Shipping Big Iron & Rail Right-Of-Way Abandonment

The biggest cause for decline for railroading in the 60's and 70's was World War 2. Believe it or not, WWII was very detrimental to the American railroads. The government imposed restrictions on pricing for shipment; these restrictions were to keep "the evil railroads" from making "windfall profits" (sound familiar? kinda like those "evil oil companies" today....). The traffic levels were the highest in history. Coming out of the Great Depression, railroads were faced with the prospect of having to pour huge amounts of money into infrastructure to improve roadbed, bridges, and to purchase new rolling stock and locomotives. Purchasing new equipment wasn't enough, though, and the railroads had to waste large amounts of time and money rebuilding equipment that was going to be retired or scrapped. In order to meet demand, the railroads were having to make 40 and 50-year old equipment ready for heavy use. During the war, maintenance on equipment was deferred. Rail lines couldn't be taken out for critical service, like replacing ties, regrading ballast, cleaning ballast, resurfacing rail, and so on. Every available locomotive and freight/passenger car was needed to support the immense traffic that was generated by the industries in full war-production mode. After the war ended, the government wouldn't allow the railroads to increase shipping rates to required levels to pay for the deferred maintenance. At the time, the Interstate Commerce Commission restricted the rates the railroads could charge shippers. The ICC didn't want to make shippers mad, so they blamed the "evil railroads" for attempting to gouge the customer, and the rates weren't allowed to increase to the level required to pay back the demands of WWII. As the road system in America improved, people wanted to travel by car and plane rather than by train. Again, the government decided to screw the railroads - the railroads weren't allowed to stop passenger service on routes that were losing money. And so it went - the rail system was in such a horrible shape due to deferred maintenance, shipping rates were artificially low, and the general public abandoned the rail passenger system. Railroad "giants" like the Pennsylvania and the New York Central had to merge to stay alive. Later, the government finally formed Conrail to prevent the virtual collapse of the North-Eastern rail network. Conrail was formed from the Penn Central and several other once great railroads. Then the abandonment of whole rail networks began. It's been only within the last 10-20 years that railroads have been making a comeback. There are expansions happening, some lines that were single-tracked to save money are now being double-tracked to handle the increased capacity. Some railroads are even attempting to break back into the "LCL" (less than carload) market again, and with the ability to use the Internet to book and track shipments and pay with credit cards. This may sound trivial to us as consumers, since we have been doing that for a while with companies like FedEx and UPS, but for an industry that is 172 years old - it's a step in the right direction. We now resume our regularly scheduled computer broadcast. This has been a test of the emergency "off-topic" system. : ) Really though, the application of technology with the railroad system is fascinating. Remote control of locomotives, satellite monitoring, automatic throttle corrections based on GPS positioning, centralized traffic control, it's all a very neat segment of technology to be interested in. - Matt At 01:25 AM 3/6/2002 -0500, you wrote: