kinlock wrote:So when the railroad closed, so did these businesses? Nope: just added more trucks on roads unfit to handle them
Well, excluding the big client International Paper, and those clients recieving coal shipments (I would presume they switched to Gas or Oil by the 1970s, coal was rapidly falling out of favor for heating by then), we have 341 carloads over a year.
Even assuming 4 trucks/carload, that's about 3.7 TRUCKS per day - nobody probably even noticed that.
Looks like about 174 carloads of coal - the change-over from coal to oil/gas heating really did take a big whack out of rail freight in the North East - those business accounted for an average of 2 additional trucks per day.
And IP was the winner - 452 car loads, which does work out to be about 5 additional truck-loads per day - now that could be noticible, since it was all going to the same business I guess.