Boeing's 707 didn't just kill the long distance passenger train, it took out the ocean liner as well.
All that aside, it was a superb aircraft!
Mike says:
Classic era coffin nails
The Classic Era began with The Fair of the Iron Horse with the B&O celebrating it's first 100 years of existance in 1927. The Fair was a celebration of everything that had taken place in transportation during the prior history of mankind. The Fair highlighted the best of the Eastern carriers motive power and some contemporary equipment both passenger and freight.
Subsequent to 1927 you had the Stock Market Crash, the Depression, carriers trying to entice passengers back to the rails - the M10000 and the Pioneer Zephyr, the various carriers efforts with streamliners in both heavyweight, lightweight, steam and diesel powered. The WW II period where traffic of all kinds ran through pre-existing records any way one wanted to look at them. The post War optimisim of 'brand new lightweight streamlined diesel passenger trains' - Optimism that continued to the middle 50's and the building of the El Capitan hi-level equipment and the Denver Zephyr. The combined Steel and Coal strikes of 1958 cast a pall over the industry that brought about the PennCentral merger that ended the period. This 30+ year period had it all - Super Power steamers, 1st generation diesel electrics, electrification between NY & DC, streamliners of all kinds, freight traffic of all kinds at volumes never anticipated, troop and military equipment trains - ALL TOGETHER
The PennCentral merger began the era of Financial Distress - the creation of Amtrak, mergers, abandonments the era of red ink which continued through to the creation of ConRail and continued to the enactment of Staggers in 1980 and in reality to the mid to late 80's. (Rail managements, long encumbered by regulation had no idea of what it took to run a deregulated business operation).
The late 80's to the present is the present day.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Look at the picture at the top of the "On The Property" blog. That's Classic Railroading. Most railyards are so sterile nowadays. No interlocking, roundhouses, coaling towers, etc, etc.
Here's a good timeline. I'll now say 1980. It's the time when the old big Class 1's started merging other big Class 1's. Chessie and Family Lines were just holding companies with separate railroads. It's when BN merged Frisco that "Classic" ended. Then the march towards the Big 7 started.
http://trains21.org/railroad-mergers-takeovers/
Correct. One man's "classic" is another's "ancient history". More often than not it seems to depend more on generational consensus than any specific attributes. My local classic rock station is now playing songs by bands they shunned in the 90's. Now, however, it's my generation (X) that's moving into the "disposable income target demographic" as we enter our 5th decade.
The exceptions that tend to muck up the works are those items and events that transcend the era in which they originate and could have been deemed a "classic" by generations that came before the thing happened or the item was invented. Case in point, the Lionel 400E:
The 67 Stingray (I watched my neighbor rebuild one of these from a burned out frame back in the 70's)
And SP4449:
And while I'm sure there are billions more examples, these 3 represent items whose beauty of design will always keep them popular, and thus, "classic".
But.
For someone born in the diesel era, and a fan of Amtrak...
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
+1 Jeff. You said it much better than I did (not that that's hard to do).
Classic is in the eye of the beholder. As those who actually remember the original defined classic era become less, the newer generations will redefine what classic means.
For me, I don't remember steam because it was gone before I was born. I can barely remember pre-Amtrak passenger trains. For me the classic era goes into the early 1980s. That's when changes really started happening. If you think about it, except for steam giving way to diesel, loss of passenger trains and equipment becoming bigger, railroading didn't change much from the turn of the century. Trains still had cabooses, there were open stations and towers, branch lines, general box car traffic, operation by time table and train order, 4 and 5 man crews.
It was the early 1980a when these things changed with a vengeance. The seeds of change may have been sowed beginning in the 1960s and 70s, but they hit wholesale in the 1980s. Staggers, technology and changes to labor agreement really changed how railroads operated.
The current state of railroads, and everything else, will someday be looked at by some as the "good old days". Hard as that is for me to fathom.
Jeff
Vince, you've got some good stuff there.
MiningmanA partial list: Branch Line Passenger - and Mixed trains. A great deal of mainline passenger Connecting trains Coal and Water towers - I remember being in both at Irricana. Right before the coal dock was demolished about 1960, Dad and I went up inside the empty bin. I had forgotten about that until I bought a book about Calgary railway history 15 or so years ago. What I remember is there is nothing blacker than creosoted timbers coated with 40 years of coal dust. There are two photos of me in our backyard about two years apart, one with the water tower in the background and the other without. Mail and Express - I remember the afternoon Dad took down the blue Canadian Pacific Expresss and Telegraph Services sign, and replaced it with the red and white Canadian Pacific Merchandise Services sign. After many iterations Canadian Pacific Telegraph became todays Rogers Mobility. Canadian Pacific Express became CanPar. The CPR shade of blue lives on as a blue trim piece on the CanPar trucks. Sleeping Car Service - in Canada. Ice Reefers - experienced a brief revival in Canada when the TV Dinner people discovered that you could fully load a fresh frozen batch of product into a car and ship it across Canada without requiring additional ice. The end came when the old reefers reached the manditory retirement age and the food companies didn't want to spring for replacements. Stockcars - the stock pen at Irricana went along with the coal dock and the water tower. Telegraph - "a long time forgotten, with dreams that just fell by the way". Towers and Stations - my childhood. The end of stations with agents in Alberta came July 1, 1965. Other provinces varied within a year or two.
Branch Line Passenger - and Mixed trains.
A great deal of mainline passenger
Connecting trains
Coal and Water towers - I remember being in both at Irricana. Right before the coal dock was demolished about 1960, Dad and I went up inside the empty bin. I had forgotten about that until I bought a book about Calgary railway history 15 or so years ago. What I remember is there is nothing blacker than creosoted timbers coated with 40 years of coal dust. There are two photos of me in our backyard about two years apart, one with the water tower in the background and the other without.
Mail and Express - I remember the afternoon Dad took down the blue Canadian Pacific Expresss and Telegraph Services sign, and replaced it with the red and white Canadian Pacific Merchandise Services sign. After many iterations Canadian Pacific Telegraph became todays Rogers Mobility. Canadian Pacific Express became CanPar. The CPR shade of blue lives on as a blue trim piece on the CanPar trucks.
Sleeping Car Service - in Canada.
Ice Reefers - experienced a brief revival in Canada when the TV Dinner people discovered that you could fully load a fresh frozen batch of product into a car and ship it across Canada without requiring additional ice. The end came when the old reefers reached the manditory retirement age and the food companies didn't want to spring for replacements.
Stockcars - the stock pen at Irricana went along with the coal dock and the water tower.
Telegraph - "a long time forgotten, with dreams that just fell by the way".
Towers and
Stations - my childhood. The end of stations with agents in Alberta came July 1, 1965. Other provinces varied within a year or two.
There are some other good points mentioned. I think the end of the era would have to be broken down into subsections; locomotives, rolling stock, operations, and new technology.
I like Johnny's idea about the end of US Pullman service.
I like the second generation diesel idea. Although I think you could break it down further by saying it was, pre- EMD GP30 and GE U-boats, American built Alcos, along with FM and Baldwin.
I may have more to add later.
Bruce
So shovel the coal, let this rattler roll.
"A Train is a Place Going Somewhere" CP Rail Public Timetable
"O. S. Irricana"
. . . __ . ______
As we all know a great many roles that had defined railroads and what they did vanished over a relatively short period of time.
A partial list:
Branch Line Passenger
Coal and Water towers
Mail
Express and REA
Pullman Services
Pennsylvania Station
Car floats and ferries
Ice Reefers
Stockcars
Telegraph
Towers and Stations ... and so on
All these items disappeared 'relatively' simultaneously. So I would say the last time these things were intact and a highly functional part of operations.
Wayne's 1960 is good. 1955 is good but will meet with resistance. To think there were still yet T1's, Niagaras and Hudsons in dead lines. Maybe that's the tipping point. Once we turned our back on that,and sent them off to scrap , railroading crossed the Rubicon. Overnight seemingly Michigan Central Station in Detroit and Buffalo Grand Central went from magnificence to dilapidated eyesores. The Classic era was truly over.
Perhaps a bit later up here. Canadian Pacifics Multimark was a valiant last gasp at its worldwide and diversified reach and Canadian National's revitalization of passenger services was brave and responsible. A wee bit of excitement in the dark 60's but both eventually fizzled.
You know, there's no right or wrong here. If someone wanted to extend the "Classic Period" through the 1970's up to 1981 it wouldn't bother me at all.
