In my opinion Bevan would have said anything to make himself look better. Saunders was notoriously anxious to get the PRR married off, and his reasons for this weren't all bad. However, there was a feeling at the time that mergers somehow saved money, even when redundant costs couldn't be cut deeply, as was the case with the PC.
I agree that if the merger had been called off something would have had to have happened with the NH, it just was not solvent in any way. I also generally agree with the idea that eventually the PRR and the NYC would have gone bankrupt, but it could have been held off at least a couple of years longer. The most staggering thought to me is the one that was posted above that there could have been a belt of bankrupt lines across the entire country, what with the RI in such horrible shape and the Milwaukee making some of the worst business decisions of any line in American history. Eventually government would have to act in some way.
An interesting thought that occurs to me, if there were the string of smaller (compared to PC) lines going broke across the entire nation, would the Nixon administration have had the stomach to create something like existed in Canada at the time? It could have been possible to create, through controlled mergers, a 2 railroad solution, one private and one that was at least temporarily government owned. To their credit, the ICC was at least somewhat interested in maintaining competition between railroads, and always feared a nation-wide nationalization of the entire system. The Canadian model could serve as a basis for how the US could have dealt with the problem, especially if the federally-funded railroad were privatized in a manner like Conrail was.
The question I still have on that though, would it have been politically possible at all?
I agree that if the merger had been called off something would have had to have happened with the NH, it just was not solvent in any way. I also generally agree with the idea that eventually the PRR and the NYC would have gone bankrupt, but it could have been held off at least a couple of years longer. The most staggering thought to me is the one that was posted above that there could have been a belt of bankrupt lines across the entire country, what with the RI in such horrible shape and the Milwaukee making some of the worst business decisions of any line in American history. Eventually government would have to act in some way.
An interesting thought that occurs to me, if there were the string of smaller (compared to PC) lines going broke across the entire nation, would the Nixon administration have had the stomach to create something like existed in Canada at the time? It could have been possible to create, through controlled mergers, a 2 railroad solution, one private and one that was at least temporarily government owned. To their credit, the ICC was at least somewhat interested in maintaining competition between railroads, and always feared a nation-wide nationalization of the entire system. The Canadian model could serve as a basis for how the US could have dealt with the problem, especially if the federally-funded railroad were privatized in a manner like Conrail was.
The question I still have on that though, would it have been politically possible at all?