Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:The Chessie System really did have a great logo & paint scheme.
Yeah. And it's not terribly complex. It's just three stripes of three colors, dark blue, orange, and yellow, but it's very bright, and crisp, and punchy. I imagine that during the gloom and doom of the '70s it was likely a breath of fresh air.
Edit: And just like that, Page 300.
Continuing the trend of friendly, cool new CSX, CSX has also announced that they are donating $5 million towards a major remodel of the B&O Railroad Musem. The donation will be used to build the “CSX Bicentennial Garden,” an amphitheater and multiuse space that can host local organizations and hold community gatherings. This will serve as a vibrant event space and provide a fresh, new location to welcome visitors to the Museum. CSX is the first corporate patron to pledge support for the campaign, which will improve the overall campus flow, add state-of-the-art educational space, including an Innovation Hall focused on present-day and future railroad technology, house extensive historical archives, and spark community economic development.
This is all to get ready for the B&O's bicentennial in 2027. I imagine that if C&O #2716 is running by then, this new CSX might be doing something special with that. After all, the whole usage of #2101 is '77 was also for the B&O's 150th anniversary.
One year into it's ownership of Pan Am Railways (formerly Guilford Rail Systems), and CSX has been pouring money into trying to get that property beat into shape. They've invested $57 million into it so far, and they estimate they will need to pour another $50 million into it, at least, before they're satisfied.
They've rehabilitated the Worcester Main Line between Worcester and Clinton, MA, including installatiing 136lb continuous welded rail and replacing all the crossings and turnouts. There was century old 100lb rail in that territory that hadn't seen a ballast train in years, and CSX was pulling up some double-tracking on ex-L&N trackage between Cincinnati and Knoxville (loss of coal traffic out of Corbin has dwindled traffic on that line), as well as a second main in the Huntington, WV area. The track now meets Federal Railroad Administration Class 2 standards, so the maximum authorized speed was raised to 25mph from 10mph(!). Next up is installing more welded rail from Clinton, MA to Harvard, which will allow a speed increase to 40mph from the current 25mph. Yes, Pan Am/Guilford was running trains everywhere under 10mph slow orders. Even fairly recently it was 10mph up through Hoosic Tunnel and it was only a couple years ago that they got it up to 25mph.
At the former Maine Central Rigby Yard in South Portland, Maine, the largest classification facility in New England, CSX has installed 50 new turnouts, more than 20,000 crossties, and resurfaced more than 98,000 feet of track, and improved walking conditions. Rigby classifies traffic bound to and from Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. CSX says the work improved the safety and fluidity of the yard, and reduced the number of minor yard derailments that historically plagued the location.
In Ayer Yard in Massachusetts, a series of projects are underway to increase capacity and fluidity of the yard. Pan Am/Guilford was notorious for cars taking forever to circulate through their yards, due to general poor layout and lack of capacity, and a couple years back Pan Am lost a pretty lucrative potential contract with Ford over Ayer Yard. Ayer Yard is the interchange point for CSX and Pan Am Southern, the joint venture with Norfolk Southern that includes the former Boston & Maine main line west of Ayer. Pan Am Southern is soon to become the independently operated Berkshire & Eastern, as soon as Springfield Terminal employees and Genesee & Wyoming (operators of Berkshire & Eastern) come to terms on labor. Ayer also is a strategic point on CSX: It’s where the Pan Am Railways corridor to New Hampshire and Maine begins.
There are also extensive upgrades to the Freight Main Line from Portland to the end of Pan Am trackage in Mattawamkeag, Maine, including tie replacement and surfacing, installation of continuous welded rail, increased capacity, and installation of new defect detectors.
The heavy repair shop in Waterville, Maine, has been reconfigured to focus on maintaining and rehabilitating CSX power and returning it to service throughout the system, and since this reconfiguration, 27 locomotives have been returned to service.
All of the work hammers home just how big of a pile of junk Pan Am Railways really was. I know that even before the rebrand to Pan Am Railways, Guilford had always been up for sale and CSX, CPR and NS had looked at it time and time again, and the asking price was just too much for how poor of condition literally everything was. Someone was asking, when CSX finally pulled the trigger on buying Pan Am, was there really that much traffic to warrant buying PAR and then get it up to good condition, and one guy's answer was "It's more of a 'build and they'll come situation'. There's still a decent bit of industry in New England, but most of it won't ship by rail because of how bad Pan Am is."
