RailRoadFan.com

I'm sorry, but reading through this list it's clear almost nobody knows how to behave properly in a police encounter. Dealing with cops is terrifying. They could destroy your life if they are evil. Fortunately they are not. However they are trained to use their intimidation power, and mislead you in...

If the production of ethanol requires more energy than the burning of that same amount of ethanol produces(I believe this is an accepted fact), why would oil companies oppose it? On top of that the government offers incentives to produce ethanol, so its forcing the use of more oil to generate the s...

And people shouldn't be so afraid to run gates... they are not made of Kryptonite. They'll damage your car, sure, but like most traffic devices they are made of Nerf so they don't injure the occupants. Smashing a gate (and maybe totaling a car) is better than frantically trying to undo seatbelt, get...

I need to find out who's involved with the cabooses in Lapeer at the Amtrak station. One of them is painted in NYC "Central Green". The Southern Michigan RR is looking at painting theirs, and I'd like to chat with those folks about paint color, durability, lettering stencils etc. Their paint has hel...

I've seen traffic lights stuck on red, and dopes sit there forever, totally terrified to slowly drive through the red light. That's because drivers will mindlessly obey a traffic light for 3 minutes or more (some cycles actually are that long, especially in places that don't have Michigan Lefts or ...

CSX needs to be more like UP. UP gives us an extra engine for that time of need. HA! Not quite. UP goes by EPA (equivalent powered axle) and most of the time, we are only rated for only having one unit online on a good-sized train. Wait, are you saying UP has you haul an extra locomotive in your tr...

I have taken it many times. It's a perfectly comfortable ride, and the scenery is good. Along the Mohawk you see lots of pretty country and tremendous canal works. You aren't "right next to a freeway the whole way" like some routes. South of Albany it is every bit the equal of the Starlight or Zephy...

Are there any others around? Stored, perhaps? Thinking one would look REAL NICE in a museum. Real nice.
What paint scheme would it have been?

Any Ann Arbor 86' cars still left? That'd be real nice too.

Be my crowning achievement to paint one.

Two GP9s gives you over 3000hp IIRC, which I would think could handle a unit train(that would probably be moved in several cuts for the most part) at low speeds over a short distance. GP9s were mainline locomotives designed to cruise between 15-75 mph and use all their horsepower at those speeds. B...

Looks like The guys over at Rails to Trails are anxious to get this last piece of the line http://community.railstotrails.org/blogs/trailblog/archive/2011/02/15/notice-upcoming-railroad-abandonment-in-michigan.aspx darn, those guys are organized. Where's my "Support a railfan organization/rail muse...

Good point MSchweibert. Just that thing I mentioned drives me nuts. Conversely when I bought soda on sale in 1983 it cost me $3.00/12pack. I pay the same today. Dinner trains are extremel expensive to operate and maintain and they use fairly heavy equipment. The East Troy Electric Railroad is doing ...

If the only income is $5000-$7250 per month there may not be a lot left over when bills are paid and Fed/State Gov gets theirs. You know, that'd be pretty good money for a railway museum. Go hit justgive.org and look at the Form 990 filings for nonprofit railway museums of various types. Another re...

Here's an interesting chart showing the price of a gallon of gas in constant dollars. It'd be interesting to see if there's a current edition out there, but it does show that everything is relative. http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/gasoline.pdf Doesn't work. The problem is t...

The SMRS South Shore cars are the ones from Lansing and I have been told that by several people from the area. SMRS's cars definitely did not come via Lansing. The Park Service dealt with SMRS directly. SMRS was invited to come to the Park Service storage site in Gary Indiana to examine and pick ou...

Interesting. Well the South Shore cars couldn't have gone to the Michigan Transit Museum at Selfridge, unless they immediately resold them to somewhere else. Their one South Shore car came from the East Troy Electric Railroad in Wisconsin, and in fact, was the LAST railroad car ever to cross Lake Mi...

Back around 1990 I was tracking the comings and goings of Chicago South Shore cars, and two of them went to a group called the Lansing-North Lansing Electric Railroad Association (or something like that). What's the story of that group? What did they have in terms of equipment and track? What happen...

You wanna see shaky, try starting a commuter railroad without a big fleet of used coaches. You have NO coaches. You have to go out and buy new stock. ....... No, having those coaches on-hand really ups the chances of pulling off a viable service and doing it inside our lifetimes. All of that seems ...

Why exactly do they even need any more up there in Owosso? The place is swarming with them, in a business venture that seems so shaky already. You wanna see shaky, try starting a commuter railroad without a big fleet of used coaches. You have NO coaches. You have to go out and buy new stock. Those ...

Thanks. 1505 is in the valid range of Metra Highliners. However it's not any known car preserved so it's clearly other stock.

Really??? Does anyone have the car numbers handy? I'm wondering where they came from. Interesting to see those. There are VERY few preserved, and in only 3 places. Here is Frank Hicks' database. http://www.bera.org/cgi-bin/pnaerc-query.pl?sel_allown=Metra&match_target=&Tech=Yes&pagelen=200 They are ...