Meanwhile in an Alternate World: Milwaukee Road kept electrification. The 1970's oil crisis showed how beneficial electrification is, and the vast majority of the US rail network was wired. In metro areas, this lead to the wide deployment of EMUs, and great regional rail. And it ran on nationalised tracks under conrail. Okay, maybe not the last bit (I'm sure it'd still be privatised again after breaking even).
We're closer now to Conrail than we think All we need is for the Class Is to keep fucking up to the point that the government seizes control so that our freight logistics don't crumble and ruin the country further
@@Sven_Okas1967 I'd say the early fifties too. A lot of good steam, diesel and electric traction from 1930's until the 1950's and then it slowly went to shit with Eisenhower's presidency and the road building program he brought in.
This is the embodiment of missing something you never got to experience. RIP to the best unnecessary transcon route. The Milwaukee Road may have done it wrong, but they were wrong with style.
@@theanonymousman3406 The Pacific extension was kinda doomed to fail since it was redundant. When the BN merger occurred, a lot of their rail traffic disappeared.
@Jen They also had messes of routes, with the Rock Island having a maze of tracks in the midwest, and the Milwaukee Road having a unnecessary electrification system on a horribly designed route
@@jasonwhitler4167 The Milwaukee Road had plenty of traffic, even on the renowned Pacific Extension - it even got a surprising traffic boost after the BN merger through trackage rights granted in Washington State. It didn’t die through lack of traffic, the MILW was murdered by its directors through a combination of mismanagement and asset-stripping all through the post-WW2 years. The MILW was heavily under-capitalised. They had the traffic, they just had no money to maintain a functional railroad. That’s why they were looking for a merger partner all through the 50s & 60s - they wanted a sugar daddy to bail them out (and by them I especially mean the directors, not just the railroad operation). Management miscalculated, they couldn’t get a bailout and they went bust.
@@ThermiteBeGiants I was always under the impression that they lost a lot of their traffic due to poor performance at the end. I guess I need to hit the books again. Regardless they always had the cards stacked against them considering the Northern Pacific and Burlington were basically built to merge from the start.
I witnessed the Milwaukee Road electrics in operation once while on a trip through Montana as a kid with my family back in July 1968. Nice, vintage, footage and thanks for sharing!
Indeed very true. Car centricism has destroyed the USA. The auto barons are some sick people. Trains are much safer and efficient. Take Detroit and all of the American cities designed as being car centric from the ground up. Car deaths every few hours in the U.S. Barons dont care how many die. They just want you to have all the ''freedom'' a car brings.....monthly payments, car insurance, taxes, parking spots, fuel, maintanance, road rage, gridlock. Lol. The greatest money making machine ever devised. Call it anything else , and you are Un- American. Lol. Oh my. God forbid any alternatives to king car.
@@trevorderper5050 That would be heaven on earth. As a professional delivery driver, I wish that I could take a commuter train to work, then when I am finished take it back home. 1 hour and 30 minutes not driving my own car after having driven truck all day to make a living. America's politics are so messed up. Transportation should never be a partisan issue. People have been so blinded and brainwashed. We have no infrastructure. I live 35 minutes from the 3rd largest city in the northwest USA, and there is absolutely no passenger rail!!!!!!! This should be an outrage!!! This is not normal!!! Idaho is the most car centric brainwashed state ever when it comes to trains . I ask anyone...were the pioneers who built the transcontinental railways commies? Am I saying to give up your guns so you can ride the train? No!!!! People in America are so dumb when it comes to transportation!!
@@torquetrain8963 Conservatives here in California hate the high speed rail we're building and they think all transit riders are homeless ppl or jobless bums.
@@torquetrain8963 I feel that, my state even has rail...but we refuse to put any money towards it and the conservative governor, Sununu, would rather buy busses for a private company than sponsor rail. It just sucks, it's like pulling teeth here in New Hampshire...I can't imagine how it is in Idaho.
Seeing these long uniform electric streamliner trains with the typical MILW observation cars at the ends, it really isn’t much of a stretch to reimagine them as modern electric inter-city trains, the observation cars being replaced by cab cars, not too different in general appearance. It’s a crying shame that this isn’t how things developed.
It's the American West. An endless expanse of mostly uninhabited land which will outlast every one of us. The climate is extreme, with mountains on par with Everest and plains so flat you'd think you can see the curvature of the earth. If you don't die of heatstroke, you'll freeze to death from temperatures that rival Siberia. There's a reason it's so sparsely populated. Yet, I miss it every day. Milwaukee Road spanned this in an era where America was willing to dream big. Sure, things were pretty bad, but we were at least making an attempt at a better world. Even California, the last refuge of the American dream, has lost that hope. Nobody can afford to move there and pursue a better life anymore.
