PRR’s “assult” on Manhatten was only because non of the others had the money to join in: DL&W, Erie, Lehigh Valley, and CNJ (RDG, B&O) and all were wary of joining the Philadelphia lawyers’ foray. The PRR picked up the LIRR for several reasons…one, they needed the land in Long Island City and financial help to dig under the East River plus the Mainline/Paoli elite wanted private rail car service to the Hamptons and Montauk.
Paul, while I would not call it a “frontal assault”, the Central ran their P&LE 4 track line into the heart of the PRR in Pittsburgh.
While both NYC and PRR had suburban electrification, PRR was smart to connect the NY & Phily electrifications, and extend it thru to DC. The NYC did not have such a dense corridor and besides, by the early 30s they had already started using the first successful road diesel (according to the Second Diesel Spotters Guide, p214).
I also have to nit-pick with “They both… went to diverse places such as most of Michigan’s “mitten” (lower peninsula)”. I live in Michigan now and have some knowledge of their histories. While the NYC/MC blanketed the southern Lower Peninsular and had a line to the tip in Mackinaw, The PRR just ran a stub to Detroit (much of it over C&O trackage rights) and their long (GR&I) line to Mackinaw.
As a casual observer of steam power I see that the Central was an early believer in super power and developed Hudsons and Berkshires while the Pennsy hung on to K4s and other basic designs. It seems the PRR only came out with radical new designs after everyone else was already going to diesels. Even their early jackshaft electrics seemed to copy steam wheel arrangements, which they built into the 20s. Their much touted GG1 was based on a borrowed NH design, using a wheel arrangement first developed for NYC/CUT. (When the Steam Railroads Electrified)
Both are great railroads, and while the PRR was bigger, the NYC didn’t try any less harder.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. I understood that they believed the PRR stocks to be good, solid LONG TERM investments, favored by trust departments of banks, managing investments over long periods of time. It wasn’t the romance and glamour of the rails, it was the low risk and yearly dividends that attracted them.
Excerpt from address at the unveiling of the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt at Vanderbilt University by Chauncey M. Depew (1897)
I had known the Commodore well for several years, and one day he suddenly asked if he could retain me as attorney and counsel. I had been appointed and confirmed United States Minister to Japan, a position of power and prominence because of the opening of that country to civilization. “No future in politics,” he said; “railroad’s the career for a young man now. Don’t be a fool.” He was seventy-two and I was thirty-two, and thus began a confidential and personal relationship which, during the intervening thirty-one years, has continued unbroken and unclouded through four generations of his family.
It was evident that the great and growing product of the agricultural West could neither find a profitable market at the seaboard nor be properly developed so long as it was subject to the tolls and the whims of many connecting lines. The Commodore quickly decided and as suddenly executed a vast scheme of consolidation. The echoes of that controversy still resound. The people were wild, first with panic, then rage, and then a determination to check or destroy the power from which such dire results were feared. The agitation threatened to ruin the Commodore’s fortune, but his movements were too rapid for Legislatures or courts. For many years the fiction of concentrated wealth controlling Congresses and courts and grinding the people under the wheels of a remorseless juggernaut eased the labors of the makers of political platforms, formed ready copy for emergent space in the newspapers, and fired the imagination and frenzied the speech of professional agitators. The fact that the reduction in expenses enabled the consolidated companies to furnish greater facilities at large reductions in the rates prevented hostile legislation culminating in the restoration of the old methods. The ablest and most eloquent of those who denounced this alleged monopoly preferred, when traveling a
It’s questionable whether a coast to coast merger in those days would have done any of the participants any good. Most rail traffic, even today, doesn’t move this way. A big downside of such a merger would have been that it would have turned the other western railroads into hostile connections to the combined railroad. That’s one of the reasons you still haven’t seen a big coast to coast merger. Further, in the waning days of PRR and NYC, the main goal of most rail mergers was to cut costs by eliminating duplicative facilities and personnel. That cut strongly in favor of merging with another road in your own territory, where the possibilities for these savings were more likely to exist, rather than extending into other territories. The regulators in that era were also more favorable to “parallel” mergersthan they were to “market extension” mergers (the reverse of today).
