Re: (erielack) Alco Farewell / Economy Changes

[Jim Guthrie <jguthrie_@_pipeline.com>]

>Actually, I had wondered the same thing in the past. Remember John Kneiling who wrote columns in TRAINS. >Didn't he, early on, suggest that the EL could be converted to solely intermodal ? 

Indeed, Kneiling suggested that (though many of us remember him as the impresario who organized lots of "Off the Beaten Track" fan trips in the 1950s here in the NY area' "Joint Railfan Trip COmmittee."

Walt Smith wrote:
>
>with UPS trains. I wonder if the UPS could have commited to 'buying ' the EL 
>while the cutoff still existed. They'd have had their own RR NY to Chicago & 
>might have been able to pick up enuf xtra business to survive. I'm sur lots of 
>folks in the Southern tier would like to have 1 & 2 and 5 & 6 back even with 
>Amtrak. 

Oh Boy Oh Boy -- Wouldn;t that have been a brouhaha! You would have had all the railroads and all the truckers ganging up on that one -- the I.C.C. would still be around and still be taking testimony and several federal courts would have found full time work on appeals every time an ICC Hearing Examiner excused himself to to to the bathroom.

Of course, we still might have an EL and a PC and the rest -- all running neat stuff on rickety branchlines waiting for a decision approaching the 40th Anniversary of it s filing <g>.

[And no, this is not abot any canards of government regulation, but about the nature of the lack of imagination of single-digit-IQ management in the transportation business, for which "regulation" ias always blamed]

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie
ELHS #1296

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