What might have been...

On this first day of CSX ownership of Pan Am Railways, I was re-reading the Wikipedia article re: PAR and learned (or perhaps re-learned!) that Mellon had the following expansion notions back in the 1980s:

Expansion attempt
In 1985, Guilford entered into an agreement with Norfolk Southern Railway (NS) to run trains to St. Louis. NS was attempting to win approval of a plan to purchase Conrail from the U.S. government and proposed allowing Guilford to lease Conrail lines to St. Louis in order to restore competition that would be lost in the merger. The plan would have allowed Guilford to use the Conrail mainline from Toledo to Ridgeway, Ohio, and from Crestline, Ohio, to St. Louis. Guilford would also purchase 955 miles (1,537 km) of Conrail track and 1,300 freight cars from Norfolk Southern for $53M.[11] NS did not prevail in its attempt to purchase Conrail in 1985, and the Guilford plan was dropped. In 1987, Guilford also placed a bid to buy Southern Pacific.

Not sure if it's mentioned in the article but Fink Senior also publicly proposed that Guilford be allowed to buy the Northeast Corridor from Amtrak. Most people stopped taking him/the company seriously after that.

Here is a snapshot of Maine Central operations in the spring of 1979. Looking through my files,
aside from adjusting times for locals there doesn't appear to be too many changes until after
1982 and the GTI takeover. Seems hard to believe now how busy it was. Timmy paid $20.5 million
for MEC and $24 million for B&M and is rumored to have made it all back over the next several
years selling off real estate. It's mind-numbing to me that the shambles left today are are worth
a reported $700 Million to CSX even after taking into consideration 40 years of inflation. Maybe
just an indicator of the diminished value of a dollar.

S1f3432 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 7:11 pm Seems hard to believe now how busy it was.

Just think of all the mills they were serving that no longer exist. (I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that the mighty Great Northern Paper mills are no longer standing.)

Also, I'm surprised they list the Mountain DIvision as leaving Rigby at 6 Pm. My recollection of those days, or just a couple of years before this at least, was that it left in the 3 Pm-4PM range. (My route home from school included crossing the tracks near Westgate in Portland).

Yes, the loss of the mills hurts- when I graduated from school there were around 30 paper mills in
Maine plus 4 more in Northern NH and VT. After I left MEC I worked construction and maintenance
projects at mills in Rumford, Jay, Westbook, Lisbon Falls, Hinkley, Bucksport, Old Town and
Madawaska; multiple times in some of them plus a summer job at Marcal Paper in Mechanic Falls
while I was in tech school. Not only loss of traffic for the railroads but the loss of good paying jobs
for a lot of people and tax base for the communities they were located in. But that is just one chapter
in the deindustrialization of the country.

As I noted Maine Central was constantly adjusting the start times of specific trains while maintaining
the basic structure of service. I have a pile of these bulletin orders, albeit incomplete, from the time
I was at Bartlet- a little over 5 years. The times for RY-2/YR-1 changed three times in 1979:
Jan 9 RY-2 2PM YR-1 7AM, Apr23 RY-2 6PM YR-1 11AM, Nov 28 RY-2 5PM YR-1 10AM
This might have had something to do with changes with connections at St. Johnsbury. Substantial
changes began in 1983 with annulling of RY-2/YR-1 in early September and on Sept 14 the creation
of Guilford System "Priority Trains" POBA, MEBA, SPBA, MERU, BASE, BASP. RUPO, BAED and all
downhill from there.