@BlueFeather posted:To be clear, I said the 1986 accident was the beginning of the end of NS heritage steam, not the end. And given your personal experience, obviously you would know more than me. However, I will say that while you're correct about PSR, liability is intrinsically tied to shareholder value. All it takes is one high-profile incident to make a very expensive mess for a Class I. Ask the UP Steam Team about their biggest fear -- it's some moron running onto the track and getting hit, and having the whole shindig permanently cancelled because an idiot couldn't be bothered with following basic safety instructions.
Yet,,,,,,,,,,,,,the UP did NOT cancel the "whole shindig", and has continued to tour both the 844 and even more often, 4014.
@BlueFeather posted:Ask the UP Steam Team about their biggest fear -- it's some moron running onto the track and getting hit, and having the whole shindig permanently cancelled because an idiot couldn't be bothered with following basic safety instructions.
Unless your eluding to this fact. Someone did get killed by 844 by standing too close to the tracks while filming.
A few years later UP runs 4014 all over the line drawing spectators out in droves.
Incidents are what insurance is for. Insurance doesn't cover revenue freight trains that are delayed by excursions for railfans.
Both UP and NS (and any Class I who would run heritage operations on their ROW) need to consider a multitude of factors, including liability, PSR and heritage's potential effect on those efficiencies, staffing, potential marketing benefits, etc. 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. You guys have certainly read it, but the excellent book "The Men Who Loved Trains" by Rush Loving Jr. gives great insights into how these huge railroads make decisions in this modern era, specifically re: the East Coast railroads and NYC / PRR --> Penn Central --> Conrail --> NS / CSX. To Rich's point, shareholder value seems to be the #1 decision point the execs at the very top of the pyramids use, while historically it was often the upper middle managers who were railroad "lifers" who knew their systems that knew how best to actually run the show.
@RickO posted:Unless your eluding to this fact. Someone did get killed by 844 by standing too close to the tracks while filming.
A few years later UP runs 4014 all over the line drawing spectators out in droves.
Incidents are what insurance is for. Insurance doesn't cover revenue freight trains that are delayed by excursions for railfans.
My point is, stuff happens. The Big Boy attracts many thousands of people when it visits a major city. Revenue freights don't. The chance of an accident goes up significantly when you have that many people around, all fighting to get as close as they can for a cellphone pic of the locomotive. Many of them know nothing about trains and how dangerous they can be. There's a reason that NS didn't publish 611's schedule en route to / from Strasburg and it had nothing to do with PSR.
@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.
Isn’t the current NS CEO about to retire??? Things could swing back sooner than you think, or maybe not.
Good points although the other part of the equation these days seems to be system capacity, i.e. the delay of the 4014 trip.
@Rich Melvin posted: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 in 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.
💯
@Dougklink posted:Good points although the other part of the equation these days seems to be system capacity, i.e. the delay of the 4014 trip.
There's 15,000 reasons not to run a trip if you don't want do. All it takes to make a trip happen is the one at the top telling those under to run it. It doesn't matter if it's the busiest line on the system. If the top brass want it to happen, it will happen. If they don't, it won't.
I'd venture a guess that the "system capacity" is a convenient excuse for the real reason, which is the STB hearings and the "bad look" that it shows running a steam engine when your freight customers are being delayed because there aren't any crews available and the system is plugged up as a result. One pilot crew for the steam engine isn't going to matter in the long run....but it looks bad to the feds when you are "playing trains" while the customers are angry.
@superwarp1 posted:Isn’t the current NS CEO about to retire??? Things could swing back sooner than you think, or maybe not.
just did. Time will tell.
Not to open a can-of-worms... but how does the Amtrak insurance thing factor into the entire operating on Class I side of the conversation? I have heard it tossed around a few times, but no explanation of how it got to this.
Example: PRR 1223 and 7002 ran over Amtrak to Philadelphia in the late 80s? What changed? Was it just CEO preferences as mentioned previously or bigger factors?
@Prr7688 posted:Not to open a can-of-worms... but how does the Amtrak insurance thing factor into the entire operating on Class I side of the conversation? I have heard it tossed around a few times, but no explanation of how it got to this.
Example: PRR 1223 and 7002 ran over Amtrak to Philadelphia in the late 80s? What changed? Was it just CEO preferences as mentioned previously or bigger factors?
As far as I know, those Strasburg trips, along with similar Blue Mountain & Reading trips and later 765 trips in 1988, were under Conrail, not Amtrak.
The insurance required by the Class 1s in the 1980s was somewhat affordable. Rich or Jack can certainly give better numbers, but it was somewhat in the range of a $30-50M policy by the late 80s. You could also amortize it over the entire season, and when you're running 20 or so mainline trips a year, it was doable.
By the 1990s, the required insurance to run on a Class 1 was somewhere in the $300M range. That was basically unaffordable, especially since they weren't going to approve enough trips to spread the cost out. Nowadays, it's over $500M.
The only way to get around that was to run under Amtrak's own insurance. It involved jumping through more hoops as now Amtrak was being involved in the operation of the train. More recently, Amtrak said we just don't want to do this any more. Thus being the situation we find ourselves in today.
