What Might Have Been

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

I was reading throught the Rock Island thread and saw mention of a Pacific coast extension the was planned but never built and that got me to thinking (always a hazardous enterprise)-I seem to recall reading of plans by the C&NW to make their own way to the Pacific. (Hmm…Chicago, North Western & Pacific? Not a bad ring to it.) Also, that the D&RGW had tried to buy into the Los Angeles, San Pedro & Salt Lake (I belive that was the name at the time) before UP got it instead (was that before or after trying to use the WP as a way past SP?). Anyone know where the Rock Island or North Western planned to meet tidewater on these ventures?

Does anyone know of any “big time” plans that other railroads had that never got built (west, east, north or south)? If I remember right, our friends to the “great white north” almost had the Canadian Northern as a third transcontinental line, built from west to east.

And for the REALLY big question-any major routes/extensions that you think should have been built but weren’t?

2

I don’t think that it was something that should have been completed. But the Reading’s line from Reading to Slatington was designed as the first leg of their own line into New England. That way all the coal being hauled to New England would stay on Reading rails and not be turned over to others. Just what the world needed, another L&HR, LNE, NYO&W, or D&H.

3

We must consider the CNO&TP (Cincinnatti, New Orleans and Texas Pacific), or the “RAT HOLE” that didn’t get farther than Atlanta. But I guess it was pretty standard back then to “dream big” !!!

4

The Reading contemplated buying the LNE in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, but the impending Penn Central merger caused them to give up on that plan. When LNE’s parent (Lehigh Coal & Navigation) shut down the LNE, they sold to CNJ the trackage in the cement region and the anthracite region, but abandoned the rest.

One of LNE’s ancestors was the South Mountain & Boston which was supposed to connect Harrisburg PA to Boston, but in the end, the LNE main line only ran from their connection with the Reading at Slatington to a connection with the New Haven at Maybrook NY. Sometime after the LNE opened the Tamaqua Extension to the southern anthracite region in 1912, they abandoned the “old main line” to Slatington. I guess there wasn’t that much bridge traffic to New England after all.

5

One of the more entertaining efforts, to my way of thinking, was Gould’s labors to bring the Wabash into the east coast, via Pittsburgh.

There was an “what might have been” that almost was (Assuming he would have continued east beyond Pittsburgh, had the bottom not fallen out)