My grandparents used to own an Apple Orchard near the former Milwaukee Road mainline in Othello. They never actually saw the trains run through since they got the property after the railroad went bankrupt. Tho there was an old substation that remained that still stands to this day.
Coast division guy here. Yeah, I'm depressed now! Still, I was luckier than most and survived the financial train wreck that most employees suffered as a result of the Milwaukee collapse. You definitely took me back to the 70's for sure!😎
Its very sad the Milwaukee Road is gone. Its probably one of my favorite railroads. There is an abandoned railroad bridge in central Washington called the Beverly Railroad Bridge that still has its catenary poles. Luckily it's in the NRHP.
Electric US railways are the thing. It used to be the state of the art. Pennsylvania electrified before there was even a transmission network, so they built their own.
Although this footage mainly fixates on Milwaukee's Electrics- Their steam locomotives (although nowhere in the ballpark of environmentally friendly ) were some of the most beautiful, from the partially streamlined Northerns (Milwaukee Road #261) to the Flagships of the era, the 4-4-2 atlantic and 4-6-4 Hiawatha's, perhaps one of the most unique streamlined steam locomotives' to date. Just my 2 cents on the Milwaukee.
It's a crying shame that one of the steam Hiawatha's could not be preserved. In the 70s or 80s Model Railroader had a fantasy cover about a Hiawatha being discovered in an old disused engine shed.
I can't speak for the Coast/Washington territory, but I am versed enough to say the juice in the Rocky Mountain division came from Montana electric. Even in its Twilight years, the Rocky Mountain division was operating in such a way that Montana electric owed the Milwaukee because the Joes and boxcabs were generating so much spare power when they coasted downgrade. Edit: and to think in 2024 there are people on social media who claimed electrified freight railroading would not work in the United States.
It's so surreal seeing electrics running through that mountain country, I live on the Donner Pass route and if we had the readily available Hydro Electric, we probably would have been electrified alas the mighty truckee tis but a creek when compared to the rivers in northern Montana lol.
Electric trains are actually the best ways to tackle a mountain pass just ask the swiss or any country in the alps. Also gain the benefit mainly today of generating power when going down hill.
I'm originally from the Pacific Northwest, so the Milwaukee and its Pacific Extension will always hold a special place in my heart. The Pacific Extension was the brainchild of William Rockefeller, brother of the infamous John D. Rockefeller and owner of the Anaconda Copper Company. Rockefeller was annoyed at having to pay exorbitant rates for shipping copper out of Montana on the Northern Pacific, so he talked the board of the Milwaukee Road (which he sat on) into building a route to the Pacific Northwest to spite James J. Hill. The whole reason the Pacific Extension was electrified was because Rockefeller wanted to funnel some of that construction money into his own pockets. In the end, the Milwaukee was saddled with an expensive extension it couldn't really afford, which was exacerbated by the Great Northern and Northern Pacific's refusal to set joint rates with the Milwaukee west of the Twin Cities. This latter issue was resolved as a condition of the Burlington Northern merger, by which point the Milwaukee was too far gone to turn things around.
THIS IS AWESOME! Thanks for this and please do one on the Great Northern electric lines too! You'd be amazed to see how they got through the longest tunnel with electrics and across the rockies. There fleet was amazing too, dwarfing the Joe's, they had the largest single units ever made, W-1s. Absolutely epic stuff.
That was one long boxcab! Such an incredible machine! In fact, they all were: Little Joes, EP-2s... Too bad we, as a country, did the MILW's electrics so wrong...
This note to our railfan community,. My earliest knowledge of railroads in America was that they are a public entity. So what we, all states have a sayas to what rail lines stay active , and which ones go away.
@@jamesrobertson5935 this makes zero sense. People choose the cheapest best option. The milwaukee squandered opportunities to provide the best value and died
RIP to what America could have been.. Got a strong melancholic vibe from this, but hey maybe someday soon we can turn this ship around. Here's to having public infrastructure before I go stir crazy
This is what I feel and it’s worse that the people I know irl don’t see that we chose a dystopian path compared to what we could have built upon. Instead we demolished our assets and abandoned our cities
What you did to that Blink 182 song was amazing and it hit perfectly woth the shots that you put it to. Bravo to near perfect video editing! Would love to have that version of the song on my iPod
I would absolutely love a voice over documentary about your thoughts regarding the Milwaukee road and how it had fallen. It's not a well known story because a lot of the reasons for why it fell was due to corporate mismanagement and would've proven to be a successful railroad if it still stood to this day.
