Railroad Forums
railfanofewu wrote:I was thinking about the idea of a modern RDC-3 or RDC-4. Up here in Washington State, their has just been completed a favorable study about purchasing the Palouse River and Coulee City Railroad. It did not say anything about passenger service. But if the State wanted to, as they are upgrading there own RR, they could put in the improvements for some passenger service, and use DMUs at first. I was thinking, there is a college town, Pullman on the route. Home to Washington State University, and I think if the track were upgraded, it would get good ridership. Also, there are a lot of students there, and if they get mail, it would be prudent to send it by train instead of Truck from Spokane. Probably just a pipe dream. Too bad not too many RDC-4s were built.Given that Pullman is not an EAS subsidized community, and that Pullman has a fairly decent sized post office, my guess is that much of the mail is flown in from Seattle - which helps prop up the three daily Horizon Air flights.
JimBoylan wrote:One of the M&St.L RDC-4s wound up in the Boston & Maine North Station, Boston, Mass. yards. It was apparently scrapped while the station was shut down for drawbridge work late in the 1900s.It had been purchased by the US affiliate of a German company called Krautkramer for conversion into an ultrasonic rail test car similar to Sperry's. (I knew Krautkramer well since they were the major competitor to my employer, Panametrics, in the field of industrial ultrasonics.) The conversion never went through and the car wound up in storage on the B&M, and was then used for many years as a crew office at North Station. It was indeed scrapped during the North Station reconstruction following the drawbridge fire, however that was in 1984, not in the 1990s.