In what year did the NYC merge to form the Penn Central? I model the NYC and the New Haven and would like to know the proper date.
Lemme see now. Wasn’t it February 1968?
It was–and the New Haven was legislated into the mix a year later. And a year after that…
[2c]lets see 1968 merger,18 months later bankrupcy,1976 broken wheel on broken rail.
If your creating your own model railroad, just pretend Penn Central never happened. Then you might get a “Model” Railroad.
Rgds IGN
Geez! Some people don’t like Penn Central…
Seriously though, could the three railroads have survived on their own, or better merged with other companies? (This should be fun… [}:)])
I thought it was January 1967 when the PENN CENTRAL merger was finalized.
What would have happened if the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the Rock Island?
What would have happened if the New York Central had merged with the Seaboard Coast Line?
Andrew F.
Since that fatal date, I’ve heard lots of NYC folks say that they’d have been OK if they hadn’t merged with that d**n Pennsylvania.
I’ve heard lots of Pennsylvania folks say that they’d have been OK if they hadn’t merged with that d**n New York Central.
Well, I worked for USRA in the '70’s - that’s the outfit that created Conrail - and I can tell you for sure that neither would have made it. The merger may have accelerated bankruptcy or it may have slowed it down - who can tell? But it was going to happen, merged or unmerged.
Old Timer
I don’t disagree with old timer. But from what I have read it did seem that NYC was at least TRYING to adapt to the changeing marketplace, while pensy seemed to bury it’s head in the sand and roll itself up in the comfort of tradition.
I seem to reacll a column be Don Phillips that recounted an alternate merger “plan”. I have read or heard pieces of this in other places, so forgive me if I’m conflating things.
The NYC was trying to get it’s house in order but was spooked by the C&O’s offer to merge with the B&O and wanted in. The PRR, faced with a C&O/B&O/NYC combine screamed bloody murder-understandably so. The C&O didn’t want to deal with trying to put together such a big merger (and provide most of the income for the new company), so talked the NYC into bowing out. The idea was that the NYC would continue to get itself slimmed down and more profitable while the C&O put it’s money into rehabilitating the B&O (physical plant or just financially, I do not know). Meanwhile, the N&W was looking to expand beyond the coalfields in a merger/lease of the NKP and the Wabash. So, the idea (I have no clue whose it was) was that the C&O/B&O and N&W/WAB/NKP mergers would be effected and once those got running smoothly, NYC would join the expanded C&O and the PRR would join the expanded N&W.
This result would have been two eastern carriers that overlapped each other and would have both covered the northeast. Both would have had traffic mixes of coal and merchandise (the PRR was a large hauler of coal and the NYC had a bigger proportion of merchandise in their traffic mix).
But, once the other mergers had been put into motion, the NYC got worried about what would happen if they DIDN’T get to merge into the C&O later. The PRR was in the same boat but (either through bluff or arrogance) was the pursued rather than the pursuer in this union. The reuslt was that both mergered with the other even though neither really wanted to-they were just afraid of being left on ther own aginst two new RR’s. The results were not long in coming…
Except for the Pennsy electrification, which was really a marvel, although the New Haven had already done the hard work for them, the New York Central seemed more progressive, moving from Niagras to diesels on the Century while the Pennsy increased crew and operating costs with double-headed K4’s on the Broadway. Remember the Pacemaker freight train service? NY-Chicago in one day? The logical combination that should have occured right after WWII would have been the PRR merging with the Southern, Norfolk and Western, Lehigh Valley, and Wabash, and the New York Central with the C&O, B&O, Reading, CNJ, WM, Clinchfield. A third player for the east would have been the Maine Central, Boston and Maine, New Haven, DL&W, Erie, Nickel Plate, W&LE, and D&H. The strength of the PRR and NYC based conglomerates would have preserved interchange into New England, while the single line advantage would have given the third player a competitive position for the east-west business. If all this had happened around 1948, say, along with a 1948 version of the Staggers act and Amtrak and local subsidies for commuter service, a lot of tracks that were ripped up would still be in place and there would not be any capacity problems for more business than they handle now. Oh well, can turn the clock backwards except in imagination? And Maybrook would still be in business and the Poughkeepsie Bridge repaired.
The NYC was very progressive and the PRR was stuck in neutral in the 1960s. Despite being saddled with full crew laws, lots of money losing passenger service and rate regulation, the NYC was struggling to try to find ways to inovate and modernize. Perlman burned through tons of capital, building modern hump yards, installing CTC on key routes and had a lab in Cleveland trying out all sorts of whacky things (jet propelled Budd cars was only one such thing). This continued into the early days of PC, before Perlman was pushed out.
