H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y C O N R A I L !!!!!!

[blownout cylinder]

Some could argue the photos were all photoshopped

I seen a couple of Conrail engines still in the blue livery going through here recently---maybe a number patch but?

[zugmann]

 I think the straight SD40s and GP38s are long gone. Both CR or NS.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Not to split hairs here, but I notice that wabash1 didn't include the ''-2''s for the GP38's and SD40's that he said were not owned by ConRail but by Southern Rwy.  Does what he posted make more sense if we ask if there are ex-SR early GP38'S and SD40's that are now owned by NS that he operates ?  Which appears to be in the western part of the NS system = former SR lines perhaps ?, since he respected the Rock Island and has seen the TRRA SW1500's first-hand, based on his recent posts.

- Paul North. 

[ns3010]

SD40-2

GP38-2

[zugmann]

wabash1

Roflmao quit your whining and begging i aint worried about his site im not concered on your opinion and its your fantisy these is a few dash 9 running out there but most of that junk is dead, and i dont haft to look at pictures i run these things everyday, and the gp38 and sd40 i switch and run locals with are not ex con-fail engines there original southern railway issue, sorry if the truth hurts

 

Conrail never had dash-9s, true.  But still plenty of gp38-2s from Conrail running around.  And Sd40-2s.  C40-8ws. C40-8s. SD60Ms. SD60Is.

A locomotve is only as good as the maintenenace it receives.  I've had plenty of engines, both ex-CR and ex-NS, that were epic failures.   

Not much left stored on NS, either.  They even dusted off the 8700s and brought them out of storage.  Even the SD50s that aren't in the current rebuild program were brought out of Juniata and back on the rails.

And Elvis is alive.  He's a goat farmer in Oregon.

 

[wabash1]

go ahead hit the report abuse button get the modertors involved it dont matter this thread has run its course unless we start talking about elenore waving at the blue trains in the fog

[wabash1]

Roflmao quit your whining and begging i aint worried about his site im not concered on your opinion and its your fantisy these is a few dash 9 running out there but most of that junk is dead, and i dont haft to look at pictures i run these things everyday, and the gp38 and sd40 i switch and run locals with are not ex con-fail engines there original southern railway issue, sorry if the truth hurts

[ns3010]

wabash1

NS never owned a sd40 a gp 38 a dash9 -8 and every GE they took from con-fail is dead at chatt

Yeah, NS DOES own SD40s and GP38s and Dash 8s and 9s. I've seen them all. If you don't want to believe me, then don't.

As a matter of fact, the loco I saw yesterday was NS 5286, a GP38-2 in Conrail Quality paint. If you look at that website, it will say exactly that.

I've referenced that site dozens of times, and seen photos, and everything on the site matches up with photos. Check out photos of NS locos on Railroad Picture Archives, and compare them with that website.

Sorry, but I don't think it's me that's living in a fantasy world...

 

[MP173]

I chose my senior Independent Study in college to be "Can Conrail Succeed?"  Had most of the background info the summer before I wrote it and had a good time with it. 

 

Anyone know of any books out there on Conrail, dealing with the finances, operations, etc and not locomotives?  Conrail Commodities is a great reference.  A book on Stanley Crain would be well worth reading.

 

ed

[CRSD50]

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.

[CRSD50]

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.

[wabash1]

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.

[cr6479]

 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.

[CRSD50]

oltmannd

wabash1

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.

[oltmannd]

CRSD50

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'd go one step farther. No Conrail = No Staggers Act = No railroad renaissance.

[oltmannd]

wabash1

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...

[CRSD50]

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. 

[henry6]

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.

[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

[wabash1]

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

[ns3010]

wabash1

dont 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.

[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.

[wabash1]

elvis is dead to and all the selfish people wont let him die either.

[wabash1]

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.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

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 ?

- Paul North. 

[ns3010]

Doh, how could I forget!

And just yesterday, I saw a NS loco, in CRQ paint, on a CSAO train in Hillside.

Conrail!

[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.

[oltmannd]

Conrail wasn't perfect. Far from it, but there were a few things it did really well that I know about that just didn't transfer well to the new owners. One is the intermodal network. It just hasn't run as well on either of the new owners. Conrail used to try to hit 92% on time to the minute for most of the intermodal fleet, and actually managed to do it for some decent stretches of time. Conrail also was way ahead in data warehousing the transportation data and having systems to manage the traffic, particularly unit train traffic. A lot of this knowledge got lost in the merger shuffle...

[oltmannd]

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,

Funny, I used to think that about all the NS engines I climbed on on Conrail!