KEN PATRICK wrote:f-line- does iron horse have a positive all-in cost differential ?. my experience is that the cost of pulling the rail, connectors and spikes and disposing of the ties- usually no good for anything else- exceeded the scrap value. hence the plethora of old ties along the various row's. ties disposal costs are the killer. i would like to see all of this 'trail use' activity reflect the costs of tie disposal to be certain the ties aren't dumped in the adjoining woods. ( see pwrr and ridep) ken patrick
They're a nonprofit, mostly volunteer-run outfit. So there might be some filings online somewhere showing what their cash flow is. They restore some antique locomotives and RR equipment on the side to puff up their nonprofit stature, but basically they're a low-rent scrap dealer that breaks even on the scrap metal resale and redistribution of what serviceable ties they can salvage. I don't know what they do with the bad ties or what their disposal deal is for them, other than it all gets carted offsite and out-of-state from whence they came and as far as anyone knows they've never been cited for improper disposal.
I don't want to slag off on them too badly. They're frequently subcontracted on
designed and
state-supervised trails to handle the scrap and cleanup because they have the equipment and manpower for it. They do good work. And it's cheap for the gov't when they take most of their compensation in scrap proceeds, arguably lower-cost than paying a state crew or borrowing a freight RR to do the line/yard/etc. dismantling. They can be trusted to build a good trail when supervised to follow somebody's design, because usually there's a few extra bucks of compensation coming their way in extra labor using higher-grade materials (small crushed stone vs. re-spread ballast), fixing culverts, basic landscaping (benches, plantings), etc. i.e. The mundane stuff for doing the job right and making it last. They're working the Saugus Branch/Bike to The Sea right now, which is a DCR-designed job (potentially very, very good trail). And they did the Watertown Branch (1996-abandoned portion) cleanup 2 summers ago on that very nice DCR-built first trail leg...even salvaging the switch to the former Armory spur and making a little historical exhibit out of it. Whenever the state closes out purchase of the just-abandoned portion to Cambridge from Pan Am, they'll probably also do the (badly-needed) cleanup and brush-cutting before DCR moves in to do the landscaping.
It's the DIY jobs and associated sales pitch--"You get a perfect trail at NO COST but the scrap!!!"--that get scammy. 1) It's like feeding NIMBY's crack to permanently screw with state-owned ROW's. 2) There is no such thing as a "free" trail because you can't grade a functional one for the cost of the scrap resale, and they'll cut every corner to make sure they don't exceed cost. I mean, I don't know what the price ceiling is for scrap...you probably know way more about that than I. But it ain't high, and if the break-even math looks fuzzy here it's easy to see just how far IH has to cut corners on the labor to not lose their shirts doing this. 3) The state/town gets taken for a ride when it gets stuck with perpetual sunk cost maintaining the low-quality trail (often result of clogged culverts, washouts, divots, inadequate vegetation removal, and other safety hazards)...cost the "free" trail wasn't supposed to incur according to the happy-joy-joy sales pitch. And 4) the all-volunteer trail lobbies that bait their ill-informed town pols with the Iron Horse talking points are themselves too ill-informed to deal with the compromises incurred by a DIY job. They underestimate the maintenance hurdles, and then go AWOL when it's time for the all-volunteer "Friends o' The Trail" group to step up on its promises to community-maintain the "free" surface, pick up trash, clean out vegetation, and do other crud upkeep. Or, worse, they whine and scream about it to the pols until the town or state has to pick up a tab it never wanted. The freebies wouldn't be a bad deal if communities were responsible enough to educate themselves and understand the risks, didn't hijack these things to settle NIMBY or political scores, and were held as a condition of the lease to uphold their responsibilities. But they don't. And Iron Horse knows the rubes are always the first in line for its sales pitch, so it promotes it as some sort of cure-all when really this DIY method only works in a very limited, careful few cases. Massachusetts, New York, Penn., and other states in the region that don't keep their ROW usage under pretty tight, centralized lock-and-key are binge-drinking on the Iron Horse pitch right now. This is at least the 5th "freebie" doled out in MA since 2009.