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Originally Posted by ArmySGT.
Alot of Rail road equipment and infrastructure will survive too as it is based in small towns too.
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The short lines might still have stuff, but the Class I roads have been shucking those lines for decades. The trunk lines still run in and through major cities, and if bridges are down, then that's a big problem.
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Rail would jump at the chance to become a people hauling entity again. There is something like 40 passenger cars in Puelbo sitting on a siding as it is not lucrative enough to run them.
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The railroads had been trying to get rid of passenger rail as fast as they could since the '60s. Having said that, I think MilGov's going to be nationalizing things
de facto, and pressing commuter coaches into use as people-haulers if they can. Freight hauling is going to be more important, anyway, as they need to knit the economy back together.
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The is even an operating Steam Locomotive that runs just for fans, the Toltec - Cumbres line.
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There's at least a dozen steam locomotives operating about the US in the '90s, but they take a lot of man-hours to maintain, and the specialized skills are pretty rare.
The two places MilGov will want to head to try to recover any steam locomotives are the Norfolk & Western's shops at Roanoke, VA and the museum at Strasburg PA. I can't recall if there was anything running from Roanoke in the late '90s, or if they had shut down by then. Sugar Creek in Ohio was running 4 steam locomotives in the last decade, but they've shut down in the last 5 years.
As for the rest of the railnet, diesel-electric locomotives need fuel to run, I presume some shop modifications can be made to run them on alcohol? The all-electric Northeast Corridor will need a lot of juice and wire work-- if there's a power plant running, it can be fixed.
Repairing any damaged rails is a bigger problem. I presume the railroads may have exhausted their stocks of replacement rails by 1999-2000, so you'll really want to get a steel mill working again.