What is the diffrence between the pensilvanya RR and penn central?
Pennsylvania Railroad merged with arch-rival New York Central to create Penn Central…
when and why did that happen?
Because the both of them weren’t doing very good. Government regulations and competition from other methods of transportation were making it hard for RRs to make money. Although it ended up being Penn Central wasn’t to great either. (went banktrupt after 3 years):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central_Transportation
After a few years government stepped in, put a bunch of the North Eastern roads together and formed Conrail. And REALLY a whole bunch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railroads_transferred_to_Conrail
THe Pennsylvania and the New York Central merged in order to maintain profitability. The merger happend in the mid to late 1960s. They didn’t do a good job of maintaining profitability in the face of increased cometition from trucks, union contracts and government oversight. When they threatened to fold, the Federal Government stepped and created Conrail in 1976. Penn Central turned over all it’s railroad assets to Conrail.
Penn Central still exists. They own a number of amusement parks usually going by the name of Great Adventure.
Irv
Here’s a wikipedia entry on the subject.
Here’s another site dedicated to the Penn Central
http://pc.smellycat.com/index.html
It was a disaster…
I happened to be riding home from Lewisburg to Paoli PA on Fri, Jan 23, 1970. According to Time Magazine, that was the day every single train in the system was late. I saw 2 wrecks between Harrisburg and Downingtown PA on the ‘old’ Pennsy mainline.
The trip took over a total of 9 hrs.
Happy Railroading.
Mark Wallace
Its wacky sometimes about business. As a business owner, it still exists and just changed its profit making strategy. No longer a working railroad business…
The Chicago South Shore and South Bend line as a business name no longer exists, it had stocks, that is totally dissolved now. The new actual line name is Chicago SouthShore and South Bend… notice the lack of space between SouthShore. NITCD owns the electric trackage now and SouthShore Freight handles the freight operations over the same line like trackage rights.
Soth Shore Freight has also aquiredthe NKP line in Michigan City and other stretches of track near the line it runs, so its operating base is larger than the electrified portions.
Technically from a business point, the actual Insull lines no longer exists, but the operating infrastrucure that created them carries on… (YEAY!)
Conrail was broken up and lines split up between Norfolk Southern and CSX, now like thru Mishawaka indiana where the NYC ran, is now owned by a Norfolk and Western predacessor and competitor like the NKP was of the NYC and Pennsy.
So like now if steam never left the rails I could run Y6b’s all the way from Norfolk Virginia all the way into Chicago VIA the NYC trackage and run parallel to the South Shore on the west side of South Bend and be totally correct prototypically…
[D)]
The Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads were arch rivals for many, many years, always building parallel lines in an attempt to draw business away from each other.
Eventually, they were both on the verge of bankruptcy and merged to form the Penn-Central. This merger was doomed to failure because all they did was merge two parallel routes that had insufficient online business.
The Government eventually stepped in and formed ConRail by bailing out the Penn Central and several other lines because they were considered as critical transportation in the event of national emergency.
ConRail was subsequently divvied up between Norfolk Southern, CSX, and a couple of other lines.
And while those problems affected all US railroads at the time, neither the NYC nor the Pennsy was especially profitable at the time of the merger, the merger was extremely poorly planned by two corporations whose officers wouldn’t talk to each other, the merged corporation adopted deceptive accounting practices that made it difficult for anyone but a select few on the inside to see just how badly things were going (the Pennsy’s books already hadn’t even been approaching the neighborhood of honesty for several years), and the merged company’s financial department was interested in anything BUT the railroad. Essentially the business management was corrupt (some have convincingly compared the bookkeeping at the Penn Central to that of Enron), and the new operations department was inept.
Entire books have been written on this. There were so many things that were wrong with the merger that there is no way that it could have succeeded, even under the best of circumstances. Then, being forced by regulators to include the New Haven into this as a condition of the merger took a no-win situation and made its doom certain.
The PC’s narrow “next quarter’s results” focus and the lack of planning for even basic considerations (such as immediately closing duplicate facilities without planning to deal with how that would change car routings, resulting in shipments being lost for weeks at a time) are stunning in how they predict some of the corporate scandals and failures of the last decade, and the colossal service meltdown of the Union Pacific when it absorbed the Southern Pacific.
