Pretend it’s spring already. Pretend that I’m transplanting this topic from another thread. The 1880’s engineering thread is spreading into several interesting directions, each of which is interesting to me. I thought I’d try to narrow the focus on part of it. with out taking away from the whole- starting with this post:
[quote user=“Railway Man”]
Murphy: You’re way, way down in the weeds with your examples, and the answers get lengthy and technical. But there’s a way to look at this from a higher level that does not nearly challenge my resources to type in this little white box before I go back to reviewing contracts tonight, that might be of use to you.
I have to unpack your question before I can begin to answer, because there’s several parts to it. Your question is better stated as “What are examples of mismatch between location and alignment.” To explain what that means, read on.
The first question in railroad engineering is not alignment, it is location. “Location” is the science of matching the railroad facility to the economic potential of a geographic area. Prior to any alignment studies, a proper locational analysis first considers the present and future traffic sources and demands of t
Pretend it’s spring? What’s a spring? Isn’t it going to be cold and dark forever? Seems like it already has been.
US railroads were overbuilt as in five rail lines to Sioux Falls, SD. I know of two reasons. First, the railroads organized themselves into cartels. A cartel will use to many resources (five ways to Sioux Falls) to produce a level of output. A railroad could build into Sioux Falls
Spring? You can have it. Give us winter back and the moisture that comes with it. Most effective fire suppressent around.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa Falls & Northwestern (Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern / controlled by CRIP sine 1881) wandered into your fair burg in 1886 in search of interchange, river terminal facilities and industries and later as access to them thar goldfields. They were a totally speculative railroad that wanted to serve ag communities with a desire to be on a main line or with two railroads to break up a monopoly on service by CB&Q and the Omaha Road. As one granger too many, it got broken up between CB&Q and CRIP in the end (1902). Your end of the railroad joined the railroad that went everywhere the hard way and mostly died with it in 1972-1980.(Some more of it died in 2008 - IANW after another of those starving grangers owned it, namely C&NW)
One of the reasons that the Milwaukee built the PCE was to give Anaconda Copper another rail line into Butte and Anaconda to compete with the NP. Several members of the Milwaukee board were also members of Anaconda’s board and probably had a significant conflict of interest in approving the extension.
The extension from Morbridge to Harlowtown was nicely engineered, with a couple of excpections the grades were 0.5% or lower, very few curves sharper than 3 degrees. This is especially evident comparing the alignment of the Milwaukee with the NP between Forsythe and Terry.
That mosture can also fall as rain, which does not require a shovel for removal.[^] I didn’t realize until we went to Colorado last August, just how dry an area that is.
Speculative railroad* kind of runs counter to RWM’s idea of a railroad checking everything out before building the right sized railroad into the right area. Were they speculative, in that they wanted to get into a new area to cash in on someone else’s lucrative traffic, or tspeculative, in that they wanted to build up the business and sell the railroad at a high price.
Not as counter to RWM’s point of view as you seem to think. At the time CRIF&NW was built, the breadbasket was wide open to competition and Iowa seemed to be in the way of where everybody wanted to go. They got part of what they wanted by having CRIP buy a large part of their investment so they could play keep-away and influence traffic to a degree.
Overlooked in this thread is the reason for the line. Is the reason the line is being built to reach a mine or a manufacturing plant or something else in particular or is it to move trains through an area non stop. Thus lines like W. Va mine spur or a grain country track were laid to reach a specific on line location. And the lines like Lackawanna’s Cut Offs and the Milwaukee Road main were to move trains over a segment. So it would follow that one might put up with a little more grade or even go around rather than through when reaching for a short destination. And it would also follow that one would fill in or bore through to get as straight a lin or as level a gradient when bulding a cut off or speedy,high density main line. And in the long run, yes, pre 1900 was more likely built to get a line into a place not fully cognizant of being a part of a “super” mainline. It’s easy to pick it all apart this far away in time.
