A century before the Eisenhower era, horse traders and carrage makers were probably moaning about the takeover of their business by the railroads.
Meanwhile, the rails still cary the same 40% share of ton-miles of freight in the US that they did a half century ago.
Sad as it was, the Penn Central debacle was the 2x4 to the back of the head that got the US government's attention that something was seriously wrong. Human beings are what they are, and sometimes that's what it takes.
Kind of like it took the "Titanic" disaster to convince shipping companys that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to send ships out with less than adequate lifeboat capacity. It wasn't just "Titanic," no ship had adequate lifeboat capacity in 1912.
Well thanks guys...Think on this grey day I'll go bury myself in my N Scale re-created world while singing "City of New Orleans".
Don't think the Milwaukee Road and Rock Island fared too well, several other as well including the mighty Southern Pacific.
Maybe a person reminisces too much in their senior years.
Nothing wrong with the highway systems, would not have been able to get to all those N Trak meets all over the place in both countries without 'em. St. Lawrence Seaway, highway systems and airports all recieved huge government monies and subsidies. Remember those full page ads in Trains Magazine from the railroads asking to level the playing field?
It took a total disaster and as close to extinction as you can get for deregulation to come about. Maybe we are smarter now.
wanswheel This Miningman’s definitely got the disappearin’ railroad blues. Worst case ever saw.
This Miningman’s definitely got the disappearin’ railroad blues. Worst case ever saw.
So, let's "pass the paper bag that holds the bottle" and we'll all feel better!
Seriously, if we're talking about the deterioration of the railroads here in the US on closer inspection we're talking about, mostly, the 'roads in the Northeast and what's now known as the "Rust Belt." The roads west of the Mississippi and in the south really didn't do too badly in those years.
I'm not much of a grand conspiracy theorist. Passenger trains, interurbans, trolleys, all of them died because they weren't wanted anymore, although in some places like New York City you could say the trolleys just evolved into subways.
The interstate highway system? It was needed, it was wanted, it was built. No-one said don't build it, at least as far as I know.
I'm certain light rail and "intercity" rail service will make a comeback. Toronto has recently added a brand new, from the ground up, light rail service from Union Station downtown to Pearson International Airport. Similiar happenings across our two lands and much buzz.
Ok, fine, I'm now a backwoods hick living in the Boreal Forest of far Northern Saskatchewan, quite isolated... an older well used Mining Engineer and Geologist using up whatever little time is left teaching Aboriginal students in these subjects.
I left Southern Ontario for good in 2006 but my kids now have the family property. On a diagonal running east-west along the property at the SW corner was the NYC Canada Southern line. There is a small concrete bridge there. A picture of it is in the CASO website. The proprietor of that website has asked not to copy and post any of the pics to another site so I will abide but if you check out the website you will find a lot of information.
So....whats the point of this? Well that was a busy line with NYC Hudsons and Mikes, lots of trains. I think the last of steam was around 1955-56. Then lots of E's, F's, Alco's you name it. Big stop at Waterford interchanging with the TH&B, CNR and LE&N interurban. That was 15km East. Things slowed down around 1960, not the same and diminishing each year afterward. Then Penn Central. Then Amtrak "Niagara Rainbow" I think. Then Conrail. Track badly deferred. Then nothing. CN and CP bought it and ripped out the beautifully engineered Canada Southern...gone.
Just a few km's south of all this was the parallel Detroit-Buffalo Wabash, Pere Marquette, CNR line. Busy busy. Bullet nose Betty's handling the fast long green and black passenger trains. Even a joint Wabash/CNR local passenger service, eventually down to one Wabash coach only. Close enough you could hear the whistles and horns. Then PM gone and now C&O, then Wabash gone and now N&W, then C&O gone and now Chessie, all the while CNR as well. Then diminishing and down to one train a day in each direction for each road and all passenger long long gone Way before that. Then nothing. Then the whole thing ripped up. Gone forever.
