Predecessors of Conrail - Penn Central Transportation Company, Pennsylvania Railroad, New York Central Railroad, Lehigh Valley Railroad, Reading (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 56. Chapters: Penn Central Transportation Company, Pennsylvania Railroad, New York Central Railroad, Lehigh Valley Railroad, Reading Company, New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, Raritan River Railroad, Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, Erie Railroad, Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, Erie Lackawanna Railway, Ironton Railroad, Central Railroad of New Jersey, Monongahela Railway, Lehigh and Hudson River Railway, New York Connecting Railroad, Ann Arbor Railroad, New York and Long Branch Railroad. Excerpt: The Pennsylvania Railroad (reporting mark PRR) was an American Class I railroad, founded in 1846. Commonly referred to as the "Pennsy," the PRR was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The PRR was the largest railroad by traffic and revenue in the U.S. for the first half of the twentieth century and was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world. At its peak it controlled about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of rail line; in the 1920s it carried about three times the traffic (measured by ton-miles of freight) as other railroads of comparable length, such as Union Pacific or Santa Fe. The only rival was New York Central, which carried around three-quarters of PRR's ton-miles. During its history the PRR merged with or had an interest in at least 800 other rail lines and companies. The corporation still holds the record for the longest continuous dividend history: it paid out annual dividends to shareholders for more than 100 years in a row. At one point the budget for the PRR was larger than that of the U.S. government; at its peak it employed about 250,000 workers. In 1968 the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with its rival, the New York Central Railroad, to form the Penn Central Transportation Company. The Interstate Commerce Commission required that the ailing New York, New Haven and...