The Famous Commodore

Author: Kyle Montgomery
Category: Book Reviews Railroads:

Last week I was intrigued by an article in the Wall Street Journal that compared Warren Buffet to the late Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt practically created the New York Central, but beyond that I knew very little about the man.

I stopped at our campus library and picked up the book Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The book provides a length narrative detailing from birth till death and every major life event along the way. It details how Vanderbilt went from nothing to go on and create his massive family fortune, first through sail, then steamships, and finally the railroads.

Additional detail is spent on the more troubling aspects of his personal life that might not be found in older works on the subject. Vanderbilt had a habit of picking up less than respectable girls from the waterfront. In fact advanced syphilis would directly lead to his death.

The author, Edward J. Renehan Junior, goes to great lengths to provide a well-researched book. He mentions a number of facts where previous biographies do not agree with his sources and provides great backing of his opinions.

As a biography the work is splendid. As a railroad book it is not so much. Only one of the 24 chapters deals significantly with the railroads and Vanderbilt’s business actions when he executed a couple of famous cornerings of the Hudson River Railroad and the New York and Harlem Railroad. Later mention is made of his failure to corner the Erie Railroad against Jay Gould.

Later Vanderbilt would merge his major New York Railroads with the New York Central, a road operating from Buffalo to Albany. This created the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, a single railroad company all the way from Manhattan to Buffalo.

I don’t really fault the author for the lack of railroad information. I did not realize that the majority of Vanderbilt’s railroad dealing were late in his life. His son, William Vanderbilt went on to help mold the New York Central’s western expansions. Instead, most of Vanderbilt’s life was spend on the steamship business and the book is proportioned accordingly. It did not detract from my enjoyment in the least.

After reading this book, would I compare Vanderbilt to Buffet? Probably not. Though the two both invested heavily in railroads during their later years, I find them to be different in both personality and temperament.If you want to make your own decision I encourage you to check out Commodore at Amazon.

Penn Central Charts

Author: Kyle Montgomery
Category: History Railroads: , ,
pc_chart

Last week I posted my review of the The Wreck of the Penn Central but before I completely move on I wanted to post a couple scans from it. The book included a number of interesting pull-out charts.

The first chart, pictured above, was the organization chart for merger day (February 1, 1968). It includes every position from chairman (Stuart T. Saunders, ex-) through the President (Alfred E. Perlman, ex-) down to the managers and assistants of the various railway companies.

This chart is interesting because it shows the integration between the ex-PRR and ex-NYC people. The former Pennsy employees were known as “Red’s” while the former New York Central people were known as “Green’s”. These nicknames came from the common color of their company boxcars, and is represented in the chart. The two corporate cultures never truly became one and this was one of the well-known problems with the merger.

pc_chart2

The second chart was prepared by the US Congress to map out all the various holdings and investments of the Penn Central Company. Included are everything from trucking companies to a pipeline company to other non-railroad related investments.

The organization of the Penn Central was made even more complicated by all the acquisitions the PRR and NYC made over the years that were never fully merged into their systems but instead existed separately on paper.

For instance, the Little Miami Railroad Co. is still listed on the chart as being owned 74% by the Pennsylvania Company (an investment company for the ). The Little Miami was a railroad originally incorporated in 1836 and bought by the PRR in 1870. However, as was the typical railroad way of doing things, it wasn’t outright bought but instead leased in perpetuity by the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad (a PRR subsidiary). This is why the Little Miami and many other smaller railroads like it still existed as a separate corporate entity on the chart, even though their lines were part of the massive Penn Central System. Many were not completely merged out of existance until the formation of Conrail in 1976.

These scans aren’t perfect and are a little blurry in the middle, but you get the idea. If you need a detailed study I would recommend purchasing the book or borrowing it from your local library.

I only have a couple of pieces of rail news for the past week. There is an article in the Dayton Daily News about local towns competing for a stop on the 3C Corridor. There’s also an article about highlights form the past week’s hobo festival in Bucyrus, and the LM&M is running their Civil War train this weekend in Mason.

Also, don’t expect a post tomorrow. Instead I’ll be devoting my time to a post Friday featuring an old PRR Lebanon Branch track chart.

The Wreck of the Penn Central

Author: Kyle Montgomery
Category: Book Reviews Railroads: , ,

After researching the history of Buckeye Yard the other week I’ve been on a bit of a Penn Central kick. There’s not a lot of people out there who model the Penn Central, but it has a certain mystic. There’s something morbidly fascinating about the great railroad that managed to implode in only 867 days.

The The Wreck of the Penn Central by Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen provides an interesting look at that railroad monolith created back on February 1st, 1968. The book starts out with a brief history of the respective companies. The and the are compared and contrast while the reader begins to understand how their respective ideologies developed. This becomes important later when you witness some of the well-known corporate culture clashes that developed in the railroad at all levels.

Eventually the book transitions in the actual merger and some of the reasons it failed. The Penn Central’s problems were many and varied. They ranged to everything from railroad operation problems (the non-compatible computer systems are a famous example), to high labor costs, to factors beyond the railroad’s control (the ICC, the state of the industry, ect).

While the first few chapters kept me on the edge of me seat reading, the book drags a bit in the middle. Too much time is spent describing every point of the Penn Central’s “Diversification Program” and every investment or perceived conflict of interest within the management is emphasized. There comes a point when you realize there is no way this railroad will stay in business and that it will all fail spectacularly. The book overemphasizes just how bad things were and for a while you have to trudge through it in order to see the fireworks at the end.

When the house of cards finally collapses however, it does so with great interest. Even though history tells you all you need to know about the end, there is a while when it seems as if the government would step in with a bailout to save the day and you almost think they will pull it off. Yet as everyone knows it was not to be and the Penn Central would fail as the largest bankruptcy to that point in American history.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book is not the manuscript itself but the time it was written. The book was published in 1971, just one year after the Penn Central bankruptcy. Conrail wasn’t formed for 5 more years. People still viewed the nationalization of the railroads as a possible doomsday option. The Staggers Act and many of the things today’s modern railroad takes for granted all happened after this book was written. As a result a very bleak picture is painted for the future of the railroad industry.

It’s interesting to look back with hindsight and compare their predictions of the future with today’s modern efficient railroad system of today. Now only 2 companies compete East of the Mississippi and much of the Penn Central’s track is long-gone. However, after reading this book I think the collapse of the Penn Central may have been necessary. The abandonments and deferred maintenance hurt in the short term, but in the long run the fallout from the Penn Central (deregulation of the railroads, Conrail, Amtrak, ect) may have saved the entire industry.

At its core, The Wreck of the Penn Central is written as a warning that this is no way to merge and business, and certainly no way to run a railroad. Its message of bailouts and “too-big-to-fail” companies is surprisingly relevant in today’s political and economic climate. Railroad buffs and business majors alike can find something to learn in this book, and overall I think it was worth the read.

If you would like to purchase a copy of The Wreck of the Penn Central you can support this site by using the link here.

In other news I have an article on the 3-C Corridor in Middletown, an old CL&N stock for sale on ebay, and some rail stimulus projects being considered for Toledo.