Perpendicular to all this was the Lake Erie and Northern interurban and the CNR line into Port Dover. Little further West CPR into Port Burwell to meet the Pennsy bringing over coal via the lake freighter "Ashtabula". Last passenger was around '59-'60 on the CNR and LE&N packed it in with passengers, being freight only for 5 years around the same time and then it quit even that. CPR quit when the big "Ashtabula" sank and this strangely coincided with steam ending in Southern Ontario. Then CNR quit and all the tracks of all three were ripped up.
So not ONE line remains anywhere in the whole county whereas just a short while ago there were many railroads and lots of track. You could book a ticket for a sleeper to just about anywhere in North America from the beautiful classy station in Simcoe, a hub of tobacco farming and production. Lots of small industry around, lots of rail business. Lots of industrial spurs. Everything gone. Stations all gone. Farmers are ok growing everything but area very depressed, unemployment high and drugs and pills rampant. Not good.
I remember well the pride and the permanence of it all. Many many folks worked for the railroads. It was built for time. Then what I saw was the beginning of the end starting around 1955 and accelerating rapidly. I'm certain this is a similar story across the land so tell me how is this a good thing or even passed of as progress. The diesels did nothing except seemed to bring the end even faster. ( I don't need a lecture here, ok).
The real story is bigger than meets the eye. Did we really have to lose them all..and everything?
To be fair CSX and NS operate in Southern Ontario with trackage rights on CN on a different route altogether. Your average citizen in Southern Ontario haven't a clue who they are.
The two big things that finally doomed steam were the rising labor costs of the 1950s and the recession of 1958. The NKP planned to stay with steam for at least several years past 1957 as in the early 1950s steam was still cheap enough to make economic sense. Labor costs (and thus shopping costs) roughly doubled between 1953 and 1956 and so steam had to go. The recession of 1958 finished the process, as well as the optimism era of the postwar passenger train.
The Milwaukee Road was so in debt after electrifying that they were never able to close the 200 mile gap between their two electric segments. Some power company railroads in isolated areas have electrified, using their own power rather than hauling in diesel, but others still went the diesel route.
The interurbans were starting to look like bad bets in the 1920s. The only ones interested then were the utilities, until 1935 when the law prohibited them from using the rate payers to subsidize the traction lines. After that you almost could have given the traction companies to GM et al.
Edit: RME's post came out while I was composing, and before I sent the above, and he said it so much more elegantly.
MiningmanHad the interurban system survived to todays world then stating that the interurban system was rickety and dangerous is a non starter...everything would be vastly improved all along.
But where would the money for all those interurban railways to survive through the '50s -- now by law divorced from the power companies that were their principal hope to survive down times, or acquire capital access for improvements -- have possibly come from?
By the late '50s it was becoming very obvious that even big railroads with paying commuter service were in deep trouble both in terms of acquiring new equipment for their service and for keeping track maintenance up. (See the PRR and CNJ with the shared Bay Head service, for example, about the time that PRR tested the 2400hp 6-motor Alcos and found them eminently suitable, a noble predecessor of that most honored of honorary steam locomotives, the U34CH). I look back at all the expedients that were tried on poor interurbans: various kinds of adapted railbus; the Autorailer and its variants; even self-propelled generators to turn interurban trains into the equivalent of gas-electrics. I just don't see anything that keeps the track kept up to the standards needed to attract and hold new business ... in that era ... without public participation (both in terms of financing and in terms of tax and policy reform).
And in most cases, I really hate to say this but a properly modified bus would have been better. Lower tare weight, better suspension, engine easy for a thousand outside mechanics to work on cheap, with relatively inexpensive parts supply. Folks in Memphis couldn't even keep rebuilt trolleys running without fire, with a renovation budget of millions and then operating support on a MUCH higher level than characterized most of the interurban lines surviving the '20s.
