@BlueFeather posted:...For now, UP has made a different choice than NS (lucky for all of us), but they're different railroads, and they always have been...
Hidden in that sentence is the bottom line as to whether a railroad will run steam or not. It has less to do with insurance, liability, PSR, etc. than it does with the man at the top. If the boss wants to run steam, the railroad will run steam.
Norfolk Southern is a textbook example. When David Goode was the CEO, the steam program he inherited ground down to a halt because he didn't want to run it. What happened when Wick Moorman took over as CEO? NS ran steam all over the system. Why? Because the boss wanted to, that's why.
I've seen this pendulum swing back and forth over the decades several times. In the late 80s and early 90s, we could run 765 almost anywhere we wanted to on CSX, but not a mile on NS. That's because the CEO at CSX at the time was OK with it, but the CEO at NS was not. In the 2000s, we ran all over NS and couldn't run a mile on CSX. The CEO at CSX did not want to run steam, but the CEO at NS at the time enjoyed it. The pendulum had swung.
It will swing again...it always does.
