How does the Strasburg Rail Road balance its tourist railroading with hauling freight? Steve Weaver, VP of Freight Services, presented at the Heritage Rail Alliance on how the railroad maintains this harmony.

https://theroundhousepodcast.com/2019/0 ... t-traffic/

...with closed captioning...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFHShXJQpI

You have a VP of freight services?

.

When are you getting the corporate jet?

They don't need a corporate jet. They call an Amish Uber.

A lot of interesting issues "touched on" in that cast, particularly on the incidentals of how the perception of running a short line freight railroad is to actuality, both internally and from afar.

What is the number of cars currently handled by SRC on an annual basis?

The Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad Museum in Iowa provides a limited freight service to the Boone Industrial Park over 1.66 miles of track. I doubt that the few cars they handle a year requires any extra administrative duties to speak of.

https://iowadot.gov/iowarail/pdfs/bsvr.pdf

Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum has a subsidiary that has the contract to switch the Enterprise South Industrial Park in Chattanooga. The major client there is Volkswagen. When I was there years ago, we also ran occasional mixed trains on the Chattooga and Chickamauga Railway and very rarely handled freight on that road.

I watch or have in the background the Virtual Railfan camera at Paradise PA up. This is the outside connection with NS for Strasburg. The NS local drops and picks up almost daily from SRR. What comes in are mostly hoppers with cattle feed, and boxcars/lumber cars with lumber, one day mattress , all kinds of stuff. Outbound are the empty hoppers, and furniture, goods. They have a SW1 switcher doing the work. They schedule pick ups at the interchange in-between the hourly passenger runs, usually midday. Quite a dance at the interchange when NS is there dropping off, Strasburg is there dropping/picking up, and the passenger train shows up. Does not happen all the time, but seen it once or twice.

The railroad has quite a big freight yard with loading platform, and storage tracks. Lots of trucks coming in for feed daily.

For a shoreline, very busy. Should have seen it when 611 showed up....

Just for the record, Strasburg's diesel No. 8618 is an EMD SW-8 800 h.p. unit, not an SW-1.

Census is trending @ 700/year.

All,

Would anyone know the Mileage of STRASBURG RR and if it connects with any Regional RR, Short Line RR or class1 rr ?

Mr. Starr

Mr. Starr,

The railroad is 4.5 miles and connects with Amtrak's Philadelphia-Harrisburg line at Leaman Place, with freight interchanged with Norfolk Southern.

Is that considered good? Bad? Mediocre? Just curious.

Well, that is more than 10 cars a week. If those are heavy loaded cars, that is a lot of train to haul up the hill, so really you are looking at 2 trains a week, more if the empties and loads are not synchronized.

It is a huge difference from 1986, when we had maybe a few cars a week that came one at a time, and we hauled them up on the back of the morning passenger train.