(1) Good people ... loyal to a fault.
(2) This railroad could adapt & change where others could not. It handled adversity well.
(3) Hodge-podge - NO..Survivor -YES.
It went where the traffic was, and did whatever was needed to get there.
When a traffic source dried up, it backed away. No futile attempts to rescue dead horses.
When traffic patterns changed, it changed to conform. That included merging with the D&SL and completing the Lucin Cutoff to finally make a short route through the Rockies.
Over its lifetime, the Grande went from being a feeder connecting mining camps to the outside world to being a bridge route - quite a transition, if you think about it.
Chuck
tomikawaTT wrote: When traffic patterns changed, it changed to conform. That included merging with the D&SL and completing the Lucin Cutoff to finally make a short route through the Rockies.Chuck
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
mudchicken wrote: (1) Good people ... loyal to a fault.(2) This railroad could adapt & change where others could not. It handled adversity well.(3) Hodge-podge - NO..Survivor -YES.
What was there, that made their people loyal, when so many weren't? Today, most consider DRG as something of an underdog. Did the railroad feel that way?
Murphy Siding wrote: I just re-read a brief history of the Rio Grande Railroad. I'm always baffled by that railroad. It seemed to be almost a hodge-podge of lines, sort of patched together. It's not clear to me, if there was ever any kind of grand(e) plan about it's development. Most development looks like it was just an effort to extend the line over the next big hill, and then expand from there. How did this railroad stick around so long, utilizing what had to be the toughest route from A to B ?
I just re-read a brief history of the Rio Grande Railroad. I'm always baffled by that railroad. It seemed to be almost a hodge-podge of lines, sort of patched together. It's not clear to me, if there was ever any kind of grand(e) plan about it's development. Most development looks like it was just an effort to extend the line over the next big hill, and then expand from there.
How did this railroad stick around so long, utilizing what had to be the toughest route from A to B ?
The history can be captured in seven distinct periods:
Stage 1, 1870-1890: Development railroad built opportunistically at very low cost to capture very high-rated traffic, with virtually no effort at permanence. Management, clear-eyed about the potential of the road, refrain from wasting the money on fool's errands like building to the Pacific. Real-estate and land development/mineral development programs run in parallel reward the developers richly.
Stage 2, 1890-1910: Very high positive cash flow, particularly from coal, enables a second set of owners to finance ventures such as WP, many of which were indistinguishable from bear runs on the stock value of established competitors. D&SL built in parallel with no apparent rationale other than a bear run both on Rio Grande and the UP.
Stage 3, 1910-1940: Original traffic sources other than coal in severe decline. Regulation creates a rate umbrella enabling participation in transcontinental traffic flows if the plant can be rebuilt to accommodate it. Enormous cash infusions from its own profits and the MP's profits reconstruct almost from scratch the entire main line from virtual junk into a reasonably good trunk line considering the terrain. The expenditure bankrupts both the D&RGW and the MP. The D&SL's bear run ultimately pans out for its owners, in no small part due to government regulatory ideals, and D&RGW has to buy it at a greatly inflated value.
Stage 4, 1940-1960: Slow decline of physical plant after WWII traffic boom ends, due to loss of traffic to truck competition, conversion of domestic heating from coal to gas, poor transit times relative to transcon competitors, and general rise in costs.
Stage 5, 1960-1980: Re-emergence of coal traffic as demand takes off for electricity and low-sulfur, high BTU coal. The railroad completely rebuilds its track for the second time, constructs some long-sought alignment improvements, and re-equips its entire coal fleet, both cars and power, with all-new, high-capacity, rugged equipment paid for in cash.
Stage 6, 1980-2000. De-regulation whacks the rate prop out from D&RGW's ability to compete for transcon traffic. Western steel industry, the railroad's single largest customer, simultaneously collapses almost overnight. Coal continues to prosper wonderfully until 1983, when finally the PRB is able to build enough capacity to overhaul Rocky Mountain coal in midwest and south-central markets, and Australia and South Africa put political and labor problems to rest and capture Asian markets. Stupendous cash position is somehow invisible to Wall Street, enabling a private buyer to purchase the railroad essentially for nothing. Combination with SP enables railroad to make another bear run on a competitor, cannibalizing itself in order to slash its rates, resulting in the competitor buying it out at a substantial premium.
Stage 7, 2000-? Merger with UP brings an abrupt end to D&RGW as a transcon route. Devolution to coal-generating branch lines occurs rapidly.
Some points to consider:
1. Had the U.S. never regulated railroads, most of the D&RGW would have been abandoned during the Great Depression. It would never have been rebuilt by the MoPac in the 1920s, and that rebuild breathed life into a corpse.
2. The market might be rational in the long run but in the short run it can be phenomenally ignorant. The failure to recognized the cash position of the D&RGW or the future value of railroad combinations allowed a few smart people to make a killing.
3. That so much of the railroad's sprawling branch line and secondary main line network survived so late was not surprising -- it took awhile to build the highways necessary to support the trucks to take the traffic, and there was a lot of investment in mineral extraction industry that took a while to exhaust.
4. The key to the D&RGW's purpose and need was and is coal. Without coal, there would have been no D&RGW beyond 1900; without coal it would not have survived the depression; without coal it would not have been rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s; without coal it would not be here today post SP-UP merger. Coal was always its raison d'etre.
RWM
Murphy Siding wrote: mudchicken wrote: (1) Good people ... loyal to a fault.(2) This railroad could adapt & change where others could not. It handled adversity well.(3) Hodge-podge - NO..Survivor -YES. What was there, that made their people loyal, when so many weren't? Today, most consider DRG as something of an underdog. Did the railroad feel that way?
The railroad was small enough that Mr. Holtman knew practically everyone by first name, small enough that managers could grasp its instant situation at a glance, small enough that competing views of its future were at a minimum; small enough that everyone knew that if they didn't care and didn't work hard they would soon be out of a job; big enough that it mattered to the states and the shippers; big enough to command enough resources to tackle monumental jobs like the Thistle Mudslide with elan and speed; big enough to make competitors wary; big enough to be a career springboard for those with big ambitions; big enough to make the homeguard satisfied with their workday. It was the right size for its time and its territory
Railway Man wrote: Stage 1, 1870-1890: Development railroad built opportunistically at very low cost to capture very high-rated traffic, with virtually no effort at permanence. Management, clear-eyed about the potential of the road, refrain from wasting the money on fool's errands like building to the Pacific. Real-estate and land development/mineral development programs run in parallel reward the developers richly.Stage 2, 1890-1910: Very high positive cash flow, particularly from coal, enables a second set of owners to finance ventures such as WP, many of which were indistinguishable from bear runs on the stock value of established competitors. D&SL built in parallel with no apparent rationale other than a bear run both on Rio Grande and the UP.RWM
mudchicken wrote:The "visionary" wasn't that great a businessman (and was a worse engineer). The folks he surrounded himself with rescued him more than once, but still couldn't save him. One of those people started a competing railroad 15 years after displacing the visionary and pulling the railroad back from the brink.
I wholly agree that Palmer was all legend and little substance, but he still manages to fool people today.
William Jackson Palmer, promoter and president of the D&RG. Began his railroading career at the PRR where he rose to secretary to J. Edgar Thomson. Purchased a colonel's commission in the Union Army and was field-promoted to Brigadier, enabling to adopt the title General Palmer. Post war became a locating engineer after a fashion for the Kansas Pacific. Incorporated the D&RG in 1870 but soon chased out by the bondholders, whereupon he became president of the then-independent Utah side of the railway, the Denver & Rio Grande Western (later Rio Grande Western). Left railroading in 1901. Also founded Colorado Coal & Iron Company, the west's first successful steel maker and a major coal mining concern, which later became CF&I Steel, and is now Rocky Mountain Rolling Mills. CF&I was funded by John Rockefeller.
Railway Man wrote: Some points to consider:1. Had the U.S. never regulated railroads, most of the D&RGW would have been abandoned during the Great Depression. It would never have been rebuilt by the MoPac in the 1920s, and that rebuild breathed life into a corpse.RWM
One of the many problems of regulation was the "Strong Road/Weak Road" delima.
If two or more railroads served a route, they often didn't do so with similar costs. So where to set the common, regulated rate? Did the regulators set it to allow the low cost carrier to make what they considered to be a "reasonable" profit. If they did that, then the higher cost carrier would fail financially. So trying to be the wise men they weren't, they kept the rates at a level so a high cost carrier like the DRGW could possibly earn a buck.
This obviously ill served the public by keeping rail rates higher than they would have been absent regulation. Despite this hampering of the US economy the system kind of "worked" until truck competition developed. Then it began to hurt all railroads by artificially holding (through government fiat) rail rates high and limiting the railroads ability to compete with the truckers.
The signficant fights the railroads had with the regulators were not about raising rail rates, they were about lowering rail rates. Can you imagine any logic that propted a government economic regulatory agency to order prices to be kept high? Such was economic regulation of rail rates.
With the reduction of economic regulation the DRGW has assumed its rightful place in the US economy, as determined by a bumpy ride into a market driven world.
greyhounds wrote: If two or more railroads served a route, they often didn't do so with similar costs. So where to set the common, regulated rate? Did the regulators set it to allow the low cost carrier to make what they considered to be a "reasonable" profit. If they did that, then the higher cost carrier would fail financially. So trying to be the wise men they weren't, they kept the rates at a level so a high cost carrier like the DRGW could possibly earn a buck.This obviously ill served the public by keeping rail rates higher than they would have been absent regulation.
This obviously ill served the public by keeping rail rates higher than they would have been absent regulation.
The counter-argument was that minimum-rate regulation preserved rail service to small shippers, remote areas, and small towns, and redressed the balance of power between urban and rural. As that is first an ideological statement and only by its method of execution a seeming economic position it is not my perogative to declare it good or bad. At a minimum it rather depended on who you were or where your interests lay, and if one's vision of a America was through a Jacksonian lens it seemed quite proper.
As we know the formula exploded with the advent of trucks, autos, and paved roads, and given a choice between nationalizing railroads and immense subsidies to preserve a modicum of rail service to rural areas and their small shippers, or loss of service to rural areas and small shippers, Congress chose the latter.
Railway Man wrote: The counter-argument was that minimum-rate regulation preserved rail service to small shippers, remote areas, and small towns, and redressed the balance of power between urban and rural. As that is first an ideological statement and only by its method of execution a seeming economic position it is not my perogative to declare it good or bad. At a minimum it rather depended on who you were or where your interests lay, and if one's vision of a America was through a Jacksonian lens it seemed quite proper. As we know the formula exploded with the advent of trucks, autos, and paved roads, and given a choice between nationalizing railroads and immense subsidies to preserve a modicum of rail service to rural areas and their small shippers, or loss of service to rural areas and small shippers, Congress chose the latter.RWM
Well, we both agree that the system quit working when trucks became viable. One major problem of regulation was that it didn't change with the new technolgy.
I do disagree that rural areas and small shippers have lost rail service. Small shippers use rail via 3rd parties, such as UPS. Some of the rail functions have shifted to trucks, but the small guys can still use rail when it makes economic sense. Grain still moves out by rail, again with a shift of some functions to truck. The rail gathering system is naturally different when the grain is loaded into a semi in the field than it was when the grain was hauled by a team and wagon.
The minimum rate regulation had its foundation in the concept that one person should pay more so than another person could pay less. That gives the person paying less a "claim" on the earnings of another person. Jackson certainly felt he had a "claim" on the earnings of his slaves, but I don't know if he would have extended the thought beyond that. (bad enough as it was.)
Anyway, we seem to agree that the regulatory system fell apart with the advent of trucks.
greyhounds wrote:The signficant fights the railroads had with the regulators were not about raising rail rates, they were about lowering rail rates.
Baloney. This is historically, absolutely, factually, wrong, and, notwithstanding isolated instances of the circumstance, it reflects neither historical experience nor the attitude of the industry. This is historical revisionism at its worst.
Prior to the enactment of the ICC Act, railroad rates were plummeting as a result of competition. Historian Gabriel Kolko, among others, has thoroughly documented the proposition that railroad rate regulation was the result of the railroads themselves attempting to mitigate the effects of true competition which was putting unacceptable downward pressure -- to fat cats desiring to remain fat -- on rail rates. The rail industry acted in concert to stop that process and to force rates to rise by political fiat, notwithstanding economic trends in the opposite direction -- the normal result of a successful Capitalistic system. It was a raw exercise of political power to exempt the rail industry from the usual rules of economics. It enabled and perpetuated an attitude of entitled inefficiency that served the industry poorly when confronted by changes in the modern world, for which the industry has continued to blame: the modern world. The attitude has plagued the industry ever since.
That never changed. Even though railroad rates were at an all time high, railroads wanted them to go even higher and the primary impetus behind the Staggers Act was the perception, and the avowed complaint, that the ICC was not allowing sufficient increases in rail rates. There is abundant testimony in the record to this effect. The railroads wanted to raise rates, and fully intended to do so when deregulated. When rates were deregulated two things happened: railroad rates plummeted, just as they had been doing prior to the enactment of the original ICC Act, and truckers increased their share of the market -- neither of which had been anticipated by the rail industry.
Railway Man wrote: mudchicken wrote:The "visionary" wasn't that great a businessman (and was a worse engineer). The folks he surrounded himself with rescued him more than once, but still couldn't save him. One of those people started a competing railroad 15 years after displacing the visionary and pulling the railroad back from the brink.I wholly agree that Palmer was all legend and little substance, but he still manages to fool people today.RWM
Railway Man wrote: William Jackson Palmer, promoter and president of the D&RG. Began his railroading career at the PRR where he rose to secretary to J. Edgar Thomson. Purchased a colonel's commission in the Union Army and was field-promoted to Brigadier, enabling to adopt the title General Palmer. Post war became a locating engineer after a fashion for the Kansas Pacific. Incorporated the D&RG in 1870 but soon chased out by the bondholders, whereupon he became president of the then-independent Utah side of the railway, the Denver & Rio Grande Western (later Rio Grande Western). Left railroading in 1901. Also founded Colorado Coal & Iron Company, the west's first successful steel maker and a major coal mining concern, which later became CF&I Steel, and is now Rocky Mountain Rolling Mills. CF&I was funded by John Rockefeller.RWM
Excellent summaries RWM
Colonel Palmer, as he was known, was a visionary alright, his "vision" was a railway that would extended from Denver, south into New Mexico and eventually to the silver mines of northern Mexico and eventually all the way to Mexico City, and westward thru the gold fields of the rockies to Utah and eventually to the Pacific. Making Denver the Chicago of the west capitalizing on mining, agriculture and transcon shipping traffic from the entire southwest. Didnt quite pan out, that initial vision never got much farther than the gold fields of the nearby rockies but it was certainly a "visionary" dream.
Have fun with your trains
vsmith wrote: Colonel Palmer, as he was known, was a visionary alright, his "vision" was a railway that would extended from Denver, south into New Mexico and eventually to the silver mines of northern Mexico and eventually all the way to Mexico City, and westward thru the gold fields of the rockies to Utah and eventually to the Pacific. Making Denver the Chicago of the west capitalizing on mining, agriculture and transcon shipping traffic from the entire southwest. Didnt quite pan out, that initial vision never got much farther than the gold fields of the nearby rockies but it was certainly a "visionary" dream.
It's very hard to discriminate between what Palmer said and what he believed. Were his schemes visionary? Or merely clever marketing schemes to separate British investors from their money? There's an interesting (and very rare) set of volumes entitled "Early Financing of the Denver & Rio Grande" that argues that the organization was about 98% a real-estate development plan and 2% a railroad. There is much evidence that Palmer was a front man for the real players who remained out of the limelight. The visionary schemes of Mexico evaporated from the promotional efforts once the railroad reached the land grants of southern Colorado and the San Luis Valley that the promoters controlled, and the Pacific Coast schemes never seemed more than token and half-hearted, designed merely to attract the small and naiive investor who expected ANY railroad west of the Mississippi to have Pacific plans in its portfolio.
From a logical point of view the Palmer projection to Mexico City was just two points on a map with a thick line drawn between them. There was no traffic moving that way nor any solid expectation there ever would be. One suspects Palmer selected Mexico City simply because it was a place investors might have heard of -- it "looked" like a destination. Imagine a prospectus that said "we intend to build to a mining town that doesn't yet exist, in a range that we haven't been to."
(Usually Palmer was referred to as "General".)
Railway Man wrote: ...............and the Pacific Coast schemes never seemed more than token and half-hearted, designed merely to attract the small and naiive investor who expected ANY railroad west of the Mississippi to have Pacific plans in its portfolio. RWM
From the limited amount of reading I have done on the D&RG, it would seem a major turning point took place in 1878, when the AT&SF won control of Raton Pass. I believe this turned the D&RG westward into the Rockies, while the ATSF continued on to the coast.
Would anyone care to speculate what would have happened if the D&RG had been the victor at Raton? I'd guess the D&RG would not have aimed for California, while the ATSF would have found a differnt route.