It's hard to overstate how much of a pile of dogE36 M3 Guilford/Pan Am Railways really was. The early days of Guilford were somewhat defensible, since B&M and MEC were completely bankrupt, and the D&H wasn't much better, and Tim Mellon swooped in to try and save them (fun fact: Guilford Rail was named after Mellons's hometown of Guilford, Connecticut, which Guilford Rail ran absolutely nowhere near) and had to do some cost-cutting to try and turn things around.
Mellon, from what I understand, wasn't too bad, but Dave Fink and some of Mellon's other underlings were real pieces of work. Rudy Garbely's book accounts a tale of some of the D&H guys sitting in an office with Fink, and a paper mill, the D&H's lifeblood, International Paper, called up complaining that their carloads weren't being moved, they had hundreds of cars scattered around New England that needed to be in Philly and DC and Guilford wasn't getting them moved. Fink grabbed the phone and screamed that the paper mill could cram their carloads up their ass and slammed the phone down and the D&H guys just stared in horror, knowing he'd just cost them that customer. International Paper took their 4000 carloads a year and moved them by truck, even though it cost more. The D&H's Vice President for Administration and Strategic Planning, Bill Collins, recalled how when the sale went through, Guilford was adamant that they had to get the Napierville Junction, which was D&H's Canadian subsidiary from Rouses Point to Montreal. Canada was very touchy about corporations in their borders owned by corporations of other nationalities and the whole deal was very touch-and-go, but was pulled off because the Collins knew guys in Canada and had worked with the Canadian government before. He said he was told that the Canadians were going to allow Guilford to get the Napierville Junction, and he called and told Guilford corporate that the sale was going through, and not long after, Charlie McKenna, who Fink had installed as D&H president, showed up and told him "Okay, you're done, pack your desk and get out." They'd gotten the Napierville Junction, and Collins had outlived his usefulness. A bunch of the D&H management talked about riding the inspection train when Guilford was going to buy the D&H, and Mellon and Fink McKenna asking them what each facility along the way was and how many guys it employed, and the D&H guys said they felt like they signed each one of those employees' death warrant, because within a year Guilford had shut down every one of those facilities and laid off everyone there.
There was also the whole Springfield Terminal deal, which while, admittedly clever, was a move guaranteed to backfire. The MEC and B&M and D&H unions were admittedly guilty of some featherbedding with their labor agreements (D&H still had firemen as a position into the late-1980s, and all three were still mandating five-man crews) and Guilford wanted to negotiate those crew-sizes down, but the unions and brotherhoods wouldn't come to the table. Guilford realized they owned the rights to the Springfield Terminal, which was a completely extinct 7-mile shortline between NH and CT, and that it had different union terms. So Guilford began "selling" Maine Central, and then Boston & Maine, equipment and tracks to Springfield Terminal (basically from themselves to themselves) to cram new union terms down their throat. The whole thing exploded into some really nasty strikes, with employees setting cars and locomotives on fire, running locomotives into turntable pits, intentionally derailing equipment, everything. Even while that was going on, Guilford went to the D&H and said "Accept the new terms, or we'll do the Springfield Terminal trick to you too." D&H management rounded up the union heads at Colonie and was telling them what was going to happen, and the unions heads were about to get violent, when Dave Fink called and said "Well, the courts struck down what we've been doing with ST. So, we're bankrupting the D&H. Get your affairs in order." They went back out and told the union reps what had just happened and everyone started cheering and saying "We're finally on our own again." Yep, they'd rather be bankrupted than stay under Guilford rule.