With NS subsidizing, or at least partially subsidizing, the insurance during the 21st Century Steam Program, you could have excursions again...and Amtrak wasn't involved at all. That option is gone now.
With so many abandoned ROW's across the country, couldn't some of these be linked together to form a line onto which these engines may run without having to have a lot of access on a Class 1 railroad?
There must be an area of the country which these various lines could be linked to form a decent run through areas of the country which remain picturesque and would draw tourists - especially for a large mainline steam engine.
I'm not a professional railroader - so I'm not going to pretend I know anything I'm talking about.
Just had a thought that there are miles and miles of ROW sitting around doing nothing - so why not acquire them and put them to good use.
Here's 1218 and 611, photos taken in the same spot a couple miles west of 'Crawford', where the Southern crossed the SCL south of Callahan Fla. 1218 is in the Southern yard in Jacksonville, Fla, my sons, about 10 and 6 at the time (now 43 and 39), the steam gauge showing pressure up (pictures a bit dark) as it sits waiting for the following days run. I just photographed the pictures in the frame they are in, too lazy to open it up and scan them.
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@Allegheny posted:With so many abandoned ROW's across the country, couldn't some of these be linked together to form a line onto which these engines may run without having to have a lot of access on a Class 1 railroad?
There must be an area of the country which these various lines could be linked to form a decent run through areas of the country which remain picturesque and would draw tourists - especially for a large mainline steam engine.
I'm not a professional railroader - so I'm not going to pretend I know anything I'm talking about.
Just had a thought that there are miles and miles of ROW sitting around doing nothing - so why not acquire them and put them to good use.
The two big things that stand out to me as an obstacle to this are cost related to owning the ROW as well as maintenance on the tracks, among other things.
@Allegheny posted:With so many abandoned ROW's across the country, couldn't some of these be linked together to form a line onto which these engines may run without having to have a lot of access on a Class 1 railroad?
There must be an area of the country which these various lines could be linked to form a decent run through areas of the country which remain picturesque and would draw tourists - especially for a large mainline steam engine.
I'm not a professional railroader - so I'm not going to pretend I know anything I'm talking about.
Just had a thought that there are miles and miles of ROW sitting around doing nothing - so why not acquire them and put them to good use.
You may want to write to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or the like and ask them if they'd be interested in putting up the tens of millions of dollars it would take do carry out such a project. 
@breezinup posted:You may want to write to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or the like and ask them if they'd be interested in putting up the tens of millions of dollars it would take do carry out such a project.
Make that hundreds of millions. It ain’t gonna happen.
@Allegheny posted:With so many abandoned ROW's across the country, couldn't some of these be linked together to form a line onto which these engines may run without having to have a lot of access on a Class 1 railroad?
When the big roads spun off all those short lines and regionals, they made very sure there would be no way to “reconnect” them into a competing railroad. Strategic pieces of railroads were removed in many places, just to make sure. Probably the best example was the removal of the ex-Erie’s bridge over Interstate 75 in western Ohio.
Reconnecting a few of them would likely be impossible because in many cases the railroads gave up their ownership of the underlying property where they removed their tracks and it reverted back to the original owners.
Even if it was logistically possible, the railroad itself would need new ties, maybe some new rail, and an operating staff to bring it back to service. Where does the money come to pay for the track work and the staff? The profit from steam excursions wouldn’t cover payroll for a week.
Rich's thoughts are to be heeded. In addition, I believe one of the major reasons for so much underused line being abandoned by the major railroads is to rid themselves of a sizeable chunk of property taxes. If the mythical excursion railroad could gain county tax abatements forever they would still be in need of insane amounts of money to operate. And who believes that taxes would be excused...hmmm?
We are now in a situation for the first time where basically no excursion train, steam or diesel, can run on a class 1 railroad except for UP’s train. That now makes most freight only lines without Amtrak or commuter service unrideable. Amtrak had Autumn Express excursions through October 2017 that partly ran on NS freight only lines but then the charter ban happened in March 2018. I just might never get to ride the NS lines between Allentown and Harrisburg and Philly, or toward NJ unless the proposed Amtrak Allentown-NY service starts. I missed every single excursion on those lines in the 80’s and 2000’s except for the 765 excursions from near Bethlehem to Pittston.
Guys,
It was simply a thought - to use some abandoned section of ROW as an excursion line. It wasn't meant to tie everything together. Yes you'd be starting from scratch as I suspect much of the line may have been removed. Tie in to a Class 1 would only be needed to transport the equipment to and off of the new line.
There may be a piece of a line (currently owned by a Class 1) that is rarely used today that could be leased or purchased with the provision that they may use it when needed. You don't know until you try and find a unique piece of line and come up with some business model that would be viable for both parties.
There has to be a solution as this is a vast country full of opportunities and people willing to work for a good and common cause.
Rather than lamenting about the current state of affairs, why not think positively about how to address the problem looking at alternative out of the box solutions?
If you start to think about alternative non conventional solutions, you may be surprised what you will come up with that may present itself as a feasible solution.
Obviously it will cost money - but if successfully marketed and run, it could also make money.
Maybe its the optimist / engineer in me that feels there is always a solution - if we only simply look for it.
