The Ripley Regional Railroad Plan

[BaltACD]

While I was looking for some other information on Google, I stumbled across a citation of the Ripley Plan for Regional railroad organization that was the outgrowth of the 1920 Transportation Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission

 

Interesting.

[Overmod]

Helps to understand the Ripley plan, and some of what came after (including the revival of the 1906 Ramsey high-speed route later in the '20s; highly interesting in conjunction with the routes in Ripley's system 7) if you start with the background here:

https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/use-federal-power-settlement-railway-labor-disputes-3973

and find and browse the 'labor alternative' commonly known as the Plumb Plan and introduced by Thetus Sims in 1919 as an alternative to the formalization of the Esch Act -- for some reason I can't find an online version of either Plumb's or Sims' actual language on the Web, but will keep looking.

 

[Overmod]

C'mon, there has to be somebody else interested in the decade between the end of Federal Control and the clamping down of the Depression.  Some very interesting stuff happened then...

[rrnut282]

As to Ripley's plan, in (perfect, I know) hind-sight, it seemed doomed to failure, creating far-flung empires with little end-point to end-point traffic.  Santa Fe into Minnesota?  SP alone and Pennsy nearly alone?

The lowly MONON only had two mainlines across Indiana, yet it was split three ways.  What were the details on that?