blue streak 1The mention of trees brings up an idea. Stimulus funds for unemployed persons it would be a help if they were used to clear trees off of RR ROWs. Do that for every Amtrak route whether Amtrak, commuter, or freight RR.
A quick way to kill people is to have unqualified people working on tree removal - be those trees be standing or fallen.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
The mention of trees brings up an idea. Stimulus funds for unemployed persons it would be a help if they were used to clear trees off of RR ROWs. Do that for every Amtrak route whether Amtrak, commuter, or freight RR.
Flintlock76Everything you say is true Mod-man, it always is, (I loved that "near-hysterical" remark!) but I have to say one thing about tree surgeons along the NEC, or lack of same: "A stitch in time, saves nine!" You don't have tree trouble on the line if you stay on top of them, they don't grow that fast. Ignore 'em for years and you know what happens! One good snowstorm, or stiff wind...
"A stitch in time, saves nine!" You don't have tree trouble on the line if you stay on top of them, they don't grow that fast.
Ignore 'em for years and you know what happens! One good snowstorm, or stiff wind...
You can stay on top of them ON YOUR LAND - however, you can't stay on top of them on land that adjoins your land, and therein is the problem with 60-80-100 foot trees blowing down on your land and tracks.
Everything you say is true Mod-man, it always is, (I loved that "near-hysterical" remark!) but I have to say one thing about tree surgeons along the NEC, or lack of same:
You're all dancing around the real reason, which is essentially the same reason for the near-hysterical abandonment of steam in the half-decade after 1948. The compensation you'd have to pay people of necessary competence and reliability to take all thise arduous jobs was not there ... and, increasingly, simply couldn't be there at conceivable profit levels for railroads as a whole.
An early and so-far-unremarked trend was to put maintenance on work trains with better power equipment, and centralize and plan maintenance activities better. The Erie did a fascinating experiment using screw spikes driven by power wrenches to hold ... and then maintain track in heavy use for commuter service, where spike killing would likely be an intolerable cause of incremental maintenance tinkering 'under traffic'. Alas! even Erie history doesn't adequately explain how well this worked, and of course that was superseded by far more effective (and section-gang eliminating) things like LWR in Pandrol-style clips -- where adjustment outside expected range from neutral could be in principle handled by a couple of guys in a pickup with some power wrenches and saws and some rail shims...
Bring back an era when large numbers of people will be motivated to do their best in awful weather for little wage (but perhaps railroad benefits in an era of 'crashed' Social Security) and you might get back to some semblance of what New Haven could do with track. Expect to pay more for the catenary support, even after constant-tension conversion; it's bad enough considering the number of tree surgeons needed in the Northeast Corridor from New York to Boston alone...
Flintlock76 seppburgh2 What a difference a millennium makes. In the 21th Century, the weather turns bad and Amtrak runs for cover. The other problem is the "railroad town" of song and story doesn't exist anymore. By this I mean a town that was a hub, or a major spoke to a hub, where engine and road crews, roundhouse workers, track workers, tower operators, station agents, and so on all lived in close proximity to the line. All they had to do to get to work was walk, mostly. Now, most live miles away and drive to work. If the roads are impassable, well there you go. Sure, we all snort a bit when "Amtrak runs for cover," remembering what it used to be like, but in this day and age they don't have much choice.
seppburgh2 What a difference a millennium makes. In the 21th Century, the weather turns bad and Amtrak runs for cover.
What a difference a millennium makes. In the 21th Century, the weather turns bad and Amtrak runs for cover.
The other problem is the "railroad town" of song and story doesn't exist anymore. By this I mean a town that was a hub, or a major spoke to a hub, where engine and road crews, roundhouse workers, track workers, tower operators, station agents, and so on all lived in close proximity to the line. All they had to do to get to work was walk, mostly.
Now, most live miles away and drive to work. If the roads are impassable, well there you go.
Sure, we all snort a bit when "Amtrak runs for cover," remembering what it used to be like, but in this day and age they don't have much choice.
Just a couple of comments cause me to come forward with comments, of my own.
Back in the late 1940's [post WWII] the comment about the Pennsy is correct...Remember the PRR railropad ystem then went from East Coast poingts to the area of the Mississippi R. [read: St. Louis, for one..] The rates favorded the war materials being moved, then.
In the 1950's the PRR started sheading blocks of lines across their system; a process that took them some years to finish. Korea came along, and gave them another 'kick' in the revenue dept. In 1967 (Sept) the Post Office cancelled the railway post office contracts, which were the service that made many railroad's passenger trains, and mail and parcel trains providing revenue for many railroad companies. When Amtrak came along there was no revenue source for its passenger trains.
