I’m saying Truman was a friend and respectful of the railroads. 1945-1952. Now there were changes coming a plenty in this period, most of them positive, with the railroads but through it all there was still a mindset, a vital need and a common sensed recognition of that. Things on the railroad looked good…the ballast, the track, the signals, the new passenger sets, the locomotives, the stations…everything. Its role in the economy and national security was assured. The pictures from this era show a beautiful and proud system across the land. The Rock Island and the Milwaukee Road were healthy and solid. They were big…household names. Pennsy and NYC were pillars and titans of industry. Even though the last of steam was built in 1948 those locomotives were super modern and would last decades…same for the steam locomotives build since 1945. Diesels may be the future but these new steam babies are the best ever and will be around a long time yet. Baldwin was still touting a future for steam, just that we ain’t seen nothing yet!. If you stated that Penn Station would be torn to the ground and dumped in the swamps of New Jersey in about ten years hence you would think we were invaded and defeated by Martians.
Enter the Eisenhower administration 1953-1960 and the huge wholesale mean natured taking apart of the railroad industry. Deferred maintenance, infrastructure lost, stations closed, passenger service vanishing, dirty locomotives, junk everywhere, new ste
I remember watching President Eisenhower on TV that night. Next day the papers were full of stories about the military industrial complex, whatever that was. But soon Ike was completely out of office and his farewell speech went practically forgotten for the rest of his life.
Ike was trying to warn people of the M-I complexes propensity to play off Cold War paranoia and suck money out of the public trough that could be better spent elseware.
Back in the 1960 campaign the Kennedy Democrats (not at ALL like todays Democrats, by the way) got a lot of milage accusing the Esienhower administration of allowing a “missle gap” to occur between ourselves and the Soviet Union, something Ike vehemently denied, saying our retaliatory capability was not just sufficient, but “awesome.” As the man in command he certainly knew wherof he spoke.
One of the wisest things Eisenhower said concerning the Soviet Union was it was bound to collapse anyway. “If they want to keep up with us, and they do, they’ll have to educate their people. And in doing so they’ll sow the seeds of their own destruction.” He was right.
What’s this got to do with railroads? Probably not too much. There were a number of things, not any one thing, that led to the railroads near-collapse.
“Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society”
The above from the speech…the railroads were kicked to the curb, fine for this and that…long haul in sparse areas ( and not all of them…only a few), coal, and so on but as an everyday means of primary transport and service the end came rapidly. It was considered outdated, useless and fairly well taken out of the equation. You can’t tell me GM did not play a monstrous role in all this. They even replaced the new steam with their own hard sell, easy financing and promises of monster savings while sticking a knife in their back. We here in Canada hung on a wee bit longer but followed suit. Really did not occur anywhere else in the world but then the rest of the world was not North America.
I suppose the free market system worked and things “evolved” naturally but I can’t shake off the eye test…thinking it might turn back sooner than we think because what we had and lost was efficient and worked very well.
Ok I’m nuts, but occasionally I am normal allright! So now read this …posted by Wanswheel in the RDC in VT thread in the Trains General Discussion forum.
For the things that we do need to move greater distances, we need to transition away from airplanes and trucks and rely more on water and rail. This shift is already beginning to happen, with UPS using rail more often for their shipments, which is a lot cheaper and much more energy efficient. I think we’re also going to end up using our old canal systems, using them for water transportation of goods. Vermont is a great example of how this could work: we might have a port in Burlington, on Lake Champlain, where we can receive and ship goods through our canal system, which extends all the way down to the Hudson River and out to the ocean.
When it comes to the transportation of people, the challenge is getting everyone out of their cars. Cars are central to our way of life: people consider the car the primary way of getting places, except when it comes to very long distances, in which case they rely on airplanes. Both of these modes of transportation are very energy-intensive and unsustainable in the long term — even higher-efficiency airplanes or electric cars (which require the same resources to build and use the same energy-intensive infrastructure as regular cars).
Soon, we’ll need to move back to a train system as our main method of moving people long distances
For very good reason - Ike was a proponent of a network of good trunk roads as early as 1919, and took the ‘right’ lesson from the Autobahn (which really means ‘automobile railroad’ in German) and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was modeled (not to its advantage!) after the Autobahn structure. He knew to put something better than double-sided Armco barrier between the opposing high-speed traffic lanes!
More to the point, the Interstate highways started being referred to as defense highways – I think Ike et al. were a bit overimpressed with Eighth Air Force-style propaganda (history written a bit too quickly by the victors, with SAC needing all the propaganda they could muster) about what either area or pinpoint bombing did to railroads. (Al Staufer has a particularly good ‘sea of mud’ comment on this in Thoroughbreds).
