Horse Shoe Curve - Blah

[D&J RailRoad]

I took the day off from work to come up here to watch trains on the HSC. The park was closed. I came back into Altoona at the ped bridge to watch. Been here now for 1 1/2 hours, no trains. Everytime I have come up here to rail fan there has never been much, if any trains. I'm convinced this trackage is merely a private shortline that operates maybe a few trains a week.

 

[logandsawman]

Rail traffic has significantly slowed in my area over the last two years. The main commodities here are taconite, coal, and oil. With the Bakken in a slowdown the oil has come almost to a standstill. Taconite is way down with several mill closures. The coal is down because we have had such a mild winter.

 

[montanan]

I think freight in general has really slow down Ken. I work in operations for a trucking company and we run refrigerated trucks from the Pacific northwest to New England and I haven't seen freight this slow in 25 years. Trucking has also been effected by the economy also.

 

[Burlington Bob]

The BNSF has put in CTC on the Beardstown Sub from Beardstown to Bushnell and lengthened several sidings as well as putting crossing lights and gates up at just about every little road that crosses the tracks. When they were doing this it seemed like a train every every hour or less. Now it's like every three hours. Or more.

 

[JWhite]

I live on the old IC (now CN) mainline. Traffic is down from usual but I'm still getting 25 trains or so a day. One thing I've noticed is that the Amtrak Chicago to Carbondale IL trains are now running 3 old streamlined baggage cars ahead of their usual 3 to 4 coaches. Makes me wonder what they are carrying. They didn't used to run any baggage cars on those trains.