Ted,
at the end of WWII, the PRR's infrastructure was shot. Beat all to heck by the enormous amount of non-stop wartime traffic over its rails. PRR management took rehabilitating the road as their top priority for expenditure, deferring rebuilds on several classes of cars. Prior to the war, the PRR had spent a king's fortune electrifying the mainline to Washington and Harrisburg. Although wartime revenue was a big boost to the PRR bottom line, its was not nearly enough to cover all the bases needed in 1946. Add to that management's decision to finally begin purchasing diesel engines in significant quantities. Therein may lie the reason for the high percentage of bad order cars.
Yes, the PRR suffered a great deal from the new love affair with automobiles. The road attempted to unload as many revenue draining branches as the government would allow, and they had a lot of branch lines. But those were slow in gaining approval from the Feds.
As for plummeting carloads for coal. That really did not happen en mass until the mid-50's.
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