Transportation
Railroads
- The same law that creates the Interstate Highway System also provides a pile of money for railroads in recognition of their superhuman efforts during World War II. This is enough to begin the massive improvements of the 1960s to 1980s field, as the development of first computer tracking systems, airplane-style cargo boxes and aluminum-and-fiberglass shipping skids in the 1960s, container-on-flat-car, trailer-on-flat-car and newer types of freight cars (including hi-cube boxcars, tri-level autoracks, larger tank cars and large covered hoppers) in the 1970s and the Iron Highway and RoadRailer systems and double-stacked container trains of the 1980s. Many railroads (including Burlington Northern, Santa Fe, New York Central, Southern, Rio Grande and Southern Pacific) also took advantage of other railroads' view that passenger service was uneconomic to get better trains and equipment for cheap in the late 1950s, creating the system of excellent long-distance trains which would be the genesis of the trains that Amtrak would take over in 1975.
- Railroad mergers reduce the number of operational major railroads from over 60 at the end of World War II to eighteen by the summer of 1979, when a massive scandal breaks out over Union Pacific's actions in attempting to sabotage the Rock Island and its actions during its merger with the Missouri Pacific, which results in a moratorium on railroad mergers by the Interstate Commerce Commission effective August 1, 1979. This moratorium is largely made permanent by the Surface Transportation Act of 1986, which despite this also provides money to improve the safety and operational abilities of the railroads. The moratorium does, however, create round after round of trading and business agreements amongst the surviving railroads, each seeking to gain advantage.
- The Penn Central merger never happens owing to mid-1960s research by the stockholders of the New York Central, allowing the NYC to push its way through the 1960s and 1970s and prosper starting in the early 1980s. The Pennsylvania, however, declares bankruptcy in 1966, and a major ecological disaster caused by a bridge collapse that drops a train of chemicals into the Ohio River in June 1973 results in the creation of Conrail and the reorganization of the Northeast's railroads. Pennsylvania, New Haven, Boston and Maine, Central of New Jersey and several other smaller lines were swept into Conrail, along with the bankrupt (but deemed critically important) Milwaukee Road. The New York Central and Erie Lackawanna go through the merger, with the majority of the Reading went to the New York Central and the Erie Lackawanna gets access to Boston, Detroit and Columbus and a bunch of Pennsy secondaries in the Midwest and a secondary main line from Baltimore to Oswego, NY, while Canadian Pacific took over the Lehigh Valley and the Delaware and Hudson soon was able to extend its operations as far west as Pittsburgh and as far south as Washington. As messy as the creation was, it would prove hugely beneficial as it allowed no less than five railroads by 1980 to be slugging out for the Midwest's and Northeast's rail traffic and allowed Conrail's ex-Milwaukee Road mainline to be a vital transportation corridor that Conrail would upgrade almost constantly (as the Milwaukee had) from 1973 until the mid-1990s.
- One effect of the merger moratorium, however, was the scuttling of a proposed Santa Fe-Southern Pacific merger, resulting in SP being sold back to its employees in 1982....and starting one of the greatest American business recovery stories of the 20th Century. SP's status as a California icon was played to the fullest by its new management, and the company did everything it possibly could to earn money early on - but its excellent facilities proved able to handle huge loads, agreements with trucking firms and co-operatives massively increased the railroad's perishables traffic, investments in everything from building materials to telecommunications lines to energy facilities earned the company billions in income. The company bought the ex-Great Northern Portland-Vancouver line in 1984, merged the Frisco into its system in 1986 (many investors in this case traded SLSF stock for SP stock, and most who did this benefitted enormously), rebuilt the ex-Chicago Great Western mainlines from Kansas City to Chicago and Minneapolis between 1988 and 1991 (they would also buy the bankrupt Chicago, Missouri and Western in 1990) and north from Odgen, Utah, to Boise, Idaho, between 1991 and 1993, then completing the biggest new rail project in decades in the 1990s by building a mainline from Salt Lake City through Utah and Nevada to its main system at Barstow, California, as well as reclaiming lines into Mexico in the 1990s, running from Mexicali and Nogales to Guadalajara, Manzanillo and Irapuato. On top of its huge railroad expansion efforts, the dot-com boom and a deal with billionaire Philip Anschultz to grow the telecom assets of the firm. This deal makes SP a pile when they bail out of the resulting Sprint and Qwest Communications companies in September 2000. SP also got into ocean shipping business when they purchased the American President Lines ocean shipping firm in 1997. The overall result was a company that grew in value from $420 million (the sale price in 1982) to over $28 Billion by 2012, and making hundreds of its employees into multimillionaires. SP would be one of the great success stories of employee-owned firms (though not by any means the only one) from the early 1980s onwards.
