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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by mudchicken I would have thought that VSmith, DHarmon, DREHEPE or the other left coasters would have jumped all over this.. (1) Flat switching at this location is more effective than humping and considerably cheaper... (2) West Colton Happened in 1985....Industry, Taylor, the Bull Ring, Wilmington and many of the others became satellite or holding or holding yards. Much of SP's industry in the basin went to crap, dried up and abandoned....Bad service, poor track (especially the old PE lines) and no money ran off a lot of business. ATSF & UP made sure SP was demoted to second string. (SP had some really good people, but the operating department culture was really corrupted by the 1980's....Anschutz and the DRGW folks could not stop the hemoraging. ATSF was fortunate that SPSF did not happen.) [/quote] Hey MC, I didn't jump on this because I'm not left coast anymore! Or, actually, maybe I'm all coasts--depends where the plane lands that day (gotta do something about this lifestyle!). But since you threw out the bait, here goes...... MC is right, and the exodus of facilities was beginning to happen when I was left coast. SP had been trying to get its volume yard switching out of what mostly amounts to downtown LA since before I left--too much congestion and the real estate got just too valuable. And what their customers didn't accomplish by shutting down and moving out (mostly over air laws, since everybody in SoCal KNOWS industry causes smog and certainly not all those voter-driven cars!), SP did for them by running them off. UP and SF moved out ASAP too--ATSF to Barstow and UP to WC just as soon as they got SP--Hobart and ELA (which also used to be a hump yard) are both just intermodal terminals now, which really screws up the traffic on my old 60 bypass, Washington Ave, by the way. There is just no good reason to have to haul trains all the way in and classify them, particularly now that most of these lines are commuter districts, when you can get the job done in the boonies and run through on down to the harbor. A flat yard should handle what local switching volume is left quite easily and economically. And MC is also right, SP had some good people, but Operating and Business Reduction (OOPS, I mean Marketing) departments left a whoooooooole lot to be desired. For those of you who may not have lived in lala land and don't really know the territory, unless you were ATSF, you had to come into the basin to get back out, back in the good ol' days. If you were UP (LASL), you came in and terminated, or gave it to SP to get it up into the south end of the SJ Valley or to about SLO on the coast line, or even if you had to get it to Burbank, etc. If you were SP, before the Cajon cutoff, you had to run right through downtown to get back up north. Even after Cajon, which was the real reason for the development of WC, you came in at least that far before you went back up the hill to get out. ATSF split off the Valley line at Barstow, way out in the Mojave, so it made exceedingly good sense to do the volume classification and reblocking for all CA destinations there--they were lucky and got to bypass the heavy city traffic. When the local switching business started drying up, even Hobart wasn't needed to break stuff up, but it and ELA (which sit side by side, for you who reside east of Beaumont Pass) are almost perfectly located to drop pigs and containers right into the middle of where they need to go. Hence, Industry becomes a flat yard, Taylor goes partially to Metrolink and the rest gets redeveloped, ELA and Hobart become pig terminals, the Bull Ring disappears, 8th St to Redondo officially go to ATK, the UP Orange County properties get significantly realigned, the Exposition Blvd Daylight bites the dust (always loved that funky city whistle), Fullerton gets 3 main tracks, the LA Junction starts to hurt for switching business, and the Alameda Corridor roto-roots the stopped up lines to the harbor. Oh, the times they are a-changin'...............[:(][:)][?]
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