I have a number of old Official Guides of the Railways placed strategically in our home.
When bored I will pickup a guide and open to a random page and look at the listings, maps, etc. particularly if a short line. Today it was Roscoe, Snyder, and Pacific Rwy. which ran between named towns in Texas. Mostly gone now, abandoned in the 1980s, except for a short stretch of industrial track.
So, here is my question for comment…what shortlines are you aware of that are still individually owned, not by the huge regionals (G&W,etc).
I know the Sandersonville Railroad in Georgia is still around…big time. They have quite a market on kaolin (used in paper manufacturing). Never been there but hope to some day.
Locally here in Indiana we have the Chesapeake and Indiana running from Wellsboro to Malden, but that was a spin off of the old C&O railroad.
I am interested in short lines which are still family owned and still around. Of course you can discuss your local short line even if a spin off of a Class 1.
RailroadfanWiki has a state-by-state list of all current shortlines, and also notes if they are independent or who owns them. It seems to be pretty accurate. Shortlines - RailroadfanWiki
The Ann Arbor is owned by Watco. They are also supposed to be buying the Great Lakes Central. Watco and G&W have ruined shortline railroads, from a fan point of view.
I grew up along the ROW of the Detroit & Mackinnac Railroad. This line never reached either city, until it took over the NYC ROW from Bay City MI to Mackinac City. It was family own until they sold out to Lake States Railway. With Lake State ownership the line only reaches Alpena, but now gets to Wixom via former CSX trackage.
One must remember that what we now consider shortlines were often pretty sizable, and some of our favorite Class 1’s of years gone by would be little more than regionals today.
Truthfully - all railroads were Short Lines at their origin. B&O’s original line was about 13 miles between Baltimore and Ellicott City. They used the profits from that operation to continue building West and finally reached the Ohio River almost 50 years after the start of the enterprise.
Back at the time of the ConRail acquisition I stumbled on file that contained the who bought who for the B&O before it was corporately merged into the C&O in 1987 - there were somewhere around 250 named entities that existed in getting the B&O to its final configuration.
For what its worth, the old Ellicott City station (or Ellicott Mills, as it was called when the line was built), is still standing and is a museum now.
I’ve never had any short lines around but I learned a bunch by seeing the boxcars that would come by on some of those Big E Train DVD’s I have and also from youtube videos. Another big reason why I won’t buy railroad DVD’s unless you they show the whole train. There are all kinds of interesting rail cars on a train.
The ‘short line’ box cars that you were seeing back during the 70’s and early 80’s were what was know as ‘Incentive Per Diem’ cars. The Class 1’s did not foresee the economic benefits of building new box cars to replace those ageing out of their fleets. The ICC created some regulations that ticked the curiosity of the bean counter who featured they could buy blocks of box cars ‘in the name of short lines’ and have them earning per diem charges through the Car Hire Rules in effect since the cars would have little to no reason to ever end up on the Short Line whose name was on the cars.
I believe the carriers cooperation with Trailer Train Corp. (which the Class 1’s own) brought about the creation of the RBOX (RailBox) fleet with the motto ‘Next Load any Road’.
Well, around here we have the Red River Valley & Western (not sure if you’d consider it a shortline with 500+ miles of track), the Dakota • Missouri Valley • Western (lot of Draper Tapers), the Northern Plains, and a few others.
On the former Dewsbury to Batley Great Northern Railway line, here in the U.K. was Austin’s Steelworks. A line (owned by the steelworks) ran from the Main Line into Austin’s works depot. A length of 300 yards or so.
A GNR train would drop off a freight wagon or two. A works locomotive would collect the said wagon/s and would deliver them into the steelworks. Each evening the reverse would happen.
An interesting twenty minutes to see.
Now not only has the railway gone, so has Austin’s Steelworks.
There’s a vaguely similar situation with an grain elevator in Dickinson. I don’t know who it is that owns the spur here, but the elevator owns (or maybe leases) the little trackmobile.
Many larger industries that have large volumes of traffic, unit train or “single” car service, have their own switch engine. It’s a lot cheaper than having the serving railroad do “intraplant” switching.
While you still see a lot of pure railroad engines, either downgraded old engines or those built for switching or industrial service, trackmobiles seem to becoming more popular. Rarely does an industrial switch engine need to move an entire loaded unit train. Most moves are a handful of cars and a trackmobile is a lot more flexible. It doesn’t need a runaround track.
One of our engineers received his first exposure to rail operations running the plant switch engine for Firestone Tires.
