Does anyone know why the former B&O mainline across West Virginia west of Grafton was abandoned? It seems to me that this could have possibly been an important line.
How is CSX handling hot freight and intermodal shipments from the Baltimore/Washington area to St Louis? Seems to me like they would have to transverse a rather circuitous routing.
Is this because this current routing avoids mountains so that it has very nearly the same running time in spite of the fact that’s it’s much longer? Or, has CSX simply given up on that market?
A short section at the western end of the line east of St Louis has also been closed although the last I knew the rails were still in place.
How many more lines like this do we have to lose?
Regards,
Fred M. Cain
Grafton - Parkersburg was closed because of clearance issues and a lack of on line traffic. While the line did have a clearance project undertaken on its many tunnels in the 1960’s those projects cleared the line to approximately 17’6" standards - it was undertaken at a time when double stacked containers as a form of rail transportation was not even a pipedream. CSX came into existance in 1980 and shortly thereafter, visionaries, could see the use of double stacking of containers as well as the enclosing of automobile racks - both of which would seriously exceed the 17’6" clearance plate. It was determined that the necessary clearance project to handle the traffic on the line would not be cost effective and subsequently operational plans were made to allow the route to be abandoned.
I might add that as early as the late 1940’s the B&O determined there wasn’t sufficient passenger traffic to support a dedicated Baltimore - Cincinnati train (The Cincinnatian). Passengers on a line (at that time) foretold the level of freight traffic the line could generate.
Thanks for your response and the information. I now know more than I did before. However, I’m still not understanding how they’re shipping double stacks from the Washington D.C. area to St Louis. My guess is they’re sending them up Sand Patch to Pittsburgh then on up to the Akron area then west to near Greenwich, OH where the former Conrail line is intersected then back down to Indy and on west from there. That is not a direct route by any means. It’s hard for me to understand how competitive that can be with over-the-road trucking.
OR, they could still send trains west through Grafton, Clarksburg, Parkersburg then down to Huntington and then back up to Cinncinati, but that’s REALLY winding around and would probably take even longer and I’m not sure they’d have the clearance on those routes anyhow.
It also kinda looks to me like the former B&O mainline has either been abandoned, sold to short line operators or some combination thereof in eastern Ohio east of Cinncy. Is that right? Has all the right of way now been completely obliterated or has most of it been “rail banked”?
Bean counters and line drawers have very different views of the railroads and how to conduct business.
Industry really doesn’t care that route A is a day quicker than route B (especially if railroad cars are being used). What they care about is that their switch happens ‘On Time’ daily and whatever the transit times for their shipment are - that shipment time is consistent.
I don’t necessarily agree with the bean counters, however, at the top levels of the company they are in possession of more hard facts than I am. I have
Good thoughts, there. One thing that I have never agreed with is the idea that when a line is deemed unprofitable, the thing to do is to abandon it and pull the tracks up. I think there are a number of cases where railroads have burned their bridges behing them by doing that. I have always believed that a better approach would be to simply mothball the line as the Union Pacific has done with their Wellton line in Arizona (possibly Tennesse Pass as well).
Do property taxes play a roll in this? If so, that would make sense. High taxes discourage investment and if taxes are punitive enough they actually ENCOURAGE disinvestment.
Now, if the Ex-B&O mainline were mothballed, CSX might consider considering taking a second look at higher tunnel clearances. But, with the tracks gone…
Sad, sad, sad. Who else said that in capital letters?
The grades between Cumberland and Grafton are more severe than between Cumberland and Connellsville over Sand Patch.
In some cases, when a right of way is ABANDONED, the railroad no longer retains title to the property the track was constructed upon. Once the rails are gone - they are gone forever.
Another thing to consider is that with the big downturn in coal mining, there isn’t anywhere as much online business and there wouldn’t be enough bridge traffic to maintain it.
CSX kept the lines out of Grafton that supported coal mines. Those that did not support mines were either abandoned or turned over to short line operators.
I’m not sure that the Parkersburg to Cincinnatti B&O main ran through Huntington, did it?
What I have discovered since I started this thread was that the former B&O mainline across southeastern Ohio is mostly intact as either a rail trail, planned rail trails or shortline railroad operations.
The biggest exception to this is in the town of Athens, Ohio. The B&O mainline went right smack dab through downtown Athens and since the rails were removed in the 1980s, much of the town of Athens has been completely redeveloped. This is a sad loss that probably cannot be replaced now.
Why do railroads have to abandon and remove once important rail lines? Why can’t they just mothball them if they believe they are not longer profitable? Is it that they get so much money from the scrap value of the line?
The CSX Ohio River Subdivision runs from Wheeling through Parkersburg to Guyandotte, a few miles East of Huntington where it connects with the Kanawha Subdivision that does terminate in Huntington. This line was never the Main Line to St. Louis.
Part of the decision process that goes into outright abandonment of trackage is the property tax
Principal reason is likely tax. Secondary might be insurance or other potential-liability cost.
Whether they take up or leave the track is probably a matter of opportunity cost, not just whether traffic might pick up in future.
One of the fundamental principles of ‘railbanking’ was to preserve end-to-end integrity of a given route if track was lifted. There is a very sad cautionary tale in the history of the Lackawanna Cutoff; hopefully there won’t soon be another in the Adirondacks.
Not even remotely. If I remember correctly Huntington (which was much more of a C&O town) was near the end of a line that ran south out of Parkersburg.
Ah, yeah, tax! That’s what I was wondering. What can be done about that? It is generally known that high taxes discourage investment and if those taxes are punitive enough they actually ENCOURAGE disinvestment.
States and counties that do this are their own worst enemy in a way. If the line disappears, they probably lose some if not most of their tax on the rail line and lose ALL of their local rail freight service. That’s what you call a lose-lose proposition.
I have long believed that railroads and farmers should be exempt from property tax but that’s a political question that depends entirely on your point of view.
And now, to drive off topic here, exactly WHAT is the current status of the Lackawanna cutoff? Rail restoration on this line has been on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again and back on again. Is it now off again?
Methinks the taxing authorities saw/see the railroads as a cash cow - a place they could tax as high as possible with little pushback.
I went through our county tax rolls a while back and figured out what the taxes were on the CSX line through here. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what the number was.
I seem to recall that there is a certain amount of regulation of those tax rates, and that the method of collection is a bit convoluted.
Apparently all the heavy lifting on getting to the point track could be restored has been done; there was in fact an estimate from early 2020, lost in the pandemic shuffle, that put the cost of restoration all the way into Scranton at under $300 million (this of course not involving the stations and other improvements I referred to earlier.
My understanding was that most of what was holding things on the first section up was local: fun with the ‘new’ station in Andover; fun with repairing Roseville Tunnel; fun with Indiana bat habitat half the year. I suspect some of the problems could be relieved if a higher priority – for example multi-state, Amtrak-subsidized funding – were to be secured and somewhat more agile project management initiated.
Since much of the original NJT MOS project hinged on the Andover improvements, the critical path stayed long. As soon as there is support for through operation most of that ceases to be a concern, and work in Roseville Tunnel before ‘bat season’ starts April Fool’s Day then becomes the main concern in that section (I get the impression this was a contract to have been let already but coronavirus concerns temporarily shelved it.)
I have not gone through the economics of using more than one TLS simultaneously; my thought on this being that renovation of the 50-odd miles to Scranton could be handled by different track equipment. One concern is that dual-mode power is really required on these trains; while it might be fun to electrify to Scranton, there’s no real economic point even at projectable use figures in doing so when much more interesting alternatives already exist.