Ha! found another video. Some decent shots every now and then but not a lot.
Interesting scenes. The Milwaukee sure looked prosperous in the steam days…plenty of blocks of cars and whole trains on numerous tracks.
Wonder at which point it started to go to pieces…'57? mid 60’s?..by the mid 70’s it was in obvious serious decline yet new markets arrive but zero cash. Dumb move cutting the electrification, great timing too…just as copper prices plunge and the oil crisis starts. Too many shenanigans going on at head office. Maybe took their cues from the crooks at Penn Central. CMSt.P&P should still be with us today.
Nice memories in the film though…turn the sound off.
Milwaukee gets this Canucks vote for All American Railroad winner.
They had it all…big city, prairie grainger, intercity high speed, commuter, northern resources, west coast, mountains, transcontinental, fierce indedependence, loyal employees, their own very special look.
Saw plenty of whats been left behind this summer of the Milwaukee as I traveled the US West…imagined and envisioned. The essence still lingers and can be felt, but it is, unbelievably, gone.
In my view the cast was set with the cost overruns of the Pacific Coast Extension. The Milwaukee took the cheap way out in a lot of cases to get the line built but the biggest thing that hurt them was the cost and the overall debt this placed on the books. Because the PCE was built so late in the game most of the land was not land grant but was purchased private land driving up costs but the overall cost of construction that went to debt on the books (going off the top of my head here so probably not an exact figure): $250-300 million which was an astronomical sum back in the early 1900’s. I believe the original cost estimate of the PCE was 10-20% of that amount.
Right here we get to the crux of the matter. What is the Bankruptcy Trustees role…is it to attempt to ensure survivability of the business, in which case most if not all the PCE debt should have been marked down to zero OR is it an attempt to get the most for the creditors of the railroad, protecting them as much as possible. My guess is the role is somewhere in between. So the PCE debt I don’t think was marked down all that much until the final 1977 bankruptcy. Was management to blame for that or the bankruptcy trustee? Not sure but management should have at lease pushed hard to get as much of that debt discharged as they could making the arguement about cost overruns. However, for whatever reason they never made that case to the first bankrupcy trustee after the PCE was built.
Now had they signed a lot of traffic to carry over the new route that expense would have faded to the background but there wasn’t any real large source of traffic to carry from Washington State to the Midwest and back and there were two other railroads it was competing against for the minimal traffic. Four if you include CP and CN
C&NW + Milw almost happened a couple of times and fell apart at the last minute. Personally I’m not in favour of consoldation type mergers rather preferring end to end mergers.
Speculation of course but Milw + Rock Island + NYC. Now you have one heck of a railroad, investors might like the long haul and money pours in to fix and rationalize. SP connections NW and SW…excellent.
Possibilty electrify the CASO. Wow. Maybe the whole route eventually Chicago- Buffalo via Canada Southern. Then the whole thing itself.
Dream on. It’s fun to think about things like that but from an investors view and todays operations it would have been ahead of it’s time.
I heard they planned the Pacific Coast Extension thinking the Panama Canal was not happening, but then by the time they completed the line, the Canal was actuall going to be built.
Much is made that the MILW’s first bankruptcy in the 1920s was because of the PCE construction and the electrification, especially the later Coast Division project. I think people overlook the MILW was spending money on other parts of the system in the 1910 era. They straightened out and double tracked most of the Iowa Division in anticipation of getting more traffic from the UP at Council Bluffs. This never materialized and by the 1930s they started single tracking the line. A process that continued into the 1970s.
At least you can’t say they weren’t optimistic about the future of their company.
Jeff
They rebuilt the Southwestern Line West of Sturtevant and went to heavy rail and steel bridges because they thought opening of the St Larence Seaway was going to be a boom to Great Lakes traffic at the Eastern ports in Wisconsin, especially the port of Milwaukee…that turned out to be a waste as well.