NFB
Published 2 Sep 2015This documentary short offers a nostalgic look at the steam locomotive as it passes from reality to history. In its heyday, the big smoke-belching steam engine seemed immortal. Now, powerful and efficient diesels are pushing the old coal-burning locomotives to the sidelines, and the lonely echo of their whistles may soon be a thing of the past.
Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate – 1959.
This month’s fallen flag article for Classic Trains is the story of the Texas & Pacific Railway by J. Parker Lamb:
Decorative ticket cover for a Texas & Pacific passenger train. T&P passenger trains were called “Eagles”, as in the Texas Eagle.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
What grew to become the 20th century’s Texas & Pacific Railway sprouted from some of Texas’s earliest railroads. The Lone Star State’s pre-Civil War network included 11 operating companies. One of the earliest was the Texas Western Railroad, chartered in 1850 and soon renamed Vicksburg & El Paso. In 1856 its name changed again, to Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Of course, this SP had no relation to the Southern Pacific incorporated in 1865 in California, although the convoluted histories of their successors later would intersect.
Backers of this railroad envisioned it as part of a southern transcontinental route from the Mississippi River to San Diego. By 1860, construction of 27 miles was completed between Waskom, on the Louisiana border, and Marshall. The eastern connection was planned as the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific, which already stretched from Waskom across Louisiana to the west bank of the Mississippi at Vicksburg (later part of Illinois Central, it is now part of Kansas City Southern’s “Meridian Speedway”).
The Memphis, El Paso & Pacific, chartered in 1856, planned to start at the Red River near Texarkana and build to a connection with the SP near Dallas, thereby bringing Midwestern traffic into the transcontinental route. Little progress was made before the Civil War, however, with only 5 miles of track built, near Jefferson.Within a decade after the war, these two lines would be fused into one company. In 1870 the Memphis road was renamed Southern Transcontinental Railroad, and in 1872 Congress issued a charter for the Texas & Pacific Railway, which soon acquired both the ST and SP. The new charter approved a route from Marshall to El Paso and San Diego, and required 100 consecutive miles of construction by 1882. Backers hired Gen. Grenville Dodge, who had been chief engineer of Union Pacific’s recently completed transcontinental line to Utah.
The route of the Texas & Pacific from the back of a ticket.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1880, the infamous “Robber Baron” Jay Gould joined the board and quickly became the president, and the T&P became a key part of his corporate empire (he already controlled the Union Pacific after 1873 and the Missouri Pacific from 1879):
“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.
Meantime, Gould directed Chief Engineer Dodge to begin an all-out effort to lay rails through the vast and nearly uninhabited desert of west Texas. Construction crews reached Big Spring, 267 miles, in April 1881 and Sierra Blanca (522) on December 16, 1881. However, it was at Sierra Blanca where Gould’s dream of a transcontinental railroad evaporated. He had been bested by Collis P. Huntington, another determined and ruthless railroad tycoon. Huntington’s eastward construction crews had passed through Sierra Blanca three weeks earlier, on November 25, en route to their own “last spike” ceremony of the Sunset Route at the Pecos River (west of Del Rio) in January 1883.
Under the banner of the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio, controlled by Huntington and T. W. Pierce, construction crews had left El Paso in June 1881. When it was clear that Huntington was winning the race for a transcontinental line, a series of court battles ensued, followed by nefarious delaying tactics (including sabotage) by each construction crew, and finally by personal negotiation between the two principals. Gould’s legal case was based on T&P’s 1870 charter to build to San Diego, whereas Huntington’s Southern Pacific charter allowed him to meet the T&P at the Colorado River (between California and Arizona).
Wikipedia provides this sketch of Gould’s railway activities after his involvement in the Erie War:
After being forced out of the Erie Railroad, Gould started to build up a system of railroads in the midwest and west. He took control of the Union Pacific in 1873 when its stock was depressed by the Panic of 1873, and he built a viable railroad that depended on shipments from farmers and ranchers. He immersed himself in every operational and financial detail of the Union Pacific system, building an encyclopedic knowledge and acting decisively to shape its destiny. Biographer Maury Klein states that “he revised its financial structure, waged its competitive struggles, captained its political battles, revamped its administration, formulated its rate policies, and promoted the development of resources along its lines.”
