lvrr325 wrote:Because the NYS&W is in private hands there's no way to know who owns what percentages.
I'm told on good authority that CSX and NS each own 40% (Conrail bought 80% and then split it in half when Conrail made the spit). Traffic on the NYSW could pick up some day. It did recently for the SU-99/SU-100 to run three times a week now. They don't have enough crews and enough power to keep up with the traffic in the last few weeks (which I guess is a good problem to have if you are to have any). Ballast trains didn't run for a few weeks since they needed the WS-2 crew to do yard work and local work. The track gangs are putting the super elevation back into the curves that was taken out so the stacks wouldn't be so tippy and I believe track speed is going to be brought up too, up to an additional 10 mph (don't quote me on it). The track already looks better even though they're not nearly done with it.
I'm on to think that anything is possible, and I wouldn't completely rule out that a "revival" wouldn't happen again. My father was a reporter for the Suburban Trends when they were still on Main Street in Butler and was the railroad's biggest cheer leader during the rebuild in '86, and was the first reporter to break the news about freight trains coming through Butler again, and everyone then said "Yeah, okay, and monkey's will fly." A revival happened once, who's one to say that it wont happen again? NYSW has been the test bed for a lot of things like the RDC's, MU'ing locomotives and the intermodal business so I wouldn't be surprised if they were the test bed for another thing in the future.
I'm not a business man on the grand scale of a regional railroad, but once my father's good friend, Walter Rich passed away, the railroad seems it constantly wants to down size while Mr. Rich's business vision was to constantly expand and grow their fleet bigger. Unfortunately, the new management sees it a slightly different way apparently--I'm not criticizing them, they know more about this than any of us do. I hear a lot of railfans complain about putting leased power all over the place instead of NYSW units, but it makes sense to use another road's locomotives and put more miles on them than their own and send them out to their home road when they need to be serviced instead of pouring money into their own locomotives.
I think in the future that there will be another big come back of some sort, just keep hoping for it to be soon.