Some thoughts on the rationale for the CMSt.P&P “Pacific Extension” question:
[Gulp [swg] ] Search this forum for “PCE” and/ or posts by “MichaelSol”. Up until a few months ago, he was a pretty prolific poster here, and was always quick to defend the PCE, at least in its later/ pre-abandonment stage. He may have said something about its genesis as well;
What do Charles & Dorothy Wood say in their 1960’s (?) mostly picture & captions book, The Milwaukee Road ? (Superior Press, I think) I know that’s not prime source history material, but they- and their sources - were about 40 years closer to it than we are now;
Someplace I read recently that “There are 2 reasons why a man does something - a good reason, and the real reason.” I suspect that’s the case here. That long ago, we may never be able to discern or know the “real” reasons;
Nevertheless, going at least as far as the Montana copper mines maybe makes sense. But why continue on through the worst of the Rockies ? It was pretty much virgin territory back then - maybe there was some thought that it would be developed and traffic sources would appear in the future ? What did the articles in Railway Gazette ( the Railway Age of the time) say about it ? Did any of the Milwaukee Road board members have ranches, minable lands, timber land, other land holdings, water rights, or hydro-power rights, etc. which would have benefitted from the PCE as well ? Corruption or conspiracy theorists, unite ! (never mind the inherent contradiction or hypocrisy in that last thought)
George W. Hilton wrote several articles in Trains in the 1960s about the cartels, the ICC, why railroads didn’t compete, and why they overbuilt.&nb
henry6: Not meant to pick it all apart, meant to get a better understanding of what happened and why. If you took me the wrong way on that, I appologize.
Murphy: A clarification that is crucial to this discussion. What Wellington said is this: “Alignment is a detail of location.” To elaborate, alignment isn’t something you work out after you decide on location, it’s something you use to inform your location, i.e., alignment appears iteratively during the process of choosing the location. What Wellington argued is that too often the cart was before the horse: alignment was worked out but the goal of the alignment often remained unexamined or misunderstood. This is a classic error that is also common today (especially in resource-based economies such as the oil states), where projects are conceived, designed, funded, and built, and only afterward is their purpose and need considered!
That said, onto your example. The example you discussed is examined
Some thoughts on the rationale for the CMSt.P&P “Pacific Extension” question:
[Gulp ] Search this forum for “PCE” and/ or posts by “MichaelSol”. Up until a few months ago, he was a pretty prolific poster here, and was always quick to defend the PCE, at least in its later/ pre-abandonment stage. He may have said something about its genesis as well;
What do Charles & Dorothy Wood say in their 1960’s (?) mostly picture & captions book, The Milwaukee Road ? (Superior Press, I think) I know that’s not prime source history material, but they- and their sources - were about 40 years closer to it than we are now;
Someplace I read recently that “There are 2 reasons why a man does something - a good reason, and the real reason.” I suspect that’s the case here. That long ago, we may never be able to discern or know the “real” reasons;
Nevertheless, going at least as far as the Montana copper mines maybe makes sense. But why continue on through the worst of the Rockies ? It was pretty much virgin territory back then - maybe there was some thought that it would be developed and traffic sources would appear in the future ? What did the articles in Railway Gazette ( the Railway Age of the time) say about it ? Did any of the Milwaukee Road board members have ranches, minable lands, timber land, other land holdings, water rights, or hydro-power rights, etc. which would have benefitted from the PCE as well ? Corruption or conspiracy theorists, unite ! (never mind the inherent contradiction or hypocrisy in that last thought)
George W. Hilton wrote several articles in Trains in the 1960s about the cartels, the ICC, why railroads didn’t com
My questions above were more rhetorical than personal - I was mainly trying to get back to and focus some possible avenues of inquiry to address the question(s) first presented by Murphy Siding re: the PCE in his original post to this thread (above) - plus I’m a little curious myself. That said -
Your strong recommendation on Vance is noted - messages received and acknowledged ! “WILCO” (didn’t mean to trouble you to have to write it again, I knew the good advice when I saw it the first time) [tup] In the meantime, I’ve found out that there are no less than 55 libraries here in Pennsylvania that are reported to have it -
Not to get too caught up in the semantics here, but for the non-professionals - particularly in this technological age - I’d also use the synonym “interactive” to provide a better sense of the relationship between location and alignment and the process of working them out, in the messy real world mix of geography, politics, economics, technology, finance, personalities, etc. that in which we live - none of that "In a perfect world, we would . . . " hypotheticals here !