Man, MILW was cool, they had electrifaction, they had some neat diesels, they felt like the kinda of railroad that wanted to do things different. My Favorite MILW Locomotives are the EP2 "Bi-Polars", EP3 "Quills", EP4 "Little Joes" and the Odd MILW SDL39 (Which I know probably ran at usual freight speeds, but I've seen some places state it could run at 80-90 mph/129-144 kmh) While MILW is long gone, railfans who play transport games can always keep the Milwaukee dream alive. I wonder how a modern hood unit style locomotive in MILW paint under electrification would look?? MAybe just a ES44AC but with pantos on top and Milwaukee Paint?
The poor, poor Milwaukee Road. They had something truly great going for them, and had they not been screwed over by their management and lasted into this era, we could have potentially seen America's first transcontinental electrified corridor. Maybe... Still, their equipment was _swanky,_ and it's a shame it went to waste.
Fun fact the MR Board wanted to sell the RR and pulled the electric lines to sell the copper to boost the bottom line. They also scraped the road (cut back maintenance) which slowed trains. Neither worked
Even more fun fact: their operating costs increased significantly as a result and the year after they got rid of the electrification, their losses doubled. This is including the money made from selling off the electrical equipment.
I wish it was easier to find the electric locomotives like the Little Joes as model trains. I'm running N scale and there's nothing unless you butcher a GG1 and get a custom body shell.
The worst part is that the Milwaukee Road would have survived at least until UP's merger spree in the mid-90s if they had just kept the Pacific Extension for 3 more years
Hear me out! A fantasy here. Milwaukee Road after the failed merger with Chicago North Western, 1960, instead somehow merged with New York Central! before PennCentral happened! Milwaukee keeps the pacific extension electrified and even bridges the "Gap". Both railroads were about speed at that time and have a dominance over the market because of speed and that ability to move cargo transcontinental on their own route!
I hope you will do a video like this about tilting trains. There quite a few videos about the 80's pendolino, apt and X2000. There is round trip to Glasgow for the APT, "L' ultimo treno per arrivare prima" about the Pendolino for example
So, ignorant New Zealander here, and one that prefers British rail modelling to boot; but, what exactly caused the Milwaukee Road to collapse? I'm vaguely aware that there was some sort of mismanagement at the top level, but not much more than that.
As a fan of train simulators, I'm not fond of American stuff because of how it's repetitive and mostly unified diesel locomotive designs - boooring when compared to European stuff. Ten years ago I've learned about this company that ran two electrified divisions, 3kV DC, the same voltage as in my country. And there's a route for the good old MSTS depicting the eastern part of Rocky Mountain Division, complete with activities that span the very beginning of electrified operations till their end. God knows how much time I've spent on virtual recreations of the line between Three Forks and Deer Lodge MT, running on the plains and climbing the hills in the middle of nowhere with either heavy coal loads or the legendary Hiawatha. Not only this route represents America's most interesting railroad, but it's also made with astonishing level of detail for a 20-year-old simulator.
3 kV DC is not best system for long distance lines, it requires converter stations every some 14 miles or so and thick overheads wires. The difference in appearance of 3 kV DC compared to 25 kV AC is astonishing. it strikes my eyes every time i get into northern part of Czech Republic that is electrified with 3 kV DC, It is almost like they had used pipes instead of wires for the system. But I guess 3 kV DC is still far better than 1.5 kV DC.
Only electric line that i for sure know that was DC electric was the woodhead route in the UK that was one sometime in the 50's i think... Mostly steep hills and ran some of the really early electrics. Rest of the electrified parts of the UK for what i know are AC in the 60's onwards. Only modern electic systems that are DC now are 3rd rail.
Im doing one of these for the Ann Arbor Railroad. Lots of old photos and modern GLC video though. Music to keep you distracted from bankruptcy for 5 minutes. Ann Arbor Railroad vaporwave. Alan has inspired someone.
Crying over what could have been. We could have been a leader in electrified railways for the Americas. We could have gotten high speed rail. We could even have had a nationalized rail network. Instead we got four (or six if you count Canada) companies and a lot of polluting diesel locomotives.
