sweet video
I like this place
(quick off-topic)[:o)]
Budliner?
Wow! Haven’t seen you post in a while! Hope you’re doing well.
BTW: Please create a thread when you finish that AEM7! Show photos.[;)]
merry x-mas
I miss the great stories here
keep up the good work
Ken
That video’s been saved on my PC for a while now. It’s actually from 1968 since that’s when the 1969 Plymouths were first coming out. Looked so promising for Penn Central too. Interesting concept for a commercial too. Showing the cars right after they’ve come to the factory. Also was cool seeing the open autoracks.
Kevin
Amazing video. My wife and I watched it and, yes, the money saving technique of deferring maintenence will lead to that. The only question my wife had was ’ and how did they think saving money on maintenence was going to work?'— could there be an answer?
I think it’s the same principle we see in politics…
No one is willing to make the hard decisions right now-- they parlay them off to the “next guy”. No one wanted to rock the boat, especially on the PRR. The NYC at least tried to reduce some of their overhead and excess trackage, while the PRR was sitting with with underused 4-track mains and loads of inefficient & costly interlocking towers.
And this mess didn’t start overnight. I have many photos from the Pennsy in the 50’s that show the presence of deferred maintance. Yes, it was a management issue, but it was a labor force issue too. The cost of labor was just too high on both the NYC and the PRR. They both needed to shed jobs quickly and couldn’t.
Finally they both needed to get rid of the many unprofitable branch lines that both had, but the abandonment procedures were just too rigid at that point in history to allow for this to happen.
Not to mention the one or two car a month shipper/receivers would howl they needed rail service to survive…Then after CR they was strangely quiet when that branch line was abandon and ripped up even tho’ they still shipped/ recieved one or two cars a month…
Sadly a lot of PC’s customers turn to trucks because of poor rail service…Some return to rail under CR.
Saddening also that the Penn Central’s brass harassed the SCL’s passenger service. PC got away with refusing to allow the Silver Comet ( New York - GA- Alabama ) to run between Wash-NY on its tracks. SCL was forced to discontinue it.
When SCL tried to add additional sections to the “Champion”, PC flat out refused to allow it even though SCL reportedly was still running full passenger loads in 1969 and making a small profit on NY-FL trains and had no problem paying PC for access to the northeast.