RE: (erielack) Railroads "That Should Never Have Been Built

[Mike Spinelli <idrsspin_@_yahoo.com>]

Who would have thought Dunkirk wasn't going to become
a great gateway to the west?

Who would have thought building on stilts with a six
foot gauge was a bad idea at the time?

Only a series of miracles allowed the Erie to last as
long as it did. How many years out of 100+ did it
actually make a nice profit? 

If I sound negative, I'm glad she did, and wish she
were still here today.

Mike Spinelli

- --- "Tupaczewski, Paul R (Paul)" <paultup_@_lucent.com>
wrote:

> > Whenever I hear a reference to something that
> "Never should 
> > have been built" made by a contemporary in the
> late 
> > 20th-early 21st century I kind of have to chuckle.
> After all 
> > that is an obituary remark, not a remark from the
> time of the 
> > planning and building. It is also ignores the
> entire complex 
> > relationship of the entity to its environment.
> 
> 
> "Hindsight is 20/20."  The prospects for the O&W
> probably seemed pretty good when it was originally
> built (who would have thought that Oswego would
> never become a huge port town? :). Also, don't
> forget, in those "boom times" every town wanted to
> build their own railroad. Many failed, many never
> got off the ground, and the rest eventually
> consolidated with neighboring railroads. Of course,
> built as a piecemeal entity, no one ever saw the
> "big picture" until they were all merged together.
> By that point, you had a fixed line, and now you had
> to figure out what the purpose of this line was
> going to be.
> 
> 
> > Corporations are formed to fill a percieved market
> or need. 
> > The world changes and some of those corporations
> change or 
> > die. Studebaker made wagons and changed to cars
> and trucks. 
> > Canals were technologically inferior to railroads
> and so were 
> > supplanted by them, not a few right on the
> towpaths. But does 
> > that mean the D&H or Erie canals should Never Have
> Been 
> > Built? I doubt many would argue in the
> affirmative.
> 
> 
> Many railroads are not around anymore because their
> raison d'etre no longer exists. I just got done
> reading the fine book "Iron Mine Railroads of
> Northern New Jersey" by Larry Lowenthal (is
> Tri-State going to reprint this gem???), which
> discusses the multitude of "really short railroads"
> in Northern NJ, most built to haul iron ore out of
> the NJ hillsides. Eventually, most of the lines
> mentioned were sucked into two roads: The CNJ, as
> part of its High Bridge Branch, and the DL&W, as
> part of its Chester Branch. The DL&W was lucky
> because the branch only provided a miniscule part of
> the line's revenue, and they were smart enough to
> prune the "dead branches" before it was too late -
> the Chester Branch was amputated south of Ledgewood
> in the 1930s.
> 
> But the loss of the iron ore business to the Mesabi
> Range on the Great Lakes is a good example of what
> Rusty is referring to. In the O&W's case, the big
> commodities were milk (which trucks quickly sapped
> away) and coal (which by the 1950s was already a
> dying commodity in the Northeast). What else did it
> have?
> 
>  
> > Give the Old & Weary its due. The railroad changed
> the face 
> > of the region through which it passed and operated
> to the 
> > betterment of most everyone it connected with
> until 
> > supplanted by new technology and cultural changes,
> just as it 
> > sister railroads did all ove the US.
> 
> It was all about timing. If you look at today's
> railroads, they're constantly finding the need to
> reinvent themselves. The NYS&W wouldn't be around
> today if luck and the double-stack revolution hadn't
> hit. Today's NYS&W no longer has stacks, but they
> haul giant trains of construction debris (as do many
> other roads). I don't know how good railroads were
> back in the 50s at "innovating" in terms of hunting
> down new business - I think most roads tended to
> stick with legacy commodities (most notably coal and
> LCL). Piggyback was a step in the right direction,
> but innovation didn't happen quickly enough.
> 
> Just my $0.02.
> 
> 	- Paul
> 
> 	The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List
> 	Sponsored by the ELH&TS
> 	http://www.elhts.org
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 

	The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List
	Sponsored by the ELH&TS
	http://www.elhts.org

------------------------------