# The empty railroads of America.



## Cycleops (Dec 6, 2014)

This is an interesting perspective of railways by a photographer who like to study them devoid of trains.

In pictures: The empty railways of America - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-40341771


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Some of those pictures were of tracks that haven't had trains on them for years.


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## time warp (Apr 28, 2016)

Interesting photo study.


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## Nikola (Jun 11, 2012)

Very cool. I love it. Plenty of abandoned rail around NYC, for sure.


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## Gramps (Feb 28, 2016)

Great photography.:appl: I particularly liked the Park Ave tunnel cut because I grew up near there and did some train watching from the top of the tunnel at 96th St. I had cousins that lived 1 block from where that picture was taken. The NYC/NH main line is on a trestle coming down Park Ave but at 98th St there is a steep hill and the trains go underground with very little, if any, change in grade on the tracks.


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## DonR (Oct 18, 2012)

Railroad mergers in North America have resulted in
the abandonment of once busy main lines. Often after
a time the rails and ties are removed. In some cases,
a 'RAIL TO TRAIL' is built. This is a paved surface for
bicyclists, walkers and runners. We have one here
that is about 20 miles long. It has a rest area at
mid point. It resulted from the merger of Seaboard Air
Line and Atlantic Coast line. They had parallel tracks
from here to Baldwin, Fl. One became surplus and
thus the biking trail. They are very popular.

In other cases the old mains become storage areas
for surplus or seasonal use freight cars. The former
Seaboard Air line Main North of Jacksonville is used
for that. Where it is not used the rails and ties have
been removed. Sad, many of the Northeast originated
Seaboard passenger trains to Florida used those rails. Two
of Seaboard's popular 'Silver' NY to FL passenger trains are still running
but on CSX tracks and as Amtrak.

Don


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## Nikola (Jun 11, 2012)

I believe that infrastructure is a one-way street. IOW, there was a need for it to be funded and built, and then all of a sudden it is superfluous? That to me means that they're doing it wrong.

I am nutty enough that I would legislate that existing infrastructure could not be abandoned or destroyed unless a very high bar was passed.

Those abandoned lines Don mentioned? If it was law that they could not be abandoned, someone would have found a way to run more freight trains on them, and that would have displaced plenty of less-efficient trucks from ever having been needed.


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## 1905dave (Sep 18, 2016)

Nikola said:


> I believe that infrastructure is a one-way street. IOW, there was a need for it to be funded and built, and then all of a sudden it is superfluous? That to me means that they're doing it wrong.


First off, only one of the pictures that I saw was of an abandoned line. ALL the other lines were active and in service.

The pictures were of EMPTY tracks, not ABANDONED tracks.

Remember that all that "infrastructure" is private property, owned by private companies and was bought, paid for and maintained with private funds.



> I am nutty enough that I would legislate that existing infrastructure could not be abandoned or destroyed unless a very high bar was passed.


There is already an extensive process required to abandon railroad tracks. The inability to abandon superfluous routes is a large part of why the railroad network in the northeast collapsed and went bankrupt in the 1970's.



> Those abandoned lines Don mentioned? If it was law that they could not be abandoned, someone would have found a way to run more freight trains on them, and that would have displaced plenty of less-efficient trucks from ever having been needed.


That was tried back before the 1970's and it resulted in dozens of railroads going bankrupt.


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## Nikola (Jun 11, 2012)

1905dave said:


> First off, only one of the pictures that I saw was of an abandoned line. ALL the other lines were active and in service.
> 
> The pictures were of EMPTY tracks, not ABANDONED tracks.
> 
> ...


We were talking about abandoned lines. Don mentioned a bunch as did I.

I say again, they're doing it wrong. I would not point to anything that happened in the 1970s as best practice.

Somehow all those superfluous routes you mentioned begat tens of thousands of 18 wheelers. I wonder how that happened? Somehow even after the routes were gone many of our railroads still went down the poopy chute.

As I said, we've been doing it wrong.


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## DonR (Oct 18, 2012)

While most of us likely would give anything to have
the railroads of yesteryear, the world has changed
on us. 

Passenger service was lost to automobiles and
airplanes. The trucking industry took away much
of the most profitable business of railroads, freight. The
railroads did what they had to do to survive. They began
buying up each other or merging. Tracks that 
are not needed are ripped up and the real estate
often turned over to the local government to 
save on real Estate Taxes.

But today, the railroads development of special cars to
carry containers is bringing business back to
railroads that trucks had taken away. Mile long
trains of bucket cars double stacked with containers
is a common sight now along major railroad arteries.
Long unit trains of coal, grain, or petroleum cars are also
a common sight on the rails.

The powerful new genset locos are doing their part
to keep railroads efficient and profitable.

Don


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## 1905dave (Sep 18, 2016)

Nikola said:


> Somehow all those superfluous routes you mentioned begat tens of thousands of 18 wheelers. I wonder how that happened? Somehow even after the routes were gone many of our railroads still went down the poopy chute.


That of course assumes that the traffic moving on the other routes was lost to truck. You ignore the fact that the traffic could have been just shifted to an adjacent line. For example there are two parallel routes that 6 trains a day on each route. You are assuming that when one route is abandoned the 6 trains on that route go to truck, when in reality the traffic on the abandoned route just shifts over to the other route and it now handles 12 trains a day. Operating multiple parallel routes is horribly inefficient and drives up operating costs, higher operating costs make rates higher and make shipping by rail more unattractive.

A town in Arkansas was wanting to create a "rail port". They owned a little branch line and wanted the class 1 to make a connection with them. The problem is that the they connected with a north-south route that had no other intermodal product on it. There was no network to connect with. In order to get into the big E-W flow, they would have had to make a connection at the junction, then be taken to another junction on the class 1, then get to another junction where the E-W long haul trains were. By the time all that transpired it would be quicker and cheaper to dray the boxes 200 miles to the railroad's existing E-W route hub and just put them on a train there.

Having every point less than 10 miles from a rail head was really cool in 1897, not really financially or operationally effective today.


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