Pending NS abandonment in West VA.

       
       


At that rate, you might as well have the catenary reinstalled to allow electrics to run!  (Honestly don't know if any EL-Cs even still exist.)

To preserve a section of a mainline railway for larger historic equipment to run would be ideal—especially if it's the only opportunity for a given locomotive to run.  I am not aware of an American equivalent to the UK's Great Central Railway, the only preserved mainline in that country.

Isnt most of this line CTC and welded rail?  With some business' still served along it?

 

Coal is still the most efficient and inexpensive energy source...those volumes will increase once Natural Gas edges up.

50 miles of track are to be shutdown from what I hear.

2 EL-Cs (New Haven class EF-4, Conrail class E33) survived right through to Conrail and are at museums today. One is at the Virginia Transportation Museum in Roanoke, VA and the other is at the Railroad Museum of New England at Thomaston, CT.

The one at RMNE (really rough-looking, I might add) has recently been/will soon be transferred to the Illinois Railway Museum.

 

---PCJ

Gas prices will take off as soon as a sufficient number of plants have been converted and the demand for coal drops below the point where mining is profitable. Those plants will never be converted back so it's gas or nothing. Forget solar and wind power. Unless you pave over the US with solar panels and windmills become as plentiful as trees you'll never meet the demand for electricity.

 

Then, with nowhere else to go it'll be Katie bar the door for gas prices.

 

Diesel was cheap as dirt at the time when railroads and the US Navy converted away from coal fuel. Then with the increased demand for diesel and it being the only game in town for commercial transportation, up, up, up it went.

 

Anyone wanting to operate a steam locomotive in the next decade or beyond had better think about converting to another fuel besides coal. No mine is going to stay in business without a market larger than a few dozen tender loads of coal per year.

Most likely, the line will either be bought by the state of West Virginia and leased out to some operating company, if any business is left on the line, or just sit and rust in the rain. Maybe, if we're lucky, the state will allow a tourist operator like the Potomac Eagle or similar to run on the line.

 

And maybe we'll see an Allegheny (Blue Ridge) on the Virginian again.

Borden, take a look at the Cuyahoga National Railroad in the Cuyahoga National Park that runs from Cleveland and Akron.  This may give you a blueprint to proceed with your concept.  Frank

I have a feeling that NS will railbank it just like they did with the old N&W between Portsmouth and Cincinnati.

Looks like they're not abandoning the line after all. Click Here to read the story.

 

 

I suspect some political pressure was brought to bear on NS. The latest news release has some corporate double-talk, looks like NS is going to avoid running through trains between Elmore and Kellysville. The Princeton yard and old shops complex does appear to have some activity for local service, visible via Google Earth.
I'll continue to hope that this line could support excursion trains, whether by NS or a private operator...

 

The problem coal production and coal use has is not the market, but our own government.

 

Simply put, the current administration essentially wants zero domestic coal use and would dearly love to close coal export for the sake of the cleaning up the "world".  The tactics are easy to see and understand:

 

* Legislate stricter and stricter EPA emission requirements (that some may say are unrealistic) that essentially force coal-fired plants to convert to natural gas.

 

* Legislate stricter and stricter laws/requirements (that some may say are unrealistic) needed to mine coal.

 

IMHO, in many ways the EPA is autonomous and pretty much does what they want and their actions only becomes vaguely accountable when they screw up in a major (read: highly visible/media covered) way like the catastrophe in Colorado.

 

 

 

laming,

   You are absolutely correct, hold on to your coal stock, cause if Trump get elected the EPA may just be a memory, anybody who believes in global warming, now climate change, is a serious fool, who should have his money stolen, by the thieving politicians who started this con-job.  

PCRR/Dave