Top 10 Most tragic railroad failures of North America?

[Miningman]

....and Charles Melville Hayes of the Grand Trunk. Imagine the change of the course of history just in railroading alone, not to mention everything else, because of the stuffy arrogance of a reckless Captain Smith. 

That kind of stuff can drive you batty thinking about the whys and the alternatives and the what could have been, what should have been, what would have been. Different world.

[Overmod]

Hampden Railroad.

Note I don't mention CNE although technically you could.  Had the Titanic not sunk I think it would have succeeded, at least for a while and as long as its competitors in that general area succeeded; a well-connected (Canadian-controlled) CNE might have been the salutary wake up call to Morgan and Mellen those two so badly needed.  (Morgan's railroad expert died suddenly in 1906 and left the vision adrift...)

[Miningman]

I would add the rapid demise and total loss of locomotive builders Baldwin, Lima, (and their futile attempt at staving off the end through a merger), and then unbelievably Alco. Montreal Locomotive Works continued on flying the Alco flag but is now consigned to dusty filing cabinets and boxes in a large room somewhere at Bombardier. To this I would add Fairbanks Morse locomotive production and long time builder CLC, the Canadian Locomotive Company in Kingston. To think that those enormous plants in Eddystone, Schenectady, Lima and Kingston are no more is beyond reason. 

The rapid demise of the newly crowned  "Standard of Railroading" the Southern Pacific. They had it all, diversified too, pipelines, oil and gas, telecommunications(Sprint), even a brothel!
Ended up being owned by D&RGW of all unbelievable things then swallowed up whole by UP.

Corporate raiders and crony capitalism, not interested in railroading or the future, only raiding the treasury and selling off assets asap but pretending to be something else. The Pennsy and Milwaukee are good examples. Of course the vandal of Pennsylvania Station, New York City, Stuart Sauders, demolishing it and dumping the remains in the swamps of New Jersey. For those that come to his defence I remind you he paid a $7 million settlement out of court for his shenanigans, and that was in the late '60's when you could retire for life with $100,000. 

The vast and quite sudden demise of passenger trains and the bill of goods we were sold. Politicians and we, the great unwashed, turned our backs on the passenger trains. Throw in any public transportation, streetcars, interurbans and the like. Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Rubber, Madison Avenue, grabbed our noses and lead us to the way it's gonna be.  This did not happen anywhere else in the world.
Compare the 20th Century Ltd. or the Broadway in 1950 to Japan,  Europe and China in 1950, to passenger rail service today in these places. What happened?  Truman said " What a paradise we could have if we don't make a mistake".  I still say we could have had both, an independent competitive vibrant modern passenger service and the family vehicle. The one side got very greedy, however, I will also state that we eagerly chose that path as a society and wrongly so. Perhaps to some extent it is slowly being realized today. 

The loss of mail, express, and the hometown railroad station went hand in hand with the above. This did not happen anywhere else in the world either.

The post war steam advances and look to the future with new and exciting and superbly engineered marvels were scrapped so fast we barely got a chance to even get over our excitement. T1's, Niagaras lead the way but there was much more. The post war rebuilt C&NW Zeppelins that we recently talked about and CPR's G5d Pacifics built in 1948 certainly are in this group. CPR had plans to order 600 of then, slightly over a hundred were made. Scrapped in 8 years. 
Now you could say this was due to the Diesel onslaught and superiority but it was an unnecessary rush to get out from being considered old fashioned and  again being sold a bill of goods.
As if the Diesels saved the railroads from the end, rather at least on the surface the opposite was true.
Once the romance of passenger service along with the steam loco and the whistle was destroyed it was no longer in the public mind.
Millions and millions wasted on perfectly fine and advanced modern steam, some 50-70 million on the T1's alone, and to be replaced by what? Baldwin Centipedes. Baby faces, Sharks, Alco PA's, Opposed Pistons and other assorted failures. A double whammy.

Of course absurd out of date government regulations, Management and Unions with an us vs them ridiculous divide contributed to many other failures. A failure of cooperation and leadership, an opportunity wasted. 

I've heard the counter arguments but make no mistake: These items were all failures and factored into the close call of destroying railroads in their entirety, certainly the way it was run for a hundred years and built nations, and in the end these failures lead to the society we have today. 

[MidlandMike]

Colorado Midland was totally abandoned except what was retained by the Midland Terminal for a little while longer.

[Firelock76]

NorthWest

While not technically a railroad, I think that the Chigago, North Shore and Milwaukee has to be included.

Possibly also the Grand Trunk system.

 

Nothing wrong with including the North Shore.  Technically it was an interurban line and not a "real" railroad, but when it died it broke an awful lot of hearts in that part of the country.  The Summer 2013 issue of "Classic Trains" had a superb article on the North Shore that almost turned me into a fan, and I'm not even from that part of the country!  I thinks it's still available as a back-issue, a good one to grab if you get the chance.

[NorthWest]

While not technically a railroad, I think that the Chigago, North Shore and Milwaukee has to be included.

Possibly also the Grand Trunk system.

[Firelock76]

Eight of them that spring to mind, at least in my mind, are the old "Anthracite Roads."

The Jersey Central, the Lackawanna, the Erie, the Lehigh and Hudson River, the Lehigh and New England, the Lehigh Valley, the New York Ontario and Western, and the Reading.

When the anthracite trade began to die so did they, and there wasn't enough business in the area otherwise to support them all.  A slow death for all concerned that it seemed no-one knew how to stop. 

Then there was the poor old Rutland up in Vermont.

I could add the New Haven, it's absorption into Penn Central was something the NYC and the Pennsy didn't want, but had to take anyway.  Some wonder if the burning of the NH's Poughkeepsie Bridge was a deliberate act of sabotage to kill that 'road, but there's no concrete proof of that nor is there any likelyhood of being any, not at this late date anyway. 

[KBCpresident]

I have tried posts like this in teh past, and all have failed. But this time, I am genuinely curious what everyone thinks. What should be on this list? I hav ea few ideas, but a top ten list needs ten entries, and I can't come up with ten. Any help is appreciated:

Inclusions on the list so far:

Penn Central: obvious reasons, internal competition, bad circumstances, bankruptsy so severe that the goverenment needed to step in.

Milwaukee Road: One of the most impressive transcons in North America with lots of unique equiptments and electric operations, until they took out the electificication and cut themselves in half.

NYO&W: Abandoned the entire system overnight if I'm not mistaken.

Rock Island: So impovershed the system couldn't afford to join Amtrak, and ultimately ceased operations all together.

What else should be on the list.