Better Times on the L&N's Beachfront Property
A forty, a fifty, and a ninety... This patchwork CSX consist was typical fare along the forgotten CSX P&A subdivision in the latter half of the twenty-teens. It's an early Saturday morning in October of 2018, and you really couldn't ask for better conditions, or locomotive consist for the spectacular 13 miles of bayshore running in Pensacola, Florida.
This stretch of trackage was the former Louisville and Nashville Railroad's connection to the Seaboard Air Line in Chattahoochee, Florida. The line famously hosted the Gulf Wind passenger train that was a combined effort between the two railroads. It ran between New Orleans and Jacksonville until the advent of Amtrak in 1971.
The L&N's side of the panhandle main was a block controlled DTC main line that saw a handful of daily movements running through from the Southern Pacific in New Orleans. The Seaboard's side was a CTC, high capacity, railroad that would help bring in a new era of traffic to the railroad. After the mega-mergers of the 1990's, new traffic patterns brought a boom to the line. In 2002 one such record of daily train movements along this stretch of track documented 31 trains in a 24 hour period, including the daily Sunset Limited passenger train.
The Hurricane Katrina disaster in August of 2005 would see the end of the Sunset, and the beginning of an up and down decline for the Panhandle mainline that would last until around 2017. In early 2017 activist investor and professional business mafia boss Paul Hilal of Mantle Ridge would tap controversial Canadian Pacific CEO E Hunter Harrison to help stage an executive coup at CSX. The CSX board and shareholders ultimately caved in to the massive pressure put on them by Hilal and Harrison. They subsequently agreed to force then-current CEO Micheal Ward into immediate retirement by bending their own internal rules and accepting the aging Harrison's ascension to the role of CEO. Tens of millions of dollars would swap hands, and E Hunter Harrison would usher in the force-fed world of "Precision Scheduled Railroading" to the entire rail industry.
Harrison went to work "streamlining" the railroad for investors. This meant sidelining thousands of locomotives, wiping out management, eliminating entire service plans, and selling off anything that he and his new team deemed "excessive" to the bottom line. He would die in December of 2017 after complications from a medical emergency. It was later revealed that CSX hired Harrison even after finding out he was in poor health from the start. Harrison was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying “don’t judge me by my medical record, judge me by my performance.” Unfortunately for CSX and Harrison they ultimately were one and the same.
One such fatality to the frenzied chopping was the Pensacola-Jacksonville mainline. By the time this photograph was recorded in October of 2018 Pensacola was down to a mere 4 train movements in 24 hours. Most crews had been forcibly relocated to other CSX locations, and had their family lives uprooted. Still, however, the worst was yet to come, and CSX finalized the sale of the entire line, and associated assets, to the new Florida Gulf and Atlantic railroad in June of 2019.
The Florida Gulf and Atlantic began operations full of promise to serve new customers, open up shipping opportunities, and be a great place to work for those previously at CSX. As is usual for a non-union railroad those promises soon fell flat. Engineers and conductors who were lured in by great pay saw leadership cut into that nearly immediately. Maintaining a 300+ mile class one mainline to the standards set forth in the sale agreement also proved to be a challenge. In less than a year of operation multiple bridges between Pensacola and Jacksonville were deemed unfit for service and the railroad was severed in the middle for the better part of a calendar year.
In 2025 the story is really still the same along the panhandle line. The Florida Gulf and Atlantic is now on their fourth round of ownership, and while carloads and service remain somewhat steady the future is unknown.... The train count along the bayshore has dwindled to two movements a day. One in and one out. Nothing even runs on weekends anymore...
Thank you for reading and looking!
Better Times on the L&N's Beachfront Property
A forty, a fifty, and a ninety... This patchwork CSX consist was typical fare along the forgotten CSX P&A subdivision in the latter half of the twenty-teens. It's an early Saturday morning in October of 2018, and you really couldn't ask for better conditions, or locomotive consist for the spectacular 13 miles of bayshore running in Pensacola, Florida.
This stretch of trackage was the former Louisville and Nashville Railroad's connection to the Seaboard Air Line in Chattahoochee, Florida. The line famously hosted the Gulf Wind passenger train that was a combined effort between the two railroads. It ran between New Orleans and Jacksonville until the advent of Amtrak in 1971.
The L&N's side of the panhandle main was a block controlled DTC main line that saw a handful of daily movements running through from the Southern Pacific in New Orleans. The Seaboard's side was a CTC, high capacity, railroad that would help bring in a new era of traffic to the railroad. After the mega-mergers of the 1990's, new traffic patterns brought a boom to the line. In 2002 one such record of daily train movements along this stretch of track documented 31 trains in a 24 hour period, including the daily Sunset Limited passenger train.
The Hurricane Katrina disaster in August of 2005 would see the end of the Sunset, and the beginning of an up and down decline for the Panhandle mainline that would last until around 2017. In early 2017 activist investor and professional business mafia boss Paul Hilal of Mantle Ridge would tap controversial Canadian Pacific CEO E Hunter Harrison to help stage an executive coup at CSX. The CSX board and shareholders ultimately caved in to the massive pressure put on them by Hilal and Harrison. They subsequently agreed to force then-current CEO Micheal Ward into immediate retirement by bending their own internal rules and accepting the aging Harrison's ascension to the role of CEO. Tens of millions of dollars would swap hands, and E Hunter Harrison would usher in the force-fed world of "Precision Scheduled Railroading" to the entire rail industry.
Harrison went to work "streamlining" the railroad for investors. This meant sidelining thousands of locomotives, wiping out management, eliminating entire service plans, and selling off anything that he and his new team deemed "excessive" to the bottom line. He would die in December of 2017 after complications from a medical emergency. It was later revealed that CSX hired Harrison even after finding out he was in poor health from the start. Harrison was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying “don’t judge me by my medical record, judge me by my performance.” Unfortunately for CSX and Harrison they ultimately were one and the same.
One such fatality to the frenzied chopping was the Pensacola-Jacksonville mainline. By the time this photograph was recorded in October of 2018 Pensacola was down to a mere 4 train movements in 24 hours. Most crews had been forcibly relocated to other CSX locations, and had their family lives uprooted. Still, however, the worst was yet to come, and CSX finalized the sale of the entire line, and associated assets, to the new Florida Gulf and Atlantic railroad in June of 2019.
The Florida Gulf and Atlantic began operations full of promise to serve new customers, open up shipping opportunities, and be a great place to work for those previously at CSX. As is usual for a non-union railroad those promises soon fell flat. Engineers and conductors who were lured in by great pay saw leadership cut into that nearly immediately. Maintaining a 300+ mile class one mainline to the standards set forth in the sale agreement also proved to be a challenge. In less than a year of operation multiple bridges between Pensacola and Jacksonville were deemed unfit for service and the railroad was severed in the middle for the better part of a calendar year.
In 2025 the story is really still the same along the panhandle line. The Florida Gulf and Atlantic is now on their fourth round of ownership, and while carloads and service remain somewhat steady the future is unknown.... The train count along the bayshore has dwindled to two movements a day. One in and one out. Nothing even runs on weekends anymore...
Thank you for reading and looking!