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Here are a couple of factors nobody has addressed. Because of its own merger and N&W's, in 1964, PRR had to divest itself of its N&W stock which it had held since 1901. After 1964 PC was left with a small amount of N&W stock which had to be divested by 1974. If you don't think this was important, from 1901 to 1964 N&W paid PRR $406.6 million. From 1946 to 1964 the amount was $193.8 million, and in 1963 the figure was more than $17 million. So a sure source of income was lost (N&W paid its common stockholders $1.97 Billion {that's with a "B"} between its first common stock dividend in 1901 and the Southern merger in 1982). (It was rumored that one year during the Depression PRR paid its stockholders the same amount of money the N&W paid PRR, because PRR made no money on its own operations.) Saunders was a lawyer who became president of N&W in 1957. He was no dummy, but ambitious. On the N&W he didn't have to know anything about operations - he had a superb team who ran the railroad for him while he went shopping for merger partners. When he got to PC - it was agreed that he'd be president - he had no such unified team; instead he had the reds and the greens at odds with each other. He found himself without anybody under him who really wanted the combined road to succeed. PRR paid great attention to passenger operations, evidently, but freight was subordinate, and when one got to outlying points and less important lines, they were left to run themselves. A case in point: A friend of mine was an Assistant Road Foreman on the N&W and came into Columbus on a freight train. He noted a Sandusky coal train over in Grogan Yard, with a 2-10-4, pumping air. He went and got his rest, and something to eat, and came back and the same train was still there, same crew still on it, still pumping air. Nobody cared that the crew was on overtime before it left the yard, and was not likely to make it to Sandusky. Where was the supervision that was supposed to see that the trains ran? You tell me. Add these things to the overbuilt plant, the regulation, the shift of industries from the Northeast, and neither Central or Pennsy had a chance. Merging them was not going to help unless some way was found to get the two factions to work together. Old Timer
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