Well, the Railroads will never regain the stature they had with the public up until the mid-20th Century…especially Passenger Service…Before the Interstate Highway System was started back in the 1930’s, and before the revolution in air travel, the Railroad was the way to travel, and to move freight. Just watch any old Railroad Promotional Film from the 1940’s…Now, with Interstate Highways getting clogged with Trucks, the trend in some ways may begin to reverse itself, as Intermodal traffic is seeing large growth on Railroads but it will never be like it was in the’Good Old Days’ when roads like the Pennsy were at the top of their game…Dave Williams http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nsaltoonajohnstown
…Dave…Turnpikes and Parkways, but not interstates in the 30’s…They were started in the mid 50’s.
Well, I used the wrong terminology there, I should have said. “before the vast improvements in the Nation’s highway system began in the 1930’s, followed by the beginning of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950’s”… At any rate…FDR’s ‘New Deal’ started alot of the Highway Improvements that would eventually create a viable alternative to railroad passenger and freight business… Dave Williams
I don’t think non-railfans have ever understood our passion for trains and railroads.
IMO the advertising they do is largely aimed at existing and potential investors and shippers with general public name recognition being secondary. The NS & UP commercials are most common on CNBC and other business news shows. Ad agencies and networks sell packages of channels and times based on demographics, so some of the ads also show up on regular news & some entertainment programs of the affiliated networks. Most of the cost is in producing the commercial, so once you have it and pay to run it in the target market, running it in other secondary markets is fairly inexpensive.
But I really doubt you’ll see UP or NS ads on major event braodcasts like the Superbowl or World Series. Amtrak did a really smart move IMO in having an ad for the Acela behind the plate in Fenway at the ALCS. That targets both New York and Boston consumers plus gets some national recognition.
For freight though, most consumers don’t know or don’t care. They give it to USPS, UPS, or FedEx(ground or air) and it’s the people at those companies that determine what goes by rail. Consumers are more concerned with lost or damaged goods, tracking, convenience, etc. It’s a little like buying a dishwasher. It may be made in USA, but few consumers are going to research if the steel is domestic or imported.
Advertising does not make sense for the railroads. Public relations does make sense.
Advertising does not make sense because the typical Class I will have about 80% of its stock held by 250-300 investors. About 80% of its revenue will come from 800-1,000 customers. Their are better ways to get your message across than mass advertising. My customers each paid the UP something in the mid eight figures a year for service. It makes more sense to deliver the message in person than run an add on TV in Houston.
The recent UP’s media campaign was aimed mostly at employees with heavy ad buys in places like Omaha, St. Louis, Houston, Little Rock and North Platte. This fits it with their mission statement:
“Union Pacific is committed to be a company where:
our customers want to do business,
our employees are proud to work,
and shareholder value is created.”
Notice that nothing is said about the general public or The Faithful. However, as railroads start to think about going after cheap government money they need to start looking at the public as a potental investor. This is where good public relations could pay off in billions for capital investment.
…I understand from a railfan point of view the railroad doesn’t have the aurora in the community it once did…“Down at the railroad depot”…point of attraction, gathering, town center point of comings and goings…I personally headed off to war by first stepping on a train in Johnstown, Pa. as did many others…Changing to a troop train in Chicago I guess it was union station for the trip to Seattle…
No one would like to have that center of transportation being again at such locations as I would. But we don’t have it anymore…Our times are different now. But…from what figures I seem to read and be aware of, the class one’s haul more tonnage now than ever before. So maybe we can take a bit of comfort that, that being true, maybe it holds a hope that more railshipments will come with our changing transportation needs…Unclogging highways, intermodule shipping expanding, cleaner processes of using coal to produce electricy and more…We can hope.
…And Dave, understand…about improvements in highways back then, even local county roads being paved getting folks out of the mud, etc…
YES those were the good old days when rail transportation dominated all other modes of transportation. Unfortunitly, I wasn’t living or should I say born then. 
I hate interstates, and turnpikes. I live about 15mins from many surounding interstates and one PA trunpike, oh they get on my nervous. The only thing I like about the PA turnpike is that at the Willow Grove exit, it follows NS mailine traffic, ex PRR tracks.
Oh as for Microsoft, they better not touch any railroad out there. I don’t care if it’s a shortline, or a class one. However, there are exceptions. Microsoft may only collaborate w/ a railroad to develop or upgrade a train simulation game. LOL.
If we consider other roads besides the UP, there certainly are a few glaring examples of double cut back to single in busy and growing corridors:
On the BN in the late 80s: north of the Twin Cities (Becker - Big Lake vicinity), and then Spokane - Pasco (one of the paired track lines taken out).
On the CN more recently: some double track in the Canadian Rockies was taken out.
I have a real hard time believing these were wise decisions (in the long run).
I recently heard from UP management about one or two examples of retrenchment that they now regret, but they escape me right now. In general, I think you are correct, UP has been much more resistant than most to reducing track capacity.
