Make sure you look at their cost projections for rehab and improvement closely. Even in 1970 dollars they are way too low. I’ve worked with Booze Hamilton and still work with them distantly today. They are rather sloppy in their proposals and fail to include items or projections of significance. They manage to survive as a consulting company as they are skilled at gift wrapping a turd so to speak. Notice the subtle implication they knew what they were talking about but Milwaukee Road management did not. You’ll note the complete absence of the competing internal Milwaukee Road study along similar lines, which I find to be far more realistic and far less dreamy in wishful thinking. The Milwaukee Study even looked at a bare bones rehab of 90lb welded rail, knowing full well it would eventually need over 100 lb rail. It’s costs with just the 90lb rail proposal and keeping curves and grades as is was prohibitively expensive and could not easily be recouped using existing traffic levels. So Milwaukee management was trying to see how vs. downplaying the PCE as not being a winner.
Lets say Milwaukee went ahead with this. It had just completed a costly tunnel revamp I believe for Tri-Level Autoracks but did not raise the clearence enough for double-stacks. A lot of the Milwaukees bridges and trestles would need to be reinforced as well for the heavier car loads as well as heavier locomotives. The Powder River traffic was already strengthing BN in it’s competitive position as well. I do believe it shared some of it with Milwaukee in the 1970’s but only for the short haul to reach power plants on Milwaukee’s lines. I don’t see in any reality how the Milwaukee could have revamped it’s lines west with w
It appears someone tried to block and delete responses. I noticed Michael Sols comments from a thread over on Classic Trains have been deleted as well.
Why would all of the many comments of one poster in a thread suddenly be removed without any explanation? Is it possible that Mr. Sol removed them? I know of no way to delete a post I make without leaving the empty box and some mininal placeholder. It is really just an edit to replace the content with something like a period. Will the moderators remove posts made by other forum members if they request it of the moderators?
So once again someone forced out interesting, albeit controversial posts. It’s much akin to the Stalinist era, when photos had banished apparatchiks airbrushed outbas though they had never existed. It’s a shame differing options presented in a polite manner are not allowed.
Yes there some kind of technical problem with this thread that arose concomitantly with the disappearance of all of Michael Sol’s comments. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions for fear of being mistaken, but this is by far the oddest occurrence on this forum that I have ever seen since 2005.
Maybe the moderator could stop by and explain it so we are not inclined to assume that this was a case of censoring of strong opinions that somehow were deemed to fail the fact check. This was one of the most brilliant discussion/debates I have seen here. It is just what is needed. Lately, I get the impression that disagreeing is now considered to be a personal attack.
I agree. We cannot rule that out without knowing more. It seems unlikely because he seemed comfortable and confident in making his case. So I cannot see a reason to pull it all down. That is unless he actually thought he was losing the debate and wanted to just end it in an explosive way almost as a distaction. But that is just hypothetical to make sense out of something so hard to understand.
I’ve seen this before but it’s been a couple of years since. When entries are removed the page count doesn’t get updated. The count at the heading says 115 replies, which would mean 116 entries, which at 30 per page would be 3 full pages plus 26 entries on the fourth page. There are actually only 2 full pages plus 25 entries on the third page (85 entries not counting this entry and any following), so apparently 31 entries were removed. When you tell it to go to the last post, it tries to go to the 116th entry which should be on the fourth page which doesn’t exist any more. See, it’s all perfectly logical.
Wonders of modern technology!
(edit): It did the same thing to me: it reported an error, but when I re-submitted it, it said it was a duplicate.
Aside from there being a technical problem with this thread, the main issue is how every one of dozens of posts by member, Michael Sol suddenly disappeared at the same time. Since a complete post delete by a member is impossible, it must have been done by a moderator. One possible explanation is that Michael Sol requested the removal of all of his posts, and the moderator accommodated that request. I see no other plausible explanations.
Something’s not right here. Unless there’s a firefight boiling over in the sandbox being reported by lots of members, the moderators rarely come to this forum. They don’t work on weekends, so they don’t moderate on weekends, especially holiday weekends.
Due to the mechanics of the forum, if a moderator were to delete a post, the sister posts- all those that replied to the post, or replied to the replies to that post- disappear as well.
Also, due to the mechanics of the forum, if a poster were to delete his own post, there would still be a post by him, it would just be an empty box. Anybody who had replied to that post and quoted it would still have the original quote on their new post.
Reality is, this is probably a technical glitch. It’s obvious that Michael Sol’s posts are missing from this thread. What’s not obvious is that there might be others missing as well.