Classic Trains "Photo of the day" is a feature I really look forward to on a daily basis. Several of the photos are of the post war period and depict scenes in the steam to diesel transition period. Magnificiant re-equipped named trains, new diesels, rebuilt fresh out of the shops steam, new steam and so on. The action scenes show beautiful manicured track, well maintained buildings and so on. I'm not talking about the staged publicity photos but rather the railfan pictures taken when they had the oppurtunity. Everything looks pretty snappy up to a certain point in time then things start to look different. We all know the reasons for the huge precipitous fall of most of the railroads but was there a tipping point? A defining moment? A point in time when it was no longer going to be that way,,,that it was gone and now it was survival or extinction.
It varteied from railroad to railroad, and for some there really was no tipping point, and things cdontinued to look sharp even up to this day, AT&SF to be specific, UP almost as much. IC was pretty late, ditto SCL, but RI much earlier, and PRR and NYC.
A lot related to interstate highway construction and loss of premium business to trucks,
s
The 'modern day' tipping point.
The cascading drop in traffic of multiple commodity lines knocked the pins out of the NE railroads to a point that they never recovered, culminating on the Penn Central merger and bankruptsy, ConRail and ultimately the Staggers Act in 1980.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
I would think the tipping point for many business's in America came about when the recession of 1957 hit. The railroads were under attack with the new highway system and air travel improvements that created the demise of passenger service. But the 1957 recession hit freight, and at a time for many railroads, especially in the heavy manufacturing east, freight was a dwindling source of income. An income needed to off set passenger losses, still rebuilding a war torn physical plant, business lost to trucks, unfair government taxation, and unfair regulation concerning abandonments.
When the recession eased in mid 1958 problems were brewing within the steel industry, a strike within a year again hit manufacturing. It seemed the railroads struggle for recovery would never catch a break. The recession in 1957 made many American business's rethink their way of doing things, the steel industry decline was underway. The rust was beginning to form.
There's probably not one 'tipping point', but several interrelated ones that produced the effect over time, each with its own internal "speed" of development (months to years). One cause for the Northeastern railroads was the flight of industry from unionized and heavily regulated New England states to the South.
The most notable 'tipping point' was the one involving large steam power, which went from being actively marketed as late as 1946 to being essentially dead by 1948. This can't be attributed to clever EMD/GM propaganda, or to the Korean war (which produced the scrap drives that helped the "obsolete" power disappear so quickly). The likeliest direct cause was the tremendous increase in base wage which the postwar economy produced - this is well documented in contemporary industry publications - combined with increasingly attractive alternatives for most of the workers who would be otherwise willing to accept the low historical wages and slow advancement associated with steam power. An indirect cause was the increased access by railroads to capital after the 'flush times' of the war years -- this would change, dramatically, within a few years when it turned out that the expensive crop of streamliners built in the years after the War weren't what most people cared to ride when they had alternatives, but it certainly made dieselization, particularly with attractive financing and 'managed risk', more possible than the high nominal cost of diesel-electric locomotives (and initially providing for their support) would otherwise indicate.
The nail in the coffin was the death of all the little companies that provided the special equipment for steam locomotives (and again, it is instructive to watch how this evolved by 'reading between the lines' in the trade press.) Some of these companies didn't even appear to consider finding alternative lines of business before shutting themselves down.
It depended on where the railroad was also. Railroads in the northeast suffered as manufacturing left the area, creating the "rust belt". Western railroads that relied on coal, timber, iron ore etc. for their income did quite well into the 1960's and 70's.
Yes, I did say "most railroads"..Santa Fe and UP are obvious exceptions...but not Rock Island, Milwaukee, many others.
I mentioned in another post the "Photo of the day" shows the RI Golden State at Joliet (in 1951), elegant, clean, gleaming and that all went downhill rapidly. That's not the Rocks fault, they sure gave it a good shot with the Rock certainly looking forward to the future in 1951. Scenes like the Monon, C&EI, Erie, GM&O with knife edged ballast and well maintained everything...my garage should look that good.
