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Alexander Craghead
, January 06, 2008
(view all comments by Alexander Craghead)
Penn Central. To this day, the name of this corporation sends shudders through the world of finance. When it went bankrupt in June of 1970, it was the largest bankruptcy in United States history, and it held that title for the next thirty-one years. (It took the collapse of Enron in 2001 to supplant it). In The Men Who Loved Trains, journalist Rush loving tells the story of how Penn Central came into being, but even more importantly how a few men picked up the pieces afterward and pulled the railroad industry out of a tailspin that might have proved fatal.
Loving's work is essentially a journalistic book, rather than a scholarly one. It is written in a prose style and has an eminently readable pacing. Yet don't take this for being lightweight; that the author can weave such an unwieldy mess into a fast and cohesive narrative is a testament to his abilities as a writer. In ways, the book follows in the tradition of works such as Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.
The story line follows the chronology of the demise of Penn Central, the struggle to pick up the pieces, and the creation, life, and eventual parting out of PC's successor, Conrail. Throughout the work we meet various key individuals; from the fiery Alfred Perlman to former CSX Transportation executive (and future Treasury Secretary) John Snow. Along the way, we come back again and again to John McClellan, tracking his career from entry level PC staffer through to planner for the Department of Transportation and eventually strategic advisory for Norfolk Southern. His career serves as a foil for the events of Conrail's life and death, humanizing a story of corporate battle and macro economics.
And what a story it is! Following the collapse of PC, many pundits were predicting doom for the entire railroad industry. The more optimistic felt that the Northeast lived behind a wall in which railroad transportation simply would never pencil out. Although a government takeover of PC would help keep the trains running, many in the private sector feared it as a dangerous first step towards nationalization. In the end, a select few fought an uphill battle for the creation first of passenger carrier Amtrak, and then of the freight railroad what would come to be known as Conrail.
Like Amtrak, Conrail has a belabored existence for much of its life. It inherited a property that was severely overextended and under-maintained. Only great gobs of public money could solve Conrail's problems, and even then there was no real guarantee it would turn the company around. Throughout its existence, philosophical and political opponents watched and salivated as they waited for the company to trip and fall.
As Loving tells, however, Conrail endured, returning to black ink, and eventually becoming a publicly traded, private sector corporation. Loving tells, too, of the irony that was the end of Conrail; the company became the subject of a bidding war between NS and CSXT, and was finally split between them in 1997, redrawing the Northeastern railroad map along lines that were eerily similar to what Al Perlman had wanted before he was forced into agreeing with the PC merger.
The book attempts to carry the story without bias, in the best journalistic fashion, and most of the time succeeds in doing so. There is, however, a distinct bias in favor of McClellan's employer, NS, and the between-the-lines feeling is that Loving and McClellan are friends. Still, Loving remains remarkable professional, remaining gentlemanly even when dealing with McClellan's arch-rival Snow.
Conrail was arguably the nation's most controversial modern railroad project. The Men Who Loved Trains tells an important tale of railroading, corporate intrigue, and a thousand might-have-beens that make it one of the hallmark railroad history books about the late 20th century, of importance not just to scholars of Northeastern and Midwestern railroad history, but to anyone with an interest in railroads, the politics of transportation, or public policy.
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