The wreck of the Penn Central book is crazy

If you liked that, I'd recommend Loving's "The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry" that was required reading for a course on the American Railroad.  It's about how the PRR/NYC merger came about (and also why it never could have worked as the corporate culture clash was too great) and how we ended up with AMTRAK, CONRAIL and, well, NS and CSX.  A good read into the business/regulation side of railroading.

Mark

+1 for 'The Men Who Loved Trains'. Great book about how the railroads were ruined by non-operating executives.

try NO WAY TO RUN A RAILROAD...by STEPHEN SALSBURY 1982  ISBN 0-70-054483-2

the untold story of the Penn Central crisis

I’ve read all of the books mentioned here. Very good reading and a fascinating story of monumental corporate failure.

Penn Central was doomed to fail from day one, but no one saw that at the time.

@PRRrat posted:

If you liked that, I'd recommend Loving's "The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry" that was required reading for a course on the American Railroad.  It's about how the PRR/NYC merger came about (and also why it never could have worked as the corporate culture clash was too great) and how we ended up with AMTRAK, CONRAIL and, well, NS and CSX.  A good read into the business/regulation side of railroading.

Mark

I read this book and was amazed by it.

I just placed my book order with my public library.

Hope to see you out rail-fanning. Gary 🚂

"The wreck of the PC" is excellent. Got a kick out of the PRR CFO calling down to the Philadelphia passenger equipment yard to "get his private car ready-----I'm going to New York City to talk to New York Central people".  The last gasp of the old order of things.

Think people are too quick to blame the executives running the PRR and the NYC. Many factors way beyond their control were destroying the income and business bases of these companies. Nothing could save them except "rationalization" (bringing costs in line with income).

I'll add my strong recommendation for "The Men Who Loved Trains."  Fascinating reading on multiple levels -- about the railroads and their history, about the men and their very different personalities and experiences who made the decisions, and also about the competition and market dynamics that played into all of it -- changing technology, consolidation, game theory (especially with NS / CSX and Conrail), politics, and plain old fashioned corruption and greed.  Simply a fabulous book.

I'll be the odd man out.  I didn't care for "The Men who loved Trains" and donated my copy.  

Of course it has the standard heaping praise for Alfred E. Pearlman and the usual deriding of Stuart Saunders.  And some strange love/hate for people who really didn't deserve the love or hate.

I'd prefer a book written by railroaders or analysts not a former bureaucrat.    I'll leave it at that.

I would concede that Perlman was probably not as great as some would believe and Saunders probably wasn't as bad, but Saunders was the top guy, and the buck has to stop somewhere.  His inept handling of David Bevan probably contributed to the demise of Penn Central as much as any one thing you can name.  As for the book, it was written by a reporter/author (Rush Loving) through the point of view of Jim McClellan, who whatever his faults might have been, was **** well more of a railroader than Saunders, John Snow, Drew Lewis, Dave LeVan or ANY of the clowns currently running any of the class one railroads. He spent most of his career taunting and antagonizing the bureaucrats to the point of firings snd near firings.  I think he would be rolling in his grave if he heard somebody refer to him as a bureaucrat.

What I like to do on any complicated or multi faceted subject is to pull information from as many sources as possible and kind of mentally stitch them all together into a “quilt” to try to get closer to the truth.  The Men Who Loved Trains, as well as McClellan’s own memoir are important but by all means not the only side of the story.  

I find it fascinating that the proposed NYC-C&O/B&O and PRR-N&W mergers that were poo-pooed then eventually came to be.

Jon

Obviously there have been a lot of books written on the subject. And yes, the railroads fell afoul of a changing country. The building of the interstate highway system made long haul trucking practical and also allowed for longer distance car travel, while air travel started taking over long distance travel. The railroads also faced ICC regulations that gave trucks and airlines an unfair advantage with pricing, even though trucks and planes were regulated, plus railroads thanks to regulation had a really hard time being able to drop routes/abandon unprofitable lines because of political pushback from the areas to be dropped.

