Brian Solomon
Odds and ends: Views and input from Trains readers
Generating reader response is a mark of successful writing. Every so often I choose a risky topic, something that might be dismissed or ignored. Such was the case with my June 2021 topic “Reading about the Reading.” Yet, nothing I’ve composed to date in Trains or anywhere else has generated a greater reader reaction. I’ve received dozens of letters and emails, most endorsing my choice of subject, some including personal recollections of the Reading Co., and many identifying the mystery location of my dad’s black-and-white photo, exposed more than a half-century ago. The consensus is that the train was westbound on Reading’s Bethlehem Branch about to cross West 3rd Street in Bethlehem, Pa. The location is much changed, the line abandoned (now a trail), with many buildings torn down.
Curiosity of the unidentified location inspired a groundswell of response. Reading was a far more popular railroad than I thought.
David Kahler wrote, “I am 84 and lived with the Reading RR for more than 50 years. I was born in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1937. My grandfather was working as a brakeman in the Rutherford yards outside of Harrisburg. During WWII he would ride down the hump with an apple wood bat that he inserted into the brake wheel for added leverage on top of freight cars. My parents [later] moved to Chadds Ford, Pa., where I attended the Chadds Ford Consolidated School, located immediately adjacent to the Wilmington and Northern branch of the Reading RR along the Brandywine River, where I enjoyed the thunder and smoke of double-headed 2-8-0 and 4-6-0 camelback locomotives [on] freight trains from Coatsville to Wilmington, Del. ... In 1951, when I was 14, I convinced my grandfather to take me to Rutherford yards where I could take photos with my aunt Ethel’s Kodak box camera. My great uncle, Amos B. Cleckner, was the yard master. My grandfather never wanted to take me to the yards because he was afraid that I would become a railroader.”
My Southern Pacific tribute in September 2021 generated a tide of response. One of the most interesting letters, and perhaps most relevant to growing public concern for Class I freight operations, came from former SP employee Paul Dyson: “Thank you for marking the 25th anniversary of the end of SP. I was there as a Los Angeles-based sales rep from 1991-95 during the time when Don Orris and others attempted to rebuild the franchise. [Previously] I worked for British Railways 1968-1979. Coming to SP, I expected to find a tighter organization, more focused on efficiency and profitability. Boy was I wrong. I found the same empire building, the same risk aversion, [and] the dead weight of bureaucracy. Indeed I found BR to be generally a more innovative place, although mostly because they didn’t have to make a profit.
“The SP people I worked with in Ops and Marketing/Sales tried really hard to service our customers. ... Within a few years of UP operation, I heard from my old customers that they would love to have SP back; ‘There was no one at UP to talk to. You just had to wait for the meat grinder to do its work and your car to be delivered.’”
Dyson adds: “The ‘competition’ put in place by STB is a travesty. Working as a consultant in the last 15 years, I find little attempt by BNSF to seriously compete through the central corridor. They run a train a day or so, just enough to keep the STB from taking action. Large parts of UP territory are monopolies, and my old territory, the SP Coast Line, is more or less dead. If a railroad deliberately chases away the traffic from a line and sets up transload hubs to handle the traffic, the STB should force them to relinquish ownership and hand it to an operator that will at least try and service the franchise, don’t you think?”
Stephen Dick, Ph.D., SE, a senior research engineer at Purdue University Bowen Laboratory, wrote regarding Class I crossover costs [“Crossover Conundrum,” August 2021], “When developing preliminary engineering and concept cost estimates for Class I railroads for capacity improvement projects in the early 21st century, I estimated $2-2.5 million a piece for a No. 24 universal (double) crossover on two tracks with signals. That included construction costs from initial dirt-work to mainline cutovers. The costs were approximately 50% track/embankment and 50% for signaling, excluding positive train control.”
This figure was a welcome addition to my discussion, which describes a low-price crossover from a short line, and a high price from an urban commuter railroad, but lacked the appropriate comparison for a Class I. Often the best way to procure information is to admit that you don’t know the answer to a question!