Posted on 04/29/2023 11:56:54 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
Trains just aren’t as useful. Rails are expensive to maintain, and insanely expensive to expand. Roads are used more, easier to maintain, and already being expanded. They’re probably pulling them up to use elsewhere, unused tracks age pretty well.
you bet! lol
so maybe Charlie will get home!
“...so I usually know where to track down information...”. I see what you did there.
Every small Hoosier town was connected by rail
Our surveyors office has a 1800s map on the wall that’s quite interesting . There was rail lines every few miles
I’ve removed a few miles of rail beds over the years. Just last year we did cleared the trees from it and loaded out the stone. Mixed with the cinders, it makes an awesome roadbed for driveways
Most interesting was one stretch that the owner showed me the deed to that was signed by Abe himself
Well over 100 years old, it was cordouroyed with logs throughout low ground and still had bark on the logs
...from a half mile...
Got ahead of myself
Nap time
Rail is now for long-haul point-to-point service, such as from coal mines to power plants or ethanol plants to tank farms. UPS CACH in Chicago is their 2nd largest hub and was built specifically on the old Sante Fe property to take advantage of rail transport to either coast. A lot of Brown rides the train!
Not unless his CBDC social credit score is high enough!
Some rail lines are more active than others. When I had a small acreage in Davis Junction, IL, there were train tracks adjacent to my back fence leading to the junction for which the village was named.
I saw everything from lumber, long metal pipes, windmill blades, tanks, hazardous chemicals, unmarked tankers, but especially HCFS (high fructose corn syrup) going past my backyard constantly. That was in 2014. It is still like that as far as I know (we know our neighbors).
Hard times those were.
Sabotage.
Is it sabotage?
Is it confirmation bias - ie we pay attention and assign meaning to something that normally happen.
I don’t know.
Railroads pay property taxes on the railways. Any seldom used rails will be ripped out, rather than left idle, in order to reduce the tax burden.
Double track will also be ripped up to single track in order to reduce the tax burden.
One thing Connecticut did right was railbanking abandoned railroads. They own the right of way and some of the state owned lines are used for freight (Cental New England) - or tourist train (Valley Railroad) or both (Naugatuck Railroad).
“What is Happening to Rail in the USA?”
Same thing that’s happening to everything else in the country...crapified by democrats.
What’s happening with freight railroads in North America is that the entire industry has undergone a long-term process of consolidation and rationalization. I’ll list a few characteristics of freight railroads in the U.S. today:
1. Since 1950 we have seen huge mergers and acquisitions in the industry, to the point where there are only a half-dozen Class I railroads left in North America — 4 in the U.S. and 2 in Canada.
2. This consolidation in the industry has been accompanied by widespread abandonment of many former lines. This is pretty much a natural consequence of mergers in the industry. If Railroad X has two main lines between New York and Chicago, and it acquires Railroad Y and its own two main lines between New York and Chicago, the merged XY Railroad won’t need all four lines. It will abandon one or two of them and run more trains on the remaining lines.
3. While the conventional wisdom may be that the railroad industry is in decline, the opposite is actually true. The industry runs more carloads today in a typical week or month than it did back in the heyday of railroading before 1950. It’s just that the system operates very differently today than it did then (see #4 below).
4. The railroad industry runs on a business model built entirely on large economies of scale. They run longer, heavier trains over longer distances than ever before. They aren’t interested in serving every small industry on every branch line that used to get one or two carloads per week. Instead, the Class I railroads want to run 100+ car trains over long distances between major terminals.
5. As part of this business model, the railroad industry focuses its business on the customers and commodities that they can move more efficiently than trucks — mainly heavy bulk loads (coal, grain, chemicals, crude oil, etc.) over almost any distance, and shipping containers (both domestic and international) that are being transported at least 500 miles.
When the original poster pointed out that the line next to his home used to have two trains a day operating on it, I figured it was only a matter of time before it was closed down. That level of activity might work for a shortline company operating on a branch line, but there’s no way a Class I carrier would go to great lengths to keep it in service.
As I type this message I am sitting less than 200 yards away from a Norfolk Southern main line that is one of the busiest freight rail segments in the U.S. There are 40+ trains operating along this line on a typical day.
LOL. That was a totally unintended pun.
FWIW — the Federal Railroad Administration reported a total of more than 1,160 derailments across the U.S. in 2022. The vast majority of them are minor incidents that don’t even make the local news.
I'm a big advocate of rails-to-trails as I use those paths frequently - for walking, not biking, however.
I do like the the commuter trains in the NYC metro area. I frequently use Metro North as well as LIRR from time to time. Much better than driving around this area.
Well, that's my input to this thread.
By 1976, Conrail and Amtrak were formed out of the shattered remnants of the Penn Central and several other bankrupt railroads in the Northeast (Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Reading Railroad, Erie Lackawanna, and others).
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