New York Central and the Virginian Railway

Towards the very end of 1958 and into 1959, the N&W made moves to merge with the Virginian Railway. Say, before the N&W's interest in the VGN, the NYC made a successful run at merging with the VGN themselves. The NYC had a direct western connection with the VGN via their Toledo and Ohio Central Railway subsidiary at Deepwater, West Virginia, so it would have been an end-to-end merger. The NYC would have had a significant revenue stream from being a coal hauling railroad just like the N&W and the C&O were and they would have had line haul for westbound coal loads over much of their Midwestern portion of their system. In the end, the NYC would not have needed to get into a bidding war with the C&O for the B&O in the early 1960s, and there probably would have been any Penn Central merger. What impact would this have made upon all of the railroad system north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers if any?

Like you said, Central could have gained what PRR and B&O had, a direct connection to the southern lines (Sou, SAL, ACL). The down side would have been going west via OH to get there.