by F-line to Dudley via Park
markhb wrote:Just curious, what does "liability-free insurance" mean in that context? I can't imagine it would mean that all liability for accidents would pass through to the host railroad.There was some descriptor of that type of insurance buried pages deep in whatever thread(s) talked about the proposal. Board search upchucks a flood of unrelated results, so you'll have to hunt and peck (then Google if you want some really dry legalese as to what it is).
Basically, the rate difference is the be-all/end-all for there being a path forward for any private operator to make a go of excursion service...and if they couldn't get it on SLR none of their cost-recovery numbers worked anywhere for the whole proposal. Not squaring the same insurance with PAR and CN (or other Canadian carriers) was enough to raise eyebrows on the public pronouncements, because it was so many steps premature to be talking start dates. But if SLR wouldn't oblige, the Class I & II roads also involved in the route had far less incentive--despite the shorter running distances--to allow a rate deal.
Think of it as a 20-step gauntlet for squaring all the paperwork and logistics to reach a service A-Day. The scammy proposals (e.g. Golden Eagle snake oil, Housatonic RR's various passenger flights-of-fancy) flunk on Step #1 without notching any approvals. The POR-MTL hotel train maybe made it to Step #3 before hitting no-go. The Providence-Worcester private commuter rail proposal is sitting on Step #6 or something in the mid-high single digits--impressively far relative to other wholly private, non- public-subsidy proposals--but having a recent hard time of it (ever since the Genessee & Wyoming buyout of P&W) getting unstuck from there and thus still quite unlikely to see a real train run. It's hard to tag something like this hotel train as 'realer' than the rest just because it sailed past the Step #1 that cuts down 97% of similar proposals. It still had like 17 steps, each of increasing difficulty, to go before netting 'a' hotel train of any kind. So securing the right railroad insurance wouldn't have necessarily increased their odds of making it through the rest of the paper torture test. But the proposal was most definitely dead right then and there when SLR refused the insurance rates they absolutely had to have.
SLR's reticience is most definitely due to that Golden Eagle guy pitching the exact same proposal a couple of years ago on the SLR main without ever giving SLR notice. It caught a minor wave of local press despite the service proposal making zero sense and the numbers being absolute baloney. And pissed off SLR to have reporters and local pols calling the home office asking about 'their' intercity proposal and having to respond, "Who???". When questions started being asked Golden Eagle went dark and dropped off the map for a couple of years, only to resurface '14-15 with the exact same snake oil pitch...this time on the Mountain Div. pitching to MEDOT (who gave the G.E. guy a tad too much self-promotion rope before questions inevitably started getting asked about sketchy numbers not adding up). So even though the hotel train was backed by a tour outfit that had done bookings for real excursion rail service before, and thus were worth a *smidge* more of an open mind on-spec...SLR had rabbit ears after their brush with the Golden Eagle scam and were not keen on contributing any PR hot air to a proposal very much in its infancy that was being promoted with too aggressive a service-start schedule for plausibility. Communication was not exactly proactive or thorough, so the railroad clammed up right then and there. Had the outreach to SLR been a lot quieter and more methodical, the hotel train still may not have had a realistic shot at getting the right insurance for a number of reasons...it's that tough, and SLR has ample self-protection reasons to not bend further than they see fit. But racing ahead PR before partner relationship-building was a legit goof on the proposal group's part that probably snagged that 20-step slog at a fatal blocker a little bit sooner than if they'd paced themselves better.