Fun to slip it in along with the other ‘defense’ things, like Tom Power and SAC and ‘sunshine units’ and mutual assured deterrence, that our society accepted as necessary against the evil Rooskies.
I don’t feel at all sorry for the Russians about there ‘turning out to be no missile gap’. They certainly worked both the bomber gap and the missile gap as hard as they knew how, to the point of turning Claire Chennault on his head by looping the flights of bombers around and around to leave the wrong impression. Should I be sorry that by the time we discovered “Keynesian” synergistic guns and butter it turned out they were bluffing?
I haven’t been sorry for a moment that we went after the USSR and took it down. I discovered I actually liked going to sleep not worried about thermonuclear weapons pointed three miles away. I’m just sorry the government frittered away the peace dividend and the European bank
Steam went out between 1947 and 1950 for very good reasons, documented extensively in the contemporary railroad press. A major ‘enablement’ was the relatively fine financial position railroads enjoyed coming out of the traffic peaks of WWII - and once they had credit and the ability to expand equipment trusts, most everyone went to diesels as quick as they could, even those like PRR who tried research to placate their coal interests. The free-piston locomotive made too much noise; the bituminous coal turbine was a long, intricate scam. Anything else used too much water, unless you wanted to keep stopping pathetic crawling freight trains every division point to swap full crews, while paying exaggerated taxes to local jurisdictions that complained about soot and noise.
Railway Express had a good business model … but one that was predicated on lots of little trains stopping often enough at lots of little stations. When better approaches came along, in the air or on the roads, all the cachet and pride there was wouldn’t keep them going - Perlman famously cancelled the Centuries before they could slump into inevitable mediocrity if left unsubsidized.
And for every railroad using CTC effectively, or running 2-8-4s effectively in bridge-line service, there were plenty more that thought a 22-mile daily run for a freight car, and incredibly large numbers of people to conduct fast freight operations that actually got packages to destinations undamaged and quickly, were just fine. That stopped paying pretty quick with trucks using the Interstates, “road use taxes” adequate or not as you care to argue. And as has been argued over and over with quite a bit of acumen on the Trains forums, what the railroads cared to do was not sufficient to maintain many of the railroads, or many of the services, no matter how romantic or interesting they
“I’m just sorry the government frittered away the peace dividend and the European bankers are back in charge of things again.”- RME
Yes, thats a real sore point with me, and I’m sure many others as well…we had a once in hundred years opportunity to make the world a better place and drive a stake into the vampire vaquishing it forever but we really flubbed that. Quite a surprising and dissapointing outcome.
As to your last posting…I suppose I reluctantly will defer to the point…it’s all a result of free market forces but much pressure artificially imposed as well. Been discussed before but N&W could have endured steam for some time yet and who knows what advancements could have come about. Recently discussed Pacifcs built in 1948 for Reading and Canadian Pacific sure as heck were not experimental. The change from looking at 1948, then 1958 doesn’t pass the smell test…something stinks!
"Passengers were going to be lost to railroads in the '50’s as they were lost to the interurbans after the '20’s - RME
Well ok BUT the best and brightest at the top of the industry didn’t see that and millions upon millions lost on new trainsets. Also…if only we had the interurban system back that was in place!..what a boon to society that would be today…big big mistake but thats the way society went. Nothing wrong with the interurban system…nothing!
But not past about 1970 - the key thing being the official passage of the Clean Air Act and the EPA. No reciprocating locomotive that was economically viable at the time would have passed. It is still difficult to design engines that will under all working conditions.
And that’s not a bad thing. I am a ‘native New Yorker’ having been born and lived my first couple of years in Manhattan. The sky was always gray or brown then, and I can remember looking up and being astounded to see blue sky and white clouds, just like the storybooks (and in Pennsylvania and at the beach on vacations) and if you breathed in too deeply your lungs would ache dully. It was a rare occasion to see the island further down than around 125th St. from the George Washington Bridge, and a red-letter day to see as far down as the 72nd St. boat basin. Twice in my entire youth I was able to see, far down the harbor, the little finger of the Statue of Liberty sticking up in the haze. Grand Central and Rockefeller Center were as black as if you’d carved them out of bituminous coal.
Now – with many more cars on the road – it’s routine to see the Verrazano Narrows Bridge distinctly, much further away. Rockefeller Center is cream and Grand Central is pink. And I wouldn’t go back for all the Baldwins … or, come to think of it, 830-series Pacifics … on CNJ.
