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

14. A School Band on the Railroad Tracks

14 A School Band on the Railroad Tracks While McClellan and the others had been creating Amtrak, Judge John P. Fullam, who was presiding over the Penn Central bankruptcy , had named four trustees, three to serve part-time as the equivalent of directors. The fourth was Jervis Langdon Jr., who became the chief trustee and served full-time. A former president of the Baltimore and Ohio, Langdon, 65, had flown the Hump with the Flying Tigers during World War II and continued to pilot his own airplane. He was a tall man with a rocklike face that was softening with age. His looks and demeanor seemed soft, but that was misleading, for his cold, alert eyes told the real story about Langdon, who was well versed in the subtleties of corporate politics. Langdon was a great-nephew of Mark Twain, who wrote Tom Sawyer in an outbuilding at the family farm—where Langdon himself still lived—outside Elmira, New York. Langdon was the ideal choice because—although no operating man—he knew how to scrutinize operations, and he understood the art of diplomacy and compromise. The latter skills would be mandatory, since working with Washington and the labor unions would be key to 135 A School Band on the Railroad Tracks Penn Central’s survival. He knew the railroad business from the viewpoint of a strategist. Langdon, who had grown up near the main line of the Erie, had been a railroader for nearly half a century. His uncle had been president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and after college Langdon had gone to work in the Lehigh’s New York headquarters as a rate clerk for $20 a week, only to leave for law school after being told by friends that he had a better chance of advancing in the railroad industry if he were a lawyer. He had wound up as vice president and general counsel at the Baltimore and Ohio the year before it became the prize in the takeover battle between the Chesapeake and Ohio and the New York Central. While the C&O awaited the ICC’s permission to conclude the acquisition, the B&O’s chief executive officer, who had urged that the merger include the Central, stepped down, and the board named Langdon. Soon Langdon found that, rather than treating his railroad as an equal, the C&O’s Cyrus Eaton and Walter Tuohy viewed it as no more than a conquered territory. “They wanted to forget about the Baltimore and Ohio as such,” Langdon said later, and he found another railroad to run out west. When Langdon moved into the chief trustee’s office atop 6 Penn Center, the first thing he encountered was the civil war between the Red Hats and the Green Hats. “As soon as I went over there, it was perfectly apparent they wouldn’t work together,” he said. “They didn’t like each other, and it went right on down.” The second thing was the economics that seemed to doom the railroad , mainly the ruinous passenger deficits and the crucial freight revenues that truck lines were capturing. Weekly he and the other trustees reported to Fullam, who was becoming a different kind of bankruptcy judge. He had been an exceptional choice for the Penn Central matter. A graduate of the Harvard Law School, he had been born 49 years earlier in Gardenville , Pennsylvania, a village that straddled a ridge and looked out over the cornfields and pastures of Bucks County. Fullam soon made it clear he wasn’t just making decisions on what to do with the assets or how to meet the demands of creditors. With utmost delicacy and subtlety, so he did not undercut his trustees, Fullam was involved, almost daily, keeping an eye on how they guided the 136 The Men Who Loved Trains railroad. Every Monday he would hold court and hear whatever pleas and petitions creditors and others were presenting. Fullam’s choice of trustees had been typical of the way he operated . “He was a first-rate judge. He was meticulously honest, no cronyism,” said one attorney. Often judges appointed friends to the easy and lucrative job of trustee. Instead, Fullam chose men whose experience could help the bankruptcy estate. He was one hell of a judge,” said Tom Hoppin, the public relations department’s liaison to the court. “Not a single order of his was reversed. Not one! He would cite...