Temporary replacement for Photo of the Day

[Miningman]

Good good, thanks Balt. Not very many know where Irricana is!

Well looks like I'm out of a temporary job again as it appears the Photo of the Day has been repaired.

Until next time.

 

 

 

[SD70Dude]

The remaining line through Irricana is CN, the CP line has been abandoned. 

[Colorado Rail Fan]

Miningman

Tuesday July 21 Photo OTD

Miningman

Once upon a time the Southern Pacific was a big deal railroad, dubbed by Trains as the "New Standard of Railroading." ... Of course this is all hard to understand as to just what happened, why, and all that and why is it still not so today in this very manner ...

The comments to this original post give some interesting info on the railroad that was the SP.  But no one has attempted to answer minningman's basic question -- framed again in the second sentence above.  Basically: Why is the Southern Pacific RR no longer in operation as such -- not a survivor RR? 

I am not as familiar with the SP as those making the previous comments to this original post.  But I will attempt to answer this basic question, anyhow. 

Basically the SP, after WW2, did not continue to modernize as quickly as other western RRs did.  When I was living in Chicago (working in the oil industry) in the 1970's & 1980's, the word on the street was that the Sante Fe was the best run RR in the west and possibly in the whole country.  Not being in the RR industry, I never knew if this was true; but is seemed to be so.  Even the Sante Fe ended up in a combination RR, but with "Sante Fe" a part of the surviving name.  Only the UP has been able to absorb other western RRs without putting the acquired RR's name in with the UP name.

The SP was bought by Phil Anschutz and combined with the D&RGW (which he had acquired earlier at a cheap price) into what became a larger SP.  But Anschutz was just out to make a buck, not to run a RR.  So he sold the combination to the UP at what to him was an attractive profit.

If the SP had earlier been more active in modernizing and cutting costs, it could possibly (althought somewhat remotely) have ended up at least being a named part of a combined RR with a name somenting like the "Southern Pacific - Sante Fe RR" or even the "Southern & Northern Pacific RR."  But that was not to be -- because the SP was not strong enough (ie worth enough) -- which made it available for Anschutz to pick up at an attractive (relatively cheap) price.     

Bottom line: The SP was an innovative RR early in its existence.  Look at cab-forward steam engines and the many profitable rail lines they built, including going all the way from CA to New Orleans.  They even came out of WW2 being well run, as cited in the original post.  They just lost it after that, and so the SP no longer exists, except as an un-named part of the larger Union Pacific RR -- the surving RR. 

[rcdrye]

SP was a well-run property into the 1970s.  A number of key product areas turned out to be particularly vulnerable to truck diversion - produce went from a mainstay to an also-ran in about a decade.  The collapse of western forest products, though only a brief dip, also took its toll. Runaway fuel prices and inflation broke what remained. SP also tried to get to Chicago, but the cost of rehabbing former Rock Island lines proved a back-breaker.  The SFSP merger (as Colorado Rail mentions above) would likely have wound up a disastrous mess.  Its failure probably saved SP's footprint, which remains essentially intact - if just as part of UP.

[MidlandMike]

The SP also lost some of its rail focus, getting into things like pipelines and telecommunications (SPRINT stands for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony)