Fred Frailey - Trains Magazine - Trains News Wire, Railroad News, Railroad Industry News, Web Cams, and Forms

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Who were the 10 best railroad CEOs? (Part 1)

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Who indeed? At the recent meeting of the Lexington Group in Transportation History, Jim McClellan and David DeBoer grabbed this braintwister and wrestled it to the ground. They each recited their own list of winners (they agreed on five names and went separate ways on the other five). I called this a braintwister, because how do you even go about this task? No slouches in the brains department, Jim (retired as Norfolk Southern’s corporate strategist) and David (retired as presiden...

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Test your Amtrak smarts

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Almost buried in a tiny corner of Amtrak.com is a treasure trove of financial and operations information about our passenger train railroad. Do this: Go to the bottom of Amtrak’s home page and click on Inside Amtrak, then Other Reports, and finally Monthly Performance Reports. I chose the most recent month, July 2009.Maybe you don’t want to slog through those 85 pages. In that case, let me entertain you with a 10-question quiz. Answers follow.1. Which long-distance train carried the most people ...

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In O. Winston Link country

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Vesuvius is the mountain in Italy that popped its top in 79 AD and buried Pompeii in volcanic ash. There’s a Vesuvius in Virginia, too, nestled in the Shenandoah Valley, and it had an eruption as well.The second eruption of Vesuvius occurred at a B&B about 15 years ago. The soon-to-be-former art director of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine popped his top at an editorial planning session. Criticized about some aspects of his recent redesign of the magazine, he flipped us The Bird and...

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Amtrak's big little secret

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Buried deep within the language of the Passenger Rail Investment & Improvement Act of 2008, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush 11 months ago, is some startling language that could affect Amtrak service four years from now. It boils down to this: By Oct. 13, 2013, any train or route of less than 750 miles outside of the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor must be state-funded, or it will not be operated. Did you know that? I didn’t, until told by Stephen Gardner, ...

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World's stupidest train crew

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Over time, I’ve probably read 10,001 railroad accident reports. Virtually all come down to mechanical failure, the elements, or one person’s poor judgment or incompetence. Very, very few involve the stupidity of an entire five-person train crew. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the doozy of them all. Come with me down memory lane and relive the Night of the Big Sleep.We’re on the Rock Island Lines in Oklahoma, on the Memphis, Tenn.-Tucumcari, N.M., route. Extra 1301 West leaves the crew-c...

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Frontiersmen of the Powder River Basin

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

It's safe for me to say that Powder River Basin coal from eastern Wyoming changed the face of American railroading. The revenues from hauling this coal kept several Midwest railroads solvent. More important, that coal revenue financed the rebuilding and upgrading of railroad infrastructure in the western two-thirds of the country. Today you can easily forget that all this didn't just happen. People made it happen, people like Lou Menk, the chairman of Burlington Northern ...

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Hell in a very narrow place

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

I ran into Paul Kingma by serendipity, at Penny’s Diner in Bill, Wyo. Bill is where Union Pacific recrews its empty coal trains and sends them off to the Orin Subdivision mines to be loaded. Then the loaded trains are recrewed again before heading south to South Morrill, Neb. Paul (that’s him, on the left) said he is a Union Pacific engineer, so we spoke about the big derailment six miles to the south. A loaded BNSF Railway coal train, CNAMCCM, from North Antelope Mine, had dumped 34 of its 130 ...

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Amtrak scenery doesn't get better than this

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Someone gave my wife a book called 1,001 Things You Must Do Before You Die. Come to think of it, maybe I gave it to her. But that’s too many things to do. I’d be lucky to finish ten of them. So I will make it easy for all of you. Here is the one thing to do before you sign in at the Big Celestial Roundhouse: Experience Amtrak between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, Cal. When you’ve done it once, you’ll want to do so another 1,001 times. I’ve spent all of today, almost 14 hours, riding up an...

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Chime whistles in the choir loft

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

At church last Sunday, the recessional hymn was a golden oldie: “The Church’s One Foundation.” I had sung it a hundred times growing up. I whispered to my wife, “This is really taking me back.” Indeed it did. By the time we were halfway into the first verse, I was pretty wiped out, tears welling up in my eyes and my voice unable to continue singing. Suddenly I was not in an Episcopal sanctuary in 2009 but carried back to the choir loft of the First Presbyterian Church of Sulphur Springs, Texas. ...

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Brain surgery on the main line

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

My column in the September issue about the calamities that befall trains on the North End Subdivision of CSX (“Where Bad Things Happen to Good Trains,” page 14) provoked a lot of responses. My favorite concerns the really bad night on BNSF Railway’s double-track Chicago-Galesburg line recently. Union Pacific enjoys trackage rights for some of its intermodal trains over BNSF between Chicago and Kansas City. UP recrews its trains midway, at Fort Madison, Iowa. Our story begins with UP int...

