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(erielack) Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: Passion for Trains Is a Way to Run a Railroad

-From the NY Times


>Passion for Trains Is a Way to Run a Railroad
>
>
>By DAN BARRY
>
>
>
>UTICA, N.Y. — David Monte Verde hears it still. Even now, even here
>— in a restaurant near the rail yard, above the din of an
>all-you-can- eat lasagna night. It rumbles through his memory the
>way it thundered through the Genesee Valley of his childhood, bound
>for Buffalo, making time. The Phoebe Snow.
>
>  "When that train came down the hill, the sound of it would just
>echo across the valley," he says, staring past the restaurant's
>gaudy glare. "You could set your clock to it."
>
>  And when she pulled into the Dansville station each afternoon at
>5:27 — her brakes sighing, her gray, yellow and maroon finish
>gleaming — young David's universe was in its rightful order. Mom
>and Dad were alive, supper was waiting, and the pride of the
>Lackawanna line would be back again tomorrow, looking to make time.
>
>  It has been about 40 years since the original Phoebe Snow made
>its last run, and nearly that long since Mr. Monte Verde watched
>the last passenger train fade from the station platform of his
>small town in western New York. He was 16, old enough to know that
>crews would soon be tearing up the Lackawanna rails from the
>surrounding hills. All he could do was cry.
>
>  Trains have defined him ever since. "You get them in your blood,"
>he says.
>
>  Today, Mr. Monte Verde is the president of his own railroad, a
>profession so uncommon, so linked to another time, that it conjures
>images of pocket watches and top hats. Strangers often
>misunderstand him to mean that he somehow earns a living by
>overseeing a fleet of model railroads. No, he has to explain: I own
>the real thing.
>
>  His is a short-line railroad called the Genesee Valley
>Transportation Company, which at last count had 27 locomotives,
>hundreds of boxcars and control of nearly 300 miles of track in New
>York and Pennsylvania. When a major hauler chugs into the grimy
>Utica yard with raw copper from Texas, a G.V.T. engine takes over,
>pulling the loaded cars down 13 miles of track and into the
>red-brick maw of the Revere Copper Products plant in Rome.
>
>  Mr. Monte Verde, 55, carries his solid build with the frenetic air
>of a commuter waiting for a train running late. He made the
>not-so-seamless transition from rail fan to rail businessman by
>collecting anything that reminded him of those childhood days:
>trainmen's keys, passenger- train china, photographs, cabooses —
>and then, well, locomotives. "It kind of got away from me," he
>says.
>
>  He has learned that the business of railroading spares little time
>for sentiment; there are customers to woo, government grants to
>win, connections to make. It is also a sobering barometer of the
>fragile upstate New York economy. When two paper mills shut down in
>the Adirondacks last winter, Mr. Monte Verde and his four partners
>lost nearly a third of their business. They were forced to lay off
>more than a dozen trainmen in a process he likened to "losing part
>of the family."
>
>  The comment reveals the blurred distinctions in Mr. Monte Verde's
>life, between work and leisure, rail yard and home, past and
>present.
>
>  He often lapses into the language of an alternate universe: of
>wide cabs, Alcos and "moving meets" (the point at which two trains
>traveling in opposite directions pass each other). He says, "Being
>a railroader takes over your life." One of his most vivid memories
>as a parent is the time, nearly 20 years ago, when he changed the
>diapers of his oldest son, Charlie, in a Buffalo rail yard.
>
>  "It was his first rail fan trip," the proud father says.
>
>  In
>1980, there were 220 short-line railroads in the United States;
>today, there are 550, thanks in part to the lifting of some
>government regulations that encouraged larger companies to sell off
>their little-used and abandoned branch lines. Those in the railroad
>industry say the arrangement has generally worked out well, with
>the major rail companies teaming up with the short-line operations
>to haul goods and material.
>
>  Even so, railroading has its familial tensions. Many rail fans
>blame the businesses for mismanaging and ultimately killing dozens
>of passenger and freight trains that once inched across the
>nation's belly with proud and poetic names. (Once there was the
>Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; now there is Amtrak.) But many rail
>businesses regard the fans as nostalgia-addled fanatics who expect
>them to run empty passenger trains at a financial loss, simply to
>conjure nice memories and provide the occasional photographic
>moment.
>
>  Mark Hemphill, the editor of Trains magazine, says the
>discontinuation of many passenger trains in the 1950's and 60's
>spurred a mutual distrust that manifests itself today in odd ways.
>Conspiracy theories abound. Some rail companies even delicately ask
>whether a job applicant is, how shall we put this, a rail
>enthusiast, forcing some to become what are called "closet rail
