I have often wondered if the ACL/SAL merger was preordained. My two alternate merger partners would the SL-SF or GM&O. Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
The SAL+ACL merger has consumed more than its fair share of my ‘what if’ cranial free-time. Understand first off that this union was the flavor of its era. It is this same mentality that brought us Penn Central, Erie-Lackawanna and (almost) Norfolk & Western + Chesapeake & Ohio. It was the wreck of the Penn Central which demonstrated that parallel mergers did not guarantee long term success.
All of this said, Seaboard Coast Line did succeed… but at a price. As has been noted in a few text books on the subject, the service level offered by the combined road never did achieve the levels of when they were separate. (It should be noted the author is a resident of the Sunshine State which was decimated by the merger so there may be just a slight bias.) It has also been noted in the biography of D.W. Brosnan that a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ was reached between Southern and ACL that each would not interfere with their respective mergers of the Central of Georgia and SAL.
It is my personal belief that they got it backwards. ACL should have gotten the Central of Georgia and Southern should have gotten the Seaboard. Even with this twist the Southern would have been smaller than the ACL-L&N family of roads but the delta would have been less. Line attrition would still be inevitable but it would have been based less on redundancy and more on actual demand. And, of course, Florida would not have had to suffer the indignity of three-quarters of its rail mileage going into one camp. Ultimately two ‘more balanced’ Southeastern roads would have been formed with greater penetration of area serviced. However, in those pre-Stagger’s Act days, the name of the game was survival not service.