A lot of time has passed since this thread was started. I do not know how many years, but a lot has happened during that time. Notably:
The politics with the rail trail debacle was taking too much out of me and affecting my family. The rail trail had the (then) NYS Governor, Andrew Cuomo, behind it, along with plenty of well-heeled special interest groups. I knew I had fought it as long as I could, and knew the Catskill Mountain RR would survive in some form or other.
I had lined the railroad up with a firm of attorneys in Albany, NY, the state capital. They succeeded in getting an injunction to let us keep what was left of our 25 year lease in place, and stalled the rail trail for a couple of years. The attorneys also succeeded in keeping a major chunk of the RR. The legal bills ran over $600,000.00. CMRR had never had that kind of money. Our new president is a civil engineer and Harvard MBA who knows how to maneuver in this sort of thing. He grew the railroad in one season from a sleepy little club-like operation to a business and CMRR grossed over $1 million that first season with him at the helm. Legal bills paid in full. Ulster County had to retain outside counsel from down in Westchester County (high rent district), no telling what their legal bills were. We had won a victory.
I resigned from CMRR's Board, knowing the railroad would survive and was in good hands. Meanwhile, the County Exec who had been one of the driving forces behind the rail trail, was given an appointment in NY State Government by Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo had to resign due to his own misconduct. The lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, took over. She discovered the former Ulster County Exec was not doing his fancy job, and fired his ass. Every dog has his day, but the damage to the railroad was done.
The new county exec was a bit more favorable to the railroad, but the rail trail people and special interest groups soon turned him around on that issue. Meanwhile, the county legislature built a solid majority in support of the railroad, and things have been looking a bit brighter.
Along the way, the County decided to split the remaining trackage into two separate entities with two separate leases. The rail trail people pushed hard and got "Rail Explorers", an outfit which charges about 40 to 60 bucks a head for people to sit on what look like go-karts. The patrons of this pedal along the tracks at the western portion, between Phoenicia and Cold Brook. There is a descending grade in one direction, so people do appear to be pedalling. The ascending direction, while not steep, is too much for most of the customers. The result is Rail Explorers had to equip their 'pedal track cars' with batteries and motor drives. We see city slickers riding these pedal track cars, mostly on the battery motor, taking selfies. Apparently, Rail Explorers has reached a market that has no shortage of customers willing to pay 40-60 bucks a pop (the cost per head is determined by how many people take one pedal track car, some are 2 seaters, some 4 seaters, and I believe some 6 seaters). They are doing little to no track maintenance up at their end of the line, just keeping up with brush cutting. The track up at that portion of the line has deteriorated to the point where it would take a major expenditure to replace a LOT of ties and bring the ballast roadbed back up to grade. The pedal track cars are so light that the deteriorated track is not an issue (yet).
At the Kingston end of the line, CMRR is running trains with great success. Often, trains are sold out. This past Christmas, they ran Polar Express for the first time in a good few years. The trains run up the line west out of Kingston, ending somewhere near where Route 28A crosses the track. There is another mile or so of track that is in limbo. It runs to the Glenford Dike and the eastern trailhead of the new rail trail. CMRR is trying to get rights to rebuild and run over this remaining track. There is real estate at the Glenford Dike trailhead area where there was once a run-around siding, water crane and station. CMRR has proposed building a new station with a dual purpose, serving the trailhead as well as the railroad. They have also proposed hauling bicycles and riders up out of Kingston to the trailhead. Whether this idea progresses beyond a few architectural renderings and business studies remains to be seen.
The railroad has a large number of volunteers and paid employees, most of whom have come on board since I retired from the railroad. It is a different crowd, not the group I ran with and worked with when the railroad was a hardscrabble outfit with next to no money. We started with equipment that was one shade from junk (or junk) and used more junk to salvage parts and materials to build up maintenance of way equipment , locomotives and rolling stock. Things have come a long way, and the railroad now hires contractors to come in with state of the art maintenance of way equipment. The days of our using a worn out Deere backhoe, picks, bars, track jacks and spike mauls are old history.
I have no idea who the new ridership base is. I retired from the NY Power Authority in 2013, and promptly got busy doing consulting engineering work as well some welding inspection and machine shop work. Work found me. Catskill Mountain RR stays in touch and will occasionally ask me about engineering matters. I see cylinder heads from the ALCO 539 series engine in the RS-1 (ex Green Mountain RR number 401) show up in my buddy's machine shop for rework. I sweated and strained thru a few cylinder head jobs on the 539 series engines on the S-1 ALCO up in Phoenicia as well as the RS-1 down in Kingston. I have no desire to work on another Alco cylinder head job. CMRR has no shop, not even a secure railroad yard as the County took that for a linear park in Kingston. Working on a cylinder head job alongside a locomotive on track accessable to the public and out in the weather is something I did once too often. They are running the RS-1 and a GE center cab locomotive down in Kingston, pulling trains often run as 'theme trains'. It's where the money is in this sort of railroad operation. The era of retired railroad men and people who would show up and remember a relative who'd worked on the railroad, or how a train passed their home daily, is long gone. The word is the era of "nostalgia" is over, and surviving tourist railroads need to be 'in the entertainment business'. That is not something I care to be a part of.
As some members of this 'board know, I had a bout with cancer in 2021. Thank God, I am at full strength and full activity levels and then some. However, the cancer episode has caused me to realize that I got either additional time or a new life (depending on how a person looks at this sort of thing). It made me realize that every moment I have left in this life is a blessing, and must be used wisely. I knew I'd made the right move retiring from the railroad some few years prior to the cancer episode. A new generation has the railroad now. I've got the same work and activities I always had prior to the cancer. I do mechanical engineering for steam locomotive boiler work, which is what my real "meat and potatoes" always was. Getting embroiled in politics and legal battles, wondering if worn out equipment would get us thru another season, and similar is a good thing to have put behind me. I devote time to my family, to our congregation, to Hanford Mills, to jobs I know I can finish, and jobs that are just plain fun to be doing. CMRR survives, and whether they ever get back up to running out of Phoenicia is very unlikely. The president, with his MBA, has said the operating revenues and overall business model running just the Eastern section (out of Kingston) are so much better than the Phoenicia end, that it simply does not make fiscal sense to try to regain that portion of the line. That was the portion of the trackage where I was most at home and where we started the CMRR. It was a different time, and it's done with. Running trains to celebrate things like the Great Pumpkin or the Easter Bunny is just not something I have any enthusiasm for. But, it does bring in a nice revenue stream. New generation, new ways of running the railroad.