I did some reading in grad school on the railroads and my take on it was that railroad management basically failed to anticipate the future, and from what I recall a lot of that was the people in charge were 'professional managers', of the school of thought "a good manager can manage anything." , and I personally think that doomed them. The problem was the railroads after the uncertainty of the 1930's depression, were obviously flying high during WWII and the immediate postwar era, and those 'good times' made them blind to the future (I also suspect some of them looked and said "the times are good, let's take everything we can out of it" ie greed as well). The railroads in the immediate post war period could and should have been pushing for regulation overhaul, and also evaluating what the future would bring. There were managers there doing that, you can see it with things like the somewhat silly "Jet Locomotive" the NYC tried, and there were attempts to make rail travel competitive in other ways,  modernizing train stations, trying to offer service the airlines couldn't. On the freight side there were people pushing to re-evaluate routes and I seem to recall with the NYC someone tried to promote using early computer systems to handle freight routing (talking mid 50's) but obviously got nowhere with it. 

In the end like most things it isn't as much heroes and villains (though I am sure there are both of those), it is more like typical human nature, being able to rationalize away the obvious and pretend like everything is fine, until it is too late. I think the management of both railroads, the ones making the decisions, were resting on their laurels rather than looking at change, and that is always fatal. It must have driven the railroad guys nuts, they likely saw what was happening on the ground and it was lost going up the food chain. I also will add that this didn't just affect the railroads, that is the story of much of corporate America, the railroads were 20 years ahead of the auto industry meltdown, for example, same kind of entrenched thinking, etc.

I walked to the library today to pick up, “The wreck of the Penn Central”

Hope to see you out rail-fanning: Gary 🚂

Like others I also enjoyed reading ’The Men Who Loved Trains’ I think primarily because it was contemporary.  I’ve read several books about railroading - circa the 1800s - (eg. The building of the first transcontinental railways in both the USA and Canada) and it was nice to read something more modern for a change.  Another book I found quite interesting is ‘Visionary Railroader’ written by H. Roger Grant about Jervis Langdon Jr. and the Transportation Revolution.  It chronicles the life of Mr. Langdon who was a key figure in the history of rail travel in the USA.  As president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Jervis had the opportunity to put progressive concepts into practice and IMO he was clearly ahead of his time.

I recall an NP executive saying that in retrospect, the court rulings that delayed the BN (GN-NP-CB&Q-SP&S) merger from 1966 to 1970 was really good luck. The extra time allowed them to get the transition set up more smoothly - and they could learn from the mistakes of the 1968 PC merger.

p.s. NYC really wasn't intending to put jet engines on top of their trains. They were doing a one-time experiment to see if high speed rail was feasible using existing mainline trackage. The only way to get a train to run at high speed rail rates (150-180 MPH) was to temporarily add a jet engine to an RDC. It basically failed, the RDC going that fast whipped ballast stones like a block from the track, causing safety issues.

I was on the NYC as Manager of Car Distribution Systems at the time of the M-497 experiment.  The project was primarily for PR purposes.  We already knew that high speed rail (120 mph version) was feasible on conventional railroad track with appropriate track alignment, curvature and super-elevation.  The PRR was running trains up to 112 with GG-1's.  On the one I rode, the speedometer gout up to only 100 mph.

It is completely erroneous to say the experiment was a failure.  So a few rocks were blown around, but everyone involved knew that we were not going to actually have trains powered by jet propulsion.  There were Turbo-trains, but those used a turbine to turn a generator to provide power to electric traction motors.

Malcolm Laughlin

PH1975 said "I did some reading in grad school on the railroads and my take on it was that railroad management basically failed to anticipate the future, and from what I recall a lot of that was the people in charge were 'professional managers', of the school of thought "a good manager can manage anything." , and I personally think that doomed them."

That was not the case on most railroads.  It was true of the original management of Conrail and the National railroad Passenger Corporation (brand named Amtrak).  The greater fault in the railroad business was that what they were doing had worked for 100 years so why change.  On a few railroads, e.g., NYC, we were challenging that philosophy.

