Video quality gets better as the video progresses. Not a lot of people riding in that Super Dome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pXySW5owCk
CMStPnPVideo quality gets better as the video progresses. Not a lot of people riding in that Super Dome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pXySW5owCk
Even more interesting than the video were the comments - comments that had no clue to the economic realities that MILW faced when they made the decisions they did.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACDEven more interesting than the video were the comments - comments that had no clue to the economic realities that MILW faced when they made the decisions they did.
I watched it all in real time and was old enough to see they had real issues. Winter of 1977 is what pushed them over the financial edge. Heck you should know that they leased BOKU locomotives from the B&O and Chessie System, I guess they were the same back then but still a large portion of the B&O locomotives were still in solid blue with yellow lettering. Southern Railway was another railroad that leased a chunk of motive power to them. A large chunk of the old Milwaukee loco fleet just died that Winter. Then there was the heavy and drifting snow which caused the Milwaukee to embargo service on some branch lines until they could plow them out with a real snow plow. I think most of their remaining E units still in UP Colors died in the METRA pool as well. Remember seeing them in the dead line in Milwaukee. It was a huge locomotive dead line as well at least 1-2 miles long of old locomotives that just could not take that winter weather, plus they filled most of the roundhouse tracks as well. Anyhoo, those power lease costs had to be horribly expense as well as the lost revenue from some of the more lucrative branch lines. It took the Milwaukee all that Summer and Fall to get rid of those lease units. Took the Milwaukee 18 months to trim the dead line in Milwaukee back to just a few locomotives on a side track. Not sure what took them so long to fix or dispose.
Most of the Milwaukee's Wisconsin branch lines, you couldn't really see the rail or ties in the Wisconsin Summer only the grass above them and all of them were plastered with 10-15 mph slow orders. WSOR and the State has done an excellent job of rehab on a lot of the ex-Milwaukee branch lines. E&LS has kept the line North of Green Bay about the same condition it was in at Milwaukee Bankruptcy.
I remember when they rehabbed the Twin Cities mainline through Brookfield, WI with the 4-R loan they got and just about doubled the speed limit from 35 mph to 60 mph. It was cool seeing the Amtrak trains fly through town at 79 mph leaving a cloud of fresh ballast dust behind. Same deal with the Milwaukee Sprint Intermodal Trains.
CMStPnP BaltACD Even more interesting than the video were the comments - comments that had no clue to the economic realities that MILW faced when they made the decisions they did. I watched it all in real time and was old enough to see they had real issues. Winter of 1977 is what pushed them over the financial edge. Heck you should know that they leased BOKU locomotives from the B&O and Chessie System, I guess they were the same back then but still a large portion of the B&O locomotives were still in solid blue with yellow lettering. Southern Railway was another railroad that leased a chunk of motive power to them. A large chunk of the old Milwaukee loco fleet just died that Winter. Then there was the heavy and drifting snow which caused the Milwaukee to embargo service on some branch lines until they could plow them out with a real snow plow. I think most of their remaining E units still in UP Colors died in the METRA pool as well. Remember seeing them in the dead line in Milwaukee. It was a huge locomotive dead line as well at least 1-2 miles long of old locomotives that just could not take that winter weather, plus they filled most of the roundhouse tracks as well. Anyhoo, those power lease costs had to be horribly expense as well as the lost revenue from some of the more lucrative branch lines. It took the Milwaukee all that Summer and Fall to get rid of those lease units. Took the Milwaukee 18 months to trim the dead line in Milwaukee back to just a few locomotives on a side track. Not sure what took them so long to fix or dispose.
BaltACD Even more interesting than the video were the comments - comments that had no clue to the economic realities that MILW faced when they made the decisions they did.
I suspect the only real difference between the locomotives in the MILW dead lines and those they leased from Chessie and SOU was that the MILW had had deferred maintenance to the point that MILW couldn't afford to fix those locomotives to be barely operatable as were those they leased. Chessie and SOU didn't lease out the cream of their fleets, they leased out those that would soon be on their own dead lines.
I recall seeing the ex-SR SD24's at Bensenville. By that time, Southern had sold them to Precision National, who was leasing them to MILW.
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