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

4. The Portly Virginia Gentleman

4 The Portly Virginia Gentleman When they met, Alfred Perlman and James Symes agreed once again that New York Central shareholders would get 40 percent of the new company and that the Pennsylvania’s owners would hold 60 percent. The “new” company actually would be the Pennsylvania Railroad, but it would assume a new name, Penn Central Corp. The shareholders approved the merger, and the Interstate Commerce Commission began more than a year of hearings in 1962. As the sessions were getting under way, McClellan was starting his job at the Southern Railway. Although he paid scant attention to rail mergers, his bosses cared, and from their vantage point just nine blocks from the ICC’s ornate quarters on Independence Avenue , they watched with concern as the Penn Central argued its case. Symes and Perlman both defended the size of the proposed railroad, Symes reminding the commission that the combined system would be moving fewer cars than the Pennsylvania carried without any disruptions in its heyday, a reassurance that would help shake the Penn Central’s credibility later. 34 The Men Who Loved Trains As in all merger hearings, there were opponents. The most important of these was the impoverished New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, which was losing freight traffic daily to the New England Throughway, an interstate that had just been built parallel to the line’s tracks all the way from New York to Boston. The New Haven demanded that it be included in the merger, but Symes and Perlman told the hearings that their own roads were weak enough without burdening themselves with that line. Instead , Perlman offered to give up the marginal Boston and Albany arm of the Central and let the ICC form a regional railroad of all the lines in southern New England. This would have lumped together three anemic roads, and the ICC was rightfully skeptical. Meanwhile, although it was not visible to the people at the Southern and other outsiders, problems were festering inside the Penn Central alliance. Symes and Perlman were a distinctly inharmonious combination. Symes was the son of a Pennsylvania Railroad baggage master, and given his relatively humble origins, he should have hit it off with the plebeian Perlman, but he didn’t. “We’re talking about the Pennsylvania Railroad with all those egomaniacs who ran it,” recalled one former senior officer of the Pennsy. “Walter Franklin [Symes’s predecessor] was an aristocrat, but Symes was not. He was a good guy. Jim Symes was a straight, straight guy, a good railroad operating man.” Perlman had gone to MIT and climbed to the top on raw merit , whereas Symes had never graduated from college, had started at the Pennsylvania as a part-time clerk in the traffic department, and had risen because he had played shortstop on a company baseball team. The company’s sports teams were an important part of the Pennsy culture, and Symes’s prowess on the diamond had caught the eye of top management. Railroading was his entire life, and he learned to climb the ladder by following orders, remaining a club member in good standing, and avoiding problems. The Pennsylvania and its managers were disliked almost universally among railroaders. It was so large that the Pennsy dominated rate-making policies in the East at the expense of the other carriers . Its officers were unbearably arrogant, viewing their property as inherently superior to all other railroads. Although Perlman 35 The Portly Virginia Gentleman saw it as mere truth-telling, many opposing railroaders viewed his own outspoken ways as unbridled arrogance, and he seemed all the more irritating to someone like Symes when he—a mere outsider—questioned the wisdom of the chief executive officer of the mighty Pennsylvania. If they merged, Perlman would cause Symes further problems inside the railroad because Symes and the railroad’s top operations officers could not help but know that Perlman was openly critical of the Pennsy’s operating and sales departments. They smarted at what they considered disrespect and even blasphemy. Symes and Alan Kirby of the Alleghany Corp., who was chairman of the Central’s executive committee, had appointed a committee of directors to complete the merger plans. There were three representatives from the New York Central, and Perlman was named an ex-officio member. Perlman noticed he was never noti- fied of meetings, and in 1962...