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(erielack) MARC-EL to North Jersey

Paul,
 
Disclaimer: Let's acknowledge that any time anyone says that  corporation 
"feels" or "thinks" one way or another, they are talking in  shorthand (at best).
 
I think it would be fair to say that the EL/LV friction wasn't so much  a 
product of rational, objective thought as it was of the raw contest for the  
insufficient traffic that remained available.  EL wanted LV to go  away, period.  
Richard Saunders captured this nicely as he described how EL  men felt 
watching LV couple onto the Apollo in Buffalo.  I'm remembering  that nice piece of 
writing from his awkwardly-titled book The Railroad  Mergers and the Coming of 
Conrail (Greenwood Press, long out of print) and I am  not sure it made it 
into his later, expanded book on the same subject, Merging  Lines.
 
As I recall, G.W. Maxwell was more focused on trying to get trackage rights  
over the Big Four to East St. Louis, so as to avoid dependence on N&W, than  
he was in MARC-EL.  The EL trustees were more focused on trying to get the  
Marion Division included in Conrail (so they could be paid a good price for it),  
than they were on MARC-EL.  Ben Franklin's adage about hanging together vs.  
hanging separately applies here.
 
I could have added previously that LV trustee Robert Haldeman made the  
rounds on Capitol Hill in late 1975 trying to pitch a plan whereby LV would  
reorganize outside Conrail with a business plan based almost wholly on serving  as 
N&W's intermodal gateway to the Northeast.  My boss asked me  to sit in on that 
presentation.  It was unclear whether N&W  actually supported the plan, given 
John Fishwicks' firewall theory, but Haldeman  wanted us to believe that it 
would.  At the time, of course, EL was teed up  to become part of Chessie.
 
WDB



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