Norfolk Southern Railway
The Norfolk Southern Railway is a Class I railroad in the United States. With headquarters in Norfolk, the company operates 19,420 miles route miles in 22 eastern states, the District of Columbia, has rights in Canada over the Albany to Montréal route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, on CN from Buffalo to St. Thomas. NS is responsible for maintaining 28,400 miles, with the remainder being operated under trackage rights from other parties responsible for maintenance; the most common commodity hauled on the railway is coal from mines in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and West Virginia. The railway offers the largest intermodal network in eastern North America. NS is a major transporter of export coal; the railway's major sources of the mineral are located in: Pennsylvania's Cambria and Indiana counties, as well as the Monongahela Valley. In Pennsylvania, NS receives coal through interchange with R. J. Corman Railroad/Pennsylvania Lines at Cresson, originating in the "Clearfield Cluster". NS's export of West Virginia bituminous coal begins transport on portions of the well-engineered former Virginian Railway and the former N&W double-tracked line in Eastern Virginia to its Lambert's Point coal pier on Hampton Roads at Norfolk.
Coal transported by NS is thus exported to steel mills and power plants around the world. The company is a major transporter of auto parts and completed vehicles, it operates some in conjunction with other railways. NS was the first railway to employ roadrailers which are highway truck trailers with interchangeable wheel sets; the Norfolk Southern Railway's parent Norfolk Southern Corporation is based in Virginia. Norfolk Southern Corporation was incorporated on July 23, 1980 in the Commonwealth of Virginia and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NSC; the primary business function of Norfolk Southern Corporation is the rail transportation of raw materials, intermediate products, finished goods across the Southeast and Midwest United States. The corporation further facilitates transport to the remainder of the United States through interchange with other rail carriers while serving overseas transport needs by serving several Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports; as of April 10, 2019, Norfolk Southern Corporation's total public stock value was over $51.6 billion.
On December 12, 2018, Norfolk Southern announced that it would be relocating its headquarters to Atlanta, leaving its hometown of Norfolk, Virginia after 38 years. The move is expected to be completed by the year 2021; the system began in 1982 with the creation of the Norfolk Southern Corporation, a holding company for the Southern Railway and Norfolk & Western Railway. The new company was given the name of the Norfolk Southern Railway, an older line acquired by SOU in 1974, that served North Carolina and the southeastern tip of Virginia. Headquarters for the new NS were established in Virginia; the company suffered a slight embarrassment when the marble headpiece at the building's entrance was unveiled, which read "Norfork Southern Railway". A new headpiece replaced the erroneous one several weeks later. NS aimed to compete in the eastern United States with CSX Transportation, formed after the Interstate Commerce Commission's 1980 approval of the merger of the Chessie System and the Seaboard System.
Norfolk Southern's predecessor railroads date to the early 19th century. The SR's earliest predecessor line was Rail Road. Chartered in 1827, the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road Company became the first to offer scheduled passenger train service with the inaugural run of the Best Friend of Charleston in 1830. Another early predecessor, the Richmond & Danville Railroad, was formed in 1847 and expanded into a large system after the American Civil War under Algernon S. Buford; the R&D fell on hard times and in 1894, it became a major portion of the new Southern Railway. Financier J. P. Morgan selected veteran railroader Samuel Spencer as president. Profitable and innovative, Southern became, in 1953, the first major U. S. railroad to switch to diesel-electric locomotives from steam. The City Point Railroad, established in 1838, was a 9-mile railroad in Virginia that started south of Richmond — City Point on the navigable portion of the James River, now part of the independent city of Hopewell — and ran to Petersburg.
