I apologize, I don't know how this terrible edit happened where I botched the quoting and included way too much irrelevant material... but I'm fixing it now.

By the way I agree with about 90% of what Sandy's said in this thread, it just doesn't look like it because I don't tend to comment on what I agree with.



Yeah, I would not get your hopes up about freight coming to the rescue. I've looked at a lot of structures:
- freight only
- freight with passenger
- passenger only, tourist railroad
- passenger only, railroad museum
And the body count in the freight business is staggering. Freight service is a very hard place to make money. Whereas passenger operations, especially ones in a nonprofit structure, are pretty solid.

That makes sense if you notice how "passion driven" small rail operations tend to be. The nonprofit structure is much better at focusing and retaining the energy of passion. But it's hard (not impossible) to run freight in a nonprofit context.


I disagree. Having traversed the Algoma Central Railroad on a hy-rail truck at urgent rates of speed, and having attempted access by "road" to one of its online towns, I can say that if someone was at random point X and needed transportation to a helicopter-landable site, they'd be worlds better off if there was a railroad adjacent. Any vehicle could traverse the trail and shake them possibly to death... but a hy-railer could move them over rail smoothy at meaningful speeds.

The railroad also tends to keep vegetation back, which increases the number of helicopter-landable sites. E.G. any railroad crossing, where the railroad has to cut it back for visibility, but the trail does not.

As far as usability, the train (and the huts it services) help a lot. Imagine there's a long stretch with no access. Saturday morning you take the train to any arbitrary starting point, hike to a halfway point with a RR supported hut, enjoy a proper breakfast and hike to any destination and back on the train Sunday afternoon. This is territory you would never see if the difficulty was raised by having to hike both ways with camp and food on your back. Because you would not have time in a weekend.

What kind of admission fees do they plan on charging to walk this trail? NET of costs of collecting tolls and preventing evasion. It would be real easy to spend more on toll enforcement than you gross. It's a huge property to patrol.
OH WAIT, the business model here is to charge NO TOLL WHATSOEVER? Ah right, so this is a new dot-com trail, a Facebook model where you make it on targeted ads?
No you say?

So the plan is to give the trail away, and make their money on Keynesian multipliers and the broken-window fallacy. It's all hypothetical arm-waving money that nobody can actually trace or attach. Oh, some riders will stop at a local restaurant (when they wouldn't before) and that will bring $10 into the economy, paid out to the restaurant's workers and landlord and food suppliers ($10 again) and the landlord spends it on paint, the employees on food, the farmer on helpers and the $10 appears again. and again, and again, and again. and has yielded over $100 before it's done.

Ignoring the facts that 90% of this money is from locals who would've spent it anway, so it isn't really a multiplier; that 30% of it evaporates to taxes at each leap, and another 50% leaves the community because the goods were sourced out of town (this is the case for virtually 100% of the money spent at a gas station)... well by the time all that happens you're lucky if the aggregate adds up to a dollar a visitor.

Whereas, that $39 passenger fare is actual, bona-fide cash inflow that accounts to real ROI you can pay local suppliers with, and THAT at least has some chance of being a multiplier.

So the very fact that you claim there is ANNY ROI on a trail, tells me you've been too close to government service for too long.



Not at all. The train is unavailable only to the handicapped, but they can't use the trail either. Meanwhile the trail is useless to huge swaths of the population because the physical hiking is beyond their reasonable ability. (read: many sedentary adults and anyone with a cane or walker.)



I think the railroad is talking to the wrong people. You go to the retireds and say "Once the rails are lifted, you will never see this country." There you go.

Ironically, I have to conclude that mining is dying in West Virginia. I speak as one who had both grandfathers as coal miners, one of them a mine owner, and one of his sons--my father--worked in that mine for a short while. It was a small operation, had maybe six men working in it. It closed up in the 1950s because the coal ran out.

We've been digging coal in this state for at least 150 years. How much is left? I recall a comment, at the time of the first oil crunch in 1973, that the state had at least 100 years of coal left. That was 40 years ago, and I'm not accounting for the acceleration in mining that took place after that.

I can point out a number of mines around my home city of Wheeling, W.Va., some of which were quite large and shipped by rail, that are now gone, on both sides of the Ohio River. Some had been in operation since at least the 1920s, and seemed they would always be there.

