[quote user=“Poppa_Zit”]
Since the parameters are so nebulous and mutli-faceted, I’ll say 1839 to 1863 was the most impres
the golden age ended over a decade ago. I’ve lost so much. Wisconsin used to thrive with railroad activity everywhere. now the busiest track is on the border. i lost ITPRA, CNW, and heck i remember when SOO had a presence here. all of that is now gone.
golden age right now? PUH! dont make me laugh! clearly this is the dark age of railroading
Golden Age=The Good Old Days=30 years ago, regardless of ones age. It’s always 30 years ago whether you’re talking about trains, cars, music, whatever. Back when I was 29 and holding.
I don’t think anyone who was there at the time sees the period 1975-1980 as any kind of “Golden Age” of railroading. Just about the exact opposite.
The golden age of railroading, can be so many things to so many people, and even so many things to the same person.
Today seems to be a golden age, great freight growth, resurgence of commuter rail, the shear number of restored and operating steam locomtives, high speed rail. The future seems to be very bright for railroads also, think of some of the new technology just starting to emerge such as positive train control, green technology, and new ways of thinking of transportation.
So many eras have played a part in this and other countries, the first railroads, the technology leaps in speed and safety, and the growth of new markets. You can use a lot of criteria to gain a conclusion but I dont think any one era could really be gauged as the true golden era’s.
Some eras probably can be excluding such as the 70’s to the 80’s as so many roads fell on hard times and were sold or liquidated, but many eras seem to fit in the golden age.
Yes, Michael, I’ll agree with you on that. Though…
When I was (much) younger, the Golden Age for RR’s was, for me, the Gilded Age. Vanderbilt, Fisk, Drew and Hill spiking down track, opening up new routes, new markets and new frontiers-and playing rough and tumble to do it. The original transcontinental was already down but they still pushed new lines across the continent. Pullman had introduced his wares to the travelling public and everywhere (it seemed) the US was being tied ever closer together by plush and polished limiteds. Cities celebrated when the first train came into town on freshly (albeit sometimes hastily) laid rails. No wonder one of the leading industry periodicals was named the Railway Age. Everyting after that was just dull routine.
Some years later, I thought it was the 1900-WWI era. Wooden cars and first generation routes were fine enough but not the real Golden Age, now it was the time that the US economy was growing by leaps and bounds and the RR’s (who had brought much of it about) were enjoying the unending boom. How could we not think of as the Golden Age the time that brought us Penn Station and Grand Central? The Lucin Cutoff, the Pacific Coast Extension and the Lackawanna’s great engineering monuments? This was a time when the the RR’s went everywhere and were everything to everybody. Confident managements could look ahead to a bright future where almost all you had to do was spend money to make money, and they did. “Make no small plans.” Beforehand was am
Well I think the miles of trackage in the U.S., number of passenger trains and passengers per day, and peak of railroad employment all came between 1910-1929. St.Paul MN gets one passenger train (Empire Builder) east and one going west each day, a hundred years ago it was over 100 passenger trains a day.
I will step up and say that the exact time period you mention was my Golden Age. My Golden Age of railfanning.
The way I read the original question, it concerns the railfan perspective, not the industry"s. Of course the Golden Age of railroading from the industry’s perspective probably happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When they were political and economic powerhouses, visible in everyday life. A time when the location of the tracks decided if a town prospered or withered.
I think maybe the question should’ve been, “When was the Golden Age of Railfanning.” That kind of question is subjective to personnal parameters. My criteria may not be yours. However, I suppose if you took a poll of every railfan and asked their particular time period and used the majority answer it would probably be the transition period 1940s/1950s +/-.
Jeff
I would have enjoyed visiting Missoula in the 1975-1980 period. Twice as many railroads, at least twice the traffic, and Amtrak as well.
I agree! That was the “sinking into the swamp” age!
I can’t decide I’d call the “Golden Age” the 1890’s, the 1920s or right now.
I think the 1890’s because the network was just about completely built out, gauge and Mech. stds. were well in place, and there was no meaningful competition. EVERYTHING over land went by rail.
I think the 1920’s because, the network, while shrinking, was still pretty substantial and a lot of permanent, in-it-for-the-long-haul improvements were being completed (Think major pass. stations, new, steel bridges, big, steel rolling stock, Lackawanna cutoff - that kind of thing) Although highways were starting to eat around the edges, ton-miles and passenger miles were growing.
I think right now, because the industry is growing faster than the underlying economy and ton-miles are at an all time high.