Reading statements in annual reports it appears all was well at least until 1953. I suppose once the realization that the folks were not coming back to the rails and so much wartime profit was wasted in new passenger equipment was quite stressful. Also think that the end of steam, although rationalized by everyone now, signalled the end of an identity and created a lot of stress as well. Roundhouses came down, thousands and thousands of co workers laid off never to return, entire trades and crafts gone. That could not have been easy. Maybe bean counters were happy but its certain that it was stressful on everyone. Southern Pacific went from "the new standard railway of the world" to fighting for survival itself.
...and then things really got bad.
K4sPRR I would think the tipping point for many business's in America came about when the recession of 1957 hit. The railroads were under attack with the new highway system and air travel improvements that created the demise of passenger service. But the 1957 recession hit freight, and at a time for many railroads, especially in the heavy manufacturing east, freight was a dwindling source of income. An income needed to off set passenger losses, still rebuilding a war torn physical plant, business lost to trucks, unfair government taxation, and unfair regulation concerning abandonments. When the recession eased in mid 1958 problems were brewing within the steel industry, a strike within a year again hit manufacturing. It seemed the railroads struggle for recovery would never catch a break. The recession in 1957 made many American business's rethink their way of doing things, the steel industry decline was underway. The rust was beginning to form.
I believe that 1957 was also the year that the Boeing 707 was introduced.
MidlandMikeI believe that 1957 was also the year that the Boeing 707 was introduced.
1955
"One test is worth a thousand opinions."
Overmod MidlandMike I believe that 1957 was also the year that the Boeing 707 was introduced. 1955 "One test is worth a thousand opinions."
MidlandMike I believe that 1957 was also the year that the Boeing 707 was introduced.
I am guessing that was a test model. I guess I should have been more specific as to what I meant by "introduction". Boeing says:
Boeing delivered 856 Model 707s in all versions between 1957 and 1994; of these, 725, delivered between 1957 and 1978, were for commercial use.
http://www.boeing.com/history/products/707.page
Overmod MidlandMike 1955 "One test is worth a thousand opinions."
MidlandMike
Always featured the 707 had the engines mounted on pylons below the wing - not above it.
That picture appears to be of the 367-80, in its famous double barrel rolls of August 1955, and before its engine pod mountings were revised to be more like 707s.
The 707's first flight wasn't until December of 1957, though it entered service in October 1958.
http://www.boeingimages.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2JRSN269V3E_H&SMLS=1&RW=1600&RH=731
"The nail in the coffin was the death of all the little companies that provided the special equipment for steam locomotives (and again, it is instructive to watch how this evolved by 'reading between the lines' in the trade press.) Some of these companies didn't even appear to consider finding alternative lines of business before shutting themselves down"- Overmod
Without taxing your time too much, can you give us an example of "reading between the lines" and an example of those companies that shut themselves down.
please do not confuse the iipping point for steam-to-deseal transition with the tipping poiht for the health of railroaods. Two very separate issues.
The tipping point for steam came very early with the AT&SF but never really came for health. io managed to stay healthy up to Staggers and then the merger BNSF.
N&W had a very late tipping point for steam and stayed healthy through the merger with souiother, and still looks pretty healthy but hit with the decline of coal traffic.
Two separate issues. Don't confuse the two.
Just to expound a bit on what David just said, but a major "tipping point" causing the steam-to-diesel transition in the 1940's was a series of coal strikes beginning just after World War Two and continuing into the 50's. Two railroads that intensified the transition that spring to mind are the Erie and the Lackawanna in the Northeast, I'm sure there were others.
Can't run coal-fired steamers without a reliable fuel source, and I can't think of a strike that ever happened in the oil industry.
daveklepperplease do not confuse the tipping point for steam-to-diesel transition with the tipping point for the health of railroads. Two very separate issues.
