Haldeman was grasping at straws, trying to stake LV's future on a traffic base (intermodal) that was marginally profitable at that time. Multi-trailer rates were set close to margin (in some cases below) in keen competition for third-party business. D&H assumed LV's Oak Island intermodal operation upon creation of Conrail, and was forced to largely withdraw from this market when it realized it was generating a loss of $3 million per year. I wasn't aware of this, or Maxwell's push for TR into E St Louis. Bill, this is very interesting material, and I'm interested in seeing more of your recollections when you get time. Paul B Paul, Disclaimer: Let's acknowledge that any time anyone says that corporation "feels" or "thinks" one way or another, they are talking in shorthand (at best). I think it would be fair to say that the EL/LV friction wasn't so much a product of rational, objective thought as it was of the raw contest for the insufficient traffic that remained available. EL wanted LV to go away, period. Richard Saunders captured this nicely as he described how EL men felt watching LV couple onto the Apollo in Buffalo. I'm remembering that nice piece of writing from his awkwardly-titled book The Railroad Mergers and the Coming of Conrail (Greenwood Press, long out of print) and I am not sure it made it into his later, expanded book on the same subject, Merging Lines. As I recall, G.W. Maxwell was more focused on trying to get trackage rights over the Big Four to East St. Louis, so as to avoid dependence on N&W, than he was in MARC-EL. The EL trustees were more focused on trying to get the Marion Division included in Conrail (so they could be paid a good price for it), than they were on MARC-EL. Ben Franklin's adage about hanging together vs. hanging separately applies here. I could have added previously that LV trustee Robert Haldeman made the rounds on Capitol Hill in late 1975 trying to pitch a plan whereby LV would reorganize outside Conrail with a business plan based almost wholly on serving as N&W's intermodal gateway to the Northeast. My boss asked me to sit in on that presentation. It was unclear whether N&W actually supported the plan, given John Fishwicks' firewall theory, but Haldeman wanted us to believe that it would. At the time, of course, EL was teed up to become part of Chessie. WDB The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List http://EL-List.railfan.net/ To Unsubscribe: http://Lists.Railfan.net/erielackunsub.html ------------------------------
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