happy birthday conrail !!!!! we miss you BIG BLUE
How can you have a birthday for something that is DEAD. and Im glad they are gone and i wish they would have scraped the engines they had also, they was all junk,
No - not dead - as with Mark Twain, the rumors of its demise are premature. Instead, it's just been 'adopted', kind of like a foster child - now co-owned by NS and CSX - the ConRail Shared Assets Operation = CSAO. See -
http://www.conrail.com/freight.htm
- Paul North.
Mechanical Department "No no that's fine shove that 20 pound set all around the yard... those shoes aren't hell and a half to change..."
The Missabe Road: Safety First
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are dead, too, but their birthdays are commemorated and celebrated; not quite sure if Conrail is in the same league, though.
Gone but not forgotten.
cr6479 happy birthday conrail !!!!! we miss you BIG BLUE
Despite what others are saying in here; thank you for posting this.
I like Conrail, it has a great success story, and was a mighty railroad. I grew up watching BIG BLUE parade across Pennsylvania. I was part of my life and part of Pennsylvania life.
By the way, Paul is right; Conrail is not even gone, Shared Assets in Jersey & Michigan.
We miss our Blue Conrail!!!!!!! Yes, Happy Birthday!!!
wabash1 How can you have a birthday for something that is DEAD. and Im glad they are gone and i wish they would have scraped the engines they had also, they was all junk,
Jealous!!
Its not the birth of Conrail that some of us celebrate but rather we mourn the deaths of the Erie Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railorad of New Jersey, The Lehigh and Hudson River, and the Reading. No, not the death of Penn Central, in that we rejoice!
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wabash1How can you have a birthday for something that is DEAD. and Im glad they are gone and i wish they would have scraped the engines they had also, they was all junk,
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Conrail was indeed perfect. It took all the bankrupts of the east and whittled them down to a sleek well run railroad with operating efficiencies and profit potentials worthy of being sold off to other railroads. It was, in effect, a great success.
Conrail was indeed not perfect: major rail lines were abandoned, ripped up, or otherwise discarded, stranding many cities and towns without an efficent and viable rail service contributing to the decline in local industry and development. Other effecient short cuts and important routes (high and wide routes, yard avoidence routes, direct routes, etc.) were lost forever while only those lines coveted or needed by Conrail survived for the benifet of Conrail and not the local economies.
Choose your side.
Doh, how could I forget!
And just yesterday, I saw a NS loco, in CRQ paint, on a CSAO train in Hillside.
Conrail!
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henry6 Its not the birth of Conrail that some of us celebrate but rather we mourn the deaths of the Erie Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railorad of New Jersey, The Lehigh and Hudson River, and the Reading. No, not the death of Penn Central, in that we rejoice!
I was thinking about the ConRail constituent roads the other day, and kind of lost count . . . I don't usually count the jointly-owned Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines separately, but a case could be made for doing that, I can see. Then prompted by something else here - Carl, I suppose - I got to wondering about the Ann Arbor Railroad. I just reviewed the history at - http://www.annarbor-railroad.com/history.html - and in light of that kind of half-in, half-out acquisition by the state of Michigan in March 1976, I now have mixed feelings about how to classify that one. I have no allegiance to the 'Annie', so I don't care either way - but as a matter of history, how should we count it ?
Awesome! wabash1 How can you have a birthday for something that is DEAD. and Im glad they are gone and i wish they would have scraped the engines they had also, they was all junk, Jealous!!
Of what/ a goverment owend and run railroad with junk for engines holes in body frames rusted and shack worse than a bowl of jello, my first trip in con-rail blue engine i turned in a injury form, that is mostly why that conrail junk is gone from the ns to many injury. and the other poster who use to think that of NS engines now you think otherwise exspecialy how smooth they ride, and your glad you dont have that conrail blue junk anymore.
elvis is dead to and all the selfish people wont let him die either.
henry6 Conrail was indeed perfect. It took all the bankrupts of the east and whittled them down to a sleek well run railroad with operating efficiencies and profit potentials worthy of being sold off to other railroads. It was, in effect, a great success. Conrail was indeed not perfect: major rail lines were abandoned, ripped up, or otherwise discarded, stranding many cities and towns without an efficent and viable rail service contributing to the decline in local industry and development. Other effecient short cuts and important routes (high and wide routes, yard avoidence routes, direct routes, etc.) were lost forever while only those lines coveted or needed by Conrail survived for the benifet of Conrail and not the local economies. Choose your side.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
wabash1dont have that conrail blue junk anymore.
