RE: (erielack) A controversial topic?

["Paul Brezicki" <doctorpb_@_bellsouth.net>]

Scuyler and List,

The problem with the DL&W-Wabash route was the slow and expensive carfloat across the St Clair River. Wabash considered its mainline to be Detroit-KC/St Louis; the Buffalo line across S Ontario was an appendage. With the 1964 N&W-NKP-Wabash merger, Wabash Buffalo traffic from the west was imeeditely rerouted onto NKP at Ft Wayne and the line across S Ontario was then used for eastbound traffic originating at Detroit (most headed for EL) and the St Thomas Ont assembly plant.

I'm puzzled by the reference to a "non-merger affiliation with Santa Fe". What kind of affiliation would that be, beyond the pair of runthrough trains the roads operated in the later EL years?? Anything beyond regular interchange risked arousing the ire of other connections at Chicago with potential loss of traffic. Back in 1967, ATSF and NYC tested an expedited NY-LA intermodal train. When SP's Biaggini got wind of this, he called Central's Al Perlman and threatened to divert 50,000 annual carloads of perishables off the Cotton Belt at E St Louis. Perlman pulled the plug on the new service, and that's how Super C became a pure ATSF train.

The problem with this "forensic railroad management" is that it ignores or minimizes the fact that RR's in the 20th Century were largely shaped by outside forces beyond their control, and by and large the decisions that were made were the best ones within the severe constraints imposed by public policy the resultant structure of the industry itself. The savviest possible management may have postponed the bankruptcies of EL and PC a year or two at most.

Paul B

Schuyler Larrabee said:

DL&W would have been better off (as we all
have discussed ad nauseam) with NKP, or possibly with Wabash, via Niagara Falls.  That would have
taken some work to make a good connection, but if you look at this map from 1953
http://home.comcast.net/~wabashrr/images/WabSysMap1949.jpg
(there are probably better maps available on line) that could have been a formidable competitor for
the other main trunk lines.  It even gets past Chicago!
  
> Erie on the other hand could have formed, without a merger, an  affiliation 
> with Santa Fe. They were both in the position to do so. If that took  place, 
> that would have given both a trans-continental railroad without having to  
> answer to the ICC. Again, the Chicago interchange.


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