By 1879, Gould gained control of three more important western railroads, including the Missouri Pacific Railroad. He controlled 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of railway, about one-ninth of the rail in the United States at that time, and he had controlling interest in 15 percent of the country’s railway tracks by 1882. The railroads were making profits and set their own rates, and his wealth increased dramatically. He withdrew from management of the Union Pacific in 1883 amid political controversy over its debts to the federal government, but he realized a large profit for himself. He obtained a controlling interest in the Western Union telegraph company and in the elevated railways in New York City after 1881. In 1889, he organized the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis which acquired a bottleneck in east–west railroad traffic at St. Louis, but the government brought an antitrust suit to eliminate the bottleneck control after Gould died.
George Hamlin reflects on the state of the US passenger rail system before the formation of Amtrak in 1971:
… non-commuter U.S. passenger trains can be said to have been under siege essentially for my entire lifetime, beginning not long after the end of World War II. Many railroads spent large sums to re-equip with streamlined lightweight equipment after the war, only to see what was originally couched as an investment turn into essentially a drain on their companies’ treasuries.
And the “rewards” for this? Passengers decamped to the rapidly-expanding airlines, and their personal automobiles. The decisive blow came in 1956, with the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act, which led to the Interstate Highway System.
Quoting from Joe Welsh’s Pennsy Streamliners, The Blue Ribbon Fleet (page 138), “Referring to the challenge, [PRR President] Symes wrote ‘There is such a thing as planning an orderly retreat in the face of superior forces.’ Clearly, the bugle had been sounded.”
In 1958, an Interstate Commerce Commission Hearing Examiner predicted that there would be no intercity passenger trains by 1970; he only missed by four months, effectively (and didn’t count on the Southern Railway, Rio Grande and Rock Island shying away from the government’s largesse). In 1959, TRAINS magazine devoted an entire issue to what was now clearly a crisis; the cover bore the legend “Who Shot the Passenger Train?”, complete with simulated bullet hole.
The 1960s in the U.S. could well be described as the “train-off” decade from a transportation history perspective; get, and read, Fred Frailey’s Twilight of the Great Trains, for a blow-by-blow analysis. The 1970s quickly produced the Penn Central bankruptcy, which proved to be the catalyst for government intervention; less than a year later, Amtrak was on the scene.
And since, it has frequently found itself in a “Perils of Pauline” existence, ranging from lack of funding to buy equipment, in many cases, to several bouts of route eliminations, to micro-management by politicians that don’t seem to be willing to provide consistent operational funding so that the company can make reasonable plans.
PRR E8A 5803 with Train 72, The Red Bird, passing the Hartsdale, Indiana tower and crossing the NYC and EJ&E on November 26, 1965.
Photo from the Roger Puta collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Chris Selley on the utter, abject defeat of the Canadian and British Columbian governments in their “negotiations” with the hereditary leadership of the Wet’suwet’en:
“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
“We’re not understanding what is the rush here,” elected chief Maureen Luggi told CBC — a sentiment Naziel echoed. “We sat here for 30 years already, waiting and talking about it,” Naziel said. “We can wait another year or two. It’s not going to hurt anything.”
Indeed, from the average Wet’suwet’en member’s point of view, there is no hurry at all. The logical thing would be to fix the governance structure, heal the wounds that need healing, and then undertake these monumental negotiations.
But for the governments involved, this wasn’t about offering the Wet’suwet’en a better future. It was about putting out a fire: A group of Mohawks thousands of kilometres away in eastern Ontario had blockaded CN’s main line in solidarity with the hereditary chiefs; and the Ontario Provincial Police, armed with an injunction demanding the blockade end, refused to lift a finger.
Something had to give. Somebody had to get screwed, and it was the rank-and-file Wet’suwet’en. For no good reason whatsoever, the hereditary chiefs now hold all the keys to their future. It’s an appalling and appallingly predictable result.
