happy birthday conrail !!! we miss you BIG BLUE
How can you have a birthday for something that is DEAD. and Im glad they are gone and i wish they would have scraped the engines they had also, they was all junk,
No - not dead - as with Mark Twain, the rumors of its demise are premature. Instead, it’s just been ‘adopted’, kind of like a foster child - now co-owned by NS and CSX - the ConRail Shared Assets Operation = CSAO. See -
http://www.conrail.com/freight.htm
- Paul North.
No, Conrail is dead. CSAO is a different railroad. By your logic the SOO Line still exists.
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are dead, too, but their birthdays are commemorated and celebrated; not quite sure if Conrail is in the same league, though.
Gone but not forgotten.
Despite what others are saying in here; thank you for posting this.
I like Conrail, it has a great success story, and was a mighty railroad. I grew up watching BIG BLUE parade across Pennsylvania. I was part of my life and part of Pennsylvania life.
By the way, Paul is right; Conrail is not even gone, Shared Assets in Jersey & Michigan.
We miss our Blue Conrail!!! Yes, Happy Birthday!!! [oX)]
Jealous!![X-)]
Its not the birth of Conrail that some of us celebrate but rather we mourn the deaths of the Erie Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railorad of New Jersey, The Lehigh and Hudson River, and the Reading. No, not the death of Penn Central, in that we rejoice!
Funny, I used to think that about all the NS engines I climbed on on Conrail!
Conrail wasn’t perfect. Far from it, but there were a few things it did really well that I know about that just didn’t transfer well to the new owners. One is the intermodal network. It just hasn’t run as well on either of the new owners. Conrail used to try to hit 92% on time to the minute for most of the intermodal fleet, and actually managed to do it for some decent stretches of time. Conrail also was way ahead in data warehousing the transportation data and having systems to manage the traffic, particularly unit train traffic. A lot of this knowledge got lost in the merger shuffle…
Conrail was indeed perfect. It took all the bankrupts of the east and whittled them down to a sleek well run railroad with operating efficiencies and profit potentials worthy of being sold off to other railroads. It was, in effect, a great success.
Conrail was indeed not perfect: major rail lines were abandoned, ripped up, or otherwise discarded, stranding many cities and towns without an efficent and viable rail service contributing to the decline in local industry and development. Other effecient short cuts and important routes (high and wide routes, yard avoidence routes, direct routes, etc.) were lost forever while only those lines coveted or needed by Conrail survived for the benifet of Conrail and not the local economies.
Choose your side.
Doh, how could I forget!
And just yesterday, I saw a NS loco, in CRQ paint, on a CSAO train in Hillside.
[bday] Conrail!
I was thinking about the ConRail constituent roads the other day, and kind of lost count . . . [:I] I don’t usually count the jointly-owned Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines separately, but a case could be made for doing that, I can see. Then prompted by something else here - Carl, I suppose - I got to wondering about the Ann Arbor Railroad. I just reviewed the history at - http://www.annarbor-railroad.com/history.html - and in light of that kind of half-in, half-out acquisition by the state of Michigan in March 1976, I now have mixed feelings about how to classify that one. I have no allegiance to the ‘Annie’, so I don’t care either way - but as a matter of history, how should we count it ?
- Paul North.
Of what/ a goverment owend and run railroad with junk for engines holes in body frames rusted and shack worse than a bowl of jello, my first trip in con-rail blue engine i turned in a injury form, that is mostly why that conrail junk is gone from the ns to many injury. and the other poster who use to think that of NS engines now you think otherwise exspecialy how smooth they ride, and your glad you dont have that conrail blue junk anymore.
elvis is dead to and all the selfish people wont let him die either.
How about option 3? Conrail was a neccesary evil, that sucked up something like $7 Billion dollars in tax money to get fromlife-support to profitable railroad.
Sorry, but I don’t see what you’re getting at. Over half of the CR locos are still active on NS, and CSX seems to have a lot as well.
what active con-rail locos are active on NS
I didnt want to bring that up and bust their bubble they are having a hard enough time in reality of the death of the money pit.