Currently, In the Upper North American system, there are 6 Class 1 Railroad Corporations. UP, BNSF, NS, CSX, CN, and CPKC. These 6 corporations have duopolies in their own respective regions. UP & BNSF share a Duopoly in the Western US, NS & CSX share a Duopoly in the Eastern US, and CN & CPKC share a Duopoly in Southern Canada. I say, there should be a revival of fallen Class 1 Railroads. One of the class 1 Railroads that should definitely be revived is the Milwaukee Road, and all there Catenary wires must also be revived. But not only that, but the entire Milwaukee Road in it’s entirety from Chicago Illinois all the way to Washington state should be electrified, and if possible, an Electric line Running from Chicago all the way to the Northeast Corridor should be put in place to create the first transcontinental electric railroad line.
Milwaukee railroad survived to this day this owned by CP CN with the 3kv DC replaced by 25kv 60hz AC with dual modes made in Salt Lake City Utah Stadler Eurodual 9000s for Seattle Toronto via Oakville freight
This is reparations for Chicago foamers from the Metra video
Make a jazz one for Chicago and northwestern
as a metra foamer, i accept these reparations.
nyc jazz mix please alan
as someone from shitcago, even though i dont particularly like metra ill gladly accept
I think every railroad should follow their example!..
Meanwhile in an Alternate World: Milwaukee Road kept electrification. The 1970's oil crisis showed how beneficial electrification is, and the vast majority of the US rail network was wired. In metro areas, this lead to the wide deployment of EMUs, and great regional rail. And it ran on nationalised tracks under conrail. Okay, maybe not the last bit (I'm sure it'd still be privatised again after breaking even).
Your vision is so beautiful, and I think realistic, that it hurts deeply
God I wish 😢
We're closer now to Conrail than we think
All we need is for the Class Is to keep fucking up to the point that the government seizes control so that our freight logistics don't crumble and ruin the country further
They had begun to stop electrification during the oil crisis if I am correct
electrification became financialy unbearable
When American rail traction was some of the best and most technologically advanced in the world...
Wait, which decade?
@@EmyrDerfel 1930-1940.....
@@Sven_Okas1967 I'd say the early fifties too. A lot of good steam, diesel and electric traction from 1930's until the 1950's and then it slowly went to shit with Eisenhower's presidency and the road building program he brought in.
Love the irony about the name for the newest electrics the Milwaukee used.
@@samuel_excels wait in what universe was steam and diesel considered advanced in the 1950s?
This is the embodiment of missing something you never got to experience. RIP to the best unnecessary transcon route. The Milwaukee Road may have done it wrong, but they were wrong with style.
Pardon me but how did they do it wrong?
@@theanonymousman3406 The Pacific extension was kinda doomed to fail since it was redundant. When the BN merger occurred, a lot of their rail traffic disappeared.
@Jen They also had messes of routes, with the Rock Island having a maze of tracks in the midwest, and the Milwaukee Road having a unnecessary electrification system on a horribly designed route
@@jasonwhitler4167 The Milwaukee Road had plenty of traffic, even on the renowned Pacific Extension - it even got a surprising traffic boost after the BN merger through trackage rights granted in Washington State. It didn’t die through lack of traffic, the MILW was murdered by its directors through a combination of mismanagement and asset-stripping all through the post-WW2 years. The MILW was heavily under-capitalised. They had the traffic, they just had no money to maintain a functional railroad. That’s why they were looking for a merger partner all through the 50s & 60s - they wanted a sugar daddy to bail them out (and by them I especially mean the directors, not just the railroad operation). Management miscalculated, they couldn’t get a bailout and they went bust.
@@ThermiteBeGiants I was always under the impression that they lost a lot of their traffic due to poor performance at the end. I guess I need to hit the books again. Regardless they always had the cards stacked against them considering the Northern Pacific and Burlington were basically built to merge from the start.
I witnessed the Milwaukee Road electrics in operation once while on a trip through Montana as a kid with my family back in July 1968. Nice, vintage, footage and thanks for sharing!
Imagine if all the billions spent on roads and highways was spent on railroads instead...
