Pennsylvania Station, 1910

if you have an interest in the story of the effort by the PRR to get into Manhattan, then I suggest you both The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station by Lorraine Deihl and Conquering Gotham by Jill Jonnes.

Both are excellent treatises on the subject, with the Jonnes book providing a bit more insight into the characters involved.

A fantastic show/DVD to watch is "The Rise and Fall of Penn Station".  Produced by The American Experience, it chronicles how the station came to be and it's ultimate demise.  It was aired on PBS earlier this year and I was lucky enough to DVR it.  I highly recommend it to anyone interested on the subject.

I saw this a year or so ago and I was amazed at the amount of infrastructure the PRR built, all using their own funds as I understood it, and the size of the PRR at that time. Then only 50 years later they are going broke and end up tearing down the station in desperation. I am still amazed by all this. I guess the NYC was about the same way back then and also ended up going broke about the same time as the PRR. I basically know what happened, but it is still difficult to grasp that two railroads so big could fail in such a short time. I am glad things have turned around in modern times and what's left of the railroads are profitable once again.

If interested in the Pennsy's demise/ill fated merger with the New York Central into the Penn Central, there are a few books published over the years. One of my favorites is Riding the Pennsy to Ruin by the Wall Street Journal (1971). It is a small paperback, but it has some good stories in it...one that I'll always remember was a telling account of how cash-strapped the newly formed Penn Central was. For all the multiple reports being filled out by their accounting people, they actually had trouble paying for enough red pens to show all of the red ink the railroad was in.

Tom

I just finished reading Conquering Gotham, about the Pennsy efforts to get to Manhattan and erect Penn Station.  Fantastic book.

George

Didn't the Penn Central only last a few months and went bankrupt? Was thinking I read that somewhere recently. They both must have been pretty much gone before the merger if that was the case.

No, the Penn Central lasted from the merger of 1968 until it became one of the railroads included in Conrail in 1976.

Tom 

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