Former Host Railroads of Amtrak Routes

[ehbowen]

Thanks for doing this, Seaboard92, I had no idea there was so much Katy trackage still in use by Amtrak. Isn't there directional running around Beaumont, TX. One part is UP/SP and the other is BNSF (maybe just trackage rights?) not sure about the original railroad - MP?

While this can change day-to-day based upon operations and track maintenance, the last several times I've ridden the Sunset east of Houston we took the ex-Missouri Pacific trackage eastbound from Houston to Beaumont and the former Southern Pacific main line westbound from Beaumont to Houston. Required a backup move out of the Houston (ex-SP) station to transfer onto MoPac trackage north.

 

[Willbridge]

Reading all of this detail reminds me of a SP civil engineer friend, Ken McFarling, telling me years ago about the rolls and rolls of hand-inked ROW and civil works drawings in the Oregon Division office in Portland. They included this sort of information and also drawings of the improvements they were going to make when the Great Depression was over.

Someone with files like that probably knows which pier in the trans-Columbia bridge at Vancouver, Washington was built by the UP subsidiary, OWRR&N. Harriman backed off and sold it for construction of the SP&S. By that time, the shooting between the Hill and Harriman lines had ceased.

 

[hastybob]

A couple more I thought of:

Decatur, Al. The Floridian used the Southern Rwy from the depot across the Southern Rwy bridge to a junction north of the Tennessee river. The depot and bridge is part of the Southern mainline (Memphis and Charleston RR). In fact, the depot was manned by Southern Rwy clerks selling Amtrak tickets.

Louisville, Ky - The Floridian used the K&IT to get from the L&N mainline to the Monon mainline on the north side of the Ohio River.

 

[George Harris]

Decatur, Al. The Floridian used the Southern Rwy from the depot across the Southern Rwy bridge to a junction north of the Tennessee river. The depot and bridge is part of the Southern mainline (Memphis and Charleston RR). In fact, the depot was manned by Southern Rwy clerks selling Amtrak tickets.

Not quite sure this should really count. The L&N has had rights on the Southern across this bridge and use of this depot since the L&N was first built into this area, as the pre-war (that is, War Between the States) N&D (Nashville and Decatur) north of the junction with the M&C (Memphis and Charlston) from which it then crossed the river on trackage rights to get into Decatur itself, and to connect with the somewhat later post-war built S&NA (South and North Alabama) line from Decatur to Montgomery, so this part was never operated by the Southern. In the late 1960's after discontinuance of the Tennessean, the last passenger train on this part of the Southern, the L&N proposed building their own small passenger station near their yard, but apparently this never happened. To confuse the issue, the L&N built a straighter and shorter line between Brentwood, just south of Nashville and a point just north of Athens AL which took the through freight and passenger trains off the original N&D. Despite this becoming the de facto main line and the route used by the Floridian, end to end milage was always quoted as being that by way of the original N&D route. This chunk of trackage right operation at Decatur is still in place, except it is now CSX on NS.

Somewhat off the subject, the pre Amtrak premier Chicago - Miami train, the ICRR City of Miami, although operated by the ICRR north of Birmingham AL ran from Jackson TN south on a somewhat stitched together route of owned track and trackage rights. From Jackson TN, beginning at Perry Switch, just south of Jackson to Ruslor Jct., just north of Corinth MS they ran on GM&O trackage rights, from there to Russellville AL they ran on their own track, from Russellville AL to Jasper AL they ran on Southern, and from there into Birmingham, they ran on the Frisco. Incidentally, by doing all this they were the last scheduled passenger train to operate on Frisco rails anywhere and on any part of the pre-Alton GM&O.

 

[McLeansvilleAppFan]

Actually between Raleigh and Cary is an interesting place because it is both Southern and Seaboard. The South Track was owned by Seaboard, and the north track owned by the Southern. I don't know who dispatches this small section.

I am glad you brought this up about Cary-Raleigh. I am willing to bet good money, like a free sleeper from Greensboro to the west coast, that CSX is the one that dispatches this part of the railroad for both CSX and NS. On ATCSMon these few miles revert to CSX mile numbers, and those folks tend to have this correct or there would be a huge uproar on the ATCSMon mailing list. This is also some of the rare CSX trackage that uses the Radio Code Line for signal and switch control due to the fact that NS has need for RCL for the rest of the NC-Line from Greensboro to Selma. I have no idea which company runs more trains in this area. It might be Amtrak at this point with the most trains as there 8 Amtraks from Raleigh to Cary and on to Greensboro and two more Amtraks form Raleigh to Cary to points south on Silver Service I do believe.

CSX and NS co-own, and I think it is 50-50, the Winston-Salem Southbound RR and I am pretty sure that is also dispatched by CSX. Maybe NC and CSX just have an agreement that CSX dispatches all of trackage like this.

About a year ago I started helping grab the signals at McLeansville and Superior for ATCSMon which is to the east of Greensboro's station about 7 miles and I learned a good bit about all of this.

 

[west point]

This is also some of the rare CSX trackage that uses the Radio Code Line for signal and switch control due to the fact that NS has need for RCL for the rest of the NC-Line from Greensboro to Selma. I have no idea which company runs more trains in this area. It might be Amtrak at this point with the most trains as there 8 Amtraks from Raleigh to Cary and on to Greensboro and two more Amtraks form Raleigh to Cary to points south on Silver Service I do believe.

Have a suspicion of what RCL is but can you amplify? Is it in additional to track code signaling? Since the line from Greensboro = Raleigh went straight from dark to CTC is RCL somewhat new or is it a NS standard using it system wide in places? Exactly how is the line from Raleigh= Selma signaled as have read it is different?

