I agree, the pinstripes should be smaller. I feel like the nose should be changed a bit, but I still can't put my finger on how.
John, the thing about the big railroads is that, especially in the northeast, there was no way for them all to be profitable if they didn't start merging out of their own territory. With the PC merger, they systematically ruined the EL, L&HR, and the BAR (in 1969 with they let all of Maine's potato harvest rot in Selkirk yard). Then, after they did all of the unrepairable damage, they too declared bankruptcy themselves in 1970. It was the largest bankruptcy in history until 2001's Enron collapse. To say that it just didn't work out is an understatement. It was a combination of all of the wrong choices at all of the wrong times. For instance, had the New Haven not been included into PC, maybe it could have been better fro everyone. The L&HR still would have had the NH connection at Maybrook to funnel traffic over their line, and in turn, the EL may have had some bridge traffic as well. The original merger in 1968 between the NYC and PC came out in the black, but the NH had a larger amount of debt than the NYC and PRR combined! PC is also somewhat responsible for Cleveland's anti-rail attitude in the 70's and 80's. They expected PC to bring more traffic through and refurbish Terminal Tower, because they were viewed as a profitable company in their first two years. When PC failed to act, Cleveland stated to distrust the railroads, and it was all downhill from there.
With the MILW, don't overlook the fact that they got double-taxed on the Pacific extension the year they ripped it up. They thought all of their deficit was coming from that line when, in reality their deficit was coming from the railroad's trunk where their granger branch lines were losing them tons of money. They ripped up the only profitable part of the company only to have the government come back and tell them that it was profitable. It could have been even more profitable if they hadn't deferred maintenance so much to prop up their bottom line for the merger with the Rock Island that never happened anyway. The PE was plagued with slow orders, taking away all of the benefits that a more direct routing had to offer.
Well sure there is sometimes no other way to keep growing a business once you've saturated your market and abilities within an area. For computer companies it's new technology and then mergers and acquisitions; for railroads it's mergers and acquisition of partners and of course building within its own region. Mergers I've noticed occur usually at the mature end of a business' growth and this is especially true of the railroads. They've already matured and now are merging.
I agree with what you said. The PennCentral didn't know how to get out of its own way. This was a lot to do with management in-fighting and disparate systems. They would have been better off having a parent company, however, operating as two distinct companies. The New York Central, I believe was in better shape than the Pennsylvania at the same time. They had already started rebuilding and streamlining their system long before the PC merger. The Pennsylvania was less keen on that and kept running business as usual as their customer base moved away. This is very much like Kodak and Polaroid in the end as they kept going, business as usual with film, while the world was moving to digital technology. Oh, they dabbled in the new technology, but not enough and too little and too late to do any good.
Yes, the PC sucking up the poorer New Haven is what did them in. The New Haven too was facing increased tax penalties with dropping off revenues, and increased operational costs brought on with its unsubsidized transit operations. They not only had commuter services in and out of New York, but also Springfield, Boston, Hartford, Providence, and Worcester, among other areas. This too was long before the state transit authorities, under UMTA, pitched in any help. As I said the taxes too were pretty high. They paid through their nose, like the other companies did for their property and infrastructure while the highways and airports were getting a free ride. We have to remember too that the NH management, which was put in place by McGuiness was sucking any profits out and saddling the company with big debt. For some reason the poor B&M and New Haven were always victims of this kind of operation. JP Morgan did this to the New Haven back in the early 1900s, and when the big panic occurred, it put both companies into bankruptcy as he pulled out the cash.
I too feel that if the PC hadn't gotten a hold of the New Haven, things would have been different. I feel they used this as a way to do in a small competitor who took a business away from both companies as they fed freight to their largest competitors in the regions - the Lehigh Valley and the EL. With the burning of the Poughkeepsie bridge, this killed off their competitors right there and then. In addition because the PC was so inept and very disorganized, it killed the BAR, and MEC, as well as the Boston and Maine which relied on them for all kinds of traffic. As a kid I remember the BAR potato trains coming through Haverhill. They would run one after another, sometimes with engines in the middle of long strings of boxcars. By 1969 I had moved away, and no longer lived near the tracks, but noticed big changes in the railroads when we would pick my dad up at the Bradford depot. As a young kid all of 8 years old, I had no idea what had happened except that there were fewer freights and no more passenger trains on the B&M.
I had forgotten about that aspect of the MILW. The accounting error is what pushed them to rip up the line. It's sad when you think about it. If they had put more into that portion we would still have that end in operation, and probably more so today with the container, oil, and coal destined to the Pacific Northwest. In July 2012 I had the opportunity to take a trip out that way, and we traveled along the route on parallel US12. I didn't realize what it was at the time, otherwise I would have taken pictures of it. The bigger bridges, all concrete, along with telegraph poles, are still in place, however, the smaller wooden bridges and the track is long gone. Everything else is ripped out, and I mean ripped out completely with no trace at all that there was even a railroad there in some places other than those bridges and telegraph poles indicating where the ROW was.
