One of the best presentations on passenger train operations anywhere! Great photos and information! Thank you so very much for sharing this!

Watched a few of these now, bravo Steve these are excellent.

Honestly had no idea the railroads pulled so many dirty tricks to get out of passenger service.

@ronclark9724

4 жыл бұрын

Unfortunately without the mail cars none of these passenger trains earned any money for the stockholders. And when the US Postal Service itself chose to fly the mail and truck the mail, passenger trains became obsolete overnight...

@Shipwright1918

4 жыл бұрын

@@ronclark9724 If the passenger numbers had remained sufficient or the ICC's policies had given the railroads the freedom to set their own rates to keep the service profitable, subsidies like mail contracts probably wouldn't have mattered. The fact the equipment was starting to age by the late 60's probably was a factor too.

@spadesofpaintstudios1719

2 жыл бұрын

Agreed I never would of guessed, I’ve always heard it was all on the highways and airplanes but i guess that’s only partially true.

@ronclark9724

Жыл бұрын

@@Shipwright1918 If the railroads had increased their fares they would have lost their passengers to the airlines sooner... And this at at time before the low fare airlines....

What I find most interesting is the fact rail power has/had so much potential but they pretty much mutilated trains of amenities like dinning cars or sleeping cars which are something that really helped people. It just sucks that the companies themselves or most of them didn’t seem to care, But good slide show and very interesting stories as well.

Normally, I don't care for You Tube slide presentations, but the real entertainment of it was to hear the discussion about these trains, and it is the first time I've ever seen any pictures of Dallas Union Terminal. I was always curious as to what it looked like. And, here are some of the 18 Santa Fe E8 diesels. I always wondered where these units worked. I loved this and thank you so much! I could listen to you talk about this all day and I've no one to discuss trains with. My thing has always been the Southern Railway System trains coming in and out of Atlanta Terminal Station (razed, 1972).

@tommythomason6187

2 жыл бұрын

I meant 8 - not, "18," - E8s that Santa Fe owned.

What a terrific video - a great 2 hours spent watching and learning about trains - in a time before I was old enough to ride them. I love Steve's books too!

Thanks, Steve. Great presentation, very informative, with priceless illustrations. My Rock Island agent dad, Lynn Browning, knew all these trains with their routes and schedules. Better yet, he had countless stories about the people and the incidents aboard and around these trains. Rob Browning

Fantastic: Learned so very much about trains in Texas and Oklahoma. I grew up on the Frisco Route: Tulsa to Dallas the Black Gold at Henryetta, Oklahoma.

Sad to see that there are less people in this room than there would have been during 2020. And this was before Covid.

Truly unique and informative…

Well done video! Thank you.

*I like the M-K-T's steam locomotives, especially their pacifics.* 38:05 this is H-2b class 4-6-2 light pacific 367, built by Alco 42:19 this is H-3c class 4-6-2 pacific 407, built by Lima

My USN air-crewman pop would say, "The real story of WWII was what the big shots were cooking up here at home while the nation's attentions were fully diverted to Europe and the S. Pacific." What we see here is how it must've felt to business and other travelers used to moving via the national rail passenger system - suddenly finding that they were "strangers at somebody else's class reunion." The plan - cooked up by auto, petroleum and insurance business interests (think about it), along with the big contractors and the big engineering firms - was to stick the taxpayers with ALL the costs and ALL the liabilities of their own day-to-day transportation. The people of the USA "had been getting off a little too easy" with the functional, economical simplicity of intercity trains and municipal transit. Today - my home state, Oklahoma, undoubtedly carries well over $100 BILLION in "unfunded highway maintenance requirement," a number which continues to skyrocket - mirroring the debt load palmed off on citizens of the whole nation by the road builders. And nobody's alarmed. Nobody cares. That debt continues to skyrocket as the surface transportation capability of the nation is reduced to massively-damaging intercity trucking - a system which could simply never bear a national emergency like WWII. This whole disaster was not cooked up by people who "wanted to compete in the free market for the transportation dollar." It was created by people who wanted to DOMINATE the people of the USA for their own fun and profit - LIMITING consumer choices by government fiat.

Interesting presentation. Though I would mention that a number of railroads tried everything they could to preserve the passenger train the public was not interested in the continuance of passenger train services. Milwaukee Road ran some passenger train service after Amtrak formation in an attempt to get a subsidy but again, public was not interested and it discontinued the practice. You can view a video on the California Zephyr on SLING TV and AMAZON Prime and see in one case of a Long Distance train, multiple attempts were made by the railroads to save the train via pricing, splitting of revenue and the like but the public again was not all that interested.

@ronclark9724

5 жыл бұрын

As noted, when the railroads discontinued their passenger trains, many cities still taxed the living daylights out of depots no longer generating income. Even when the railroads were willing to sell their depots to the cities for a dollar. No wonder many were razed. Keep in mind the railroads were corporations and their management desired to be in the black generating dividends to their shareholders. Otherwise the management got the sack... As also seen the mail contracts kept passengers service around another decade, especially for rural towns airlines didn't serve. But eventually the postal service bought semi trucks to replace old worn out rolling stock...

👍

I was glad to be disabused of my notion that CRIP used the T&P terminal. I guess I thought CBQ used the T&P terminal and I somehow got the impression the Q and Rock did things together in Ft. Worth.

23:18 Rock Island

There was NO diner on the "Katy Flyer". Mr Goen is incorrect here.

@stevegoen2836

Жыл бұрын

Yes, that is the Katy Flyer arriving in Dallas on its last run from San Antonio. The diner was part of several cars from the Texas Special that were being deadheaded back to Dallas. You can tell from the sun that this is a morning photo which matches up with the Katy Flyer’s scheduled arrival into Dallas.

@ironhorsemedia2881

4 ай бұрын

@@stevegoen2836do you know if any passenger trains passed through Keller and Roanoke on the way to Dennison on the mopac/katy

I don't blame the Railroads for wanting to get rid of passenger trains. The ICC, TRC, and everyone else did not do anything to make trains cheaper to operate

@spadesofpaintstudios1719

2 жыл бұрын

That’s true it’s just more or less sad they didn’t even try to fix the situation.

That was probably a heck of a racket with that ice coming off at 77mph! 😮🪨🏝️