As to the part about Amtrak employees...Out here in the 'hinterlands' the only employees one might see are riding their trains, except for the station agents, who are more or less part-times, and are only around when the trains are due(?).
My impression is that their only full-time maintenance workers are around on the high-density traffic areas of N.E.C. Out here, they work for the 'host railroads'. On arecent trip, we had a local station agent (NEW) and in Albuquerque, the agent who checked boarding passengers in, was a conductor off our train, who came into the station.
And on the 'railroad town' situation...The one I am most familiar with was Parsons, Ks. When it was a division point on the MKT, population was in the area of 7 to 8 K. But there were all the normal railroad activities there, back shops, yard, and MOW, not to mention the administration types, as well. Now it seems the population is around 2 to 3 K(?).
Back about 67 years ago, DPM wrote of a trip he took to the West Coast in December, riding the NP west--and mentioned seeing a signal maintainer huddled by the track as the train went by him at night, in a storm.
Johnny
seppburgh2What a difference a millennium makes. In the 21th Century, the weather turns bad and Amtrak runs for cover.
A century ago, virtually all employees involved in the operation and maintenance of the railroad lived within walking distance of their employment headquarters. There were 'inside callers' and 'outside callers' - the inside callers kept track of who needed to be called for which assignment - outside callers took the directions from the inside callers and traversed the neighborhood to personally notifiy the individuals of the time and the assignments they were called for.
In the 21st Century - very few employees live within 10 miles of their reporting point. Signals and crossing protection require the continued operation of the commercial electrical system - notification of employees require the continued opeation of the various cell and land line telephone system. Employees require the local governments to keep the highways and byways open for automotive transportation. Virtually no one lives within walking distance of where they report for duty.
It's not the Amtrak runs for cover - it's that Amtrak can't get enough of their employees 'uncovered' to operate their system.
I'm rereading Eric Hirsimaki's Black Gold-Black Diamonds and part of it is about this very subject. It appears that the Pennsy was too wedded to Baldwin. They had been their main locomotive supplier for years. Yet, Baldwin wasn't doing well financially and wasn't making cutting edge locomotives. Altoona had lost its designing edge because of the long break after the M1's were produced. When you get two companies who have seen their best days to try to do something modern, bad things happen. The PRR was also infatuated by the single high horsepower locomotive because of the success of the GG1. We see how that worked out with the Q2, T1 and Centipedes.
Overmod Flintlock76 What happened to the PRR? No one else was reporting losses in the immediate post-war era. It was a one-time loss, on paper, in 1946, and I think most of it was adjustment for wartime situations and damage. The expenditures for diesels came later. As did both the colossal increase in labor cost (and relative loss of skilled or dedicated prospective employees) starting about 1947 and accelerating radically in the next couple of years. The point about even wretched diesels being 'better than steam' is a partly valid one. Baldwin, for example, held the 'clean room' shop requirements down to a minimum (the injector rebuild facility, for example) allowing a steam-era shop to do much of the rest of the work with more typical machine-shop practice. It had been well understood since the Twenties that the thermal efficiency of diesels was much higher and, as 'gas engines' the whole issues of water rate, explosions, cut corners on boiler fabrication (see the 1361 follies), limited range, track pans, etc. goes away. Availability and over-the-road reliability go up, too ... if the engines are correctly designed. A great many weren't. Part of the issue in the late '40s is that most builders were playing a kind of catch-up ball in a new field, with ground faults being one of the things in particular that dogged Baldwin almost ineradicably (thanks in part to their baroque out-of-sight-out-of-mind assumptions about where and how you run power wiring). That some of the actual repair expenditures were radically higher than expected -- or touted by builders inexperienced with complex diesels or electric drive -- is unfortunate, and in some cases steam administered scientifically with the greatest attention to detail was competitive or even superior to some of those early things. But the situation is like what happens when you extrapolate WWI into 1919, something that always gave Winston Churchill a frisson of dread, by his own admission, when he considered it. Any advantage even for advanced turbine steam was vanishing as the second-generation diesels were built, with some of the last potential 'markets' vanishing with things like gas turbines and multiple-engined units on the one hand and better detail design on the other. I find it highly unlikely that even if many of the 'niche suppliers' had remained in business or effectively 'outsourced' production of key auxiliaries to, say, a company like Trailer-Train owned by a pool of railroads and kept solvent through hard times by them, there would have been a sustained market for 'first-generation' steam -- or much of a take rate for further generations, for other than experimental operations. With regard to the absolute amount: In order to recognize greater savings, a very large number of steam locomotives had to be replaced in reasonably short order, this accelerating as it became excruciatingly obvious both that operating older designs was like burning thousand-dollar bills in a cold shower and that newer designs cost a huge amount for proprietary crap that often did not perform as expected ... or needed. They thought they were spending money to responsibly save money ... and I, personally, suspect they were right and justified even if all they had to buy were neo-klunkers in many respects. Remember also that financing was much more available for units that were more 'fungible' -- that was for example the only way the NYO&W could get new power, and it certainly proved to be right. If there was a red lesson from the big T1 purchase, it was that large equipment-trust obligation on something no one else wanted would have to be 'continued by other means'...
