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Chuck, Did you mean CSX shutting down a lot of Frontier Yard in Buffalo? I know they closed Bailey Avenue Yard Tower as that part of the old West Shore yard at Buffalo (part of Frontier's northern side) had its own yeardmaster and such. Man, if Frontier is dwindling, this is horrid! I always saw the railroads as the most accurate and immediate barometer by which one could get an idea of what was happening with the economy. The trains have been markedly shorter up there on the old NYC mainline, although the TV trains seem to be running about the same (Super Vans up there is what they OUGHT to be called!). NS owns the former Bison Yard site. They had torn that all up during the CR years and that was a major hump yard for EL / NKP (NW). NS came in about ten years or so ago and rebuilt a set of yard tracks and made a nice, but smaller yard with a major intermodal and bulk facilitity as well as auto unloading. I really am sad over this - when I was a kid my favorite railroad was the NYC, then the PC by default. I spent a lot of hours up in Newark NY on the old NYC mainline during the years 1970 - 1976 as witnessed some of the heaviest railroad traffic I have ever seen under the PC flag. E unit - powered mail trains with Flexi Vans, fleets of conventional TV trains, autorack trains, coal trains, and a plethora of general merchandise frieghts and a slew of locals powered by RS-11s or SW1500's. The Buffalo - Syracuse road freights still usually drew a set of four or five F units right up until Conrail. PC on the old NYC in upstate NY was an incredible show! Fast, frequent and unrelenting in variety and just plain awesome! Conrail actually seemed a lot like PC with a different name and paint job as they ran each section of the railroads they acquired much in the same spirit and manner as did the predecessor roads. The NYC side still had the speed, feel, tonnage and sense of urgency with every train as it did under the days of the PC. Now, although CSX runs a LOT up there, it just isn't the same...something was lost in the last decade and a hlaf that I doubt will return. Railroading lost a lot of its appeal and romance when these mega takeovers were allowed to swallow up all the heritage and identities of the mainline railroads. I mean, what "heritage" does CSX or NS have here in upstate NY? Two southern companies whose corporate identities reflect nothing of the former glory or geography of the territories they now occupy. I guess with NS, you could say that since N&W controlled the EL for the Dereco years, and PRR controlled the N&W for a long time, that somehow NS "fits" into the scenario nicely. And since there was a time when the NYC sought inclusion into C&O / B&O, I suppose it is almost a natural transition that might have occurred years earlier had the regulatory environments been different in the early sixties. Hell, I understand that the DL&W and NKP were looking into merger at one time - that would have made for an entirely different set of circumstances. Even PC was considering dividing the railroad back into it's pre - merger NYC / PRR compnents during the bad times after the 1970 bankruptcy...I wonder what would have transpired from that idea? And the poor EL - they were supposed to be included in Chessie System until an unresolvable union dispute supposedly sunk the whole thing and thrust the EL into CR at the last minute. I wonder if this mailine through here would have been the big NY - Chicago CSX mainline by now. Surely, Chessie would have invested heavily into this route and it would have remained the big mainline for them. Now it is still a major mainline from Binghamton to Buffalo, but the section east of Binghamton is currently leased to the NYSW and sees little traffic, and the old "mainline" west of Hornell towards Chicago is run by the Western NY and Penn. Railroad shortline. NS coal trains to our region from Pittsburg and beyond run over this line from the Youngstown area and, yes, the the WNY&P runs with M-630s and C636 diesels which makes it a cool novelty - but I sure would rather be seeing big time railroading over those routes instead of the subsidized stuff. I just am saddened seeing so many mainlines so close together in our area that see little or no traffic anymore. It didn't have to happen, did it? Jim Kosty Painted Post NY HotmailŪ goes with you. Get it on your BlackBerry or iPhone. |