My definition of a classic car? If the car was around when my father was a kid, it's a classic. If it was around when I was a kid, it's a bomb!
Not to be overly argumentative -- I find it impossible to include things like repeatedly painting the undercarriages of P5 electrics to keep ahead of the cracks either 'classic' or demonstrative of 'the golden years of railroading' as the Great Generation defined it and oh-so-many readers and subscribers want it.
That's not to say there isn't a place for later material in such a magazine -- I complained about the arbitrary cutoff restricting discussion of the Metroliners and TurboTrains until recently, and there are plenty of things with 'golden age' intent like PAs on the Adirondack that qualify even now. But to lump much of the '60s and '70s in with the 'golden age' is to stretch the gentle nostalgia inherent in the original magazine's conception.
I advocated years ago that we need an 'intermediate' forum that is not driven so much by contemporary railroading, as the Trains forums largely are, but not restricted by a nominal and arbitrary 50-year cutoff (even a rolling one). One of the most interesting eras in railroading came in the 1980s, much of it is underdocumented or downright unknown, and we're rapidly approaching the edge of history in ways that can be almost dangerously underrated (for example, preserving the circuit design and microcode in proprietary control setups and boards in '80s-era locomotives). But there's little place outside some niche discussions on RyPN about this, and precious little discussion of 'preservation' other than designing kludges when the magic smoke gets out somehow.
I do agree that 'Classic Trains' doesn't have to be either elitist of Pollyanna-ish about railroad history, and that it's completely legitimate to include up to the late '70s in a nostalgia magazine even if a 'fifty-year' cutoff for such material is as remote as 5550.
'
I just turned 60 and I believe the 50 year cutoff is correct. "Classic" is probably anything that the majority of current hobbyists weren't around to experience. I go to classic car shows and remember when those models were new. I got interested in trains back around 1970, so anything before that is "classic". My view is that some don't want that stuff to be considered "classic" because then they would have to acknowledge that they are getting older and no one wants to do that... Maybe the (current) cutoff should be when 2nd generation diesels became the clear majority?
As Wayne says, the going became tough in the 60's. To me, one important date was 12/31/68--when the Pullman Company ended its overnight service.
I well remember my last trip attended by Pullman--From Washngton to Birmingham, with my mother, on the Silver Comet, in late November of 1968. When the two conductors came into our bedroom, I handed our Pullman ticket to the Pullman conductor, saying, "Here's our space," handed my RF&P/SCL ticket to the RF&P conductor, saying, "Here's my transportation," and said to him, "My mother has her transportation (which was a pass)."
Johnny
Interesting.
Personally, I'd consider the "Classic Era" as a period dating from the driving of the "Golden Spike" at Promontory Summit closing the "Pioneer Period" of railroading, up to and through the post-war transition period of steam to first-generation diesels, ending in 1960.
After 1960 it gets tough. "The Dark Ages?" The "Time of Troubles?" "The Dismal Years" as many Class Ones were going out of existance and/or falling to pieces? Hard call.
After the Staggers Rail Act was passed it gets easier, we can call that the "Railroad Renaissance" era.
It should be interesting to see the feedback and ideas on this!
PS: This is the reason I don't look into the "Model Railroading" Forum all that often and stick to the one on the "Classic Toy Trains" site. On the CTT Forum we don't agonize over our trains, we just play with 'em! Woo-hoo!
It's like Christmas every day!
Interesting thread on the MR forums about what definitions for "Modern Era" are appropriate. Some interesting proposed taxonomies.
"Classic Trains" was always about the Golden Age of railroading, which ended sometime between the end of WWII and the 'end of steam' circa 1960, depending on some general preferences. While at the time the magazine was founded a "50-year cutoff" made a certain amount of sense, lumping an era anywhere near "1970s" into 'classic' as Kalmbach has quietly done recently almost defies common sense. Nostalgia for that era: yes. "Classic" -- not so much. One poster describes the 1960s as being a general 'Dark Ages' and from almost any viewpoint (including much of the vaunted advanced new approaches and technologies from that era) I think this would be correct; the '70s and early '80s aren't that much more 'classic' either when we get to them, and it would be interesting to see what sort of 'take' there would be for a nostalgia magazine specializing in that era.
Should we have a revised preference for the eras in Classic Trains, as I think we badly need ... and what should the definitions and bounds of those eras be?
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