Saw this and thought it was worth sharing:
I read an Artical about this in the Trains Mag. Right now I can’t find it at the moment, but I found it was pretty interesting.
wassamatter you railroaders, know how to add another track?
or just sit and whine and dine?
During the merger 60’s-70’s, a lot of lines cut back tracks for economical reasons, now your booming.
Lesson learned from earlier times but sometimes you couldnt help this.
The many interurban lines now abandoned sure could have them back.
Looks like its time to lay rail on the old Milwaukee Road bed…I wish [sigh]
I wouldn,t worry about it, the way things are going with the price of fuel we won,t have any money to buy things so they won,t need to ship so much. Sure we export products to china but who’s going to buy the finished goods when we’re all broke?
And if we’re all broke because nobody’s buying anything, then there will be mass layoffs and then nobody will have a job. Then we’ll revert to the stone age and won’t need gas.
Life will certainly be simpler once this happens. [swg]
An interesting concept is taking back all the “rails to trails” miles…let the whining by the liberals begin!
Brian
Quote-“Others suggest the railroads are being alarmist.”
I think that line sums it up.[:-^]Sounds like they want to raise prices now for improvements that probably won’t be made for increased future business that will probably never be seen.
Those rail trails ought to be really useful, for example the one near here that is essentially a 50-mile long loop serving a number of coal mines and prep plants that aren’t just closed, but were remediated into pastures and wetlands 10 years ago. Or the short one in Beaver Falls that runs past a half dozen factories that closed or were bulldozed 10-15 years ago, and through a public freight yard that has 8-inch diameter trees growing in it.
KL
I have two near me. One is the Hoodlebug Trail which was the old PRR Indiana Branch. Passenger service ceased in 1940 and the freight staion closed down and the lines were ripped up in 1964.
The Ghost Town trail is the old Cambria and Indiana Railroad. Once called the “World’s Richest Little Railroad” because they bought up a large portion of the nations coal hoppers and leased them to class 1’s. Rail service ended in 1994 when the last of the mines closed.
I’m sure NS will be tearing their hair out trying to get the right-of-ways back. People just don’t think ahead.
I think you have to remember the audience/context to which this is directed. It’s a classic case of crying ‘the sky is falling’ in order to secure more federal funds from Washington. While I’m sure more trackage (and upgrades) is needed, like any shrewd corporation they’re going to try to get someone else to pay for it all (or at least part of it).
Kinda like welfare? or foodstamps? Or free medical? But if the company is capable of working and making a profit wouldn.t they be to proud or imberist to ask for a hand out???
Maybe 50 years ago!
Anybody who tries to predict ANYTHING a quarter century into the future is hallucinating!
After all, in the earliest days of digital computing, a high IBM exec stated that all the calculations needed for the remainder of the 20th century could be done with five mainframe computers… (About 27 years later I bought a pocket calculator that had more capability than his mainframe. So did several million other people.) And there was that ‘learned astronomer’ who declared, in 1932, that “Flight into airless space would be forever impossible.” (27 years later, Yuri Gagarin was waving hello from Low Earth Orbit. Ten years after that there were bootprints on the Moon.)
Maybe the answer to all the NIMBYs is to tunnel UNDER their back yards. Advanced TBM technology is available NOW.
As for private corporations looking for government money - if the government hadn’t blotted up every available cent of cash and credit, maybe the private sector would have enough to go it alone.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - where the Class 1 was a government monoply)
The Alameda Corridor works for everyone except people near water where those kinda tunnels could lead to sinkholes and cave-ins of the ground.
Railroads are learning from the airlines …[:-^]
The rails-to-trails I’ve ridden don’t look very promising for reopening for freight. The economy along them kinda petered out before the rails were pulled up. (For example, what is now the Virginia Creeper Trail).