Then you have to explain how you would crew the necessary level of service to make an interurban operating model work, in those days of radically escalating wages but wretchedly primitive autonomous train control. I don't for example think that either the Lindenwold or BART style control modalities, even if using OTS follow-on economies of production and scale, would work on typical legacy interurban equipment, and there was rather pointedly NOT the kind of advanced design that characterized the PCC development, over on the interurban/high-speed-long-distance side. The Electroliners are wonderful, but lord! do they require exacting maintenance, and once a great many things on them break there are no cheap replacements. And advance that controller and watch the lights go dim all over town; both IRM and Rockville will tell you about the giant sucking sound, but strangely neither train has the ability to cut out motors for light duty.
I'd be willing to bet that not one out of 50 interurban lines 'back in the day' still have enough potential traffic ... operated as interurbans, by private companies, for profit ... to do any better now than they were doing in the '30s. With or without a company like NCL to buy up the franchise and convert them to a different mode. Probably wouldn't pay as bus lines, either, even if you got van Hools or Prevosts and tricked them out like Nite Coaches.
This is one weird thread for Classic Trains. (I can see it on the Trains forum.)
I think rather than by conspiracy railroads in the 1950s were, as conventional wisdom holds, done in by a convergence of naturally occurring unfriendly events and trends. Interstate highways and jet planes were not invented and built to do in the railroads, but were simply in the natural progression of things.
Yes, they got a leg up from government, as the railroads did in their genesis, at the same time that gummint's heavy thumb of regulation -- outdated, as even the dense gummint came to realize -- weighed against the rails.
Now, in the natural progression of things, the air and highways are getting overcrowded and overexpensive, and the vaunted efficiencies of rail are getting a chance to reassert themselves.
If rail deserves to survive and thrive, it will.
P.S. Steam was a ridiculous, high-maintenance anachronism, given we had been in the internal-combustion age since at least the teens of the 20th century.
Had the interurban system survived to todays world then stating that the interurban system was rickety and dangerous is a non starter...everything would be vastly improved all along. The Lake Erie and Northern, which I rode on in the '50's was smooth as silk. Even today if I left Brantford by car to go to the terminus in Port Dover it is doubtful I could get there first...a line from Buffalo to Albany and Rochester as existed would make congestion on the highways look mighty foolish as you waved at them from your window....and a heck of a lot safer with all those big rigs out there, not to mention the idiots who think they are in a car commercial or those that are texting, killing the innocent and themselves.
As for the Millenials, they could use the walk by the looks of a lot of them and would get used to it real quick...it would be the parents that would be overprotective causing troubles.
Trinity River Bottoms BoomerItem: ATSF did undertake a study during the WWI era to determine the advantage of hanging wire over Raton Pass vs. steam. SP did likewise in the Sierra Nevadas, but both Western roads ended up rostering gigantic steam locomotives instead.
There are many other examples of major electrification planning, including both Erie and Lehigh Valley. Note that N&W actually went back from wire to gigantic steam locomotives, via construction of the new Elkhorn Tunnel, as late as the early '50s.
One problem with effective electrification is that to get maintainable plant, you have to spend much more money than a Milwaukee-style installation with wood poles and a bunch of pulloffs. Very few roads had the access to capital combined with the willingness to forgo the other opportunities which that capital could have enabled. Even PRR, which certainly demonstrated it could string wire to Harrisburg, didn't extend it where it was most needed, or even put the tunnel under Horse Shoe (which would have required it in steam days) through: it did the job with diesels, and did it well enough. (It is difficult for me to figure out where PRR, even in wartime, would have gotten the wherewithall to electrify from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, or how they would have handled the debt service even as early as 1946).
There are two promising opportunities - both, alas! problematical. One is to co-locate new transmission lines with railroad ROWs, and construct the catenary infrastructure piecewise as Public Service did in the Jersey Meadows many years ago now. The drawback is that derailments or accidents cause trouble for the electric power grid. The other opportunity is to build dual-mode-lite power (or use electrified road slugs with reversible connections to their mothers) and implement catenary only where operationally justified at first, gradually extending to close the gaps 'as needed' (or as national policy may determine in future).
