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What is Happening to Rail in the USA?
Our Own | April 29, 2023 | John Leland 1789

Posted on 04/29/2023 11:56:54 AM PDT by John Leland 1789

Here in south-central Indiana we are watching the rail tracks removed throughout our region of the state.

There is, . . . no, was a rail line 500 feet from the Indiana house I bought in 1997. At that time we enjoyed watching and hearing two fairly long freight trains pass us each day.

We went to the Philippines for a missionary tour, and when we returned (2004), there was no more rail traffic. But after several months, one day, to our surprise, we heard the rail-crossing bells, then a train horn, then we saw a lengthy automobile carrier train move from the east to the west. We watched every moment of its passing. And THAT was the last we have seen of a train through town since early 2005.

Lately machinery has been pulling up the rails and ties, and the beds are being fairly leveled out. Ours is a rural town with fewer than 1,500 postal addresses in our ZIP code.

Would they be planning to asphalt some of the lines for walking/biking trails? I don't think that they would go through that expense out here in the country, although, at 67 years old, I might bicycle the 9 miles into Salem during good weather.

I haven't found any satisfactory information yet, even searching the WEB. But if someone has some leads for my, I'd be very interested indeed.


TOPICS: Chit/Chat; Local News; Travel
KEYWORDS: hh2; rail; railroads; vanity
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To: 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.


21 posted on 04/29/2023 12:30:14 PM PDT by discostu (like a dog being shown a card trick)
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To: Pontiac

you bet! lol


22 posted on 04/29/2023 12:32:06 PM PDT by Irenic
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To: 9YearLurker

so maybe Charlie will get home!


23 posted on 04/29/2023 12:39:26 PM PDT by bigbob
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To: Alberta's Child

“...so I usually know where to track down information...”. I see what you did there.


24 posted on 04/29/2023 12:39:38 PM PDT by GMThrust
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To: John Leland 1789

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


25 posted on 04/29/2023 12:45:41 PM PDT by digger48
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To: digger48

...from a half mile...

Got ahead of myself

Nap time


26 posted on 04/29/2023 12:48:01 PM PDT by digger48
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To: John Leland 1789

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!


27 posted on 04/29/2023 12:52:19 PM PDT by bigbob
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To: bigbob

Not unless his CBDC social credit score is high enough!


28 posted on 04/29/2023 12:57:30 PM PDT by 9YearLurker
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To: John Leland 1789

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).


29 posted on 04/29/2023 12:58:35 PM PDT by Dr. Sivana ("If you can’t say something nice . . . say the Rosary." [Red Badger])
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To: John Leland 1789
Is that the old Monon line from New Albany to Salem? Sorry to hear that’s been torn up. Grandmother used to tell about the 1937 flood when women and children were loaded onto a boxcar in West Louisville and evacuated to stay with home owners in Salem.

Hard times those were.

30 posted on 04/29/2023 1:00:39 PM PDT by rhinohunter (“Being woke means you’re a loser” — Donald J. Trump)
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To: John Leland 1789

Sabotage.


31 posted on 04/29/2023 1:04:23 PM PDT by blackdog ((Z28.310) We're all Women now.)
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To: John Leland 1789

Is it sabotage?

Is it confirmation bias - ie we pay attention and assign meaning to something that normally happen.

I don’t know.


32 posted on 04/29/2023 1:06:25 PM PDT by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to se)
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To: John Leland 1789

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.


33 posted on 04/29/2023 1:14:17 PM PDT by FarCenter
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To: John Leland 1789

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).


34 posted on 04/29/2023 1:20:35 PM PDT by Deplorable American1776 (Guns don't kill people, LIBERALS DO!! Support the Second Amendment...)
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To: John Leland 1789

“What is Happening to Rail in the USA?”

Same thing that’s happening to everything else in the country...crapified by democrats.


35 posted on 04/29/2023 1:22:42 PM PDT by Bonemaker (invictus maneo)
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To: PGR88
Thanks — and great post.

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.

36 posted on 04/29/2023 1:29:35 PM PDT by Alberta's Child ("I've just pissed in my pants and nobody can do anything about it." -- Major Fambrough)
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To: GMThrust

LOL. That was a totally unintended pun.


37 posted on 04/29/2023 1:31:13 PM PDT by Alberta's Child ("I've just pissed in my pants and nobody can do anything about it." -- Major Fambrough)
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To: BitWielder1
I don’t know for sure that there’s been any increase in derailments. They’ve just gotten more attention lately.

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.

38 posted on 04/29/2023 1:34:11 PM PDT by Alberta's Child ("I've just pissed in my pants and nobody can do anything about it." -- Major Fambrough)
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To: RoosterRedux
Willie Green gave up in despair, I believe.

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.

39 posted on 04/29/2023 1:35:20 PM PDT by SamAdams76 (5,181,324 Truth | 87,174,230 Twitter)
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To: SamAdams76
Most of the major rail lines in New York east of the Hudson River trace their roots to the New York Central Railroad or the Pennsylvania Railroad systems. They merged to form the Penn Central in 1968 out of desperation in the face of many challenges in the railroad industry. Two years later the merged company filed for bankruptcy — the largest in U.S. history until the collapse of Enron in 2001.

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).

40 posted on 04/29/2023 1:46:27 PM PDT by Alberta's Child ("I've just pissed in my pants and nobody can do anything about it." -- Major Fambrough)
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