It was acquired by the South Side Railroad in 1854. After the Civil War, it became part of the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad, a trunk line across Virginia's southern tier formed by mergers in 1870 by William Mahone, who had built the Norfolk & Petersburg Railroad in the 1850s; the AM&O was the oldest portion of the Norfolk & Western when it was formed in 1881, under new owners with a keen interest and financial investments in the coal fields of Western Virginia and West Virginia, a product which came to define and enrich the railroad. In the second half of the 20th century, the N&W acquired the Virginian Railway, the Wabash Railway, the Nickel Plate Road, among others. In 1982, the two systems formed the Norfolk Southern Railway; the system grew with the acquisition of over half of Conrail. In 1996, CSX bid to buy Conrail. S. responded with a bid of its own. On June 23, 1997, NS and CSX filed a joint application with the Surface Transportation Board for authority to purchas
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, with a population of 545,500 as of 2017. It lies within the United Kingdom's second-most populous built-up area, with a population of 3.2 million. It is fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, an arc of towns with which it forms a continuous conurbation; the local authority is Manchester City Council. The recorded history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium or Mancunium, established in about AD 79 on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell, it was a part of Lancashire, although areas of Cheshire south of the River Mersey were incorporated in the 20th century. The first to be included, was added to the city in 1931. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township, but began to expand "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century. Manchester's unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, resulted in it becoming the world's first industrialised city.
Manchester achieved city status in 1853. The Manchester Ship Canal opened in 1894, creating the Port of Manchester and directly linking the city to the Irish Sea, 36 miles to the west, its fortune declined after the Second World War, owing to deindustrialisation, but the IRA bombing in 1996 led to extensive investment and regeneration. In 2014, the Globalisation and World Cities Research Network ranked Manchester as a beta world city, the highest-ranked British city apart from London. Manchester is the third-most visited city after London and Edinburgh, it is notable for its architecture, musical exports, media links and engineering output, social impact, sports clubs and transport connections. Manchester Liverpool Road railway station was the world's first inter-city passenger railway station. Manchester hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games; the name Manchester originates from the Latin name Mamucium or its variant Mancunium and the citizens are still referred to as Mancunians. These are thought to represent a Latinisation of an original Brittonic name, either from mamm- or from mamma.
Both meanings are preserved in Insular Celtic languages, such as mam meaning "breast" in Irish and "mother" in Welsh. The suffix -chester is a survival of Old English ceaster and from that castra in latin for camp or settlement; the Brigantes were the major Celtic tribe in. Their territory extended across the fertile lowland of what is now Stretford. Following the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century, General Agricola ordered the construction of a fort named Mamucium in the year 79 to ensure that Roman interests in Deva Victrix and Eboracum were protected from the Brigantes. Central Manchester has been permanently settled since this time. A stabilised fragment of foundations of the final version of the Roman fort is visible in Castlefield; the Roman habitation of Manchester ended around the 3rd century. After the Roman withdrawal and Saxon conquest, the focus of settlement shifted to the confluence of the Irwell and Irk sometime before the arrival of the Normans after 1066. Much of the wider area was laid waste in the subsequent Harrying of the North.
Thomas de la Warre, lord of the manor and constructed a collegiate church for the parish in 1421. The church is now Manchester Cathedral; the library, which opened in 1653 and is still open to the public today, is the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom. Manchester is mentioned as having a market in 1282. Around the 14th century, Manchester received an influx of Flemish weavers, sometimes credited as the foundation of the region's textile industry. Manchester became an important centre for the manufacture and trade of woollens and linen, by about 1540, had expanded to become, in John Leland's words, "The fairest, best builded and most populous town of all Lancashire." The cathedral and Chetham's buildings are the only significant survivors of Leland's Manchester. During the English Civil War Manchester favoured the Parliamentary interest. Although not long-lasting, Cromwell granted it the right to elect its own MP. Charles Worsley, who sat for the city for only a year, was appointed Major General for Lancashire and Staffordshire during the Rule of the Major Generals.
