They would do the absolute minimal work and many of the railroads in the northeast where nearly or actually bankrupt. That was why Amtrak and Conrail were formed. It's no coincidence that they both were formed in the 70's. Heck many railroads had issues staying out of bankruptcy to being with.
Simple No Amtrak TL
- Thread starter Bureaucromancer
- Start date
marathag
Banned
North/South always had it rough, with bulk freight having to compete with Barge traffic on Rivers.
CNW tried most of the '60s to buy Rock Island, as did UP
Both wanted to take some bits, and sell/abandon the remaining.
UP already had their hooks deep into IC
MOPAC was in Trusteeship from the Depression till the mid '50s and was probably in the best shap of any of the major N/S RRs, not that it helped them before being gobbled up
Timeline of Class I railroads (1930–1976) - Wikipedia
To echo Bureaucromancer...what era?
1890's
-The Rock Island and the Frisco were both held by the Moore-Ried group. That could become a full on merger (and a pretty good one, too, imo).
-You might get a B&O/RDG combination here.
Early 1900's:
-Burlington Northern (aka Northern Securites) is a natural. If you want to come up with a way that the GN/CB&Q quietly combine under Hill control without the fight for the NP (or the Justice Department pries it away with the Sherman Act), you may butterfly away the MILW's Pacific Coast Extension.
-Along with that, the Harriman Lines UP/SP merger. The C&NW may eventually be included...but Harriman already had a stake in the IC.
-George Gould's ill-fated "true transcontinental" system manages to survive (WP/D&RGW/MP/WAB/W&LE/P&WV/WM).
-Or maybe JP Morgan finishes monopolizing New England with a NH/B&M/MEC(...BAR?) system before the NH breaks under the strain and goes bankrupt?
Between the Wars:
-The most obvious ones are the ICC's Final Consolidation Plan; it's progenitor, the Ripley Plan; and the various proposed northeastern region counter proposals.
-The FEC doesn't survive bankruptcy as an independent line, and gets merged into the SOU.
Postwar:
-I believe this was when John Barringer floated the idea of merging the small midwest "regionals" (C&A/M&StL/Monon...maybeCGW-I don't recall) into one system.
-C&O/B&O/NYC was proposed.
-PRR/N&W/WAB was also proposed as a counterweight to that.
-I think the NKP/DL&W explored merging.
-UP/RI is the elephant in this room.
You could, of course, adopt your own plan (I will also make a shameless plug for the fact that I have put together an AH merger plan dating from the 1928-1933 era...not for any TL, just as What I Would Have Done scenario).
The main issues and one I don't think gets enough attention is that railways were simply not trusted to operate in a fair or legal way and there was justification for that view, A problem is that many of your ideas go against the pubic mood of the time. In the case of the New Heaven J.P. Morgan tried to make a commuter railroad into a rival of railroads with more opportunities to grow. Now there's a thought If a owner of it saw the raise of suburban living maybe there's a chance for it to live.
These are interesting ideas. If you assume that a subsidy program started around the mid-1950s, that would have been the same time-frame when consolidation begins to happen in a big way (as has already been brought up). So having a smaller number of bigger railroads might help take care of the "branding" issue (less of an issue back then, of course, since more people were familiar with passenger railroads). If, say, two big systems in the Northeast were built around the NYC and PRR (as they should have been; arguably today's Norfolk Southern and CSX are a modern version of that, the 1996 breakup of Conrail being a "correction" of the original Penn Central mistake), they would stand out in the public eye in the same way that, say, Southwest and United do as airlines, even while "air travel" functions as a brand.
Whether a privately owned Amtrak would end up in the same position as OTL Amtrak may have to do with with the railroad's perception of their degree of ownership and investment in the joint venture. If this company made money, and (let's say) ten big railroads each own a tenth of it, their profits would increase the value of the railroad's stock holdings, which is good financial news for them. They might have more incentive to encourage Amtrak to make a profit in this scenario - and they'd be in a better position to make steps to make that happen.
The problem is from what I understand railroads saw passenger service as unprofitable and in addition many railroads in the northeast where having the basic reasons for their existence being called into question. Passenger service had declined by nearly 30% between 1946 and 1958 to less then 50% and freight was increasingly carried by truck. To be honest saving private passenger service is probably not feasible once cars and trucks are capable of long distance travel safely and fairly reliably. And actually the desire for good roads was because of the bicycle at least in the US in the 1890's.
Once cars became common (and cheap enough) the writing was on the wall for passenger rail .... about 1905, I think ..
Passenger rail simply CAN'T be made profitable when faced with cars and/or air (USA and any other 'spread out' nation). No amount of fiddling with dates of mergers is going to change that.
If you want a POD where 'short distance' passenger rail 'works' for a little longer, you are going to have to eliminate Henry Ford ... and anyone else who comes up with the idea of making cheap cars using a moving production line ... Or place massive taxes on car owership so cars are the preserve of the wealthy (and the common man will have no other choice than bus or rail).
For long distance passenger rail, well the Wright brothers will have to bite the dust (although to be honest I doubt a fatal crash at Kittyhawk would have the same effect on airplanes as the Hindenburg had on airships ..) .. Or again, massive taxes on air travel ...
Massive Tax on transport, of course, will really distort the free market. What effect a Car Tax would have on trade is anyone's guess (no mass manufacturing in Detroit may well mean USA looses WW2)
Passenger rail simply CAN'T be made profitable when faced with cars and/or air (USA and any other 'spread out' nation). No amount of fiddling with dates of mergers is going to change that.
