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That's what I get for answering questions at 06:15 a.m. after four hours sleep last night. I was glancing upward at a previous post and thought I read 1965, and I copied that (when it really said 1955!). It sounded wrong at the time, but did I look it up? Nooooo. The little bell that rang in the back of my head? I turned it off. Anyway, scratch the part about the UP-RI merger: it doesn't apply. But passenger service even by 1955 was clearly into permanent decline, that is, if you're a forward-thinking railroad. Not everyone was -- some railroads clung grimly to passenger service a decade after it was completely hopeless. Jim: as for whether this will appear in the magazine -- not really. The magazine demands a rigor of thought and fact; it's regarded by many readers as a permanent record whereas an internet forum is ephemeral. What I wrote in 10 minutes at 0600 I would spend at least a half-day considering and researching for the magazine, and it would get five other people looking at, each at least twice, before we committed it to ink. I'd include lots of caveats just to avoid having to answer 20 argumentative letters from readers that wanted to debate each point. That's one beauty of this forum; it allows us to all be a little more casual and general than we can be in print. On the other hand, I see some interesting things in the forum that leads the magazine into places it may not otherwise have gone. And, I've had such an interesting time reading what some of the people in this forum have to say that you'll start to see some of them appearing in the magazine. There's already, I think, five people who regularly appear in this forum that are working on something for the magazine. From my point of view, this forum has paid off more than I ever thought it would. (I've said it before, but it bears repeating. I look at ALL the railroad forums every day, but the people here are using this forum in a far better manner than the rest. There's very little of the one-upmanship and trolling that poisons most other railroad forums.)
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