He was a diligent puritan, banning the celebration of Christmas. Significant quantities of cotton began to be used after about 1600, firstly in linen/cotton fustians, but by around 1750 pure cotton fabrics were being produced and cotton had overtaken wool in importance; the Irwell and Mersey were made navigable by 1736, opening a route from Manchester to the sea docks on the Mersey. The Bridgewater Canal, Britain's first wholly artificial waterway, was opened in 1761, bringing coal from mines at Worsley to central Manchester; the canal was extended to the Mersey at Runcorn by 1776. The combination of competition and improved efficiency halved th
BNSF Railway
The BNSF Railway Company is the largest freight railroad network in North America. One of eight North American Class I railroads, BNSF has 44,000 employees, 32,500 miles of track in 28 states, more than 8,000 locomotives, it has three transcontinental routes that provide rail connections between the western and eastern United States. BNSF trains traveled over 169 million miles in 2010, more than any other North American railroad; the BNSF and Union Pacific have a duopoly on all transcontinental freight rail lines in the Western U. S. and share trackage rights over thousands of miles of track. The BNSF Railway Company is the principal operating subsidiary of parent company Burlington Northern Santa Fe, LLC. Headquartered in Fort Worth, the railroad's parent company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. According to corporate press releases, the BNSF Railway is among the top transporters of intermodal freight in North America, it hauls bulk cargo, including enough coal to generate around ten per cent of the electricity produced in the United States.
The creation of BNSF started with the formation of a holding company on September 22, 1995. This new holding company purchased the Atchison and Santa Fe Railway and Burlington Northern Railroad, formally merged the railways into the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway on December 31, 1996. On January 24, 2005, the railroad's name was changed to BNSF Railway Company using the initials of its original name. On November 3, 2009, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway announced it would acquire the remaining 77.4 percent of BNSF it did not own for $100 per share in cash and stock — a deal valued at $44 billion. The company is acquiring $10 billion in debt. On February 12, 2010, shareholders of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation voted in favor of the acquisition. BNSF's history dates back to 1849, when the Aurora Branch Railroad in Illinois and the Pacific Railroad of Missouri were formed; the Aurora Branch grew into the Chicago and Quincy Railroad, a major component of successor Burlington Northern.
A portion of the Pacific Railroad became the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway; the Atchison and Santa Fe Railway was chartered in 1859. It built one of the first transcontinental railroads in North America, linking Chicago and Southern California; the Interstate Commerce Commission denied a proposed merger with the Southern Pacific Transportation Company in the 1980s. The Burlington Northern Railroad was created in 1970 through the consolidation of the Chicago and Quincy Railroad, the Great Northern Railway, the Northern Pacific Railway and the Spokane and Seattle Railway, it absorbed the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway in 1980, its main lines included Chicago-Seattle with branches to Texas and Montgomery and access to the low-sulfur coal of Wyoming's Powder River Basin. On June 30, 1994, BN and ATSF announced plans to merge. S. Class I railroads; the long-rumored announcement was delayed by a disagreement over the disposition of Santa Fe Pacific Gold Corporation, a gold mining subsidiary that ATSF agreed to sell to stockholders.
This announcement began the next wave of mergers, as the "Super Seven" were merged down to four in the next five years. The Illinois Central Railroad and Kansas City Southern Railway, two of the five "small" Class Is, announced on July 19 that the former would buy the latter, but this plan was called off on October 25; the Union Pacific Railroad, another major Western system, started a bidding war with BN for control of the SF on October 5. The UP gave up on January 1995, paving the way for the BN-ATSF merger. Subsequently, the UP acquired the Southern Pacific Transportation Company in 1996, Eastern systems CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway split Conrail in 1999. On February 7, 1995, BN and ATSF heads Gerald Grinstein and Robert D. Krebs both announced shareholders had approved the plan, which would save overhead costs and combine BN's coal and ATSF's intermodal strengths. Although the two systems complemented each other with little overlap, in contrast to the Santa Fe-Southern Pacific merger, which failed because it would have eliminated competition in many areas of the Southwest, BN and ATSF came to agreements with most other Class Is to keep them from opposing the merger.