I recall the long, long list of mines that would be on radio station WWVA's "Mine Bulletin Board," a broadcast that announced working days in the mines. That program is, I believe, long gone, and would certainly be greatly abbreviated if it were still around today.

In addition to that, mining equipment has improved so much over the years that we just don't need miners in the numbers we used to have. I seem to recall a figure of only about 25,000 working miners in West Virginia today.

This doesn't mean thee aren't a lot of people convinced that getting rid of some "war on coal" is going to make this a land of milk, honey, and millionaires--too many have bought into that. But the truth is going to hurt, hurt, hurt in the next 30 years or so.

I happen to be an auditor, and on one of my assignments, someone happened to mention a fairly large operation that was under audit will probably close in the next seven years. They will run out of material to dig in the property they control. That was a year ago; means they're down to six years now.

I am just so disappointed too many do not see what I do. It does not require you to be an MBA--or an auditor--to see these things. All you have to do is know where to look.

But then, I am trained to look behind things, to ask questions. Maybe it's an edge--but too often, it seems a curse.

I'm not the one making such a claim at all. I agree with you that the assumption that trail users will pump money into the local economy, thus offsetting in part or full the trail's capital costs (i.e. "investment" in their parlance), is a classic bunch of political balderdash. I'm not bold enough to say the return is zero as you allege, but it's definitely minuscule in real terms compared to the amount of money consumed in building (and probably maintaining) the trail.



One has to pay a fare (not cheap), possibly make reservations in advance, and be at a specific station at specific times on specific days, to ride the train. A trail I can access whenever I get there, and wherever I choose to go on it. As someone who has had to plan entire vacations and itineraries around one or two specific such train departures, and not ridden at least two excursion lines I drove miles to see because of a traffic jam or other delay making me miss the last/only train of the day, I can tell you that the flexibility comes in QUITE handy when it comes to getting there when I can get there.
We could go round and round about accessibility issues. Suffice it to say that I don't feel it's my job to pay for someone else's access to every last available inch of a park, and even if we adopt that approach, there are cheaper ways to do so than maintaining an entire passenger railroad.


And that is a bold-faced lie. Plain and simple. I'm not going to do that.

Just keeping an eye on things. . .

First up, an editorial (reprinted from another source), wondering why the Governor of New York has not come out in favor of the trail. . .seems the trail people are anxious about his silence as well.

http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.co ... l?nav=5041

And taking another look at McCulley's posted link on snowmobile sales, it's interesting to read further into it that US sales have been. . .flat. Canada was up by 8%, though, and the tone of the article suggests a lot of sales growth was in northern Europe and Russia. Sadly, those sales across the Atlantic (and likely a good portion of the ones in Canada) aren't likely to result in ridership in New York.

http://www.snowmobile.org/worldwide-sno ... ercent.asp

Man, those professional marketing men are really slick. They manage to hide things and speak the truth at the same time. You really do have to look at "the fine print."

Too bad I never quite got the hang of such "communication."

I wonder what the registration figures will show for the current season. Up? Could be, maybe a lot of snowmobiles will have been reactivated by the current favorable season.

Down? Maybe, if the trend means anything; big question would be, why? As noted, this year looks to have been pretty decent for snow, and it shouldn't be the economy, either.

Stay the same or close to the same? Most likely answer in my opinion, based on the US sales comments above, but we won't really know what happened until next April or May, which will be when the next park service report comes out.

Just stumbled onto this (and will be placing it on the Catskill page, too); wish the New York trail people understood this as well as this Virginian lady:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-eLneUU-uc

The Adirondack is getting national coverage. Link is from the ARTA's page, and the photo is from a local story with Dick Beamish pointing out "rotting" track--but not the three NEW ties right in front of him!

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/NY-a ... php#src=fb

Yes, it is interesting that the trail people are also frustrated at the slow pace at which the DOT and the governor are working.

Further material from "The Adirondack Rail Trail:"

The Adirondack Rail Trail
2 hours ago
There have been rumors of a compromise being discussed whereas the tracks remain to Tupper and the Trail goes from Tupper to Placid. What do you all think about that scenario?
3Like · · Share
6 people like this.

Joe Rebot I think that is a terrible compromise for the people who want to ride from Old Forge. What is the point of keeping and spending money on a railroad nobody uses and loses money every year.
2 hours ago · Like · 7

The Adirondack Rail Trail So do we so we got to get people to get out and say something about it.
2 hours ago · Like · 1

Daniel Cash Why doesn't the train use those tracks currently? If they can't support the rail service from LP to SL, what makes them think that they can do it from OF to TL? Won't those tracks need millions of dollars to resume train service? Who's going to ride a train from Utica to TL?