“I don’t see why the government gave them this, because this has got nothing to do with what the protests across Canada started from,” chief Dan George of Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation told CBC. “Those issues are not resolved. They can set up roadblocks again and do it again, and that’s what I’m worried about.”
If negotiations don’t go well, that might well prove to be a prescient remark. But for now, the hereditary chiefs’ victory is total: They have every reason to stay the course. The message to other groups, however, is clear: If you want to advance your cause, make friends with the Ontario Mohawks. They pretty much run the country.
Screencap from a TV report on Mohawk Warriors attempting to set a freight car on fire along the Canadian National mainline through Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario in February, 2020.
This month’s fallen flag article for Classic Trains is the story of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway by George Drury:
Pages from a circa 1937 booklet about the Santa Fe trains The Chief and the Super Chief. The railroad was showcasing the streamlined changes made to its main Chicago to California trains. Super Chief had given up its boxcab locomotives for EMC E1 units. Chief was no longer pulled by the “Blue Goose” steam locomotive, but by EMD diesel locomotives.
Wikimedia Commons.
The Atchison & Topeka Railroad was chartered in 1859 to join the towns of its title and continue southwest toward Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“Santa Fe” was added to the corporate name in 1863. Construction started in 1869; by the end of 1872 the railroad extended to the Kansas-Colorado border, opening much of Kansas to settlement and carrying wheat and cattle east to markets. The railroad temporarily set aside its goal of Santa Fe — once the trading capital of the Spanish colony in that area — and continued building west, reaching Pueblo, Colorado, in 1876, just in time for the silver rush at Leadville, Colorado.
In 1878, the railroad resumed construction toward Santa Fe, building southwest from La Junta to Trinidad, Colorado, then south over Raton Pass. It chose that route instead of an easier route south across the plains from Dodge City because of Native American attacks and a lack of water on the southerly route and coal deposits near Trinidad, Colorado, and Raton, New Mexico.
The Denver & Rio Grande was also aiming at Raton Pass, but Santa Fe crews arose early one morning in 1878 and were hard at work with picks and shovels when the Rio Grande crews showed up after breakfast. At the same time the two railroads skirmished over occupancy of the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River west of Canon City, Colorado; the Rio Grande won that battle.
The Santa Fe reached Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1880 (because of geography the city of Santa Fe found itself at the end of a short branch from Lamy, New Mexico) and connected with the Southern Pacific at Deming, New Mexico, in 1881. The Santa Fe then built southwest from Benson, Arizona, to Nogales, on the Mexican border. There it connected with the Sonora Railway, which Santa Fe interests had constructed north from the Mexican port of Guaymas.
Comparison map showing the Santa Fe Trail and the ATSF Railway, 1922.
Map from By the Way – A condensed guide of points of interest along the Santa Fe lines to California, Rand McNally and Company via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1960 the Santa Fe bought the Toledo, Peoria & Western Railroad, then sold a half interest to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The TP&W cut straight east across Illinois from near Fort Madison, Iowa, to a connection with the Pennsy at Effner, Indiana, forming a bypass around Chicago for traffic moving between the two lines. The TP&W route didn’t mesh with the traffic pattern Conrail developed after 1976, so Santa Fe bought back the other half, merged the TP&W in 1983, then sold it back into independence in 1989.
During the 1960s the Santa Fe explored merger with the Frisco and the Missouri Pacific with no success. By 1980 Santa Fe, which had been the top railroad in route mileage in the 1950s, was surrounded by larger railroads. It was well managed and profitable, and it had the best route between the Midwest and Southern California, but its neighbors were larger, and friendly connections had been taken over by rival railroads. Southern Pacific was in the same situation. In 1980 Santa Fe and SP proposed merger. Approval seemed certain, but in 1986 the Interstate Commerce Commission denied permission because the merger would create a railroad monopoly in New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
The Santa Fe, suddenly the smallest of the Super Seven freight railroads, began spinning off branches and secondary lines and became primarily a conduit for containers and trailers moving between the Midwest and Southern California. In June 1994 Santa Fe and Burlington Northern announced their intention to merge — BN would buy Santa Fe. The deal was consummated in 1995, forming the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, known today as BNSF Railway.
The denied merger between the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe included an eye-catching proposed “Kodachrome” paint scheme for locomotives, as described in the Wikipedia article:
The holding company controlled all the rail and non-rail assets of the former Santa Fe Industries and Southern Pacific Company, and it was intended that the two railroads would be merged. They were confident enough that this would be approved that they began repainting locomotives into a new unified paint scheme, including the letters SP or SF and an adjacent empty space for the other two (as SPSF, the reverse order of the holding company).
The locomotive livery featured the Santa Fe’s Yellowbonnet with a red stripe on the locomotive’s nose; the remainder of the locomotive body was painted in Southern Pacific’s scarlet red (from their Bloody Nose scheme) with a black roof and black extending down to the lower part of the locomotive’s radiator grills. The numberboards were red with white numbers. In large block letters within the red portion of the sides was either “SP” (for Southern Pacific-owned locomotives) or “SF” (for Santa Fe-owned locomotives). The lettering was positioned on the locomotive sides so that the other half of the lettering could be added after the merger became official. Two ATSF EMD SD45-2s (ATSF #7219 and #7221) were painted with the full SPSF lettering to show what the unified paint scheme would look like after the merger was complete. One Santa Fe caboose was also painted with “SPSF” in a similar situation.
This paint scheme, combining yellow, red and black, has come to be called the Kodachrome paint scheme due to the colors’ resemblance to those on the boxes that Kodak used to package its Kodachrome slide film (which was heavily used by railfans of the time). After the ICC’s denial, railroad industry writers, employees of both railroads and railfans alike joked that SPSF really stood for “Shouldn’t Paint So Fast”.
Thunderbolt 1000 Siren Productions
Published 17 Jan 20202 days late and I lost several hours of sleep but holy hell it’s worth it now that it’s done! Enjoy this pretty interesting story on a runaway GG1 just days before Eisenhower’s inaguration
Please don’t shoot me for the Trump pics 😐
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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 1 Feb 2019During the gilded age ruthless businessmen fought for control of railway lines. The Albany and Susquehanna railroad was another battlefield in the “Railroad wars.” In this episode, The History Guy remembers “the Battle of the Tunnel”.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As images of actual events are sometimes not available, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 15 Sep 2018Railroads played a critical role for the United Kingdom in the Great War. But the increased burden on the nation’s railways had its cost. In the early morning hours of May 22, 1915, a crowded schedule resulted in the 1915 Quintinshill Rail Disaster, the worst railway disaster in British history. Its victims, mostly men of the 1/7 Royal Scots regiment, deserve to be remembered.
The History Guy uses media that are in the public domain. As photographs of actual events are sometimes not available, photographs of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
The episode includes historical photos involving the Great War and a 1915 railway disaster. Those photos are provided in context of the historical events. No graphic violence is shown.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
https://teespring.com/stores/the-hist…The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are portrayed in historical context.
#quintinshill #wwi #thehistoryguy
Randal O’Toole wonders why the lone sacred cow of mass transit is still running, despite its potential role in spreading disease:
MTA NYC Subway 1 trains at 125th St., 14 May, 2018.
Photo by Mtattrain via Wikimedia Commons.
Sit‐down restaurants and bars have been shut down. Public officials are discouraging or even forbidding people from doing “unnecessary travel,” even if it is to visit a second home where they might be able to socially distance themselves better than in their first, more urban home. All sorts of other rules are being passed, all supposedly for our own good.
So why are urban transit systems still running? A 2018 study found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.” A 2011 study found that people who use mass transit were nearly six times more likely to have acute respiratory infections than those who don’t. Not surprisingly, a study published a few days ago found that New York City subways were “a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.”