I was absolutely sure some of this was under development by 2009. It's hard to believe there would be a more tempting excuse to throw hundreds of billions into 'infrastructure' on railroads than we saw during the Obama stimulus years, especially with the announced 'interest' in HSR. Now it's a major thing just to get a few miles of existing heavy electrification converted to constant-tension.
Rats!
One must not forget that National City Lines was created at the end of WWII to systematically destroy many of the "clean green" electric operated streetcar operations coast to coast, year after year, well into the Eisenhower administration of the 50s. One of the first to fall to the stinkers was Tampa Electric Co. when newly created NCL sent Tampa buses built by GM, rode on Firestone tires, used Standard Oil for fuel, which commenced operations during the Truman administration!
Who doesn't get goosebumps when they watch a Berkshire on the point hauling Nickel Plate High Speed Freight? Sad but true, and quoted by the late Hollister Noble, in his 1954 novel published by Doubleday "One Way to Eldorado", the steam locomotive was stabbed in the steamchest the day the first practical Diesel rolled off the production line!
Lest we forget, when Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul made the decision to string wire in the Rockies, America was headed for an electrical revolution. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Lord Mr. Ford's horseless carriage literally stopped any potential nationwide mainline electrification in it's tracks, possibly due to Rockefeller and Ford political interests in Washington DC.
True, though the interurban era brought new interest in railroad electification, but just like it returned during the energy shortage of the 70s when the Black Meas & Lake Powell Railroad hung wire in the Arizona desert, it quíckly disappered while EMD, Alco, and GE, continued building high horespower diesel-electric locomotives keeping the builder's books full of orders.
Item: ATSF did undertake a study during the WWI era to determine the advantage of hanging wire over Raton Pass vs. steam. SP did likewise in the Sierra Nevadas, but both Western roads ended up rostering gigantic steam locomotives instead.
Where are the railroads headed today? It doesn't look like any will consider hanging wire anytime soon but major cities continue to operate, expand, or plan rapid transit and/or revitalized streetcar lines all across America, utilizing wire or heavy third rail such as San Francisco's BART! Perhaps we'll see the day when a major Class One railroad will decide to "Live Better Electrically". It will make Reddy Kilowatt's day!
Miningman ... N&W could have endured steam for some time yet and who knows what advancements could have come about.
But not past about 1970 - the key thing being the official passage of the Clean Air Act and the EPA. No reciprocating locomotive that was economically viable at the time would have passed. It is still difficult to design engines that will under all working conditions.
And that's not a bad thing. I am a 'native New Yorker' having been born and lived my first couple of years in Manhattan. The sky was always gray or brown then, and I can remember looking up and being astounded to see blue sky and white clouds, just like the storybooks (and in Pennsylvania and at the beach on vacations) and if you breathed in too deeply your lungs would ache dully. It was a rare occasion to see the island further down than around 125th St. from the George Washington Bridge, and a red-letter day to see as far down as the 72nd St. boat basin. Twice in my entire youth I was able to see, far down the harbor, the little finger of the Statue of Liberty sticking up in the haze. Grand Central and Rockefeller Center were as black as if you'd carved them out of bituminous coal.
Now -- with many more cars on the road -- it's routine to see the Verrazano Narrows Bridge distinctly, much further away. Rockefeller Center is cream and Grand Central is pink. And I wouldn't go back for all the Baldwins ... or, come to think of it, 830-series Pacifics ... on CNJ.
Recently discussed Pacifics built in 1948 for Reading and Canadian Pacific sure as heck were not experimental.
And neither, by the time they were built, was the PRR T1: all the difficulties had hard engineering solutions by that point. And the T1 was a far more capable engine than either Pacific, even when fired and run to reach the same fuel and water consumption -- same as the Niagara, which was a better 2-8-0 when sliding-pressure fired than a 2-8-0.
Problem was that they still cost more, and required more training and skill, and needed far more infrastructure than their replacements. PRR knew as early as 1946 where the right answer for their passenger power would be - gloriously streamlined or otherwise. So did NYC.