Indeed very true. Car centricism has destroyed the USA. The auto barons are some sick people. Trains are much safer and efficient. Take Detroit and all of the American cities designed as being car centric from the ground up. Car deaths every few hours in the U.S. Barons dont care how many die. They just want you to have all the ''freedom'' a car brings.....monthly payments, car insurance, taxes, parking spots, fuel, maintanance, road rage, gridlock. Lol. The greatest money making machine ever devised. Call it anything else , and you are Un- American. Lol. Oh my. God forbid any alternatives to king car.
and the milwaukee road would have kept their electrification and if railroads got more then we could have a great railway system just like europe
@@trevorderper5050 That would be heaven on earth. As a professional delivery driver, I wish that I could take a commuter train to work, then when I am finished take it back home. 1 hour and 30 minutes not driving my own car after having driven truck all day to make a living. America's politics are so messed up. Transportation should never be a partisan issue. People have been so blinded and brainwashed. We have no infrastructure. I live 35 minutes from the 3rd largest city in the northwest USA, and there is absolutely no passenger rail!!!!!!! This should be an outrage!!! This is not normal!!! Idaho is the most car centric brainwashed state ever when it comes to trains . I ask anyone...were the pioneers who built the transcontinental railways commies? Am I saying to give up your guns so you can ride the train? No!!!! People in America are so dumb when it comes to transportation!!
@@torquetrain8963 Conservatives here in California hate the high speed rail we're building and they think all transit riders are homeless ppl or jobless bums.
@@torquetrain8963 I feel that, my state even has rail...but we refuse to put any money towards it and the conservative governor, Sununu, would rather buy busses for a private company than sponsor rail. It just sucks, it's like pulling teeth here in New Hampshire...I can't imagine how it is in Idaho.
Seeing these long uniform electric streamliner trains with the typical MILW observation cars at the ends, it really isn’t much of a stretch to reimagine them as modern electric inter-city trains, the observation cars being replaced by cab cars, not too different in general appearance. It’s a crying shame that this isn’t how things developed.
I was thinking similar things watching the Olympian Hi fly past
I like to imagine what an fully American designed and built high speed train would look like
im very dissapointed that we went from having thousands of km of electrified rail to just about 1000 km of electrified rail.
@@zacharylegaspi7594 Imagine a Penn Central/Amtrak Metroliner!
@@davidw5266the metroliner has the aerodynamics of a soup can it doesn't count
Why does this make me feel nostalgic for a railroad in another country which I never lived to see….
Idk but i feel the same
It's the American West. An endless expanse of mostly uninhabited land which will outlast every one of us. The climate is extreme, with mountains on par with Everest and plains so flat you'd think you can see the curvature of the earth. If you don't die of heatstroke, you'll freeze to death from temperatures that rival Siberia. There's a reason it's so sparsely populated. Yet, I miss it every day.
Milwaukee Road spanned this in an era where America was willing to dream big. Sure, things were pretty bad, but we were at least making an attempt at a better world. Even California, the last refuge of the American dream, has lost that hope. Nobody can afford to move there and pursue a better life anymore.
@@Madwonk the american dream… is dead
My grandparents used to own an Apple Orchard near the former Milwaukee Road mainline in Othello. They never actually saw the trains run through since they got the property after the railroad went bankrupt. Tho there was an old substation that remained that still stands to this day.
Coast division guy here. Yeah, I'm depressed now! Still, I was luckier than most and survived the financial train wreck that most employees suffered as a result of the Milwaukee collapse. You definitely took me back to the 70's for sure!😎
I am also a Coast Division guy
@@HanKim-b7g where did you work? I was in Stacy Street for four years then went out on the road and worked out of Tacoma.
Its very sad the Milwaukee Road is gone. Its probably one of my favorite railroads. There is an abandoned railroad bridge in central Washington called the Beverly Railroad Bridge that still has its catenary poles. Luckily it's in the NRHP.
The things that could have been...
Meanwhile, Italian HSR has murked an air line.
You saw that NJB video too?
Electric US railways are the thing. It used to be the state of the art. Pennsylvania electrified before there was even a transmission network, so they built their own.
and ngl the GG 1 is sure one of the better looking locomotives america has built.
Sure fits it's time.
Although this footage mainly fixates on Milwaukee's Electrics- Their steam locomotives (although nowhere in the ballpark of environmentally friendly ) were some of the most beautiful, from the partially streamlined Northerns (Milwaukee Road #261) to the Flagships of the era, the 4-4-2 atlantic and 4-6-4 Hiawatha's, perhaps one of the most unique streamlined steam locomotives' to date. Just my 2 cents on the Milwaukee.
It's a crying shame that one of the steam Hiawatha's could not be preserved. In the 70s or 80s Model Railroader had a fantasy cover about a Hiawatha being discovered in an old disused engine shed.
And just how did the Milwaukee generate the power for their electrics? Or were they buying the power?