UP was satisfied with a single segment of trackage rights from Abilene, Kansas to Superior, which BN and ATSF had both served. KCS gained haulage rights to several Midwest locations, including Omaha, East St. Louis, Memphis, in exchange for BNSF getting similar access to New Orleans. SP requesting far-reaching trackage rights throughout the West, soon agreed on a reduced plan, whereby SP acquired trackage rights on ATSF for intermodal and automotive traffic to Chicago, other trackage rights on ATSF in Kansas, south to Texas, between Colorado and Texas. In exchange, SP assigned BNSF trackage rights over the former Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad between El Paso and Topeka and haulage rights to the Mexican border at Eagle Pass, Texas. Regional Toledo and Western Railway obtained trackage rights over BN from Peoria to Galesburg, Illinois, a BN hub where it could interchange with SP; the Interstate Commerce Commission approved the BNSF merger on July 20, 1995, less than a month before UP announced on August
Locomotive
A locomotive or engine is a rail transport vehicle that provides the motive power for a train. If a locomotive is capable of carrying a payload, it is rather referred to as multiple units, motor coaches, railcars or power cars. Traditionally, locomotives pulled trains from the front. However, push-pull operation has become common, where the train may have a locomotive at the front, at the rear, or at each end; the word locomotive originates from the Latin loco – "from a place", ablative of locus "place", the Medieval Latin motivus, "causing motion", is a shortened form of the term locomotive engine, first used in 1814 to distinguish between self-propelled and stationary steam engines. Prior to locomotives, the motive force for railways had been generated by various lower-technology methods such as human power, horse power, gravity or stationary engines that drove cable systems. Few such systems are still in existence today. Locomotives may generate their power from fuel, or they may take power from an outside source of electricity.
It is common to classify locomotives by their source of energy. The common ones include: A steam locomotive is a locomotive whose primary power source is a steam engine; the most common form of steam locomotive contains a boiler to generate the steam used by the engine. The water in the boiler is heated by burning combustible material – coal, wood, or oil – to produce steam; the steam moves reciprocating pistons which are connected to the locomotive's main wheels, known as the "drivers". Both fuel and water supplies are carried with the locomotive, either on the locomotive itself or in wagons called "tenders" pulled behind; the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive was built by Richard Trevithick in 1802. It was constructed for the Coalbrookdale ironworks in Shropshire in the United Kingdom though no record of it working there has survived. On 21 February 1804, the first recorded steam-hauled railway journey took place as another of Trevithick's locomotives hauled a train from the Pen-y-darren ironworks, in Merthyr Tydfil, to Abercynon in South Wales.
Accompanied by Andrew Vivian, it ran with mixed success. The design incorporated a number of important innovations including the use of high-pressure steam which reduced the weight of the engine and increased its efficiency. In 1812, Matthew Murray's twin-cylinder rack locomotive Salamanca first ran on the edge-railed rack-and-pinion Middleton Railway. Another well-known early locomotive was Puffing Billy, built 1813–14 by engineer William Hedley for the Wylam Colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne; this locomotive is the oldest preserved, is on static display in the Science Museum, London. George Stephenson built Locomotion No. 1 for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the north-east of England, the first public steam railway in the world. In 1829, his son Robert built The Rocket in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Rocket was entered into, won, the Rainhill Trials; this success led to the company emerging as the pre-eminent early builder of steam locomotives used on railways in the UK, US and much of Europe.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, built by Stephenson, opened a year making exclusive use of steam power for passenger and goods trains. The steam locomotive remained by far the most common type of locomotive until after World War II. Steam locomotives are less efficient than modern diesel and electric locomotives, a larger workforce is required to operate and service them. British Rail figures showed that the cost of crewing and fuelling a steam locomotive was about two and a half times larger than the cost of supporting an equivalent diesel locomotive, the daily mileage they could run was lower. Between about 1950 and 1970, the majority of steam locomotives were retired from commercial service and replaced with electric and diesel-electric locomotives. While North America transitioned from steam during the 1950s, continental Europe by the 1970s, in other parts of the world, the transition happened later. Steam was a familiar technology that used widely-available fuels and in low-wage economies did not suffer as wide a cost disparity.
It continued to be used in many countries until the end of the 20th century. By the end of the 20th century the only steam power remaining in regular use around the world was on heritage railways. Internal combustion locomotives use an internal combustion engine, connected to the driving wheels by a transmission, they keep the engine running at a near-constant speed whether the locomotive is stationary or moving. Kerosene locomotives use kerosene as the fuel, they were the world's first oil locomotives, preceding diesel and other oil locomotives by some years. The first known kerosene locomotive was a draisine built by Daimler in 1887. A kerosene locomotive was built in 1894 by the Priestman Brothers of Kingston upon Hull for use on Hull docks; this locomotive was built using a 12 hp double-acting marine type engine, running at 300 rpm, mounted on a 4-wheel wagon chassis. It was only able to haul one loaded wagon at a time, due to its low power output, was not a great success; the first successful kerosene locomotive was "Lachesis" built by Richard Hornsby & Sons Ltd. and delivered to Woolwich Arsenal railway in 1896.