Sorry, but I don't see what you're getting at. Over half of the CR locos are still active on NS, and CSX seems to have a lot as well.
what active con-rail locos are active on NS
Murphy Siding henry6 Conrail was indeed perfect. It took all the bankrupts of the east and whittled them down to a sleek well run railroad with operating efficiencies and profit potentials worthy of being sold off to other railroads. It was, in effect, a great success. Conrail was indeed not perfect: major rail lines were abandoned, ripped up, or otherwise discarded, stranding many cities and towns without an efficent and viable rail service contributing to the decline in local industry and development. Other effecient short cuts and important routes (high and wide routes, yard avoidence routes, direct routes, etc.) were lost forever while only those lines coveted or needed by Conrail survived for the benifet of Conrail and not the local economies. Choose your side. How about option 3? Conrail was a neccesary evil, that sucked up something like $7 Billion dollars in tax money to get fromlife-support to profitable railroad.
I didnt want to bring that up and bust their bubble they are having a hard enough time in reality of the death of the money pit.
wabash1 what active con-rail locos are active on NS
756 of the 1,167 originally transferred over.
http://www.nsdash9.com/crrepaints.html
Wabash, you are living far in the past, especially when it comes to Conrail. Your remarks fit the first phase of CR but the management team did take it out of government ownership to the open market and on to a really well run railroad with well maintained and good equipment. Conrail Day One was quite different than the last day by many miles and by millioons of dollars returned on the investment.
You can count me among those who misses Conrail, I mean the Class 1 powerhouse Conrail as we used to know it. Big Blue was my favorite railroad, and now I can't honestly say I have a favorite.
As railfans, we're all entitled to our opinions about who/what we like and don't like. But we need to get the facts straight. Conrail was indeed a success story. It was born out of the rubble of all those bankrupt and decrepit northeast railroads. Yes, at startup they were losing $1million a day in taxpayer money. But they turned it around, and a profitable company was built from it, and in fact the government spun it off at a profit.
The fact that Conrail, I mean the independent Class 1, no longer exists, is due to their success, not failure. CR was so desireable that CSX and NS went into a bidding war, with the result being that CR stock went to $115 per share. That was a huge change from 1976.
I never had the honor of riding a CR locomotive. They certainly inherited alot of "deferred maintenance" locos from the predecessor railroads, but they soon retired these and invested in a lot of modern power.
wabash1what active con-rail locos are active on NS
CRSD50You can count me among those who misses Conrail, I mean the Class 1 powerhouse Conrail as we used to know it. Big Blue was my favorite railroad, and now I can't honestly say I have a favorite. As railfans, we're all entitled to our opinions about who/what we like and don't like. But we need to get the facts straight. Conrail was indeed a success story. It was born out of the rubble of all those bankrupt and decrepit northeast railroads. Yes, at startup they were losing $1million a day in taxpayer money. But they turned it around, and a profitable company was built from it, and in fact the government spun it off at a profit. The fact that Conrail, I mean the independent Class 1, no longer exists, is due to their success, not failure. CR was so desireable that CSX and NS went into a bidding war, with the result being that CR stock went to $115 per share. That was a huge change from 1976.
oltmanndwabash1 what active con-rail locos are active on NS For starters, if it was built before 1998 and it has air conditioning, then it is an ex-Conrail. Only US RR not buying air conditioning on new power in the 1990s was.....NS! Sounds like a bad case of the N&W stubborns. And, that's just for starters...
-And let's not forget toilets in the locos vs. bags issued to crews.
some ex-conrail units still have the RS3L horn on them which is nice to hear again. well....... to me conrail was best railroad to work for as engineers and conductors say.
ns3010 wabash1 what active con-rail locos are active on NS 756 of the 1,167 originally transferred over. http://www.nsdash9.com/crrepaints.html
If you want to put your trust in this guys web site you need to stay as lost as he is, Ive sent him messages of corrections before and nothing ever happened, and to read his list NS never owned a sd40 a gp 38 a dash9 -8 and every GE they took from con-fail is dead at chatt. and they con-fail merger didnt happen ti 2000 late. the engine number are wrong but who cares about con-fail anyways.live in your fantisy, I dont care.
Here's a link of sightings of NS locos still in CR blue. The thread is about 15 pages long and I have the link to the most recent page:
http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=53800&start=210
Obviously, after over 10 years the blue is pretty faded, but we're not even talking about those which have been repainted to NS black&white.
Trying to decipher your comment about 2000, but hard to interpret. Something about the merger/breakup, but this happened in 1999.
If you will please look at these couple links, from the link I posted above, you will see there are indeed a couple recent shots of ex-CR GE's, alive and well and not in Chattanooga.
http://kaback9.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1988569
http://chuchubob.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1927950
http://kaback9.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1988669
There's others, but you get the idea.
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