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?
-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
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!
And please, don't use fewer words. I always learn something from your posts, usually several things.
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?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
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.
RWM
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.
"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
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.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.