Awesome . . . there is still hope for me.
Gabe
Murphy Siding wrote:With all due respect that I'm able to muster, would you mind doing the rest of us a favor, and taking this somewhere else? I realize, that you feel you must refute anything you disagree with. On the surface, there's nothing wrong with that, as that's the nature of a message board forum. Where I do find fault, is in your predictable need to *joust* with the same people over and over.
Actually, it's the ideas that I find offensive, perpetrated everywhere, that misrepresents history in the guise of personal agendas. I agree, the original comment about regulation was completely off topic on this thread, but there it was, and of course, you had no problem with it until I commented on it because it was a grevious mistatement of historical fact. Where I "find fault", is your predictable need to make it personal when you, as you often are, found welded to pre-determined conclusions based poorly on fact, or research.
Your comment is no different than many you have made in the past, and hopefully your efforts to personalize yet another discussion of history has gratified you once again, ironically, as you took the considerable time to interrupt a discussion on railroading to complain about interrupting a discussion on railroading
Your uncensored comment on another thread about me being your "arch-nemesis" certainly likewise had nothing to do with that thread, was purely a personal assault that had no place on these forums, but suggests the highly personalized nature of your attitude, and your enthusastic willingness to express it.
Unlike you, I don't call people names and use forums, as you have here, for purely personal purposes and to make a highly exaggerated point. I might call an opinion "dumb", or even "baloney" but unlike you, I'm not here to call people names. You apparently are. I did not initiate the comment about regulation. However, I did make a pointed comment about the historical inaccuracy of it. And history is important. Oddly, that might be a lesson of this thread as well, since these railroads rarely rose and fell without a regulatory angle. Indeed, if you will read the remark by another -- "1980-2000: De-regulation whacks the rate prop out from D&RGW's ability to compete for transcon traffic" -- you will see, but probably not understand, that industry expectations regarding rates after the Staggers Act relates directly to my comment. That is a key to the D&RG's circumstance, and understanding that is at a minimum a key for the historical context of the period.
But, then you couldn't make your highly personal point about your avowed "arch-nemesis" could you? Frankly, I think that's just weird for normal people to even think that way. I think forums would be best served if you kept your obviously deeply felt personal problems to yourself, and cease spreading them, now, to two different threads, well, three since you felt a "need" to start one with my name on it. Three threads? And I didn't offer anything to say about you on any of them? You are intentionally trying to create personal animosity here, and up until now, I haven't commented on your name-calling.
But look at your own comments on a recent steam thread someone tried to start. All sarcasm and off-topic remarks. The guys that wanted to discuss a nuclear locomotive gave up. Or the recent "CN wants Conductors to wave!" where you completely went off topic, the person who started the thead gave up, you started insulting all sorts of people who hadn't even posted on the thread, including me, and finally got the thread locked.
Since you are one of the people who often show up on threads only to make sarcastic remarks -- it amazes me how clever such people must think they are -- your feigned indignation on this thread rings quite hollow. So hollow in fact that you missed the fact that my comment related directly to what happened to the D&RG after 1980. Indeed, if and when you take the time to reflect on the original poster's comment, you will see that his contention that the inability to lower rates was the real problem shows up as utterly false when the D&RG finally had all the opportunity in the world to lower rates after 1980.
History is important. Your agendas aren't. I think that's why you often have trouble synthesizing coherent opinions from evidence made available to you: and I have always offered you the courtesy of facts, and citations, and statements relating to them. Courtesies you never acknowledge nor reciprocate. And other than your intemperate outburst here, distracting from a conversation about railroads, my comments here were directed to a specific remark, included citations, and was, in fact, about railroading, and the specific historical expectation regarding deregulation and how it backfired on railroads like the D&RG, and nearly everyone else as well.
My recommendation to you is: keep it about railroading.
Railway Man wrote: vsmith wrote: Colonel Palmer, as he was known, was a visionary alright, his "vision" was a railway that would extended from Denver, south into New Mexico and eventually to the silver mines of northern Mexico and eventually all the way to Mexico City, and westward thru the gold fields of the rockies to Utah and eventually to the Pacific. Making Denver the Chicago of the west capitalizing on mining, agriculture and transcon shipping traffic from the entire southwest. Didnt quite pan out, that initial vision never got much farther than the gold fields of the nearby rockies but it was certainly a "visionary" dream. It's very hard to discriminate between what Palmer said and what he believed. Were his schemes visionary? Or merely clever marketing schemes to separate British investors from their money? There's an interesting (and very rare) set of volumes entitled "Early Financing of the Denver & Rio Grande" that argues that the organization was about 98% a real-estate development plan and 2% a railroad. There is much evidence that Palmer was a front man for the real players who remained out of the limelight. The visionary schemes of Mexico evaporated from the promotional efforts once the railroad reached the land grants of southern Colorado and the San Luis Valley that the promoters controlled, and the Pacific Coast schemes never seemed more than token and half-hearted, designed merely to attract the small and naiive investor who expected ANY railroad west of the Mississippi to have Pacific plans in its portfolio.From a logical point of view the Palmer projection to Mexico City was just two points on a map with a thick line drawn between them. There was no traffic moving that way nor any solid expectation there ever would be. One suspects Palmer selected Mexico City simply because it was a place investors might have heard of -- it "looked" like a destination. Imagine a prospectus that said "we intend to build to a mining town that doesn't yet exist, in a range that we haven't been to."(Usually Palmer was referred to as "General".)RWM
"General" Palmer (I stand corrected I just remembered it was a high military rank) certainly knew how to sell the big idea, just like PT Barnum did when you think about it the two were not that very different.
deleted by the author, to keep the peace.
vsmith wrote: "General" Palmer (I stand corrected I just remembered it was a high military rank) certainly knew how to sell the big idea, just like PT Barnum did when you think about it the two were not that very different.
Murphy Siding wrote: Now kindly move along....shoo....shoo...
Now kindly move along....shoo....shoo...
Wow, name calling, moving threads around, not understanding relevant content, disrupting yet another thread for your own reasons, ordering people what to post and where to post ... you're getting quite an attitude these days. This is the third thread in a row that you've brought your personal agendas to. How about this: mind your own business, and let people who wish to discuss railroading do so without your personal problems getting in the way.
Murphy Siding wrote: MichaelSol wrote: Murphy Siding wrote:With all due respect that I'm able to muster, would you mind doing the rest of us a favor, and taking this somewhere else? I realize, that you feel you must refute anything you disagree with. On the surface, there's nothing wrong with that, as that's the nature of a message board forum. Where I do find fault, is in your predictable need to *joust* with the same people over and over. Actually, it's the ideas that I find offensive, perpetrated everywhere, that misrepresents history in the guise of personal agendas. I agree, the original comment about regulation was completely off topic on this thread, but there it was, and of course, you had no problem with it until I commented on it because it was a grevious mistatement of historical fact. Where I "find fault", is your predictable need to make it personal when you, as you often are, found welded to pre-determined conclusions based poorly on fact, or research. Your comment is no different than many you have made in the past, and hopefully your efforts to personalize yet another discussion of history has gratified you once again, ironically, as you took the considerable time to interrupt a discussion on railroading to complain about interrupting a discussion on railroadingYour uncensored comment on another thread about me being your "arch-nemesis" certainly likewise had nothing to do with that thread, was purely a personal assault that had no place on these forums, but suggests the highly personalized nature of your attitude, and your enthusastic willingness to express it.Unlike you, I don't call people names and use forums, as you have here, for purely personal purposes and to make a highly exaggerated point. I might call an opinion "dumb", or even "baloney" but unlike you, I'm not here to call people names. You apparently are. I did not initiate the comment about regulation. However, I did make a pointed comment about the historical inaccuracy of it. And history is important. Oddly, that might be a lesson of this thread as well, since these railroads rarely rose and fell without a regulatory angle. Indeed, if you will read the remark by another -- "1980-2000: De-regulation whacks the rate prop out from D&RGW's ability to compete for transcon traffic" -- you will see, but probably not understand, that industry expectations regarding rates after the Staggers Act relates directly to my comment. That is a key to the D&RG's circumstance, and understanding that is at a minimum a key for the historical context of the period.But, then you couldn't make your highly personal point about your avowed "arch-nemesis" could you? Frankly, I think that's just weird for normal people to even think that way. I think forums would be best served if you kept your obviously deeply felt personal problems to yourself, and cease spreading them, now, to two different threads, well, three since you felt a "need" to start one with my name on it. Three threads? And I didn't offer anything to say about you on any of them? You are intentionally trying to create personal animosity here, and up until now, I haven't commented on your name-calling. But look at your own comments on a recent steam thread someone tried to start. All sarcasm and off-topic remarks. The guys that wanted to discuss a nuclear locomotive gave up. Or the recent "CN wants Conductors to wave!" where you completely went off topic, the person who started the thead gave up, you started insulting all sorts of people who hadn't even posted on the thread, including me, and finally got the thread locked.Since you are one of the people who often show up on threads only to make sarcastic remarks -- it amazes me how clever such people must think they are -- your feigned indignation on this thread rings quite hollow. So hollow in fact that you missed the fact that my comment related directly to what happened to the D&RG after 1980. Indeed, if and when you take the time to reflect on the original poster's comment, you will see that his contention that the inability to lower rates was the real problem shows up as utterly false when the D&RG finally had all the opportunity in the world to lower rates after 1980.History is important. Your agendas aren't. I think that's why you often have trouble synthesizing coherent opinions from evidence made available to you: and I have always offered you the courtesy of facts, and citations, and statements relating to them. Courtesies you never acknowledge nor reciprocate. And other than your intemperate outburst here, distracting from a conversation about railroads, my comments here were directed to a specific remark, included citations, and was, in fact, about railroading, and the specific historical expectation regarding deregulation and how it backfired on railroads like the D&RG, and nearly everyone else as well. My recommendation to you is: keep it about railroading. And now you've had your say on the issue as well. Most posters on this forum will be able to make up their minds about my and your attitudes and behavior over the long haul. If anyone wishes, he or she may certainly PM me, if I am out of line. Now kindly move along....shoo....shoo...
MichaelSol wrote: Murphy Siding wrote:With all due respect that I'm able to muster, would you mind doing the rest of us a favor, and taking this somewhere else? I realize, that you feel you must refute anything you disagree with. On the surface, there's nothing wrong with that, as that's the nature of a message board forum. Where I do find fault, is in your predictable need to *joust* with the same people over and over. Actually, it's the ideas that I find offensive, perpetrated everywhere, that misrepresents history in the guise of personal agendas. I agree, the original comment about regulation was completely off topic on this thread, but there it was, and of course, you had no problem with it until I commented on it because it was a grevious mistatement of historical fact. Where I "find fault", is your predictable need to make it personal when you, as you often are, found welded to pre-determined conclusions based poorly on fact, or research. Your comment is no different than many you have made in the past, and hopefully your efforts to personalize yet another discussion of history has gratified you once again, ironically, as you took the considerable time to interrupt a discussion on railroading to complain about interrupting a discussion on railroadingYour uncensored comment on another thread about me being your "arch-nemesis" certainly likewise had nothing to do with that thread, was purely a personal assault that had no place on these forums, but suggests the highly personalized nature of your attitude, and your enthusastic willingness to express it.Unlike you, I don't call people names and use forums, as you have here, for purely personal purposes and to make a highly exaggerated point. I might call an opinion "dumb", or even "baloney" but unlike you, I'm not here to call people names. You apparently are. I did not initiate the comment about regulation. However, I did make a pointed comment about the historical inaccuracy of it. And history is important. Oddly, that might be a lesson of this thread as well, since these railroads rarely rose and fell without a regulatory angle. Indeed, if you will read the remark by another -- "1980-2000: De-regulation whacks the rate prop out from D&RGW's ability to compete for transcon traffic" -- you will see, but probably not understand, that industry expectations regarding rates after the Staggers Act relates directly to my comment. That is a key to the D&RG's circumstance, and understanding that is at a minimum a key for the historical context of the period.But, then you couldn't make your highly personal point about your avowed "arch-nemesis" could you? Frankly, I think that's just weird for normal people to even think that way. I think forums would be best served if you kept your obviously deeply felt personal problems to yourself, and cease spreading them, now, to two different threads, well, three since you felt a "need" to start one with my name on it. Three threads? And I didn't offer anything to say about you on any of them? You are intentionally trying to create personal animosity here, and up until now, I haven't commented on your name-calling. But look at your own comments on a recent steam thread someone tried to start. All sarcasm and off-topic remarks. The guys that wanted to discuss a nuclear locomotive gave up. Or the recent "CN wants Conductors to wave!" where you completely went off topic, the person who started the thead gave up, you started insulting all sorts of people who hadn't even posted on the thread, including me, and finally got the thread locked.Since you are one of the people who often show up on threads only to make sarcastic remarks -- it amazes me how clever such people must think they are -- your feigned indignation on this thread rings quite hollow. So hollow in fact that you missed the fact that my comment related directly to what happened to the D&RG after 1980. Indeed, if and when you take the time to reflect on the original poster's comment, you will see that his contention that the inability to lower rates was the real problem shows up as utterly false when the D&RG finally had all the opportunity in the world to lower rates after 1980.History is important. Your agendas aren't. I think that's why you often have trouble synthesizing coherent opinions from evidence made available to you: and I have always offered you the courtesy of facts, and citations, and statements relating to them. Courtesies you never acknowledge nor reciprocate. And other than your intemperate outburst here, distracting from a conversation about railroads, my comments here were directed to a specific remark, included citations, and was, in fact, about railroading, and the specific historical expectation regarding deregulation and how it backfired on railroads like the D&RG, and nearly everyone else as well. My recommendation to you is: keep it about railroading.
And now you've had your say on the issue as well. Most posters on this forum will be able to make up their minds about my and your attitudes and behavior over the long haul. If anyone wishes, he or she may certainly PM me, if I am out of line.
Why PM when one can call you out on your own thread? I agree with Michael. His comment is in line with the subject matter, perhaps a bit hardball, so what? Your comment on the other hand is purely vidictive, totally off topic.
You need to get real. My two cents.
Now, play nice before someone gets a whippin'........
Well, they did name a lake after him....
(Palmer Lake--the high point between Denver and Colorado Springs on the Joint Line)
One of the great things about the Rio Grande was their ability to turn lemons into lemonades over several decades. The operated "succesfully" in the expansion times, the progressive era of the Trust Busters, the Public Utility period (1920-1929), the Great Depression, WW II, the Rise of Trucks (1945-1970, and Collapse of the National Rail System. They finally ran out of gas with Phil's arrival. It was a long and great run but dust to dust...
bobwilcox wrote: One of the great things about the Rio Grande was their ability to turn lemons into lemonades over several decades. The operated "succesfully" in the expansion times, the progressive era of the Trust Busters, the Public Utility period (1920-1929), the Great Depression, WW II, the Rise of Trucks (1945-1970, and Collapse of the National Rail System. They finally ran out of gas with Phil's arrival. It was a long and great run but dust to dust...
The secret to that success was coal. And even though the name might be gone and the railroad not much of a through transcon route these days, the coal moves in greater volume than ever before. The transcon business lasted for 70 years whereas the railroad's last spike was driven 127 years ago.
So today the Rio Grande has come full circle to its original rationale, a railroad that moves minerals from the mountains to the cities, but it's not dust yet nor is it likely to be as far as I can see into the future.
Murphy Siding wrote: vsmith wrote: "General" Palmer (I stand corrected I just remembered it was a high military rank) certainly knew how to sell the big idea, just like PT Barnum did when you think about it the two were not that very different.I've always found it fascinating, how seems like there was always someone willing to invest with people promoting big schemes. When you think about how many fortunes were made and lost, just in the railroading business, you wonder how new investors were found.
"Found"? They were born. Their descendents were last seen clutching fistfuls of worthless shares of pets.com while watching the repo man hauling off the big-screen plasma TV after flipping one too many houses in Las Vegas.
nanaimo73 wrote: From the limited amount of reading I have done on the D&RG, it would seem a major turning point took place in 1878, when the AT&SF won control of Raton Pass. I believe this turned the D&RG westward into the Rockies, while the ATSF continued on to the coast.Would anyone care to speculate what would have happened if the D&RG had been the victor at Raton? I'd guess the D&RG would not have aimed for California, while the ATSF would have found a differnt route.
I think the race to Raton Pass is mythology informed by the knowledge of what played out much later rather than what people actually were thinking when it happened -- an answer in search of a question. While the event did occur I do not think it greatly mattered at the time to the parties. Either railroad could have gone around Black Mesa to the east, which the C&S did much later on its way to Texas, or used a couple of other passes, if it wanted so badly to reach the coalfields of Raton Mesa or the rude adobe village that was Santa Fe. Neither the Santa Fe or the D&RG was sure at that time where its destiny lay. The Santa Fe was not en route to Los Angeles at that time -- Los Angeles being a dusty hamlet adjacent to an intermittent stream in a hot desert basin. Raton Pass was a convenient path to ... something. But they didn't know what yet.