And neither, by the time they were built, was the PRR T1: all the difficulties had hard engineering solutions by that point. And the T1 was a far more capable engine than either Pacific, even when fired and run to reach the same fuel and water consumption – same as the Niagara, which was a bett
One must not forget that National City Lines was created at the end of WWII to systematically destroy many of the “clean green” electric operated streetcar operations coast to coast, year after year, well into the Eisenhower administration of the 50s. One of the first to fall to the stinkers was Tampa Electric Co. when newly created NCL sent Tampa buses built by GM, rode on Firestone tires, used Standard Oil for fuel, which commenced operations during the Truman administration!
Who doesn’t get goosebumps when they watch a Berkshire on the point hauling Nickel Plate High Speed Freight? Sad but true, and quoted by the late Hollister Noble, in his 1954 novel published by Doubleday “One Way to Eldorado”, the steam locomotive was stabbed in the steamchest the day the first practical Diesel rolled off the production line!
Lest we forget, when Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul made the decision to string wire in the Rockies, America was headed for an electrical revolution. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Lord Mr. Ford’s horseless carriage literally stopped any potential nationwide mainline electrification in it’s tracks, possibly due to Rockefeller and Ford political interests in Washington DC.
True, though the interurban era brought new interest in railroad electification, but just like it returned during the energy shortage of the 70s when the Black Meas & Lake Powell Railroad hung wire in the Arizona desert, it quíckly disappered while EMD, Alco, and GE, continued building high horespower diesel-electric locomotives keeping the builder’s books full of orders.
Item: ATSF did undertake a study during the WWI era to determine the advantage of hanging wire over Raton Pass vs. steam. SP did likewise in the Sierra Nevadas, but both Western roads ended up rostering gigantic steam locomotives instead.
Where are the railroads headed today? It doesn’t look like any will consider han
There are many other examples of major electrification planning, including both Erie and Lehigh Valley. Note that N&W actually went back from wire to gigantic steam locomotives, via construction of the new Elkhorn Tunnel, as late as the early '50s.
One problem with effective electrification is that to get maintainable plant, you have to spend much more money than a Milwaukee-style installation with wood poles and a bunch of pulloffs. Very few roads had the access to capital combined with the willingness to forgo the other opportunities which that capital could have enabled. Even PRR, which certainly demonstrated it could string wire to Harrisburg, didn’t extend it where it was most needed, or even put the tunnel under Horse Shoe (which would have required it in steam days) through: it did the job with diesels, and did it well enough. (It is difficult for me to figure out where PRR, even in wartime, would have gotten the wherewithall to electrify from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, or how they would have handled the debt service even as early as 1946).
There are two promising opportunities - both, alas! problematical. One is to co-locate new transmission lines with railroad ROWs, and construct the catenary infrastructure piecewise as Public Service did in the Jersey Meadows many years ago now. The drawback is that derailments or accidents cause trouble for the electric power grid. The other opportunity is to build dual-mode-lite power (or use electrified road slugs with reversible connections to their mothers) and implement catenary only where operationally justified at first, gradually extending to close the gaps ‘as needed’ (or as nat
Had the interurban system survived to todays world then stating that the interurban system was rickety and dangerous is a non starter…everything would be vastly improved all along. The Lake Erie and Northern, which I rode on in the '50’s was smooth as silk. Even today if I left Brantford by car to go to the terminus in Port Dover it is doubtful I could get there first…a line from Buffalo to Albany and Rochester as existed would make congestion on the highways look mighty foolish as you waved at them from your window…and a heck of a lot safer with all those big rigs out there, not to mention the idiots who think they are in a car commercial or those that are texting, killing the innocent and themselves.
As for the Millenials, they could use the walk by the looks of a lot of them and would get used to it real quick…it would be the parents that would be overprotective causing troubles.
This is one weird thread for Classic Trains. (I can see it on the Trains forum.)
I think rather than by conspiracy railroads in the 1950s were, as conventional wisdom holds, done in by a convergence of naturally occurring unfriendly events and trends. Interstate highways and jet planes were not invented and built to do in the railroads, but were simply in the natural progression of things.
Yes, they got a leg up from government, as the railroads did in their genesis, at the same time that gummint’s heavy thumb of regulation – outdated, as even the dense gummint came to realize – weighed against the rails.
Now, in the natural progression of things, the air and highways are getting overcrowded and overexpensive, and the vaunted efficiencies of rail are getting a chance to reassert themselves.
If rail deserves to survive and thrive, it will.
P.S. Steam was a ridiculous, high-maintenance anachronism, given we had been in the internal-combustion age since at least the teens of the 20th century.
