I listened to that station when it was known as WWSW and played polkas every day from 12:15 to 1PM.
Mark
1 Like
You know you’re old when the oldies stations STOP playing the music of your childhood and program newer stuff as ‘nostalgia’…
The situation was complicated at the old Classic Trains because they set a ‘fifty-year window’ on a sliding basis – the problem being that slowly but surely that cutoff worked forward through the 1960s and then arrived at the amusing oxymoron of ‘the golden years of railroading’ including the 1970s.
For quite some time, the bulk of automobile production in the 1970s was called the ‘Malaise Era’ and that term certainly describes a great deal of railroading in the '60s and '70s. The interesting thing is that it could be said there was a ‘classic revival’ in the late '80s (for example with the introduction of the Super Fleet era on ATSF) extending all the way to the modern robber-baron PRR-centric stuff (that is not ‘classic’ and I wonder how much nostalgia will accompany thinking about it when it starts to be 50 years old…)
1 Like
I’m not worried, had a lot of experience hanging out with old geezers in my twenties and thirties. It is weird to have come across a scan of a 1924 magazine to see a picture of someone I’d met several times in person in the 1980’s.
This discussion got me to thinking about what someone who was a much older than I am as I am from you. Classic would mean wood passenger and freight cars, non-superheated steam locomotives and before his time would link and pin couplers along with freight cars using brakemen. Classic for me would be first generation diesels, cab units for freight, lots of local freight and LCL.
Amfleet cars were first put in use about wen I started my senior year in college. There was one trainset of Amfleets used on the Surfliners when I was commuting in 2013-14. Speaking of which, a 2013-14 issue of Classic Trains had a picture of the San Diegan taken in 1964 - I had that issue with me on the 50th anniversary of that picture being taken when the train passed that spot.
1 Like
Yep. I think you need to pick a period and then stick with it.
Rich
Still remember the Woodland Scenics Scenery Manual I got back in the mid 90s considers 1961 and up as the modern diesel era. Not sure what the more recent versions of it say.
1 Like
The problem with Classic Trains now is that it’s almost all reprinted articles.
Yeah, that needs to change.
Rich
I agree that defining when the classic era ended is subjective.
For me, the classic era ended in the mid to late 1980s. Train crews went from 4 men to 3, then 2 men on most trains. Cabooses disappeared, becoming “shoving platforms” or office and locker space on MOW trains. In dark or ABS signal territory, time table and train order was replaced by track warrant control or direct traffic control. With that operating change and computerization of the waybilling from central offices, small town depots went away.
Jeff
2 Likes
That’s a bit late if you ask me. But, of course, nobody is asking me.
Rich
What do you think Rich, when did the classic era end?
One of my memories of spending summers in Montana was watching the BN coal trains roll by punctuated by a green and yellow BN caboose. My recollection was that cabooses were usually clean. The 1980’s were definitely a time of change for the industry, probably driven by the passage of the Staggers act.
The 1970’s were a decade that most would like to forget, with much of the industry in bad shape and the end of the optimism of the post WW2 era.
Railroading has gone through a number of transitions over the last two centuries.
1 Like
We had a comparable discussion a few years ago about an :“American approximation” to the various ‘eras’ for British and some European practice.
One place that ‘classic old-time railroading’ experienced a major paradigm shift was in the switch from first-generation-size power to larger and more capable ‘second-generation’ power, with fewer quirks, where replacement units were ‘better’ than 1:1 replacement for the early stuff. That transition was around the time of the GP24, and the date I remember (probably a compromise) was about 1963.
Then of course there was the jump from 3600hp (for a really big mainline unit starting in the mid-Sixties) through the better electronics of the Seventies and Eighties to the adoption of widespread 4400hp locomotives, often with some form of radial steering, and then increasing use of AC drive. So far, that era has had remarkable ‘legs’ – I still regularly see locomotives in service from 1991 or before, which would have been unthinkable for earlier generations of power…
I am sticking with the notion that there was a specific period in time that makes something classic. It doesn’t diminish, it doesn’t get added to, and it doesn’t get replaced.
Rich
1 Like
There’s something to be said for adopting the definition of ‘classic’ used by the Classic Car Club of America – from 1915 to 1948. That is fairly close to defining ‘the golden age of steam’, bracketed by Cole’s locomotives like the K28 and the development of USRA standardization on the one hand, and the great dying off of most steam research which accelerated around some time in 1947.
As an alternative, I propose fixing the ‘ending date’ relative to a somewhat esoteric, but I think meaningful benchmark: the range where the MKT turned from a proud, effectively-managed railroad to the streaks of Dust Bowl rust it had largely become by the time of the Trains article in the mid-Sixties. All the other stuff that marked the passage of the actual ‘golden years of railroading’ will be right in that range of years. The last hurrah for golden-age passenger trains was not the CZ, I think, but the post-coaches-on-the-Century PRR Broadway, which tried to step right into the shoes of all-Pullman de luxe service. If any train could have pulled it off, that would be it… and it failed to thrive in an appallingly short time.
Of course, the end of practical passenger service came with the cancellation (no pun intended) of the Post Office contracts. That in turn was the effective end of REA as effective support of local express on the rails. Nobody could really consider Amtrak as a golden age of passenger service, in any epoch…
1 Like
I would like to know what would make people believe flying in a tin can would be so much better then stretching your legs on a train and sitting down to a good meal.
1 Like
Maybe it boils down to this: Time is money.
1 Like
Sometime in the 1968-9 time frame, someone did a relative cost analysis of the California Zephyr versus a 727 for the Chicago - Denver route. The costs of the zephyr were much higher than for the 727, mainly due to labor. This was reported in Trains and ISTR Air Progress.
maybe, but to take a santa fe from California to Chicago and eat at a Harvey House would be great.
It sure would. I’d do anything to revive that kind of travel.
But consider this: For people who weren’t (or aren’t) railfans, doing this kind of train trip more than a few times can be likened to a sort or Purgatory. Actually, the right word for it is boring. I’ve ridden across the country enough times to know that a good part of it is not real interesting (Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, the Dakotas–I’m looking at you). Three whole days inside a steel train car is not preferable to five hours in a “tin can,” as you term it. For most people, the object is the destination, not the journey.
That being said, I’m a huge fan of dining cars and the great food I’ve enjoyed there. I doubt if anyone 50 years later rhapsodizes about an airline meal they once had.
For my money, Harvey Houses were the best restaurant chain America ever had. I miss 'em.
It’s preferable only if you have unlimited free time. My in-laws are in California and we’re in Michigan. How often do you think we’d be able to visit them if we had to take the train? As it is, we fly out there 2-3 times a year.