Transit agencies say they are helping “essential workers” go about their business. But if they are so essential, isn’t it important to find them a safe way of getting to work? If we truly cared about people’s safety, then transit services should have shut down at the same time we closed other non‐essential businesses and asked people to stay at home.
[…]
Unfortunately, the transit lobby has successfully turned government‐subsidized transit into a sacred cow. Transit is supposedly greener than driving when in fact it’s an energy hog. Transit is supposedly needed to help poor people get to work when in fact the people most likely to commute by transit are those earning more than $75,000 a year.
When the pandemic took away most of transit’s customers, instead of shutting down, which would have been the responsible thing to do, transit agencies demanded that Congress give them $25 billion, tripling federal support to transit this year. Thanks to transit’s sacred cow status, Congress agreed without any serious debate.
Effectively, Congress rewarded the agencies for spreading disease. It would have been better to use that money to help transit‐dependent essential workers buy a car so they could have a safe way of getting to work.
New York City subway system.
Image by Jake Berman (maps.complutense.org) based on information from the MTA, via Wikimedia Commons.
Dane Stuhlsatz outlines the story of US federal government subsidies and other interventions into the 19th century railroad industry and the one tycoon who avoided the lure:
Postcard photo of the Great Northern Railway’s “Empire Builder” streamliner between Everett and Seattle, Washington, circa 1963.
Great Northern Railway postcard via Wikimedia Commons.
Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlined this story in his book, The Myth of the Robber Barons, identifying two models of entrepreneurship; the “political entrepreneurism” of lines like the Union Pacific and Central Pacific versus the “market entrepreneurism” of James J. Hill and his Great Northern Railway.
Canadian-born James J. Hill (1838-1916) in 1914.
Photo from Famous Living Americans, edited by Mary Griffin Webb and Edna Lenore Webb via Wikimedia Commons.As Folsom details, the former chased government largesse, ultimately in exchange for loss of control of their business, while the latter chased profits through prudent business decisions. Hill’s success juxtaposed with UP’s and CP’s failure is due in no small part to his steadfast refusal to accept any federal subsidies. In short, UP’s and CP’s government subsidized incentives were vastly different from Hill’s profit driven incentives, which lead to vastly different outcomes.
Federal subsidies incentivized speed, not efficiency. The subsidies were paid in the form of both land grants and direct payments. For each mile of track laid, the UP and CP would receive 20 acres of land and either $16,000 (for track on flat land), $32,000 (for track on hilly terrain), or $48,000 (on mountainous terrain). This incentive for speed resulted in winding, inefficient, routes built with inferior materials, ultimately culminating in a federal price tag of 44,000,000 acres and $61,000,000 (astronomical sums in the 1860s-70s). Despite all this federal assistance, shortly after the golden spike was driven on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, the UP and CP were nearly bankrupt and required further assistance to stay afloat.
The lines which were born and brought up on federal aid needed federal aid to continue. This led to the passage of the Thurman Law in 1874 which forced UP to pay 25% of its earnings a year to pay its federal debt.
UP’s profitability decisions were also subject to government approval. Branch lines — smaller lines off the main line into rural communities — which could have helped UP’s bottom line, were often not approved by federal bureaucrats. Additionally, the federal Bureau of Railroad Accounts required constant checking of UP’s books. All these measures stifled the ingenuity that UP so desperately needed to make its line profitable. UP quickly found out that the power to subsidize was the power to destroy.
Hill’s line on the other hand was methodically surveyed and built, on the shortest routes possible, with the least gradient possible, and using the best steel and other materials on the market at the time. Rather than political largess, Hill made his decisions based on profit and loss. But, for all the efficiency that Hill built into his line — he was able to transport across the country faster, cheaper, and with less maintenance costs than could the UP and CP — arguably the most important aspect for the viability of his business was the freedom to conduct business untethered by the strings that accompanied government subsidies.
While Hill was free to build when and where he wanted so long as he reached voluntary agreements with landowners, consumers, and employees, UP was tied up in red tape. As Hill’s line grew evermore profitable and reliable for customers, the UP and CP struggled along on federal aid, until they ultimately went bankrupt in 1893.
