by F-line to Dudley via Park
Jeff Smith wrote:As always, F-Line, thanks for that thorough explanation. I tend to think that the "permissive" operating agreement from back in the day was necessary to get the line back open before it was lost to time like some of the other land-banked ROW around the state.Yes. That trackage rights deal was cut in a different era when CDOT had very little in-house IQ on how to administer a state-owned rail network. 30 years ago they had Metro North and Amtrak operating under out-of-state auspices like some opaque black box CDOT didn't dare pry open, and Valley doing its Valley thing for the tourists. That was it; all other active rails were still privately-owned. The state wasn't prepared for the big sell-a-thon of Conrail dispersals in the mid-80's, or for the suddenness of Guilford's about-face on all the new territory in CT that B&M bought just prior to that company changing hands. So the state's first experience at direct public-private action managing and preserving its freight rail corridors happened under lots of time pressure in one massive circa- 1983-86 slate of carrier turnover and too-little of a well-formed worldview of what was a good business risk and what wasn't. They tended--out of no small amount of desperation--to over-trust the competence of the first shortline bids who returned a phone call for filling that acute post-Conrail/Guilford vacuum. And not just here on the Berkshire Line, either. Valley RR-subsidiary Connecticut Central's uneven little decade of public-private amateur hour with the Air Line/Middletown Cluster happened in the same general timeframe as the Housy trackage rights deal. That one had a much happier ending with CC "falling up" into buyout by P&W and traffic rebounding to a long-term stable place under a long-term stable Class II's stewardship. But things were very volatile in that intervening era and it showed--painfully--how in over their head CDOT was at thinking that they could plug the post-Conrail void in any sort of easy set-it-and-forget-it fashion.
In related news: viewtopic.php?f=67&t=59648&p=1389194#p1389194" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
the study that never ends did finally end, with a whimper.
Hence, Housy gets a trackage rights agreement that was too tilted in favor of the tenant carrier to have a viable escape clause or penalty mechanism if the tenant flauted their rights and responsibilities. All because CDOT was so eager to prevent the Berkshire Line from getting severed in the middle that it was willing to contract out to the first warm body that made a sales pitch in that moment. Now, you can argue very strongly that HRRC did indeed save the Berkshire Line and that there'd be no complete corridor to ponder if CDOT hadn't taken the first warm body. It definitely wasn't a "mistake" in that sense, and so many contrasting variables are in-play that it would be uselessly simplistic to reduce it to win/loss terms. But what seemed like a happy ending back then--get another Valley-esque "do-gooder" excursion carrier installed to revive the line, and have the freight prospects be the follow-through that keeps it stable--did not anticipate possible changes in Housy's business practices during the term of that very long and nearly unbreakable trackage rights deal. CDOT failed to acknowledge that when dealing with private business, it's dealing with the innate uncertainty over the term-of-contract that the management or ownership of said private business could overturn or radically change priorities. That is, CDOT didn't have the business IQ at the time to understand that boilerplate penalty clauses weren't for the trustworthy Housy management it was dealing with at that moment in the mid-80's, but for possible unforeseen configurations of Housy management that could come during that contract term if they got bought out, re-invested or re-staffed by total strangers, etc. Something the state should've seen--but didn't--as exceptionally high-risk at the time because of all the other CT rail lines plunged into chaos by the 180 change-in-management from corporate B&M to corporate Guilford, and the pivot gov't-owned Conrail management made in the mid-80's to mass-dump its low-margin branchlines in direct anticipation of the big '87 IPO and going totally private. Unexpected corporate change was the stuff that was initiating that mid-80's crisis with falling CT branchlines, but for whatever reason it never quite clicked with CDOT officials that the same thing could potentially plunge a freshly-minted shortline on state-owned corridor into the same chaos with the same suddenness.
Well...corporate changed at Housy. A lot. Housy's big reorganization into a maze of holding companies started in 1990 during Year 6 of the CDOT trackage rights deal, upon their pickup of Pittsfield-N. Caanan ownership from Guilford. In '92 it changed again with the south-of-New Milford and Maybrook Line pickups from Conrail. The passenger excursions that were the original restarted traffic on the CDOT-owned segment abruptly stopped. Management ranks overturned from John Hanlon's original "can-do!" charter group to the bunch of ex-Guilford rejects and associated hangers-on giving them such a bad name today. To CDOT's credit, they've grown their rail business IQ by leaps and bounds ever since. They now successfully manage a majority state-owned rail network and portfolio of stable and growing branchlines despite having to make do without a native in-state Class I interchange. While the "Dept. of Studies About Studies" still has its cringeworthy moments on the passenger side, generally speaking they're doing a consistently good job of late with pursuit of good-risk freight ROI and at not throwing good freight money after bad. The CDOT of today would not have made the mistakes that the low-information, high-desperation CDOT of 1985 did at over-trusting a for-profit corporation to never change. Unfortunately, this low-information mistake ended up having its risks exploited multiple decades into the trackage rights agreement instead of self-correcting like the low-information Connecticut Central deal did when the adults at P&W traded up into that territory. This one is going to be a messy fix for a generation of state officials and state taxpayers who weren't around (or even born!) in 1984-85 when the trackage rights agreement was first negotiated.