Murphy Siding wrote: Railway Man wrote: ...............and the Pacific Coast schemes never seemed more than token and half-hearted, designed merely to attract the small and naiive investor who expected ANY railroad west of the Mississippi to have Pacific plans in its portfolio. RWM Wasn't that more or less what they aimed at later, when hooking up with line to Salt Lake City, and later yet, with WP?
Not really. The connection across the desert was a convenience to enable profitable commerce between western Colorado and Utah, a connection which occurred when it became obvious that the eastern extent of the Utah lines in the Book Cliffs Coal Field, and the western extent of the Colorado lines at the junction of the Grand and Gunnison Rivers, would be only separated by about 150 miles of open desert.
The WP venture came two decades later under the aegis of George Gould. Almost nothing has been documented about the business methods or life of the junior Gould, unfortunately. It's not known if he genuinely thought it was valuable to build a coast-to-coast system, and if so, what possessed him to think it could be economically muscular with such a peculiar skeleton. Perhaps he was engaging in a bear run on Harriman with the WP, thinking to connect with the CB&Q or C&NW in central Utah, and the D&RGW was a stepping stone that would soon revert to its logical role as a feeder line. Or, perhaps he was merely a guileless inheritor of great wealth who was driven to demonstrate his importance and boldness, and thus step out from the shadow of his feared and brilliant father. I most think it was the latter, as the railroad expansion era was already obviously drawing to a close and if one was to make a mark in the early 1900s as a railroad builder one had to do it quickly and with whatever kit was handy. There wasn't much left in the way of untapped new routes that had even the barest of economic reason. Senator W.A. Clark of the SPLA&SL was another of that type.
Railway Man wrote: 4. The key to the D&RGW's purpose and need was and is coal. Without coal, there would have been no D&RGW beyond 1900; without coal it would not have survived the depression; without coal it would not have been rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s; without coal it would not be here today post SP-UP merger. Coal was always its raison d'etre.RWM
Murphy Siding wrote: Railway Man wrote: 4. The key to the D&RGW's purpose and need was and is coal. Without coal, there would have been no D&RGW beyond 1900; without coal it would not have survived the depression; without coal it would not have been rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s; without coal it would not be here today post SP-UP merger. Coal was always its raison d'etre.RWMWithout regulation to make DRG a player in the transcon business, wouldn't DRG's coal traffic have made it a target for some connecting railroad, such as a western extention for one of the railroads in Denver?
Several reasons why it didn't:
1. Coal moving in very large volumes greater than 500 miles distances from mine to market entirely by rail is a post-1970 phenomenon. Prior to 1900 coal moving more than 200 miles from mine to market was quite exceptional. The D&RGW coal market basin in the domestic heating era was bounded tightly to its own lines with the addition of the MoPac east to western Kansas, the LA&SL south to Milford, the WP west into central Nevada, and the OSL north and west throughout southern Idaho. Coal mines in the Denver Field on UP and CB&Q barred D&RGW coal from markets north and east of Denver. Coal mines on C&S and Santa Fe in the Raton Mesa field competed in markets east of Pueblo and Trinidad.
2. The UP via its lease of the LA&SL and OSL interchanged with Utah Railway at Provo and preferentially interchanged with URY, which had good penetration in the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau Coal Fields. LA&SL participated 50-50 with URY in the "Utah Coal Route" coal car fleet and the Provo yard and engine terminal was a 50-50 URY/LA&SL facility. URY thus shared with D&RGW the coal market on the LA&SL south, the WP west, and the OSL north and west -- along with Wyoming coal competing on UP in the Idaho and Montana markets.
3. By the time coal began to move long distances railroad mergers were regulated. By the time railroad mergers were partially deregulated, 1980, the railroads in a position to buy D&RGW consisted only of SP, UP, Santa Fe, and BN. BN was cash-poor because it was investing so heavily in the PRB and did not have routes leading from D&RGW territory into coal buying territory except to the east and south, where it would be competing with PRB coal. Santa Fe, even poorer connections. SP, cash starved. UP -- it got the coal interchange anyway.
4. Connecting railroads to D&RGW got the coal traffic anyway, without all the headache of having to run the railroad or pay for the thinly trafficked lines.
5. A western extension to someone like the BN or Santa Fe got it nothing unless it wanted to also buy the WP or SP. Merger policy under the ICC made it highly unlikely either Santa Fe or BN could purchase the SP, and the WP was a very weak and undesirable railroad with no obvious future potential. UP -- why would it want it?
6. In the early 1900s the D&RGW had value as a cash source, but zero value as a transcon player. The coal business was highly local in character. UP and Santa Fe had excellent on-line coal sources -- UP at Carbon, Hanna, Rock Springs, and Kemmerer, Wyo., Santa Fe in the Raton Mesa and Gallup fields. So there was no 1+1 =3 potential, just more railroad, more territory, and more risk.
7. Coal markets prior to 1900 consisted mostly of mines and smelters. D&RGW-served mines had the only cokable coal in Utah and competed into Montana for a brief period until cokable coal was developed in the Kemmerer field in western Wyoming. Santa Fe, C&S, and D&RGW all served the Raton Field, which had cokable coal, so competed for the smelter market in Pueblo and Denver. Smelters after 1900 declined and closed in Colorado with the exception of the AV Smelter in Leadville. Big smelters in Utah were served directly by D&RGW or Utah-UP, or both.
Murphy Siding wrote: Hello! I'm back online, after having been unexplicably locked out from logging in for 3 days. I've been told by the moderator, that I had not been intentionally locked out, and I will take that as the truth. I don't, however, expect to change who I am, or how I interact with other members on the forum. I have a lot of people on here that I consider to be friends...and a few detractors. Such is life, and I guess we'll work our way through it. If I'm out of line, by all means tellme, on here or in a PM, and we can discuss it.
Your personal problems are fascinating. Once again, what on earth does this have to do with this thread?
Michael, it seems to me the Murph is informing those who wondered where he had disappeared to over the past three days that he had a problem getting onto the forum. In view of his suspicion that one of the mods had locked him, he had time over that absence to reflect on his behaviour on the forum, including his interactions with you. I would guess that the rest of his announcement was also explanatory, if largely unnecessary. I don't think it ranks as objectionable.
Let's get back to the topic.
-Crandell
selector wrote: Michael, it seems to me the Murph is informing those who wondered where he had disappeared to over the past three days that he had a problem getting onto the forum. In view of his suspicion that one of the mods had locked him, he had time over that absence to reflect on his behaviour on the forum, including his interactions with you. I would guess that the rest of his announcement was also explanatory, if largely unnecessary. I don't think it ranks as objectionable.Let's get back to the topic.-Crandell
He had a field day expressing his opinions on the Conductor's Waiving thread, which most of his victims there hadn't even posted on, including me. His interruption of this thread with his vehement personal opinions was likewise objectionable. He has a hard time staying on topic and a penchant for voicing his personal opinions about people, and interrupting threads with sarcastic remarks.
I didn't see anyone wonder where he was. I doubt that anyone noticed. He didn't need to explain anything. He didn't need to tell the world that he's not going to mend his ways and that he intends to go right on interrupting threads to satisfy his personal needs. His post was right up what has become his typical alley: snide remarks, personal comments, and his perceived role on the forum, including starting threads with other people's names while he alone pretends to decide what is appropriate and inappropriate content. The behavior is weird and getting weirder.
I'm on this forum to read about railroads in an economic context and not about some guy's ongoing personal anxieties, inability to do any minimal research, and his continuing empty grudge matches smothered in puerile sarcasm, nor do I care for announcements on a D&RG thread about where he's been or why he thought he was there.
He can start his own thread for that. Maybe I'll start one for him.
Railway Man wrote:The secret to that success was coal. And even though the name might be gone and the railroad not much of a through transcon route these days, the coal moves in greater volume than ever before. The transcon business lasted for 70 years whereas the railroad's last spike was driven 127 years ago. So today the Rio Grande has come full circle to its original rationale, a railroad that moves minerals from the mountains to the cities, but it's not dust yet nor is it likely to be as far as I can see into the future.RWM
And I do see a lot of coal moving on the Moffat Sub! Just for curiosity, is there a chance that Uncle Pete would ever consider using the line for transcon purposes again? Kind of a "relief valve" for their transcon?
Also, since I haven't seen it pop up lately here, what's the current status of the Tennessee Pass line? Is the reopening of the Climax mine going to affect the line, or is that operation planning on operating with trucks?
-ChrisWest Chicago, ILChristopher May Fine Art Photography"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration." ~Ansel Adams
MichaelSol wrote: inability to do any minimal research
These forums exist so that young railfans and casual railfans can learn more about railroads, and hopefully become Kalmbach customers. There are a lot of members on this forum like myself that learn from Murphy's questions and the respones he receives.
nanaimo73 wrote: MichaelSol wrote: inability to do any minimal researchThese forums exist so that young railfans and casual railfans can learn more about railroads, and hopefully become Kalmbach customers. There are a lot of members on this forum like myself that learn from Murphy's questions and the respones he receives.
And I am sure they will learn a lot when he refers to people openly as his "arch-nemesis," and continually posts snide remarks on threads he doesn't like, shutting down the recent conductor thread and the nuclear locomotive thread -- neither thread of which I had anything to do with, incidentally. Perhaps Kalmbach would be better served by developing a market of polite, informed railfans who are not obsessed with asking questions they already have an answer to, and with blowing up thread after thread with their personal agendas that are often the antithesis of an actual discussion about railroading -- of which this one is a good example of inserting himself into a specific comment he was not a part of and frankly, had no business sticking his nose in if he, in fact, had nothing to say about the specific railroad subject matter.
And he didn't.
Edited by the author. My apologies Selector.
I will repeat myself this once only, gentlemen. Get back on topic.
CopCarSS wrote: And I do see a lot of coal moving on the Moffat Sub! Just for curiosity, is there a chance that Uncle Pete would ever consider using the line for transcon purposes again? Kind of a "relief valve" for their transcon?Also, since I haven't seen it pop up lately here, what's the current status of the Tennessee Pass line? Is the reopening of the Climax mine going to affect the line, or is that operation planning on operating with trucks?
I can't comment on your first two questions.
Mines that extract hard rock metallic ores of virtually all the metals except iron and aluminum -- even world-class mines like Climax -- do not consume or generate large quantities of material. Most metallic ores other than aluminum and iron these days are mining ore that contains less than 1.0% of the desired metal, which is usually combined with oxygen, carbon, sulfur, etc. Almost without exception the ore is concentrated as close to the mine as possible to reduce transportation costs. In many large mines such as the porphyry copper mines, the concentrate is smelted on site too, or if its an oxide ore it's heap-leached and the leachate is electrolyized to anodes (the term is SX-EW, for solvent extraction electrowinning). Thus in a big open-pit mine extracting 30,000 tons of 1.0% ore per day, only 300 tons of that represents the mineral. After concentration the result is three covered hopper loads or 12 truckloads. While those three covered hopper loads might be very high intrinsic value -- the contents worth well over $1 million each -- the transportation value is very low.
Inputs to open pit mines are largely diesel fuel to run the machines and in combination with prilled ammonium nitrate provide the explosive. Construction materials such as cement and structural steel to build the concentrator might amount to maybe 200-300 carloads in total, not a lot. Underground mines can use a lot of cement and some steel, but underground mining is increasingly too expensive to do in the U.S. as the labor input is very high. Block caving methods decrease the amount of labor but the skill level required for a block caving operation is high and attracting and holding skilled miners is very expensive. SX-EW mines consume sulfuric acid, and concentrators and exotic autoclaves and things like that in use today consume reagents and pH modifiers, but again in quantities that can be economically trucked a few hundred miles without serious effect on the economics of the mine.
"We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo Possum "We have met the anemone... and he is Russ." Bucky Katt "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in physics
Railway Man wrote: 1. Coal moving in very large volumes greater than 500 miles distances from mine to market entirely by rail is a post-1970 phenomenon. Prior to 1900 coal moving more than 200 miles from mine to market was quite exceptional. The D&RGW coal market basin in the domestic heating era was bounded tightly to its own lines with the addition of the MoPac east to western Kansas, the LA&SL south to Milford, the WP west into central Nevada, and the OSL north and west throughout southern Idaho. Coal mines in the Denver Field on UP and CB&Q barred D&RGW coal from markets north and east of Denver. Coal mines on C&S and Santa Fe in the Raton Mesa field competed in markets east of Pueblo and Trinidad. RWM
You mention coal movement before 1900, and after 1970. What about in between? My employer was big into the (lumber) and coal business in years past. The elderly owners were proud of the fact that back "before the war" they were the biggest coal dealer in town. They carried 46 varieties of coal(!)(?) I never did get the low-down on why you needed 46 varieties, and maybe that was an exaggeration on their part. I was intrigued, however, by the thought of 46 kinds of coal coming from maybe 46 different mines? These old boys were smart. They built a lumber & coal yard where the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road crossed.
Jay -- Sort of.
The basic difference is that coal lies in a seam that extends indefinitely in all directions, like the frosting layer inside a two-layer cake. The art of coal mining consists of removing as much of the seam (the frosting) as possible and as little of the surrounding rock (the cake) as possible. Since it is impossible to hold up the mountain above the seam over a vast acreage all at once, the idea is to hold up the mountain only above where you happen to be mining at that moment, and letting the mountain collapse to fill the void as quickly as possible to keep weight from building up on the area where you absolutely must hold the mountain up.
Long-wall mining as you know is a system where the coal is extracted continuously along a long face by a travelling cutting head that deposits the coal into a conveyor belt system that moves the coal to the surface of the mine. (There were pre-mechanized long-walls but we'll avoid that here to keep this below book-length. Also sometimes shuttle cars are used instead of conveyors; same comment as above.) The working face is held up by large robotically controlled steel shields that consist of a bottom leg laid flat on the floor, a vertical member that is hydraulically extended to take weight onto the shield system, and a top leg laid flat on the ceiling, arranged in a big C shape with the open side of the C facing the coal cutting face. The longwall cutter and the miners work under the protection of the shields until a foot or so of the coal is removed. Then the shields retract downward one at a time just enough to relieve pressure and step forward, all in sequence, and the entire working face a thousand or more feet in length advances forward. Behind the shields the roof is now unsupported and caves into the void, relieving pressure on the shields.
Long walls have many ways to get into trouble. A roof that is too competent, e.g.., made up of a thick, strong, sandstone layer, may not collapse in little pieces and try to span too far until the pressure is so severe on the shields that they are driven into the floor and cannot advance. There is more than one instance of a $6 million long-wall being abandoned inside a mine. Long walls don't like seams that have dips, splits, pinches, faults, or hogbacks. They want a nice, near-flat, seam of uniform height. Longwalls can't be made strong enough to span very thick coal seams either and in those cases the only practical solution may be to slice off the bottom of the seam and leave the top of the seam behind.
The longwall requires a lot of prepatory work to advance haulage and ventilation tunnels to the back of the area that will be mined. These tunnels are narrow enough in width that the roof will span naturally like an arch from side to side. Rock bolts and steel mesh are used to keep superficial rock from spalling off -- often the roof isn't a nice thick layer of sandstone but consists of a foot or so of rotten shale that wants to fall off in chunks and kill miners. The rock bolts are only there to tie the roof into a solid piece; they by no means are holding up the mountain! In the past a tremendous amount of wood timbering and lagging served the same purpose. Sometimes steel sets are used to make up for deficiency in the strength of the roof or the coal pillars on either side, but they're only helping out: you cannot hold stand a mountain on top of a post and expect that it won't crush the post like a bug.
Generally the long wall advances from the back of the area to be mined toward the entrance to the mine so that the collapse area and the pressures it creates and the methane it might trap is not between the miners and the way out. A lot of coal has to be left in the long, continuous barrier pillars between the haulage and ventilation tunnels and between the tunnels and the longwall area itself, in order to protect the tunnels and the longwalls from too much pressure or from tranferring collapse zones to each other. In ideal geologic conditions a longwall might remove 80% of the coal, leaving 20% behind forever. That may seem dismaying but the old room-and-pillar system often did no better than a 40% extraction ratio.
Metallic minerals in contrast occur in two basic ways -- as a defined vein structure in worthless country rock, called a lode, and as a disseminated mineral in a large body of rock. Gold is about the only metal that rarely combines with other elements in nature and is found in the pure form. All other metals happily form compounds with common elements such as oxygen, sulfur, or carbon. Metals that compose a large percentage of the earth's crust such as iron and aluminum are almost always mined from large deposits where the metal occurs in high concentration, e.g., 60% or more iron was common in the Mesabe Range in hematite beds. Valuable metals such as copper, silver, lead, zinc, molybdenum, etc., that are relatively scarce in the earth's crust can be found either as lode deposits or disseminated deposits. Most of the lode deposits on this planet have been located and extracted by now as they present highly concentrated minerals in a very defined, small, and obvious space, and could be extracted profitably with hand tools.