The company built a series of kerosene locomotives between 1896 and 1903, for use by the British military. Petrol locomotives use petrol as their fuel. Most petrol locomotives built were petrol-mechanical, using a mechanical transmission to deliver the power output of the engine t
Centralized traffic control
Centralized traffic control is a form of railway signalling that originated in North America. CTC consolidates train routing decisions that were carried out by local signal operators or the train crews themselves; the system consists of a centralized train dispatcher's office that controls railroad interlockings and traffic flows in portions of the rail system designated as CTC territory. One hallmark of CTC is a control panel with a graphical depiction of the railroad. On this panel, the dispatcher can keep track of trains' locations across the territory that the dispatcher controls. Larger railroads may have multiple dispatcher's offices and multiple dispatchers for each operating division; these offices are located near the busiest yards or stations, their operational qualities can be compared to air traffic towers. Key to the concept of CTC is the notion of traffic control. Trains moving in opposite directions on the same track cannot pass each other without special infrastructure such as sidings and switches that allow one of the trains to move out of the way.
The only two ways for trains to arrange such interactions was to somehow arrange it in advance or provide a communications link between the authority for train movements and the trains themselves. These two mechanisms for control would be formalized by railroad companies in a set of procedures called train order operation, partly automated through use of Automatic Block Signals; the starting point of each system was the railroad timetable that would form the advanced routing plan for train movements. Trains following the timetable would know when to take sidings, switch tracks and which route to take at junctions. However, if train movements did not go as planned, the timetable would fail to represent reality, attempting to follow the printed schedule could lead to routing errors or accidents; this was common on single-track lines that comprised the majority of railroad route miles in North America. Pre-defined "meets" could lead to large delays if either train failed to show up, or worse, an "extra" train not listed in the timetable could suffer a head-on collision with another train that did not expect it.
Therefore, timetable operation was supplemented with train orders, which superseded the instructions in the timetable. From the 1850s until the middle of the twentieth century, train orders were telegraphed in Morse code by a dispatcher to a local station, where the orders would be written down on standardized forms and a copy provided to the train crew when they passed that station, directing them to take certain actions at various points ahead: for example, take a siding to meet another train, wait at a specified location for further instructions, run than scheduled, or numerous other actions; the development of Direct Traffic Control via radio or telephone between dispatchers and train crews made telegraph orders obsolete by the 1970s. Where traffic density warranted it, multiple tracks could be provided, each with a timetable-defined flow of traffic which would eliminate the need for frequent single track-style "meets." Trains running counter to this flow of traffic would still require train orders, but other trains would not.
This system was further automated by the use of Automatic Block Signaling and interlocking towers which allowed for efficient and failsafe setting of conflicting routes at junctions and that kept trains following one another safely separated. However, any track that supported trains running bi-directionally under ABS protection, would require further protection to avoid the situation of two trains approaching each other on the same section of track; such a scenario not only represents a safety hazard, but would require one train to reverse direction to the nearest passing point. Before the advent of CTC there were a number of solutions to this problem that did not require the construction of multiple single direction tracks. Many western railroads used an automatic system called absolute permissive block, where trains entering a stretch of single track would cause all of the opposing signals between there and the next passing point to "tumble down" to a Stop position thus preventing opposing trains from entering.
In areas of higher traffic density, sometimes bi-directional operation would be established between manned interlocking towers. Each section of bi-directional track would have a traffic control lever associated with it to establish the direction of traffic on that track. Both towers would need to set their traffic levers in the same way before a direction of travel could be established. Block signals in the direction of travel would display according to track conditions and signals against the flow of traffic would always be set to their most restrictive aspect. Furthermore, no train could be routed into a section of track against its flow of traffic and the traffic levers would not be able to be changed until the track section was clear of trains. Both APB and manual traffic control would still require train orders in certain situations, both required trade-offs between human operators and granularity of routing control; the ultimate solution of the costly and imprecise train order system was developed by the General Railway Signal company as their trademarked "Centralized Traffic Control" technology.