They are indeed separate, even though there are some common characteristics (notably the increasing cost of qualified labor and the emergence of alternative careers). More to the point I was making, there are different 'tipping points' for different aspects of railroads, and indeed different inflection points for the speed with which events after a given point ran downhill -- a particular instance here being the effect on American passenger service of the stopping of Post Office mail contracts in the mid-60s, and the subsequent effect of this on what was left of REA operations.
Part of what I was pointing out with steam was to explain the oft-commented observation that 'the roads that dieselized the last tended to be the ones that dieselized the quickest'. N&W to my knowledge never had a problem with profitability in the late '50s, but the time from any definition of their 'tipping point' to total abandonment of working steam was very quick. This was, I think, due to more than a bunch of non-railroader lawyers implementing a "politically-motivated" rather than technical or techonomical strategy.
ATSF did fine as long as there was a market for a high-speed railroad with corresponding great maintenance problems on parts of its route. As soon as passenger service stopped paying, and it became clear that no Super C service would pay the marginal bills, ATSF was in trouble; if I'm not mistaken they also did not take the sort of action IC and SP did (to name two) to diversify away from railroading as the big egg in the basket. And then we got the Reichmanns and Canadian finance into the SLSF boondoggle, after which ATSF had no hope as an independent entity...
I think it is clear that ATSF wanted dieselization at an early stage, as did B&O (look at the cancellation date for the latter's W-1 as confirmation of the date range) although the actual 'tipping point' for steam use was much, much later: even the earlier 'improved' classes often lasted to the mid-Fifties, which by most East Coast standards was quite late especially for high-speed long-distance service. (This further establishes Mr. Klepper's initial point.)
One thing that might be included here is a discussion on the degree to which dieselization helped or accelerated the general railroad-decline 'tipping point'. It has been argued (in Brown, I think, explicitly) that the larger overall capital cost of dieselization weakened many roads, out of proportion to the actual economic gains that diesel operation permitted. I don't really believe that, but it bears mentioning and, in some circumstances at least, consideration.
I also suspect that key externalities -- completion of parts of the Interstate system; developments in truck construction or applicable motor-vehicle law; selective retention of outdated taxation policies for politically-motivated reasons -- will prove to have equal or greater importance than just railroad ability to keep or gain market share.
MiningmanWithout taxing your time too much, can you give us an example of "reading between the lines" and an example of those companies that shut themselves down.
"Reading between the lines" here means reading through back issues year after year, looking at the advertising and the news items, noting as the full-page ads for auxiliaries became smaller and then disappeared, and reading the news items about how once-powerful companies were taking corporate action to disband.
I don't have bound copies here, and probably won't get back to the University library for a few days. These are still in copyright, so no Google Books or freely-available Hathitrust items yet, or soon...
One very notable company was the people making shaped arch brick - American Arch Company. Another one with a famous name is Franklin Railway Supply, which went into 'aerospace' after 1954. I will make a list when I can, but anyone familiar with where patent auxiliary devices 'came from' can easily go back and look at the corporate history reasons why people stopped making or marketing them.
Well thanks Overmod--I'll look things up as suggested. Too bad about American Arch Co. ...they could have made some great pizza ovens as is in vogue today!
MiningmanToo bad about American Arch Co. ...they could have made some great pizza ovens as is in vogue today!
A perhaps more pointed example is Alco, which in rather indecent haste knocked down their very recently completed vertical annealing facilities for welded boilers ... just a few years before those would have been of amazing value for welded nuclear-service heat exchangers...
Did Alco not know better? They were in the nuclear buisness as part of their business! Must have been later..wonder if they ever realized this.
Wasn't the bottom-line tipping point the gross failure of PC service, its inability to deliver on promises made by all its Class 1 connections? I'm talking freight, the big-money item. (PC's passenger service was already ridiculous to the point that, as Loving shows in his book, its remaining trains ran mostly empty.)
