How much up and down elevation change could the grain gathering branch lines of the upper plains deal with a century ago? We just purchased a lake cabin on Lake Hendricks, on the SD/MN border. A CNW branch line used to run through the property parallel to the highway. I can’t believe that a lot of dirtwork was done after the rail line was pulled up, probably in the mid-60’s.
It sure looks like the line would have been a roller coaster. Were the trains so light 100 years ago that a little hill climbing wouldn’t be an issue?
Probably had less to do with weight than the ability / need to build the line cheaply and get the rails where they needed to go. Get the line in and worry about the topography later.
How much the elevation changed was not critical, although the actual gradient did matter. Branch lines often could be a bit of a rollercoaster to keep the grading costs down. And you could even cheat a bit on the grades if there was going to be some momentum from a dip
The amount of dirt work done after the line was pulled might surprise you.
When the wye was pulled at Big Moose, NY (NYC), a fellow bought the land from the railroad for the sole purpose of mining the fill (there was a fair amount of it involved), after which I understand he simply abandoned the land.
I suspect that most such lines had a ruling grade of about 1%. Dealing with the ruling grade is ALWAYS THE issue. When that line was built in 1880 +/- 20 years, the usual engine was a 4-4-0 American Standard that would generate about 10-13,000 pounds of tractive effort. The limit of train that could be handled by one engine without doubling the hill was roughly TE/J+G where TE is tractive effort in pounds, J is journal and flange resistance in #/ton and G is grade resistance of 20#/ton times grade in percent. The result is in tons. This is a simplified version of the Davis formula. With 30 ton cars, J is about 5# and for a 1% grade G = 20#, which gives a tonnage limit of 520 tons, or 17 loaded grain cars of the day plus a caboose, in warm weather.
The undulations, so long as they are not more than the ruling grade, are irrelevant. Given the cost of earth moving in the day and the irrelevance of the undulations, it is not surprising that the only profile grading was to keep the undulations down to no more than the ruling grade.
If, like James J. Hill, you wanted to be the low cost carrier, ruling grade reduction/limitation was required. When Hill’s Manitoba took over the St. Paul and Pacific he began to systematically reduce main line ruling grades (all in Minnesota) from 1% to .4%. Now resistance became 5+8 pounds per ton, virtually half af the previous condition, and train size can be doubled, reducing most operating costs by 50%. In this program the undualtions over .4% and longer than a new train length (35 cars * 33 feet = 1155 f
Tyler to Astoria was never more than 1.25% (all 1,2 and 3 degree curves)…very easy for a branchline. The worst was between Hendricks and Ivanhoe (really just the 3 miles west of Ivanhoe), no big deal)…it just was a collector line that filled in a gap between two other CNW lines…Everything funnelled east, so there was no point in building on to Watertown with this line or the branch to the north.
Abandoned May 1969 under ICC FD-25690…nothing more than 60# rail in the dirt and cinders from its 1883 beginninings. You are somewhere MP 25-26.
That was a stated reason for buying the Lackawanna Cutoff and promptly dividing it up into subunits by county. In a state with lots of building going on, “there’s gold in them thar fills”. Fixing that fiasco cost the New Jersey government plenty o’ Benjamins…
RME “up and down”: Tree 68 comment was interesting about fill being “mined” I have seen that here also (on a very small scale) … My curiosity is …Reference: Lackawanna Cutoff ……”fixing the fiasco cost the state of New Jersey” what happened that the state had to “pay up”? SSW9389 and I have been doing some search for an abandon branch line. It is so amazing to see the “tell tale signs” of where it was. When viewing google earth there is the obvious, elevated grade still existent. But then when the county roadway is at an odd angle (it ran parallel to the ROW) it is a strong indicator. The fascinating thing is when all this is connected together, even in fields that are leveled for years, one can see the distinctive “trace” that something used to be there. Endmrw0531161649
Thanks. That was interesting to read and to ponder. Do/did railroads ever do any kind of post-mortem studies on a rail line? Kind of a “figure out if that line made money over the years, and how much, then use that type info for future” planning?
Yes - thus all the ‘plant rationalization’ that was done post Staggers. If a line could not earn it’s maintenance costs, it was abandoned or spun off to a Short Line operator.
One of my first tasks at the ICG was working on branch line abandonments.
It’s hard to demonstrate that a branch makes or looses money. The costs of operation is fairly easy to determine. The revenues are another story. How much of the revenue of a through movement is to be allocated to the branch.
My example is an ICG branch from Bloomington, IL to Mason City, IL. If we received a carload of lumber off the UP at Council Bluffs and moved it to a lumber yard in Mason City we knew how much total we got for moving the car.
But how much of that went to the branch? It had to be an arbitrary allocation. The government set it at an arbitrary 50%. They needed a number so they picked one out of the air.
I do not have acess to the facts to answer your question, but I doubt that anyone did so for three reasons.
First is the question of relevance. Given that we know cumulative contribution margin of a line built 20 years ago, what does that tell us about today? In other words how would knowing the answer to the question change my behavior (affect my decision) today which should be made on the expectation of future earnings.
Second, the regulatory system constrained revenues from ca 1910 to the Staggers Act of 1980, so a line with a history of unregulated earnings is not comparable to likely earnings in a rate regulated future. In fact, real rates fell substantially between 1865 and 1901 so past rates tell nothing about the future.
