Lac-Mégantic

[Randy Stahl]

I'll second that the OP doesn't make any sense. The Chicago New York airline was designed to be a flat, straight rail line between the two cities. The company built 40 miles and ran out of money. The construction was done with hand tools, horses and tough men.

The grades around Lac Megantic aren't even as bad as other grades around the country, whats the issue?

 

Randy

[RME]

MidlandMike

ack to the OP on freight routes, an "Air Line" type rail route does not always work out as expected.

Don't leave out the 'elephant in the room', the Atglen & Susquehanna 'Low Grade' that Michael Froio has been documenting so well.  I still find it astounding that such a piece of engineering can be lost so completely for comparatively small changes in policy.  The other great example, not far from it, is the DL&W/EL super railroad across western New Jersey and northeast Pennsylvania... the whole east end stagnating as governments try to find the many millions to rehabilitate it; the great 'Tunkhannock' viaduct (actually in Nicholson, or rather over it) primarily used as a tourist attraction by Steamtown. 

History is full of projects and suggestions for taking early railroads, often born of expediency (remember the early curves on the B&O, predicated in part on the Winans friction wheel, that caused so much trouble later?) and improving them dramatically.  Yes, with tons of money you can daylight them, or curve-reduce them, or build tunnels to change their profile dramatically.  PRR in 1928 was working on a main-line change to make New-York-to-Chicago speeds like those of Weed's parcel-delivery railroad practicable -- the Depression, and then competition from other modes, put an effective kibosh on that.  Somebody tell me where the money, let alone the political will to implement, for heroic curve and grade improvements in and around the Lac Megantic region were going to come from ... I see facile references to massive cuts and relocations, heroic fills and viaducts, as if little more than revealing the tremendous wisdom, or picking up some more chicken wire, plaster, Homasote and Plastruct, would be needed to start gittin 'r dun.  More is usually needed.  Where, Mr. Falconer, would that be coming from for this line?