Almost all the Class Ones connected with PC, and PC was alienating their good customers with its deteriorated last-miles track and service.
With passengers, Washington's hypocrisy is shown by Amtrak. While the ICC had made the railroads jump thru ridiculous hoops to abandon money-losing services, Amtrak immediately cut those services to the bone, once they were for its account.
"thing that might be included here is a discussion on the degree to which dieselization helped or accelerated the general railroad-decline 'tipping point'. It has been argued (in Brown, I think, explicitly) that the larger overall capital cost of dieselization weakened many roads, out of proportion to the actual economic gains that diesel operation permitted. I don't really believe that, but it bears mentioning and, in some circumstances at least, consideration."
"I also suspect that key externalities -- completion of parts of the Interstate system; developments in truck construction or applicable motor-vehicle law; selective retention of outdated taxation policies for politically-motivated reasons -- will prove to have equal or greater importance than just railroad ability to keep or gain market share......"
....from Overmod
Dieselization certainly did not prevent the economic disasters that were to follow and in the case of the Eastern Roads, and some Central, there was not enough time to see the full benefits before things settled down. The PRR was so big that it took time to dieselize and by the time it was done the numerous items you listed in the second paragraph above were in full swing. Also I believe you had to dieselize in its entirety or the benefits just don't happen. The high initial cost and vast numbers of units to replace and all those declining revenue factors made it all pretty ugly. Financing it all over time on the "easy payment plan" only added to the cost and put off the piper for another day. It is generally accepted that the N&W would have been fine for some time had they retained steam but they were either lucky or smart because they avoided all those troubles with the first generation diesels, waited it out patiently and smartly and jumped straight into the Geeps.
You would think a person could run a computer econmic simulation or do an economic forensic analysis and run different scenarios. Maybe the PRR should have kept steam and "used it up" and jumped in at the very end, say 1960. It would be an interesting study.
All the other factors you list happened, along with several others. It is my belief that these were easily foreseeable and could have been planned for and also fought against much more rigorously. That's why I posted the thread about "The Speech" a few days ago thinking that someone could make a concerted effort and steered it in the right direction. It's armchair stuff, after the fact , but I really do think it was easily foreseeable and things could have been different.
MiningmanYou would think a person could run a computer econmic simulation or do an economic forensic analysis and run different scenarios. Maybe the PRR should have kept steam and "used it up" and jumped in at the very end, say 1960. It would be an interesting study.
PRR did as near an analogue of this in the late 1940s as is necessary to examine. You can almost read between the lines in the reasons why the improved V1 was not built: for PRR, at least, the advantages of dieselization were compelling even in 1946 for many services, and the disadvantages of steam very well established by no later than the early '50s. Combined with the recognized traffic and profitability troubles PRR was seeing, this led to no conclusion that included modern steam; if you have any question about this, consider why PRR did not help their subsidiary N&W, in the hole on the TE-1 by the equivalent of nearly 25 million iron men, make the 'minimum production quantity' that was needed... keeping in mind that the PRR motive power people probably knew more about steam-turbine locomotive power than anyone at that time, perhaps including those in Scandinavia.
It was something of a mistake for N&W to jump into Geeps when what it clearly needed was larger power; your point would be much better made if you referenced TrainMasters and six-motor Alcos instead... which turned out to be minority builders with their own quirks. My own opinion is that N&W "should" have held out a little longer, until reliable high-speed high-horsepower six-motor units were available (that would be around the mid-Sixties) but I can't imagine them continuing after that time, and we have a very likely hard 'end date' for regular N&W steam in the passage of the EPA legislation in the Nixon years.
None of this affects the likely traffic mix, or indicates anything "positive" that would have made the bottom-line economics any different for railroads.
