Death of the American Railroad - The Rise and Fall of the Penn Central

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This is a reworked and reuploaded version of the original video.

Howdy! :D

This video has been redone substantially different, so much so that it has dethroned my World Trade Center video for being my longest production to date. However, as I consider the collapse of the Penn Central to be the perfect paradigm of the decline of rail transportation in the mid-20th Century, especially in the United States, I felt my previous video didn't do it justice, and thus I have pulled out all the stops to provide as much information as possible on this most monumental of corporate collapses. Thus, I have created this feature-length year-by-year account of the Penn Central's slow and complicated collapse over the course of its eight year existence, thereby giving a full summary of how this most monumental of failures was allowed to take place, but also how it led to a new future for the railroading scene.

The Penn Central came about as a desperate merger between two of America's largest but also most competitive railroads, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central, and was conceived as a way of securing their joint futures as both long and short distance journeys lost out to the meteoric rise of car and aviation modes following the end of World War II.

Sadly, what resulted was a completely wrong-headed combination of two companies that had no business merging to begin with, leading to needless duplication, widespread corporate inefficiency, intense internal rivalry and an inability to adapt to the unified network, culminating, in June 1970, in the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history to that point, though from its terrible downfall, action was ultimately forthcoming, and within a decade the railroads were back on the rise again as deregulation saw the shackles of suffocating legal limitations thrown off decades too late.

Chapters:

0:00 - Preamble
1:24 - The Formative Railroads
9:48 - The Need for a Merger
16:00 - Developing the Penn Central
30:14 - The Merger Made in Hell
38:30 - The First Full Year of 1969
42:49 - The Crash of 1970
46:24 - Going off Gold in 1971
50:50 - Stormy Weather in 1972
54:40 - Having a Crisis in 1973
58:00 - Watergates and Washouts in 1974
1:02:42 - Regulation Revisions of 1975
1:05:22 - Coming to an End in 1976
1:09:10 - The Conrail Culmination
1:14:24 - Could the Penn Central have worked?
1:16:48 - Conclusion

Special thanks to Railroad Media Archive for allowing me permission to use their footage to help support this production. I highly recommend heading over to their channel to see the raw original videos, illustrating some fantastic shots of the American railroads of yesteryear:

@RailroadMediaArchive

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of 'Unknown', and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): [email protected]

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

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References:
- Rush Loving Jr. - Trains Magazine (and his respective sources)
- Wikipedia (and its respective references)