#David fink hand planes Pc
#David fink hand planes series

#David fink hand planes Pc

Then, by some form of serendipity I don’t fully recall, I encountered journalist John Dodge, at the time the editor of PC Week magazine and also a technology columnist for the Boston Globe.

It wouldn’t be fair to name them, and in a way, I couldn’t really blame them - no one wants the hassle of a lawsuit, not at the rates we were paying. One by one, my usual contributors turned me down. Trouble was, I couldn’t find anyone to write the piece, such was Fink’s reputation for either avoiding being interviewed, or suing a publication after he was. David Ingles when he occupied the editor’s chair.

#David fink hand planes series

As Trains’ editor, I headed into the late 1990s with the naïve conviction that doing a Guilford story would be a piece of cake, a natural choice after a decade of profiles of other regional railroads, a series launched brilliantly by my colleague J. “In your face.” That seems to be the perfect phrase for Fink, even if you experienced him from a distance. New England is a beautiful region but was hostile territory for railroad owners a generation ago.” I’ve always thought you had to have a certain amount of those characteristics to survive in running a big New England railroad. A bit like Donald Trump, maybe, and Dave made a lot of enemies. “You punch him, expect to be flattened in the counterattack. “Let’s just say the man was direct, in your face, and unafraid of a fight,” Fred concluded. As author Fred Frailey wrote in his book “Last Train to Texas,” a battle-hardened Fink was more than ready for whatever the old B&M territory threw at him. His long resume included an education at the University of Pennsylvania, a stint in the Marines, and a railroad apprenticeship on the Pennsylvania and later Penn Central. From thence they proceeded to make a profit in a region where short hauls and the loss of manufacturing - especially the decline in Maine’s paper industry - made railroading an especially difficult game.įink was up to the challenge. As his obituary on the Trains News Wire reminds us, Fink partnered with Pittsburgh banking heir Timothy Mellon to acquire Maine Central in 1981 and Boston & Maine in 1983 and combine them under the Guilford banner. Fink proved to be elusive, and so was the story I planned.įink died on October 11 at age 86, leaving a long shadow across railroading in the Northeast. The pugnacious president of Guilford Transportation Industries had a reputation for being difficult with journalists, but long about 1997 I decided Trains absolutely had to have a profile of his railroad, no matter what. Fink, but I felt his presence for a while in the late 1990s.