By the late 1800s the presence of disseminated deposits was known but there was no economic method to extract them nor any reason to, as lode deposits were still available at shallow depths. In 1900, the first disseminated non-iron metal deposit was attacked by the brilliant mining engineer Daniel Jackling and the Utah Copper Company at Bingham Canyon, Utah, using open-pit methods. It took Jackling several years, taking his ideas to one investor group after another, to find one who agreed to Jackling's plan to use steam-powered churn drills to open blast holes and steam shovels to load the broken ore into trains, thereby profitably mining copper ore that until then was regarded as copper-bearing waste rock. The Utah Copper enterprise was an immediate success and Jackling's techniques were emulated world-wide.
Disseminated deposits could now be economically mined, but only if they lay close to the surface. What if they laid beneath several hundred feet of barren overburden? Or if the ore body was not shallow and broad but tall and slender, forcing an open pit to bench far into country rock on either side? The answer was block-caving, an expansion and refinement of earlier techniques of mining large veins called shrinkage stoping (describing this is far more detail than I want to get into here.) Block caving consists of starting to one side of the ore body and sinking a shaft beyond the bottom of the ore body. From the shaft, miners drive flat haulage tunnels at regular parallel intervals a hundred feet or more beneath the ore body. Finger raises are driven upward from the haulage tunnels to the bottom of the ore body. The ore body is divided on paper into blocks several hundred feet on a side. When all is ready, the bottom of each block is completely sliced off and removed -- the ore removed during this process falls by gravity into the finger raises and down to where the raises meet the top of the sides of the haulage tunnels, where gates control the ore flow and a motorman opens the gates to meter broken ore into his train. To complete the slice of the block, the final pillars of ore holding it up are shattered with explosives and the ore block is now completely unsupported from below. The block will for a brief period try to span in an arch from one side to the other, but soon the arch will begin to fail under its own weight and the block will start to collapse into the void beneath it, shattering itself into pieces as the ore block shears apart and falls. The broken ore is regularly drawn off into trains and more ore collapses into the void beneath it until the entire block -- several hundred vertical feet high -- has collapsed, been drawn, and the block is considered mined out. The surface of the earth above collapses along with it, creating what's called a glory hole. Sometimes an open pit operation will work in the glory hole at the same time, shoving broken ore into the hole to fall into the finger raises. Assays are taken constantly to make sure that what's being mined is "ore" and not "waste," since visually they might be indistinguishable. The line between waste and ore depends on the market price of the metal that day. In a rising market waste becomes ore and in a declining market ore becomes waste.
Block caving is extremely challenging. The blocks have to be drawn off in careful sequence and with constant engineering analysis to avoid creating so much pressure on any portion of the haulage tunnels below that they cannot be supported and collapse. The ore in a block may not break into small enough pieces to fit into the finger raises and miners have to crawl up into the caved area beneath the block and set charges to break it. The blocks may hang up. The finger raises very frequently hang up and miners have to figure out how to unstick them -- often by climbing up into them, figuring out what's wrong, and setting charges that are big enough to break the ore but not so big they destroy the finger raise and the gates below. This often consists of tieing several sticks of dynamite to a long wooden stick with a long dangling fuse, fishing it up in between boulders in the raise, lighting the fuse, and hoping it works. Or too much ore falls too fast and blows out the gates. Or the blocks fail diagonally and worthless country rock dilutes the ore values, or the good ore may not come out at al. The timbering costs in the drifts and haulage tunnels can be very high. Many miners have been killed or maimed by raise blockages unexpectedly deciding to come down.
Block caving properly practiced was an amazing technique that extracted millions of tons of ore that otherwise was too deep for open-pit mining, with very low labor inputs compared with traditional shrinkage stoping methods. The cost of skilled labor and the forests of trees that went into the drifts, tunnels, and raises have rendered this technique uneconomical in most cases now. However, the cost of open-pit mining has continued to rachet down, with the continuing development of bigger, faster, and less labor-intensive down-hole drills, rope shovels, front shovels, and off-road trucks. Jackling's Utah Copper enterprise quickly replaced rail-mounted partial-swing shovels with full-rotation shovels on caterpillar treads, steam shovels with electric, steam locomotives with electric, and now is using the largest trucks in the world, the Caterillar 797B hauling nearly 400 tons per truckload. Several previous block caving operations (including the Climax Mine) have been converted into open-pit, and the overburden that previously made the decision to make them underground mines has been stripped off to get at the ore body. Many ore bodies that 50 years ago would have been without question a block-caving operation are now mined open-pit without question.
(Now how is it that you and Murph ask 10-word questions and I have to post 1,000-word answers!)
If you want to know about block caving, there is a wonderful two-volume set called "The Porphyry Coppers in 1933" and "The Porphyry Coppers in 1956" by A.B. Parsons that describes the entire history, economics, and technology of large-scale mining of disseminated copper ore bodies in lucid and readable prose. These mines include Bingham Canyon, Ely, Morenci, Ray, Chino, Baghdad, Ajo, Bisbee, Miami, and San Manuel in the U.S., and Braden, Chuiquimata, and a couple others in Peru and Chile.
Murphy Siding wrote: You mention coal movement before 1900, and after 1970. What about in between? My employer was big into the (lumber) and coal business in years past. The elderly owners were proud of the fact that back "before the war" they were the biggest coal dealer in town. They carried 46 varieties of coal(!)(?) I never did get the low-down on why you needed 46 varieties, and maybe that was an exaggeration on their part. I was intrigued, however, by the thought of 46 kinds of coal coming from maybe 46 different mines? These old boys were smart. They built a lumber & coal yard where the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road crossed.
Before 1900 the coal market consisted mostly of three buyers -- domestic heating and heating of stores, schools, and the like; railways; and steel mills, smelters, and foundries. Metallurgical coal was almost all coked right at the mouth of the mine in beehive coke ovens. Domestic users needed lump coal that didn't fall through the grates of their stove. Coal was mined entirely by hand with great care taken to remove it in lumps -- the miner was paid for the lump coal and nothing for the "slack coal" -- the fines and dust inevitably created in the mining process. The slack coal was coked, if it was cokable, right at the mine mouth. N&W, which owned its coal lands, required lessors to construct coke ovens to optimize the value of its coal lands -- a mine was "rated" in number of coal cars it would receive per day according to its size, and its rating determined the number of beehive ovens it had to construct and operate. Railways bought the cheapest coal they could get, usually the "mine run" that was not quite slack and not quite lump, and often not quite flammable because it was so full of bone (carbonized shale), clay, and rock.
After 1970 the coal market consisted virtually 100% of steam coal and met coal. Met coal was now almost 100% coked at the steel mill or dedicated merchant coke plants in "byproduct coke ovens," so called because they recover the byproducts of the coking process, e.g., the valuable volatile gasses and oils. Beehive ovens waste all this to the atmosphere, which as you might imagine blackened the sky with a yellowish, noxious, cloud of smoke, and poisoned all vegetation and animal life to a moon-like surface throughout the vicinity of the ovens. Steam coal, since it is blown into the fireboxes at high pressure, is crushed at the mine to 2x0 (i.e., small enough to fall through a grate with 2" round holes; the "0" means that anything down to dust that will fit through the grate is good to be loaded into the train and sent to the power plant. Coking coal is crushed as well before being charged into the ovens. Thus, the market shifted 100% from a lump-coal driven market where slack was waste, to a crushed-coal driven market where lumps were meaningless or undesirable.
In between the market transitions from one to the other. Steel mills started to build byproduct ovens in the early 1900s when the market for coal chemicals appeared, and because the coke oven gas, largely methane, became very valuable to power the many heat processes in the mill. The domestic market held pretty strong until WWII, when it collapsed both natural gas became available, because home owners were sick of the filth and the bother, and because air-pollution laws outlawed coal burning for heating in most cities. (I have a photo in my files of high noon in Salt Lake City on a winter day, with the visibility downtown about 20 feet due to coal smoke.) The steam market starts to appear in the 1950s, at first mostly with mine-mouth plants but in the early 1960s with power plants located near load centers (eastern and midwestern cities) or water sources (in the west). Unit trains, dallied with by the ICC since 1947 on a one-off "let's see what happens" basis, finally became a going thing in 1958 to keep the B&O, Erie, PRR, and NYC from losing all their coal traffic to mine-mouth plants or cheap Venezualan resid oil.
The 46 varieties you mention is probably no exaggeration. Most mines of any size in the lump-coal era would ship from 6 to 10 different sizes of lump, everything from "egg" to "pea" to "nut" and all sorts of other interesting size descriptions. Each field tended to have its own sizing system, too, just to add to the complexity. So a coal dealer in South Dakota might stock eight sizes of Wyoming low-BTU bituminous, Iowa semi-bituminous, Illinois high-BTU bituminous, cannell coal from Oklahoma and something from Pittsburg, Kansas. When people's life revolved around coal, people were picky, just as they might go into a Starbucks today and order a double-shot half-caf dry vanilla mocha fair-trade whatever. I just order "medium coffee, strongest you have, room for cream." I refuse to call it a GRANDE or whatever silly name it is that they give it.
I do not believe there would be enough money in the world to pay me for the job of setting charges to clear the raises or break up the oversized rocks.
As you know, I have watched a long wall coal mining operation in a southern Illinois mine. The seam of the mine I was in ran from 6 to 9 feet in depth. It was something to witness. The roof in this area was shale, and although I did not witness the event, at the early stages of the mining of a panel the roof would just sag, getting lower as the wall was advanced until at some point it broke apart and collapsed. One of the engineers told me it was like a big dynamite blast.
A further aside, my company employed retreat mining on a room and pillar mine in West Virginia. Starting at the back of the mine, a continous miner took coal out of the pillar and timbers were used to hold the roof in the newly mined out area. This process went on until almost all the coal was removed from the pillar. At that point everybody cleared out of the are until the roof collapsed splintering the timbers like so many match sticks. Substantial increase the yield from the 40% figure.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
I think it's important to remember that the Rio Grande also benifited from the fact that three railroads had lines into Colorado from the east. Through freight on these lines had nowhere to go but on the Rio Grande. The MOP line to Pueblo, the Rock Island and the CB&Q all came into Colorado from the east and literally had to turn through freight over to the Rio Grande.
With the Federal minimum rate regulations (established in 1920) keeping these routes operating, if not financially chipper, the Grande benifited from being the only place to go.
Now the MOP route has been taken out, the Rock Island is long gone, and the BNSF can get freight to/from Northern California on its own. Another reason the ex-Grande is no longer an important transcon route.
greyhounds wrote: I think it's important to remember that the Rio Grande also benifited from the fact that three railroads had lines into Colorado from the east. Through freight on these lines had nowhere to go but on the Rio Grande. The MOP line to Pueblo, the Rock Island and the CB&Q all came into Colorado from the east and literally had to turn through freight over to the Rio Grande. With the Federal minimum rate regulations (established in 1920) keeping these routes operating, if not financially chipper, the Grande benifited from being the only place to go.Now the MOP route has been taken out, the Rock Island is long gone, and the BNSF can get freight to/from Northern California on its own. Another reason the ex-Grande is no longer an important transcon route.
The interchange traffic was the other way around -- the preponderance of the loads ran eastward, not westward. D&RGW was a feeder to the grangers and important to their traffic base. Most of the inbound traffic from the east to Denver stopped in Denver, which was open to reciprocal switching, thus of little benefit to D&RGW which received only the switching charge. Most of the customers were on UP, CB&Q, and Rock Island. There was some finished auto and autoparts traffic interchanged to D&RGW but not nearly as much as what UP, SP, and Santa Fe got the long hauls on. CF&I Steel had its own Class III railroad, the Colorado & Wyoming, and its output to the east and south went directly to those railroads with no D&RGW interchange. Northward it had to share with C&S and Santa Fe. Iron ore came in shared between C&S and D&RGW from Wyoming, and shared UP-D&RGW and UP-C&S from Utah. Coal it had to share with Santa Fe.
The important part of these three grangers was that none of them was named "Union Pacific". D&RGW did not have much interchange traffic with UP as it was in direct competition with UP for the commodities it hauled if not the actual shippers themselves. Ponderosa pine mouldings from Weyerhaeuser Lumber in Klamath Falls shipped SP-D&RGW-CB&Q did not look any different to the lumberyard in Chicago than the ponderosa pine mouldings from Boise-Payette Lumber in Emmett, Idaho, routed UP-C&NW. Canned tomatoes shipped SP-D&RGW-MP were the same as shipped Santa Fe all the way.
There is at present one manifest train weekly operated by BNSF on the Central Corridor via the Overland Route. BNSF access to Northern California is the continuation of the GN-WP partnership of old, resumed after the interruption by the UP-MP-WP merger.
Murphy Siding wrote: If coal was the reason DRG existed, what of the other minerals on the route? Were the rails there because of the mines, or the mines there because of the rails?
Must ... use ... fewer ... words. OK. That's out of my system.
The mountains and desert of Colorado and Utah were explored and appropriated from tribal ownership specifically for the potential of precious metals. Placer gold discoveries along Cherry Creek in 1859 became the genesis of the city of Denver, and careful prospecting by experienced Georgia miners soon led to very rich lode gold discoveries at what became Central City, nearby in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Prospectors rapidly fanned out and by the 1870s had sampled virtually the entire state. Leadville, the first major silver discovery in Colorado, was at first a placer gold discovery that quickly went barren. Only after the camp was derelict was it realized that a bonanza of silver in shallow limestone replacement deposits underlaid a broad area. Only two major discoveries, Creede and Cripple Creek, silver and gold camps respectively, escaped this first wave of prospectors, and went undiscovered until the late 1890s.
Gold and silver camps required supplies -- coal, lumber, foodstuffs, machinery -- which could only be economically transported by rail. So in this case the mines attracted the railroads. The coal fields, of which Colorado is rich, in many cases awaited the arrival of the railroad to be exploited. But many coal branches and lines were constructed specifically to extract coal, such as the D&RGW's North Fork (of the Gunnison River) Branch, which today ships out more than 50,000 tons daily of high-BTU, low-sulfur, low-ash, low-moisture coal.
The other major mineral in Colorado is molybdenum. A mountain's worth of the steel-alloying metal was discovered in the 1890s near Leadville -- the Climax Mine, containing more than a trillion dollars of ore value. No one had any use for moly until WWI, when it was realized that it improved armor plate and armor-piercing shell casings, making them harder but less brittle, ideal qualities for something that is not supposed to shatter on impact. The mine soon became the largest underground mine in the world, employing more than 10,000 at peak production, driven after WWI by the automotive industry who needed lightweight high-strength alloy steels for tooling and engine parts. It was later converted to an open-pit operation and shut down under pressure from byproduct copper mine molybdenum in 1983. Skyrocketing metals prices have finally led its owner to reopen it beginning this year. Interestingly there were TWO railroads literally at the doorstep of the Climax Mine at the time this t side by side and both narrow-gauge, a D&RG branch running northwest from Leadville to the Blue River Mining District at Dillon, and a DSP&P (later C&S) main line running in the opposite direction from Denver to Leadville. The D&RG branch was abandoned before the moly deposit attained merchantability, and the C&S line was the one to get the business. Later the C&S abandoned all of the main line except the last bit from Climax down to Leadville, leaving an isolated stub interchanging with D&RGW at Leadville to carry the business of Climax.
Utah is a bit of different case. The Church of Latter Day Saints discouraged its members from prospecting and discouraged outside prospectors, believing (correctly) that mineral discoveries would lead outsiders into Deseret and diluting its ability to offer a safe and self-sufficient kingdom for its members. U.S. Army occupiers went prospecting anyway, quickly locating rich silver and gold deposits in the mountains surrounding the Salt Lake and Utah Lake valleys. One of those discoveries, in Bingham Canyon, was a mantle of silver and gold values on an enormous core of copper. That became the Utah Copper Enterprise, still, I believe, the largest open-pit mine in the world, and the largest man-made excavation in the world. Mining and smelting activities demanded coal, and although UP could supply all the coal the valley might desire from its literally trackside mines in Wyoming, UP's prices were rather high. Vast coal deposits were known to exist on the other side of the Wasatch Plateau from the Utah Valley. That encouraged independent interests to build what became the Rio Grande of Utah, eastward from the Utah Valley over Soldier Summit to open coal mines of the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateaus.
D&RGW's Utah Fuels Co. was the biggest mine operator in the Utah fields until the 1930s. The second largest was United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Co., which owned the Lark silver-lead-zinc mine near Bingham Canyon and the large Midvale Smelter. USSRM built the Utah Railway to supply its smelters, mines, and other customers with coal. Biggest coal mine operator in the Colorado fields was Colorado Coal & Iron Co., later CF&I Steel, whose steel mill at Minnequa near Pueblo began as a sister company to the D&RGW. Other big coal mine operators were Kaiser Steel and U.S. Steel, beginning in WWII.
