In the mail...

.....the two volumes of John Thomas's "The North British Railway". The North British was kind of an interesting operation - an insurgent company, dedicated to breaking the monopoly the Caledonian enjoyed on service to Scotland.

I first became familiar with it when I started doing some reading on the Tay Bridge disaster. The bridge over the Firth of Tay was at its completion in 1878 the longest in the world. It lasted for about a year in service, collapsing under a passenger train on the night of December 28th, 1879, and carrying all 75 people aboard to their deaths. The very British voice of "The Steam Index" describes it as "mean and impoverished," a condition that almost certainly contributed to the fatal corners that the contractors cut in its construction. The Tay Bridge collapse was one of the great folkloric disasters of the long Nineteenth Century (1815-1914), producing some of the same cultural effect as the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the Space Shuttle, or 9/11 - it was one of those events that appear as a kind of general rebuke to the achievements of the age.

Interestingly, Thomas chose the disaster as the dividing point between the two volumes; the endpaper of the first volume is adorned with a diagram of the coaches and locomotive on the Edinburgh-Dundee express, the train that fell into the Tay encased in the girders of the bridge. The North British had its share of engineering achievements - its bridge over the Firth of Forth is perhaps the greatest of all Scottish engineering landmarks, and its buildings in Edinburgh are splendid piles of Victorian gothic.

Man Bites Dog: People Hate Airlines

So says the Seattle Times. But the surprise is the fact that they apparently hate them more than the Internal Revenue Service, surely the benchmark for a disliked public institution. A University of Michigan Customer Satisfaction Index Survey gave the airlines a popular approval rating of 63 percent, two points behind the IRS with a rating that would have earned you an F in the public school system I attended, 65%. Southwest was the industry leader with a 76% (that's a D), while United anchored the bottom bracket with a 56% - a great score only in baseball.

(h/t, Trains News Wire)

Jane Galt takes on mass transit...

....and comes away with a slightly different answer than we might expect.

I tend to agree, incidentally, that urban mass transit is preeminent only in New York - that's the unique legacy of the greatest builder of urban highways in America, Robert Moses.

Wooden Hoppers

The EarlyRail group at Yahoo has been abuzz with Westerfield's release of this beauty - a Pennsy coal hopper from the early 1890s. I've never built a Westerfield kit, although I periodically slaver over their Pressed Steel Car Co. ore cars, but these might just get me off the fence, even at that price. I've always liked coal hauling railroads, in part because they're high-traffic, heavy-duty operations: Virginian, N&W, the D&RGW in Utah, the Reading, and of course, B&O in West Virginia. Coal hauling meant mountains, and long trains, which meant multiple locomotives - usually the biggest ones available, to squeeze the maximum tonnage out of the crew's wages. Most commercially available coal hoppers tend to be from a later era - the composite cars usually are post-1910, and the steel hoppers started showing up in the Twenties. Tichy Train Group's ore cars had the authentic wooden look, but they were too short - ore, after all, was much heavier than coal, and companies put a lot less car on a pair of trucks to compensate.

Buffett drops the other shoe....

......and it says "Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern."

So I was half right.

The real question: what did he see in UP?

The Economics of Kitbuilding

Model Railroader has a review up of Walthers' new (well, relatively) USRA Heavy 2-10-2 in HO, with video, here. I haven't seen one in action yet, but the dead-tree review was pretty favorable and they include DCC, sound and prototype-specific detailing. The MSRP from Walthers is $425.

This sorta raises an interesting point for me, because I recently finished kit-building a Bowser model of the same engine; I reviewed it here. The basic kit cost $127, and the superdetail kit added another $56 to that. The engineer and fireman figures added another $11.40, which comes to $194.40. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a pretty significant savings. Now, the non-DCC and sound version of the Walthers model chips $100 off the price. So the difference between the electrically comparable Bowser and Walthers models turns out to be $131. For that price, incidentally, you could go out and buy a second kit - for example, a Bowser New York Central K-11 Pacific and superdetail kit and still have enough left over for a small snack (reviewed here by noted locomotive surgeon Darth Santa Fe).

I realize that I have left out some hidden costs - for example, I haven't included the cost of decals, paint, and the modelers' tools (although those are all useful for multiple projects - so any honest economic accounting would have to take that into consideration). But you really don't need that many of the latter, even for a Bowser kit - a set of small screwdrivers, hex wrenches, a flat file (and I got by with one), some very fine grit sandpaper, glue, and a pin vise with associated drills pretty much cover it. This goes a long way toward suggesting that even in the age of cheap Chinese imports, kitbuilding is still a viable means of saving money.

As an aside, for my fellow model rails: isn't Walthers' search engine kind of a pain? Every search term I tried turned up an N scale Con-cor model, and using "Walthers" as a search term just brought up what appeared to be the entire stock of Walthers, which is like getting everything at Sears: it's unimaginably vast. But I got the exact page on the Walthers' website I needed in thirty seconds with Google - and using the exact same search terms, too.