Third, what predictive value does past traffic have? Industrial scale mining and smelting needs transportation. Traffic before the fisrt line is built into the area was zero, so predictive value of past traffic is zero. Mining is particularly subject to nasty surprises of decreasing ore values and increased cost with depth. Knowing what the traffic was 10 years ago tells me nothing about traffic ten years in the future. Grain growing seems more predictable in that land can be evaluated for suitablity ahead of construction. There may be some hardy pioneers out there to provide yield information, but the point is future traffic, not the past. For the future can we predict weather and climate other than to assume that the future will be like the past? One of James J. Hill’s blunders was to encourage wheat culture in central and eastern Montana. His promotion began during a series of wet years and all was well. Then came a series of dry years that dr
Murph: Being that this stuff is a small part of what I do for a living, I’ve developed a collection of stuff plus multiple websites and other sources to go to. Surveyors and railroad civil engineers have got to have a good grasp on what has happened beforehand before figuring out the next move. If you want a trackchart snapshot of the “hood” in 1959, go here: http://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/C&NW/C&NW%20Track%20Charts/C&NW%20System%20Track%20Chart%203-1-1959.pdf and go to Dakota Division, Pages 84-87
DC, PDN and I all have some common overlapping skills, but we all have some unique skillsets that sent us off in different directions professionally. (Hopefully, BNSF in their current downsizing exercise doesn’t make the same
It isn’t limited to those specialties. I spent a lot of time truing up “reinvented wheels” that the youngsters designed and then couldn’t figure out why they didn’t work. As one program chief engineer put it, “Having bright engineers on a program is certainly a good thing; I just wish we had some more engineers with actual knowledge.”
It’s not a new concept; Henry Petroski quotes a Roman engineer from around 200 BC to that effect in one of his fine books.
Tyler to Astoria was never more than 1.25% (all 1,2 and 3 degree curves)…very easy for a branchline. The worst was between Hendricks and Ivanhoe (really just the 3 miles west of Ivanhoe), no big deal)…it just was a collector line that filled in a gap between two other CNW lines…Everything funnelled east, so there was no point in building on to Watertown with this line or the branch to the north.
Abandoned May 1969 under ICC FD-25690…nothing more than 60# rail in the dirt and cinders from its 1883 beginninings. You are somewhere MP 25-26.
Mudchicken- is there a place where you find this type information, or is it a lot of places, and you simply know where to look?
Murph: Being that this stuff is a small part of what I do for a living, I’ve developed a collection of stuff plus multiple websites and other sources to go to. Surveyors and railroad civil engineers have got to have a good grasp on what has happened beforehand before figuring out the next move. If you want a trackchart snapshot of the “hood” in 1959, go here: http://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/C&NW/C&NW%20Track%20Charts/C&NW%20System%20Track%20Chart%203-1-1959.pdf and go to Dakota Division, Pages 84-87
Mudchicken, your Multimodalways.org is incredible! Thank you for causing me to find their CV timetable, which I sent to my brothers. Our grandfather and 2 great-uncles were CV engineers, the youngest born in 1889 and still working in the 1950s.
#3880 = Bridge Inventory/ Bridge #…Just like the highway bubbas, the bridge does not have to match the milepost location (but it makes it harder on the LCD’s in the company)
24" is the diameter of the concrete pipe (“cp”) bridge/pipe opening (remember, anything that carries drainage water is a bridge in the railroad world)
The breakline that you see betwen MP 25 and MP 26 was put there at the draftman’s discretion. He needed the room below the grade line to put in more relevant data about the bridges.
Remember these track charts are a schematic tool and every railroad approaches things a little differently, so no two railroad drafting standards look the same. (ps - Condensed profile is something much different to me) Don’t try to read too much into these, too many amateurs continually try to make more out of a track chart than is really there. If you need more info, it’s time to start digging into the railroad cadastre for what you need. These rascals have been around for over 100 years, long before GIS, PDA’s, CAD and computers. I spend lotsa time reconstructing long gone railroads for survey and engineering purposes. I’ll go looking for Employee TT’s first, then track charts and then the various types of mapping. (got a chunk of railroad in SE KS that is becoming a struggle to deal with with 3 former Cls. 1’s having ownership claims originally, but nobody claims 2.2 miles of that chuck out in the weeds, including a shortline and two Cls. 1’s…)
IM or e-mail me on the GN/BNSF location. Have a great time in Section 15, T12N, R47W of the 5th PM. (looks like the original GLO Surveyors (Hudson W. Bishop & Co.) got themselves in trouble with convergence back in 1872 (Section 14 vanished!)
Methinks we jumped the gun on the start of the railroad.
Hendricks to Astoria happened about 1900, Tyler to Hendricks about 1898 (according to the ICC GO-20 & GO-26 reports) with surveys of the Dakota Cent
George Harris - who earns his living in the business for a major consulting firm, and also moderates a forum entitled “Railroad Physical Plant Discussions” at http://forums.railfan.net/forums.cgi?board=Infrastructure - once wrote that those of us in this line of vocation/ avocation tend to become pack rats of such information to preserve it and help us in the future. That’s the best description and explanation I’ve seen yet, and at times my wife tends to agree.
For example, I owe mudchicken a big thank-you for sharing with me a copy of the “1984 ATSF Turnout Manual” by Leo Rekush - more info in about 100 pages than I’ve ever seen elsewhere.