Its first installation in 1927 was on a 40-mile stretch of the New York Central Railroad between Stanley and Berwick, with the CTC control machine located at Fostoria, Ohio. CTC was designed to enable the train dispatcher to control train movements directly, bypassing local operators and eliminating written train orders. Instead, the train dispatcher could directly see the trains' locations and efficiently con
Amtrak
The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak, is a passenger railroad service that provides medium- and long-distance intercity service in the contiguous United States and to nine Canadian cities. Founded in 1971 as a quasi-public corporation to operate many U. S. passenger rail services, it receives a combination of state and federal subsidies but is managed as a for-profit organization. Amtrak's headquarters is located one block west of Union Station in Washington, D. C. Amtrak serves more than 500 destinations in 46 states and three Canadian provinces, operating more than 300 trains daily over 21,400 miles of track. Amtrak owns 623 miles of this track and operates an additional 132 miles of track; some track sections allow trains to run as fast as 150 mph. In fiscal year 2018, Amtrak served 31.7 million passengers and had $3.4 billion in revenue, while employing more than 20,000 people. Nearly 87,000 passengers ride more than 300 Amtrak trains on a daily basis. Nearly two-thirds of passengers come from the 10 largest metropolitan areas.
The name Amtrak is a portmanteau of the words America and trak, the latter itself a sensational spelling of track. In 1916, 98% of all commercial intercity travelers in the United States moved by rail, the remaining 2% moved by inland waterways. Nearly 42 million passengers used railways as primary transportation. Passenger trains were owned and operated by the same owned companies that operated freight trains; as the 20th century progressed, patronage declined in the face of competition from buses, air travel, the automobile. New streamlined diesel-powered trains such as the Pioneer Zephyr were popular with the traveling public but could not reverse the trend. By 1940, railroads held just 67 percent of commercial passenger-miles in the United States. In real terms, passenger-miles had fallen by 40 % from 42 billion to 25 billion. Traffic surged during World War II, aided by troop movement and gasoline rationing; the railroad's market share surged with a massive 94 billion passenger-miles. After the war, railroads rejuvenated their overworked and neglected passenger fleets with fast and luxurious streamliners.
These new trains brought only temporary relief to the overall decline. As postwar travel exploded, passenger travel percentages of the overall market share fell to 46% by 1950, 32% by 1957; the railroads had lost money on passenger service since the Great Depression, but deficits reached $723 million in 1957. For many railroads, these losses threatened financial viability; the causes of this decline were debated. The National Highway System and airports, both funded by the government, competed directly with the railroads, who paid for their own infrastructure. Progressive Era rate regulation limited the railroad's ability to turn a profit. Railroads faced antiquated work rules and inflexible relationships with trade unions. To take one example, workers continued to receive a day's pay for 100-to-150-mile work days. Streamliners covered that in two hours. Matters approached a crisis in the 1960s. Passenger service route-miles fell from 107,000 miles in 1958 to 49,000 miles in 1970, the last full year of private operation.
The diversion of most U. S. Postal Service mail from passenger trains to trucks and freight trains in late 1967 deprived those trains of badly needed revenue. In direct response, the Atchison and Santa Fe Railway filed to discontinue 33 of its remaining 39 trains, ending all passenger service on one of the largest railroads in the country; the equipment the railroads had ordered after World War II was now 20 years old, worn out, in need of replacement. As passenger service declined various proposals were brought forward to rescue it; the 1961 Doyle Report proposed. Similar proposals failed to attract support; the federal government passed the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 to fund pilot programs in the Northeast Corridor, but this did nothing to address passenger deficits. In late 1969 multiple proposals emerged in the United States Congress, including equipment subsidies, route subsidies, lastly, a "quasi-public corporation" to take over the operation of intercity passenger trains.
