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Re: (erielack) A controverial topic?



Perhaps trash is the new coal.

Railroads really bank on getting a lot of something to somewhere. 
Perhaps the only large export we have from the east is trash...

Sadly

George

Montgomery, Edward T wrote:
> Good points from Paul B.  Lackawanna, LV, RDG, CNJ, and Erie were dependent upon anthracite for originating traffic and when that disappeared, so did the profits.  Erie went to Chicago, but there wasn't much out on that end to generate profits.  The said state of affairs with the dependence on anthracite can be seen in the demise of the NYO&W with its bankruptcy in the 1930s.  The O&W did what they could to improve their railroad but there wasn't much online industry to support the rail operation - very similar to the other anthracite carriers.  The exodus of the old "smokestack" industries between Hoboken and Paterson kept DL&W and Erie alive a little longer.  There was a chance for success with piggyback freight.  If the Staggers Act could have been enacted in the mid-50s, things might have turned out much differently.  The need for businesses to located next to a rail line disappeared with intermodal freight.  Lackawanna figured that out quite early, but didn't have the
 f!
>  reedom to initiate the new form of freight delivery that came after Conrail.
>  
> Ed Montgomery
>  
>  
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: erielack-owner_@_lists.elhts.org on behalf of Paul Brezicki
> Sent: Mon 2/19/2007 11:33 AM
> To: EL Mailing List; Paul Tupaczewski
> Subject: Re: (erielack) A controverial topic?
> 
> 
> 
> Paul,
> 
> What's not a good thing, thinking or driving home?  ;-)  I'll weigh in with my thoughts on this, probably not a good thing either because I'm getting rather cynical in my old age about the RR scene. Concerning a possible NKP-DL&W merger: it's unlikely it would have got past the ICC. Have you heard about the Rock Island merger case? It took the ICC 12 years to cross the Missouri River, and that was after 1960. By that time the Rock was rubble and nobody wanted it. A proposed merger through the Buffalo gateway would have had LV, Wabash and probably every other Eastern road weighing in. After being held up by the ICC for perhaps decades, any approval would have had more strings than Gulliver was tied down with. There's a reason why the Eastern RR map remained virtually the same from 1900-1960. The EL merger was approved because the ICC knew the partners were too feeble to pose much of a threat. The Erie simply had an inferior NY-Chicago route and no matter how much it was imp
ro!
>  ved, it would always be 10% longer than the PRR, hillier than the NYC, and with more curvature than both. We always gripe about regulation, but without its designs of protecting weaker competitors and preserving the status quo, our beloved Erie would have vanished during the Depression.
> 
> Even if approved, NKP-DL&W or any other combination you could think of would have failed. In the environment of regulation, government-subsidized competition and de-industrialization, Northeast railroading was not a "viable business model". That's why all mileage that was not supported by the Pocahontas region coal trade (N&W, C&O) was in bankruptcy by 1972 (with the exception of bridge road D&H). EL was doomed before it was created. The only possible alignment that might have survived was the proposed N&W+PRR and C&O/B&O+NYC. The logic of that proposal was validated when it was more or less achieved with the Conrail breakup. The marketplace will eventually establish the superior choice when artificial constraints (like regulation) are removed.
> 
> Paul B
> 
> From: paultup_@_comcast.net
> Subject: (erielack) A controverial topic? :)
> 
> 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
 o!
>  n 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?
> 
> 
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