Can you really hate other railroads? I think you can’t. I think you can’t because what did they do? I know railroads buy up other railroads, but you should be cheering for them. I don’t hate any other railroad because WC is gone and it has no other competors. So what’s to hate? I don’t hate CN for buying them because they bought them and you should at least cheer for them. I also wouldn’t hate a railroad of competing for another railroad. It just makes more interesting. So can you really hate other railroads?
I agree with you - no one can hate a Railroad. I mean do you hate the tracks or the engines? That’s just impossible.
Maybe you could hate the business practice of a Railroad but then you focus more on the Managment and not the whole RR.
However today the word hate is used a lot and sometimes just slips out like “I hate that paint scheme” or similar stuff but I don’t think they really hate it. They simply dislike it.
I hate Chessie the Knife.
Images courtesy Jeremy Cooper’s Western Maryland Railway’s West Sub website.
After they took over the WM’s plant and operations, it didn’t take them long to drive it into the ground. And I’m not just talking as an embittered railfan. I personally know people who worked for the WM for decades, and watched in horror as everything they believed in was pulled out from under them.
Lee
Now that I got to agree a little with. Said to see your friends lose a job.
I have to admit that when UP took over SP in my area, they began promising a whole bunch of things that so far had not taken place–such as resuscitating the Donner Pass (ex-SP) route as the central transcon into Northern California.
But less than a month ago, the American River trestle burned down, just about severing UP’s Northern California connections with the rest of the US. UP came in, rebuilt the wooden trestle with steel and concrete in record time, about two weeks.
Now I understand that traffic over the Donner Pass line has increased, taking the pressure off of UP’s ex-WP single-track longer and slower Feather River route. They’ve eliminated grade crossings in Reno by digging a double-track trench, and there’s rumors of impending re-laying of double track between Sacramento and Truckee on the original SP line.
So, okay, UP gray and yellow just doesn’t look RIGHT up there against the granite and tall trees of the Sierra like SP’s “Bloody Nose”, “Black Widows” and AC’s did, when I was younger, but the trains are running, and that’s all to the good.
Now if UP could just find some excuse to re-open Tennessee Pass in Colorado, I’d be a pretty happy camper. I know, I know, NOBODY likes a 3% grade, so I don’t need a lecture on that, but it seemed to work pretty well for a long, long time.
Tom
Yes, I certainly can hate railroads: jfugate’s Siskiyou, Dave Vollmer’s PRR sub, Art’s, Mr. B’s, Mouse’s, Jon Grant’s, Jeffrey’s, Aggro’s, the list goes on an on…
Oh…wait, you meant…oh, ummm…[:I]
Selector:
STOP THAT! We’re talking about REAL railroads!
Or at least, from your post, railroads that OUGHT to be real, LOL!
Tom
It’s funny that this came up today, because it’s a subject that has been on my mind since my roadtrip yesterday. I’ve always “had it in for” the N&W for the way they let the old Wabash line through my home town deteriorate…and also for the Chessie system and subsequently for CSX for their part in “sanitizing” what was the old B&O through my old town.
What brought this up for me was CSX’s refusal to sell the old B&O depot to the historical society, and instead let it decay. Last year it was burned and had to be demolished. Many feel that CSX may have had a hand in it’s firey demise. That’s probably just so much bitter conspiracy theory, but over the weekend I heard specualtion from more than one along the lines it was burned to get the historical society off their backs. The speculated reason is that they did not want the liability of having a structure they didn’t own so close to their tracks.
Hate is such a strong word. I can’t say that I hate any railroad. I dislike how plain most of them are though. I look forward to manifest freights, grain trains are fine, double stacks okay, coal trains not so much. I also dislike some of the management practices but some seem to be at least trying to spruce things up a bit.
Rick
Sure I can!!
It’s called CN. [:D][}:)][:(!]
Long live Canadian Pacific [bow]
Gordon
I can’t stand Amtrak. I try to like it, but they’re just so stupid.
Don’t be too quick to ‘hate.’ It’s a strong emotion that clouds judgement and burns energy better expended in more productive ways.
As for ‘hating’ railroads:
- I may think that the actions of some managers are of questionable intelligence.
- I may wonder if some employees ever heard of customer relations.
- I might suspect that people who don’t like the next-door rails weren’t paying attention when the realtor showed them the house.
Asking if I ‘hate’ any particular railroad is rather like asking this (happily married) human male if I hate any particular woman. Not without compelling reason - and in seventy years, only one ever got over that threshhold. (No, not the wonderful lady I’m married to!) No railroad has even come close.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Does this answer your question?