Even into the '90s and early 2000s, the roster was a dog's breakfast of junk: ex-Penn Central U33Bs, ex-Rock Island U25Bs, old unrebuilt Boston & Main GP7s and GP9s, ex-Norfolk Southern high-hood GP35s and GP40s, ex-ATSF SD26 "slushbuckets", and none of it in good shape. Employees said that their horsepower/hour accounts with Conrail, and then CSX, were always in arrears for pooled power service, because half the time they tried to send their power west, Conrail/CSX turned it back at Mechanicville on account of it's poor condition and then put their own power on the lead and billed Guilford/Pan Am for it. Even when their power did get used in pooled service, it failed to rack up sufficient horsepower/hours because it was so much lower in horsepower compared to SD70s and C40-8s. (Horsepower/hours is how accounts are balanced for pooled power. If you lend me one 3000hp GP40 for three hours, that's 9000hp/hrs. Now I can lend you three 1500hp GP7s for two hours and we're even. Its hard to make up the difference when you're sending 3000hp GP40s and your pool-mate is sending you 4400hp AC4400Ws) For a while, Pan Am tried to make their entire roster to just be EMD 40-series, GP40s and SD40s of all flavors, and then they ended up finally buying a bunch of C40-8s off of CSX just to get some newer more repliable stuff with some more horsepower to try and balance their accounts.
Track conditions were also absolutely horrible, 10mph slow orders everywhere. In its latter years, the B&M could get a train from Mechanicville, NY to Portland, ME with one crew. Oftentimes Guilford/Pan Am was lucky to make it from Mechanicville to East Deerfield, MA on one crew, even though its about one-third the distance. Slow track speeds, lack of passing sidings, and usually a dead train clogging up the main, either because it's power died or it's crew was "outlawed" (worked longer than 12 hours). They seemed to spend a lot of money on taxi cabs shuttling crews to remote locations where previous crews outlawed and tied trains down. Carloads took forever to get anywhere because they spent days being cycled through yards, due to mismanagement, derailments, and lack of crews.
Junker ex-CSX GE C40-8s on Pan Am Railways. After a push to rationalize their roster almost entirely with EMD 40-series power for road trains, they then bought 20 or so old standard cab C40-8s from CSX. Still painted in faded CSX "Yellow Nose 2" livery, Pan Am painted over the CSX lettering, added Maine Central reporting marks, and painted the noses a variety of different colors, and pressed them into service. Now, with CSX buying out Pan Am, they've ended up back on the CSX roster, and I'm sure their time on CSX is likely limited.
Another of the Maine Central Dash-8s, this one with a white-painted nose. In it's 43 years of existence, Guilford Rail Systems/Pan Am Railways never bought a single new locomotive. Not one. Everything was either secondhand from other railroads, or lease units.
They also got some wide-nose C40-8s, which would be a C40-8W, which they gave just as much love and care in terms of paint. That's MEC #7835 exiting the famed B&M Hoosac Tunnel, often known as the "Bloody Pit" for the amount of lives it's construction consumed. According to this photographer's notes, this was right after Pan Am did some track work that got this line back up to 25mph.
Another of the Pan Am/MEC C40-8Ws, this time with the nose rattle-canned with baby blue paint and a black stripe through the CSX lettering. I wonder if Pan Am had the dynamic brakes disabled on these when they bought them, because Guilford/Pan Am was notorious for disabling the dynamic brakes on any units that they bought or leased, because it was less to maintain.
When Guilford bought the rights to the bankrupt Pan Am Airways and rebranded themselves as Pan Am Railways, I surmise as a way to distance themselves from the PR black eyes of Guilford Rail Systems, they ended up buying a pair of ex-CN/ex-VIA FP9s from Conway Scenic and some dome cars to add to their Office Car Specials. A lot of people viewed this move as a symptom of Guilford/Pan Am's dysfunctional management: 10mph track every, old motive power that was falling apart, poor service, and yet they could spend money on a bankrupt airline and buy shiny F-units and dome cars. That's the thing about Guilford/Pan Am, there had to be some sort of profits, because you don't typicall keep an unprofitable railroad going for 43 years, but the profits were never plowed back into the physical plant. Last I heard, they had been moved down to CSX's Waycross, GA facility and were up for sale.
One of the Springfield Terminal GP9s that Pan Am was still hanging onto into the 2010s. They still had unchopped noses, and as you can see by the engineer being on the right side here, they were still set up for long hood forward operation. This is on the Freight Main at Etna, Maine in 2009, and they were still wearing Guilford gray and orange.
A Pan Am GP40 creeps down the Danvers Industrial Track in Peabody, MA. This was once a major part of the B&M, with multiple online customers and passenger service as late as 1958, but was allowed to wither away under Guilford/Pan Am
The same location, just last year, with a GP40-2W for power.