Just an aside… Unlike Clevelanders and the NYC, Pittsburghers never really had a “local feeling” in their hearts for the PRR, despite its being the biggest player in town among many roads, large, medium and small. To Pittsburghers, the PRR was an unwelcome interloper from Philadelphia that imposed its will on the Steel City. The destructive anti-PRR labor riot of the late 1800s set the tone for that, and the feeling lingered in Pittsburgh until the Pennsy’s last days. To its credit, the PRR served the city’s industries and passenger traffic, long-distance and commuter, pretty darned well.
That’s an interesting observation…I would also think that, while NY and Philadelphia, were served by other roads, Pittsburgh was “home” to many or were parochially served. B&O, Monogohela, Interstate, Shawmut, Western Maryland, Bessember and Lake Erie, BR&P, just to name a few, were probably more like homebodies than the PRR’s mainline and the NYC’s P&LE stepchild. Cleveland was definitely an NYC town as NKP as a line thorugh town, was not much bigger than the branch services of Erie and PRR or B&O. I wouldn’t be surprised that the number of railroad employees for all the other lines in the the Pittsburgh region was greater than the PRR and probably the PRR and NYC combined.
Dave, this situation obtained wherever two or more routes connected two cities. For instance, if you rode from Washington (or points northeast) to Montgomery, Alabama, you paid the same fare whether you went directly via Atlanta or via Richmond and Waycross, even though the RF&P-ACL route was longer. Also, Washington-New Orleans fare was the same whether you went via Roanoke, Atlanta-Birmingham, or Atlanta-Montgomery.
The fares were called “competitive fares.”
One case that interested me was that the Chicago-Baltimore fare was the same as the Chicago-Washington fare, whether you rode PRR or B&O.
The fare structures were not just a PRR/B&O/NYC matter.
Let us know when you find those PRR Hudsons.[*-)]
And while we’re thinking about Hudsons, what did ATSF call a 4-6-4?
I think that the proper way to view this, is that at one time there was sufficient business available to support these and other players. It became more a matter of “not who ya knew” to get the business.
That’s why some markets were so overbuilt,
As trucking started bleeding off the business, then the battle for an ever shrinking slice of the pie made it a battle for survival.
But markets have changed since 1960 and comparing today to then does not make sense nor can it be an equal comparison. Manufacturing in the East has gone; Pennsylvania and Ohio steel making is gone; same with coal the way we knew it before then; there are more modern harbors up and down the east coasat and new one’s on the Gulf; containers instead of box cars are the freight movement of choice today; the Eisenhower Interstate HIghway System is now complete; more goods are coming in from the west coast. To address PRR and NYC as haveing the same markets as exist today clouds the picture of how the two railroads competed because their markets (except end terminals) we larger and so different than today as was the role of the secondary railroads from the New Haven, NYO&W, Erie, Lehigh Valley, Lackawanna, CNJ-RDG-B&O, Delaware and Hudson, L&HR, Wabash, Nickle Plate, Western Maryland, and L&NE as they acted as bridge lines as well as connections and extensions probing the NYC and PRR territories as well as being competitive in their own right. Today you only have three railroads in the Mid Atlantic and New England states: CSX, CPR, and NS-Pan Am; all others are terminal or regional short lines. So things are so different that if you don’t understand the difference time has brought, camparing the two cannot make sense.
(My emphasis added.)
As late as the 1960s, when I hired out on the Central and lived through the subsequent merger, freight trains were expected to operate on time, all the time. Questions about freight train delays came from HQ offices in New York and were usually written in a “why should we continue to employ you?” style.
Meanwhile, PRR was “holding for tonnage”; i.e, waiting for enough tonnage to tax the assigned power. When Al Perlman first visited Crestline, Ohio, he was told that its function was to combine westbounds because of the easier grades to the west and reduce the size of eastbounds out of deference to the grades across Pennsylvania. Crestline was closed a year later.
In the late 19th Century railroad wars were fought with construction crews. A great what if in the debate would have been putting the South Pennsylvania Railroad through.
Vanderbilt and the Pittsburgh industrialists attempt to break into the Pennsylvania’s steel making citadel came close, but J. P. Morgan ended the war. The spoils of this war decades later went to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Would the South Pennsylvania route completed long after the Pennsylvania have been better engineered and cost advantageous between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia? Would stealing steel and related traffic in S. W. Pennsylvania have deeply wounded the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Like Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg being successful, no wrong answers. Just speculation.