My chief complaint is that ... and this is a banker's issue, again, that doesn't quite pass the smell test ... in order to get out from under the high expense, both the T1s and the Niagaras had to die. That meant demonizing the T1 and branding it (and its designers) a hopeless failure, and thrashing the Niagaras to an early grave with mishandling.
But this doesn't get around why so many other railroads got rid of steam with indecent haste, most notably roads like the Lackawanna that had so much truly capable big, high-speed power. Scrap for the Korean War goes only just so far (but it certainly meant that all the power retired in that era, regardless of how fast, had a quick meeting with Destiny).
Note that there are very, very few places where steam has come back in place of diesels, and those usually have very special mitigating circumstances (like the Hudsons to Woolongong). Tom Blasingame seldom misses a chance to complain about this. But I'm afraid his order book reflects the situation.
... Well ok BUT the best and brightest at the top of the industry didn't see that and millions upon millions lost on new trainsets.
No, they didn't see it, and yes, they wound up losing millions upon millions. But we're looking with 20/20 hindsight, not as 'they' saw the situation at the time. War was over, enormous pent-up demand, vivid history of streamlined-train success from the mid-Thirties right up to wartime; why should it be any different? And indeed much of the long-distance streamliner allure continued right through the DC-7C era ... but 707s and the like killed that dead. And the development of easy-to-run, air-conditioned cars and high-speed roads to run them on ... and the infrastructure described in The Insolent Chariots to make their purchase and yearly replacement at hideous expense a social ritual ... made train travel either an expense for the rich or a sorry excuse to rub elbows with the perceived less well-to-do.
Meanwhile just about every railroad chairman since William H. Vanderbilt understood that high-speed train competition doesn't pay almost anywhere it counts. And few of them recognized the actual economics that might prefer high-speed train service over the sort of mere-80-mph maxima that PRR and NYC used on their sleeper trains. Those who did had already started a new era of goin' downgrade-makin'-ninety-miles-an-hour (127mph on single track on ACL??!!) culminating in the Naperville wreck that seems to have made the ICC crack down on automatic train control. You will note how few railroads, by the time the order was fully effective in 1951, actually spent the money on new automatic train control.
Also...if only we had the interurban system back that was in place!...what a boon to society that would be today...big big mistake but thats the way society went. Nothing wrong with the interurban system...nothing!
Except that it was rickety, dangerous, only made economic sense when big power companies needed it to make physical-plant development practical in the short run, didn't take most people anywhere near where they actually needed to go, and otherwise were a perfect solution to problems no one actually asked, the actual problems having very different operational and practical answers.
It is not difficult to 'gin up a version of the future in which interurban railways play a significant role. It is much more difficult to explain how those interurban railways got built (or even to explain how they would have survived the Thirties, let alone the Fifties, in any numbers that mattered, in shape to improve themselves) Note that, with one (rather easily achieved) assumption, plug-in autonomous vehicles give a much, much better solution for an enormous percentage of 'interurban' traffic (both actual and postulated) than large railcars on fixed guideways will. And that's just relative customer satisfaction; we haven't gotten to maintenance economics yet, and we'd better leave debt service concerns completely out of mind.
This is not to say that light rail is worthless - it is of high value in many places, Charlotte one of the more interesting. I support it in many places; even its development as a regional network feeding higher-speed transport (to make stops for the latter more rational than at every population center of any size or political importance). But compare the light-rail ridership with automobile use, even in the Millennial community. And tell me how many Millennials will regularly walk to and from the nearest points that interurbans approach where they want to go ... or what sort of schedule the cars can keep if they make everybody's stops. If that era of interurban service were to return, it wouldn't last through the first Speedrail-type accident. And that, judging by recent operating history, wouldn't be long in coming.
One more thing....when was the last time we had a good massive staybolt fiesta eh?
