This reminds me that while John was often substantively right - more often than he was given credit for, I think - he was nevertheless a real “bull in a china shop” when it came to communicating with people and persuading them, and did not “get along well with others” in other settings, such as the several political and governmental forums and bodies with which railroads are inextricably intertwined. He may have had good or excellent ideas, concepts, and proposals, but it is a truism in the engineering business (and others) that those great ideas are worthless if you can’t communicate them effectively. John was just scary at how he went about that - some of that may have been merely for dramatic effect (I recall that he was an amateur thespian) - but if not, then he was dangerously naive about how some of society’s generally accepted and hallowed institutions function (or don’t), and how to work within their limitations to nevertheless achieve the desired goal. If he were in my shop, I would not have let him attend - let alone speak at - any meeting on other than purely technical matters, and maybe not even those. The risk of him inflaming people whose cooperation was needed would be too great.
A little personal story might illustrate this better: One of my professors at Lafayette
It may be more an advertising / marketing term than an actual railroad term. M-Saint-L promoted itself as “The Peoria Gateway” meaning that cars going say west to east could use the M-St.L’s connections in Peoria to go around Chicago rather than thru it, thereby saving about a day’s worth of time (and money) to get where they were going. It was a ‘gateway to the east coast’ I guess.
BTW the M-St.L used to pick up Santa Fe reefer blocks going to the Twin Cities and take them north from western Illinois (somewhere around Galesburg), allowing the fruit to get there much faster than if they had to go to Chicago and then go back northwest to get there.
It’s absolutely a railway term not a mere marketing term in my 30 years in the business. Beyond its generic use – a location where routes come together and a new route can be selected – it also had a technical term to refer to the location where lines passed through rate territory boundaries. Thus, at a gateway, rates changed, route choices appeared, and things happened.
How does/did a gateway function? To get approval from the Milwaukee Road for the BN merger, Milwaukee Road was given new gateways in, I think Louisville, and in Montana(?). So before that, if Milwaukee wanted to exchange westbound cars with NP or GN in Montana, they were just out of luck, if the Northern lines didn’t want to ?
Let’s see if I read/remember this correctly… Somewhere, buried in the many Milwaukee Road and Pacific Coast Extension threads, I believe it was said that the Milwaukee was limited to interchanging westbound traffic to the GN & NP at the Twin Cities. That meant that a car originating in Chicago on the MILW to, say, Maple Valley, WA, on the GN would have to be turned over to the GN in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, rather than the MILW carrying it to Seattle on its own rails and delivering it to the GN there. Opening up additional “gateways” allowed the MILW to carry westbound traffic farther along its lines before surrendering it (and its cut of the rate) to BN. Did I understand correctly?
If so, how on earth did the MILW agree to such a remote western traffic gateway as the Twin Cities in the first place?
There was/is no legal barrier to interchange between two Class 1s at almost all locations, but there might be a rather large financial disincentive. The shipper can specify any route he wishes through any interchange. However, there may not be a “through” or “interline” rate available at that location for the commodity offered by the shipper, only a combination of two local rates. That’s because no Class 1 is obligated by law (so far) to short-haul itself.
For example, if a car was originating on NP at Auburn, Washington, in 1955, and waybilled to Chicago, the NP was under no obligation to quot