2018: 50th anniversary of the PC merger

Fifty (!!!) years ago yesterday - February 1, 1968 - was the first 24 hours of the Penn Central.
"What a long, strange trip it's been."
Hard, indeed, to believe that PRR has now been gone for a full half-century.

Yes, the single event that started the cascade of northeast railroad failures.....

Similar to the assassination of the Archduke in 1914..

And last May was the 40th anniversary of Conrail.
(For WW I analogies… was Chessie System's refusal to take over the Erie similar to American isolationists' refusal to join the League of Nations?)

I'm pretty sure Conrail Startup Day was April 1st 1976 ?

Everybody got a big hoot out of starting up on April Fool's day.

So that would be 42 years ago this coming April 1st.

True--Penn Central was February, Conrail was April, and Amtrak was May of their respective years.

Allen Hazen wrote:And last May was the 40th anniversary of Conrail.
(For WW I analogies… was Chessie System's refusal to take over the Erie similar to American isolationists' refusal to join the League of Nations?)

Except that the shoes were on opposite feet: the U. S. refused to join the League, but it was Chessie which declined to accept the EL into the "family"--although I believe the EL employees themselves were very much against it. (There was reportedly a signal bungalow, I believe in Binghamton, which had an anti-Chessie message on it that probably cannot be quoted on a family website, if that's what this is.)