- After the revelations of Union Pacific's conduct in 1979, the struggling Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific found new funds for its operations from investors, and the growth in traffic in the 1980s resulted in new markets and profitability, particularly as the railroad narrowed its focus into its trunk routes connecting Chicago with Minneapolis, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston and Memphis, while the line connected New Orleans to its network in 1983 and in 1985 added an ex-Milwaukee Road line to expand from Minneapolis to Duluth, followed by the purchase of an ex-Great Northern line from Burlington Northern to connect to Winnipeg. The latter proved fortuitous - As the Rock Island's grain traffic swelled in the 1980s, the Winnipeg-Duluth-Twin Cities line allowed Canadian grain to funnel onto the Rock Island, then all the way as far as Galveston, Texas. This and other connections in 1986 pushed the Rock Island to be the founder of the Alliance of American Railroad Carriers, which in 1987 got the Rock Island, Rio Grande, Western Pacific, Erie Lackawanna and Delaware and Hudson to agree to a wide-ranging deal to allow each other's traffic to move across the system as seamlessly as possible. This when combined with the fast-freight efforts of the railroads allowed for the railroads to offer New York to San Francisco services starting in 1988. The Alliance facilitated the merger of the Rio Grande and Western Pacific in 1990, and the building of the Rio Grande's Marysvale Subdivision into the company's Utah Main Line from Barstow, California, to Salt Lake City via Las Vegas, which along with SP's route, led to a reshaping of a lot of Los Angeles-bound freight traffic through Salt Lake rather on the congested SP Sunset Route or ATSF Transcon. The improvements at Rock Island and Frisco's integration into the SP doomed the Missouri-Kansas-Texas, which merged into the Burlington Northern (after surprisingly little objection from rivals) in 1991. The Alliance gained a new member in the newly-independent Wisconsin Central in 1995, and the Southern Railway became a partner of the Alliance in 1997.
- As American railroads got their differences sorted out in the 1980s, traffic for them helped drive the growth - American rail freight traffic grew a factor of four between 1975 and 2005 - and increasingly-better relationships between the management of the railroads and their workers both improved the workers' lives and would ultimately see many train systems grow their workforces. The disappearance of cabooses off of trains ended by the late 1980s as several railroads (naturally led by Conrail and Southern Pacific) began equipping cabooses with air compressors and remote control systems to give better brake response and using manned mid-train helpers on difficult routes. GATX's TankTrain system, first used in the mid-1970s, began to be used heavily for bulk chemical shipments in the early 1980s before gaining widespread use for liquid petroleum products later in the decade and later for bulk shipments of everything from industrial acid to beer. Safety concerns (and insurance demands) resulted in double-stack trains largely being built with movable bulkheads to allow the carrying of many different sizes of container, and bulk trains of all kinds got greater and greater traction during the 1980s and 1990s.
- After Conrail's extensive electrification growth in the 1970s onward (they would extend electric traction from Seattle and Tacoma all the way to McLaughlin, South Dakota, as well as from Philadelphia to Canton and Columbus as well as from Lewistown, Pennsylvania to Albany and Boston) showed many railroads the benefits of it, other railroads moved to electrify routes. Wires were strung above Burlington Northern's Powder River Basin divisions, Southern's Cincinatti-Chattanooga-Atlanta main line, New York Central's freight mains from Selkirk, NY to New York and Boston and Canadian National's Edmonton-Vancouver Rocky Mountain Main Line in the 1980s, with Union Pacific's power-hungry Overland Route from North Platte, NB, to Salt Lake City and Pocatello, ID, the British Columbia Railway from Vancouver to Prince George, BC, Norfolk and Western's New River Gorge main line (Cincinatti and Columbus, OH to Lynchburg, VA) and Southern Pacific's Shasta (Portland, OR to Sacramento, CA), Salt Lake (Sacramento to Odgen, UT), Mojave (Bakersfield, CA to Los Angeles, West Colton and Las Vegas), Tuscon and San Antonio divisions followed in the 1990s. electric locomotives improved economics of the railroads involved if they could handle the extra maintenance cost, and most had little difficulty with that.