Gettysburg. It's not for want of opportunity, it's a scarcity of opportunities. Take a look at the pictures of 844 after her little swimming-pool-chemical contretemps and tell me there wasn't opportunity knocking (with the handle of the scythe, and wanting in BAD) averted more by horrified necessity than good judgment. And this on one of the most pampered and famous locomotives still running!
"I'm just sorry the government frittered away the peace dividend and the European bankers are back in charge of things again."- RME
Yes, thats a real sore point with me, and I'm sure many others as well...we had a once in hundred years opportunity to make the world a better place and drive a stake into the vampire vaquishing it forever but we really flubbed that. Quite a surprising and dissapointing outcome.
As to your last posting...I suppose I reluctantly will defer to the point..it's all a result of free market forces but much pressure artificially imposed as well. Been discussed before but N&W could have endured steam for some time yet and who knows what advancements could have come about. Recently discussed Pacifcs built in 1948 for Reading and Canadian Pacific sure as heck were not experimental. The change from looking at 1948, then 1958 doesn't pass the smell test...something stinks!
"Passengers were going to be lost to railroads in the '50's as they were lost to the interurbans after the '20's - RME
Well ok BUT the best and brightest at the top of the industry didn't see that and millions upon millions lost on new trainsets. Also...if only we had the interurban system back that was in place!...what a boon to society that would be today...big big mistake but thats the way society went. Nothing wrong with the interurban system...nothing!
Technology has displaced millions of jobs creating massive unemployment and underemployment and keeps doing so....this is a huge problem that no one, absolutely no one has an answer to. We need decent work for those that shower after work, not those that shower before they go in to work, or you won't have a society left. Quite the dilema and problem but the folks have to come first.
Miningman ... what we had and lost was efficient and worked very well.
Steam went out between 1947 and 1950 for very good reasons, documented extensively in the contemporary railroad press. A major 'enablement' was the relatively fine financial position railroads enjoyed coming out of the traffic peaks of WWII - and once they had credit and the ability to expand equipment trusts, most everyone went to diesels as quick as they could, even those like PRR who tried research to placate their coal interests. The free-piston locomotive made too much noise; the bituminous coal turbine was a long, intricate scam. Anything else used too much water, unless you wanted to keep stopping pathetic crawling freight trains every division point to swap full crews, while paying exaggerated taxes to local jurisdictions that complained about soot and noise.
Railway Express had a good business model ... but one that was predicated on lots of little trains stopping often enough at lots of little stations. When better approaches came along, in the air or on the roads, all the cachet and pride there was wouldn't keep them going - Perlman famously cancelled the Centuries before they could slump into inevitable mediocrity if left unsubsidized.
And for every railroad using CTC effectively, or running 2-8-4s effectively in bridge-line service, there were plenty more that thought a 22-mile daily run for a freight car, and incredibly large numbers of people to conduct fast freight operations that actually got packages to destinations undamaged and quickly, were just fine. That stopped paying pretty quick with trucks using the Interstates, "road use taxes" adequate or not as you care to argue. And as has been argued over and over with quite a bit of acumen on the Trains forums, what the railroads cared to do was not sufficient to maintain many of the railroads, or many of the services, no matter how romantic or interesting they were to fans.
Once you eliminate the pains of large debt service to banks on the purchase of hideously-expensive-per-horsepower diesel electrics ... which is really the thing GM did to open the floodgates ... many of the operating characteristics of the diesels were almost immediately and grandly better. PRR for example found they could run F units across four divisions without having to refuel them, whether or not the brotherhoods still made them stop every division to change crews. The whole convoluted architecture and premise of locomotive watering went out, as did the danger of low water explosions. No John L. Lewis brinksmanship, no sooted laundry, no dynamic augment effects (although the lateral force problems in wheelbarrow-suspended-motor trucks were papered over) and cheaper fuel much more stingily used, no massive backshop actions every few thousand miles, no multi-hour startups or massive staybolt fiestas...
