Say goodbye to CSX in Eastern Mass?

Looks like CSX want's out of Boston.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editor ... _for_sale/

http://railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 649#361649
Its easier with one thread and since thise one has more responces, we should go here

since it all has to do with CSX and Mass., ill let it stay

As the gentleman in the other forum said, It'll be just like south Florida where CSX sold it's tracks to the state and and maintained trackage rights. The state pays for repairs and upgrades to enhance the Commutor trains and CSX keeps runnin frieght trains.

Of course, Massachusetts has to come up with the $$ to acquire said trackage. There are many views that MA and the MBTA are already "over extended" in terms of debt financing.

But the Turnpike Authority already ownes the line out as far as Rt128 and the "T" owns as far as MP33 in Westborough. Harvard University bought Beacon Park yard from the Pike two or three years ago.

Typical slimeball CSX move. Let the tracks fall apart, and then offer the gubbermint a "chance" to "preserve rail service" (and expand government mass transit) by selling the right of way.

CSX doesn't want to be a transportation company. They want to be on the receiving end of the dole, in a government/corporate "partnership."

Gee, I miss Conrail...even owned by the government as it was, it wanted to keep and work its own tracks and rolling stock.

Conrail became a publicly traded corporation in 1986.

lvrr325 wrote:Conrail became a publicly traded corporation in 1986.

Yup. A number of my co-workers made a nice packet with the sale of their shares of Conrail stock, issued them when the railroad was sold by the government.

But by then, the dynamic was in place. Conrail, for whatever reason, by chance or serendipity, became the rarity - a government program that worked, even better than its proponents hoped. It was really a railroad driven by railroaders who believed in what they were doing and wanted to do it better.

What railroad can that be said about, today?

At the risk of veering OT, having an effective monopoly on mainline freight service in the northeast US (including the B&A route) certainly helped Conrail's profitability and success. I don't mean to minimize the quality of Conrail's operations from a railroader's perspective, but CR management clearly got to choose which traffic it cared about (and to what degree) and which routes and shippers (eg, ex-EL Southern Tier or any n/s traffic into NJ/New England) it could de-emphasize based on profitability. CR was also notorious for downsizing/removing infrastructure that could have been beneficial for handling today's traffic levels. It really is too bad that Chessie and EL unions couldn't come to terms at the time of CR formation in 1976. Breaking up CR in 1999 has been a good thing, although there were clearly transition problems.

johnpbarlow wrote:At the risk of veering OT, having an effective monopoly on mainline freight service in the northeast US (including the B&A route) certainly helped Conrail's profitability and success. I don't mean to minimize the quality of Conrail's operations from a railroader's perspective, but CR management clearly got to choose which traffic it cared about (and to what degree) and which routes and shippers (eg, ex-EL Southern Tier or any n/s traffic into NJ/New England) it could de-emphasize based on profitability. CR was also notorious for downsizing/removing infrastructure that could have been beneficial for handling today's traffic levels. It really is too bad that Chessie and EL unions couldn't come to terms at the time of CR formation in 1976. Breaking up CR in 1999 has been a good thing, although there were clearly transition problems.

I don't know from what dimention you live, that you can claim that. Infrastructure deterioration, contemptable corporate citizenship, harassment of/reduction in employees and perpetually blocked road crossings, have been the symbols of this "transition."

As to the first: What would you have had, a continuation of a time when a business could NOT decide which product/service (rail traffic) it offered, and which was not worth offering? That was WHY the Penn Central, the EL, and others were insolvent or in need of merger: Someone ELSE was setting rates, telling them where they must offer services; and insisting on requiring permission to discontinue.

You cannot run a business like that and after 40 years of trying, the Pennsylvania and the Central empires collapsed.

More of the same would lead to more of the same - Conrail in the same position Amtrak is in today, a corporate ward of the government.

As you imply, deregulation under the Staggers Act of 1980, which Conrail got to exploit but its predecessors did not, clearly is key to RR's current profitability (and so was donating commuter rail ops to state agencies).

But from a shipper's perspective, competition is key. With the breakup of Conrail, New England has two viable rail routes to the rest of the US, CSX and PAR in conjunction with NS/CP. From the late '70s to 1999, there was Conrail as by far the major route and Guilfie, with its almost moribund District 4, as a weak alternative for D&H traffic. Today, both routes offer competition and feature the addition of n/s traffic (including JAX-Worcester/Boston intermodal) that Conrail was not too interested in operating from what I recall.