I can't speak for the Coast/Washington territory, but I am versed enough to say the juice in the Rocky Mountain division came from Montana electric. Even in its Twilight years, the Rocky Mountain division was operating in such a way that Montana electric owed the Milwaukee because the Joes and boxcabs were generating so much spare power when they coasted downgrade.
Edit: and to think in 2024 there are people on social media who claimed electrified freight railroading would not work in the United States.
As someone who lives near a ex milwaukee road tracks I can say this is a certified hood classic
never forget what they took from you
It's so surreal seeing electrics running through that mountain country, I live on the Donner Pass route and if we had the readily available Hydro Electric, we probably would have been electrified alas the mighty truckee tis but a creek when compared to the rivers in northern Montana lol.
Electric trains are actually the best ways to tackle a mountain pass just ask the swiss or any country in the alps.
Also gain the benefit mainly today of generating power when going down hill.
they tried it in the 60s but it failed, I blame over complacted for no reason German engineering
I'm originally from the Pacific Northwest, so the Milwaukee and its Pacific Extension will always hold a special place in my heart. The Pacific Extension was the brainchild of William Rockefeller, brother of the infamous John D. Rockefeller and owner of the Anaconda Copper Company. Rockefeller was annoyed at having to pay exorbitant rates for shipping copper out of Montana on the Northern Pacific, so he talked the board of the Milwaukee Road (which he sat on) into building a route to the Pacific Northwest to spite James J. Hill. The whole reason the Pacific Extension was electrified was because Rockefeller wanted to funnel some of that construction money into his own pockets. In the end, the Milwaukee was saddled with an expensive extension it couldn't really afford, which was exacerbated by the Great Northern and Northern Pacific's refusal to set joint rates with the Milwaukee west of the Twin Cities. This latter issue was resolved as a condition of the Burlington Northern merger, by which point the Milwaukee was too far gone to turn things around.
THIS IS AWESOME! Thanks for this and please do one on the Great Northern electric lines too! You'd be amazed to see how they got through the longest tunnel with electrics and across the rockies. There fleet was amazing too, dwarfing the Joe's, they had the largest single units ever made, W-1s. Absolutely epic stuff.
Been a Milwaukee fan for decades, some of this footage I've never seen! Excellent!
That was one long boxcab! Such an incredible machine! In fact, they all were: Little Joes, EP-2s... Too bad we, as a country, did the MILW's electrics so wrong...
It wasnt the country, the milwaukee shot themselves in the foot due to terrible management
This note to our railfan community,. My earliest knowledge of railroads in America was that they are a public entity. So what we, all states have a sayas to what rail lines stay active , and which ones go away.
@@jamesrobertson5935 this makes zero sense. People choose the cheapest best option. The milwaukee squandered opportunities to provide the best value and died
I want to see a GE 2-C+C-2 with Euro9000 internals, that would be a sight to see.
everything good that this country had, has been lost to time.
and highways
RIP to what America could have been.. Got a strong melancholic vibe from this, but hey maybe someday soon we can turn this ship around. Here's to having public infrastructure before I go stir crazy
This is what I feel and it’s worse that the people I know irl don’t see that we chose a dystopian path compared to what we could have built upon. Instead we demolished our assets and abandoned our cities
@@weenisw You are spot on.
Amen.
Excellent! I never realized that the Little Joes had steam generators.
This is basically a Milwaukee Road AMV... and I'm here for 100% of it.
I finished an essay and submitted it just as the final chords of Save Your Tears played. Perfect timing indeed
I didn't know that electrifed railroads reached this far west.
Thank you Alan!
This may be the dopest thing I have ever seen/heard. Way to go playboy!
What you did to that Blink 182 song was amazing and it hit perfectly woth the shots that you put it to. Bravo to near perfect video editing! Would love to have that version of the song on my iPod
I'll have individual versions of the songs uploaded soonish on my second channel
@@alanthefisher are they up?
@@alanthefisher Is there a way the mixes could make it onto Spotify also, or is that a copyrights issue?
@@professorspark2361 this 100%
This is a V I B E and I am here for it. Awesome playlist and sweet tribute to one of my favorite railroads when I was a kid
Seriously, America, you used to have beautiful things, but ended up killing them with your own incompetence and greed...
I would absolutely love a voice over documentary about your thoughts regarding the Milwaukee road and how it had fallen. It's not a well known story because a lot of the reasons for why it fell was due to corporate mismanagement and would've proven to be a successful railroad if it still stood to this day.
This
It's fun to imagine if this were still around; Thanks for the bangers DJ Alan
Man, MILW was cool, they had electrifaction, they had some neat diesels, they felt like the kinda of railroad that wanted to do things different.
