That’s good information. You should post more about it.
The area behind our neighborhood where I once lived is being made into “rails to trails.” Its a disused line which hasn’t seen rail traffic since the 1980s.
AT LEAST someone in government had the sense to preserve them as public “rights of way” - so nothing is built on them which would preclude them coming back as future rail, pipelines, telecom corridors.
The decline of rail in the last 60 years is fascinating. My great Uncle, born in 1880, as a young teen, used to be able to take this same rail line (buffalo-pittsburgh line) in the morning, travel 35 miles, to drop off milk from his family farm at a dairy in downtown Buffalo, and be back in time to go to school. He said it cost a nickel.
So in 1890, we had fast, efficient, cheap and profitable private commuter rail service - which has been basically eliminated from most cities.
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.
What would a nickel then be worth now?
In the mid-1960s, my allowance was a nickel, and I could buy a candy bar with it. Now it’s almost $2 to buy a candy bar! (Which is good for my waistline, at least.)
So I can only imagine what a nickel in the 1890s would be worth!