And I agree about the SP case. They needed that track on the Sunset Route a lot more than they needed it on the Overland Route. That was really a case of a poor RR redeploying assets where they were more urgently needed, rather than outright elimination of track capacity.
Best regards,
Rob L.
CSXrules…About something to like about the Pa. Turnpike…How about the fact the original part follows approximately the route of the never quite finished South Penn Railroad over and through the mountains on it’s way from near Harrisburg to Pgh…
Microsoft and the railroad…
Poor engineers who would have to deal with Windows crashing or my personal favourite
“Window has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down”
Maybe the locomotive will run slow because it needs to be defraged.
Ahh…it’s fun to jest.[:D]
As far as double going to single, The NY Central single-tracked alot of the old West Shore line along the Hudson River in the early 1960’s but left sections in, as sidings. CSX is finding out that re-doubletracking the line may be a necessity as traffic has grown significantly since the half dozen to a dozen trains a day in the late 1960’s on the River Line to now averaging close to three dozen a day…I can hear the horns from this line in the distance at night from where I live. Dave Williams http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nsaltoonajohnstown
LOL! [:p][:o)][:)]
Well, the name “the Wreck of the Old 97” is taken, but someone might write a tune called “The Crash of the old 98” and have a hit among Microsoft users. Actually, it might be a bigger hit among us Mac users.
One problem of railroads is that they are now almost invisible since so many grade crossings have been replaced with over and underpasses. And of course, to us old timers, diesels have the all the charisma of a brick.
Railroads do little in the way now of publicity. They seemed to have learned that anonimity is much better in an age of out of control lawsuits. Railroads in the Georgia Railroad Association, which are not class 1s, fight hard to keep an almost invisible profile. I cannot even get any to let me do a coffee mug with their heralds and history. Some feel that if anyone knows about them, they will sue. And if history is any indicator, railroads have been used as a brass ring for many, many greedy Americans and their greedy, greedy lawyers. Mark, I hope you don’t mind if I say anything negative about lawyers.
Jock Ellis
Junctionfan,
I don’t think the public waking up one day and deciding to convert all railways to “public walkways” is something about which UP executives wake up in the middle of the night in a cold feverish sweat thinking. I wont pretend I know whether this could be done in Canada, but I can think of at least three legal reasons this couldn’t be done in the United States, even if the entire public of the United States decided to take one big acid trip to come to such a laughable conclusion.
I read your post carefully; I don’t feel as though you gave my post the same courtesy, as you seemed to completely ignore the gravamen of my point: the inherent differences of the product that railroads sell does not make it amenable to the “glitz” advertising that you describe and works so well for beer.
Even if we could get commercials of trainmasters going around calling fouls on shippers for shipping with UP instead of BNSF like Budweiser and Miller commercials, or “UP Cheap Rates Less Polluting—as opposed to tastes great less filling,” and the public suddenly ooed and aaahhed over railroads like I do over a good micro brew, what would happen next? I am sure scenic railroads would love it, but I don’t think the same would be the case for freight railroads.
Advertising of the type you refer to is aimed at impulse buying, those who want to appear fashionable, and decisions that don’t generally receive in depth cost-benefit analysis. Although my faith in business is diminishing, I would hope CEOs of companies make their decisions of how to transport their product in a little bit more complicated way than I do for choosing beer—although they could probably learn a lot by the way I chose my wine.
Gabe
Exactly…because with wine it comes down to numbers…if there’s going to be a lot of people, then buy box’ o wine. If it’s just you and the wife…then something red or white depending on the mood or meal…but make sure it’s got a screw on top, case you want to save some for later.
Hey Gabe,[:D][8D]
Don’t feel down, guy.
Railroads may have lost their “high status” with the public that they enjoyed years back, but by NO MEANS have they lost their importance! Just try to imagine what would happen if all of the operations and maintenance workers of every Class 1 and Class II railroads in the U.S went on strike! You’d see the President, Congress, Dept. of Transportation, and thousands of businesses go into “Panic Attack” mode!
I took a course in economics when I attended Junior College, and was happy to learn that railroads are still an integral part of the economy! It has already been established that trucks cannot handle the bulk shipments like the Class 1s can. Look at how incredibly successful the intermodal business is. Phenomenal! Look at raw material shipments. Are you going to get 200 trucks to carry what a 100 car coal train can carry? Forget it!
We’ve joked on this forum in how Union Pacific has been so overwhelmed that it’s actually turning shippers away! (price they’re paying for “single tracking” most of their mainline track back in the 1980s! )
The problem (if it is a problem) is that the public today views railroads as utilities, as a poster above so well put it. Except for bullet trains, the glitz and glamour are gone.
Now how do we generally treat utilities today? We pretty much ignore them…even their t.v commercials…until the power goes out, or the telephone quits working, or a water line breaks…then it’s Red Alert and we have a hissy fit!
So inspite of the low return on investing, frivolous lawsuits against them, ongoing labor problems, safety issues, and
Exxon is worth even more than Microsoft, but not too many people get nostalgic for Esso stations or Standard stations or “They’ll never get rid of the Tiger.”
It was a far better world!