Victrola1. First, I really beleive that the Southern Pennsylvania was never expected to be really built in its entirety because they actually believed PRR would have found a way to stop them or at least retreat from building the West Shore any further.
As for the quality of construction. IF it were a sincere effort to take business away from PRR, then it would have been high quality construction. If it were just a scare tactic, or even with the idea of giving to PRR as WS was “given” to NYC, then, perhaps, no, not great construction so that recipient would have to pour money into it to make it work. But, yes, advancements in construction as well as locomotives able to haul more, would have favored the project. However, there might have been more tunnels and more bridges, evven stiffer but compensated grades. What NYC got on the West Shore was as mixed blessing…great connections to all railroads west of the Hudson in NY harbor, sort of a water level route across NY state except up the Hudson (grade up an over and out of NJ to water, then up from the river after Newburg to Albany, then parallel to NYC&HR route to Buffalo); it also did not get into the major cities being south and west of Albany, on the south side of the Mohawk and over the hill to Syracuse and the northern tips of the Finger Lakes to the south side of Rochester, etc. It actually turned out to be a great secondary freight route and, with many crossovers, segmented detour routes. PRR, in reality, got nothing but money in handing the West Shore over, along with the cases and disist of the building of the Southern PA. The Commonwealth and the Highway lobby made out well with a well surveyed and engineered right of way, including tunnels, for the PA Turnpike, though.
It is my understanding Lehigh Valley’s main western connection was with CN/GTW via Niagara Falls-- longer route but double track all the way. CN definitely ran hotshot freight tied to LV schedules, and it was LV’s advertised Chicago connection for passengers.
What many of you consider a disadvantage became Erie’s biggest advantage in the era of fast freight. Because Erie avoided so many big cities, it also avoided traffic tie-ups. Erie’s fast freights were REALLY fast compared to their competitors.
As has been said elsewhere, the NYC vs. PRR question is mostly one of personal taste or association. Your opinion will depend mostly on your own memories or associations with either railroad. Even if you never saw either railroad, what you have read or heard will tilt your perceptions.
B&O suffered competitively two ways. First, it was THE pioneer, and the others were able to learn from its mistakes in locating their original lines. Consider that the B&O existed in the first place because Baltimore could not get access to the hinterland by canal. The others had easier paths as they followed the old watercourses for the most part. Second, it was controlled by the PRR for most of the 20th Century. I do not know how heavy a hand PRR put on the B&O management, but the discontinuance of such competitive services as the old “Royal Blue Line” expresses smacks of PRR influence.
BTW, Lehigh Valley was also a PRR-controlled property. This made the PRR a more direct competitor to Erie and DL&W in the Jersey City to Buffalo traffic than you may have realized.
NYC had TWO New York/Chicago routes, both double-track. As fast as the old Lake Shore route was, the Canada Southern/Michigan Central route scorched the ballast, too, after the Detroit Tunnel was completed.
Beware not to underrate the Big Four as a competitor to the PRR west of Cleveland. The New York/St. Lo
To Paul North:
ONLY the B&A? A branch line? My, my, my – don’t ever be seen in Massachusetts! The B&A was as heavy a main line as you could want. Not four tracks, perhaps, but as solid and busy as double track could handle.
And as for “major eastern ports”, the folks in Boston will be glad to inform you more about that, too.
jpp…you miss two important connections west from Buffalo: the LV to NKP and the DL&W to NKP; and also the Wabash had a line in via Detroit I think. The NKP was for both passenger and freight, Wabash only freight. And the LV-NKP connection lasted up to Conrail with run through power of both roads to and from Conneaut, O and Sayre, PA. The service lasted despite N&W takeover of NKP while holding all the chips in DERECO which owned and operated the D&H and EL. Some of the LV-NKP traffic actually was handed off to the D&H at Binghamton!
As for the B&A, even today the track through the Berkshires from Albany to Boston is “the B&A” despite CSX ownership. Was once told tht the B&A designation had to be carried by NYC at the insistance of a wealthy old woman stockholder; when she died, they turned off the B&A designation. However, there was a set of gonodolas or hoppers with B&A markings that were exclusively used to Bensen Mines in the western Adirondacks even into CR days.