce cash was needed elsewhere.
The remaining trains lasted as long as they did (end of 1978) because Illinois subsidized their operation. When the subsidy ended, so did the trains.
During expansion in the late 1800’s, the leadership in charge decided not to acquire lands for industrial development. It was thought that they would let other railroads do the industry switching and that carloads would be interchanged to the RI for line haul. I think this came back to haunt later operations.
The Reid-Moore Syndicate acquired control of the RI on Jan. 1, 1902 and continued until 1915. This was when the RI entered it’s first bankruptcy.
One source states that during the R-M Syndicate’s years of control over $20 million dollars was diverted from the RI for other purposes and funded debt increased from $64 million to $235 million, with an increase in interest expense from $3 million to $10 million.
One reason that the RI bought more 4-8-4s than really needed before more routes were upgraded was that Charles Hayden was on both the RI and ALCO’s board of directors.
Back in the early 1980s after the RI quit and the MILW had reduced to it’s core system, the MILW picked up a lot of RI business in the Quad Cities, Muscatine, and for a while pre IAIS, the line to Iowa City, IA. The agent at Durant, Iowa (In 3 years he worked for 3 different railroads out of the same depot.) told me a person out of the MILW’s traffic department had stopped by. The man had said he couldn’t understand how the RI could’ve gone bankrupt. At that time, half the MILW’s revenue for the remaining core system was coming out of the Quad Cities-Muscatine-Iowa City triangle. Now some 20+ years later, I couldn’t say if that area still provides as much business to the IAIS and ICE.