For his part, Hill’s line was the only transcontinental railroad to never go bankrupt.
Route map from the Great Northern Railway, circa 1920. Red lines are the GN route; dotted lines are other railroads. Created from the Map Maker at nationalatlas.gov and routes drawn in, using a 1920 map as a reference.
Map by Elkman via Wikimedia Commons.
This month’s fallen flag article for Classic Trains is the story of the Pere Marquette Railway by Kevin P. Keefe:
C&O’s formal acquisition of the Pere Marquette in 1947 did more than help usher in the postwar merger era; it also closed the book on a railroad with a colorful and quirky history. PM was created in 1900 by the consolidation of three roads: Flint & Pere Marquette; Detroit, Grand Rapids & Western; and Chicago & West Michigan. (The town of Pere Marquette; today we know the place as Ludington. Jacques Marquette, the French missionary and explorer, died and was buried here in 1675, and the name Pere Marquette had been given to the inlet lake off Lake Michigan, the river that feeds into it, and an 1847 community there.)
All three carriers had roots in the lumber industry, so the new Pere Marquette Railroad not only connected important Michigan cities, it also operated a branchline network covering much of the state’s Lower Peninsula. PM’s early corporate history was chaotic, marked by receivership and ownership changes. The Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton acquired PM in 1904 and for a time leased it to various parties, including the Erie Railroad. Thus did Baltimore & Ohio briefly control the PM through its ownership of the CH&D. When Pere Marquette came out of a receivership in 1907, it would be for only five years.
Those early, troublesome times, however, were marked by two strategic steps forward. One was the chartering of the Pere Marquette of Indiana, which built from New Buffalo, Michigan, southwest to Porter, Indiana, allowing PM to reach Chicago, via trackage rights on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern (NYC). The second was the lease of the Lake Erie & Detroit River Railway, pushing PM eastward from Walkerville (Windsor), Ontario, to St. Thomas, thence to Suspension Bridge (Niagara Falls), New York, via rights on Michigan Central affiliate Canada Southern, and on to Buffalo on the NYC. Patched together as they were, these additions allowed PM to position itself as a Buffalo–Chicago bridge carrier.
Pere Marquette route map from a 1944 timetable.
Via Classic Trains.
In the ensuing years, the rectangular PM logo would largely disappear from view, although the road’s eventual 12 E7’s wore the script Pere Marquette train name, along with C&O identification, into the mid-1950s, thanks to equipment trust restrictions. PM’s three GE 70-tonners of 1947 were sold, but a few of its 16 EMD switchers (2 SW1’s of 1939 and ’42, 14 NW2’s of 1943–46) carried PM lettering into the 1960s, and C&O kept PM’s color pattern of yellow front-end bands with red pinstriping on a blue body on 11 more EMDs of 1948 that came fully lettered C&O: NW2’s 1850–1856 and E7’s 95–98.
As for the famous Berkshires, they, along with all of Pere Marquette’s steam locomotives, were retired by 1951. Eleven found a temporary reprieve on C&O’s Chesapeake District in Kentucky and West Virginia, but only for a few months. Two, 1223 and 1225, survived as display items in Michigan, and as a student at Michigan State University, I became involved with the restoration of the 1225, which today occasionally operates on excursions.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the Pere Marquette’s last equipment order as an independent railroad was in 1947 for six of EMD’s 1,500 h.p. BL2 “branchline” diesels, Nos. 80–85. Chosen to negotiate PM’s web of secondary lines — most of them rooted in the road’s origins as a logger — the homely diesels were as quirky and as singular as the PM itself. Pointedly, even though they sported the “speed striping” as found on the E7’s, the BL2’s were delivered in full “Chesapeake & Ohio” lettering.
Pere Marquette 1225, a Berkshire 2-8-4 steam locomotive, passes through Alma in March 2009.
Photo by Chelseyafoster via Wikimedia Commons.
