The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry

5. An Eleventh Hour Surprise

5 An Eleventh Hour Surprise As McClellan—now at the Central—watched the merger’s inevitable approach, he and the other junior officers of the two railroads grew increasingly apprehensive. Although they could not imagine its impact, they were about to be caught in the middle of the biggest debacle the transportation industry had ever experienced . For McClellan it would be a watershed that would determine everything he was to experience or do for the rest of his life. If the Central had joined with the C&O–B&O and the Pennsy with the N&W, it would have created two competitive lines. Instead , they were being amalgamated out of fear, not from some grand dream of creating a better transport system. “I didn’t think it was a particularly good merger, but we were trapped into some kind of merger,” Perlman said later. They had too many tracks, too many yards, too much railroad, and they needed to cut back by consolidating. It did not seem normal for two such fierce competitors to join up. “Those of us inside the New York Central or Pennsy said, ‘This is an unnatural act! Not the way to go. This is crazy. It’s going to be a monopoly,’” said McClellan. In his view, railroads got lazy and unimaginative when they held monopolies. 49 An Eleventh Hour Surprise Nevertheless, they still did not recognize how truly critical the situation was becoming, in part because the Central’s own blinding esprit de corps caused McClellan and his friends to ignore some of the bad signs from their own railroad. “Now,” he said, “I kind of believed the New York Central hype when in fact it was bad track and bad ties and no money. They really had some serious problems. I look back now and say, ‘Goddamn, it was pretty ragged.’ I remembered at the time how ragged the Twentieth Century was, but I was a believer—I didn’t want to recognize that.” Indeed, the Twentieth Century Limited had degenerated so badly that Perlman had managed to persuade the ICC to discontinue the fabled train. McClellan also did not hear some of the guarded comments his superiors were making about the Pennsylvania’s anemic profits. There was more, and it was harsh enough to unnerve even those who didn’t want to see it. McClellan and all the other Central people—from the top down—viewed the Pennsylvania managers as a bunch of relics. Once McClellan sent around a memo bearing a picture of Saunders and a disparaging caption, and not even his senior bosses complained. Well before Merger Day arrived, McClellan and his young cohorts from the Central were discovering that the Pennsylvania was not preparing for the merger. To improve key routes and yards so they could handle the increased loads of traffic, Perlman was spending twice as much as the Pennsylvania on each mile of track during the last two years before the merger. Despite its poverty, in five of the eight years from 1960 through 1967, the Central laid more rail per mile of its track than the Pennsylvania. When measured against the tons of traffic they were moving, the Central outspent the Pennsylvania every year but one. Although to McClellan the Pennsy’s rights-of-way appeared in better condition than the Central’s, the Pennsylvania was deferring maintenance. Many of its rails were worn, ties often were rotting, and rain and snow had eroded the ballast. By 1968, when they merged, the Pennsylvania’s lines were suffering so much that some routes were pocked with slow orders, forcing trains to reduce speed because of bad track. In the preceding two years, the number of miles under slow orders had jumped more than four 50 The Men Who Loved Trains times. The Pennsy’s accident rate, which almost invariably goes up when maintenance goes down, was roughly double that of the Central when the two merged. Perlman and Saunders had agreed on a plan for building two mammoth automated freight yards to handle the changed flows of traffic, one at Selkirk, New York, outside Albany, and the other at Columbus, Ohio. When he conceived of the yards, Perlman was introducing the industry to a whole new way of operating long-haul trains, a method that is the standard among railroads today. Traditionally railroads operated yards at major junctions usually about 100 miles apart where...