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  • For topics on Class I and II passenger and freight operations more general in nature and not specifically related to a specific railroad with its own forum.
For topics on Class I and II passenger and freight operations more general in nature and not specifically related to a specific railroad with its own forum.

Moderator: Jeff Smith

 #1455331  by Gilbert B Norman
 
This could possibly be Open Content:

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TRAINS has compiled their "top ten" stories of 2017. Guess who is "on top"?

YAGER

Here are the rankings (pardon my parenthetical):

1) Hunter (RIP)
2) GE Transportation
3) Disasters
4) Cascades 501
5) Brightline
6) C&O 1309 (beats me!)
7) Summer of Hell (was it?)
8) Siemens-Alstom
9) Clinchfield 800 (Really?)
10)Automous Train (1:1 Lionels)
 #1460981  by Engineer Spike
 
Hunter didn’t do anything revolutionary. He just made things a shambles. First, it doesn’t take a genius to sell assets to raise cash. Secondly, his precision railroading only works if everything goes right. If there was bad weather, or a mechanical failure, then there was no backup. One example was running large trains, with the power maxed out. Meanwhile hundreds of units were mothballed. If a unit quit, there were no spares. With every train maxed out, nobody had a unit to give up, when one failed.

Hunter said that these monster trains are most cost effective. On a Boston and Maine forum, there was a thread about train lengths, and a study done by MIT. The short fast trains made better time, and made better connections. Of course Hunter was smarter than the engineering students! The study was done back when full crews were still used, and we were in the middle of the oil crisis. These factors would suggest what Hunter thought, but was proven wrong.