The PRR in 1967 wasn’t really any different in any respect that it was in 1947, after the post-war modernization/rebuilding was complete. They just saw the handwriting on the wall and gave up.
It is likely that railroading in 1960s in the Northeast was a losing game no matter how you played it.
The book “The Wreck of the Penn Central” by Peter Binzen & Joseph Daughen covers the story pretty deeply. It paints David Bevan in a pretty bad light as one of the main problems although he was aquitted of criminal charges. Despite the fact that the merger idea had been around for some ten years, the date was Feb. 1,1968.
Penn Central + Rock Island - would have sunk faster than a large boulder dropped into a lake. Talk about the mother of all disasters.
New York Central + SCL : would have produced a VERY strange-looking system map. Did they connect anywhere? This combination might have survived with Al Perlman at the helm, maybe, but it would have been a weird combination.
In the world of what if, what if the Central and Pennsy had been broken up into smaller railroads?
That happened in the 1990s. The Central came back under the name Conrail while the PRR was scattered among dozens of owners.
The situation today is pretty much what is described above. The NYC was in deep doo-doo from 1956 on and PRR was not as bad off, with Norfolk & Western, PennRoad and Wabash stock dividend income that NYC didn’t have. NYC had real estate but, it wasn’t producing the steady income that PRRs holdings were producing. Most of NYCs property was on the market, like Buffalo’s Central Terminal, which Fifty years later is now owned by preservationists that are up against a dying neighborhood and a city that has been broke longer than most of it’s residents have been alive![V] This situation was not helped by Central’s image of progress and arrogance. Local governments in the NYSSR couldn’t wait to tax the living[censored]out of their property, regardless of its true value. The other states in which NYC operated were just as bad, like Tax-er-Massachusetts, which also taxed the living daylights out of NYC property, no matter how much the property cost NYC to keep up, considering that it was obsolete and impossible to sell as is, where is. NYC was in a bad way no matter who they were merging with. They could have broken C&O, but it would have taken longer![xx(]
From 1901 to 1972 (the cutoff date was 1964 but divestiture wasn’t complete until 1972) N&W paid PRR $407 million dollars (that’s 40% of a billion) in dividends, including all through the Great Depression.
For those who can’t bring themselves to believe that made a big difference to PRR, I call your attention to the rapidity with which PRR went down the toilet when the N&W dividends were cut off.
I’m one of the guys who believe that a large part of PRR’s self-proclaimed status as “The Standard Railroad of the World” was paid for by the hillbillies in Roanoke.
Old Timer
I’m right with you on this one. (Though, to pick a nit, I might not have included Southern in the above PRR system-a little too “unbalanced” south of the Ohio River. But I digress.) I think that, in the broad outline, you have a good 3 system east, especially using the Erie for long haul to New England (and combining all the NE lines into one system).
My biggest “if only they’d done it this way” gripe with history (a.k.a. “why the world went to h…”) is the era of parallel mergers. I don’t argue that declining traffic levels left too much track to maintain for too little traffic (and no one wanted to be the one RR too many to throw in the towel-just combine into one big one and everybody shares the losses of abandonments and gets the dividends of lower cost). I wasn’t there, so I can’t criticize anyone’s crystal ball, but…
The historical developement of US railroads was to extend themselves. The end to end mergers of the 80’s-90’s look to me like the logical resumption of the expansion era of the teens-20’s (before interruption by ICC oversight). I really think using both the NYC and the PRR as platforms to build out from (like you plan above Dave) would have saved a decade of grief and left us with a stronger industry, almost certainly without
The NYC wanted to be included in the C&O - B&O merger. C&O made the case that their healthy railroad could support the B&O while they got it straightened out, but couldn’t support B&O and NYC while straightening them out. Kind of ironic that Jervis Langdon (I believe) was put in as president of B&O just before the merger and he managed to make enough changes to show a small profit the last year or next to last year before the merger. That almost killed the deal with the ICC.
Al Perlman was remaking the NYC into something that (at least in my opinion) had a chance of making it as an independent railroad. Can anyone speak to how far along he was in that process, and whether or not NYC could have made it on its own, before the PC merger? Thanks.
Sayeth JOdom:
“Al Perlman was remaking the NYC into something that (at least in my opinion) had a chance of making it as an independent railroad. Can anyone speak to how far along he was in that process, and whether or not NYC could have made it on its own, before the PC merger? Thanks.”
As noted a few entries back, I worked for the outfit that put Conrail together in the 1970s. Perlman didn’t even have a good start on it, and, no, to repeat: the NYC wasn’t going to make it on its own, any more than the PRR was.
It makes partisans of both roads feel good to think that their road could have made it, but it just wasn’t going to work.
Old Timer