I'm all for finding the best way forward, but that seems like a bad compromise for the trail system AND the train people.

By the way, when the trail is built (after the UMP is opened or the train runs out of money) let's organize a bike race from OF to LP!
2 hours ago · Like · 4

Phil Leone Rather see the tracks stay from Tupper to Placid and out from Thendara to Tupper.
2 hours ago · Like · 1

The Adirondack Rail Trail My sources in Tupper want the Trail to come from Old Forge and Lake Placid. They are the geographical center of the Adirondack Universe and points north to St. Lawrence Cty and south to Hamilton Cty.
about an hour ago · Like · 2

Bill Lahey No way
about an hour ago · Like

Bill Schneider Terrible deal! Sure it would be great for locals like me who want to exercise and commute, but a big part of this is bringing in more business to ALL the towns up and down the line. I don't ride a snowmobile, but my guess is they won't make the trip up here from Old Forge if they have to deal with the tracks (given our average snow fall). Who knows what kind of summer traffic you’d be able to draw with a forty-something mile trail? The true and fair compromise is let the ASR run the train south of Old Forge (where it’s actually viable), and they give up the $40ish+ million pipe dream of track rehab and stop beating their dead horse. How many private companies tried to run train service up here, how long has the ASR tried to make this work?!? It’s time for them to let our communities make better use of this resource and build the trail, especially since it’s what most residents and businesses seem to want!
about an hour ago · Like · 4

Bill Schneider I guess the other question is this some kind of deal the train folks are pushing behind the scenes to avoid re-opening the UMP? Because if the UMP re-opens, I think the trail comes out the winner between LP and Old Forge.
about an hour ago · Like

The Adirondack Rail Trail Legally, we believe the UMP has to be opened to initiate any change in use whether rail or trail or both. The state just likes to have a better idea of which way the hearing is going to go before they have it. Also, they like to give hearing goers a few scenario options to choose from.
about an hour ago · Like

Matt Charles I agree that the TL to Saranac section would be the part that I, personally, would use the most, but shortening the trail that much would eliminate the long, multiday bike touring trips that have worked so well for the Great Allegheny Passage trail and other long distance routes.

Also, I agree with the question: Who would want to take a train from Utica to Tupper Lake?
about an hour ago · Like · 1

Stuart Nichols Bad idea. Backwards at best.
about an hour ago · Like · 1

The Adirondack Rail Trail Even if you "dislike" this idea it is OK to "LIKE" this post and spread the word. LOL!
about an hour ago · Like

Bill Schneider Well, if the UMP has to open either way…then I say go for the whole enchilada, LP to Old Forge. It’s really the only option that makes sense anyway!
about an hour ago · Like · 1

Craig Hart My wallet continues to get thinner because of these imbeciles! They just want to keep WASTING the taxpayers money!
about an hour ago · Like

Bob Dudek That WOULD SUIT THE local miniority OF merchants that want the $led money to stay south of Tupper...Make NO mistake not everyone in the TOW wants this to happen..Just look at the demographics of the Summer trade.
about an hour ago · Like

Stuart Nichols I met people a few years ago in Tupper Lake that were headed back to Old Forge. They were gassing their sleds in Tupper about 7 PM and I asked them where they had been. It was an all day trip from Old Forge to Malone, and back. I have tried to impress this upon the Franklin County legislators that Tupper Lake is a natural entry point to the entire county for snowmobiles coming from the south and west. All their email addresses can be found on the Franklin County website.
about an hour ago · Like

Jim Mcculley Yesterday we met some snowmobilers in Star lake that wanted to go to Tupper than back to Old Forge via the tracks. They turned and went back the way they came so they wouldn't ruin their sleds on the rails.
about an hour ago · Like · 1

The Adirondack Rail Trail You are right Stuart. Tupper Lake is the missing link. Think of all the trail riders from Malone, Plattsburgh, Potsdam, etc. that could get to TOW through Tupper Lake if the tracks were gone. Gives a new meaning to the "Junction".
about an hour ago · Like · 1