I would substantially disagree with the idea that big, modern steam was "that much" less precise than diesels were. That claim would be much easier to make about the simple and relatively crude locomotives that 'made it' in such numbers to the end of steam precisely because they had fewer systems to break or maintain or try to source unobtanium proprietary parts for. But those are ridiculously leveraged out toward uneconomical time and fabrication cost as labor expense rises and taxation stays at constant (expedient) levels.
No one, I hope, is going to argue that if Northeastern railroads had gone spectacularly and hopelessly bankrupt a decade or so earlier, or tried to keep more steam and its associated infrastructure and marginal costs, the Staggers Act deregulation etc. would have been passed more quickly.
Seems like their were a lot of foxes and wolves in the hen house during this time.
How about the Grand Trunk Western as a notable exception. Now I know they basically followed orders from parent Canadian National. They ran steam right up to 1959 and even into 1960 on passenger service. The Canadian roads and affiliates "used it up" but also introduced diesels all along and both existed side by side for some time. Buisness actually increased substantially for them and the diesels were assigned to new buisness and steam kept everything else going. The wartime built Northern fleet performed equal to the diesels and didn't drag these companies down. CanadIan Pacific and GTW had fleets of relatively modern Pacifcs as well. The CPR did dieselize through the mountains and western regions much earlier however. Also of note, Alco (MLW) was a huge player in Canada and remained so for a good long time.
Point being it did not seem as such a do or die situation or "we gotta do this real fast" and it all worked out pretty well for them.
Sauders killed steam in a real hurry on the N&W, (which easily would have continued on for another 8-10 years), then went on to demolish Penn Station and dump it into the swamps of New Jersey, then line his pockets with the financial shenanigans of Penn Central for which he was sued and settled out of court ( for some 19 million, no chump change in the sixties) along with his cronies. The vandal of Penn Station running railroads. Sheesh.
Consensus seems to be the period 1955-1960 as the tipping point when it became apparent that railroading had drastically and shockingly changed, especially in the East and some of the Mid West. Several have mentioned 1957 and I would agree with that but maybe when the wrecking ball hit Penn Station we knew it was never to be again and all downhill from here.
All of the forgoing then begs the question - what would have been the outcome had Staggers type legistlation been enacted in 1950 or thereabouts. From hindsight we know the pressures that forced Staggers in 1980 - how would the carriers have dealt with the relative business freedom 30 years earlier?
BaltACD- Well that's the great theoretical question. I've argued that serious deregulation should/could have been enacted in 1950 in regognition for the tremedous effort put forth by the railroads in winning WWII. It could even be argued that this was in the interest of national security and preservation of competition and free enterprise. That events that were going to unfold for the future were easily forseen and known to government such as highway construction and air travel and technological advancements that would seriously affect the railways ability to maintain market share and begin to erode its infrastructure. A healthy strong and vibrant railway industry was in the nations interest. I believe it to be reasonable that this could have occurred.
So what would have been. I think more end to end mergers, lots of them, making for multiple systems that had much longer route miles. Sort of made everyone into a Union Pacific. If it was coupled with the recognition that commuter service was a necessary social responsibility beyond the financial abilities to absorb the losses and required capital requirements of the railroads and they were relieved of this burden then you really might have had something. There are many other outcomes and scenarios and almost all of them are pretty positive. Feel free to come with an alternative time line. TGV's and Bullet trains type development well before Japan and Europe, who knows?
While I enjoy the romance of steam as much as anyone else, I can't see how the transition to diesels contributed to the downfall of the industry. One only has to look at the labor involved to operate and maintain steam, to know that diesels were a smart move economically. As for labor itself, weren't most of the workers unionized with seniority rights? Didn't the railroads train workers to do other jobs?
There are some historians who believe that if it wasn't for World War II, the railroad industry would have died off during the Great Depression. As it was post-World War II, the railroads were able to tread water against 2-lane highways and propeller airliners. It was the near simultaneous appearance of Interstate Highways and jets that drove the nail in the coffin.
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