My Favorite MILW Locomotives are the EP2 "Bi-Polars", EP3 "Quills", EP4 "Little Joes" and the Odd MILW SDL39 (Which I know probably ran at usual freight speeds, but I've seen some places state it could run at 80-90 mph/129-144 kmh)
While MILW is long gone, railfans who play transport games can always keep the Milwaukee dream alive.
I wonder how a modern hood unit style locomotive in MILW paint under electrification would look?? MAybe just a ES44AC but with pantos on top and Milwaukee Paint?
The poor, poor Milwaukee Road. They had something truly great going for them, and had they not been screwed over by their management and lasted into this era, we could have potentially seen America's first transcontinental electrified corridor. Maybe...
Still, their equipment was _swanky,_ and it's a shame it went to waste.
Thanks, gonna go cry now
Loved Milwaukee’s electrics. What a great variety!
I'm a die-hard Milwaukee fan in the Midwest and the first track hits so hard.
This is what was taken from us, huh.
this is great 👏🏼 remembering a quite forgotten giant
Fun fact the MR Board wanted to sell the RR and pulled the electric lines to sell the copper to boost the bottom line. They also scraped the road (cut back maintenance) which slowed trains. Neither worked
So they got rid one of the nation's largest electrified lines, for the sake of short-term profit.
Figures.
Even more fun fact: their operating costs increased significantly as a result and the year after they got rid of the electrification, their losses doubled. This is including the money made from selling off the electrical equipment.
@@souvikrc4499 They expected 5 million in copper, only got 2 million. Plus all crapped just as the 74 oil crisis started
rest in power Milwaukee road 🕊
Your channel is amazing, btw.
I wish it was easier to find the electric locomotives like the Little Joes as model trains. I'm running N scale and there's nothing unless you butcher a GG1 and get a custom body shell.
n scale is just touh in general. Everything is only from certain roads. Try finding B&M stuff in N fml.
Back when america used to have electric freight routes everywhere. Now theres only one more left in the wild and now thats struggling
The worst part is that the Milwaukee Road would have survived at least until UP's merger spree in the mid-90s if they had just kept the Pacific Extension for 3 more years
Yep.
No johnkenerflick ceo of Up rr thaught about buying the Pacific ext but change his mind he said the Milwaukee road was junk
Outa money
@@Dog.soldier1950 no john change his mind. John kenerflick was one of the best CEO in UP rr history
Ngl but seeing Electric with Diesel (same with steam locomotives too) together is kinda awesome.. you really don't see it in North America anymore...
Why are the first few clips nostalgic but I was only born in 2007
makin' me cry
Hear me out! A fantasy here. Milwaukee Road after the failed merger with Chicago North Western, 1960, instead somehow merged with New York Central! before PennCentral happened! Milwaukee keeps the pacific extension electrified and even bridges the "Gap". Both railroads were about speed at that time and have a dominance over the market because of speed and that ability to move cargo transcontinental on their own route!
Request: Southern Pacific Meleancholy 1980s-1990s: Il vento d’orifto
Peak American railroad electrification right here. RIP 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙬𝙖𝙪𝙠𝙚𝙚 𝙍𝙤𝙖𝙙
once the US has a state of the art electrified railways
Then everything changed when the diesel nation attacked.
This is very calming 😌
Orange and Black forever!
F in chat for the Milwaukee Road
F
F
@@JustAPufferkuesser F
Delightfully mix dude
Honestly this is a late post, but the final song “Save Your Tears for Another day” made me cry when looking at the last footage of the Milwaukee Road😭
This is so sad wtf😭
I hope you will do a video like this about tilting trains. There quite a few videos about the 80's pendolino, apt and X2000.
There is round trip to Glasgow for the APT, "L' ultimo treno per arrivare prima" about the Pendolino for example
Deep Tom delonge is truly the angel from my nightmare. Bravo sir
The Milwaukee Road is my favorite railroad. By by Olympian Hiawatha, the current day Hiawatha doesn't even reach the twin cities.
why ya gotta make me feel now
We’re literally struggling to even talk about transportation options we had almost a century ago.
So, ignorant New Zealander here, and one that prefers British rail modelling to boot; but, what exactly caused the Milwaukee Road to collapse? I'm vaguely aware that there was some sort of mismanagement at the top level, but not much more than that.
Ah, such beauty!
Back when the USA was still as beautiful as in the brochures.
R.I.P.