The only reservation I have about calling “right now” the golden age is that RRs are really selling into niche markets and don’t have the universality they had in the past.
Coming out of WWII, the railroads thought they were heading into Golden Age, but they guessed wrong. The whole cultural shift to an automotive based society, that had started to take root in the 20’s and 30’s, came to full bloom and the RRs headed into a long decline.
From a purely local perspective, if I was to pick a time in my lifetime that everything seemed to sparkle in railroading, it would be 1958. The streamlined, rebuilt BiPolar Electrics had just been transferred to the Olympian Hiawatha on the Rocky Mountain Division and the OH, which had received the Armour Yellow treatment, suddenly looked super-modern and complete with those graceful engines, now in Armour Yellow, on the headend blasting through Montana valleys at 85, er, I mean, 79 mph. The Joes began to be repainted into their final paint scheme and looked new. The NP had just gone all diesel-electric and its passenger fleet was just about new. Everything was streamlined and optimistic. Bi-level Auto racks were starting to show up on both roads. NP was putting together its COMPASS and Milwaukee its CARSCOPE systems which was a real change in railroading, and NP started installing microwave. Fancy stuff. NP had a dispatching office in Missoula, and it was the Division headquarters. NP’s experiment with Northern Pacific Transport, its trucking subsidiary, was in full flower, trucks everywhere. Milwaukee had just built “the world’s largest and most modern freight car classification yard” at Bensenville, and two more automated Yards at Airline and Pig’s Eye. NP was putting a ton of money into it’s yard at Pasco. Both roads were putting new heavy rail in place – the two of them together more than 25 times the amount of heavy rail as their mutual competitor, the GN. Milwaukee Steel Gangs had reworked the PCE. The Electrification had just gone t
"The true history of the United States is the history of transportation … in which the names of railroad presidents are more significant than those of Presidents of the United States." – Philip Guedalla, The Hundred Years, 1937.
I think using that criterion, the 1880s were probably it.
Ironic, since IIRC a lot of the old NP main has been blacked out or sold to shortlines.
I bet BNSF wishes they had that line back. If not, then soon. - a. s.
According to Don Hofsommer in his book, Minneapolis and the Age of Railways, in 1888, the Milwaukee Road was running 62 daily passenger trains between Minneapolis and St. Paul, including commuter trains and through trains. The competing Manitoba RR had a four-track mainline between the two cities and was running commuter trains every 30 minutes.
Since he states golden age from the perspective of the fan, I’d have to give the current era pretty high marks. Unprecedented amounts of leisure time, affordable quality camera gear, and the advent of portable scanners make being a rail fan a much richer experience than it could possibly have been at any time prior to the 1960s. And the recent surge in rail related business makes the past 5-10 years the best since 1960…so the intercept suggests that today is special in it’s own way. It’s easy to wax nostalgic about the “robber baron” era, or the peak passenger era, and romaticize about how rosey things might have been. But something tells me that back in the 1880’s families were too preoccupied putting food on the table to have much time for railfanning, just as higher priorities such as the Depression and WWII dominated the 1930s and 40s.
I’ll second that , that particular “golden age” was for me the golden age of railroad unemployment,. The real golden age was the 1890s . Railroads even had well maintained flower gardens at the depot, think the PRR in the 19th century.
I hadn’t considered that aspect to the question, but I have to agree. When I think of the grande hotels that all the robust railways in Canada were building at the time, with many companies buying out smaller railroads while yet other new ones were replacing them on the map, it must have been a going concern. Wooden trestles had reached their useful lives and were being replaced (at least on the CPR) with grand steel sructures…and there were many…this had to be a heady time to be a railroad employee, an early form of railfan, and certainly someone who had risked capital in the railroads.
Selector, you might have hit on something–when were all of the truly great railroad structures built? Passenger stations, the bridges that seem to last forever, and so on. In a Golden Age, a railroad would be building itself like it intended to be around for a while.
We might be seeing a little of that now, with the western railroads expanding their trackage, commuter lines adding or replacing stops with nice, new, “traditional” buildings, or otherwise worn structures being replaced. Even the Kate Shelley High Bridge is going to be replaced by a stronger structure. Maybe the new Golden Age will have arrived when the UP’s bridge at Clinton is replaced by something that won’t slow things down as much.
if we’re coming up on another golden age, then would Altoona ever leave the dark age?
Anything is possible. You could have a foreign auto maker built a plant there if conditions were right. If workers were plentiful, land was availible, the state contributed, and CN was given rights from Chippewa Falls. Who knows ?