I read somewhere that the Bangoor and Aroostook nearly became bakrupt in the early 70s, Penn Central lost most of the BAR's potato shipment somehwre in a yard in New York. Is this true? I know the PC was seen as somewhat incompitent, but was it THAT bad?
From wiki, which you may have already seen:
what actually resulted in the railroad losing its potato business forever was the Penn Central Transportation Company (PC), whose interchange service became so bad during the winter of 1969–70 that a large portion of the 1969 potato crop was spoiled by freezing when car heaters ran out of fuel. The claims process against PC was not resolved prior to PC's bankruptcy declaration the following June. As a result, several potato farms went out of business; and those that survived distrusted rail service and never returned to using the railroad
Google Books brings up a short photo caption from the book "The American Freight Train" (Jim Boyd) which pretty much states the same thing.
Even more searching indicates
In the 1970s, much of the potato traffic was diverted to the recently completed nearby I-95 Interstate. The Penn-Central's inability to deliver potato trains to New York City had many shippers using trucks on the new roadway instead of the unreliable rail service. This hurt the short line and CP decided to sell it to local businessmen in 1980
If you thought thier freight service was bad, you should have ridden one of thier long distance passenger trains.
except for the Broadway Limited, which did keep a decent standard of service and on-time operation, even in its reduced "General" form.
And the Florida trains and the through Southern trains were also decent, account of pressure by the major railroads for those trains.
This sounds similar to Southern Pacific and Sunkist.
"No soup for you!" - Yev Kassem (from Seinfeld)
After the RI quit in 1980, the DRI Line and then the MILW provided interim carrier service over the old RI between Davenport and Iowa City. West of Durant, IA (near where my profile picture was taken) is a fertilizer plant. It was Twin States Engineering, the facility is still there but I don't know if it operates under the same name. They were a steady customer of the RI and the later interim carriers. I knew the agent at Durant and one day when visiting I noticed Twin States only had a couple cars there. Normally they had 8 or 10 cars every other time I had went by it. He said that they had curtailed their use of rail after the MILW had "lost" some important cars for 30 days.
Fortunately on later visits to the area, it looked like the IAIS had recaptured their confidence and business.
Jeff
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