In the Amtrak and Conrail cases, the Harvard B School / McKinsey & CO. approach dominated, and that was a primary reason that both were so bad at the beginning.  The McKinsey types didn't bother to get out on the railroad to see how things really work, and that is why they were never able to control what was done in the operating department.

At Amtrak, they hired a guy from PanAm as marketing VP, and he never understood the game.  The key execs traveled by air and didn't use business cars.

Conrail had a "Strategic Planning Department" run by a former McKinsey principal and staffed by MBA's who thought the B school case method could solve any problem.  They never did get their minds around how railroads operate.  I had an inside view of that having worked there on a consulting contract to develop the car utilization chapter of the 1978  business plan.  The later financial success of Conrail came after the appointment of an experienced railroad marketing man, Jim Hagen, as chief executive.  Only then was the operating department brought under control from the top.

ML

Wreck of the Penn Central is a book of rare accuracy.

From my first few years of working for the NYC, beginning in 1959, I found that a lot of what I had read in Trains magazine didn't describe typical railroading.  Journalists write about the stuff that is exceptional and interesting, not about day to day activity.  As a rule of thumb, I figure that what is written about railroads in the popular press is 30 to 40% wrong.

The PC book is an exception.  I was there, as and employee and later as a management consultant.  In contrast to the usual case, that book is at least 90% right.

I'll comment later on The Men Who oved Trains.  Jim McClellan was a good friend, and I've met no one who is close to him in strategic knowledge of how the railroad business works.

Malcolm Laughlin

I read "Wreck of the Penn Central" quite a few years ago.  What struck me was the financial games being played by the Pennsy's financial officers (Bevan, etc). My reaction was that it sounded like a dress rehearsal for Enron.

As for railroad in the 40's and 50's not changing with the times, an interesting book to read is "New York Central and the Trains of the Future." What I find interesting about it was how Robert Young wanted to change the way the New York Central operated its passenger trains. He wanted to: Eliminate all switching of passenger trains by removing all head end cars (baggage and RPO), thus reducing costs of operating them, plus improving schedules by reducing time at stations; operate passenger trains only to the maximum distance that they were time competitive with planes; operate passenger trains with only one locomotive, hence the interest in lighter cars (also saving money).  Apparently Perlman wanted to eliminate all passenger trains from the Central, and did what he could to undermine the efforts of Young.

Stuart

@mlaughlinnyc - I don’t dispute anything you’ve said but just want to clarify a misquote that you made, because it was @bigkid who attended grad school - not me (although I wish I had).  😉

Here's something that you all might find interesting regarding Penn Central.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmyYqfNYnc

Jon - interesting tape.  As noted, the horrendous number of derailments experienced on PC.  There seems to be a growing number of derailments on today's railroads.  Could that be a warning for the industry?

I believe that derailments today are a different phenomenon.   At PC, the cause of a large percentage of derailments was quite clear - deferred maintenance.  Th track wasn't fit to run trains.

Today's derailments are a combination of many factors, including much longer trains more prone to brake and slack problems and a host of other problems.  You don't see deferred maintenance as an accident cause nearly as much as we did in the 70's.

ML

@mlaughlinnyc posted:

I believe that derailments today are a different phenomenon.   At PC, the cause of a large percentage of derailments was quite clear - deferred maintenance.  Th track wasn't fit to run trains.

Today's derailments are a combination of many factors, including much longer trains more prone to brake and slack problems and a host of other problems.  You don't see deferred maintenance as an accident cause nearly as much as we did in the 70's.

Just my opinion but, I disagree! As a result of PSR, the major class 1 railroads have drastically reduced personnel across the board, including Mechanical Department, MofW, Operating Department, and supervision.

ML

Another worthwhile read IMHO is "From The River To The Sea" by John Sedgwick about the fierce competition between the Santa Fe and Rio Grande and the building of both lines. Off topic but still wanted to share.

Jim K