Eric Kessin Do it, especially if the track scrap pays for the new trail. Once everyone sees what a success it is, and once everyone figures out that there is no need or demand for rail beyond Old Forge, then the tracks from OF to TL will also be ripped out. In other words, do Phase 1 (LP to TL), and Phase II (TL to OF) will happen. And the railroad, which is actually a nice thing, will remain from Utica to OF.
46 minutes ago · Like

Jim Mcculley We trailered through Tupper yesterday to ride St Lawrence County. spent $150.00 their. Not a dime in Tupper or Franklin County. We would have rode right through Tupper and stopped for services at least once.
44 minutes ago · Like

And a reposting at "The ARTA:"

The Adirondack Rail Trail
There have been rumors of a compromise being discussed whereas the tracks remain to Tupper and the Trail goes from Tupper to Placid. What do you all think about that scenario?
Like · Share · 2 hours ago
Lindsay Cron likes this.

Jim Rolf A complete waste of NYS tax dollars, IMO. Snowmobilers haven't been able to access the Tupper Lake area much if at all this winter. How does this so-called compromise change that fact???
about an hour ago · Like · 2

Hope Frenette So, how do we get the word out Jim? That we oppose that idea.
about an hour ago · Like

Hope Frenette Here's what I find interesting. I keep hearing that nobody is interested in taking a train to Tupper Lake yet there are all these snowmobiler's who are dying to ride here yet we can't accommodate them because a few and I mean a VERY few people are stepping in the way. These snowmobiler's, by the way, don't care if the ACR ever comes to fruition, they want to ride here anyway. Why are we ignoring this?

Just keeping an eye on things--anti-railroad, pro-trail editorial, unfortunately relying on a major error by the trail people (overvalued price of scrap rails):

http://auburnpub.com/news/opinion/new-y ... INJ4.email

Just an FYI: I was just the other week informed of a price for scrap rail, delivered to the scrapyard, of about $250 per "stick," or $65,000 per mile of right-of-way. Add in the price of tieplates and spikes. Subtract the cost of removal--not insignificant. This was for 130-pound rail, in 39-ish-foot-lengths. Worth possibly more if someone wants to reuse it as rail.

About $65,000 per mile for 130-lb. rail. . .Adirondack Scenic is 105 and 90 pound stuff. . .not likely to be too far off when you include spikes and tie plates.

Things get more interesting when you compare restoration and conversion cost estimates:

Rail Upgrade:..........................$320,000 per mile
Permanent Trail Conversion:...$440,000 per mile
Temporary Trail Conversion:....$550,000 per mile

The temporary trail conversion includes the cost of storing the track material for 10 years.

The price of scrap doesn't look like it will go too far in the trail conversion; based on these numbers, it pays for less than 15% of the conversion--and that assumes the rail just walks to the scrapyard by itself.

Source is the trail group's commissioned study by trail consultant Camoin & Associates, Page 14; figures are based on a 2010 baseline, with no inflation adjustment:

http://www.thearta.org/Camoin%20Rail-Co ... Report.pdf

Pro-railroad editorial from Utica:

http://www.uticaod.com/article/20140309 ... /140309425

Just a most interesting article, from a public radio outlet, in union with a trail newsletter, both of whom have been supportive of the trail in the past.

http://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stori ... ment-73809

I'm not going to comment on this one. . .other than to say you need to read it yourself and wonder if the world has shifted. . .

Probably one of the more neutral and balanced reports on the subject in the region that I've seen.

And reading the last sentence tells me EXACTLY how to finance the trail.

Assign each 'tourism-centric supporter' of the trail a pro-rata share of the trail cost, based on ARTA's projected cost. Then require them to provide that same pro rata share of contribution for any further costs and improvements to the trail. Raise their tax liability according to the amount of state money applied for their benefit.

Betcha support for the trail would miraculously decrease!

Another anti-railroad letter in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

https://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.c ... l?nav=5041

A bit off topic, but an example of how railroads are a low priority for a lot of people:

https://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.c ... l?nav=5154

The Olympic facilities in Lake Placid will be getting $9.4 million in state money for maintenance and some facility upgrades; they've been getting state money for years. The town of North Elba also regularly chips in $750,000 per year.

I can't help but recall that the Western Maryland Scenic had to contend with a loss of state support for track maintenance some years back, even though it was self-sufficient operationally, while the state went and bailed out Rocky Gap Park, which had incurred $30 million in construction debt and then ran up another $30 million in debt from operating losses. I don't think Rocky Gap is "profitable" even now, although I could be mistaken.