WI: No Penn Central

What if the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad, once staunch rivals, did not decide to merge together as Penn Central? What would become of American railroading, namely in the northeast?
 
In his twin histories Merging Lines and Main Lines (highly recommended), Richard Saunders at one point discussed the proposal made in the early 1970s, when the government was trying to sort out the Penn Central mess, of combining all of the non-PC bankrupts into a single route (the MARC-EL proposal). On its own it wouldn't be much, but Saunders suggested that if slightly earlier in RR history the Erie, Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, Reading, Central of New Jersey, Delaware & Hudson, Boston & Maine, Wabash, and Nickel Plate had all merged, the resulting railroad might well have been a player in the Northeast - at least able to hold its own with the likes of the C&O if not necessarily the PRR and NYC. An interesting thought.
 
To answer your specific question: The ONLY reason the government approved the merger of the PRR and NYC was because it was seen as the ONLY way to save the New Haven, which was hopelessly bankrupt and unwanted by everyone but which was vital as a New York-Boston carrier. Any scenario where the PC merger is avoided thus has to come up with some means of addressing the fate of the New Haven; probably the only alternative would be nationalization as an early form of Amtrak or Conrail.

Most everyone in the 1960s expected the PRR to line up with the emerging N&W system and the NYC with the C&O-B&O. That of course is how it eventually shook out anyway, when CSX and Norfolk Southern split up Conrail. Find an answer to the New Haven, and you might well have seen everything coalesce around competing PRR- and NYC-based systems.
 
To answer your specific question: The ONLY reason the government approved the merger of the PRR and NYC was because it was seen as the ONLY way to save the New Haven, which was hopelessly bankrupt and unwanted by everyone but which was vital as a New York-Boston carrier. Any scenario where the PC merger is avoided thus has to come up with some means of addressing the fate of the New Haven; probably the only alternative would be nationalization as an early form of Amtrak or Conrail.

Most everyone in the 1960s expected the PRR to line up with the emerging N&W system and the NYC with the C&O-B&O. That of course is how it eventually shook out anyway, when CSX and Norfolk Southern split up Conrail. Find an answer to the New Haven, and you might well have seen everything coalesce around competing PRR- and NYC-based systems.
Would it be unlikely for CDOT to step in and take over the new haven, similarly to the MTA and NJT?
 
Would it be unlikely for CDOT to step in and take over the new haven, similarly to the MTA and NJT?

You mean ConnDOT?

There's just one problem with that, and that can be summarized with a Wiki map of the network at its peak:
1024px-New_Haven_Map.png


In order for the New Haven to be taken into public ownership at the state level, it would have to require Massachusetts and Rhode Island both to step in alongside in, even in the much-reduced state the New Haven was in in the 1960s (when the MBTA was formed in 1964 precisely to subsidize commuter rail service in Metro Boston) - for example, Cape Cod service beyond Hyannis no longer exists and IOTL the old network is now a network of rail trails. You'd have to have public ownership happen around the same time as the MBTA's formation, and find a way to overcome the NYNH&H's traditional resistance by management to nationalization. So it would have to be public ownership with compensation to the previous owners by all three states.

Would that open possibilities? Oh, yes, it definitely would. The limits, of course, are a combination of political will and if the public was ready for it. Much like Amtrak IOTL a decade later and the dramatic turnaround of the MBTA's Commuter Rail division during the late 1970s into the 1980s, a lot of shit would need to be done in order to even make a bare-bones essential service viable and ultimately break it out of its mid-20th century shell and think outside the box. In this case it would be even more so to even get a decent intercity service off the ground as well as commuter (read: suburban and regional) rail, and would basically necessitate a total reconstruction within those three states (four if the MBTA's Commuter Rail service north of Boston is folded in, and thus encompasses New Hampshire - which would require a merger of the *NYNH&H into the MBTA first) of what a passenger rail service in the late 20th century would be, even if it means taking the low-cost Southwest Airlines-esque route to get there (as indeed is essentially the case across the Atlantic).
 
Given the political realities of the 1960s it would be very hard to convince enough people that nationalization at the state or federal level is a good idea. Railroads were still thought of as cash cows for tax revenue at the time. And they deeply resisted any form of subsidy, because they feared it was a foot in the door to nationalization. They didn't want subsidies; what they wanted was for the government to STOP paying for highways and airports (which, of course, wasn't going to happen). You really pretty much need a disaster of Penn Central-like proportions to create enough disarray to make nationalization palatable. Maybe if the New Haven, like PC around 1972-73, threatens to shut down completely.

I'd bet, though, that sometime in the 1960s, when the PRR wanted to merge with the N&W and maybe additional lines, the ICC would say, "OK, the condition is you have to include the New Haven. Take it or leave it." The NYC, already in ownership of the B&A, would have an excuse to wriggle out of that.
 
Given the political realities of the 1960s it would be very hard to convince enough people that nationalization at the state or federal level is a good idea. Railroads were still thought of as cash cows for tax revenue at the time. And they deeply resisted any form of subsidy, because they feared it was a foot in the door to nationalization. They didn't want subsidies; what they wanted was for the government to STOP paying for highways and airports (which, of course, wasn't going to happen). You really pretty much need a disaster of Penn Central-like proportions to create enough disarray to make nationalization palatable. Maybe if the New Haven, like PC around 1972-73, threatens to shut down completely.

There's a brief window where that could be potentially possible - in 1958 the Connecticut Turnpike opened, followed in the following year by the dissolution of the Old Colony Railroad (because the NYNH&H discontinued service, and the Old Colony management - which had allowed the New Haven to lease all its network for service - thought it was better to wind up then restarting service under its own name) and in 1961 by the New Haven's bankruptcy. Of course, all throughout this Patrick McGinnis didn't help one bit with his flamboyant style of bringing the company up to snuff which only exacerbated the financial problems the New Haven was having. Though during 1958 and 1959 Massachusetts gave the Old Colony subsidies until the Southeast Expressway was completed. Thus, the late 1950s to early 1960s could be the perfect time for the New Haven to have a Penn Central-like disaster - which butterflies away the MBTA, though something like the MBTA for the Boston & Maine and New York Central's commuter rail services was going to happen anyway (the Boston & Maine in particular was able to have any rail service at all in Massachusetts only due to subsidy). It's around this brief period when we can let the Southern New England states jointly take over the New Haven - in MA's case, an earlier dissolution of the New Haven could be the opportunity for, as per OTL with the MBTA's formation, folding the then-MTA into the new organization (hence making the nationalized New Haven also a successor to BERy), forcing it to act on its promise of replacement rapid-transit service on the Old Colony, at least for part of the South Shore (what is now IOTL the extension of the Red Line to Quincy and Braintree). This could be one place to start, particularly since IOTL during the 1960s and 1970s the early solution for the loss of commuter rail around Boston was simply to extend the subway, including the Orange Line as far north as Reading and the Red Line as far north as Lexington (which now end respectively at Malden [Oak Grove] and Cambridge [Alewife]), and converting an old rail line into the Green Line's D Branch to Riverside. ITTL these could be part of much larger plans for southern New England.
 
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