I read the story on Newswire about the NEC being sold off by Bush’s puppet “board”. I hope we don’t see a repeat of what happened to the Pacific Electric in California. GM forced Southern Pacific to sell it to them by threatening to divert their finished auto traffic to other railroads. GM then destroyed the Pacific Electric by scrapping it. That created a market for their autos and buses.I hope that a similar scenario is not playing itself out here. If the highway and airline establishments get control of the NEC through some bogus corporation,they could start curtailing service and destroying it to get those passenger-miles on to airlines and highways. I hope I’m wrong about this.
So the old conspiracy story is being dragged out for at least the millionth time. There were a lot of transit systems that started converting to bus before World War 2 and completed the process shortly afterward. I would hardly think that GM and National City Lines had much to do with these cases.
Also, Roger Lewis, who was the first president of Amtrak, was also a former airline executive.
In the era around 1950 at least PE’s passenger service was sold to Metropolitan Coach Lines.
If one reads the Snell Report, I believe it’s called, there are details of how National Cities Lines was created, who owned it, and what they did. Many cities lost their sreetcars under NCL ownership.
In the 50’s the SP wanted out of the commuter passenger business. While National City did convert routes to buses during their short tenure as owner of the system they did not complete the conversion and they even bought rail equipment to improve the rail service. The conversion to buses was completed by Regional Transit after National City gave up and the Government took over.
I never before heard the assertion that GM forced the SP to sell to National City.
A thread earlier this year linked to a web site with a lot of info on the court cases regarding the dealings of National City Lines, GM, etc. The final outcome was that National City was guilty of restraint of trade by requireing the companys the owned to buy GM buses.
I think there is some confusion with Pacific Electric and Los Angeles Railways. LAR became a National City Lines property before PE was sold to Metropolitan Coach. Both systems scrapped modern PCC cars. The GM influence was important in the National City Lines conversion to buses, but just as important was the general USA mindset that streetcars of all types were obsolete and that rail and auto on the same land don’t mix well. NYC is anothe story with GM directly buying New York Railways in 1926 and converting all lines to buses in 1935-1936.
A little history on the PE. In 1953 Pacific Electric sold it’s passenger operations, both rail and bus to Metropolitan Coach Lines. The Pacific Electric began motor coach (bus) service in the late 1920s. Metropolitan Coach retained rail service on the Long Beach, Watts, San Pedro and Bellflower lines. These operations lasted into the formation of the MTA in 1957. The Long Beach Line made it’s last run in April 1961. Metro Rail’s Blue Line largely replicates the PE Long Beach run today. Backing up a little, The Los Angeles Railway, also owned by former PE owner Henry Huntington, was sold to National City Lines in 1944. While it is true NCL was a bus operator, it did purchase quite a few PCC-P-2 streetcars for upgrades on the P, J, R and V car lines. PCC cars later were placed in service on the F and S lines. NCL did a pretty good job of maintaining LARWY’s fleet of Huntington Standard, H , and K class cars. I rode many of these as a younster growing up in Los Angeles. The cars were all repainted into NCLs yellow and green paint scheme. NCL even went so far as to put sheet metal skirting on many of the H,K and Huntington Standard cars. This, no doubt didn’t please the shop forces at the various car houses, or the purists who recall the LARWy cars in their yellow,black and silver form. NCL abandoned many of it’s streetcar lines in 1955, but in general, took pretty good care of the cars they inherited. I even recall several Christmases in the early 1950s when LATL painted several Hand K Class streetcars as “candy cane” cars for Christmas.
National City Lines was formed for the purpose of converting streetcars to buses. In certain cases they made a business decision to buy new streetcars or rehabilitate existing PCC cars because they did not want to scrap an investment in new track and wire that had been made just before they got control. In most cases, not LA but elsewhere, they bought the systems because the USA Justice Department (in a dimentia possibly never exceeded) said power companies owning streetcar systems constituted a monopy. (And all the while General Motors had direct ownership the main Manhattan streetcar lines, New York Railways!) But in all cases they did eventually intended to put on buses. In Baltimore and Los Angeles they were not ruthless, and really tried to provide good service. In Philadelphia the opposite was the case and they kept PCC hidden in carbarns while running old Peter Witts on the street. They forced the abandonment of the mostly private right of way Willow Grove Line which should have been kept as a heavy feeder to the Broad Street subway line. Their actions in Los Angeles and Baltimore were somewhat of a replay of what happened when they took over Manhattan’s New York Railways. I was told by people like Herman Rinke and Walter Druck that GM immediately improved service, and they even built one sample light-weight modern car, that looked somewhat like a Brill Masterunit. But the ultimate intent was conversion to buses, and this was done by the end of summer 1936. Third Avenue Railrways continued to operate its yellow and streetcars in Manhattan until 1947.