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Lot's of interesting points about the demise of the Rock Island. Interesting how many believe that you can mis-manage anything. The point is, management can make mistakes, but it can only make good decisions based on what cards you have been dealt. As one who spent a decade of my 38 railroad years with Rock Island, I dispatched every mile of the railroad and knew just about every manager and every piece of the Company. Rock Island had incredibly good employees and many darn good managers. It had few reasonable union leaders, however, who led good employees down the path to unemployment. Most of the Union leaders kept their positions with successor lines and cared little of the troops they had led. They were "frozen at the controls" when management tried to show new ideas to save the Company, they couldn't respond with anything except status quo. Another point that has been missed: In the early 70's, I started dispatching at Des Moines and the C&NW began detouring grain trains over the line from Des Moines to Kansas City, primarily because of the condition and limited capacity of the CGW line. Traffic continued on Rock Island at a hectic pace, with tremendous growth in export corn and soybeans, wheat, etc. Jimmy Carter issued the Russian Grain Embargo and took everyone out of the rush. Had the embargo not been placed, cash flows would have been much better and the Spine, at least from Iowa Falls to Houston probably could have been rebuilt. As it was, there was no money for enough track work to eliminate the derailments, and the line could not survive on its own. If ever management was remiss, it was during the Langdon era when maintenance was eliminated. Money formerly spent on capital trackwork and ordinary maintenance was now spent on derailments. It was a downward spiral that could not be recovered. Not too many employees cared for the Ingram era management, especially the revolving door of people they brought in while ignoring the more experienced people already there. Notwithstanding this, to blame "mismanagement" of the railroad as the cause of its demise misses the broad picture of our regulated climate at the time and the ignorance of the unions. One other point: A then-senior official of Union Pacific has said that Union Pacific offered major traffic diversions and funds to several points on the Rock Island, IE Chicago-Council Bluffs and to Kansas City, in exchange for Rock Island downgrading Co. Bluffs and KCity to Denver, but it was killed by the UTU and BLE.
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