If you want a POD where 'short distance' passenger rail 'works' for a little longer, you are going to have to eliminate Henry Ford ... and anyone else who comes up with the idea of making cheap cars using a moving production line ... Or place massive taxes on car owership so cars are the preserve of the wealthy (and the common man will have no other choice than bus or rail).
For long distance passenger rail, well the Wright brothers will have to bite the dust (although to be honest I doubt a fatal crash at Kittyhawk would have the same effect on airplanes as the Hindenburg had on airships ..) .. Or again, massive taxes on air travel ...
Massive Tax on transport, of course, will really distort the free market. What effect a Car Tax would have on trade is anyone's guess (no mass manufacturing in Detroit may well mean USA looses WW2)
Question for Bureaucromancer: Would you see subsidies as being aimed more at covering passenger operations per se (e.g., subsidizing service on a particular route or set of routes, along the lines of OTL Amtrak) or more at infrastructure (covering maintenance and capital projects)? Because the latter would also directly impact freight operations.
Been re-cogitating about this question a bit more, and decided to approach it from scratch...
No Amtrak but a condition of "Staggers 1970" is continued passenger train operation. Hmmm...
Otl Amtrak axed a lot of trains on startup day so those are going to continue. But for how long? A lot of these trains were down to a single coach. It won't be long before that becomes a single passenger. What mechanism will exist to finally pull the plug on these zombies? Then, we might just be back to the same old same old of driving passengers away in order to justify discontinuance. So...Staggers without Amtrak may mean the complete end of passenger rail by 1980.
If this early Staggers Act trims passenger service down to the Amtrak startup network, with a strong (or at least convoluted enough) procedure to consider train offs-or none allowed at all-then we have trains. But what form do they take? I supposed things will start with cannibalizing the existing fleet to do cheap upgrades on the remaining runs. If we don't butterfly away the 1973 Oil Embargo, there will still be an upsurge in patronage. Where it goes from there...
At the other end of the spectrum, any non Amtrak service is going to be carried on no further than the letter of the law requires. If discontinuances are off the table, then cutting costs is the only direction things are going to go. Automat food service, bare bones stations, minimal/no staffing, and fewer, more crowded coaches (kiss sleeping cars goodbye). With any luck, passenger service (even on transcontinental runs) will resemble little more than a contemporary commuter train. And let's not even think about timekeeping! So, passenger rail would be a combination of old commuter equipment, without onboard amenities of any kind, operating from bus-stop stations, with Canadian level schedule keeping.
I think I wish I hadn't rethought it. So depressing.
The biggest butterfly is what is going to happen to Penn Central? The Staggers Act might have let it survive as an atl proto-Conrail but PC was doomed from Day One. Now, it won't be relieved of much of its passenger losses (so much short haul commuter traffic), even if the bankruptcy court allows reorganization instead of liquidation. The CNJ is going the same route, and you could make the same argument about the C&NW.
In this scenario, long-distance trains would indeed be doomed. Probably only commuter services and some state-supported corridor services (for those states that chose to support them) would survive. The only long-distance trains around would be if somebody like the Rocky Mountaineer people decided here and there (with the cooperation of the railroads - which may not be forthcoming) to initiate high-end luxury "cruise" trains.
marathag
Banned
USA hit maximum RR Trackage in 1913, before Henry Ford did the moving Assembly Line at Highland Park, recently opened in 1910.
68k were built in 1912 and priced under $700 for most models, and 170k made in 1913, year of peak rail.
With the Assembly line fully utilized, 500k a year made, and price dropped under $400 in 1916.
marathag
Banned
Chicago Great Western started Trailer on Flatcar service in the 1930s.
It's possible that REA could 'piggyback' on that, and not be totally done by 1975, with UPS taking over the small package delivery service market.
You can’t deregulate the railroads and still insist they keep passenger travel.
Passenger trains in general are not profitable in this day and age most places. Even in Europe they are typically subsidized. Directly or indirectly.
The railroads typically ran the name trains as part of advertising not for profit but they got to the point that passenger levels were all but non existent.
And the post office trains helped keep the trains going but in effect that is just another subsidy.
The minute you tell railroads they don’t have to keep passenger trains the passenger trains are gone. The original point of Amtrak was to let passenger trains die off, it was only Congress insisting on keeping passenger trains and paying for Amtrak that keep passenger trains in the 70s.
And deregulation does not mean automatic approval for mergers. Any large company such as Railroads or telecommunications or even significantly larger retail or manufacturers has to get permission to merge. So deregulation does not mean we will get mergers that were denied
Passenger trains in general are not profitable in this day and age most places. Even in Europe they are typically subsidized. Directly or indirectly.
The railroads typically ran the name trains as part of advertising not for profit but they got to the point that passenger levels were all but non existent.
And the post office trains helped keep the trains going but in effect that is just another subsidy.
The minute you tell railroads they don’t have to keep passenger trains the passenger trains are gone. The original point of Amtrak was to let passenger trains die off, it was only Congress insisting on keeping passenger trains and paying for Amtrak that keep passenger trains in the 70s.
And deregulation does not mean automatic approval for mergers. Any large company such as Railroads or telecommunications or even significantly larger retail or manufacturers has to get permission to merge. So deregulation does not mean we will get mergers that were denied