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February 2016
magazine sounds excellent as usual…welded rail who would have thought it.
What a way to ruin my Holiday Cheer today with the preview of the forthcoming February issue with the map of Seaboard Coast Line. Make’s a grown man cry to see all the track that has been lifted in Florida. The “Service Customer’s Like” slogan painted on box cars shifted to “The Public Be Damned” instead. Still, sounds like a great issue otherwise!
HAPPY NEW YEAR Jim!
I have watched the progress on the il high speed rail here in the Pontiac area. the new tech is amazing up is doing a great job in partnership with Amtrak and state.
Wa e all know what happened to the Seaboard Coast Line,vital points in Virginia & North Carolina were severely cut from the rest of the system.It was a sad time when the tracks were taken up from Petersburg,Va to Raleigh.I hope I don’t cry when I see the map.Also anxious to here about another mega-merger of two Class1 Titans.CP is looking to take over the US.
Looks like another great issue!
SCL map: My 1st ‘real’ job after college in 1972 was with SCL as a trainee then filling in for General Yardmasters at Portsmouth and Uceta. That led me into coordinating yard and ramp functions and computerizing yard operations before I was cut loose upon the merger with Chessie. Although that was several years after the merger they were still trying to consolidate ACL and SAL operations. Even later viewing CSX as an ‘outsider’ it always seemed decisions were made from a short-sighted perspective, always ripping out ‘redundant’ main lines during cyclical traffic declines to save a few maintenance bucks. Of course when traffic increased, congestion became intolerable to the point of losing major customers like UPS. Even in mediocre economic times, traffic could have been segregated between parallel routes by speed and tonnage; slow grain trains and fast intermodals don’t usually play nicely together. In my opinion one of the big mistakes in railroading was the readiness of regulatory agencies to approve mergers of parallel railways as opposed to end-to-end mergers. That cost the US a reduction of competition in the market and the loss of route infrastructure which could accommodate traffic increases in good times.
The Rocky Mountaineer story and its success reinforces that the allure of train travel is as strong as ever. This operation and those scenic operators in the US Rockies and Appalachian regions should give pause and serve as an inspiration to NYS that has proposed to pull up rails in one of the most scenic and world renown destinations in the Adirondacks. Tourism is a sustaining life blood in this six million acre park created and protected by the State Constitution. The existing rail infrastructure defines a travel corridor that connects with AMTRAK and today reaches Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, the two largest communities inside the Park. The rail infrastructure is on the state and national historic registers. A proposal has been created to rip up an operating section of the line (26 percent of the trackage) to create a “multiuse trail” – that essentially will be a high speed corridor for snowmobiles – that already have unique access to the corridor during winter months.
Thanks to Jim Winn and his team for creating great issues that showcase this important industry’s challenges and solutions. Having spent almost a decade with CN in the 80s, I look forward to each issue as a reminder of one of the best times in my business career.
Mr. Burton: Great observation about SCL. My late best friend of 44 years (RIP) and myself came up with a plan after SCL was created to construct a new yard north of Tampa on the ACL Ocala Division (now the industrial track now known as Nevy Spur with what was once the Gary “Y” tower, that is still used by Amtrak to back into Tampa Union Station), then lift both Uceta (ACL) and Yeoman (SAL), developing the land for a new rail served industrial park. Alas, the new management couldn’t tell the difference between the motive power and the caboose, or what was in between, so probably no one even considered the advantage of such an undertaking.
With so much track lifted in Florida, including the Ocala Division and famous Perry Cut-Off, both which were part of ACL, as well as SAL’s line north of Brooksville, they enabled trains to run north out of Tampa. Now with all trains required to run east to Plant City and Lakeland, must make a long detour, costing milage and manpower, for traffic to the Mid-West and West, it is no wonder the truckers cashed in on moving motor freight from the Tampa Bay/West Gulf Coast region of the Sunshine State! Sadly, lots of rail remained in place that didn’t get lifted, rusting away as a rememberance of what was once track that served many a customer, who was forced to tuen to the rubber tire instead of the steel rail!
The July 1, 1967 merger is why I returned to my native Texas and hired out with Cotton Belt after my discharge from the US Army Transportation Corps instead of trying my luck in Florida with SCL or FEC. SCL had wiped out two great railroads in Tampa where I had lived with my parents when I graduated from high school in 1964, and the nasty relations between the FEC and unions made it all but impossible to even consider hiring out with them.
The greater Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex still hosted so many railroads I had a choice which one to hire out on. This even included the industrial Great Southwest RR between D and
Mr. Worthy: Comparing the SCL map to CSX today is enough to make any grown man cry! Regarding the Canadian Pacific 21st Century invasion of the US: When will all of this Mega.Merger Madness end?
Item: I purchase Trains, THE Magazine of Railroading, off the newsstand at Deutsche Bahn’s Nuremberg train station here in Germany. I don’t save any $$$ by subscribing to Trains, due to the unfair unrealistic foreign postal rates Kalmbach is forced to charge and pass on to me, as a result of the USPS elimination of printed paper rates. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about receiving a damaged magazine or the frustation when one is lost in international mail.
When I was a subscriber and I received a severly damaged or lost a copy of Trains, a phone call to Kalmbach’s Customer Service girls, who are the BEST in the business!!!, ALWAYS replaced the magazine for free at Kalmbach’s expense, receiving absolutely zero compensation from the grossly mismanaged USPS who was responsible! Indeed, USPS is a modern day Robber Barron corporation, sadly, not unlike many elected “By the People” politicians who function in a non-functioning job in Washington, D.C. There are a few hard working exceptions of course! They know who they are, support Amtrak, and other sound transportation issues in the US as well. Thank you gentlemen!