>fans."
>
>  "The feeling has been that the rail fan will run trains for the
>sake of running trains, whether or not they make money," Mr.
>Hemphill says. But he adds that the idea that an enthusiast cannot
>be prudent in the business of railroading is "silly."
>
>  There are, after all, the likes of Mr. Monte Verde — his company's
>logo on his shirt, a worn trainman's switch key in his pocket. The
>inside of his well-traveled Dodge sedan crackles with the
>short-wave conversations between dispatchers and train engineers.
>Whenever he sees an Amtrak train whiz past, he reaches for the
>schedule he keeps tucked in the car's sun visor, just to see how
>late it is running.
>
>  But that cluttered Dodge is a satellite office of his company's
>headquarters in Batavia, about 23 miles east of Buffalo. He roams
>the state and eastern Pennsylvania, meeting with clients, buttering
>up politicians, and doing anything else he can to keep his company
>profitable.
>
>  After graduating from college, Mr. Monte Verde spent two decades
>in the business of rail equipment and signal supplies, then worked
>for a few years at Kodak in Rochester. All the while, he fed his
>rail passion, studying railroad history and taking train
>photographs by the score.
>
>  In 1987, he and four partners bought and restored an Alco engine,
>made money by leasing it out, and then donated it to the Rochester
>chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. "Then we bought
>two more," he says.
>
>  Today, the partnership that became Genesee Valley Transportation
>oversees five active rail lines. They include the Depew, Lancaster
>& Western Railroad, featuring a seven-mile run in Batavia that
>moves loads of fertilizer and beer; the Delaware-Lackawanna
>Railroad, which hauls grain and propane 30 miles from Scranton,
>Pa., to the Poconos; and the Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern
>Railroad, here in Utica.
>
>  The morning after his lasagna feast, Mr. Monte Verde walks through
>the gravel and grime of the Utica rail yard, pausing to examine a
>1964 Alco engine nicknamed Jumbo. A rail fan, he says, marvels at
>the paint scheme of the engine, imagines photographing it against a
>setting gumdrop sun. But an owner studies the wear and tear on the
>steel wheels, and wonders whether it is time for old Jumbo to take
>a trip to the repair shop.
>
>  Soon the 132-ton Jumbo is chugging through the rail yard landscape
>of wheat-colored cattails and 20-foot piles of logs, "switching and
>kicking" rail cars into position along several tracks. Some contain
>junk destined for a steel mill; others carry copper for the Revere
>plant in Rome.
>
>  The engineer, Bob Hoffman, stout and 51, lives outside Rochester
>but spends four nights a week in a converted rail car he keeps in
>the yard. He adjusts the throttle and peers into his side-view
>mirror, occasionally pausing to bite a glazed doughnut and slurp
>some cold coffee.
>
>  His lanky assistant, Jeff Collins, 40, used to work on a rail line
>that served a paper mill, not far from his home in Watertown. But
>that mill closed, and now he spends weeknights on a cot in Utica.
>Part of his job is to hop off the engine every now and then to set
>the switches and rattle off the identification letters and numbers
>of the cars over a two- way radio.
>
>  "Fire away there, Jeff," the engineer says, clipboard and pen in
>hand.
>
>  "HWA 12778, HWA 882202."
>
>  Mr. Monte Verde rides with them for a while in the battleship-gray
>engine cab; with voices raised above Jumbo's heaves and sighs, he
>and the men talk trains. About the guy who lost a leg a week
>earlier in a Syracuse yard. About that remote station sign, just
>above Boonville, which simply says "Hell." About the exact meaning
>of that milepost in the yard ("It means we're 235 miles from Grand
>Central Terminal," Mr. Monte Verde says).
>
>  The agile Mr. Collins leaves the cab and pulls the pin that
>connects Jumbo to its load. The four rail cars roll away, as if in
>a dream, onto a sidetrack, where they will be hitched up and pulled
>on another day.
>
>  "That's a perfect kick," Mr. Monte Verde says, in the language of
>his universe. Recently, he experienced a different kind of perfect
>kick. After years of scouring rail magazines, memorabilia
>conventions and the Internet for anything related to the passenger
>trains of his Dansville childhood, Mr. Monte Verde came upon a
>photograph that had been posted on a rail fan Web site. A rail
>buff, riding in the back of the last Hoboken, N.J.-bound passenger
>train on the Lackawanna line, snapped the photo as the train pulled
>from the Dansville station on a hot July day in 1962.
>
>  There, in black and white, is the clapboard building, the
>platform, the shingle bearing the name of the town. And there, near
>the baggage cart, is 16-year-old David Monte Verde, hands on hips
>and tears to come.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/30/nyregion/30TRAI.html?ex=989660919&ei=1&en=08a24a74186b8511
>
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>


Joshua

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