3 ms·

When they started getting rid of passenger service had a lot less to do with losing ridership and money and lot more that cargo contracts paid a lot more and wi

When they started getting rid of passenger service had a lot less to do with losing ridership and money and lot more that cargo contracts paid a lot more and with a lot more regularity. The "Robber Barons" get that nickname for a lot of reasons, but one of them was using public land and eminent domain tactics under the "public utility" excuse of providing passenger service for a time for an area, while negotiating for the shortest possible passenger service requirements and the least possible public oversight of their use of once public land, because they knew all along the real, big money was in cargo. A lot of passenger services ended to the day of passenger service requirements contracts ending, even if they were profitable and had high ridership. The scam was in from the beginning. The car helped exacerbate the problem and the train companies made big fusses about all the lost ridership to the car, as things went along, but even at the beginning a lot of the US rail companies were built on the knowledge that cargo was lucrative and passenger travel the necessary trojan horse to pickup land for cheap.

bell-cot 1y ago
I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east - would have spent the vast sums on opulent passenger terminals, fast luxury trains, and high-density passenger service if passenger service was merely a legal necessity for their freight businesses. Flip-side, I have heard that the phase-out RMS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service ) cut the RR's passenger train revenue by about 1/3. Few business models can survive a 1/3 revenue cut. BTW - at the high end, airplanes were at least as damaging (to passenger rail) as cars.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  > I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east I was talking most specifically about the early "oil rush" ones in a lot of "rollover country" (or yes, "flyover country" being the modern term because indeed, air travel also disrupted train travel a lot) that didn't live long enough to be long-established, in the North-East, or bother much at all with opulent terminals and luxury cars. Many of those companies really did exist just long enough for eminent domain to do its job and launder public lands into private hands that cared a lot more about cargo contracts than any of the places the trains stopped along the way. Most of those rail company names are also kind of lost to time, too, and the tracks are owned by cargo-oriented mega-conglomerates like CSX today. Not to pick on any one in particular by naming names, but also the easiest one to anecdotally name because it owns the dilapidated station I regularly walk past that is today an awful, unsafe shelter for the unhoused that sometimes cargo trains sit on top of for hours at a time, and wasn't particularly "opulent" (outdoor and entirely exposed to the elements) even during the exactly 10 years it operated as a passenger station. (It closed to passenger travel before both most highways had been built and air travel became common, weird huh? Surely just a coincidence that 10 years was the required passenger contract by the eminent domain seizures that opened the land for rail development?)

bell-cot 1y ago

I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east - would have spent the vast sums on opulent passenger terminals, fast luxury trains, and high-density passenger service if passenger service was merely a legal necessity for their freight businesses. Flip-side, I have heard that the phase-out RMS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service ) cut the RR's passenger train revenue by about 1/3. Few business models can survive a 1/3 revenue cut. BTW - at the high end, airplanes were at least as damaging (to passenger rail) as cars.

WorldMaker 1y ago
> I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east I was talking most specifically about the early "oil rush" ones in a lot of "rollover country" (or yes, "flyover country" being the modern term because indeed, air travel also disrupted train travel a lot) that didn't live long enough to be long-established, in the North-East, or bother much at all with opulent terminals and luxury cars. Many of those companies really did exist just long enough for eminent domain to do its job and launder public lands into private hands that cared a lot more about cargo contracts than any of the places the trains stopped along the way. Most of those rail company names are also kind of lost to time, too, and the tracks are owned by cargo-oriented mega-conglomerates like CSX today. Not to pick on any one in particular by naming names, but also the easiest one to anecdotally name because it owns the dilapidated station I regularly walk past that is today an awful, unsafe shelter for the unhoused that sometimes cargo trains sit on top of for hours at a time, and wasn't particularly "opulent" (outdoor and entirely exposed to the elements) even during the exactly 10 years it operated as a passenger station. (It closed to passenger travel before both most highways had been built and air travel became common, weird huh? Surely just a coincidence that 10 years was the required passenger contract by the eminent domain seizures that opened the land for rail development?)