So, to answer your question, the minerals attracted the railroads. There was meager other reason for a railroad to be there. Row cropping is not a viable pursuit in mountains and deserts innocent of irrigation, and the territory for the most part is too dry or too cold, or both, to sustain forests worthy of large-scale logging.
Railway Man wrote: Must ... use ... fewer ... words. OK. That's out of my system. Placer gold discoveries along Cherry Creek in 1859 became the genesis of the city of Denver, and careful prospecting by experienced Georgia miners soon led to very rich lode gold discoveries at what became Central City, nearby in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. RWM
Placer gold discoveries along Cherry Creek in 1859 became the genesis of the city of Denver, and careful prospecting by experienced Georgia miners soon led to very rich lode gold discoveries at what became Central City, nearby in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
DANG! I'm impressed! Not many people know the first gold rush in the U.S. was in north Georgia, near Dahlonega. Am not sure of the year, believe it was in the 1820's or 1830's. The dome of the Georgia Capitol is covered in gold mined or found in Georgia, as is the steeple (don't know the proper term) of some public building in Dahlonega, either county courthouse or admin building at North Georgia College I think.
And please, don't use fewer words. I always learn something from your posts, usually several things.
Georgia Native
This thread has officially made it into my "Favorite Thread" folder.
Just for curiosity, did passenger traffic account for much traffic on the D&RG?
JOdom wrote: DANG! I'm impressed! And please, don't use fewer words. I always learn something from your posts, usually several things.
DANG! I'm impressed!
I agree. He is veritable railroad encyclopedia!!
CopCarSS wrote: This thread has officially made it into my "Favorite Thread" folder.Just for curiosity, did passenger traffic account for much traffic on the D&RG?
Other than the California Zephyr(?), you don't hear much about passenger trains on DRG. I wonder if passengers were more of a hinderance?
I know that in the early days of the railroad, passenger traffic was important enough to garner some very plush cars on trains like the San Juan Express.
Towards the end of the narrow gauge, I think tourist based passenger traffic played a part in keeping some lines open at least for awhile. I don't know how much, though, hence my question.
Murphy Siding wrote: CopCarSS wrote: This thread has officially made it into my "Favorite Thread" folder.Just for curiosity, did passenger traffic account for much traffic on the D&RG? Other than the California Zephyr(?), you don't hear much about passenger trains on DRG. I wonder if passengers were more of a hinderance?
Well, passengers were always kind of a hinderance.
In the early 1960's the Rio Grande passenger service consisted of:
The California Zephyr, Chicago - Oakland via CB&Q-DRGW-WP
The Prospector, Denver - Salt Lake City overnight with sleepers and diner lounge
The Yampa Valley Mail, Denver - Craig local
The Royal Gorge, Denver - Glenwood Springs via Pueblo (combined with the Prospector west of Glenwood Springs to/from SLC. Handled through cars to/from Chicago to/from Colorado Springs connecting with the Denver Zephyr.)
The Colorado Eagle, St. Louis - Denver via Missouri Pacific-DRGW
Plus the Silverton and ski trains.
Passenger traffic was important to almost all railroads prior to WWI -- and when one says "passenger" one should say "express and mail" in the same breath as the two were hand-in-glove services delivered by the same organization with shared people, facilities, and costs. After WWI the local passenger and express business was gutted in less than 10 years by the rapid expansion of all-weather highways throughout rural America and the introduction of low-cost, reliable automobiles and trucks, and along with it a gasoline supply system and repair capabilities extended into every farmyard.
With the loss of local service, the long-haul business had to carry the cost of the service, and it could not on all railroads and all lanes. Some railroads with a large long-haul business such as Santa Fe from Chicago to California and ACL from Chicago and the Northeast to Florida were able to endure much longer. Railroads with virtually nothing but a local network like CGW and M&STL exited early.
In D&RGW territory, trucks, buses, and autos eroded D&RGW's local mail and express business quickly. Almost in a matter of months after a start-up truck and bus line was established parallel to an existing D&RGW service, the business switched virtually en masse to rubber tire. D&RGW countered more rapidly than most railroads, and established its own truck and bus subsidiary, Rio Grande Motorway, in many cases purchasing and folding into its system the small independent companies that had sprung up in its territory.
The long-haul business on D&RGW was mostly discretionary and vacation-oriented, its route being slower than UP or Santa Fe, and the ever-dwindling pool of travelers that was comfortable with rail travel and didn't want to change to air and auto. That base evaporated during the 1960s as well.
Passenger and express after 1900 at best accounted for only a very low double-digit contribution to D&RGW's revenues. It was a nice-to-have business but not significant to the railroad's long-term fortunes, until it began losing money. Then it was very significant, but not in a good way.
Railway Man wrote: Passenger traffic was important to almost all railroads prior to WWI -- and when one says "passenger" one should say "express and mail" in the same breath as the two were hand-in-glove services delivered by the same organization with shared people, facilities, and costs.
Passenger traffic was important to almost all railroads prior to WWI -- and when one says "passenger" one should say "express and mail" in the same breath as the two were hand-in-glove services delivered by the same organization with shared people, facilities, and costs.
Ahhh, now you've piqued my interest!
Can it be said that, had UPS and FedEx had attained seminal maturity prior to the advent of Amtrak in 1970, that we might still have private Class I passenger service in that "express and mail" sector?
Yeah, UPS has a significant freight business with the railroads via TOFC, and Amtrak has attempted to haul such freight within it's passenger schedules in the past, but let's face it - Amtrak, being what it is (an example of why socialism is doomed to failure), has no incentive to provide such services in an expedient manner, and anyway is mandated to try and emulate the "name" trains it inherited, not the express/mail trains of the Class I's. And I'm sure UPS doesn't want it's TOFC schedules bogged down by an addition of passengers.
Perhaps this train of thought deserves it's own thread.
Norman Saxon wrote: Railway Man wrote: Passenger traffic was important to almost all railroads prior to WWI -- and when one says "passenger" one should say "express and mail" in the same breath as the two were hand-in-glove services delivered by the same organization with shared people, facilities, and costs. Ahhh, now you've piqued my interest! Can it be said that, had UPS and FedEx had attained seminal maturity prior to the advent of Amtrak in 1970, that we might still have private Class I passenger service in that "express and mail" sector?Yeah, UPS has a significant freight business with the railroads via TOFC, and Amtrak has attempted to haul such freight within it's passenger schedules in the past, but let's face it - Amtrak, being what it is (an example of why socialism is doomed to failure), has no incentive to provide such services in an expedient manner, and anyway is mandated to try and emulate the "name" trains it inherited, not the express/mail trains of the Class I's. And I'm sure UPS doesn't want it's TOFC schedules bogged down by an addition of passengers.Perhaps this train of thought deserves it's own thread.
RWM will probably explain this better, but...
No.
The need for rapid delivery of small shipments (or big shipments for that matter) didn't materialzie with the advent of UPS and FedEx. It existed in the 1800's and private companies developed to meet the need. The big mail order firms such as Sears and Montgomery Ward were major users, just as Best Buy will use UPS today if you order on line.
If you ever wondered why American Express was called American Express it's because they started out as an express company.
Several private competing companies developed to meet the need. These included today's American Express and Wells Fargo - which are now financial companies. The development into financial services was a natural result of being in the express business. People would use the companies to ship money and gold. It soon became obvious to the companies that it would be easier to just give the shipper a piece of paper after they received the gold and redeem it at destination than it was to transport the small lots of gold and money. The move into financial services followed as a natural result.
Other significant private express companies included Southern Express and Adams Express.
Everything was going along pretty well until the government decided to get involved. They created Parcel Post, which the Post Office was in no way set up to handle. The US Mail did a pretty good job with letters (it still does IMHO), but it wasn't really able to handle packages.
Parcel Post instantly became a subsidized looser. The private companies couldn't compete against a government subsidized service and exited the express business. The remaining express operations were consolidated into the Railway Express Agency and forced onto the railroads with a long term contract lasting through 1968. REA did a pretty good job at moving the packages around, just as Wells Fargo had, but it too was financially unsuccessful competing against a taxpayer subsidized service. Railroads viewed it as a looser.
When the contract expired in '68 the railroads cast REA loose and let it die.
The "Private Express Statues" prevented the express companies from delivering letters and documents. This lasted into the 1970's. I remember having to put US postage on an envelop before putting it into a FedEx envelop to stay legal.
What would have happened had the government stayed out is conjecture. The competing private express companies certainly were not tied to rail. They would have adopted use of trucks and aircraft as the technoligies fit their purpose. Would there be speeding express trains between Chicago and Denver instead of 757's, with those trains handling passengers as an add on? I don't think so. UPS and FedEx developed to fill a need. UPS chose TOFC and not passenger trains.
Murphy Siding wrote: What was DRG incentive to be part of The California Zephyr? By that late date, could it have been much of a profitable venture?
I honestly have no idea. I still can't figure out why any railroad wanted to be in the passenger business after VJ Day, 1945. The typical post-war long-distance streamliner such as the CZ was an extraordinarly expensive niche-market product aimed at the last remaining market segment that appeared to still have profit potential, the long-haul discretionary market. Given the cash needs of railroads, it's hard to think of a worse use for the capital.
The CZ was a successful train for only about four years following its introduction. After 1953 it was apparent that the financial trends were negative and would not reverse.
Railway Man wrote: Murphy Siding wrote: What was DRG incentive to be part of The California Zephyr? By that late date, could it have been much of a profitable venture?I honestly have no idea. I still can't figure out why any railroad wanted to be in the passenger business after VJ Day, 1945. The typical post-war long-distance streamliner such as the CZ was an extraordinarly expensive niche-market product aimed at the last remaining market segment that appeared to still have profit potential, the long-haul discretionary market. Given the cash needs of railroads, it's hard to think of a worse use for the capital.The CZ was a successful train for only about four years following its introduction. After 1953 it was apparent that the financial trends were negative and would not reverse.RWM
The handwriting was on the wall by the mid '30's for those who had the ability to see it. In 1936 the ICC mandated that railroads couldn't charge more than 2 cents a mile for coach and 3 cents Pullman and doomed the profitability of passenger trains or even the ability for a company to recoup the costs of operation. Remember, this was during the era that Railroad Management thought it was wise to spend money they didn't have on new passenger equipment and advertisement.
The bitter end was only postponed by the War. If you look at passenger numbers, they began to fall rapidly after 1920 and continued to fall at an increasing rate after the War.
greyhounds wrote:RWM will probably explain this better, but...
I don't think I can explain that any better, at least the part about REA's origins, life, and expiration.
UPS and FedEx have very different business models. FedEx's began as a high-service, high-value delivery service for documents using contract labor to drive the trucks and part-time labor to run the sort centers in order to offload as much of the cost of labor onto the general ledger of the taxpayers as possible. FedEx was also conceived under the premise of cheap oil being a permanent thing. FedEx's model has a low volume output in relation to the manhours and gallons of fuel input, and thus works so long as the differential between the cost of labor and fuel can be paced by what the market will bear for the price of the outputs. If input costs rise sharply, the business model gets squeezed. FedEx began before e-mail and the internet slashed the demand for overnight document delivery, and to its management's credit recognized that trend early and used its cash strength to build a large LTL trucking system that is sort of a hybrid between UPS and a traditional LTL trucker like Yellow Freight. A question now is whether the overnight express business still has legs; there are some analysts who think not especially given some recent court rulings that the drivers do not qualify as independent contractors, which if upheld will dramatically increase the labor cost. The ground LTL business has economies of scale by sharing facilities and overhead with the express business; if the express business dwindles will the LTL business look like everyone else's LTL businesses -- which barely make money in the best of times? I don't know.
UPS, conversely, began as a package delivery service for department stores using organized labor and focused on achieving high volumes relative to the labor and fuel inputs. This is best illustrated by observing that the FedEx delivery truck is often an ordinary 1/2-ton van whereas the UPS truck has 10 times the volume capacity. The UPS model is accordingly much less sensitive to labor costs -- it's already expensive -- and fuel cost increases can be spread over much, much more volume. The infrastructure is sprawling and continues to focus on its original market segment, a delivery service for retail stores.
UPS converted early and in depth to intermodal. The fact that FedEx is almost a nonexistent customer for railroad intermodal is often touted as "proof" that railroad intermodal is a lousy product because it can't attract a star customer like FedEx (which would imply that UPS must be some sort of wooden-axle outfit). The more obvious conclusion to be drawn is that FedEx doesn't have the volumes or network model that make intermodal attractive.
In a world of $5/gallon and up diesel fuel, a network that can generate high volumes with low inputs is king.
I apologize this is a long way to get to the original question if whether FedEx and UPS had appeared earlier it would have had any effect on passenger trains. I think not. First, I don't think they could have appeared any earlier. Second, I think they would have used truck for the same reason that railroads built truck lines like D&RGW's Rio Grande Motorways and SP's Pacific Motor Transport -- the volumes were too low and the flexibility needs too high to make good use of rail service, until the 1970s by which time the passenger train was dead. UPS intermodal trains are really nothing but a mail train, sans the useless rider coach. And when they appeared, they sat in the same main line capacity slot and main line operating model as the passenger train that had departed just a few years prior.
wsherrick wrote: The handwriting was on the wall by the mid '30's for those who had the ability to see it. In 1936 the ICC mandated that railroads couldn't charge more than 2 cents a mile for coach and 3 cents Pullman and doomed the profitability of passenger trains or even the ability for a company to recoup the costs of operation. Remember, this was during the era that Railroad Management thought it was wise to spend money they didn't have on new passenger equipment and advertisement.The bitter end was only postponed by the War. If you look at passenger numbers, they began to fall rapidly after 1920 and continued to fall at an increasing rate after the War.
Agreed. However, railroads believed the decline was restricted to the local and businessman's market. Railroads for reasons still not clear to me did not see the handwriting on the wall for the long-distance discretionary market, as evidenced by the postwar streamliner.
A few years ago I was looking through UP Annual Reports, which until 1936 broke out their four subsidiaries, OSL, O-WR&N, LA&SL, and StJ&GI, in the same great depth as the UP proper. The St. Joseph had no passenger business but local passenger business. The contrast between it and the rest of the system in the 1920s was phenomenal. While the passenger and express results on the system as a whole did OK, on the St. J they were virtually wiped out.
In addition to RMW and Greyhound above, when AMTK was authorized by Congress, the freight lines made sure that AMTK would not be able (legaly, by statute) to carry mail and express. As mentioned above, particularly with the end of REA, all of this business was on the rubber tire and what was still with the railroad was TOFC. AMTK tried, several times, to get into this business by hook or by crook, but each time failed for all of the above reasons mentioned in this thread.
Could AMTK operate an M&E business ala REA? Yes. Could they do so profitably? Probably. Could AMTK then be made independant of subsidy? Maybe -- or maybe not.
I am not any sort of expert on this subject, but it is my understanding that AMTK could haul FedEx, UPS, DANZAS, and so forth if the express companies owned the cars that only their own shipments were sent in and AMTK handled them as a private car at the private car rate. I postulate that for the express companies to attempt this business model would cause much red ink. It would be the terminal costs. I would think that RoadRailer and Flex-I-Van would be the only viable methods, and I think that they would fall into the prohibited catagory.
I think their heads were in a whole different world. They were not a business but a railroad. I remember managers at the C&NW in the early 1970s thinking it was our public duty to provide service at a loss. Running a re-equiped 400 was a part of that vision until it was engulfed in waves of red ink. As the use to say during slide shows at the Chicago Railroad Club, "It was a far better world."
kenneo wrote: Norman Saxon wrote: Railway Man wrote: Passenger traffic was important to almost all railroads prior to WWI -- and when one says "passenger" one should say "express and mail" in the same breath as the two were hand-in-glove services delivered by the same organization with shared people, facilities, and costs. Ahhh, now you've piqued my interest! Can it be said that, had UPS and FedEx had attained seminal maturity prior to the advent of Amtrak in 1970, that we might still have private Class I passenger service in that "express and mail" sector?Yeah, UPS has a significant freight business with the railroads via TOFC, and Amtrak has attempted to haul such freight within it's passenger schedules in the past, but let's face it - Amtrak, being what it is (an example of why socialism is doomed to failure), has no incentive to provide such services in an expedient manner, and anyway is mandated to try and emulate the "name" trains it inherited, not the express/mail trains of the Class I's. And I'm sure UPS doesn't want it's TOFC schedules bogged down by an addition of passengers.Perhaps this train of thought deserves it's own thread.In addition to RMW and Greyhound above, when AMTK was authorized by Congress, the freight lines made sure that AMTK would not be able (legaly, by statute) to carry mail and express. As mentioned above, particularly with the end of REA, all of this business was on the rubber tire and what was still with the railroad was TOFC. AMTK tried, several times, to get into this business by hook or by crook, but each time failed for all of the above reasons mentioned in this thread.Could AMTK operate an M&E business ala REA? Yes. Could they do so profitably? Probably. Could AMTK then be made independant of subsidy? Maybe -- or maybe not. I am not any sort of expert on this subject, but it is my understanding that AMTK could haul FedEx, UPS, DANZAS, and so forth if the express companies owned the cars that only their own shipments were sent in and AMTK handled them as a private car at the private car rate. I postulate that for the express companies to attempt this business model would cause much red ink. It would be the terminal costs. I would think that RoadRailer and Flex-I-Van would be the only viable methods, and I think that they would fall into the prohibited catagory.
