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Trains Magazine 1965 June Japan wins speed sweepstakes
Trains Magazine 1965 June
June 1965Volume 25 Number 8
NEWS - -3
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS -8
ONE FOR DAD - -18
JAPAN TAKES BLUE RIBBON - 20 LONG-LEGGED LOCOMOTIVES 32
PHOTO SECTION-38
RIDE BEHIND STEAM44
WEST LIBERTY - -48
Railway post office 50Second section 54
Of books and trains 52Running extra 55
Interchange 58
COVER: Japan's new Tokyo-Osaka speedster; and Vernonia, South Park & Sunset's 2-6-2.
NYC+PRR, OKAY-BUT EL?
ONLY yesterday, or so it seems, those two onetime aristocrats of Eastern railroading, Pennsylvania and New York Central, would barely nod at one another socially and there was neither hint of nor cause for romance. Pennsy was No. 1- and had been so for so long that it never occurred to Philadelphia that the Pennsylvania could be anything else. When hard times finally did take their toll, Central first sought Chessie, then B&O, finally both. But for a dozen straight years (through 1963) the one-time giants between them lost 18.1 million dollars per annum on their rail operations, managing to survive only through their investments in other properties (notably N&W for PRR, hotels for NYC). In 1958 Stuart T. Saunders gave Norfolk & Western a green light toward what, as it worked out, would be an inevitable Big Three of mergers in the East. Finally, with N&W bidding for NKP and Wabash after swallowing VGN, and Chessie winding up in exclusive control of B&O, Central and Pennsy decided to marry, and so informed the I.C.C. on March 9, 1962.
Three years later, after sitting through 129 days of hearings in 18 cities involving 461 witnesses, 337 attorneys, and 40,000 pages of testimony, Examiners Jerome K. Lyle and Henry C. Darmstadter affixed their blessing on what would be the largest privately owned railroad in the world: a 19,631-mile Pennsylvania New York Central Transportation Company with assets totaling 52 billion dollars. The examiners listened to but were unmoved by Justice Department antitrust charges; pleas of New Haven commuters; and requests for inclusion by Boston & Maine, Delaware & Hudson, and Erie Lackawanna. Thanks to a Saunders-sparked agreement with unions representing 98 per cent of organized employees which guaranteed that nobody would be removed from the payroll because of the consolidations, labor's opposition was muted. Size, said the examiners, was not the issue; the issue was how the petitioners could survive as a viable free enterprise. The answer: merger.
Specifically, the examiners would have the Commission reject the collective bids of B&M, D&H, and EL for inclusion into Penn-Central on grounds that these roads better belong in one of the other two big Eastern systems and that such injury as they might sustain from NYC +PRR would be offset by an indefinite delay in approving Penn-Central. D&H (and through it, in effect, B&M) should be granted trackage rights over Pennsy from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Hagerstown, Md., so as to afford a physical connection with
N&W, advised the examiners; and the whole record should be held open for 10 years just in case marriage with N&W or C&O-B&O does not work out. New Haven, said Lyle and Darmstadter, was an iron horse of another color. It has no hope of being annexed by N&W and its freight service, albeit "marginal at best," is vital to southern New England and would be struck a mortal blow by exclusion from NYC +PRR. NH's passenger service was a local dilemma, and the examiners excluded it unless local governments underwrote the costs of
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