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[quote user="Datafever"][quote user="greyhounds"] So, I think we've established that the economy of the 1970's had nothing to do with the Penn Central collapse or the other Northeast railroad bankruptices that brought on the much needed and benificial deregulation.  [/quote]As a side note, you bring up an interesting point.  I don't know for sure, but it appears that it was the eastern railroads that had the majority of the problems in the 70's (60's) as far as bankruptcies were concerned.  If that is so, why were the eastern railroads more heavily impacted than the western railroads?[/quote]For one there were a lot more of them in the Official Territory, so you first have to zero out for sheer percentage of the total.  Second, they were compacted into a lot smaller space, so the traffic cannibalism was very high.  Third, much of the traffic base these roads were built to handle had evaporated, notably passengers, anthracite, and New England textiles, brassware and shoes, whereas outside the Official Territory traffic was actually up as traditional resource bases for lumber, minerals, etc., shifted west and south following exhaustion in the East as well as population shift to the sunbelt. Fourth, western roads inherently had longer hauls due to widely separated and highly concentrated urbanization, whereas eastern urbanization is not widely separated and not highly concentrated, but worse from a railroad's point of view, is of sufficient mass to afford industrial economy of scale without requiring concentration.  Western geographic factors were very much in a railroad's favor whereas eastern population geography was very much in trucking's favor.  Ironically the long distances that made western roads such an iffy proposition in the mid-1800s turned out to be their greatest advantage by the mid-1900s.Fifth, prior to WWII there was a substantial coastwise and intercoastal shipping business (more than 1,000 vessels) that ceased during the war (the ships were requisitioned) and did not restart after the War because its costs climbed so much faster than rail costs it was soon priced it out of the market for just about everything except crude oil and refined petroleum products.  The decline of coastwise shipping was highly beneficial to southern and western roads but actually hurt eastern roads because of the traffic shift away from traditional hinterland-to-port routes toward gateway routes where they had little investment.S. Hadid
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