The Newswire at Trains.com is reporting that the Santa Fe Southern has been shut down since October, with little hope of either excursion or freight service returning.

Those of you with Trains subscriptions will find some intriguing comments from the railroad's general manager regarding excursion trains......

http://trn.trains.com/en/Railroad%20New ... 0down.aspx

An interesting emphasis on steam locomotives being necessary to generating revenue...

KL

I was just there last weekend. With the commute train sitting there - the competation is too great. Maybe a steam locomotive would draw - not sure. But, there is no reason to go to Lamy other than to ride a train there and back.

Santa Fe Southern has had three things working against it for some time:

a. Decreasing freight traffic.

b. A complete lack of support from the Principality of Santa Fe, its Exalted Residents and Businesses, Equally Exalted Political Establishment, and other Equally Exalted Residents living near the ROW, plus

c. An inherently (if not openly) hostile attitude toward the RR by the above, most of whom would prefer to have the SFS turned into Yet Another Worthless Rail-to-Trail Project, but can't since the ROW was purchased by the NMDOT both to maintain freight access for those Santa Fe businesses that still want it and to maintain an "escape route" for RailRunner Express trains in case the new commuter line connecting Santa Fe to the former ATSF "passenger main" is blocked and/or damaged for some reason.

Combine that with steady encroachment on the ROW by increasing numbers of overpriced houses whose owners have moved to the area "for the view" (which is one of the SFS' main attractions) and the problems resulting from it (including said owners' dislike of the trains and the resulting cluttering of the landscape by said homes, although some pains have been taken to better blend those homes into the scenery and keep the "clutter" effect to a minimum) and less than stellar ridership numbers and it's hardly surprising they're in such dire straits.

I've ridden it a few times myself, and while there is some potential for growth of both freight and passenger traffic, the aforementioned hostility and lack of support makes growing that traffic (much less continuing to run) a forlorn hope at best, even if SFS management somehow did acquire a working steam locomotive (or restore one to service). I'd love to be proven wrong, but nothing I've observed regarding the situation suggests I will (unfortunately).

you turn it around and start Light rail service on it.

Shaker Heights was about getting passenger service to the rich neighborhoods to the east of Cleveland.


yea OK, build homes around an airport now see what...

I have some swamp land in Florida to sell cheap, great views of alligators and sink holes there....

Even though it has been "modded" as the kids say, the gem down there on the SFS is the combine "Halley" from The Blue Comet. A little bit of NJ far from home.

Ah, yes, the Exalted Ones, every town has'em; I would almost bet most, if not all of them, are over 60 or so. If that's so, they are part of the generation that believed trains were a part of the past, like the stagecoach, and were supposed to go away. This was touched upon in the recent story about what may have been overenthusiastic railway closures in Great Britain in the 1960s, and I can personally say I've seen it in action when I tried to promote a light rail system where I live (I didn't know I was a Communist until I was told I was a Communist--and some stronger things, too! Whooee!!) Thankfully, most of this crowd is now between 60 and 90; twenty years ago they were mostly between 40 and 70.

You can bet they would squawk even louder if the line ran steam, especially if it were coal fired!

Yup, and damn near all of 'em are in the 40 to 70 year old range and are very vocal to boot. Not all of 'em really are opposed to SFS' continued operation, mind you, but there's enough who wouldn't mind ending it just the same.

The "Elite" power brokers usually are the elected politicians, supposedly to serve the citizens that elected them, Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development.
We lost a fantastic chance at the Port Royal RR a few years back due to the plain ignorance of the "elite".
Nasty 'ol railroad, vanish.
Well it did and now any chance that Port Royal ever had to being someting other than a ghost town is long gone.
R-T-T group was without funds to even start cnverting the ROW once the rails were scrapped out. However, that did not stop them and they won out.
However, a small situation that we advised them about and they declared was a non-situation at the time was the years and years of weed spraying chemicals that had penetrated down into the subroadbed. A chemical engineer learned the "mystery" chemical was directly related to Agent Orange, of Vietnam fame. The Elite denied this only to learn of it actually being there the hard way.
26 miles of what could have been a mighty fine tourist railroad shot in the arse by The Elite.
OH, BTW, the Elite in the case were a mix of young "yuppies" and some golden age types.
H.

For those not "in the know," the Port Royal RR was a line from Yemassee to Beaufort and Port Royal, SC, between Charleston and Savannah. I really wanted that line to succeed, but it had a couple other strikes against it besides NIMBYs......

We were in Santa Fe a couple of years ago and rode the line -- we found ridership to be very light, little to do in Lamy except hope Amtrak came through .... (it didn't, but there were a few connecting passengers)

The SFS no longer had a ticket office in the Santa Fe station and parking our car was not easy....

Ridership on the Road Runner was good because people do want to go to Santa Fe, but not to ride another train.

Not exactly a formula for success.

Bob

You joke, but look what Disney did with their patch of Florida swampland lol

I did the "circle trip" a couple of years ago just after Rail Runner started up. Took the SFS to Lamy, Amtrak to ABQ then the Runner back to SF. Yes I did check to make sure Amtrak was not ridiculously late before I started. Parking was an issue. The people at SFS strongly suggested I take a cab or shuttle van from my hotel as the area around the station is an intense no-parking/15 minute parking zone when they can tow overtime violations in addition to ticketing. Not exactly the same as the Strasburg's easy in/easy out parking!

Glad I did it once (that's the rare mileage collector in me speaking).

I rode the SFS back in 2000, and it was a well patronized trip (easily over 150 people on the train), freight cars were included in the consist for interchange, they still operated out of the original station, parking was simple, the crews were extremely friendly, equipment was in nice shape (though they had issues with tagging then as they do now, it was not on any in service equipment) and the food and wares available for sale in Lamy were a true harken back to old school tourist railroad of the 60's.

As the old saying goes, its not about the destination, its the trip getting there that makes the day.

The SFS was in a good position prior to the City evicting them from the station and wanting them to totally vacate the City in favor of the Railrunner... Soon Santa Fe will be overbuilt like ever other City and completely lose its charm...oh wait, its already done that.

It is a shame for those who were not able to see the SFS in its "heyday"... it was a true shortline with the Southwest hospitality that made you forget about the troubles of life.

"It’s an excursion business without a steam engine,” he says. “You lose money on that. You can’t make money without a steam engine, and we have no facilities for that. Traditionally we were able to support the excursion business with other activities, but bit by bit the freight’s gone, some asset transactions we could use to fund the deficits have gone, so at the end of the day we could not fund operations.”

So you can't make money without a steam engine, huh? They ought to try making money with a steam engine.

Of course this might come as a surprise to the Napa Valley Wine Train, Tioga Central, etc.

"It's time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war"

-Sheldon Cooper.