The Pere Marquette also had a maritime division and one of their ships had a disastrous voyage (via Wikipedia) 110 years ago:
The Pere Marquette operated a number of rail car ferries on the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers and on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. The PM’s fleet of car ferries, which operated on Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan to Milwaukee, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, were an important transportation link avoiding the terminal and interchange delays around the southern tip of Lake Michigan and through Chicago. Their superintendent for over 30 years was William L. Mercereau.
Pere Marquette 18
On September 10, 1910, Pere Marquette 18 was bound for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Ludington, Michigan, with a load of 29 railroad freight cars and 62 persons. Near midnight, the vessel began to take on massive amounts of water. The captain dumped nine railroad cars into Lake Michigan, but this was no use — the ship was going down. The Pere Marquette 17, traveling nearby, picked up the distress call and sped to assist the foundering vessel. Soon after she arrived and she could come alongside, the Pere Marquette 18 sank with the loss of 28 lives; there were 33 survivors. Her wreck has yet to be located and is the largest unlocated wreck of the Great Lakes.
Geographics
Published 29 Nov 2019The journey to the Express was not a simple one. For upper class travellers to enjoy a luxury, non-stop train ride across seven nations, it would take the dream of a lovesick Belgian engineer, with his rather interesting supporting cast: an American industrialist, the inventor of US tabloid journalism, the Prince of Wales, and one of the most prolific mass murderers of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Arnaldo Teodorani
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell HarrisBusiness inquiries to admin@toptenz.net
In Trains, Bill Stephens highlights the terrible time Canada’s largest railway has been having since the beginning of the year:
“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
It would be hard to imagine a worse start to the year for Canadian National, whose volume is down 16% due to a string of events that’s mostly odd, unrelated, and unrelenting. CN is taking it on the chin, as no other North American railroad has seen its volume fall by more than 10% this year and rival Canadian Pacific’s traffic is up 10%.
First, there was Mother Nature. Winter arrived in January with eight days of deep cold in Western Canada, forcing CN to restrict train length. Then powerful rainstorms lashed southern British Columbia starting Jan. 30, washing out CN’s main to Vancouver for six days.
The major washouts occurred in the rugged Fraser River canyon directional running zone where CN and CP share trackage, with CN hosting westbounds and CP carrying eastbounds. The railways had to resort to running directional fleets of 15 to 20 trains at a time over CP’s line. The single-track bottleneck caused eastbound traffic to stack up at the Port of Vancouver and westbounds to be staged as far away as the Prairies. The directional running zone ranks among the top three freight mains by tonnage in North America, alongside BNSF Railway’s Southern Transcon in the Southwest and Union Pacific’s triple track across Nebraska. So this blockage was, by itself, a big deal.
Then came nearly a month of civil protests. On Feb. 6, as CN began digging out from the washout backlog, the first of several First Nations blockades set up camp on CN’s tracks. The blockades, protesting a proposed natural gas pipeline in British Columbia, halted traffic on CN’s Montreal-Toronto mainline in the East. Also ultimately affected: CN’s line to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, which was blocked by protests for six days. Other protests came and went in Edmonton, Alberta; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Quebec; and British Columbia. CP was affected, too, but to a much lesser extent. CP even hosted detour traffic for CN between Montreal and Toronto.
As if that wasn’t enough, then came regulatory woes. The same day the protests began, a CP crude oil train derailed and caught fire in Guernsey, Sask., the second such wreck in the area since December. Hours later Transport Canada issued a ministerial order that restricted key trains – those with 20 or more cars of hazardous materials – to 20 mph in metropolitan areas and 25 mph elsewhere. With the stroke of a pen, Transport Minister Marc Garneau’s knee-jerk reaction effectively reduced CN’s overall capacity by a third. You could call this slowdown “Whoa Canada!”
