by lvrr325
What would it carry? As CN's outlet to the New York City area, anything they wanted to ship. Certainly if nothing else paper for Mehoopany, which originated on CN and pre-Conrail interchanged at Binghamton with the D&H, and during Conrail often traveled Montreal Sec-Syracuse-Buffalo-Corning-Sayre-Mehoopany. As a leg of CN, I'm sure that would all be shifted to an all CN-LV route via Buffalo.
The LV seperate from Conrail becomes a bridge line from Buffalo to New York - there was enough traffic for the D&H to survive about 10 years after the merger AND for the NYS&W to prosper via stack trains, and both continued through the late 90s Conrail split. The LV may have been redundant in a time when you had 6 railroads connecting Buffalo and NY, but as the only competiton to a single system it becomes vital.
You can argue bleeding money, loss of traffic, ignore the profitable quarter of 1975 all you want but it still boils down to Penn Central going bankrupt and no longer paying per diem to the LV and other roads, taking a big chunk of cash flow away, that led directly to the LV's need to also declare bankruptcy. Otherwise it could have continued to totter along awaiting the railroad reform acts of the 1970s - maybe it would have run out of cash before that, maybe not. Were it sold to someone else, though, they could have continued to pump money in and improve the line as needed. Conrail and CSX maintain that Montreal Secondary and apparently make money with it on fewer trains per day than the LV ran between Sayre and Buffalo.
The LV seperate from Conrail becomes a bridge line from Buffalo to New York - there was enough traffic for the D&H to survive about 10 years after the merger AND for the NYS&W to prosper via stack trains, and both continued through the late 90s Conrail split. The LV may have been redundant in a time when you had 6 railroads connecting Buffalo and NY, but as the only competiton to a single system it becomes vital.
You can argue bleeding money, loss of traffic, ignore the profitable quarter of 1975 all you want but it still boils down to Penn Central going bankrupt and no longer paying per diem to the LV and other roads, taking a big chunk of cash flow away, that led directly to the LV's need to also declare bankruptcy. Otherwise it could have continued to totter along awaiting the railroad reform acts of the 1970s - maybe it would have run out of cash before that, maybe not. Were it sold to someone else, though, they could have continued to pump money in and improve the line as needed. Conrail and CSX maintain that Montreal Secondary and apparently make money with it on fewer trains per day than the LV ran between Sayre and Buffalo.