IIRC about a decade back AMTRAK made a serious pusyh to try to get much more express business to the point that they were proposing a whole network of new trains based around parcel/headend traffic. The host RR's nixed that pronto, using the (true) statement that AMTRAK would be using thier own lines to compete against them...
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
IIRC about a decade back AMTRAK made a serious push to try to get much more express business to the point that they were proposing a whole network of new trains based around parcel/headend traffic. The host RR's nixed that pronto, using the (true) statement that AMTRAK would be using thier own lines to compete against them...
carnej1 wrote: kenneo wrote: Norman Saxon wrote: Railway Man wrote: Passenger traffic was important to almost all railroads prior to WWI -- and when one says "passenger" one should say "express and mail" in the same breath as the two were hand-in-glove services delivered by the same organization with shared people, facilities, and costs. Ahhh, now you've piqued my interest! Can it be said that, had UPS and FedEx had attained seminal maturity prior to the advent of Amtrak in 1970, that we might still have private Class I passenger service in that "express and mail" sector?Yeah, UPS has a significant freight business with the railroads via TOFC, and Amtrak has attempted to haul such freight within it's passenger schedules in the past, but let's face it - Amtrak, being what it is (an example of why socialism is doomed to failure), has no incentive to provide such services in an expedient manner, and anyway is mandated to try and emulate the "name" trains it inherited, not the express/mail trains of the Class I's. And I'm sure UPS doesn't want it's TOFC schedules bogged down by an addition of passengers.Perhaps this train of thought deserves it's own thread.In addition to RMW and Greyhound above, when AMTK was authorized by Congress, the freight lines made sure that AMTK would not be able (legaly, by statute) to carry mail and express. As mentioned above, particularly with the end of REA, all of this business was on the rubber tire and what was still with the railroad was TOFC. AMTK tried, several times, to get into this business by hook or by crook, but each time failed for all of the above reasons mentioned in this thread.Could AMTK operate an M&E business ala REA? Yes. Could they do so profitably? Probably. Could AMTK then be made independant of subsidy? Maybe -- or maybe not. I am not any sort of expert on this subject, but it is my understanding that AMTK could haul FedEx, UPS, DANZAS, and so forth if the express companies owned the cars that only their own shipments were sent in and AMTK handled them as a private car at the private car rate. I postulate that for the express companies to attempt this business model would cause much red ink. It would be the terminal costs. I would think that RoadRailer and Flex-I-Van would be the only viable methods, and I think that they would fall into the prohibited catagory. IIRC about a decade back AMTRAK made a serious push to try to get much more express business to the point that they were proposing a whole network of new trains based around parcel/headend traffic. The host RR's nixed that pronto, using the (true) statement that AMTRAK would be using thier own lines to compete against them...
That's the gist of my point. If the RR's were running their own express/parcel/passenger trains, they wouldn't be competing against themselves!
I guess what I'm saying is that passenger trains by themselves cannot be profitable, but passenger trains morphed with an express business could be.
Congress are you listening? We can ditch Amtrak while having private sector passenger service if someone has the wherewithall to tweak the regs a bit.
(Apologies to Murphy Siding for sidetracking his thread)
In the last half of the 1990's, Amtrak President George Warrington included a serious attempt at handleing express traffic as part of the "Glide Path to Profitability". (I always thought a glidepath angled downward).
Obviously, adding additional revenue to trains already running would seem to be an easy to bring money right down to the bottom line. So, Amtrak acquired a bunch of express box cars and Road Railers, cobbled together some terminal facilities and added necessary staff. In fairness, business was generated and the operation appeared to make a positive financial contribution of a few million dollars, but only made a very small dent in Amtrak's billion dollar deficit.
The problem is that freight, by whatever name, does not go in and out the same door or platform as people and Amtrak's express operation caused additional delays to an already poor time performance. In making his decision to discontinue the program, Dave Gunn recognized that there were some added costs for train crews resulting from delays, and of course, delays are a big reason for travelers choosing something other than Amtrak.
It seems to me that in the post WWII streamliner era, the major railroads providing mainline long distance trains tended to deal with the incompatability of express/mail and people by running mail trains. I can think of a number of routes, IC, Santa Fe, Milwaukee Road, and NYC that had trains with schedules mainly for mail and express and I am sure that a search of a mid-1950's Railway Guide would find many more.
May I add:
Here in the US we have three huge entities providing service for mail and express-four if you include DHL. Each of these provide service between every point in the country and at least UPS, FedEx and the USPS have invested huge dollars in highly efficient automated sorting and distribution facilities.
With Amtrak serving only 500 some points and no automation for handling express parcels, I find it hard to believe that Amtrak could compete on the basis of either cost or service.
In simplest terms, Amtrak M&E was an initiative in which Amtrak would market intermodal services in direct competition with Class I intermodal services, and achieve pricing power by continuing to use Amtrak's passenger train slots which by law are costed to Amtrak at a tiny fraction of their true value. Amtrak M&E even proposed to expand Amtrak service to a large swath of new lanes, service which consisted of an intermodal train with a token Amtrak rider coach on the rear, anticipating that it could purchase these slots again at a fraction of true market value because in its eyes it was creating a new public good.
The reaction from the Class Is to this initiative varied from "You've got to be kidding" to "OK, I see now that you're serious but preternaturally naiive -- and the answer is no."
Romantically, it sure looked like a way to revisit the passenger glory days of yore. From a practical viewpoint, it was if a railroad's passenger, mail & express business suddenly seceded from the railroad, set up its own business with its own books, bank accounts, and profit extraction, and was shocked when the freight railroad paid a visit and asked it to start paying rent on its stations, tracks, and shops.
Murphy Siding wrote: Was the Western Pacific built as something of an extention of the DRGW? It seems like there was some ownership overlap (Gould), and when WP got into financial trouble, it pulled DRGW in with it.(?)
Sort of. Or, that's the received wisdom. I discussed this in an earlier post in this thread but to recap, there are three hypotheses for the construction of the WP:
1. As a component of a complete coast-to-coast railroad that consisted of the WP, D&RGW, MoPac, Wabash, P&WV, and WM. This is the conventional wisdom but there is no supporting evidence that this was an actual policy of Gould and not just an observation drawn by outsiders or a public-relations ploy.
2. As a bear run on the Harriman System. The CB&Q was thinking hard about extending its system to Salt Lake City. As a dead-end extension of the Q, that line would be utterly worthless, as the Harriman System would have interchanged no traffic to it on a through rate, and the local business would be insufficient. Joined with a WP, however, the rate competition would have been enough to cause Harriman some pain, and encourage a combination on attractive buyout terms to Gould and the Q's owners. The D&RGW would be useless in this regard as its physical plant was far too sketchy, its operating costs too high, and its transit times too long, to be a meaningful competitor to the Harriman System. (The C&NW was also thinking of building west from its end of track at Lander, Wyoming, but its F&EV line was so cheaply located and in such thinly supported territory that it would be a pale threat to Harriman.)
3. As a personal statement of George Gould, who was regarded as a pale imitation of his father both in acumen and power. This hypothesis I find the most attractive. While I have no positive evidence to support it, neither does positive evidence exist for #1 and #2 above, and #1 and #2 are burdened with negative evidence. Absent a committment from the CB&Q to build a line to Salt Lake City, #2 requires Gould to be either a fantastic risk taker or irrational. #1 requires Gould to be irrational. There were many rail builders whose strongest motivation appears to have been to leave their mark on the face of the planet, and Gould could well have been one of them.
As to the part of your question about finances. George Gould controlled the MoPac, which was always the core property of his father Jay. The MoPac purchased a controlling interest in the D&RGW, and used the D&RGW's cash flow and assets to guarantee the construction bonds necessary to build the WP -- the D&RGW was mortgaged. The WP's cost of construction ran wildly over estimates (which were probably intentionally shaved in order not to scare off investors in the stock -- which is unsecured). The WP had insufficient traffic to pay the interest on the bonds, defaulted on the bonds, and the D&RGW guarantee came into force. That created a lien on D&RGW which it could not satisfy from liquid assets. To satisfy the lien the D&RGW was sold at auction, the purchaser being none other than the WP and MP. To explain: the D&RGW was overmortgaged to build the WP. The D&RGW did not have assets or future potential to satisfy the lien, and run the property. Prospective bidders for the D&RGW at auction bid less than the amount of the WP lien. The WP and MP bondholders were really just pulling play money out of one pocket and putting it into the other, as the cash value of the WP and D&RGW was at that point negative. However, they did wipe out the outside stockholders in both properties, gaining control at no out of pocket cost to themselves.
The result was that the WP had no cash to build feeder lines to develop traffic, and the D&RGW had no cash to pay to maintain its plant. The D&RGW fell into physical ruin. This condition persisted until the 1920s when the MoPac borrowed heavily against its assets to make (almost from scratch!) the D&RGW into a viable railroad able to compete for a modest share of transcontinental traffic under the umbrella of rate regulation. The enormous cost of remaking the D&RGW drove the MoPac and D&RGW into bankruptcy, from which the D&RGW would not emerge until 1947 and the MoPac much later.
Norris, after this week of chaos I don't even remember my own phone number!
Narrow-gauge doesn't have any advantage over standard-gauge in being able to handle steeper grades for the same inputs of horsepower. The physics are identical. (However, the locomotives often had a higher horsepower to weight ratio for similar design.) Nor does narrow-gauge have an advantage over standard-gauge in being able to handle tighter curves: standard-gauge equipment can turn almost as tight a corner, and often did on logging railroads, interurbans, and mining railroads, so long as the equipment is the same length, locomotives have blind center drivers and short wheelbases, etc.
Narrow-gauge was built to save on "first costs", i.e., the cost to construct and equip a line and open it for service. It's use was mostly limited to areas where there was insufficient traffic potential to support the higher cost of standard-gauge, or insufficient capital available, or because it was anticipated the traffic was ephemeral (a forest that would soon be logged or a mine soon stripped of its treasure). There are three principal "first-cost" advantages:
The tighter curves and steeper grades that were often employed by narrow-gauge were so used because it corresponded with the reduced expectations for traffic volume and necessary speed, and because it additionally saved on first cost. If there were the traffic expectations to make it worthwhile to produce low grades, low curve resistance and rail wear, and higher speeds, then there were also the traffic expectations to justify the larger tonnage productivity per unit inputs of steel, iron, wood, coal, and labor of standard gauge.
In many cases the employment of narrow-gauge was a gross error in judgement by the locating engineer. While the first costs were reduced sufficiently to be able to bring the railroad in to completion within the proposed budget, the operating costs were so greatly increased that the railroad could not earn enough on the traffic to cover its costs. Moreover, as you surmise, if the traffic did grow, the investment made in constructing a narrow-gauge was virtually 100% stranded. Most of the D&RGW narrow-gauge alignment that was subsequently widened to standard-gauge had to be abandoned wholesale, and an entirely new alignment constructed, often not even in the same valley. (The best place to see the result of this is on the Green River Desert between Cisco and Woodside, Utah, where even in open country the narrow-gauge alignment was totally unsuitable even for a low-capacity, cheaply built standard-gauge line, and was 100% given up.) A few of the locomotives were widened to standard-gauge but were so modest in capacity that they were useful only as work-train engines and switchers for a few years, then scrapped. The freight and passenger rolling stock investment was totally lost.
Narrow gauge persisted only on locations where traffic growth did not occur but highway construction lagged due to difficult terrain and low demand. At any place where standard-gauge lines came into competition the narrow-gauge was driven from the scene virtually on the same day the standard-gauge opened for service. The inability to waybill cars for through movement without a manual transfer of freight, and the low weight capacity of narrow-gauge cars, greatly hindered the market basin for any shipper located on a narrow-gauge line.
A third and more subtle factor that eludes many nostalgists is that the narrow-gauge by virtue of its high inputs of labor, fuel and material relative to its outputs of ton-miles had very high rates. The D&RGW was remarkable in railroading circles in the late 1800s as having the highest rate structure in the entire U.S. -- because it had the highest costs, too. This was barely acceptable during the bonanza phase of the Colorado and Utah precious-metals mining boom, from the railroad's cash-flow perspective and the economic interests of the territory it served. It was not acceptable from any perspective that took a longer viewpoint than one or two years. The high costs and high rates sowed the seeds for the mining industry's rapid destruction. Exorbitant transportation charges incentived mine owners to quickly strip only the richest ores and employ low-cost mining methods that made it virtually impossible to ever return for the lower values, thus gutting their own properties' potential and destroying any chance of building a careful capital investment, development, and exploration program to recover the full value of the mineral deposits. It is often said that "most of the gold and silver is still in the ground." That is a true but misleading statement, as it implies to the novice outsider that the mining industry in these former bonanza lodes is on the verge of returning. It is not and will not be; the original mine owners made such a mess of the underground that the only way to deal with it is an open-pit excavation, and even with today's very low costs of mass excavation only a small percentage of these narrow-vein deposits have enough value to pay to remove the very large amount of waste rock required to get at the veins.
Similar rapid and destructive depletion of the coal and forest resources occured; only the richest coal "splits" were mined and the rest of the mountain reduced to a jumbled pile of broken rock that cannot be mined without slicing the mountaintop off. That is feasible in the low-rise mountains of West Virginia but not in the Rocky Mountains where the rock cover over the coal seam is 1,500 to 3,000 feet. The forests were denuded of the timber and grass and the ground abandoned to erosion. On a personal note, my father in the 1970s purchased two quarter sections in Colorado logged after the D&RG built its main line down the valley a century before. At that time the hillsides were forested with Douglas fir on the wetter north-facing slopes and ponderosa pine on the warmer, dryer, south-facing slopes. The erosion following the logging and overgrazing had been so severe that only a century later was the ponderosa beginning to re-establish itself on the ridgetops and creep down toward the valley floors, and because the topsoil had mostly eroded away the trees were not robust and were being successfully attacked by bark beetle. The Douglas fir will likely never come back until the climate becomes considerably wetter and colder. The creeks in the valley floor which had previously supported substantial fish populations are still drowned in silt and are vulnerable to flooding after any cloudburst because the precipitation is no longer captured by the vegetation.
Railway Man wrote: Nor does narrow-gauge have an advantage over standard-gauge in being able to handle tighter curves: standard-gauge equipment can turn almost as tight a corner, and often did on logging railroads, interurbans, and mining railroads, so long as the equipment is the same length, locomotives have blind center drivers and short wheelbases, etc.
Nor does narrow-gauge have an advantage over standard-gauge in being able to handle tighter curves: standard-gauge equipment can turn almost as tight a corner, and often did on logging railroads, interurbans, and mining railroads, so long as the equipment is the same length, locomotives have blind center drivers and short wheelbases, etc.
I would think that the "curve resistance" would be less with narrow gauge due to the spacing between the inner and outer wheels being a smaller fraction of the curve radius. Having said that, it is probably a rather small advantage in relation to all of the disadvantages of narrow gauge.
Interesting insights on the effects of D&RG's high rate structure.
It is, but the mechanical advantage was offset by the tighter degree of curvature common to narrow-gauge. And in any event curve resistance is a small fraction of grade resistance.
Interestingly, curve resistance plays a part in descending grades that can be quite significant. The most outstanding example I know of is Cima Hill on the LA&SL, 17 miles of 2.2% with virtually no curvature. During the steam era westward trains often exceeded the available braking horsepower because of the lack of curve resistance, and accordingly empty stockcars were kept at the summit where downhill drag freights would pick up a string to decrease their tons per operative brake. At Kelso, the drag would set them out, and the next light eastward train would take them back to Cima.
Railway Man wrote:UPS and FedEx have very different business models. FedEx's began as a high-service, high-value delivery service for documents using contract labor to drive the trucks and part-time labor to run the sort centers in order to offload as much of the cost of labor onto the general ledger of the taxpayers as possible. FedEx was also conceived under the premise of cheap oil being a permanent thing. FedEx's model has a low volume output in relation to the manhours and gallons of fuel input, and thus works so long as the differential between the cost of labor and fuel can be paced by what the market will bear for the price of the outputs. If input costs rise sharply, the business model gets squeezed. FedEx began before e-mail and the internet slashed the demand for overnight document delivery, and to its management's credit recognized that trend early and used its cash strength to build a large LTL trucking system that is sort of a hybrid between UPS and a traditional LTL trucker like Yellow Freight. A question now is whether the overnight express business still has legs; there are some analysts who think not especially given some recent court rulings that the drivers do not qualify as independent contractors, which if upheld will dramatically increase the labor cost. The ground LTL business has economies of scale by sharing facilities and overhead with the express business; if the express business dwindles will the LTL business look like everyone else's LTL businesses -- which barely make money in the best of times? I don't know.