Ted Campbell on the Trudeau government’s apparent abject surrender to the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs (“apparent” because we still don’t have any details of the “deal”):
The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ agenda seems simple enough to me. They don’t like the notion that the Wet’suwet’en people can elect band councils that might act for the good of the people and < quelle horreur > the people might even disagree with the hereditary chiefs. Some (male) hereditary chiefs seem to have managed to strip some other (female) chiefs of their titles because they, the female chiefs, sided with the elected councils. This is, in 21st century British Columbia, something of a replay of 17th century Europe and the end of the divine right of kings, except that the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs might succeed where Charles I and Louis XVI failed because they have the dimwits in the Trudeau cabinet on their side.
To make matters worse, as John Morris of the Canadian Press points out in an article published in the Globe and Mail, the government negotiated with the hereditary chiefs, only ~ with the people who broke the law; and they ignored the elected leaders ~ the people who played by the rules.
How typically Trudeau: he surrenders, cravenly, to the reactionary, anti-democratic lawbreakers and, simultaneously, shuts out the elected representatives of the Wet’suwet’en peoples. Is that the Canada in which we all want to live? Is that the sort of “leadership” for which millions of Canadians voted in 2019? I think not. Justin Trudeau is both a fool and a coward and his party, the Liberal Party of Canada, has a duty to Canada: throw the bum out!
But, not to worry, the Trudeau regime’s
propagandistspress agents will tell us that it’s all good, we “won,” something or other … didn’t we? And who cares if we lost something nebulous like honour and responsibility? It’s all about reconciliation, isn’t it? What do trivialities like democracy and the national interest matter when really important things, like preserving the power of hereditary chiefs over elected councils, are at stake? But that reactionary system seems to have been strengthened, and so “It was a famous victory.”
This month’s fallen flag article in Classic Trains magazine recounts the story of the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio, later known as the Clinchfield Railroad:
Clinchfield Railroad SD40 locomotive number 3002 at Spartanburg, SC in February 1968.
Roger Puta photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The Clinchfield was different. It was conceived by men who had the vision and resources to do things right. It was built to the highest engineering standards of the early 20th century. It never went through a financial failure or reorganization. Indeed, the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway was the antithesis of traditional railroad evolution.
In 1902, a wealthy regional businessman, George L. Carter, began stitching together an integrated industrial enterprise to develop vast coal deposits in the Clinch (River) Fields of southwest Virginia and to deliver the coal across the southern Appalachian mountains to markets in the Carolinas and to ships calling at Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Carter, from whom Howard Hughes could have learned a thing to two about secrecy, operated using the South & Western Railway banner. The name said everything … and nothing. The S&W was chartered from any point on the Atlantic Ocean to any point on the Great Lakes. Carter agents seized by legal means and/or physical occupation key terrain features through the mountains in competition with the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Southern Railway.
Clinchfield Railroad map. The Clinchfield’s 277-mile, 5-state line stretched from Elkhorn City, Kentucky, to Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Map via Classic Trains.Within that generous charter was the idea of building a railroad to haul coal south and merchandise in both directions between the Midwest and the Southeast. The plans also incorporated development of several on-line cities to consume coal and make products from regional resources to diversify and grow the freight business. Finally, a steamship line was organized to move coal beyond the ports to customers in the Caribbean.
By 1905, Carter realized he needed far more capital than he could personally provide. Reluctantly, he managed to convince Blair & Co., a big Wall Street investment house, to finance the project. M. J. Caples, an engineer with mining and railroad experience, laid out and then built a magnificent low-grade, high-capacity railroad. Tunnels, steel viaducts, generous fills, and rocky cuts appeared as needed. More than 4 percent (almost 10 miles) of the line was underground in 55 tunnels. With construction of the 277-mile railroad well advanced, its name was changed to Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway in 1908.
Coal began flowing across the 242 miles from Dante, Va., to Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1909 while the owners and engineers debated how to cross the Cumberland mountains into the Ohio River valley. Between 1912 and 1915, a 35-mile extension including what was then the 10th-longest tunnel in the U.S. created a through route connecting Chesapeake & Ohio at Elkhorn City, Kentucky, with the three major southeastern carriers (Seaboard at Bostic, North Carolina; Atlantic Coast Line and Southern at Spartanburg). In constant-value dollars, the five-state CC&O was the most expensive railroad ever built in the U.S.
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