But where would the money for all those interurban railways to survive through the '50s – now by law divorced from the power companies that were their principal hope to survive down times, or acquire capital access for improvements – have possibly come from?
By the late '50s it was becoming very obvious that even big railroads with paying commuter service were in deep trouble both in terms of acquiring new equipment for their service and for keeping track maintenance up. (See the PRR and CNJ with the shared Bay Head service, for example, about the time that PRR tested the 2400hp 6-motor Alcos and found them eminently suitable, a noble predecessor of that most honored of honorary steam locomotives, the U34CH). I look back at all the expedients that were tried on poor interurbans: various kinds of adapted railbus; the Autorailer and its variants; even self-propelled generators to turn interurban trains into the equivalent of gas-electrics. I just don’t see anything that keeps the track kept up to the standards needed to attract and hold new business … in that era … without public participation (both in terms of financing and in terms of tax and policy reform).
And in most cases, I really hate to say this but a properly modified bus would have been better. Lower tare weight, better suspension, engine easy for a thousand outside mechanics to work on cheap, with relatively inexpensive parts supply. Folks in Memphis couldn’t even keep rebuilt trolleys running without fire, with a renovation budget of millions and then operating support on a MUCH higher level than characterized most of the interurban lines surviving the '20s.
Then you have to explain how you would crew the necessary level of service to make a
The Milwaukee Road was so in debt after electrifying that they were never able to close the 200 mile gap between their two electric segments. Some power company railroads in isolated areas have electrified, using their own power rather than hauling in diesel, but others still went the diesel route.
The interurbans were starting to look like bad bets in the 1920s. The only ones interested then were the utilities, until 1935 when the law prohibited them from using the rate payers to subsidize the traction lines. After that you almost could have given the traction companies to GM et al.
Edit: RME’s post came out while I was composing, and before I sent the above, and he said it so much more elegantly.
The two big things that finally doomed steam were the rising labor costs of the 1950s and the recession of 1958. The NKP planned to stay with steam for at least several years past 1957 as in the early 1950s steam was still cheap enough to make economic sense. Labor costs (and thus shopping costs) roughly doubled between 1953 and 1956 and so steam had to go. The recession of 1958 finished the process, as well as the optimism era of the postwar passenger train.
I’m certain light rail and “intercity” rail service will make a comeback. Toronto has recently added a brand new, from the ground up, light rail service from Union Station downtown to Pearson International Airport. Similiar happenings across our two lands and much buzz.
Ok, fine, I’m now a backwoods hick living in the Boreal Forest of far Northern Saskatchewan, quite isolated… an older well used Mining Engineer and Geologist using up whatever little time is left teaching Aboriginal students in these subjects.
I left Southern Ontario for good in 2006 but my kids now have the family property. On a diagonal running east-west along the property at the SW corner was the NYC Canada Southern line. There is a small concrete bridge there. A picture of it is in the CASO website. The proprietor of that website has asked not to copy and post any of the pics to another site so I will abide but if you check out the website you will find a lot of information.
So…whats the point of this? Well that was a busy line with NYC Hudsons and Mikes, lots of trains. I think the last of steam was around 1955-56. Then lots of E’s, F’s, Alco’s you name it. Big stop at Waterford interchanging with the TH&B, CNR and LE&N interurban. That was 15km East. Things slowed down around 1960, not the same and diminishing each year afterward. Then Penn Central. Then Amtrak “Niagara Rainbow” I think. Then Conrail. Track badly deferred. Then nothing. CN and CP bought it and ripped out the beautifully engineered Canada Southern…gone.
Just a few km’s south of all this was the parallel Detroit-Buffalo Wabash, Pere Marquette, CNR line. Busy busy. Bullet nose Betty’s handling the fast long green and black passenger trains. Even a joint Wabash/CNR local passenger service, eventually down to one Wabash coach only. Close enough you could hear the whistles and horns. Then PM gone and now C&O, then Wabash gone and now N&W, then C&O gone an
So, let’s “pass the paper bag that holds the bottle” and we’ll all feel better!
Seriously, if we’re talking about the deterioration of the railroads here in the US on closer inspection we’re talking about, mostly, the 'roads in the Northeast and what’s now known as the “Rust Belt.” The roads west of the Mississippi and in the south really didn’t do too badly in those years.
I’m not much of a grand conspiracy theorist. Passenger trains, interurbans, trolleys, all of them died because they weren’t wanted anymore, although in some places like New York City you could say the trolleys just evolved into subways.
The interstate highway system? It was needed, it was wanted, it was built. No-one said don’t build it, at least as far as I know.