Deferred Maintenance starts with not paying or hiring employees to do the maintenance.
If no one can see or repair the decaying structure, then is it actually decaying?
Please. The reason that the federal government got so involved in railroad operation was because of people like Jim Fisk and Cornelius Vanderbilt. No one is going to react well to a railroad president saying “The public be damned.” That’s the kind of publicity robber barons got in the so called “good old days”.
Politicians are elected to represent people, not corporations. When they hit on a hot political issue that people can relate to, they will run with it. It doesn’t have to make sense. The US Air Force in Glendale, Arizona found out the hard way that people don’t agree with fighter jets screaming over their house at 7:30 AM. It might have been the “sound of freedom” to a few, but to the majority of folks, it was a source of anger. It didn’t matter to them that they had built houses within earshot of an active runway… all they knew was that a bunch of arrogant Tom Cruise trigger happy kids were waking them up at all hours of the day and night. Did politicians get involved? You bet… even Barry Goldwater, may he rest in peace, realized that voters respond better if they believe their representative is doing something that benefits them.
Is it an election scam to get votes based on people’s fear? Sure it is. That rusty old bridge down the street might be structurally sound, but if a politician points it out as unsafe, people tend to believe him, not the railroad. If I have spent a large portion of my paycheck making payments on a house, I don’t care if the railroad is making more money by raising speed limits; I do care if there’s a good possibility that the chlorine car rolling over the rusty bridge is going to cause me to think about the fastest evacuation route out of the neighborhood. If my local politician says he’s going to make it easier for me to sleep at night because the trains are quieter, guess what? I’m going to vote for him.
If I were a railroad commuter on the Connecticut shorel
Funny when you think about the stories describing Al Perlman riding around the New York Central in a theatre car screaming at his secretaries because some one had freshly repainted a signal mast silver instead of the system standard of black.
Now a days , they are lucky to see a repainting
MC -
Yeah, I could certainly comment on politics and RR Bridges [shudder] but such commentary could easily fill a treatise.
I can tell you many things about the Elmira viaducts from an operating standpoint having run numerous trains over it. It is a heavy concrete structure that runs through downtown Elmira an old city without much of a downtown left beyond the usual bank buildings and related offices. When Hurricane/Tropical Storm Agnes came through in 1972 the city was badly flooded, in some areas the water rose to over 20’ in depth. As the city was already in decline it has never truly recovered.
That said, the concrete viaducts are in good shape and now carry only a single main track. The track is well ballasted and surfaced and tie condition was good when last I saw it and I believe both a tie and surface gang have been through since. There are no grade crossings as all streets are grade separated (the Erie built as excellent RR in that respect. I wouldn’t have any qualms about running 50 over the viaduct. I never had any issues at 40 either. The funny t
Now I take great offense to this. It is well known that we, the People of Illinois, have the two worst senators.