Two old ex-ATSF SD26 "slushbuckets" (SD24s that were rebuilt and upgraded at Cleburne in the '70s) bracket a pretty rare ex-Illinois Terminal SD39 (one of four bought from IT, and one of only 54 built) at Elnora, NY in 2009. All the SD26s and SD39s are long gone now.
One of the SD26s leads two Helm Leasing units and a B&M EMD.
An ex-NS high nose GP40 leads a GP35, a GP40-2W and another GP40 out of Northern Maine Junction in Hermon, Maine
One of the ex-NS GP40s in PAR blue prepares to duck under downtown Greenfield, on the Conn River line. Great track conditions.
In reply to NickD :
That last picture, as well as the pictures of the industrial trackage, are frightening. I'm amazed they aren't plagued with constant derailments.
Lou Manglass
In reply to TheMagicRatchet :
They did have a lot of derailments, and that's why they scared off a lot of customers. That's also why they had 10mph slow orders pretty much everywhere. Guilford/Pan Am were also unique in that they still had their own wreck trains, one based out of East Deerfield, MA and one out of Waterville, ME. They had Industrial Brownhoist cranes, one 200-tonner and one 250-tonner, and a bunch of old heavyweight passenger cars, some from L&N, some from B&M and even some really rare cars from the Rutland, that they had set up as worker quarters or tool cars, as well as some old 40' boxcars, at least one old troop sleeper, and some cabooses. Most of your modern railroads prefer to just contract out to Hulchers or one of the other contractors for wreck clean-up, but Guilford/Pan Am preferred to keep it in-house. With the sale, there's been a lot of worry over what's going to happen to the wreck trains. The cranes, maybe not so much, since there is really an overabundance of cranes in preservation to the point that museums are starting to scrap some, since they frequently have multiples. But the Rutland RPO and B&M steel baggage cars are extremely rare pieces, even if they have been tunneled or heavily modified.
I know I posted this previously, but I caught the Pan Am OCS rolling (slowly) through Old Orchard Beach, ME two years ago. It was a pretty train - you'd never know the rest of the railroad was such a dumpster fire.
02Pilot said:I know I posted this previously, but I caught the Pan Am OCS rolling (slowly) through Old Orchard Beach, ME two years ago. It was a pretty train - you'd never know the rest of the railroad was such a dumpster fire.
That's a pretty rare catch with PAR #2 leading, usually it was PAR #1 in the lead. Funny thing is that those GMD (not EMD, because they were built in Canada) FP9s came from Conway Scenic. They had bought them from VIA Rail and then ended up trading them for an ex-Maine Central GP38 and an ex-NS high hood GP35, when Conway started moving towards second-gen road switcher power for their primary usage. The B&M F7s we rode behind last year at Conway are not owned by Conway, but by 470 Railroad Club. (Side note, I'd like to go on that 470 Railroad Club charter again this year, now that I have an actual camera, and see if it's a little better run)
I've read a lot on the D&H side of Guilford Rail Systems/Pan Am, and it's pretty sad. By that point, the D&H was in fairly bad shape, Norfolk & Western wanted rid of it before the Norfolk Southern merger went through, and N&W was offering the whole railroad, all the tracks, equipment, buildings, everything, for just $500,000. Tim Mellon, who had already bought the Maine Central and was in the process of buying the Boston & Maine, expressed interest and everyone really thought that it was a great idea at the time. As early as 1967, D&H president Frederic "Buck" Dumaine had put forth the idea of a B&M/MEC/D&H merger and tried to force it through, but lost the fight to the D&H board and was ousted. At the time, the D&H was pretty profitable still and the board was worried about diluting their stocks by going in with the sickly New England roads. The B&M was also supposed to be included into N&W control under Dereco, alongside the Erie-Lackawanna and D&H, but missed their window due to shortsightedness by B&M management.
The D&H interchanged with B&M pretty heavily, although a lot of the traffic from the B&M was not terribly profitable due to the short haul between Mechanicville to Binghamton and expensive trackage rights further west from Binghamton to Buffalo, and the Maine Central extended their reach all the way up the Atlantic coastline. Tim Mellon was quite wealthy (he's of the Andrew Mellon family) so a lot at the D&H thought of it as "Oh, this wealthy billionaire is going to step in and save us. It's going to be great." The D&H had a lot of great people and a decent customer base, but it needed the money to overhaul the infrastructure and get some new locomotives, and Mellon could potentially provide that. Guilford promised that D&H carloads would go up by a 45,000 cars annually once it was integrated into the system, which also sounded great.
