Mike Trent Wrote:
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> Hank,
>
> I'm sure they are referring to the fact that in
> the early 60's, everything was still in place,
Err, Marshall Pass, Valley Line, Black Canyon, Santa Fe Br., RGS, ...
Need I go on?
>
> Also, you have to consider that in the 60's the
> "Silverton" was actually upgraded and promoted,
> which made the Narrow Gauge truely profitable for
> probably the first time ever.
Ooh, there's a can of worms!
Well the narrow gauge was truly profitable before 1890, since the whole system was narrow gauge up until 1887-88.
Harder to tell later on, accounting being sometimes a subspecies of lying with statistics, but looking at the RGS even with the D&GR doing it's best to drain $$$ out of it, RGS showed a profit, over and above its $180k yearly bond payments, from the late 1890's until the whole system came crashing down in the wake of the WP debacle (IE: just before WWI). Given that RGS was profitable, it seems likely that the 3' lines of the D&RG were also.
> Certainly in D&RGW
> times.
Harder to say here, altho the fact that $$$ were spent on the 3' lines in the 1920's (ok, it was a pittence compared to need but still) would seem to indicate somebody had hopes. It does seem clear from the record that the Company was doing it's level best to drive traffic away and kill the lines from 1928-30 onward (with perhaps a short reprieve in the early years of the McCarthy/Swann recievership) and felt that the return on investment would be too low to justify spending shareholder $$$ on improvements/modernization.
BTW, that concept, "return on investment" is very important to the discussion and sets a different, higher bar than merely "profitable". And this is the one that managers are truly required to meet (by force of law) in our system. To be profitable is not enough.
One piece of hard evidence, available from CRRM, is the 1938 Branch line Report. This internal D&RGW doc. looked at a number of lines all over the system including the following 3' ga lines:
Santa Fe Branch: System Loss $71-1-05k + per year abandon
Silverton Br: system Profit$50-60k retain
Farmington Br: system Profit $94-113k Retain
Alamosa + Orient Brs: system Profit $82-85k retain
Alamosa Br(Mrs jct-Hooper only) + Orient Brs: system Profit$70-74k Retain
Ouray Br: system Profit $75-96k retain
Ouray Br(Rdg-Ouray only): system Profit $19-25k retain
Gunnison - Montrose: system profit $15-42k divert trafic to std ga at Montrose and abandon.
One would assume that, since this survey was looking at the weakest lines, the rest of the lines were considered profitable. Also note that, in spite of it "earning it's way," the study recomended getting rid of the Black Canyon line.
The 1948 Narrow Gauge Report, also avail from CRRM, shows a grimmer picture. Some might argue that by this time the fix was in, certainly company spokesman claimed that all 3' ga lines were, by their very nature, money losers. Of course the industry in general was trying to get rid of most, if not all branch lines by this time. Groupthink is certainly a possibility. The 1948 report used 3 different formulae to examine profitability. Under Basis I (ICC formulas) all lines except
Montrose-Cedar Creek, Poncha Jct-Sapinero & Mears Jct-Hooper show a profit to the system for 1948. Basis II (out-of-pocket expense) adds the coal branches out of Gunnison to the loser list. Basis III (gross ton mile proportion of full operating costs) has only the Ouray Branch (both sections) showing a profit to the system.
Now you can make a long argument about which is the correct system to use, frankly MEGO, but of greater interest to me is that the 1948 numbers (which removed Sapinero-Cedar Creek traffic from the totals btw) represent, even under the worst method, trivial losses to the system of about $240k. The D&RGW had a net income (bottom line) of $ 7.01 Million in 1948 (from Moody's Manual of Investments, Steam Railroads 1949 p810).
And of course much of the loss could probably have been done away with by purchasing diesels for the areas where helpers were in use. For ex; I'd be willing to bet that a 2 or 3 unit set of 1000 hp b-b units, working to Monarch during the day and doing Sargent or Villa Grove turns at night as needed, could have made profitable the old 3rd Div lines. But probably not profitable enough to justify spending the money when a higher return could be gotten by buying std ga units for use on the Moffat or Tennesse pass.
> At a minimum, the period of the 50 and early 60's
> could indeed be argued to be the "peak of
> operations" of at least more recent history, and
> by almost any definition of the D&RGW, which
> succeeded the old D&RG.
If you want to limit it to D&RGW, I'd argue for the late 20's with coal iron and limestone traffic coming into Salida or the WWII era with the sytem wide boom that was going on.
> I know it seems strange, but I think I agree with
> it.
I don't. Shall we have a horse race?
hank