IIRC, FedEX ground is what used to be Roadway Package Service (think I got the name right...).
In one way, the advent of the World Wide Web was probably more of a benefit to the likes of FedEX and UPS with the advent of "e-commerce" (which is a speeded up form of mail-order). There are times where it is very handy to have an order arrive the next day - and it can be cheaper for many businesses to pay the premium of overnight delivery rather than stocking the parts/supplies. Even digital information can be sent faster by FedEx - shipping a 1 TB hard-drive by overnight is equivalent to a 20 megabyte per second data link.
While this is mostly a post to get this in "My Forums" (this is a REALLY great read!), I thought I'd add an uneducated theory on Gould. Being thrust into the man of the Family bread and butter, the Mopac, maybe(?!) Gould's idea was protection of himself and MP. Many rail owners had been in the game a long time and (in his mind, and probably in reality) had forgotten more tricks to ruin the competition than he knew. By expanding his reach, he would guarantee his home road friendly connections to the east and west, albeit somewhat out and around. It would also make him a little to large for someone to get an easy run on him, or his railroad, in the stock market. Any competitor would hard struck to cut off connections for the MP.
Perhaps it wasn't an attempt at large scale provado that drove him, but a childlike sense of fear of failure of losing the family bread and butter? I don't think he had any thoughts of creating a transcontinental railroad, or even trying create a bull-run on the stock market, just a cub's strange attempt at trying to protect the MP from the big bears of the industry.
Just a thought...
Edit: ooh, ooh, ooh, just had an after-thought (always after the the original post, isn't it? And it keeps this on-topic). Gould obviously wanting and needing a guaranteed friendly western connection, probably couldn't afford ATSF, and Harriman's roads were clearly not an option (Harriman being the biggest threat to Gould and MP in the west), and Hill's lines going way to far north before going west, Rio Grande would have been his only option. Woo-hoo!, but Rio Grande didn't go anywhere near California. Gould, it seems, would have had no choice but to acquire the Rio Grande and build the WP. Any thoughts on Hill having maybe quietly pushing the young Gould to take such a chance to annoy Harriman, and give his own system a California connection in the process (further irritating Harriman, I'm sure!). All with Gould's money, not his own. All the reward, and none of the risk, and all he had to do was convince a young, inexperienced Gould that Harriman was a real threat thim him he HAD to build to California to protect himself and his Mopac. Then build a few short miles to connect to it. I'm sure Hill was salivating at the thought of Gould (not just the Rio Grande) going bankrupt building the WP and upgrading the RG, then step in and buy up the RG/WP quick to put him into Northern California via the Q at Denver and the NP at Berber, Ca. Even if he had nothing to do with, he had to salivating at the thought. I would have been... hehehe!
A win-win situation. If Gould succeeds, he has a friendly connection to N. Cal. for two of his roads (which, he did). If he fails, Hill steps in and buys it all up and finishes it himself.
I'm probably going off the far end, but rivalries (in any major industry of the time) in those days seem to me to have been as much personal as they were business.
I guess basically what I'm asking what about the possiblity that a young and inexperinced Gould may not have been a man of great, yet misunderstood, forsight, but boy played by the type of people he was hoping to ward of, hoping for his quick demise.
snagletooth wrote:Edit: ooh, ooh, ooh, just had an after-thought (always after the the original post, isn't it? And it keeps this on-topic). Gould obviously wanting and needing a guaranteed friendly western connection, probably couldn't afford ATSF, and Harriman's roads were clearly not an option (Harriman being the biggest threat to Gould and MP in the west), and Hill's lines going way to far north before going west, Rio Grande would have been his only option. Woo-hoo!, but Rio Grande didn't go anywhere near California. Gould, it seems, would have had no choice but to acquire the Rio Grande and build the WP. Any thoughts on Hill having maybe quietly pushing the young Gould to take such a chance to annoy Harriman, and give his own system a California connection in the process (further irritating Harriman, I'm sure!). All with Gould's money, not his own. All the reward, and none of the risk, and all he had to do was convince a young, inexperienced Gould that Harriman was a real threat thim him he HAD to build to California to protect himself and his Mopac. Then build a few short miles to connect to it. I'm sure Hill was salivating at the thought of Gould (not just the Rio Grande) going bankrupt building the WP and upgrading the RG, then step in and buy up the RG/WP quick to put him into Northern California via the Q at Denver and the NP at Berber, Ca. Even if he had nothing to do with, he had to salivating at the thought. I would have been... hehehe!
Only problem is that the Inland Gateway was completed in the early 1930's, not the 1900's. By the way, it was the Great Northern, not the NP that connected to the WP at Bieber.
Railway Man wrote: lower cost of equipment (because it's smaller)lower cost of grading and construction of an embankment to support the track (because it's narrower)lower cost of track structure and bridges (because the equipment is lighter).RWM
Murph,
In addition to 3' rolling stock being narrower than standard gauge rolling stock, the cars and locomotives would typically be not be as tall as their standard gauge equivalents. Also figure that the width would come close to scaling proportionally with gauge for stability reasons. The upshot is that a 3' gauge car or locomotive may weigh half of a standard guage car or locomotive, which would allow for much lighter rail - bridges could be made lighter as well. With allowances for sharper curves and steeper grades, a narrow gauge line becomes much cheaper to build than a standard gauge line.
The downer is that the narrow gauge line is much more expensive to operate...
had to search a bit to find a picture
IDK to me 36" narrow gauge feels more human size... standard gauge is just fricken huge and I'm 6'3!
arbfbe wrote:The narrow gauge vs the standard gauge argument went on in the railroad trade press in the 1850s through about 1900 in a form which would do this forum proud. Proponents on both sides were set in their arguments and carried on editorial and personal battles right to then end of major railroad construction. Niether side was willing to give an inch. Economically the standard gauge side won the war but I am sure there would be individuals who would argue that the biggest mistake the UP and CP made was building their transcontinental railroad to standard gauge instead of 3' standards. The flip side is from the minority who believed in 5' and 6' gauge standards, if standard gauge was good, wide gauge would be better. If people had the forsight to look into what railroads would become by 2008 they could have noted the standard gaugers were too narrow minded to build for the future and not the present.
Professor George W. Hilton has gotten into this subject in detail for those who cannot seem to grasp what RWM is talking about. Best description and analysis would be in "American Narrow Gauge Railroads" Stanford University Press 1994.
mudchicken wrote: Professor George W. Hilton has gotten into this subject in detail for those who cannot seem to grasp what RWM is talking about. Best description and analysis would be in "American Narrow Gauge Railroads" Stanford University Press 1994.
mudchicken wrote:Professor George W. Hilton has gotten into this subject in detail for those who cannot seem to grasp what RWM is talking about. Best description and analysis would be in "American Narrow Gauge Railroads" Stanford University Press 1994.
A very fine book indeed. The format of the book is similar to his 1964 book on electric interurbans, though production values had improved in the intervening 30 years. I was impressed by how the book was laid out, done by someone with very good taste (might have something to do with D.E. Knuth being a Stanford prof).The book is filled with all sorts of interesting details about the history and technology of the narrow gauge lines.
Hilton also touches upon the subject of wide gauge RR's to complete the coverage as to why standard gauge is standard in this country. One common problem to both narrow and wide gauge lines was the lack of the network effect - i.e. a standard gauge car could go to hundreds of different RR's all over North America, where narrow or wide gauge cars could at best be intechanged with a couple of lines over a limited geographical area.
Makes me wonder what the US would have been like if we went for the Erie's 6 foot gauge...
Which reminds me - one advantage of narrow gauge (and a disadvantage for wide gauge) is that the axles end up being shorter, lighter and stiffer for the same diameter.
Mr_Ash wrote: had to search a bit to find a pictureIDK to me 36" narrow gauge feels more human size... standard gauge is just fricken huge and I'm 6'3!
Looks like a "N"-scale car next to a "HO"-scale car.
Yes, and the trucks, themselves, would be lighter (probably...if they accommodate smaller axles) which means less unsprung weight, and that would probably be easier on the rails?
Erik?
selector wrote: Yes, and the trucks, themselves, would be lighter (probably...if they accommodate smaller axles) which means less unsprung weight, and that would probably be easier on the rails? Erik?
Less unsprung weight would be easier on the rail structure, but remember that the whole rail structure is also lighter to begin with. Cape gauge (3'6") carries some heavy tonnages in South Africa and Queensland, but the engineering is also much more robust than what most of us picture for narrow gauge.
Thanks, Paul.
Murphy Siding wrote: One last question, before this thread slips off into oblivion. Alfred E. Perlman played a central role in PennCentral. Most accounts note that he was hired by the NYC based on what he did for the Rio Grande. They never really go into detail what he actually did for DRGW. What was his role, that he received such high marks for?
I've never heard specifics. It's an interesting question and I would like to know the answer, too.
P.S. -- as long as you keep asking questions, you'll keep this thread alive.
CSSHEGEWISCH wrote: selector wrote: Yes, and the trucks, themselves, would be lighter (probably...if they accommodate smaller axles) which means less unsprung weight, and that would probably be easier on the rails? Erik?Less unsprung weight would be easier on the rail structure, but remember that the whole rail structure is also lighter to begin with. Cape gauge (3'6") carries some heavy tonnages in South Africa and Queensland, but the engineering is also much more robust than what most of us picture for narrow gauge.
Indeed! Spoornet is quite a rail system. It and the Western Australia iron-ore haulers show what can be done with a single-purpose line versus the compromises inherent in a network such as North America. North America is fortunate that its early builders were so cash poor as it forced them away from emulating British practice with its emphasis on grade and curve minima, thus little investment was made in a fixed plant conceived for a small loading gauge.
Found a better Standard gauge vs Narrow gauge photo, this one is of D&RGW passenger car's, those NG coaches arnt that small. The NG coach on the left is 319 with the closed vestibules from when it was modernized for the "San Juan" trains
http://photoswest.org/cgi-bin/imager?00401110+RR-1110
Also here is one showing SG vs NG Cabeese and duel gauge track in Alamosa
http://www.drgw.org/features/hall/ala08.htm
snagletooth wrote: While this is mostly a post to get this in "My Forums" (this is a REALLY great read!), I thought I'd add an uneducated theory on Gould. Being thrust into the man of the Family bread and butter, the Mopac, maybe(?!) Gould's idea was protection of himself and MP. Many rail owners had been in the game a long time and (in his mind, and probably in reality) had forgotten more tricks to ruin the competition than he knew. By expanding his reach, he would guarantee his home road friendly connections to the east and west, albeit somewhat out and around. It would also make him a little to large for someone to get an easy run on him, or his railroad, in the stock market. Any competitor would hard struck to cut off connections for the MP. Perhaps it wasn't an attempt at large scale provado that drove him, but a childlike sense of fear of failure of losing the family bread and butter? I don't think he had any thoughts of creating a transcontinental railroad, or even trying create a bull-run on the stock market, just a cub's strange attempt at trying to protect the MP from the big bears of the industry.Just a thought... Edit: ooh, ooh, ooh, just had an after-thought (always after the the original post, isn't it? And it keeps this on-topic). Gould obviously wanting and needing a guaranteed friendly western connection, probably couldn't afford ATSF, and Harriman's roads were clearly not an option (Harriman being the biggest threat to Gould and MP in the west), and Hill's lines going way to far north before going west, Rio Grande would have been his only option. Woo-hoo!, but Rio Grande didn't go anywhere near California. Gould, it seems, would have had no choice but to acquire the Rio Grande and build the WP. Any thoughts on Hill having maybe quietly pushing the young Gould to take such a chance to annoy Harriman, and give his own system a California connection in the process (further irritating Harriman, I'm sure!). All with Gould's money, not his own. All the reward, and none of the risk, and all he had to do was convince a young, inexperienced Gould that Harriman was a real threat thim him he HAD to build to California to protect himself and his Mopac. Then build a few short miles to connect to it. I'm sure Hill was salivating at the thought of Gould (not just the Rio Grande) going bankrupt building the WP and upgrading the RG, then step in and buy up the RG/WP quick to put him into Northern California via the Q at Denver and the NP at Berber, Ca. Even if he had nothing to do with, he had to salivating at the thought. I would have been... hehehe! A win-win situation. If Gould succeeds, he has a friendly connection to N. Cal. for two of his roads (which, he did). If he fails, Hill steps in and buys it all up and finishes it himself. I'm probably going off the far end, but rivalries (in any major industry of the time) in those days seem to me to have been as much personal as they were business. I guess basically what I'm asking what about the possiblity that a young and inexperinced Gould may not have been a man of great, yet misunderstood, forsight, but boy played by the type of people he was hoping to ward of, hoping for his quick demise.
You bring up concepts that are true but are case specific. In the case of the D&RGW, they don't apply. Here's why.
In the era of George Gould, the vast preponderance of traffic was local -- a term of art that means "originates and terminates on the same railroad," as opposed to interchange. Thus for the MoPac, a big, sprawling system, so long as it had a substantial presence in its own territory, the threat of an end-run by another system was not crucial. Where railroads competed sharply in that era was for traffic between small towns and large cities where the move was local to two or more railroads, e.g., wheat moving from Fort Scott, Kansas, to Kansas City. It could move on either Santa Fe or MoPac as a local move, and the rate and service competition pitted the Santa Fe-served elevator in Fort Scott vs. the MoPac-served elevator in Fort Scott. Both would access the same or equivalent terminal elevator in Kansas City.
Only when railroads wanted to support a line with thin local support whose purpose was to bring traffic to and from a point of articulation would transcon-level traffic competition apply. The example in the MoPac's case would the same line that passed through Fort Scott, which encountered increasingly desolate territory beyond Lindsborg, Kansas -- about the western limit of European style spring-planting, rain-supported agriculture -- until for practical purposes it was in a desert, before reaching the articulation point of Pueblo. To make that line pay, the MoPac needed interchange traffic with the D&RGW. The D&RGW was a traffic-originator. Its traffic base was coal, metals, livestock, and some products of farms that it either delivered to the cities at its endpoints, or to connections. The D&RGW as originator of the traffic had some choice of where it went. To the east, it could hand off to the C&S or Santa Fe at Trinidad for points southeast, at Pueblo to MoPac or the Santa Fe at Pueblo for points east, or haul north to Colorado Springs to the Rock Island for points east, or to the UP or CB&Q at Denver for points east (or the Rock Island, too). As Pueblo was the first point of articulation reached east of the Rocky Mountains, the principal choice for traffic flowing out of the mountains was the Santa Fe or MoPac. For practical reasons the D&RGW preferred the MoPac as it had no parallel routes where it competed with the MoPac whereas it was paralleled from Denver to Trinidad by the Santa Fe, and as far west as Canon City, too. The MoPac (Gould) controlled the D&RGW at an early date to protect this profitable business.
Now we come to the Western Pacific. The point often overlooked is that the D&RGW was not viable as a transcontinental railroad until about 1928-29. It was simply too slow, too expensive to operate, and too fragile to be a competitor on anything other than paper. Thus in 1902 or so, when Gould conceived of building the WP, there could have been no intent of protecting an existing transcontinental traffic flow to the MP via the D&RGW, because there was virtually none.
If Gould's plan was to build a transcontinental railroad -- and there's little evidence but hearsay to support that conclusion -- then building the WP was only half the problem solved. He still had a gap between Salt Lake City and Pueblo that was filled only by a transcon-in-being; it was not practical for use. From an engineering and operating perspective, what the D&RGW had was a right-of-way already acquired, and a track just good enough to run construction trains to build a new railroad more-or-less in the same right-of-way. Nor did Gould have the assets to mortgage or cash in the bank to pay for rebuilding the D&RGW. Perhaps Gould anticipated that general economic growth would create so much traffic that he could bootstrap the reconstruction of the D&RGW. If he thought that, then he was not too astute about geography, mining, agriculture, or manufacturing, as there was little prospect of that growth occurring due to the lack of water in the West. E.H. Harriman and J.J. Hill were that astute, and refrained from building useless extensions into deserts or from parallelling already-built railroads that had taken up the best location. Where they clashed they soon cooperated.
It's hard for us to day, with coal moving from Wyoming to Georgia, containers from Los Angeles to Newark, and lumber from British Columbia to Florida, to contemplate the world as it was in 1900, when the average haul for lumber and coal was perhaps one hundred miles. Transcon strategy then was to seize the productive local territory first, attract the shippers to trackside and encourage them to invest in trackside structures and facilities for handling the business, and build up the local business carefully and prudently. At points of articulation, the idea was that it mattered not who or how many was the connections, only that if the preponderance of the traffic originated or had to terminate only on your railroad, then you controlled the connection. The UP was the classic example at Council Bluffs of this strategy.
chad thomas wrote:I recall reading where he was responsible for introduceing spectoral analasys of diesel engine oil to determine when major componets were near failure (due to metalic residues in the lube oil).
