Most every book or magazine about railroad history speaks of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Depending on the point of view of the author, PRR is painted in several different lights. Which category would most people put PRR in?
Don’t know what most people would say. I tend to think that the most productive people started leaving for greener pastures post-World War I. The industry had peaked, and nationalization during the war was an indicator to those type of people what was to come. I think WWI was a massive shock to the American psyche. Foundational outlooks changed. My Grandfather worked for Armour Packing Co. in Chicago at that time. The government required that the production from 18 of the 19 smokehouses the company owned be dedicated to the war effort. Armour barely stayed afloat with the revenues that one smokehouse produced. my 2 cents
What is it that the experts always claim? That NYC had superior routes, while PRR had superior management?
My own perceptions being that I really didn’t care for the PRR, in my younger days…not that it matters. Of course my knowledge was limited by what I could observe.
Looking back on it all, post humously, I’ve developed a form of respect for them,. over the way they seemed to know no sense of moderation. Their affection for dual mains, often with a passing siding for each line where desirable, the almost “overbuilt” feeling to much of their infastructure, and their hunger for expansion…is hard to not have respect for.
At or within a short drive of where I am , the PRR had their Pittsburgh, Ft Wayne, and Chicago main, their Grand Rapids and Indiana line, the P,C,C&StL, and the Vandalia.
Even now with much of that either abandoned or downsized, it’s still interesting to railfan.
800 pound octopus seems more like it. [:)]
Maybe rather than “or” it is “and.” Maybe neither are true.
The NYC might have had a better alignment than the PRR, but a better route (or more precisely, location?). I can’t see that.
I’ll go with the gorilla analogy, though 800 lb. doesn’t come close to capturing the PRR’s power in its day. Certainly the PRR’s shippers hated the PRR. It utterly refused to participate in reciprocal switching and could refuse thanks to its tremendous reach in the industrialized heartland. Might made right. An Official Territory shipper not located on the Pennsy had a very tough time of it. Competing roads for the carload traffic in the PRR’s territory weren’t just bested, they were inexorably and brutally crushed as their customers migrated to the PRR or demanded concessions in order to compete with their PRR-located shippers, and the “strong road-weak road” dialectic that resulted rippled outward to influence railroading throughout the U.S. The PRR really was the “standard road,” in that as the PRR rose or fell, so ultimately did everyone else.
S. Hadid
…And that Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne and Chicago line extended across the length of Pennsylvania {and more}, and across the hard way…perpendicular across the mountain ranges and did much of it with 4 track mains. Seemed there were trains on it {50 so years ago}, almost anyplace one stopped and watched…Multiple trains much of the times visible. Big hauler of coal, Steel products, passengers and general freight. Of course they were a major factor in providing transportation for the WWII war effort along with transporting millitary personal 24/7…I’d call the Pennsylvania an easy 800 lb. gorilla in it’s day.
How much coordination existed during the 1950s between the PRR, and their subsidiaries, the Wabash, the Lehigh Valley, and the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton ?
Can you explain reciprocal switching please?
Reciprocal switching- Railroads serving the same town agree to perform industry switching for each other. Let’s supose the FWD and MKT serve Yellow Dog; a town in the TX panhandle with several cotton gins. Some shippers are located on the FWD and some shippers are located on the Katy All of the shippers in Yellow Dog ship cotton to Houston for export. The FWD and MKT have agreed to switch for one another on shipments to Galveston. The advantage to the railroads is they do not need to go to the expense of building a siding into an industry on the other railroads. The advantage to the shippers is they have two railroads to pick from. If FWD gets congested they can use the Katy and vice versa.
Since were are talking about the regulation era the carload rate on bales of cotton from Yellow Dog to Houston will be the same regardless of which railroad you use. In addition the TX Railroad Commission ruled that all industries at a station had to be open to reciprocal switching for all line haul railroads serving the station.
The Pennsy seemed, in my frame of reference to all ways be known as the “The Standard Railroad” As I have gotten older, it seems that they were just as prone to bad decisions, as were all the other railroads of the era. Maybe their bad decisions were on such a grand scale that they astounded rather than dumbfounded. Everything they did seemed to be publicized in a grand manner and surely they litigated as no one else could.
Could it be that those of us who have always admired the Pennsylvania Railroad for its acumulation of “stuff” [ locomotive, trains, track,etc.] . Might our admiration be misplaced? Maybe we should shout and glorify , rather than the Operating and Mechanical Departments?
The Public Relations and Legal Departments as they are the real heros[?]
The “Traffic Dictionary” 1950 edition says “A mutual interchange of inbound and outbound carload freight which is switched to or from a siding of another carrier under a regular switching charge. The charge is usually absorbed by the carrier receiving the line haul.”