Matters were brought to a head on March 5, 1970, when the Penn Central, the largest railroad in the Northeast United States and teetering on bankruptcy, filed to discontinue 34 of its passenger trains. In October 1970, Congress passed, President Richard Nixon signed into law, the Rail Passenger Service Act. Proponents of the bill, led by the National Association of Railroad Passengers, sought government funding to ensure the continuation of passenger trains, they conceived the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, a private entity that would receive taxpayer funding and assume operation of intercity passenger trains. The original working brand name for NRPC was Railpax, but shortly before the company started operating it was changed to Amtrak. There were several key provisions: Any railroad operating intercity passenger service could contract with the NRPC, thereby joining the national system. Participating railroads bought into the NRPC using a formula based on their recent intercity passenger losses.
The purchase price could be satisfied either by cash or rolling stock. Any participating railroad was freed of the obligation to operate intercity passenger service after May 1, 1971, except for those services chosen by the Department of Transportation as part of a "basic system" of servic
Goods station
A goods station or freight station is, in the widest sense, a railway station where, either or predominantly, such as merchandise and manufactured items, are loaded onto or unloaded off of ships or road vehicles and/or where goods wagons are transferred to local sidings. A station where goods are not received or dispatched, but transferred on their way to their destination between the railway and another means of transport, such as ships or lorries, may be referred to as a transshipment station; this takes the form of a container terminal and may be known as a container station. Goods stations were more widespread in the days when the railways were common carriers and were converted from former passenger station whose traffic had moved elsewhere; the world's first dedicated goods terminal was the 1830 Park Lane Goods Station at the South End Liverpool Docks. Built in 1830 the terminal was reached by a 1.24-mile tunnel from Edge Hill in the east of the city. The station was a part of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, a first being the first inter-city railway.
Goods stations may be located: next to a passenger station, separately from the associated passenger station on one of the railway lines leading from it, as an independent facility not connected with any particular passenger station. Where individual goods wagons are dispatched to specific goods stations, they are delivered to special shunting stations or marshalling yards where they are sorted and collected. Sometimes there are combined shunting and goods stations. A goods station is equipped with a large number of storage and loading sidings in order to fulfil its task. On the loading sidings there may be fixed facilities, such as cranes or conveyor belts, or temporary equipment, such as wheeled ramps for the loading of sugar beet. Stations where the primary purpose of the station is the handling of containers are known as container terminals, they are equipped with special cranes and fork-lift vehicles for loading containers from lorries or ships onto the railway vehicles, or vice versa. If only a small section of a station is used for the loading and unloading of goods, it may be referred to as the "loading area" or "loading dock" and has its own access and signposting.
There are no facilities for loading and the individual firm has to organise its own loading equipment such as conveyor belts or lorry cranes. Such loading areas were to be found on branch lines, narrow gauge railways and at smaller stations. Medium-sized and larger goods stations have marshalling or shunting sidings to enable trains to be divided amongst the various local loading and sorting sidings and industrial branches, at the same time performing the function of a small railway hub. In many European countries they are equipped with a hump yard. Due to the increasing amount of goods traffic that has switched from rail to road many goods stations and, in consequence marshalling yards and were eventually demolished, so that reviving rail services at the same location is no longer possible. In combined goods and hub stations with a hump yard, the latter was closed if the station lost its role as a railway hub, whilst the local goods function was retained. In addition, in most countries, part-load or parcel goods services have been transferred to the roads, which has led to the closure of goods sheds as well as most of the public loading sidings and ramps used by smaller customers.
As a result, most of the remaining goods stations today are just used as container or transshipment stations. In German-speaking countries, various terms for goods station are used including Güterbahnhof in Germany and Switzerland, Frachtenbahnhof in Austria. In French: gare aux marchandises or gare de fret. Freight yard Goods shed Goods train Railway station, which includes information on passenger stations. Container terminal Blum, Personen- und Güterbahnhöfe. Zweite neubearbeitete Auflage von Dr.-Ing. Habil. Kurt Leibrand, Handbuch für Bauingenieurwesen, Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Grau, Bahnhofsgestaltung. Bände 1 und East Berlin: Transpress VEB Verlag für Verkehrswesen. Europe-wide goods station search Goods stations search - Germany Container services
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