The beat to Stay for Awhile sounds like a diesel starting up
As a fan of train simulators, I'm not fond of American stuff because of how it's repetitive and mostly unified diesel locomotive designs - boooring when compared to European stuff. Ten years ago I've learned about this company that ran two electrified divisions, 3kV DC, the same voltage as in my country. And there's a route for the good old MSTS depicting the eastern part of Rocky Mountain Division, complete with activities that span the very beginning of electrified operations till their end. God knows how much time I've spent on virtual recreations of the line between Three Forks and Deer Lodge MT, running on the plains and climbing the hills in the middle of nowhere with either heavy coal loads or the legendary Hiawatha. Not only this route represents America's most interesting railroad, but it's also made with astonishing level of detail for a 20-year-old simulator.
3 kV DC is not best system for long distance lines, it requires converter stations every some 14 miles or so and thick overheads wires. The difference in appearance of 3 kV DC compared to 25 kV AC is astonishing. it strikes my eyes every time i get into northern part of Czech Republic that is electrified with 3 kV DC, It is almost like they had used pipes instead of wires for the system. But I guess 3 kV DC is still far better than 1.5 kV DC.
Only electric line that i for sure know that was DC electric was the woodhead route in the UK that was one sometime in the 50's i think...
Mostly steep hills and ran some of the really early electrics. Rest of the electrified parts of the UK for what i know are AC in the 60's onwards.
Only modern electic systems that are DC now are 3rd rail.
@@davidty2006 NSW and Victoria, Australia, both have 1.5 kV DC electrified systems, but they do not run freight on them anymore.
And they said that the tech didn't exist...
Don’t cry because it’s over, cry because they took this from you
Great mix!
Is it just me, or does the first song sound like someone's playing ping pong in the recording studio?
Im doing one of these for the Ann Arbor Railroad. Lots of old photos and modern GLC video though. Music to keep you distracted from bankruptcy for 5 minutes. Ann Arbor Railroad vaporwave. Alan has inspired someone.
Crying over what could have been. We could have been a leader in electrified railways for the Americas. We could have gotten high speed rail. We could even have had a nationalized rail network. Instead we got four (or six if you count Canada) companies and a lot of polluting diesel locomotives.
I wanna hear ur opinions on all of the lines. Like the UP-N
Read about algoma central railway and lmk what you think
We could have had it all.
very upset that "On The Old Milwaukee Road" isn't on here
This is that railway that had the manic-depressive locomotives, right?
idk, I'm still waiting on a magic manic pixie foamer tho
@@alanthefisher Before the little Joes, they had bipolar locomotives
God those pantographs are TALL
Tall boi
can probs fit 2 containers high under them without issue.
I was the 600th like. Felt good
The hidden 6th track in the mix: "I'll be alright without you" by Journey
Alan uploaded go brrrrrr
That's some purty equipment ..
Dump a transcon route in favor of decrepit tracks from Chicago to Louisville with most under trackage rights? Talk about insanity.
Talk about short-sighted.
Why does the obs parlor at 1:22 look like a TGV from a distance 🙃
Please do a BC Rail one
Nice.
Trainwave
nyc jazz mix when???
Take a trip out to the rust belt. We got the last interurban
THE MILWAUKEE ROAD
YES
DO A METRA THING AGAIN. REview all of the lines
when america is doing the right choice of using electrics and not focusing on cars aka metal boxes of claustrophobia and death.
re-start now. immediately.
Currently, In the Upper North American system, there are 6 Class 1 Railroad Corporations. UP, BNSF, NS, CSX, CN, and CPKC. These 6 corporations have duopolies in their own respective regions. UP & BNSF share a Duopoly in the Western US, NS & CSX share a Duopoly in the Eastern US, and CN & CPKC share a Duopoly in Southern Canada.
I say, there should be a revival of fallen Class 1 Railroads.
One of the class 1 Railroads that should definitely be revived is the Milwaukee Road, and all there Catenary wires must also be revived. But not only that, but the entire Milwaukee Road in it’s entirety from Chicago Illinois all the way to Washington state should be electrified, and if possible, an Electric line Running from Chicago all the way to the Northeast Corridor should be put in place to create the first transcontinental electric railroad line.
dam
Milwaukee railroad survived to this day this owned by CP CN with the 3kv DC replaced by 25kv 60hz AC with dual modes made in Salt Lake City Utah Stadler Eurodual 9000s for Seattle Toronto via Oakville freight
11:35 T H E V I B E C O M E S I N
the milwaukee road