>>1096558Agreed, everything is so sterile and uniform and monotone in railroading now. On the mainline the only thing you see usually are huge unit trains of containers or oil tanks or whatever else pulled by the same half a dozen six-axle GE or EMD units. Nothing much interesting happens on the rails anymore, as compared with the story above or the story below. The romance and excitement of the rails is certainly dead and buried. I'm sure it sucked for the employees and the shippers to deal with such a clusterfuck system as PC (and the Rock Island and Milwaukee at the same time in the '70s) but there's a certain charm and appeal to those railroads that is lacking today.
>A same source remembers another situation where the PC ran a short train on the same ex-big 4 route. The original crews usually used lighter Baldwin S-12 type engines since the already poorly-maintained tracks on that line could not take anything heavier without risk of derailments (and they usually would practically idle their way down that line because it was so bad). The S-12's were at the time in Toledo, OH being used. So another crew from Tiffin had a GP7 available, and took it w/ a string of box cars NE towards Green Springs. Because of the heavier unit, the tracks could not take it, and the loco derailed out somewhere in farmland territory (front truck derailed only). Another miscommunication. 