Joint Line 1995 

Thank you for uploading! Love all the footage around Littleton.

Again, tremendous stuff, need to go there some time. Ideally, when the SP makes a come-back out of retirement. Oh, and so do all its engines.

I so miss the BN....

This video was enjoyable and yet honestly kind of sad seeing just how bad of shape the SP was in before the UP take over was implemented September of the following year. Hindsight is always 20/20 but with how poorly the SP was managed in the years that lead up to it's ultimate demise it almost makes you wonder if the decision makers were bored of the rail industry and wanting the company to fail or at the very least trying to compete with Chrysler Motor Company in terms of self sabotaging through spending gross amounts of capital on projects outside of the rail industry instead of reinvesting in themselves for their own survival. Again hindsight is always going to be right, but there were soooo many terrible decisions made that common sense would have said to not make yet SP seemed to want to make every single one of them and they paid the price for it in the end. Granted it's hard to tell the decision makers at the top of the company the truth but they needed to step down long before that company folded. Not to mention all the new 4-axle power should have never existed. It should have been purely 6-axle power and investing heavily in AC traction through outside investment options would have done the company wonders. Selling off aging money pit power for anything it could be sold off for and using that capital to upgrade track and related infrastructure would have helped too. Positive Train Control in principal isn't a new idea. It's simply doing more with less using new technology and motive power to do it. SP had new power options and technology in it's hands as well as the potential for third part investments to pay the bills for those new assets to company and they couldn't seem to grasp that concept despite the fact it, along with high level company members being replaced, would have at least in my opinion saved SP. I mean outside investors are the only reason SP's 25 SD70M's even came to be at all. It's not a big stretch of the imagination to assume that had SP been managed better then more newer bigger power could have been made available even without third party investment. Admittedly I'm on the outside looking in but the answers to SP's problems at least on the surface seem like nothing more then common sense. Albeit a severe lack of it will kill any company. We all saw how well the Penn-Central merger went...

Love the SD40T-2 making that bark at around 17:00 in!

Superstuff FMNUT