Nice! A rail story to lead of the new day. More Trains, Less Cars!

It's great to see a feature on short lines in the Inquirer, but it's too bad there's no local context associated with the story. When once-locally headquartered Consolidated Rail Corporation was fighting for its life in the 1980s as the Reagan Administration planned to break it into pieces and sell the profitable chunks to competitors, Conrail chairman L. Stanley Crane successfully lobbied Congress for legislative reforms to help Conrail achieve profitability. One of those reforms permitted Conrail to abandon politically sensitive but largely unused branch lines to save money. Many of those branch lines became the seeds of the shortline revival recounted in the AP story. Instead of just throwing those branchlines to the wolves, Conrail's shortline marketing program, spearheaded by South Jersey resident Kelvin MacKavanagh, became a model for cooperation between the Class I railroads and the newly emerging shortline industry. Conrail's program won the prestigious Golden Freight Car Award from Modern Railroads Magazine. Kel MacKavanagh is currently president of the New Jersey Short Line Railroad Association. If you want to see just how far the railroads have come, take a look at the 1974 movie produced by the Penn Central trustees in an effort to show Congress how dire the conditions had become, and how badly the railroad needed the federal intervention that led to the successful Conrail experiment. The video can be viewed at http://professionalpodcasts.blip.tv/file/1566325/.

While sitting on the daily parking lot that Route 422 or the NorthEast Extention has become you can pass the time by counting the ties on the unused railroad track that parellels both. Why have we not tried to reuse them? Do we need to wait until gas is not available at any price?

By way of correction, Kel MacKavanagh notes that he is secretary of the NJ Shortline Railroad Association, not president. Bob Bailey is the president. Sorry for not getting that right!

The reason there is no local context is because this is an AP story, not written by the Inquirer.

To Spider9: Yes, I know the difference between a locally written story and an AP story. My point is that the Inquirer, which used to have several highly experienced reporters covering railroads, now relies on editors choosing wire copy to decorate the front of the business section who obviously have no sense of history of the place. Philadelphia has a long and storied history as the headquarters of major railroad companies, and at least two reporters still at the Inquirer -- Harold Brubaker or Tom Belden -- could have enriched this story with local railroad perspective. However, because the layout editors don't know enough about the topic to do more than fit the story to the news hole, they don't run it by the experts they have on staff. All it would have taken is to get Tom Belden to call Kel MacKavanagh to get a local shortline quote and drop it into the wire story. They are allowed to do that, but they usually don't. That's what I am griping about.