Alot of what I have read has stated that both Erie Lackawanna and Lehigh Valley were in power crunches not having enough units etc. But they went bankrupt. How can you have problems coming up with enough locomotive power if you’re traffic base is erroding? Does this mean most of what was killing these eastern lines was unbelieveable overhead? Old debt, taxes from the bowels of hell? Pension plans and old school employees that just cost to much? Out of date policies?
Is that a “choose one of the following only” and, one of those choices is “all of the above” and “more than all of the above”?
Power problems come in many forms - from broken engines, not enough engines, to such “hidden” causes as engines sitting on trains out on the main line that can’t move because there is another train in front of them or there are no crews available. The E-L and LV had severe train movement problems in their final years. They simply (for a large variety of reasons) could not move trains. So, if the train does not arrive, there is no supply of “new” units for “new” train movements. If all of the crews are “on rest” because it took more than one crew to get a train over the road, then subsequest trains get to wait for rested crews. This problem snowballs like you would not believe. Veterens of the SP in its final 10 years and Penn-Central will be able to tell you horror story after story about this problem.
Everything about a railroads operation is so interrelated, that when two or three things start going wrong, it soon becomes almost impossible to fix things.
Yeah that makes sense. How much has deregulation done to solve these kinds of problems?