Step onto the captivating world of Hotrail Productions, where the magic of lights, camera, and trains combines to create an unforgettable experience. I travel all over the country photographing railroad history in the making. My footage dates back to 1995. Whether it's a thrilling action sequence or a heartwarming romantic scene, the railway has long been a favorite setting for filmmakers and TV producers.
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A westbound Canadian National freight heads west in the former Illinois Central Iowa Division with 6 units and an Algoma Central caboose! This is Annie Glidden Road, just south of Belvidere, IL.
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At Minooka, Illinois, an eastbound Iowa Interstate mixed freight crosses Ridge Road with a pair of GEVOS. This is the former Rock Island mainline to Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Filmed on May 4, 2023,
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A pair of MAX Light Rail Trains meet at Portland's Mt. Hood Ave. station. The first train consists of a pair of Type 3's, and the second train consists of a Type 3 and Type 1.
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00:00 Introduction
00:10 First Train
00:49 Second Train
The transcontinental railroad will produce a one-time surge in volume, but won’t fix the industry’s underlying growth struggle
The
1960 merger of the Erie and Delaware, Lackawanna & Western staved
off the inevitable bankruptcy for more than a decade. At Mountain View,
N.J., a tower guarded the crossing of Lackawanna’s double-track Boonton
Line and Erie’s 32-mile Greenwood Lake Division. Hot DL&W freight
NE-4 hits the diamond behind A-B-B-A Fs led by F7A 633. Jack Emerick
Back in the day when railroads were squeezed under the thumb of the
Interstate Commerce Commission and saddled with money-losing passenger
service and dying branch lines, Class I railroads went through merger
after merger to fend off financial collapse.
The goal of those combinations was to eliminate duplicate routes,
yards, shops, and headquarters in the hopes of remaining in the black.
They were mergers born from failure. And they worked, for a time.
Now along comes Union Pacific decades later with its proposed $85
billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern. No one would call either
railroad a failure.
UP was the most profitable railroad last year, hauling in $24.3
billion in revenue, $9.7 billion in operating income, and returning $4.7
billion to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share
buybacks. If anything, it’s an embarrassment of riches under CEO Jim
Vena, who has lit a fire under a long-slumbering franchise.
NS is on the comeback trail after
its disastrous 2023 hazardous materials derailment in East Palestine,
Ohio. Last year it beat back an activist investor, eased broader safety
concerns, and weathered the departure of its chief executive under a
cloud of scandal. Even after all this, NS in 2024 generated $4.1 billion
in operating income on revenue of $12.1 billion.
And yet UP+NS is born from failure, too. No, it’s not a failure to
turn a profit. It’s a failure to effectively compete with trucks. The
railroads said as much in their preliminary proxy filing this week.
“The Norfolk Southern board … discussed industry trends and the
difficulty Norfolk Southern and the industry has had, and risked
continuing to have, in achieving significant growth on a standalone
basis, including due to lower volumes because of truck market
penetration, and the potential for a transcontinental merger to break
through these challenges,” the regulatory filing says.
It’s an admission that Class I growth strategies have not borne fruit
— and that they view a merger as the only way to win back freight from
the highway.
Freight
cars gather in Norfolk Southern’s Moorman Yard in Bellevue, Ohio, where
there’s excess capacity in the hump yard’s classification bowls. Joe
Zadeh
Let’s assume regulators approve the historic deal — and that Omaha
doesn’t screw it up with technology or operational snafus. A
transcontinental Union Pacific should gain volume merely by offering
true coast-to-coast, single-line service. Intermodal, for example, wins
more market share when just one railroad handles the load. So it’s
likely we’ll see a one-time growth spurt, perhaps even a sizeable one.
But then what? We’re right back where we started, unable to grow and bleeding volume to trucks.
The 52,215-mile UP — and an
eventual, inevitable BNSF+CSX rival — will still be under intense
investor pressure to maintain a low operating ratio, whether it’s Wall
Street or Berkshire Hathaway applying the thumbscrews. Eliminating
interchange in Chicago won’t fix this. And so transcon mergers simply
kick the can down the road.
UP will harvest the low-hanging fruit, only to eventually run smack
into the same obstacle railroads have been facing since volume peaked in
2006. Wall Street demands fat profit margins and doesn’t care whether
railroads are growing or taking trucks off the highway.
Trains Columnist Bill StephensThat’s
because real growth requires service investments — more crews, more
locomotives, more marketing and sales people — and those costs push up
the almighty operating ratio in the short term, which Wall Street
punishes. A railroad that strays outside the operating ratio box, no
matter how briefly, soon finds activist investors at its doorstep.
And so a low operating ratio and growth are incompatible. An
exception would be in Western Canada, where bulk traffic sprouts like
weeds and can’t move to port without Canadian National and Canadian
Pacific Kansas City locomotives on the point of unit trains of covered
hoppers or tank cars.
In the truck-competitive U.S. of A., however, taxpayer-supported
interstates parallel every major main line, and railroad volume growth
has been anemic. A transcontinental merger does nothing to change the
eventual outcome of trucks carrying the day — and the freight — if
railroads continue with business as usual. UP+NS is a temporary
Band-Aid, at best.
To truly flourish — that is, make a decent buck while hauling more
tonnage — the U.S. Class I railroads need a new game plan. One that goes
beyond mergers and tackles the service and reliability gap that keeps
the truckers’ trailers full.
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In an iconic moment, a southbound CSX freight grinds around the southwest wye track at Deshler and enters the Toledo Sub. Power is an ES44DC with a Western Maryland herald, a Canadian Pacific AC4400CW, and a rare CSX GE C40-9W. Watch as the B&O color position light signal changes from clear to stop.
Filmed on September 26, 2019
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A Canadian National unit tank train blasts through Walkerton, Indiana and across the Elkhart & Western diamond.
Filmed on June 5, 2019.
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