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The making of a railroad executive

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

From Rollin Bredenberg comes a note. “Did I ever show you this?” he asks. Attached is a story that appeared 48 years ago in the San Antonio Express & News. The accompanying photograph shows 16-year-old Rollin beside Southern Pacific’s San Antonio Division superintendent. Rollin looks just the same today, by the way. He’s just added 48 years of age to that enthusiastic face. The son of a dairy farmer, Rollin grew up near Lacoste, Texas, west of San Antonio. In his subteen years ...

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Mr. Big to the rescue! (Day 8)

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

What I'm about to say I cannot prove, but I feel in my bones it's so. And what my bones are saying is that last year someone, a Mr. Big, got to the Class I railroad chief executives and said something like this: "Guys, we've got to talk the talk and walk the walk with Amtrak trains. People are turning to railroads for travel, and the late Amtrak trains we're running are about to become a bad political issue. We have enough bad political issues as it is. So pitch in.&q...

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Bumps down memory lane (Day 7)

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

I began in Mena, Ark., astride Kansas City Southern's northern neck (KC-Shreveport) and snug against the Ouachita Mountains. As the morning wore on, I worked my way north through incredibly beautiful landscape on the western edge of the Ozarks, sometimes on back roads (to stay near the tracks) that you'd need topographic maps to find; past such places as Marble City, Baron, and Lyons, all in extreme eastern Oklahoma. And to pass the time as I drove, I imagined passing the Souther...

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Good blood, bad blood (Day 6)

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

I invited myself into Thomas S. Carter's life 31 years ago, on my first assignment for Trains. David Morgan titled that September 1979 story "President Carter (Tom, That Is) Puts a Railroad Back Together." Cute, eh? Tom was in his sixth of 13 years running the Kansas City Southern Railway, but before that he had led a fascinating railroad life. With an engineering degree from Southern Methodist, he joined the Katy Railroad after World War II as an assistant bridge engineer, and by ...

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The great Texas desert (Day 5)

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

Going from Pecos, Texas, to the edge of Fort Worth is an experience everyone should have. Just don't do it the way I did, in the middle of summer, during a strength-sapping heat wave. Half a dozen years ago, when I began this annual west-to-east ritual of driving alongside Union Pacific's Texas & Pacific Route it was trapped in a vicious drought that had driven many sheep ranchers off their land. You would have to reach Sweetwater, roughly two-thirds of the w...

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The $2,300 photograph (Days 2,3,4)

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

In about half an hour, the mechanic in Las Vegas, N.M., determined there would be no quick, easy fix to my malfunctioning transmission (see "My Star-Crossed Adventure"), and began disassembling it piece by little piece. Watching him work was like witnessing abdominal surgery, what with all those things spilling out. I was determined to get my show back on the road, no matter what. I had until 9 that evening, Day 2, to get 388 miles to El Paso and meet Tom's plane for our train-scou...

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My star-crossed adventure

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

In the abstract, my plan was sound, even inspired. I would leave the Vail, Colo., area by car on Day 1, meet my friend Tom in El Paso the next evening and on Days 3-4 we would explore Union Pacific's Texas & Pacific line to Fort Worth. On the morning of Day 5, I'd deliver Tom to DFW Airport and work my way to Texarkana, to follow Kansas City Southern's line northward. On Day 6 I'd reach Kansas City's suburbs and on Days 7-8 drive the rest of the w...

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Dog Days on the Desert

Posted 15 years ago by Fred Frailey

I’m just back from a week of full immersion along part of the second-busiest rail-freight artery in the country, BNSF Railway between Kansas City and Belen, N.M. Let me start by saying that things aren’t well. BNSF reports carloadings down 19 percent versus a year ago, and it sometimes seemed to me that all the lost business leaked from this, its Chicago-Los Angeles line, known as the Transcon. This is the route that two yea...

Who were the 10 best railroad CEOs? (Part 1)

Test your Amtrak smarts

In O. Winston Link country

Amtrak's big little secret

World's stupidest train crew

Frontiersmen of the Powder River Basin

Hell in a very narrow place

Amtrak scenery doesn't get better than this

Chime whistles in the choir loft

Brain surgery on the main line

The making of a railroad executive

Mr. Big to the rescue! (Day 8)

Bumps down memory lane (Day 7)

Good blood, bad blood (Day 6)

The great Texas desert (Day 5)

The $2,300 photograph (Days 2,3,4)

My star-crossed adventure

Dog Days on the Desert

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