Flintlock76 What happened to the PRR? No one else was reporting losses in the immediate post-war era.
It was a one-time loss, on paper, in 1946, and I think most of it was adjustment for wartime situations and damage. The expenditures for diesels came later. As did both the colossal increase in labor cost (and relative loss of skilled or dedicated prospective employees) starting about 1947 and accelerating radically in the next couple of years.
The point about even wretched diesels being 'better than steam' is a partly valid one. Baldwin, for example, held the 'clean room' shop requirements down to a minimum (the injector rebuild facility, for example) allowing a steam-era shop to do much of the rest of the work with more typical machine-shop practice. It had been well understood since the Twenties that the thermal efficiency of diesels was much higher and, as 'gas engines' the whole issues of water rate, explosions, cut corners on boiler fabrication (see the 1361 follies), limited range, track pans, etc. goes away. Availability and over-the-road reliability go up, too ... if the engines are correctly designed. A great many weren't.
Part of the issue in the late '40s is that most builders were playing a kind of catch-up ball in a new field, with ground faults being one of the things in particular that dogged Baldwin almost ineradicably (thanks in part to their baroque out-of-sight-out-of-mind assumptions about where and how you run power wiring). That some of the actual repair expenditures were radically higher than expected -- or touted by builders inexperienced with complex diesels or electric drive -- is unfortunate, and in some cases steam administered scientifically with the greatest attention to detail was competitive or even superior to some of those early things.
But the situation is like what happens when you extrapolate WWI into 1919, something that always gave Winston Churchill a frisson of dread, by his own admission, when he considered it. Any advantage even for advanced turbine steam was vanishing as the second-generation diesels were built, with some of the last potential 'markets' vanishing with things like gas turbines and multiple-engined units on the one hand and better detail design on the other. I find it highly unlikely that even if many of the 'niche suppliers' had remained in business or effectively 'outsourced' production of key auxiliaries to, say, a company like Trailer-Train owned by a pool of railroads and kept solvent through hard times by them, there would have been a sustained market for 'first-generation' steam -- or much of a take rate for further generations, for other than experimental operations.
With regard to the absolute amount: In order to recognize greater savings, a very large number of steam locomotives had to be replaced in reasonably short order, this accelerating as it became excruciatingly obvious both that operating older designs was like burning thousand-dollar bills in a cold shower and that newer designs cost a huge amount for proprietary crap that often did not perform as expected ... or needed. They thought they were spending money to responsibly save money ... and I, personally, suspect they were right and justified even if all they had to buy were neo-klunkers in many respects.
Remember also that financing was much more available for units that were more 'fungible' -- that was for example the only way the NYO&W could get new power, and it certainly proved to be right. If there was a red lesson from the big T1 purchase, it was that large equipment-trust obligation on something no one else wanted would have to be 'continued by other means'...
By labor cost, do you mean that Pennsy was done in by wage inflation, or do you mean constant-dollar labor cost, that diesel maintenance -- in the Transition Era -- was a lot more costly than people let on, then or even today?
Or do you mean that Pennsy -- chose . . . poorly -- with their Baldwin diesels that never worked right?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Exploring my memory further, 1946 may be the year that PRR railroad operations showed a deficit, but they paid a small dividend to stockholders anyway, bexause non-railroad (non-transportation, mostly real-estate) and Norfolk and Western dividend income more than made-up for the deficit.
The story on PRR's road to the first reported year of deficit, 1946, was covered in Trains, and I am giving you what my memory says is correct. You are a lot closer than I am to Washington, so go to it!
I am not denying in any way that PRR's postwar equipment purchases could have been wiser.
daveklepper Firelock, raoilroads were not flush with cash because WWII military traffic all moved at reduced rate.
To know the cash position of the nation's railroads in 1946, one would need access to the financial statements of every carrier or an industry roll-up.
Have you looked at the 1946 financials for each carrier or the cash positions as reported to the Interstate Commerce Commission, Association of American Railroads, etc.?
