Fred Frailey - Trains Magazine - Trains News Wire, Railroad News, Railroad Industry News, Web Cams, and Forms

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Love in the time of Hunter (an allegory)

Posted 6 days ago by Fred Frailey

Karen noticed the change in Eric in late April. His normally cheerful, funny personality turned dark, sarcastic, bitter. He used to spend hours on weekends at the Starbucks near their brownstone in Brooklyn, happily engaged in the Times Sunday Magazine crossword puzzle or the latest issue of The Nation and Mother Jones. Now Eric snapped at the friendly young woman at the counter when she asked him to repeat his order for a double butterscotch latte. Even the Sunday crossword lost its appeal. "It...

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Supremacy in the West

Posted one month ago by Fred Frailey

CSX is struggling, driverless trucks are on the horizon, and the railroad world seems in disarray. Let’s talk about something that works: railroading in the West. Let’s talk about BNSF Railway and Union Pacific. We have here two magnificent companies, each well run and hugely profitable. Their differences are what interest me. Why, for instance, has BNSF’s business over time been growing and Union Pacific’s shrinking? And why, despite this, does Union Pacific consistentl...

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Shrink the Water Level Route?

Posted one month ago by Fred Frailey

CSX has been studying the feasibility of single-tracking its route from Chicago to Selkirk (Albany), N.Y. But is it feasible, people are asking? Wouldn’t the railroad grind to a halt? Some of you have already said as much in comments to an earlier blog. I decided to find out. A couple of years ago I built a simulation model for CXS between Buffalo and Selkirk using interactive Train Dispatcher 3 software. I’ve just employed this platform to run the trains actually operated over the ...

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The CSX follies

Posted one month ago by Fred Frailey

First, what I know. Then, what I think. I asked a railroader with excellent access to the details of CSX operations how he would rank the current disarray, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 10 being the equivalent of Union Pacific’s historic 1997 meltdown. His reply: “A 5 heading toward 7. A slow railroad dies faster than a fast one does.” And I agree. Metrics continue to head down, and now there’s the pileup of a train descending Sand Patch grade near Cumberland, Md. You w...

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Great ball of fire!

Posted 2 months ago by Fred Frailey

Steam locomotive 844 and I entered this world months apart in 1944. The last steam locomotive built for Union Pacific, it never left that railroad’s active roster. Instead, it has served for half a century as UP’s good-will ambassador. With its 80-inch driving wheels, it is a magnificent machine that impresses people of all ages. Yesterday, Cathie and I rode behind the 844 from Denver to Cheyenne and back aboard the train the Denver Post and UP sponsor to celebrate Frontier Days in C...

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CSX is about to look like CN

Posted 2 months ago by Fred Frailey

In recent weeks, Hunter Harrison-led CSX Transportation has terminated all nine of its division superintendents (called managers) and their assistants, among many other field personnel, according to multiple sources close to the company. None has been replaced. The firings appear to be part of a broad realignment of the transportation structure of CSX. When the smoke clears, the railroad will cease to have divisions but be managed from as few as two regional headquarters. A couple of sub-region...

23

Fred has a brand new gig

Posted 3 months ago by Fred Frailey

The news has been my life. I became a reporter for my dad’s little daily newspaper in Sulphur Springs, Texas, at the age of 16 in 1960. At the time, I expected to be a newspaperman until I died, just like my dad. But life is full of strange turns we can’t predict. At age 27, I left a Chicago newspaper and became a magazine writer. What’s the difference? The best way I can describe it (I think Trains editor Jim Wrinn, an old newspaper hand, would agree) is that newspapers are m...

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Railroading in a fiery furnace

Posted 3 months ago by Fred Frailey

About 4 o’clock Tuesday afternoon, Tom Hoback and I drove across the Colorado River from Topock, Ariz., and entered California a few miles south of Needles. I glanced at the temperature readout on our rental car. It said 134 degrees. That day’s Los Angeles Times had reported that the highest recorded temperature anywhere, ever, was in California’s own Death Valley, in 1917. Then it was 136 degrees. That’s how close we came to becoming living history. When I’d step o...

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The meaning of "My Life With Trains"

Posted 3 months ago by Fred Frailey

Jim McClellan’s testament—My Life With Trains: Memoir of a Railroader—is out and being distributed by Indiana University Press. I can safely say that it is the railroad publishing event of the year. But I am biased, because I had a hand in its final stages of production after Jim’s death last autumn and read it cover to cover, several times. I was taken by the comments made to friends about My Life With Trains by Jim Blaze, Conrail’s final corporate strategist (and...

302

The myth of intermodal growth

Posted 4 months ago by Fred Frailey

It has been said so many times that it has become mantra: The future for railroads is intermodal. Bye-bye coal, bye-bye crude oil, bye-bye carload traffic (CSX carload volume is off 20 percent from 2000). All that doesn’t matter, the mantra goes, because we have intermodal, and intermodal is the growth engine that will save us. That promise was Norfolk Southern’s chief line of defense in 2016 when Canadian Pacific tried to nudge it into a merger. But it appears to me that all this...

31

Auto-Train reborn!

Posted 4 months ago by Fred Frailey

Just when I thought that Auto-Train Corp. would fade into the sands of time without a proper telling of its short but fascinating history, along comes Doug Riddell. Quite under my radar, Doug researched, wrote, and produced Auto-Train, which has been published by the Richmond Fredericksburg & Potomac Historical Society this spring. To order it, go here. It’s the sort of accurate and readable work we’ve come to expect from Doug over the decades. And it comes with lots of ski...

24

Clarence Gooden's classy exit

Posted 5 months ago by Fred Frailey

I am going to miss Clarence Gooden. Clarence retired as CSX president in March, in anticipation of Hunter Harrison’s arrival at that railroad. I’ve never actually met the man, although we did spend 28 hours close to one another one time. I guess I should explain. I had been slipped aboard a BNSF Railway-CSX test train run in 2002 from Los Angeles to Little Ferry, N.J., to judge the feasibility of taking a day off United Parcel Service cross-country deliveries. The tale of that advent...

53

Perils of public transport

Posted 5 months ago by Fred Frailey

How the worm has turned. I’m old enough to remember when public and press alike were as one in their disdain for the disgusting quality of most railroad passenger train service. Nothing has changed except the object of disdain. Now it is the airlines—you could have cut the derision directed toward United Airlines this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with a dull knife. The spectacle of Chicago cops bloodily ejecting a gentlemen from his seat (which he had pai...

48

Remembering Mr. Johnston

Posted 6 months ago by Fred Frailey

I'm sitting in my room on the Auto Train, waiting to leave Lorton in Virginia, and struggling to come up with a single word that applies collectively to the chief executives of the seven Class I railroads. The best I can do is "uninspiring." Yes, Hunter Harrison makes good copy for writers such as myself. But these guys all lack something. Call it pride in the companies they captain, in how their railroads are esteemed by the public, in how their fellow employees take their jobs seriously. Gosh,...

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What Hunter will do at CSX

Posted 6 months ago by Fred Frailey

Hunter Harrison and his partner Paul Hilal, who runs a hedge fund called Mantle Ridge, didn't just decide one day that it would be nice if Harrison ran CSX Transportation. Rather, they studied the company and all its moving parts the way an army's general staff examines a likely battlefield opponent. To hide their intent from CSX, they hired other investment companies to recruit as paid consultants retired or former executives of the railroad, the better to know what makes the railroad tick, whi...

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