It pretty much started to fall apart immediately. Kent Shoemaker, who was really only supposed to be a temporary president when he signed on in '78 anyways, wanted out and so David Fink installed his buddy Charlie Mckenna as president, even before Guilford took over. Providence & Worchester actually protested that move, saying that Guilford was exerting influence over D&H before they owned it, but by that time the sale had already gone through. When the sale went through, they had a big press event at Billerica and David Fink was up on a podium saying "All these other railroads, CSX and ATSF and BN, they're just initials, but here at Guilford, we're a family", and then immediately stepped down off the podium and literally right onto D&H Vice President for Administration and Strategic Planning Bill Collins' shoes. Collins said it was a pretty fitting start for how things kicked off, and he still has the shoes with the crushed-in tips as a reminder.
Jervis Langdon Jr., who was director of the D&H and had brought Bill Collins on board, had led the charge for the sale to Guilford, thinking that it was the only way out for the D&H, after the federal government had so badly screwed the D&H in the 1976-1981 and N&W had largely neglected the D&H from 1968-1981. He left pretty early into Guilford ownership and even though Langdon never came out and said anything so, those who knew him said they always got the feeling that Langdon felt that he had made a major mistake getting them in bed with Mellon and Fink and Guilford Rail System as a whole. Later on, Langdon told the NYSDOT that "When Guilford started, it had some fine people, but they have all left or been fired. Tim Mellon, who knows nothing about the business, has delegated authority to those who think they know but actually don't."
Also, pretty early on, Bill Collins said that his office should have been equipped with a revolving door. Employees were constantly coming in and going "Hey, Bill, how do I get out of this place?" and a lot of the major talent quickly beat feet out the door. Guilford was reselling all the D&H locomotives to Maine Central or Springfield Terminal, selling off buildings and real estate left and right, and not really reinvesting anything into the D&H. Howard Hontz, who was assistant president of operations and had been with the D&H for 41 years and change, saw what was happening and didn't like what was happening to the D&H and turned in his resignation, which was met with argument from Dave Fink who told him that they wouldn't accept it because they were going to make Hontz the head of the entire north east. Hontz told them like hell they would and left.
D&H chief mechanic officer Fred Cheney mentioned how for a while he struggled to figure out how Dave Fink would always know every little bad thing that happened at the D&H. He then realized that D&H and B&M employees lived right next door to each other in Mechanicville. Cheney reported directly to general manager Dick Williams, and Williams lived in Mechanicville and was friends with VP of operations at the B&M, Sydney Culliford. Williams would anecdotally tell some of the going-ons at the D&H, and Culliford would immediately go run to Dave Fink and tattle on the D&H over any of their screw-ups to earn brownie points. Then Fink would call up Charles Mckenna and send Mckenna to the D&H offices loaded for bear and tear them a new one.
In the mid-1980s, Guilford was also part of the "ProRail" proposal, alongside of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, which would have seen Guilford running as far as Chicago and St. Louis. Frightening to think about, for sure.
The basis of the idea was that Conrail was never supposed to be a permanent fixture, even from day one. The federal government was not in the business of running a Class I freight railroad, plain and simple. Conrail was to be formed to prop up the collapsing northeastern region, and then once the situation was stabilized, it was to be sold off or made a privately-run operation. By 1981, largely due to the Staggers Act, Conrail had adjusted rates and trimmed off unprofitable lines and was actually turning a profit, and both N&W/NS and Chessie Systems/CSX began trying to figure out how to grab up Conrail for themselves. Most of their early efforts involved one trying to buy it entirely for themselves and squeeze out the other, which the FRA was not a fan of.
One of them came about in 1985, when Norfolk Southern was making one of their failed plays for ownership of Conrail. The big hang-up was that the FRA didn't want whoever ended up with Conrail to end up with a dominance of the northeast, the same concern that caused the ICC and USRA to throw together the plan for the D&H with trackage rights to Philadelphia, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Potomac Yard in 1976. So, as part of buying Conrail, NS had to make sure to make some concessions so that there'd be a northeastern competitor, or at least the appearance of one.
