Why did Conrail absorb Lehigh Valley and Jersey Central if..

[gearhead]

they were going to abandon almost all of those lines? where were the shippers lobbies during this time of Gov control of Conrail? How did the board of Conrail keep politics out of the game? Was this there plan all along?

[charlie6017]

Actually a good chunk of the LV is still being used. From Oak Island yard in NJ to Waverly, NY the line is still being used, albeit now split between 3 different carriers. NS also uses the trackage from Sayre to north of Ithaca to service a power plant. Some of the CNJ is used in NJ as well.

Charlie

[Noel Weaver]

The question "Why did Conrail absorb Lehigh Valley and Jersey Central if"? My answer is because they were absolutely broke and would probably have been shut down if Conrail hadn't come into being. In short, as I have pointed out previously, there was simply too much duplicate railroad mileage in the northeast. The best routes were in most cases the lines of the former Penn Central. A good share of the Lehigh Valley and Reading survived because they offered and still do offer a good alternative to lines of the former Penn Central that became Amtrak owned and operated and the Lehigh Valley and Reading offered a good route serving the same places and the same interchanges as Penn Central did in most cases.
Noel Weaver

[Kilgore Trout]

Ignoring the solvency of the CNJ and LV, did Conrail expect in 1976 to leave the NEC and accordingly snap up the duplicate routes to have to itself?

[gearhead]

But it seems that the way the LV was dived up in the finger lakes gave conrail a monopoly on the power plant and salt mines in Ithaca....There is no connection there and Conrail ignored attempts to save the railroads and put a moratoroium on short lines that could posssibly compete with them for traffic. Look at how Falls Road RR was spilt up

[charlie6017]

I'm going to send you a link to a site where you can read the "Final System Plan" formed by the United States Railway Administration, which lays out how Conrail was to operate the roads of its predecessors. In 1976, Conrail pretty much DID have a "monopoly" on most railroads in the northeast, with the exception of perhaps Chessie System, and the roads that Conrail didnt want and those were either spun off to a short-line or abandoned outright. In addition to the link, I would suggest maybe purchasing "The Men Who Loved Trains", by Rush Loving, Jr. It's a great read, and you would learn a lot about why Conrail was created and the state of the railroad business and how it became profitable again.

USRA Final System Plan

Charlie

[ExCon90]

It's also worth noting that Conrail didn't make a lot of these decisions. USRA was charged with deciding which lines (not companies, but individual lines and branches) were worth saving. Those that made the cut were combined into one system, which came to be called Conrail. (There were a lot of other things going on, involving Chessie, Dereco, MARC-EL, etc., but that's essentially the way it turned out.) The lines not made part of Conrail were cut loose unless someone wanted to take them over at their own risk.

[gearhead]

I am reading the final system plan as we speak. The point I see over and over again is "Make Conrail Self Suffciant" as soon as possible. Profit and self sufficacy seemed to take the priority over the needs of small shippers.Hence the cutting of small buisess railroad sidings and branch lines. The report also totes that TOFC will serve the needs of small shippers....what they did not antispate was trucking deregulation. Amtrak seemed to be created as a way to save Conrail. Had Conrail been forced to operate intercity passenger trains Conrail could not have made it. The Goverment wanted to fix Conrail and get it off there hands asap.

[ExCon90]

Amtrak was not created as a way to save Conrail, since Amtrak was created in 1971 and Conrail in 1976. The purpose in creating Amtrak was to get the freight railroads out from under the intercity passenger business and provide a form of hospice care for intercity passenger trains until they expired of natural causes, as they were generally expected to do (the for-profit language in the legislation was in there to gain enough votes to pass it). The reason for the Preliminary System Plan and its successors was to deal with the fact, as famously quipped by John Ingram of the Rock Island, that the "eastern railroad-bankruptcy problem" had reached Tucumcari. It is correct that the overriding objective was to make the eastern (and other) railroads self-sufficient by any means necessary, and one of the most important was getting rid of underproductive branch lines (the "small businesses" had stopped using their private sidings long ago -- that was just the trouble). It is a sad truism that small businesses shipping one or two cars at a time generally did so only when the rates were too low to be profitable and for various reasons couldn't be raised. Actually, trucking deregulation greatly helped to expand TOFC -- it was much easier, and involved much less red tape, to put together combination rail-truck routes after deregulation than before.

[JimBoylan]

The short and overly simple answer could be that ConRail didn't create ConRail. The people who set it up were not always the ones who decided a few years later how it would be run. And, not all of the assumptions used to make decisions in the Final System Plan that created ConRail came true.

[lvrr325]

In the case of the Lehigh Valley, it was a Penn Central property, owned to the tune of 80% or 90%, I forget the exact figure, but never merged into the system - the PRR took control about 1962 and tried to pawn it off as part of the prep for the PC merger, but neither C&O or N&W wanted it.

The CNJ was similarly aligned with the B&O until about 1972 when the USRA plans began to take shape; by then they gave up on their tracks in PA which became LV operated by default.

All of these companies gave up the rail assets and properties in the final system plan, to Conrail, and the Penn Central and even the LV continued to exist for some time after to dispose of the property not included in the Conrail system, be it through leasing for operation, sale, or scrap/demolition. Penn Central itself became an insurance company that has since changed names a couple times, possibly at least one via another merger.

[SENIOR BUFF]

"In the case of the Lehigh Valley, it was a Penn Central property, owned to the tune of 80% or 90%, I forget the exact figure, but never merged into the system - the PRR took control about 1962 and tried to pawn it off as part of the prep for the PC merger, but neither C&O or N&W wanted it."

What you say is almost totally true. What is totally true is that the PRR purchased the LV back when it was a small coal road surrounded by much competition. They completely upgraded and lengthened the line to make it a relief valve for the over-crowded New York - Chicago service. Between 1910 and as late as 1936, the LV Passenger trains ran out of Penn Station New York, and changed power at Newark, while the Freight service had already been established on its own at New York Bay [Black Tom was their Car Float and Lighter station, which was given over to ammunition and other explosive materiel prior to the explosion]. The PRR later gave up control of the LV, but maintained partial ownership through 1962 to the very end.