“Iteratively” I heard early and often in engineering school. “Inform” - in the sense of being an “input to” - I never heard that application until I started working closely with a couple of sophisticated architects a few years ago.
What it all means is that we should try to choose select the means - alignment - that’s appropriate for the intended end - the business and traffic of the location - and as well, make sure that the location is suitable for and worthy of the means - the alignment - that will be needed.
The Milwaukee Road(then the St Paul Road) had built a quite extensive granger network in the Midwest. They realized two things:
There was not enough traffic being generated to really support the heavy debt load.
They needed a new traffic source.
A 3rd factor was basic ‘I want to control my own railroad’. They could see that they were not the ‘Super Grainger’ and would be bought out at some time(and control would be moved out of the local area). The answer was to build the ‘Pacific Extension’. The line had several issues:
The GN & NP were already there
The alignment crossed ‘one too many mountains’
They had to electrify due to the grades/weather conditions
It took a lot more money to build than forecast
And to top it off, the Panama Canal opened and transcon traffic fell off for years
They took a gamble and it did not pay off. Had they not built it, maybe they could have sold their Midwest lines for top dollar - Who knows. That is ‘History’…
"All your questions will be answered in about 4 minutes. For the love of God don’t expect to find truth about the Milwaukee Road Puget Sound Extension in this forum, because the discussion is religious in character.
RWM"
But RWM, are you not referring to all discussions involving railroads and railfans and not just the MLW PSE? That’s indeed why the internet was founded!!!
I have absorbed a great number of points on this forum regarding the advisability of Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension, so I am surprised to learn that the matter can be settled in four minutes of reading Vance. Can somebody sum up the conclusions reached in these four minutes? I would like to put the matter to rest.
I can sum Vance. I’d like to go further but that would be plagiarism. I do you a disservice because I cannot write with the elegance or sweep of Vance. So here goes:
Locational analysis apparently not performed
No traffic base not already adequately served by others
No significant service advantage
No significant operating cost advantage
No significant interline connection advantages
Too much track through too much sterile territory.
The Panama Canal is not an excuse. The Panama Canal made traffic move only that never would have moved by rail. Other railways that should have been affected by the Panama Canal did not go bankrupt (SP, UP, GN, NP, and Santa Fe).
Electrification dug the grave deeper Capital cost could not be recovered.
Branch lines were not considered until too late. Extensions such as Great Falls were horribly expensive and, once again, had to share the traffic with others already there and already more advantageously placed with the customers’ already existing facilities.
This last point is crucial. The Milwaukee Road could not just jam its tracks into the shippers’ facilities but needed the shippers to come to its tracks, which the shippers, having just a few years prior built facilities on the Brand X railways, were fairly loath to do.
An analogy would be this. Suppose you rent a house. It’s not a mansion perhaps, but it does your family fine. You look out your front door one morning and a builder has built a new house right across the street! You look it over carefully, and while the paint color is different it otherwise looks mostly just like yours. The builder walks over and says, “Hello! I’d like you to live in my house.”
“That’s interesting,” you reply, “but is the rent of your house cheaper?”
[:O] That has some really eerie similarities to the Western Front in 1914/15.
Maybe the reason that I seem to be thick as a brick sometimes, is that I’m always thinking there must be simple answers out there, to what in reality are complex questions. Railroad history is no different than any other history, I suppose. It’s complicted, interesting, and generally written from an opinionated point of view. At least it’s not full of obscure French phrases, like most books on European history.[D)]
] Search this forum for “PCE” and/ or posts by “MichaelSol”. Up until a few months ago, he was a pretty prolific poster here, and was always quick to defend the PCE, at least in its later/ pre-abandonment stage. He may have said something about its genesis as well;