I read somewhere that the Bangoor and Aroostook nearly became bakrupt in the early 70s, Penn Central lost most of the BAR’s potato shipment somehwre in a yard in New York. Is this true? I know the PC was seen as somewhat incompitent, but was it THAT bad?
From wiki, which you may have already seen:
Google Books brings up a short photo caption from the book “The American Freight Train” (Jim Boyd) which pretty much states the same thing.
Even more searching indicates that the Aroostock Valley RR had similar issues with Penn Central:
If you thought thier freight service was bad, you should have ridden one of thier long distance passenger trains.
except for the Broadway Limited, which did keep a decent standard of service and on-time operation, even in its reduced “General” form.
And the Florida trains and the through Southern trains were also decent, account of pressure by the major railroads for those trains.
This sounds similar to Southern Pacific and Sunkist.
After the RI quit in 1980, the DRI Line and then the MILW provided interim carrier service over the old RI between Davenport and Iowa City. West of Durant, IA (near where my profile picture was taken) is a fertilizer plant. It was Twin States Engineering, the facility is still there but I don’t know if it operates under the same name. They were a steady customer of the RI and the later interim carriers. I knew the agent at Durant and one day when visiting I noticed Twin States only had a couple cars there. Normally they had 8 or 10 cars every other time I had went by it. He said that they had curtailed their use of rail after the MILW had “lost” some important cars for 30 days.
Fortunately on later visits to the area, it looked like the IAIS had recaptured their confidence and business.
Jeff