Warren Buffett and BNSF

So five weeks ago, Warren Buffett surprised the heck out of me by buying a ten percent equity stake in Burlington Northern Santa Fe. He surprised a lot of other people, too. It's not that BNSF was a bad investment; I own some, and it has been my experience that knowledgeable people who want to invest in railroads generally choose it as one of the sector's best investments.

I was surprised at his timing. I bought in last summer when the seasonal slump hit, and kicked myself for buying in too soon when the slump proved to be deeper and longer than I expected. I bought pretty early, so the price had just recovered when Buffett bought in, and raised it almost ten percent (graph here). So, my first question is, why now? I understand that it's impossible to time the market, and I grant that even a company that's driven by a relatively small number of decision makers like BH must have some internal process that prevents it from turning on a dime. If Buffett was looking at BNSF, was he looking at them a year ago? And if not, what made them more appealing now that a prosperous business cycle is another year into its course? The Transcon improvements were well in hand, and their completion was predictable - so why did he wait to buy in?

The other big question - and I got a few takers when I asked it here - was, "what were the other two lines that he purchased?" He bought a smaller stake in two other properties that wasn't large enough to require an SEC notification. While the overall sector has floated upward with BNSF, the other shoes haven't dropped yet. When they do, some lucky people are going to make a bit of money - and my bet is that those lucky people are going to be Norfolk Southern and Canadian National shareholders.

La Veta Pass behind Steam

This looks like it's going to be a good summer for "rare mileage" fans: various operators are going to be running excursions over the Rio Grande's old La Veta Pass route and the Northern Pacific's Stampede Pass line. Stampede Pass has hosted excursions since BNSF rehabbed and reopened the line, but LVP is really rare mileage. It hasn't hosted scheduled passenger service since the D&RGW took off the San Luis from Denver in the late 1950s, and even that service was overnight. So daylight passenger trains crossing La Veta are rarer than rare.

The La Veta excursions are even going to be in steam, starting on Memorial Day. But here's the interesting thing - they picked up ex-SP Mogul 1744 for the service. She was a 1901 Mogul, a "Valley Mallet" designed for service on the flat expanses of central California. They were pretty speedy little things, but they were never great pullers - their maximum tractive effort topped out around 33,000 pounds, and they probably developed that at five or ten miles per hour, max. That's not much for a line as steep and curvy as La Veta. The Grande regularly used their L-96 class Mallets to pull the "Colorado and New Mexico Express" overnight from Denver - they developed about three times the TE of the 1744 - and those trains had fewer than twenty of the Grande's big heavyweight coaches, plus some mail and express cars.

So what I'm wondering is.....will the excursions be very short, very slow, or will they have a diesel engine coupled unobtrusively behind the engine like a big, vibrating baggage car?

Richard Prince, FINALLY affordable.......

Self-publishing is a blessing and a bane to railfans and modelers. Without it, a lot of stuff would never get published; unfortunately, it often means that the sudden appearance of something interesting but not immediate places you in a bind: do I buy it now, while it's affordable, or wait until I decide I need it, only to find that the price has escalated out of the realm of reality?

I always had this feeling about Richard Prince's books on the motive power of various Southern trunklines. Prince self-published them in the 1960s and early 1970s under such deceptively simple titles as "Louisville and Nashville Steam Locomotives." They're compilations of photos and locomotive data, and they retain a lot of self-publishing quirks - the locomotive rosters in his "Southern Railway System Steam Locomotives and Boats" are actually handwritten - it looks as if they were simply Xeroxed or mimeographed for the printing. But the quirkiness and the simple titles conceal a set of extraordinary mechanical histories of the railroads of the industrializing, postwar South, and it's not Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozart:" these were pretty sophisticated operations. Each one seems to have something unique: the L&N history includes a couple of priceless aerial photos of the Hiwassee Loop, and the NC&StL book includes an account of the Great Locomotive Chase assembled by the railroad's mechanical department years after the fact, and illustrated by paintings made by the son-in-law of one of the participants. The pinched face of Clarence Darden, the NC&StL's great motive power superintendent, stares dourly out of a section devoted to eulogizing the road's mechanical excellence: he looks like Kevin Costner playing Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK. But of course he was the man who developed and patented the idea for creating a locomotive frame as a single casting, an innovation that saved countless man-hours of rivet-tapping and bolt-tightening for machine shops everywhere.

I was visiting a used bookstore the other weekend and found an original edition of his "Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway: History and Steam Locomotives." The store wanted $150 for it, which was steep, even for a Prince book. So I went home and checked it out - and, as it happens, Amazon had it new for $29; but the publisher, Indiana UP, was letting it go for $21. The information is nearly perfect - but the market still takes time to react.