Pan Am Southern / Patriot Corridor Discussion

Are there any CSX locos headed to New England to replace the PAR locos that are going to B&E?

Former birch hill Subaru guy has a video from yesterday or the day before with 426 eastbound on the B&A with 4 4-axle Locos in tow. I’m assuming these were headed to csx’s side of the pan am property

And another video tonight of a train westbound through royalston with 3 NS units followed by mec 7875, 7725 and 3405

Thanks to Mr. Barlow who got me looking at the Chester Railway Station camera log, I see that yesterdays M426 besides the usual GE wide cabs had 2 CSXT GP- 40's #6152 and #6960, a GP-38-2S #6062, and a road slug #2360. The author of the log stated they are going to Waterville for rehab and return to service. I don't know where they will return to service.

BlueFlag wrote: ↑Mon Aug 28, 2023 9:31 pm
Norfolk Southern’s year to forget has another unfortunate reason to be remembered. A NS “technology outage” today pretty much brought operations to a standstill — and the company states the impact on those operations will last “a couple of weeks”.
.

I rest my case. Clearly NS is completely and totally justified in suing CSX for causing every problem they have ever had.

someone please just make it stop

Hard to believe it has been more than 15 years since PAS was announced; it has certainly been an interesting ride. Given the unusual ownership and competitive situation, I am presuming until shown otherwise that things under B&E operations will remain far more interesting to follow than most rail lines. I welcome the thoughts of those close to PAS operations on the degree to which 15 years later, track quality, customer service, train speed and reliability and capacity on the route did actually improve long-term.

MAY 2008: NORTH BILLERICA, MASS., NORFOLK, VA. – Pan Am Railways (PAR) and Norfolk Southern Railway Company (NS) have agreed to create an improved rail route between Albany, N.Y., and the greater Boston, Mass., area called the “Patriot Corridor.” Investments in the Patriot Corridor are expected to improve track quality and customer service, boost train speed and reliability, and increase capacity on the route. PAR and NS each will have a 50 percent interest in the newly formed railroad company, called “Pan Am Southern.”

I will take a stab because I wasn't too far out of the B&M when PAS was formed.

Things were very promising in the beginning. Through the influx of capital for the first time since the 80s the railroad was running timetable speed between Mechanicville and Westminster. There were sufficient crews. New gateways were opened. Yard crews were putting road power on trains and they departing on time whether they had 1 or a 100 cars to move.

It did not last long. The track deteriorated back to 25 (and 10 over many winters), crews became more scarce. NS investment slowed down, and things remained fairly stagnant since. Yes some big new customers were landed, but this was offset by the loss of overhead traffic that moved to the Barbers gateway.

I think it's difficult to determine whether the joint partnership has been a success up to the present. Ultimately, I think a lot of the failures were due to operations being shared between PAR and PAS by way of the ST. These railroads had far different core commodities, interchange partners, territory types, etc.

I do think things are going to be very rocky post-ST separation for a while but ultimately this will be to the benefit of the customer. PAS can be run like an actual railroad with its own strategy without a care for the other half. The one thing I do fear is a potential lackadaisical attitude from both owners and how that will affect the physical plant. It is clear CSX wants nothing to do with it. NS has been the biggest disappointment of all by planning to move the very core traffic off the route that was the basis for its formation. Ultimately, I think to truly be successful GWI (or another shortline) will need to obtain full ownership. Perhaps this is a first step, time will tell. I wish the employees the best of luck and hope the railroad is successful.

I remember being very optimistic back when PAS was first announced, and being impressed when the NS power started showing up at Ayer and things seemed to get more serious. NS was going to be the solution. Now it kind of seems like they’re the problem.

It does seem to me that even if NS & CSX are relatively disinterested owners, having a separate operating company that’s not going to shift power and crews to what was PAR ought to make for some improvement. And maybe some company with more enthusiasm will buy CSX’s half.

Apparently B&E will not be listed as a carrier on the GWI site but has its own as of today. https://panamsouthern.com/

LOL Your favorite You Tuber is going to love this, keeps the Pan Am bashing going.

"Shameful railroad, shameful employees."

Never let's it go.

https://panamsouthern.com/sitemap/ gives a 404 not found error. Still, not bad for a railroad website on it's first day of operation.

Love the Minuteman logo. Imagine if they use a custom livery instead of the orange & yellow: Heritage maroon & gold with Minuteman logo, PanAm Southern spelled out in PanAm Airlines font.

Maroon and gold would be very cool!
Or, if they want to inflame a certain rail fan, they could go with dark gray, a long orange stripe and a big white P instead of a G

In other news, saw a video today of 16R backing down east wye like the pig. The camp and or west wye must really be in an almost unusable state these days

One thing that's somewhat interesting about the maps on the PAS site is that they don't include the Conn River. I know that the state bought the ROW as part of fixing it up for passenger service, but while their interactive map includes all the way to Ayer, which is over the same type of trackage rights, it doesn't show any part of the Conn River line.

(correction, after zooming in all the way - it does show the Conn River line, but very faintly with thin lines compared with the way the Freight Main is shown).

I'm not sure what's in store paint wise but if I were a betting man I'd say we'll see GWI livery before any new PAS scheme. Remember PAS is not a common carrier so while they could paint them in some type of PAS paint the road bettering would still need to be BER or PS. Is BER even registered as a common carrier? I forgot what they said in the application.

So we still have a Pan Am Southern entity, but no longer have B&M, MEC, Springfield Terminal nor Guilford in the corporate family. I wonder what happened top the Pan American rights that Mellon so jealously guarded.