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2nd Trick, I appreciate this thread, being fascinated with things on steel wheels since childhood myself (I will be 60 by summer's end). I grew up in PRR/Penn Central/Conrail territory, and would myself like to read your take on the PC.
Webster, the restored Big Boy #4014 has been running for a couple of years now. It was deployed in time to take part in the Golden Spike sesquicentennial celebration.
My father worked for the Penna. RR, Penn/Central,and finally Conrail, from 1953 to 1986, when he retired.
He was a freight yard manager in locations all over Western PA.
He was always proud of working for "The Pennsy", "The Standard of the World."
I used to visit relatives in Ohio & Pennsylvania, traveling for free on the PRR.
Yet another era gone with the wind.
In 1947, the City of New Orleans (Illinois Central) took 15 hours 55 minutes on its southbound route from Chicago to New Orleans. It had an average speed (including station stops) of about 58 m.p.h.
Note, especially, the 53 mile stretch between Hammond and New Orleans. Illinois Central ran that segment in 1 hour 13 minutes (44 m.p.h.) whereas Amtrak takes 2 hours 19 minutes (23 m.p.h.)
This is, sadly, one of a number of reasons why long-distance passenger trains are no more than a niche player nowadays.
To finish up the story of the Penn Central debacle and its aftermath/legacy:
By 1973, it had become apparent that the entire American railroad network was in danger of collapse and eventual nationalization -- most so in the industrial Northeast and Great Lakes due to the stagnation and exodus of heavy industry. Erie-Lackawanna had joined the list of railroad bankruptcies, and several weak Midwestern "granger" roads were poised to follow suit. Containerization and trailer-on-flatcar or "piggyback" service continued to show promise, but poor reliability and large claims for lost and damaged freight was still a problem.
Much of the trouble was eventually found to lie in equipment design; TrailerTrain, a consortium which designed and leased much of the equipment for both new automobile and container shipments, had standardized around an 88-foot flatcar designed to carry two 40-foot semitrailers -- wheels, axles and hubs included; but the length of a single "box" soon expanded, to 45, 48, and even 53 feet with the completion of the Interstate Highway System. And the 88-foot flatcars could also generate several inches in vertical play when in motion. -- further fracturing freight.
Fortunately for all concerned, TrailerTrain went back to the drawing board, and came up with (1) the "six-pack" -- a 250 foot center sill with up to five single truck (wheel) assembles evenly spaced. so as to accommodate six "boxes" of up to 53-foot length with minimal vertical play, and (2) the "double-stack", which allowed placement of one container on top of another (no wheels, obviously). These changes, combined with larger centralized traffic control systems and the work-rules reforms cited elsewhere, turned a moribund system into a consistent moneymaker.
In the American South, consolidation gradually reduced the number of freight carrier rail systems to two, the Southern Railway System first envisioned by J P Morgan, and the gradual folding of Louisville and Nashville, Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line into what came to be called the "Family Lines", The eastern bankruptcies, meanwhile, were all folded into the quasi-public Consolidated Rail System, or "Conrail".
To preserve as much (mostly service-based) competition as possible the regulators then determined to split Conrail into two privatized systems -- roughly along the lines of the old (New York) "Central" and "Pennsy", With a few exceptions, the former got control of the C&O/B&O and all of the Family Lines, and now operates as CSX; the latter was attached to the Southern and N&W to form Norfolk Southern.
Which is basically how we got to the four American-based and two Canadian-based rail systems prominent in the English-speaking North America of the present day.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 05-29-2021 at 03:17 PM..
Exploratory merger talks between the New York Central (NYC) and Pennsylvania (PRR) began in the late Fifties, and were common knowledge by 1959. At the same time, NYC was investigating merger with coal-hauler Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) which already controlled Baltimore and Ohio (B&O), so PRR pursued a similar course with partially-controlled, and coal-rich Norfolk and Western (N&W). (While not that lucrative, heavy coal traffic was pretty much a guarantee of stability and solvency).
PRR was ordered to divest itself of its interest in N&W as a condition of the merger, so N&W merged with profitable Nickel Plate (NKP) and so-so Wabash (WAB). The NYC-PRR merger was finally consummated in the winter of 1967-68, and the new company was strong-armed into absorbing perpetual albatross New Haven (NH) about a year later.
Integrating the three systems proved far more complicated than anticipated, and it wasn't long before western connections began pulling their sensitive perishable traffic off Penn-Central, and trucking the meat and much of West Coast fruit and vegetable traffic from Chicago and St. Louis to the Eastern Seaboard on newly-completed I-80 and I-70.
Penn-Central filed for bankruptcy, over the course of a summer weekend in 1970.
Penn Central was a hot mess and a merger that never should have been allowed to happen.
Pennsylvania RR and New York Central were bitter rivals for about one hundred or so years, whoever thought all that hostility would be set aside and two different operations would work together were deluding themselves.
What many predicted would happen, did, and the rest as they say is history.
Huge part of how American railroads failed post WWII can be laid largely at feet of federal and often local governments. Post WWII they were regulated, highly taxed and otherwise interfered with as if railroads were still the dominate industry of USA. That time had passed and federal government made sure it wasn't coming back by pouring hundreds of millions into interstate highway system and otherwise favoring rise of automobile.
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