An example helps. Suppose in Denver there is a lumberyard located on the Rio Grande, and a semi-trailer manufacturer located on Union Pacific. Both are open to receiprocal switching. The lumberyard orders a carload of lumber originating at Joseph, Oregon, on the UP, and the semi-trailer manufacturer orders a carload of light structural steel shapes delivered to Rio Grande at Minnequa, Colorado. Both shippers are quoted a single-line line-haul rate by the line-haul carriers as if the shipper was located on their own railroad. Rio Grande delivers the carload of steel to the UP for switching to the semi-trailer manufacturer, and UP the carload of lumber to Rio Grande for switching to the lumberyard. At the end of the month the two railroads settle their accounts by adding up the total number of reciprocal switches. Whatever doesn’t cancel out is billed to the other railroad at a set charge – say, $50 per switch – and the other road pays the balance out of its general accounts. The shipper meanwhile receives a bill from the line-haul carrier that doesn’t even show the reciprocal switch charge, only the line-haul charge.
Almost all cities and industries west of Chicago were open to reciprocal switching. The Official Territory (east of Chicago and north of the Ohio and Potomac) was another matter, and most cities and industries therein were not open to reciprocal switching. For example, suppose you have two lumbermills in Indianapolis, one located on the PRR and the other on the B&O, across the street from each other. Both are receiving oak flooring from a mill located on the PRR in Pennsylvania. The distributor located on the B&O pays both t
I wouldn’t consider the PRR’s disregard for reciprocal switching to be
Just what I remember reading a time or three.
If you look at the way the former NYC routes were retained by conrail while many of the parallel PRR routes were laid to waste, there must be something to it.
for example, the routes between New York city and Chicago, the routes up to the north end of the Michigan lower peninsula, routes such as that.
Reading THE MEN WHO LOVED TRAINS and various other publications and books I’ve read, the short term answer is that the PRR hierarchy had the attitude that they were the Pennsylvania and everything would be done the PRR way, no deviations. The NYC had Perlman and he had ideas, I guess he wasn’t much of a people person but he gathered together other people with ideas and they tried their best to make the New York Central work. Organizations and companies that get hidebound seem to eventually fail.
Considering there’s virtually nothing left of either railroad still in use as a main line except New York-Chicago, Philadelphia-Chicago (which join to become one in Ohio), and appendages to Detroit, Boston, and St. Louis, perhaps a more accurate way of saying it was that most of the route-miles of both railroads had little intrinsic economic value. Once west of the Alleghenies there was little practical difference between the two from an alignment point of view, and Conrail’s selection was based on other factors.
I also recall reading similar statements, for what it’s worth, and my takeaway was that the Red Team vs. Green Team partisanship of NYC and PRR fans can withstand even the dismemberment and internment of their teams. I used to find their tortured putdowns of the other team annoying but now it’s become endearing from a distance, kind of like the eccentric aunt one experiences solely through the retelling of bizarre experiences of family members that still visit.
S. Hadid
…With as much time as we’re dealing with here on these former main line routes it might be recognized to be pretty normal for routes of transportation to be changed for ever. Example: At least 13 miles of the original Pennsylvania Turnpike {Breezewood area}, are reverting back to nature having been abandoned and since rerouted and moderized. Was a time one might have thought it couldn’t be done any better but time proves otherwise.
I think a lot of what the PRR is to people depends on what time period we’re looking at, too. Post WWII, the branch lines that fed million of tons of traffic to the mains became less important as traffic generators and more a problem of money sinkholes. The massive fixed expenses involved in passenger stations, yards, trains, etc. still had to be paid long after the passengers left for the Interstates. In this time, the Pennsy could easily be written off as an uncooperative, arrogant “Gorilla” that was past it’s prime and living off it’s accumulated market dominance. But how did it achieve that dominance? The “overbuilt” facilities were there to handle floods of traffic that were expected to eventually be offered. Greyhounds referenced a book (“Enterprise Denied”) in another post about the effects of Federal regulation in the 1897-1916 era. The early chapters, setting the stage for the story, tell of how the railroads in the US were faced with the explosive growth of the US economy during that period (same as we are seeing in China today) and the burdens of almost too much traffic that were placed on the system. At that time, most of the US economy was concentrated in what came to be called the Official Classification Territory. Cities that are now “rust belt” shadows of their former selves were then massively productive industrial centers. Some off the top of my brain: Chicago (plus the NW Indiana industrial area), Saint Louis, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleaveland, Dayton, Akron, Cincinatti, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Youngstown, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York (and New Jersey)-to name just a few. Everyone of these cities had more than one railroad to serve them and several railroads served several of them-but PRR had the most complete routes to the most of them. The Pennsylvania didn’t stumble too much in making the most of their franchise, either. The “Standard of the World” days of the PRR were born out of the right people making the right decisions in the right place at the right time. That’s the
Kevin, I recall seeing a quote from a PRR official stating that because of the mess that occurred as a result of WWI, the railroad invested in extra yards and other facilities (otherwise not needed) so it would be prepared for any future surge in traffic.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that the “800 lb gorilla” sobriquet would be appropriate politically. Apparently the PRR was a huge power in Pennsylvania state government and politics.
I think Kevin’s post hit the nail squarely on the head of this topic. The socio-economic forces that deeply intertwine with any particular route are contingent. Any road, regardless of size or grasp of it’s management, is utimately dependant on forces that are beyond their control within a frame of a much larger picture. Despite the justifiably deep hubris of their self created image, The Standard Railroad of The World, was a transitory creation subject to the waxing and waning of it’s enviroment.