 

[McLeansvilleAppFan]

Have a suspicion of what RCL is but can you amplify? Is it in additional to track code signaling? Since the line from Greensboro = Raleigh went straight from dark to CTC is RCL somewhat new or is it a NS standard using it system wide in places? Exactly how is the line from Raleigh= Selma signaled as have read it is different?

I am no expert on this but I am willing to type out what I think I know and my short history in the hobby of ATCSMon.

I think RCL came about in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Many RR's use this type of network that has CTC and it is used to control switches and signals and I think it might also help with hot boxes and FREDs at the end of the train. Basically RCL replaced "telegraph" lines with wireless transmission using some frequencies set aside by the FCC. The signal was not encoded and the AAR may have even published whtie papers on the tech for anyone to read. Someone figured out how to decode the signal and make sense of all the data. From what I can tell most railroads that are Class I used this technology and many still do use it, such as NS. CSX dropped this for bouncing the signal off of satellites about a decade ago. (I am not arond CSX much but in the few cases I am near CSX control boxes at switches and signals the boxes have small parabolic antennas pointing to the sky. ) Other railroads I think have moved to fiber in the ground if they are off RCL. Right now the FCC is forcing, from my understanding, the RRs to drop the frequencies being used (I think there may be plans to use the RCL frequencies for cell phone in the future or maybe government emergency/first responder communications. I read about this but I don't remember) and this is going to be done in 2 or 3 years or maybe even less time than that. From what I can gather this process is happening as I type this. Some RR's will go to fiber, some may adopt the satellite tech used by CSX and some may continue with RCL but at a different frequency AND, heres the kicker, with encrypted data, and that will be hard to get the docs to decrypt and most think reverse engineering would be breaking the law around decrypting data that is not allowed by the encrypting party.

I moved to my home on the extreme east of Greensboro in 2009 and I can't remember if I stumbled on ATCSMon then or before I lived here. We moved from the extreme south side of Greensboro and near the dark CF line that runs south from Greensboro towards Sanford. But one way or another I found out about it and was asked to help and I passed on it for a decade almost as I did not want to spend money running a computer and have to devote internet bandwidth to the cause with a family of 5 all needing internet.


Now I have gigafiber with ATT so plenty of bandwidth and the wife and I are empty-nesters so no worries about 5 people needing to use the internet at once. The person that installed my system donated the antenna, wiring and software defined radio to connect to the computer. I donated an old Win7 machine but they have that ready to go as well. He set everything up so I never had to read any documentation that would have explained all this tech in detail. I log on every other day or so just to make sure my system is sending the signal out to the servers but I don't watch it that much. It is interesting and I am glad I can serve a need for railfans that do lots of sitting by track-side to watch trains come by. My software defined radio moves off the frequency some so I know how to fix that. A few months after I finally got this up and running is when I first started hearing rumors about it going away over the next couple of years.

ATCSMon can be a bit hard to set up but it works fine for the one track I have which is the NC-Line by my house. Connected and separate to this is TrainMon5 which takes the data going to ATCS servers around the country and converts that to something that a web browser can show. I use that on my phone and it allows coverage around the country. Not every ATCS route is converted to TrainMon5. From what I can tell some people running ATCS do not want to work with TrainMon5 for some reason so TrainMon5 is a subset of what is available on ATCSMon. The other caveat is that people have to agree to host and be near the signal boxes. I am about a mile from the McLeansville control point and about 2-3 miles from the Superior Control Point. McLeansville gives me a clean signal about 95% of the time and Superior is about 80% of the time. I can sometimes pick up Fields, which is just to the east of the Greensboro station and about 6-7 miles from me. Fields is very sporadic for me. Sometimes I can pick up a signal 50 or more miles away such as Nelson, but I never seem to get anything to the west of Greensboro's station which are quite close, at least compared to control point Nelson. Something about Nelson and geography I guess. I need to check out that area on Google Earth. Recently some signals around Cary went off line for ATCSMon when a restaurant closed and they served as our computer location. That happens. There is a consolidated route on TrainMon5 that is the NC main from Atlanta up into Virginia and then also the NC-line from Greensboro to Raleigh and also the line from Winston-Salem to Roanoke and Charlotte to Columbia.

I hope I answered your question. I started rambling. Sorry for the long post and it is a bit off Amtrak discussion.

 

[west point]

I have noted CSX has installed Verizon dishes at all CPs in my area. Do the other RRs use land-based antennas to transmit data? (NS?)

 

[McLeansvilleAppFan]

I have noted CSX has installed Verizon dishes at all CPs in my area. Do the other RRs use land-based antennas to transmit data? (NS?)

With this forced change to other frequencies I think some RR are working with a mix at present between satellite dishes in some divisions and other divisions still with land-based antenna and others still using fiber in the ground. It is a mix from what I have read.

The NS dispatched line from Atlanta to north of Greensboro, (maybe into the DC area) and then the line from Greensboro to Selma, NC and finally the line from Winston-Salem, NC to Roanoke, VA has the land-based antennas and transmiters. Beyond that I can't say with any authority. Actually the only thing I can really state with 100% authority is that the NC-Line from Greensboro to Raleigh has land-based antenna as I can visually inspect some of these.

The antenna at the control point for McLeansville is positioned right beside a parking lot for McLeansville Baptist Church. I'll grab a photo and post a link in a day or two. I am not sure if NS only uses this antenna type but it is at least one type they use. (I mention the church by name as you might be able to see the metal housing for the switch and signal circuity from Google Earth street view but I can't promise that. The next control point west (Superior) is behind some private property and in a thick set of trees. The control point just east of McLeansville (Fields) is really easy to see with Street View. Find 211 Dudley St, Greensboro, NC ( where the road intersects at grade with the NC-Line) and rotate your view to look west (southbound on the rail line) and one has a really good view of the antenna and control point housing.