I recently borrowed the Pentrex Video “Best of 1985” from K-10 hobbies in Maryville, IL, and one of the featured items was “The new SPSF paint scheme”
What if the ICC had approved the merger, would we see have seen BN merge with another Railroad? Would the Rio Grande still be independent, and would the Union Pacific be the powerhouse it is today? Would the SP AC4400’s be painted in the so called kodachrome? How would the SPSF of 2006 have played the highly valued intermodal market, SP was the innovater, and SF was the master of speed.
It was probably just as well for Santa Fe that the ICC denied the SPSF merger. SP’s weak finances would have been a real drain and a lot of the capital developments now in progress on BNSF might never have happened.
UP might have been even stronger than it is now since it wouldn’t have been stuck with many of the negative aspects of SP.
Don’t forget, it was the SPSF Corp. that stripped SP of many of it’s non railroad assets in the first place that put them in such bad financial condition. They were in bad enough shape as it was from there erodeing traffic base with out the failed merger.
That would have left three in the west and three in the east, so theoretically, you could have had 3 east/west mergers. IC and KCS would have been scrambling around looking for a way to fit in.
How about, CR &SPSF (intermodal and chemical focus), NS & BN (coal and automotive focus) and CSX & UP with a mix of everything. IC going with NS & BNSF and KCS going with CSX & UP?
Prior to the SP-ATSF attempt, the SP and the SCL were in merger talks. The two CEO’s couldn’t get along (among other things) so it fell through. My personal opinion is that would have been a better merger that CSX ended up being.
Can you just imagine Long Beach-Los Angeles and Oakland containers on a double or triple track main from the Los Angeles Basin all the way to Florida and up the East Coast?
The Santa Fe wasn’t in all that great shape, either–some pretty radical stuff was going on there. Would it have been possible that SP and SF together would have been a lot like Penn and Central together? Something that had to be bailed out, and later split up by the survivors, BN and UP?
FWIW, I had a series of exchanges here with Mark Hemphill about a year or so back, where i posed that very concept to him. Not a question in his mind that it was a bad idea that ONLY could go wrong.
Since it was a point I had raised, trying to preserve some sense of dignity, I dug up a persistent chain of “what if?s” trying to dredge up some scenario where it might have looked like a good idea.
He shot them all down…
About the only concession I could get out of him was that SP’s access to the chemical coast MIGHT have given SF a better hand against UP than they have at present. otherwise…no gain.
Mark was (and still is) correct. It was a terrible idea and about the only two good things to come of it were for the ATSF to have gained all of the SP’s land and mineral holdings (non-railroad assets) and the Kodacrome color shceme. SP’s land holding bailed out the ATSF and the lack of them was the root cause of the SP’s death - which was a bad thing.
If you take a look at the railroad map prior to CR being divided, if you put the SP, MILW, CRIP (south), EL and SCL together, only part of the NorthEast would have been without at least 2 competing RR’s, and usually 3 RR’s. Our rail system would be in better shape service and capacity wise that way. The rest of the mergers would also have worked better, too
What I’ve come to conclude is that the failure of the SF/SP merger has become a post humus refuge for people who are not fond of the union of BN and SF.
They resent the BN half of it so much that they see the SFSP merger in the light of “what might have been”, perhaps even romancing it up with convenient memory a tad just for effect.
I think it was part way that for me, anyway.
Today is a different landscape, so it’s hard to judge 20 year old strategies objectively based upon the climate today… But one thing SP offered in spades was the way they had built out into industrial parks as the parks themselves were being built.
We had warehouses in Oakland, Santa Clara, and Hayward California, and it’s amazing how SP nearly owned the territory, track wise
Phoenix was that way too, we had a place just south of the ne ballpark, and SP just owned rail access to the entire area
Maybe 20 years ago that was a valuable asset to aquire, but you go through there now and most of those sidings are ribbons of rust.
The Golden St route would have gone bye, bye as the traffic SP/SSW was hauling from KC to New Mexico would have shifted to SF. Thank goodness for many reasons the combo did not take place.
Asking “what if” on this subject, is alot asking “what if” the Japanese had won at Midway, or the Germans at Stalingrad, or, if Bill Gates decided he hated computers… Full of endless speculation, ranging from well informed, and plausible, to down right hallucinatory… (is that a word??)
Yes, I’ll firmly second this notion. Look at what there was within the two companies: one based on supreme arrogance, possessed of a wholly militaristic mindset, and apparently blind to its eroding traffic base and deteriorating financial condition versus one based on speed, performance, customer satisfaction, and good community relations. The two corporate cultures would have killed each other. It definitely would have been Penn Central all over again!
BN and UP would have had a fine time cherry picking the remains.
It seems to be that way for a lot of folks, but I don’t see things that way. The BN was fine to work with and be a customer of until the Frisco was merged into it. Frisco management pushed aside the BN folks and their influence is still very noticable even today. The merger of BN and ATSF ended up forcing the West into a two company rail system and any competition between systems simply vanished. Other than the attitude problems of BNSF, the problem was not the merger but the consequences (unintended or otherwise) of that merger.
The SP was a “retail” railroad in areas like Phoenix, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Oregon. One of my Agencies had two of those parks and the only auto unl