And it does have to be noted that GM, Ford et al. contributed a great deal to freight railroad bottom line; I remember almost no cars in showrooms in my childhood that did not show on their stickers that they'd been transported by 'rail'. Passengers were going to be as lost to railroads in the '50s as they were lost to interurbans after the '20s. And I think it was clear by the early years of the model T that the rise in inexpensive automobile production (and in the markets opened up for 'used cars') would make it so. (People tend to forget the massive amount paid in 1928 for the Fischer-Tropsch patent rights, because cheap oil was 'running out' (one of the assumptions behind the Teapot Dome scandal a few years earlier, I believe).
It's interesting to speculate how things might have been different for passenger if the Depression had continued harder or longer, or if WWII and later the Democratic Party giveaway of much of Europe and Asia hadn't stimulated aircraft technological development. (Sorry, but all the revisionist historians in academe can't make me like that noisy little shopkeeper.) Or if the Government hadn't forced Pullman to decide whether to serve passengers or build cars. But I have the suspicion that in a great many cases, railroads would have given up the business much as they did.
MidlandMikeThe Interstate highways are sometimes referred to as the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.
For very good reason - Ike was a proponent of a network of good trunk roads as early as 1919, and took the 'right' lesson from the Autobahn (which really means 'automobile railroad' in German) and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was modeled (not to its advantage!) after the Autobahn structure. He knew to put something better than double-sided Armco barrier between the opposing high-speed traffic lanes!
More to the point, the Interstate highways started being referred to as defense highways -- I think Ike et al. were a bit overimpressed with Eighth Air Force-style propaganda (history written a bit too quickly by the victors, with SAC needing all the propaganda they could muster) about what either area or pinpoint bombing did to railroads. (Al Staufer has a particularly good 'sea of mud' comment on this in Thoroughbreds).
Fun to slip it in along with the other 'defense' things, like Tom Power and SAC and 'sunshine units' and mutual assured deterrence, that our society accepted as necessary against the evil Rooskies.
I don't feel at all sorry for the Russians about there 'turning out to be no missile gap'. They certainly worked both the bomber gap and the missile gap as hard as they knew how, to the point of turning Claire Chennault on his head by looping the flights of bombers around and around to leave the wrong impression. Should I be sorry that by the time we discovered "Keynesian" synergistic guns and butter it turned out they were bluffing?
I haven't been sorry for a moment that we went after the USSR and took it down. I discovered I actually liked going to sleep not worried about thermonuclear weapons pointed three miles away. I'm just sorry the government frittered away the peace dividend and the European bankers are back in charge of things again.
Ok I'm nuts, but occasionally I am normal allright! So now read this ...posted by Wanswheel in the RDC in VT thread in the Trains General Discussion forum.
For the things that we do need to move greater distances, we need to transition away from airplanes and trucks and rely more on water and rail. This shift is already beginning to happen, with UPS using rail more often for their shipments, which is a lot cheaper and much more energy efficient. I think we’re also going to end up using our old canal systems, using them for water transportation of goods. Vermont is a great example of how this could work: we might have a port in Burlington, on Lake Champlain, where we can receive and ship goods through our canal system, which extends all the way down to the Hudson River and out to the ocean.
When it comes to the transportation of people, the challenge is getting everyone out of their cars. Cars are central to our way of life: people consider the car the primary way of getting places, except when it comes to very long distances, in which case they rely on airplanes. Both of these modes of transportation are very energy-intensive and unsustainable in the long term — even higher-efficiency airplanes or electric cars (which require the same resources to build and use the same energy-intensive infrastructure as regular cars).
Soon, we’ll need to move back to a train system as our main method of moving people long distances. Planes will still be in use, but much less frequently—and at a much higher price to the traveler. The U.S. doesn’t have enough investment in a passenger transportation program. We need to give more funding to Amtrak and build better infrastructure to create a workable train system with nice facilities and stations and many more destinations across the country. We also have much of the infrastructure already in place with freight rails. In many places, there’s a lot of capacity, since freight trains often only run a few times a day, which presents a great opportunity to incorporate commuter rail into these existing railways.
"Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society"
The above from the speech....the railroads were kicked to the curb, fine for this and that...long haul in sparse areas ( and not all of them...only a few), coal, and so on but as an everyday means of primary transport and service the end came rapidly. It was considered outdated, useless and fairly well taken out of the equation. You can't tell me GM did not play a monstrous role in all this. They even replaced the new steam with their own hard sell, easy financing and promises of monster savings while sticking a knife in their back. We here in Canada hung on a wee bit longer but followed suit. Really did not occur anywhere else in the world but then the rest of the world was not North America.
I suppose the free market system worked and things "evolved" naturally but I can't shake off the eye test...thinking it might turn back sooner than we think because what we had and lost was efficient and worked very well.
Ike was trying to warn people of the M-I complexes propensity to play off Cold War paranoia and suck money out of the public trough that could be better spent elseware.
Back in the 1960 campaign the Kennedy Democrats (not at ALL like todays Democrats, by the way) got a lot of milage accusing the Esienhower administration of allowing a "missle gap" to occur between ourselves and the Soviet Union, something Ike vehemently denied, saying our retaliatory capability was not just sufficient, but "awesome." As the man in command he certainly knew wherof he spoke.
One of the wisest things Eisenhower said concerning the Soviet Union was it was bound to collapse anyway. "If they want to keep up with us, and they do, they'll have to educate their people. And in doing so they'll sow the seeds of their own destruction." He was right.
What's this got to do with railroads? Probably not too much. There were a number of things, not any one thing, that led to the railroads near-collapse.
I remember watching President Eisenhower on TV that night. Next day the papers were full of stories about the military industrial complex, whatever that was. But soon Ike was completely out of office and his farewell speech went practically forgotten for the rest of his life.
http://www.panarchy.org/eisenhower/farewelladdress.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY
The Interstate highways are sometimes referred to as the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.
Truman and Eisenhower I'm saying Truman was a friend and respectful of the railroads. 1945-1952. Now there were changes coming a plenty in this period, most of them positive, with the railroads but through it all there was still a mindset, a vital need and a common sensed recognition of that. Things on the railroad looked good...the ballast, the track, the signals, the new passenger sets, the locomotives, the stations...everything. Its role in the economy and national security was assured. The pictures from this era show a beautiful and proud system across the land. The Rock Island and the Milwaukee Road were healthy and solid. They were big...household names. Pennsy and NYC were pillars and titans of industry. Even though the last of steam was built in 1948 those locomotives were super modern and would last decades...same for the steam locomotives build since 1945. Diesels may be the future but these new steam babies are the best ever and will be around a long time yet. Baldwin was still touting a future for steam, just that we ain't seen nothing yet!. If you stated that Penn Station would be torn to the ground and dumped in the swamps of New Jersey in about ten years hence you would think we were invaded and defeated by Martians. Enter the Eisenhower administration 1953-1960 and the huge wholesale mean natured taking apart of the railroad industry. Deferred maintenance, infrastructure lost, stations closed, passenger service vanishing, dirty locomotives, junk everywhere, new steam scrapped like the whole thing was just a big lie and nothing but a dream. The titans bleeding badly and looking very wounded and suddenly vulnerable. A dagger in the side of the railroads, so they can bleed out and stumble to the end in another ten years hence. It happened very quickly. The charlatans and lawyers took over the reigns of railroad power destroying and pillaging. It was shocking to witness the events that annually took a toll. It was over for much of what was. So the big question is was this a normal evolution of events, virtually unforeseeable by learned men, or was this a giant economic play, a deliberate manipulation to replace a way of life with another, marketed and sold by the same group that could and would even eliminate its competition and take over as the new giant and telling us all how it is going to be. Is this a fair assessment or not possible. Did all of this play a role in Eisenhower's heartfelt and dire warning for all of us regarding the military industrial complex? Those were some powerful words...he knew, he saw it, he got out the warning.
Login, or register today to interact in our online community, comment on articles, receive our newsletter, manage your account online and more!
Get the Classic Trains twice-monthly newsletter