GTI's expansion plans

Was this ever a serious endeavor involving expanding into Midwest? And if it was, what went wrong?

I’m sure others that were around at the time have a better understanding of the details than I do, but yes it was a fairly serious endeavor. When NS pursued buying Conrail, they had a deal with GTI to sell them some track & rolling stock, and lease them some Conrail lines in order to enable GTI to run trains to St Louis. When NS didn’t purchase Conrail, the deal fell through. A few years later, GTI also bid on Southern Pacific.

PAR was ready to make another attempt when rumors were swirling of an NS-CP merger a few years ago. They were ready to petition the STB for trackage rights to Chicago and had documents and maps drafted and printed to make the case. A long shot, for sure. But just goes to show they've never given up on the idea.

GTI has had several strategies over its life that influenced its expansion plans.

Guilford was conceived to be a non-union Conrail competitor operating in New England, the Northeast, and the Midwest. There was a two-step plan to accomplish this. Step 1 was to merge the Maine Central, Boston & Maine, and Deleware & Hudson, a merger that was first proposed by the ICC in the 1920s. Step 2 was to take advantage of the government's sale of Conrail to Norfolk Southern to acquire a mix of lines and trackage rights into the Midwest to places like Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit. After the NS-Conrail deal fell through, Guilford bid on SP in hopes of bullying Conrail to give it trackage rights into the midwest. This clearly did not come to pass.

Here is a map showing what lines they planned to acquire: http://multimodalways.org/docs/railroad ... er+Map.pdf

After the government failed to sell Conrail to Norfolk Southern, Guilford adopted a new strategy. It would take advantage of Conrail's market power by becoming what amounted to a large New England terminal railroad. The D&H no longer fit into this strategy, so it was ditched. Guilford signed many agreements with Conrail during this time, including one to make Worcester the primary interchange point between the two railroads. (This continues to be the case today with CSX.) Several ex-NH branch lines were purchased from Conrail, and Guilford also put out bids for both the Bangor & Aroostook and Providence & Worcester as well, but those acquisitions also never materialized.

With the coming of the Conrail split, Guilford's strategy once again changed. Guilford would continue to be a large New England terminal railroad, but this time it would play CSX and NS off each other to its own advantage. The Pan Am Southern deal brought NS directly to the Boston area, while CSX remained Pan Am's largest interchange partner through the Worchester gateway. Pan Am bid on several lines during this era, including the MaineDOT-owned Rockland Branch, and the lines that currently make up the Maine Northern Railway. When the MM&A went bankrupt, Pan Am and the Irving Roads put up a joint bid to acquire the Maine portions of the MM&A. None of these came true, but it shows that Pan Am has never given up on expansion.

BostonUrbEx wrote:PAR was ready to make another attempt when rumors were swirling of an NS-CP merger a few years ago. They were ready to petition the STB for trackage rights to Chicago and had documents and maps drafted and printed to make the case. A long shot, for sure. But just goes to show they've never given up on the idea.

Sounds like something they would do. I would love to see those documents since I obsess over this stuff. Some ideas truly never die!

Then there was that time when they tried to buy the Northeast Corridor...

https://web.archive.org/web/19980130185 ... 7-97pr.htm

he SPLIT of CR to CSX and NS was a shock to Guilford,a possible split of PAR/PAS with the "hung up "sale to CSX is another shock to Guilford.

shadyjay wrote: ↑Thu Feb 04, 2021 4:25 pm Then there was that time when they tried to buy the Northeast Corridor...

Didn't they have rights at one time on the NEC to the RF&P? And after reading the previous links the answer would be yes.

It's entertaining to think about all the possible "what-if" scenarios and imagine how they would've played out if Guilford had been successful with any of these various ideas.

It also begs the question: why was Guilford unsuccessful with nearly all of them? And just how serious was Guilford about these ideas? Did they try really hard, or was it more along the lines of "we'll take a swing and maybe we'll get lucky?"

Now I find myself imagining a consist of locomotives in the Guilford Phase I paint scheme: a Boston & Maine GP40-2, a Maine Central U18B, a Delaware & Hudson C424, a Bangor & Aroostook GP38, a Providence & Worcester M420R, and a Southern Pacific B36-7 — all different, but all the same — dragging loaded SP coal cars to Mount Tom Station.

When they were cleaning out files from the storage area in Billerica office back in Spring of 2019, there were several folders found that pertained to the potential expansion plans circa 1985. There were notes and detailed photos from a hi-rail trip that someone from Transportation and someone from Marketing took out in OH, IN, and IL. They detailed "cab view" shots of the signals, junctions, customers, and ROW of the ex-EL mainline that was now downgraded to single track at that time.

So there was obviously some early effort put in to look at the feasibility of having the Big G run from Maine to Chicago as a Conrail competitor.

I imagine lots of companies and people would have opposed those plans. Perhaps some folks intervened to stop them.

Yes, you can see pictures of Guilford units sitting at Potomac Yard. When they let the D&H enter bankruptcy, that ended. The Susquehanna, as D&H designated operator, would run down on CSX from Philly to Pot Yard.

John


Didn't they have rights at one time on the NEC to the RF&P? And after reading the previous links the answer would be yes.
[/quote]

Another question would be did Guilford ask for anything durring the Conrail split?

With their "anti-union" stance,there would have been great opposition from the Unions
Not a peep during the CR split.

We'll likely never know, yet it could be enlightening if any of the Big G bids were even close to competitive. Were Mellon's billions (which certainly could have been utilized to compete with "the big boys") largely withheld and GTI content to remain a little g regional? Perhaps they banked on possibilities of a a legit bidder withdrawing their offer and we now could be witnessing deferred maintenance on the NEC etc and the resultant side effects? Projecting here
Corporate welfare from states and/or Feds for upgrades and maintenance on the NEC etc would have been welcomed with "open arms."

Fortunately, we'll never know...

PBMcGinnis wrote:So there was obviously some early effort put in to look at the feasibility of having the Big G run from Maine to Chicago as a Conrail competitor.

That effort was at the core as to why Mellon and Fink purchased the 3 properties in the first place early 1980's and shows the connection, influence and inspiration of NS in those early years.

Those plans wouldn't have had GTI competing with Conrail, but providing the needed necessary competition with a dominant combined NS/Conrail system up north while CSX competed down south within a cooked up NS/Reagan administration plan to get Conrail off the dole.

But, L. Stanley Crane, Conrail's Chairman and recently retired from Southern Railway as Board Chairman and Chief Executive, and the Brotherhood of Railway & Airline Clerks, exacting revenge against NS no doubt (see below), working with Hays T. Watkins and John Snow at CSX, derailed NS and the Reagan Administration's plan to hand NS what would have been a huge strategic win. Their successful rallying cry was "Let Conrail Be Conrail !"

Once that happened, Fink took out N&W's President John Fishwick's successful playbook from the watershed 1978 BRAC strike and turned attention inward, having had their strategic thrust thrown into the dustbin by a financially and politically strong Conrail.