The result was called ProRail, and involved Guilford Rail Systems and their three railroads, Boston & Maine, Maine Central and Delaware & Hudson, as well as the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie and Grand Trunk Western. From the lines they would be receiving from Conrail, Norfolk Southern planned to give ProRail the the eastern end of Erie-Lackawanna's lines west of Buffalo, the ex-Erie Southern Tier Line, and the former PRR main across Ohio, Indiana and into Chicago. Norfolk Southern also planned to sell them their ex-Nickel Plate Road "Cloverleaf Line" from Delphos, Ohio down to St. Louis.
On paper this made a lot of sense: D&H and P&LE were already exchanging traffic with the D&H using the Southern Tier Line to get to Buffalo. P&LE was generating a lot of coal loads going to New England power plants from the Monongahela coal fields and the P&LE was shipping a lot of steel from Pittsburgh up to the shipyards in Maine and Massachusetts. Grand Trunk Western ran north over the great lakes and dipped down into Michigan and Vermont. And then they could run intermodal and auto shipments from Chicago and Detroit and St. Louis into New England and the north east over one line, making it truly competitive in terms of accessed markets. D&H traffic rights also gave them access to Potomac Yard in Alexandria, VA and Philadelphia, PA, but Guilford had given up on the trackage rights to Oak Island yard at this point (which would have been somewhat shortsighted if this had gone through)
But someone at Norfolk Southern had to have been doing the J.K. Simmons laugh over the proposal the whole time. The Southern Tier Line, from Buffalo to Binghamton, was actually pretty decent. It missed pretty much every major settlement along the way, but it had wide clearances, was a great express route, and New York state had subsidized a pretty substantial overhaul by Conrail. The eastern end of E-L's Lines West was so-so, it was in okay condition (it hadn't been blasted by Hurricane Agnes in '72) but it was also not routed the best (Erie had the longest route between New York and Chicago) and again missed most major settlements other than Youngstown. From there, things got significantly worse. The PRR mainline into Chicago wouldn't be bad, except that the "powers that be" of the proposed system did not know that Conrail had single tracked & downgraded the line a few years prior to that, they still thought it was intact as double track all the way into Chicago. And the old NKP "Clover Leaf" line was just a cruel joke. Always the weakest part of the Nickel Plate, the "Clover Leaf Line" was originally built as a narrow-gauge line that was standard-gauged, and as a result was a narrow, twisting line with significant weight restrictions even when it was active in the NKP era. By 1985, it was two largely-disused streaks of rust with only a little local traffic at the ends, and wasn't even functional as a through-route due to a damaged bridge that was embargoed.
Ultimately, the FRA turned down Norfolk Southern, and without the sale of Conrail to NS, there was no reason for ProRail to exist. P&LE did try to buy the E-L lines from near Cleveland to Buffalo and the Southern Tier Line, and Conrail was willing to sell but there were issues with the financing and the continued longevity of "the Little Giant". Pan Am was also ready to make another attempt when rumors were swirling of an NS-CP merger a few years ago. They were ready to petition the STB for trackage rights to Chicago and had documents and maps drafted and printed to make the case, but the NS-CP merger fell through.
this Guilford story and some of the associated shots of those locos crawling through those overgrown industrial lines is so incredibly fascinating for some reason. i think i'm more impressed they just managed to nurse along a bunch of decrepit machinery that long.
In reply to ScottyB :
I find the '70s era of railroading fascinating, where a lot of operations were just keeping running on a shoestring, but the frustrating thing about Guilford/Pan Am, was they kept that way even after the Staggers Act was passed and ran a bunch of once-proud names through the mud. And while a lot of your railroads were in that condition because they weren't profitable, Guilford/Pan Am clearly had some sort of profitability because, like I said, you don't keep an unprofitable railroad running for 42 years just for funsies. It's just that the owners were using it to line their pockets, rather than make any sort of repairs or preventative maintenance.
The one good thing to come out of Guilford was them deciding to sell the section of the old Maine Central Mountain Division from Conway to Fabyans, NH to the Conway Scenic Railroad. I rode the Conway Scenic last year, and of the railroads I've ridden, that's easily the most impressive and scenic trackage that I've ridden so far.
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