In the 50’s what railroads were the Rock Island’s biggest competeters ? Thanks !
Chicago & North Western; Chicago Burlington & Quincy; Union Pacific
Milwalkee, Chicago Great Western. The region was way ovebuilt.
Rmember this - Wherever the Rock did go, so did someone else and they usually had a faster way there.
In KS, OK, TX it was the Santa Fe. When the Rock was building its trk from KS to TX in the 1880’s, the north-south mainline was was placed 27 miles w est of OKC at El reno. Up till the end in 1980, this proved to be a huge traffic disvantage as most north/southbound traffic at OKC was routed via ATSF and some on Frisco/BN.
Hi Alex [:)]
I guess the answer to your question would depend on WHERE you live. Here in Arkansas the Rock had a mainline running from Memphis through Little Rock then west. I don’t have my Rock timetable in front of me but I think I remember [B)] that this line reached Tucumcari, New Mexico. Here in Arkansas that line’s biggest competition would have been Missouri Pacific. However, once you reached the Arkansas Oklahoma state line I am not sure which railroad would have been its main competitor.
MudChicken can probally answer this question very well. [;)]
The Rock also ran down through Alexandria, LA to Lake Charles. SP/KCS was the other guys. But they had a HUGE advantage over the Rock. They actually went to the chemical plants/refineries and the port factilites that are on the west side of Lake Charles. The Rock ended about 20 miles EAST of Lake Charles and depended on SP to get to Lake Charles
JHH : The “Little Rock” to Memphis connected at Tucumcari and also got to Amarillo and Little Rock…
In our part of Colorado & Kansas, UP was parallel most of the way west from Kansas City/ Topeka with the Rock crossing/connecting with UP at Limon, CO and Topeka/ Manhattan… MoP/ATSF/UP-KP were close to CRIP in lots of places along with Frisco in Central Kansas.
Rock Island and Katy/BM&E both were looking to go west in southern Kansas and Colorado. CRIP negotiated a contract to cross ATSF’s DC&CV (Now CVRY) at Hugoton, KS and Castaneda/Ramsey, CO by way of Richland, KS(I,ve seen the contract, never built) coming across from Liberal and also a line coming up from Etter, TX…The line was to continue west towards Trinidad, Co to Jansen and up the Purgatoire Canyon west into the San Luis Valley (all never built, a paper dream)…MKT/BM&E got to Keyes, Oklahoma and died in 1970. All that remains is the RA/NOKL at Woodward, OK and an elevator spur on the old BM&E main at Keyes, OK…
Santa Fe financed and built most of the Rock Island Line between St. Louis & KC and the Rock wound up with it after the financial panic of 1903 had weakened ATSF. (ATSF also let go of D&RG and Colorado Midland)…the US rail map might look much different if that had not happened.[;)][;)][;)]
If you examine the railroad scene over the years, you have to conclude that certain railroads should never have been built. An example of this in the east is the Lehigh Valley, which never should have gone west of its named territory (it might have done better if all it did was haul coal from Pennsylvania to North Jersey)… And I’m certain that there are other roads that went farther than they should have.
In the midwest, it was the Rock Island. It probably should never have been built west of Joliet, certainly not farther west than the Quad Cities.
Both the LV and the Rock had their fans, were picturesque in their own ways, and added much to the lore and attraction of the railroad scene.
That the Rock Island went all the way to Tucumcari was always a wonder to me (I was working for the Rock at its demise). Every carload of freight interchanged with the Espee there had to be wrested from them with great effort; the Espee, with the Cotton Belt, went all the way to St. Louis and really shorthauled itself when giving stuff to the Rock. And on the Chicago-KC and Omaha runs there was always too much competition. About the only place the Rock didn’t have too many competitors was on the line from the Twin Cities to Texas; the reason for that is there wasn’t a great volume of freight going that way.
The number of bankruptcies suffered by the Rock is indicative of the facts shown above.
Old Timer
A freind of mine, now retired from the AAR, was one of the ones who inventoried the Rock after it went belly up. You would not believe the things they found. They would be highrailling and find a switch. They would follow the siding and see what they could find. On one siding, there were trees growing between the rails, but futher on they found a bunch of boxcars no one knew were there.
I’ll email him and see if I can get him to post here. He is really a great guy and I love talking to him on the phone, the stories he tells me are great.
It should be noted that the Rock Island’s Chicago-Omaha main survives as the Iowa Interstate, but with minimal overhead traffic, as mentioned in another thread. The Kansas City-Tucmcari line was going to be retained as a secondary main line for boxcar traffic if the SPSF merger would have been approved, not exactly a good sign for its continued existence. The Spine Line served as an entrance to Kansas City for C&NW since it was better than the ex-CGW line.
The Rock Island went to most of the same places as the Burlington, but the long way around.
Well, in fact, the anthracite trafic dwindled long before the rest of the trafic on the LV. Most of the anthracite roads, Reading, Jersey Central, Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley and Lehigh and New England were hit pretty hard when people in the Northeast started switching from anthracite to oil to heat their homes in the 1950’s. The Jersey Central pretty much paralleled the LV all the way from Easton PA to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, and the CNJ was almost totally dependent on coal traffic on the western end. The Valley at least had a friendly connection with the N&W / NKP in Buffalo. The CNJ pulled out of Pennsylvania in 1972, and the LV took over CNJ’s tracks in PA until Conrail. From what I’ve read about the Lehigh Valley, their biggest problem was that they came under control of the PRR in the mid 1960’s.
It was true though, that there were too many New York-Buffalo routes, and Conrail thinned them out by keeping only NYC and Erie mostly intact.
Sounds interesting… I would bet that’s probably true with most railroads. After all, they are some of the largest, and oldest companies in the country. Imagine the nightmare of keeping track of all the properties. It wouldn’t be hard for some things to fall through the cracks over the years. Non RoW properties as well.
Dave
Los Angeles, CA
-Rail Radio Online-Home of the “TrainTenna” RR Monitoring Antenna-
http://eje.railfan.net/railradioonline
In 1980 North American Car Corp., a carbuilder, repair and leasing company, received a contract from the CRIP bankruptcy Trustee, to locate, inspect, generate car repair estimates, contact car owners and transport derailed equipment to car repair facilities. The CRIP Mechanical Dept. furnished car reporting marks and numbers and locations of the derailed cars.
As manager of the program I hired 14 CRIP Car Department supervisors and we travelled every mile of CRIP track. We originally had a list of just under 400 cars. Our inspection turned up 489 cars some of which were never reported as derailed for fear that the FRA would shut the railroad down. In reality the CRIP had two mechanical departments…the Mechanical Dept. in Chicago and the divsional Mechanical Officers who didn’t keep Chicago informed as to how bad conditions were. As I remember the Chicago Office initially refused to accept the list that was developed via NAC inspection
trip.
We picked up cars that derailed on their first revenue trips and had trees growing up through the open doors. In one case we found a group of tank cars that had derailed and tumbled down an embankment. Our pick-up crew was met by a shotgun weilding farmer who would not let us on his property. He was using the derailed cars as a fence to keep his livestock in place.
The maps i’ve seen, the CB&Q usually went the long way around. Maybe if the Rock had been owned by the Hill lines things would’ve turned out differently.
In the 1880’s and 1890’s during the construction era, the management used trackage rights too often to get into major cities. They didn’t aquire land for industrial developement. There idea was to let other railroads spend the money developing industry. Then let those other railroads switch the cars over to the RI for line haul movements. I really think that came back to haunt them in the later years.
I think the old saying was that the Rock Island went everywhere the Burlington did, but by a more circuitous route. Perhaps this is the reason they went belly up.