I've read those accounts too, Chad, along with some others. The problem is context. If, for example, we had an article from a respected railway mechanical journal such as Modern Shop entitled "Advances in Diesel-Electric Maintenance through Spectrographic Analysis of Lubricating Oil," and in that article it said something like "The D&RGW, under the leadership of A.E. Perlman, was the first to investigate and employ these methods, which were then emulated by all other railroads," then we'd really be on to something. But instead, the source is a history of the D&RGW, a history whose preparation was financed by the D&RGW, and with a thesis statement that could be described as "This is the greatest railway EVER. Trust me." The source and the context is not sufficient for a reader to judge if the fact has meaning.
I will applaud and honor the person who shoulders the herculean task of plowing through all the railway professional journals published during Perlman's era at the D&RGW and reports back whether he caught the attention of his peers, or made a difference at the D&RGW that proved his mettle, or did things that advanced the industry. And I'll be thrilled, because I'd like to know the answer, too. I have been through every issue of Railway Age from 1890-1970, page-by-page, item-by-item, and I did read everything I could find on D&RGW, but that's just one journal, and one because of its breadth of scope is unlikely to be definitive on mechanical engineering or track and structures engineering. I don't recall anything about Perlman that was astonishing but I wasn't looking for it either. Someday when I retire from the railroad job I will repeat my steps and look. I do recall that the D&RGW got more press than it would if on a per-capita revenue or mileage basis, which is in itself a good sign that maybe its management was indeed better than your average bear. Or, perhaps the editors of Railway Age just liked the scenery!
I believe that while Perlman was in a high-up Engineering or Operating Dept. position with the D&RGW, he pioneered - or at least provided a great case study in - the use of off-track construction equipment. That would include such types as bulldozers, dump trucks, and the like, instead of work-train steam shovels, cranes with clamshell buckets, and gondolas or dump cars, etc. My recollection is this occurred in restoring a key line back to service in an incredibly short time after a flood (or similar event) - far quicker and with less work-train disruption to resuming operations than would otherwise have been expected.
There have been at least 1 - and maybe 2 - articles on Perlman in Trains since about 1970 - 1 of them within the last 5 years or so, that would confirm my recollection. I'll try to provide a citation in the next day or two.
- Paul North.
Railway Man wrote: chad thomas wrote:I recall reading where he was responsible for introduceing spectoral analasys of diesel engine oil to determine when major componets were near failure (due to metalic residues in the lube oil).I've read those accounts too, Chad, along with some others. The problem is context. If, for example, we had an article from a respected railway mechanical journal such as Modern Shop entitled "Advances in Diesel-Electric Maintenance through Spectrographic Analysis of Lubricating Oil," and in that article it said something like "The D&RGW, under the leadership of A.E. Perlman, was the first to investigate and employ these methods, which were then emulated by all other railroads," then we'd really be on to something. But instead, the source is a history of the D&RGW, a history whose preparation was financed by the D&RGW, and with a thesis statement that could be described as "This is the greatest railway EVER. Trust me." The source and the context is not sufficient for a reader to judge if the fact has meaning. I will applaud and honor the person who shoulders the herculean task of plowing through all the railway professional journals published during Perlman's era at the D&RGW and reports back whether he caught the attention of his peers, or made a difference at the D&RGW that proved his mettle, or did things that advanced the industry. And I'll be thrilled, because I'd like to know the answer, too. I have been through every issue of Railway Age from 1890-1970, page-by-page, item-by-item, and I did read everything I could find on D&RGW, but that's just one journal, and one because of its breadth of scope is unlikely to be definitive on mechanical engineering or track and structures engineering. I don't recall anything about Perlman that was astonishing but I wasn't looking for it either. Someday when I retire from the railroad job I will repeat my steps and look. I do recall that the D&RGW got more press than it would if on a per-capita revenue or mileage basis, which is in itself a good sign that maybe its management was indeed better than your average bear. Or, perhaps the editors of Railway Age just liked the scenery!RWM
RWM, Thanks for your input. Thinking about it I got that from a WP / Al Perlman article by Rush Loveing Jr. a while back in Trains mag. I figured it was credible and took it on face value.
For a guy who started as a track laborer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, he went a long ways fast. In general, for those who believe the industry is always right, Perlman stands in marked contrast by nearly always proving it wrong. For those who take the trouble to use search engines, there is a great deal of information on line. For those who prefer to let others do their work for them, I am sure someone will oblige.
"Alfred E. Perlman Dies at 80; New York Central President." The New York Times. May 2, 1983.
An interesting appearance in a corporate movie:
http://www.archive.org/details/BigTrain1950
His biggest impact on the industry was perhaps not through his ill-fated role in the Penn Central debacle, and certainly not the D&RGW, but through the impact of his various vice presidents and assistants, generally equipped with the MBA degree he felt most important, spreading out through the industry as they jumped a sinking ship, generically known as "Perlman's Boys", bringing modern financial analytical tools to the industry.
To briefly correct & supplement my previous post:
Perlman's innovative work in restoring washed-out rail lines was on the CB&Q in the 1930's, not the D&RGW.
Perlman is also - and perhaps better - known for restoring the bankrupt Denver & Rio Grande to profitability, as Executive Vice President under Judge Wilson McCarthy.
He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from MIT in 1923, and a Masters in Railway Transportation from Harvard Business School in 1931 - neither one a shabby institution.
Railway Man wrote: In simplest terms, Amtrak M&E was an initiative in which Amtrak would market intermodal services in direct competition with Class I intermodal services, and achieve pricing power by continuing to use Amtrak's passenger train slots which by law are costed to Amtrak at a tiny fraction of their true value. Amtrak M&E even proposed to expand Amtrak service to a large swath of new lanes, service which consisted of an intermodal train with a token Amtrak rider coach on the rear, anticipating that it could purchase these slots again at a fraction of true market value because in its eyes it was creating a new public good.The reaction from the Class Is to this initiative varied from "You've got to be kidding" to "OK, I see now that you're serious but preternaturally naiive -- and the answer is no."Romantically, it sure looked like a way to revisit the passenger glory days of yore. From a practical viewpoint, it was if a railroad's passenger, mail & express business suddenly seceded from the railroad, set up its own business with its own books, bank accounts, and profit extraction, and was shocked when the freight railroad paid a visit and asked it to start paying rent on its stations, tracks, and shops. RWM
Railway Man wrote: I've read those accounts too, Chad, along with some others. The problem is context. If, for example, we had an article from a respected railway mechanical journal such as Modern Shop entitled "Advances in Diesel-Electric Maintenance through Spectrographic Analysis of Lubricating Oil," and in that article it said something like "The D&RGW, under the leadership of A.E. Perlman, was the first to investigate and employ these methods, which were then emulated by all other railroads," then we'd really be on to something. But instead, the source is a history of the D&RGW, a history whose preparation was financed by the D&RGW, and with a thesis statement that could be described as "This is the greatest railway EVER. Trust me." The source and the context is not sufficient for a reader to judge if the fact has meaning.
Unfortunately, most readers come unprepared for the task, even suspending any natural analytical skills in favor of believing and perpetuating mythologies. Indeed, many come looking for such mythologies, as if it fulfills some personal need to have them, and facts be d*****. A railfan forum is probably not the place to make the observation, but the symptoms certainly show up on a regular basis, with questions being posed that clearly presume the answer the questioner wants to hear, with predictable results if the questioner hears an answer that does not confirm his romantic self-interests and an almost embarassing adulation if he does.
And it's not that much better on the professional side. Historians with little economics background trying to make sense of an economic history; Economists with little understanding of the historically peculiar nature of the rail industry; Business writers with little historical or economic training attempting to manufacture a rational explanation for what they see.
D&RG is symptomatic. People want to anthropomorphize circumstance. It's a "plucky" little railroad, isn't it? "Persistant"! Well no, circumstances pretty much defined everything that happened. Alfred Perlman has been identified in some publications as the man that "brought the D&RG" out of bankruptcy, as though that were a yeoman's task vindicating assessments of his brilliance. Actually, every single railroad that entered bankruptcy in the period 1935-1937 -- and there was a bunch -- also came out of bankruptcy 1945-1947. Perlman was Chief Engineer until 1947 and had little to do with any "turnaround" since he was general manager for the period after the railroad left bankruptcy. Too, the "turnaround" had little to do with anything that was not directly tied to WWII and post-War prosperity. But, one explanation fits the "narrative" and the other is pretty mundane.
While it is possible from time to time to identify an original builder as giving life to a genuine dream, even that often falls victim in the hands of railfans and historians alike to some innate desire to tell a good story, rather than the truth. Most likely because while one is easier to tell, the other requires some hard work.
MichaelSol wrote:D&RG is symptomatic. People want to anthropomorphize circumstance. It's a "plucky" little railroad, isn't it? "Persistant"! Well no, circumstances pretty much defined everything that happened.
I think I'd be one of the first to anthropomorphize the railroad. No matter the set of circumstances, there's still human interaction with those circumstances. I think it's a natural reaction to impart human attributes on inanimate objects because of the human element involved with those objects and the circumstances at any given moment.
While the D&RG might have been "plucky" or "persistant," I think the same can be said to any even higher degree for the RGS. There's a railroad that had no business surviving as long as it did. Circumstances certainly changed quite a bit for that railroad during it's lifetime, but the determination of the individuals associated with it kept it alive. It's just natural for me to sum up their efforts as a whole by anthropomorphizing the corporate entity that was common to them all -- so I say that the RGS was a plucky little railroad!
MichaelSol wrote: ...Unfortunately, most readers come unprepared for the task, even suspending any natural analytical skills in favor of believing and perpetuating mythologies. Indeed, many come looking for such mythologies, as if it fulfills some personal need to have them, and facts be d*****. A railfan forum is probably not the place to make the observation, but the symptoms certainly show up on a regular basis, with questions being posed that clearly presume the answer the questioner wants to hear, with predictable results if the questioner hears an answer that does not confirm his romantic self-interests and an almost embarassing adulation if he does....
...Unfortunately, most readers come unprepared for the task, even suspending any natural analytical skills in favor of believing and perpetuating mythologies. Indeed, many come looking for such mythologies, as if it fulfills some personal need to have them, and facts be d*****. A railfan forum is probably not the place to make the observation, but the symptoms certainly show up on a regular basis, with questions being posed that clearly presume the answer the questioner wants to hear, with predictable results if the questioner hears an answer that does not confirm his romantic self-interests and an almost embarassing adulation if he does.
...
Michael, I think by now we get that you feel you have been hard done by of late. Could we give it a rest already and just stick to the discussion without so much editorializing? And, I am not making this observation in a vacuum; the off-line grumbling is getting harder to ignore.
Murphy Siding wrote: The other thing that keeps popping up is the narrow gauge issue. As I read it, railroads built narrow gauge to save money. They could build them cheaper, with tighter turns, and apparantly(?) steeper grades(?) Later, when some of the lines were standard gauged, it would seem like an engineering mess on some of the lines. I'm not sure how you'd retroactively fix tight turns and steep grades.
Converting lines from narrow to standard gage was a mess, but so was the realignment and general upgrades made to many standard gage lines as their business took off.
I have some random thoughts about the choice of gage, starting with my belief that there is no gage that is fundamentally superior or inferior to any other as long as it is ideally matched to its purpose. Eventually a consensus developed around a gage of 56-1/2" to meet the average purpose. In the beginning, however, everybody had a different idea about what the ideal gage should be. Some thought 56-1/2" was too narrow, and some thought 24" was wide enough.
The argument simply revolved around matching the capacity of the plant (the size of train and track) to the transportation job. Excessive size/capacity was deemed a waste of resources. The decision was exacerbated by not knowing what the future need would be, considering the inflexibility of changing gage once a line was built.
Because railroads provide for long, self-guiding vehicles, if you have a choice in making the vehicle wide or narrow, it makes sense to make it narrow. To carry the same load in a wider, but shorter vehicle requires a wider track all the way, and the majority of the plant cost is in the track and earthwork. Thus the motive was to achieve the largest train capacity on the narrowest track and roadbed.
Therefore, as the gage concept narrowed, the tendency was to narrow the track disproportionately more than the train. The resulting increase in overhang led to charges by the larger gage advocates that narrow gage had problems with stability. In fact the objective of stability seems to have played a big part in the choice of gages of six feet or more, which was seen as a way to minimize overhang as much as its ability to increase capacity. This broad gage school regarded 56-1/2" as narrow gage, and argued against it just as the 56-1/2" advocates argued against gages such as 36."
The plot really thickened when railroads became so numerous that they connected, and thus found the advantage of interchangeability as an alternative to breaking bulk. Then with that development, in addition to the objective of matching the scale of the plant to the size of the task, there was the hope of choosing a gage that would eventually become standard with all other lines, coupled with the speculation about what that consensus gage would end up being. So, not only was building a railroad faced with the difficulty of financing and construction, but also it required the commitment to selecting a gage that not only matched its transportation task at the time of construction and into the future, but also matched the anticipated future gage of its interchanging lines.
Bucyrus:
Your logic is sound, though I think arguing that so long as the gauge is ideally matched to its purpose the specifics of the gauge are of no matter, leaves unanswered the more important question about purpose. Also, I am not aware that narrow-gauge created any significant stability problems. I don't recall that in any of my old engineering texts. Aren't there some high-speed lines that are less than standard-gauge?
I agree that prior to the Civil War the technology and the industry was immature and it was not ignorant or incorrect to have reasonable differences of opinion about the prior gauge. But by the 1870s, when the D&RG was incorporated, the technology and culture of railways was fully mature and almost the only plausible rationale for narrow-gauge was if the railway was conceived as a short-term get-rich scheme with no intent of economic development of the territory. For a one-shot mining road like the Eureka & Palisade or White Pass & Yukon, deep in a territory that would obviously never support agriculture or manufacturing, narrow-gauge was a reasonable choice as a means to strip an ore body of its riches and withdraw. To lay narrow-gauge in Ohio or Iowa after even 1860 was idiocy. At that time the industry was already a half-century old and there was no excuse for being innocent of the paradigms. It would be as if Boeing announced their 797 would be built from fabric and sprucewood spars in order to save a little bit on materials.
Railway Man wrote: Bucyrus:Your logic is sound, though I think arguing that so long as the gauge is ideally matched to its purpose the specifics of the gauge are of no matter, leaves unanswered the more important question about purpose. Also, I am not aware that narrow-gauge created any significant stability problems. I don't recall that in any of my old engineering texts. Aren't there some high-speed lines that are less than standard-gauge?I agree that prior to the Civil War the technology and the industry was immature and it was not ignorant or incorrect to have reasonable differences of opinion about the prior gauge. But by the 1870s, when the D&RG was incorporated, the technology and culture of railways was fully mature and almost the only plausible rationale for narrow-gauge was if the railway was conceived as a short-term get-rich scheme with no intent of economic development of the territory. For a one-shot mining road like the Eureka & Palisade or White Pass & Yukon, deep in a territory that would obviously never support agriculture or manufacturing, narrow-gauge was a reasonable choice as a means to strip an ore body of its riches and withdraw. To lay narrow-gauge in Ohio or Iowa after even 1860 was idiocy. At that time the industry was already a half-century old and there was no excuse for being innocent of the paradigms. It would be as if Boeing announced their 797 would be built from fabric and sprucewood spars in order to save a little bit on materials. RWM
The stability I am referring to is the issue of increasing overhang (as a percentage of gage) as the gage is reduced. I don't think that it was ever a practical problem because it was adequately offset by lowering the center of gravity. The two-foot-gage lines seemed to be the ultimate test of how much overhang was possible, and I recall reading that they ran passenger trains up to 60 mph. The issue of stability was mostly just a claim that anyone could make to support a wider gage. Although, I also recall reading in The Main Two-Footers about a passenger train that completely tipped over while standing still on a super-elevated curve. I do recall reading a few oblique references to the charge of narrow gage instability in the tally of wrecks published in the Railroad Gazette. In some cases where equipment tipped over with seemingly unusual ease, they mentioned that the line was narrow gage as if to explain the accident with the implication of instability.
I agree that when I mentioned matching gage to purpose, the bigger challenge is quantifying purpose. And purpose would also include compatibility, which naturally grows more necessary as systems develop, and ultimately usually eclipses the parts of purpose that deal with traffic, location, etc. I would guess that if the dictates of compatibility were somehow magically suspended, American gage would have continued to grow just as all the other physical attributes of trains and tracks have.
I think the reports of trains tipping over and the report that "it was narrow-gauge" was a sarcastic inference to the usual lackadaisical approach to safety, maintenance, and efficiency of the narrow-gauge lines, not an issue with the physics. D&RG narrow-gauge track maintenance standards could be written down in three words: "We don't bother." The trade press considered the narrow-gauge lines as something between embarrassment and excrescence.
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