Given the financial struggles the railroads are experiencing, I am wondering how long rail bed maintenance can be deferred before it starts impacting service levels.
This question arose when I saw this:
It’s amazing what a telephoto lens can do.
Weed spraying is one of the many things that were cancelled during Hunter Harrison’s time here. All that growth is from spilled grain, which also attracts wildlife to the tracks.
It is amazing how long you can ride a good physical plant into the ground, CN did it for the better part of 10 years in this area.
That photo is only a few miles west of one of the stretches of double track that Hunter ripped up, and now the National Park won’t let CN put it back.
What does that location appear like now?
You can defer maintenance until there is a bad accident, then you should have done some repair work the week before.
Amazing, especially when you consider back in the old days a division superintendant would have gotten reamed for letting things get out of control like that.
Nowadays you would get reemed for wasting your budget on “non-essentials”.
CN did start running a spray train again last year, and it just passed through this area again a couple weeks ago. It has helped, as will all the new (not as leaky) grain cars that are currently on order, to go along with the ~1000 new cars that are already in service.
Spillage from covered hoppers is fairly minimal when compared to that from boxcars in grain service. Taconite spillage from ore jennies may be hazardous to the conductor’s health.
Looks as though they have turned the sleepers into chia pets? Could this be paert of a green solution offering the ties a renewable shield from UV damage? [:-,]
Taconite spillage is hazardous to any man or animal that tries to walk across the area where the spillage is. Walking on ball bearings !
One has to wonder how long the almighty god of lower ORs will mean a bunch of derailments and slow orders ? Worse still lower MAS for passenger trains.
I was startled by a recent look at one of the Train Watcher’s Guide to Chicago books recently. Although the roadbeds looked normal to me at the time (1970s), they look terrible to me now! And I can remember in the early 1980s that CNW’s track by our commuter station regularly had standing water between the rails. It may take a little while, but I wonder whether UP will emulate that in their efforts to turn an ever-bigger profit.
I concur in your thought processes - viewing the roadbed conditions when I hired out in 1965 and through subsequent years I thought what I was seeing was 1st class — it wasn’t it was deferred maintenance overtaking what once was 1st class.
Subsequent years of profitable operations of my carrier permitted it to raise the level of maintenance to a level one should expect of a Class 1 carrier. PSR I fear is returning the rights of way to the level of disrepair I experienced when I hired out.
Ask anyone familiar with Penn Central. It can be deferred to significant extent with predictable results. The railroad can be slow-ordered so that trains stall on grades, fail to get over the road during crews’ hours of service and derailments become a commonality. At one point during PC years, the Trenton Cut-off was in such bad shape that precipitation caused so many track circuits to be shunted from bad insulated joints that it was found trains made better time operating against the current of traffic with train orders rather than under block signal indication, going from one stop and proceed signal to the next.
The lessons of deferred maintenance have stood up well over the years with (I suggest) a predominance of the track structure kept in very good state. Temptations to cut cost are perhaps more profound than ever, coupled with a seeming lack of willingness to generate traffic. So these temptations may increase, but the ultimate result can be chaotic to operating efficiency and costly to reverse.
In years, and conditions past; railroads seemed to show success when tracks were maintained to levels where trains were able to ‘run’ and maintain schedules. As financial conditions began to slide towards unprofitibility; maintenance seemed to be the area taking the ‘financial hits’. Speed restrictions became the ‘rule’, tie replacement seemed to go to longer and longer cycles, as did worn rails, certainly, structure maintenance was right in there as well.
The MKT RR
Sam, the technical term for that is a “standing derailment”. Penn Central had lots of them.
This is an interesting thread. Railroads are just a “casual” concern of mine… i like trains. But i had no idea of the poor state of the railroads in the usa. The UP runs 300 yards from my house. I am in Elk Grove CA 95624. where i am…the rains run right over our downtown street… the tracks and ballast look fine.
There are not nearly as many grain trains in California as there are in western Canada.
Some crops are genetically modified to be resistant to that most common of herbicides (glyphosate/Roundup), making them harder to kill even when the spray train does show up.
Our yard doesn’t seem to be as bad in recent years - I would account that for a lot of newer hoppers that we now have show up. Used to have the bottom of the barrel 50-year hoppers that were being held together by rust and reflective tape.
Guess many of those have hauled their last loads.
Former Rock Island cars with ‘bankruptcy blue’ showing through their later paint are still a regular sight out here (IC and Grand Trunk Western bought lots after the Rock went down). The ‘Trudeau’ hoppers are just as old.
CN has a total of 2500 new high-capacity grain hoppers either in service or on order, CP is also in the process of replacing their fleet. Many grain companies are also acquiring their own fleets of brand new cars.
Some of those old Rock Island hoppers showed up here a few years ago, kind of a shock if you knew what you were looking at. Typically the oldest rolling stock observed were Southern Railway boxcars with the “Southern Serves The South” logo. You darn well knew they hadn’t seen a paint shop in decades!
Deferred maintanance? Well there is the old saying, “Pay now, or pay later!” Cars, buildings, or railroads, it will catch up with you eventually.