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icmr - you're first. The NS is better in safety because they began a formal, meaningful Safety Program way back in 1912, when it was only a word in the dictionary to the C&O people. smalling - I was the first N&W operating supervisor to be sent to the Wabash after the 1964 merger, and those Wabash guys thought they were the only people on the face of the earth who knew how to railroad. They believed their own press clippings, like the PRR people. They survived in a highly competitive market (mainly by violating speed limits), and thought that made them top operators, and they thought N&W made money hauling coal downhill. They couldn't wait to get down on the old N&W and show those hickabillies how railroadin' oughta be done. Well, one of their guys, an ex-PRR empty suit named Pevler, was president after the merger, and he took some of the WAB guys down east with him. The silence was deafening. Nothing changed. They did have sense enough to realize where the REAL money was being made, and not to mess with it (PRR had realized it, too, and didn't exercise the control their stock holding entitled them to to the extent of messing with N&W's operations, perhaps the wisest thing they ever did). They found out that N&W made its money hauling its eastbound coal over three mountains (two more than C&O had to face), and that there were some 250 classifications of tidewater coal to deal with - coal is not just coal, as they had thought. N&W had made some of its billions over the years selling coal blended to customers' specifications at the ship, and were still doing it until the bottom dropped out of the export market. When the Southern boys took over in 1982 they belittled the N&W for the way it handled its coal; they thought the only way was to haul unit trains. Unit trains are fine if you have power plants that can take 100 cars four times a week, but N&W didn't have that kind of coal business. The kind they did have had been immensely profitable, but the SR folks overlooked that little detail. (I asked an old friend, a Southern guy, how the merged railroad was doing a couple of years after the merger. He replied that it was awful - those N&W guys didn't know diddly; if it wasn't for the billion dollars they had in the bank earning money that they'd be in trouble. I asked him who put that billion dollars in the bank, knowing that it surely wasn't the Southern. He didn't reply . . .) Old Timer
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