If you really want to understand just how badly the PC merger was planned and executed on the inside and the many forces which undermined it from outside, two good books on the subject are The Wreck
Pennsylvania and the New York Central merged to become Penn Central.
Penn Central came into existance on Feb. 1, 1968.
It became Conrail on April 1, 1976
I think me smells a future PRR/Penn Central/Conrail modeler coming about. Yes, yes, come to the dark side my son. [:-^]
Yes, literally the dark side. All the engines were black, but you couldn’t tell 'cause of all the dirt! Except Conrail, who painted all their engines blue to mask the true evil lurking within.
Funniest thing I’ve ever seen on a US railroad:
Conrail blue boxcar patched PRR (indicating it would be Norfolk Southern property after the ‘de-merger’ of Conrail) - with the NYC ‘football’ herald dimly visible through the fading blue paint. Apparently it had never been repainted during its Penn Central days.
Of course, the funniest thing about the Conrail de-merger was that ‘to be NS’ assets were given temporary PRR reporting marks. At one time the PRR owned 30% of Norfolk & Western…
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
What’s the difference? Heh. The PRR was a mighty railroad that was the biggest, most successful railroad for 100 years. The PC was a mighty failure that was the biggest collapse in American business history (until Enron).
The PC merger should never have happened, and it took some 30 years to undo the damage with the Conrail break-up. What should have happened was what has happened, essentially. PRR should have merged with N&W, and NYC should have merged with C&O. But both the N&W and the C&O wanted nothing to do with the PRR and NYC by then.
What really did in the PRR and NYC was the same thing that the NH had to deal with: heavy industry moving South and West. Heavy industry started moving away, even in the late 1920’s, to avoid paying the high cost of doing business in the Northeast. Businesses started up here because we had what they needed: people, water, electricity, and cheaper transportation because we are close to their markets. But to get those, they had to deal with higher taxes, higher labor costs, and higher heating costs.
As the US population increased in the South and West, utilities followed. The poorer states in the South and West had lower taxes, and the labor forces didn’t demand as much money. And being in a warmer clime meant that heating bills would be much less. Then, once it became economically feasible to ship goods longer distances, the heavy industry that is a railroad’s lifeblood started to leave the Northeast in droves (which is why I don’t have that much sympathy for those complaining today about losing jobs overseas…nobody gave a rat’s behind when the Northeast lost almost all their industry to other States).
Yes, PC is APU. Some knucklehead actually tried to copyright the PRR keystone logo a few years ago, and wrote letters to all the model manufacturers demanding payment for use of “his” logo. I g
The real irony was that in the late 50’s, the NYC was in talks with the C&O about a possible merger, and as you note, the PRR owned a sizable chunk of the N&W. Unfortunately, the imbeciles at the ICC put the kibosh on both arrangements, so C&O completed its acquisition of the B&O, the PRR was forced to sell its interest in the N&W, (which having billions of dollars worth of coal running through its veins was a major cash cow for the PRR) leaving the two rivals PRR and NYC with nowhere else to turn but to each other. The discussions began in 1959, about the same time the industrial base of the northeast began to deteriorate… The writing was on the wall for 10 years before the merger took place, another 10 years for everything to collapse and start rebuilding, and another 10 years for the lines to make enough sense for NS and CSX to even be interested in them.
The regulatory issues aside (which were a major factor in the problem) one can’t help but wonder if the original NYC-C&O and PRR-NW arrangements were allowed to flourish, if a lot of this torment could have been avoided…
“Hi… We’re from the government, and we’re here to help!”[#oops]
Lee
I would also add, No Way to Run a Railroad, which was written by the PC’s Chief Financial Officer, whose name I forget. I understand this book has been used as a textbook in business schools to teach how not to do business.
Most of PC’s problems had been in the works for years–both PRR and NYC let their physical plant deteriorate in the years before the merger. With that said, it’s no wonder PC had maintenance issues and poor track. Also, PC ran a huge amount of intercity and commuter trains. Those losses weren’t anything to sneeze at either. Throw in the fact that the PRR and NYC were rivals for over a century, and it’s no wonder things didn’t work.
PC had some neat locomotives though–where else could you see GG1s, E7s, and E8s running along SD45s? So many variations in paint schemes too–PRR, NYC, NH, with or without worms, the blue/yellow on the FL9s, ex Rio Grande F7s, and green and red passenger cars!
Join us! Dave did.