Many years ago, when I lived in New York, I used to take the train to Washington and spend the better part of the day at the AAR's library. At the time it was open to the public. My guess is they would have the financials for 1946 on microfish; whether one could get the information without a valid reason for doing so is unknown.
Rio Grande Valley, CFI,CFII
I don't think that anything could have saved NYO&W after the coal traffic dried up. It probably lasted as long as it did since Chapter 77 bankruptcies were intended to keep the railroad operating, not liquidated.
Thanks David! I have to defer to your knowledge, you were there, I wasn't, and Overmod made some good points too.
I'm flattered you remember my old "callsign!"
The Mod-man mentioned the NYO&W. Diesels sure didn't save them. As a matter of fact the only diesels the "Old and Weary" owned they managed to pay off before the collapse were some GE 44-tonners.
Firelock, raoilroads were not flush with cash because WWII military traffic all moved at reduced rate. Railroads could not buy rails and other necessary material to keep everything in good condition, and the Governent would not permit them to put funds into a deferred maintenance account to allow massive repair after VJ-Day. This is what led to PRR's showing a loss for the first time in 1946, the 1st Post-WWII full year, and a year requiring massive RoW repair to keep the railroad in safe operation and before any massive diesel purchases.
Of course, buy them, get them, on the easy peasey payment plan. Except Baldwin, cash only. That money went down the drain for a lot of headaches and trouble. Junk replacing superior performing steam and a skilled workforce that knew what they were doing. Gone, now your stuck.
How about no stop or one stop Niagara's NY City to Chicago .. hardly limited range.
Diesels did nothing to stem the rot. Did not save the Pennsy or the NYO&W. Just made money for EMD.
Keeping steam up to mid 60's to 1970 or so would not have brought the end any sooner but may have better exposed the weakness in competivness and brought about fair play and less regulations in commerce. Kept the charm and fascination with the public too!
Just seemed everyone in North America jumped on the bandwagon and were sold a tall tale with lollipops. Rest of the world didn't pay heed for quite some time. About that 1970 marker.
Oh well, didn't happen. The T1 in the movie looked good. They should have kept it that way. I bet it looked like hell a year later.
Flintlock76What happened to the PRR? No one else was reporting losses in the immediate post-war era.
zugmann Flintlock76 Someone in the Pennsy's hierarchy must have been spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. C'mon Wayne, state legislatures don't come cheap!
Flintlock76 Someone in the Pennsy's hierarchy must have been spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave.
C'mon Wayne, state legislatures don't come cheap!
Yep! The USA has the best government money can buy.
Since the SCOTUS 'Citizens United' decision in 2010 the door was opened legal buying. Government is bought and sold in the USA at all levels daily.
Show me a politician that leaves office poorer than they were when they entered office and they will be one of two things - a honest politician or dumb beyond human belief.
Oh that's hysterical!
Well, there is the old story about how the Pennsylvania state senate used to wrap up the day's business with one final question:
"Are there any matters important to the Pennsylvania Rail Road?"
Remember what Al Capone said?
"An honest politician is one who when he gets bought, stays bought!"
I have to believe that even lousy diesel models were less labor intensive than steam.
Flintlock76Someone in the Pennsy's hierarchy must have been spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.
Early in my tme after joining this forum, maybe early 2006 (?), the topic of what happened to steam, and how the roads found purchasing and incorporating diesels wholesale to be appealing, was debated very comprehensively, and with some of the usual vituperation present in at the time. One of those explaining, with what I took to be quite a solid stock of crediblity, ended up banned about four months later. Basically, he made it sound as if the roads were made offers the bean counters couldn't refuse. Or wouldn't.
CSSHEGEWISCH As most know, PRR took a loss in 1946. Diesels had to look really good after that happened.
As most know, PRR took a loss in 1946. Diesels had to look really good after that happened.
And that's something I've always been at a loss to understand. The PRR, and just about every other railroad in the country for that matter, was flush with cash from the tidal wave of government contracts during the war. What happened to the PRR? No-one else was reporting losses in the immediate post-war era. All were optimistic of post-war prosperity, the Jersey Central, for example, was happily buying new diesels to replace their worn-out and obsolete steam engines with the money they'd made.
Someone in the Pennsy's hierarchy must have been spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave.
And that's something I've always been at a loss to understand. The PRR, and just about every other railroad in the country for that matter, was flush with cash from the tidal wave of government contracts during the war. What happened to the PRR? No-one else was reporting losses in the immediate post-war era.
The loss was not because of steam! Expensive Diesels, many junk, made it all worse. It was the first of many losses to come. Diesels certainly did not save them, they went bust anyway. Things only got worse when the last of steam disappered.
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