What ever happened to the BSMFF ? Did it or a decendant make it into the UP era?
What does that stand for !
Gee. I haven’t heard of the Memphis Blue Streak Merchandise Forwarder in a lot of years now. I knew it was a favorite on the Southern Pacific. I wish I knew what happened.
Another train I’ve been wounding about was the Chats hauler. SP would run it up to Gemco yard and it would go back out as the symbol of the day (i.e. GMNFA - Gemco to Norfolk Southern Autos).
The story is nicely covered (for the ‘meaningful’ years) in Frailey’s book “Blue Streak Merchandise” (published in 1991). Abebooks has a copy which could be yours, delivered, for under $23.
IIRC (been a while since I read the book and I don’t own it) the fast running was stopped in 1974 – probably a combination of the oil crisis making the high speed uneconomical, and the trackwork being unduly whacked. We’ve had threads in the forum about precisely why a single high-speed train made sense in the era of unused capacity and high-speed passenger service, but less in an age of stack trains run to high capacity, with more direct and guaranteed point-to-point service reliability via containers. If there’s no cost-effective need for a 70-mph train… it unsurprisingly doesn’t pay to run one…
The Santa Fe Super C trains (some of which, I believe, ran even faster at peak than the BSM) did not succeed for similar, economic, reasons.
There was a press release for the transcontinental Atlanta/Florida ‘Blue Streak’ service that indicated UP retired the ‘Blue Streak’ name in 1996, after the merger, but I don’t think the age of heroic high-speed railroading returned after the Seventies… hope I’m mistaken.
I thought NS and UP were going to run another EMP/Blue Streak on from Memphis to Los Angelas using those TTRX spine cars.
I have read Fred Frailey’s book on the Blue Streak several times. It is one of my all time favorite books. I was more interested in contemporary times. I know it still existed when I lived near Gemco yard. But I left there in 95, before the merger.
So I guess UP retired it. No suprise. I guess it got assimilated like all else SP. [:(]