The Penn Central had a lot to hate about it. The era was the worst in the history of American Railroading, and the PC was (until Enron) the largest American business failure in history. There was serious talk about nationalizing all railroads starting with the PC, not just passenger service. Their equipment was painted in watercolor black (right over the rust) that washed off in the rain, and they dispatched a half dozen locos so that hopefully a couple were still running by the time it got to the end of the trip. The PC railroad “bulls” (ie, RR cops) were notiously ill-tempered. They were hemoraging $1 million a day in debts. The weeds on the NEC (where the Acela now travels at 150mph) were knee high, and they were talking about single tracking the NEC east of New Haven, CT. The PC had many standing derailments, where the rail simply spread out from under freight cars because the ties were so rotted. The PC was anti-preservation, as there was someone who wanted to preserve the very last DL109 (Jim Bradley)…but the PC cut it up rather than sell it to him (even tho’ the NH was willing to sell it). They also took all the NH documents that were in the basement of South Station in Boston (some dating back to the mid-1800’s) and tossed them in the dump. I have also heard how non-NH PC employees would go around the NH territory and clean out old stations and towers of antiques and sell them for personal profit. They also allowed the Poughkeepsie bridge to burn by removing the fire barrels and cutting the stand pipe, which allowed them to abandon the Maybrook freight route and do in the L&HR. PC also tried to abandon the Providence & Worcester, which led to their successful break away and independant operation today. And there’s many a tale I
I don’t actually hate any railroad, but have to admit that I do have a bit of a grudge against Union Pacific for absorbing Southern Pacific… Otherwise, I’d rather just say that there are roads I have no business trying to model because they’re not from my part of the country. But then that’s not totally true either because I model the Norfolk & Western 4-8-4 J as a freighter. And if I could get my hands on a Nickel Plate Road Berkshire and caboose I’d model them too…
Tracklayer
I don’t hate any railroads past or present. The only people I would say are qualified to express any ill feelings towards any railroad would be anyone who actually may have worked (works) for real railroads, or was financially affected by any merger or closing or a RR company. Everyone else (myself included) should just enjoy the hobby and let real railroads do their thing. Does it really matter if UP took up SP, or that X RR company didn’t keep up the lines of Y RR company? These things happend and are done with, why does it bother the general public so much? I don’t own stock in any rairoad, so if a RR company vanishes, oh well, maybe they should have done business differently. This reminds me of those people that say that they hate so and so team from some other city they’ve never been to or know anything about because they beat their home team. Or those that say they hate diesel because it phased out steam. Oh well.
If I stepped on some toes, didn’t mean to, but I just had to say what I said.
[2c]
Ditto. I agree. if we don’t like a certain railroad, big deal. we can always model history the way it could have been. for example, on my late 60’s layout, the CGW is alive and well, and not part of the C&NW.
I think there can be a rough time when railroads merge, or one railroad takes over another. I know in my area the BN merger wasn’t very popular, with the loss overnight of GN, NP and CB&Q. Because of layoffs and cutbacks, “Big Nasty” wasn’t all that popular with the employees either I guess. But in time people started to be OK with BN, and even like it, and now that BN is a “Fallen Flag” there’s even kind of a nostalgia for it.
It wasn’t just the loss of some jobs. The people I was acquainted with were operations guys and on the sales force. When they got “assimilated” over to Charles Street, they had to check their creativity, innovation and ethics at the door. After years of beating the B&O and PRR at their own game, now they had to spend their time apologizing to their customers for lousy service, beat up equipment, and damaged shipments.
From a railfan’s standpoint, they added insult to injury by replacing a sharp looking railroad with a stupid cat and a paint scheme only the disco era could love.
CSX/Chessie burn down a depot? Nah. It’s just a coincidence that WM depots at Owings Mills and Hancock, MD and the roundhouse at Elkins “accidentally” were destroyed by fire. And it was simply a matter of bad timing that the entire shop facility at Hagerstown was torn down in 2000 even though there was an active group raising funds to preserve them as a regional railroad historical attraction.
Chessie the Knife… If only the N&W could have gotten the WM’s right of way… there’d still be trains running into Port Covington… instead of a Wal Mart parking lot. Feh.
“…and nothing was left but some hooks and some wire…”
Lee
To paraphrase a popular bumper sticker:
“I love [your favorite railroad here], but I fear/hate its management”
Seems to me that from a railfan standpoint, you can question the motives of upper managment and strongly dislike/disagree with their decisions, but at trackside, it’s hard to have anything but respect for the crews (and many of the mid-level management) who usually are working their butts off. And, no matter its paint scheme, there’s always something exciting about the locomotives and rolling stock. After all, any train is better than no train.
Of course, this assumes that there’s something left. Purgatory should have two divisions for railroad upper management. One for those managers who had to abandon one route in favor of another, in the best interest (as they perceived it) of keeping the whole railroad in business. The lowest pit of hell should be reserved for those managers who let the whole thing go to blazes (as in Milwaukee Road and possibly Rock Island) in the name of the almighty dollar.
Tom
I always enjoy listening to CSX complaining about it’s capacity problems in the northeast when right across the river from the old B&O is the line with the shortest distance between the midwest and tidewater, the easiest grades over the Alleghenies, and the best clearances for over-sized shipments. Of course, the only traffic on that line now is provided by bicycles…[|(]
Lee