(erielack) A controverial topic? :)

[paultup_@_comcast.net]

Hi folks,

While out and about today, I got thinking while driving home (never a good thing ;) about the DL&W and its grand place in the railroad world (this line of thought occurred while I was driving alongside the DL&W on Route 80 in Mount Arlington, NJ). The DL&W only ran between Hoboken and Buffalo (with several branches), and from the start, the big "cash cow" on the road was its anthracite traffic. It's what helped fund all the Lackawanna's engineering masterpieces and turned it into a "super railroad" (as it's been labeled in several magazine articles). But after the anthracite dried up, it had a harder time with standard manifest freight since it's western terminus was Buffalo, not Chicago. Granted, most of the Chicago-bound traffic went via partner NKP, but was this a result of myopic thinking on the part of railroad management? PRR and NYC both had through roads from the NYC market to Chicago, and they took a lion's share of that traffic. Instead of spending all that money on its v
arious engineering projects, would it have been more prudent for DL&W to build or acquire a line between Buffalo and Chicago to compete for the lucrative NYC-Chicago traffic market?

Yes, the various engineering projects did help to increase speeds and reduce train transit times, but perhaps some money could have been used for expansion. Granted, by the time the DL&W got into thinking about this (such as a potential NKP merger), it was already too late, but if they had approached this tact much earlier, could they have been successful?

And just so I'm not perceived as "road biased," I thought a similar question about the Erie. Why this railroad, that had great high-wide clearances and a line from the NY market to Chicago, go through so many bankrupties and was only able to get a small portion of that traffic, compared to its NYC and PRR competitors? Was the Erie so cash-starved (and in bankruptcy) that they simply couldn't improve its main line to make it more competitive with the other roads?

Thoughts like this make the EL merger even more interesting in my mind, but again, "too little, too late." It's interesting that EL's sales people finally began to capitalize on the advantages of its NY-Chi line by capturing lucrative UPS traffic. It just seems that the DL&W and Erie had two fundamentally different problems, but if a merger happened "way back when," (and if you took the strong feelings of the two roads' employees out of the picture), could they have been a successful road? The DL&W's money could have been used to improve the Erie main from Binghamton-Chicago, bringing it up to "Lackawanna standards" and making it a more competitive road, and the Erie's line opening up the Lackawanna's former west end of Buffalo. Or am I being overly simplistic?

Just my random thoughts for the day. :)

        - Paul

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