Eastern Railroad Discussion > Look at that Pan Am freight go!

Pan Am trains are usually easy to chase on its under-maintained home rails as speeds are often sub 25mph. But once on track where someone else is paying for the upkeep, a little leg stretching occurs as the freights rocket along up to 40mph. Here is the E Deerfield to Portland daily road freight EDPO moving smartly through North Leominster, MA with 101 cars, including 6 beat up company gondolas of ties headed for track maintenance project north of Auburn, Me. Three hours ago, EDPO had departed Gardner, 20 miles to the west from N Leominster, and crawled down to CFP-FG in Fitchburg, where due to closure of track 2 through MBTA track work around Ayer, it had to wait about an hour for 23K to come west on track 1.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/14 04:57 by JPB.

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Yes, typical Pan Am to under maintain and get someone else to rebuild the track...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/14 05:05 by wabash2800.

#1 EDPO gets ready to depart ahead of intermodal 22K at Gardner at about 1pm.
#2 23K proceeds west through N Leominster at about 3:15pm
#3 22K which was running about 45 minutes EDPO passes east through N Leominster just before 5pm.

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Wow, good stuff. Good light, good sky, good road power (all running). Excellent......

Nice photos, thanks for posting. I wonder why NS doesn't just buy PanAm and get it over with.

Perhaps too much deferred maintenance to catch up with?

RFandPFan Wrote:
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> Nice photos, thanks for posting. I wonder why NS
> doesn't just buy PanAm and get it over with.

The FF feature was pretty surprising.

Pan Am is privately owned, and like any other business owners they do not have to sell to someone else if they do not want to or get their price. Maybe NS has offered to buy it and the price wanted was so high for the traffic gained it was not worth it. You can be sure NS has the capability to quite accurately estimate the value of the markets Pan Am serves and the investment required to bring it up to NS's high standards. They must feel the current agreement they have with Pan Am is the best one they can do now. As time passes maybe it will become available. You know NS could find the money in a few days, look what they did when Conrail decided to merge with CSX only, 18 years ago. I believe NS could re-capture a lot of the lost business, but they cannot do much about the closed paper mills if those owners do not want to re-open, and neither can Pan Am.

Private ownership is not necessarily bad. Some shortlines and regionals are privately owned, but almost all of their owners believe in growing their business and re-investing in their railroads. Reading & Northern is a good example.

Nice video. Looked pretty sweet once the power cleared the 40 mph restriction at the platform and they kicked it up to 120! <grins>



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/14 17:02 by PittsburghMike.

Nice pics and video....!!! :<)

well done

RFandPFan Wrote:
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> Nice photos, thanks for posting. I wonder why NS
> doesn't just buy PanAm and get it over with.

I suspect it would cause more difficulty than NS considers it to be worth, including:

- new lines in an area with flat traffic growth
- different labor agreements that could cause tension with current NS labor
- likelihood of vigorous push from Northern New England states to impose conditions to maintain viable CSX interchange

They already have what they most want from Pan Am, which is intermodal access to the Boston area (via the Ayer terminal)

Dave

wabash2800 Wrote:
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> Yes, typical Pan Am to under maintain and get
> someone else to rebuild the track...


Just like Guilford before them, and also the reason why it took forever to get Amtrak into Maine in the 1ST place!