The original edition of this book appeared exactly thirty years ago. In that year of 1972, Richard M. Nixon was president and made a historic visit to China. That same year he gained reelection by a landslide and five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex. George M. Wallace of Alabama seemed a serious threat for the Democratic nomination until he was shot by a would-be assassin and suffered partial paralysis. Two separate teams of astronauts spent record periods of time on the moon. A stone-age tribe, the Tasadays, was discovered living in caves in the Philippines. Mark Spitz captured seven gold medals at a summer Olympics blighted by the tragic deaths of eleven Israeli athletes. Hurricane Agnes devastated the East Coast, and a strike delayed the opening of the baseball season by thirteen days. The Dow Jones industrial average soared beyond one thousand for the first time ever. Life magazine ceased publication, and All in the Family dominated the television ratings.
When this book appeared that busy year, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad was still one of the major systems of the South—a proud company with a proud history, although its future as an independent road seemed uncertain. Today the central fact about the L & N is that it has ceased to exist as a corporate presence and has become the property of historians and railroad buffs. Its disappearance is hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, railroads have followed a consistent pattern of being absorbed by other, usually larger roads until only a handful of lines bearing their original names survive. In this respect the railroads proved a harbinger of things to come, as they did in so many other areas of American life. During the twentieth century the business landscape of America, once crowded with familiar signposts of individual, family, and corporate firms, has seen vast numbers of them swept into the vortex of merger or failure.
The pattern for railroads followed a course that has become all too familiar in modern times. Small local lines, often bearing the names of their terminuses, joined with connecting lines to form longer roads under a new name. In Darwinian fashion the newly extended line usually acquired or built additional mileage or found itself absorbed by a still larger company. Gradually this tangle of older roads and newly built mileage coalesced into a system occupying a territory well beyond that served by any of the original lines. Where once a town or local area identified with “its” railroad, the blanket of identity now extended over a wide region served by a still-expanding system. Town after town that had once been a proud terminus found itself a way station on a line to somewhere else.
At an even later stage, entire systems began to swallow one another, creating mega-systems, until now only a handful of giants dominate the rail landscape. Scattered about them are clusters of smaller local lines, many of them cast aside by the giant systems or resurrected from the scrap heap of past failures. Since the early twentieth century, this process of consolidation has also been one of attrition as the American rail system shrunk in size as well as in number. At its apex in 1916, a total of 1,243 rail companies of all classes owned 254,251 miles of line. By 1994 only thirteen Class I railroads remained, and the mileage owned had declined to 132,000.1 Lost in the shuffle of this massive consolidation and contraction was any sense of local identity among most of the survivors.
The L & N’s own history exemplifies this pattern to the last detail. Born as a child of the commercial rivalry between Louisville and Nashville, the road’s original route was plotted less by engineers than by the lottery of which towns cared to contribute to the construction of the line. The main line opened in October 1859 and soon underwent the ordeal of the Civil War, from which it emerged with the road intact, the treasury full, and an alert management eager to press its advantage over the prostrate roads of the defunct Confederacy. By 1875 it had secured control of a line to Memphis and another through the rich iron and coal regions of Alabama to Montgomery. During the next decade the company built, merged, and leased its way into Mobile, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Evansville, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pensacola, as well as the coal fields of western Kentucky.
By 1885 this rapid expansion had elevated the L & N into one of a handful of systems dominating southern railroad traffic. It also brought the management, which was headed by New York interests, to the brink of financial disaster and forced a reorganization that installed Milton H. Smith as president in 1884, an office he held until 1921. Although not a Kentuckian by birth, Smith returned the management of the road from New York to Louisville and presided over the last golden age of L & N home rule. Under his leadership the company extended lines into the coal fields of eastern Kentucky and the mineral beds of northern Alabama. During the 1880s and 1890s the L & N built, leased, or absorbed more than fifty smaller roads. Then in 1902, through a convoluted sequence of Wall Street maneuvers, controlling interest in the L & N passed into the hands of another system, the Atlantic Coast Line. The swallower had itself been swallowed, but not fully digested.
Despite this change of ownership, the L & N retained its separate identity as a system and continued to expand under Smith. Between 1902 and 1921 its mileage rose from 3,327 to 5,041, most of it in the form of more feeder lines into untapped regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. The death of Smith in 1921 coincided with the opening of a new era in which the L & N, like other railroads, struggled to adjust to the radically changed conditions of post-World War I America. The age of expansion had ended, never to return except in the form of mergers.
Between 1921 and 1941 the L & N fought to regain its footing from the wear and tear of World War I and the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression. A flood of business during World War II relieved the financial distress at the cost of running the physical plant of the road to exhaustion. When the much-dreaded postwar depression did not materialize, the L & N launched a vigorous program of modernization in a dogged effort to keep up with a changing transportation scene that bore hard on all railroads.
Through these years of scrambling and adjustment the L & N maintained its separate identity despite being owned by another system. Its largest subsidiary was not so fortunate: in August 1957 the company absorbed the 1,043-mile Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis system, which it had controlled for seventy-seven years but had left as a separate entity. The L & N system remained largely unchanged until 1969, when it acquired the 135- mile Tennessee Central and the 287-mile Chicago & Eastern Illinois roads. Two years later the company purchased the 571-mile Monon Railroad, giving it a second route into Chicago. Yet even as the L & N absorbed its newest (and last) major acquisition, it was being targeted for the same fate.
It was at this point that the story told in the original edition ended.
During the early 1960s, two major movements emerged in the railroad industry. One was a drive to reorganize railroads into holding companies that separated out their non-rail assets and usually left the railroad itself as merely one of several divisions. The other involved a renewed wave of mergers that redrew the nations railway map in spectacular fashion. The first aimed to restructure individual firms, the second the industry as a whole. Together they promulgated the most drastic overhaul of the American railroad scene in history. Between 1955 and 1966 the Interstate Commerce Commission fielded no less than fifty applications for mergers of Class I railroads. In July 1967 the Atlantic Coast Line merged with its longtime rival, the Seaboard Air Line, to form a new company, the Seaboard Coast Line. Even as it swallowed smaller lines, the L & N found itself with a new owner.
The combined system, which embraced the Seaboard Coast Line, the L & N, and some smaller roads, totaled 16,000 miles of track and began to market itself as “The Family Lines Rail System.” Within the “family” the L & N maintained its own identity even though many administrative, marketing, and operations functions were integrated. The Seaboard also followed the trend of creating a holding company, Seaboard Coast Line Industries. In November 1971 this company increased its holding of L & N stock from 33 percent to 98 percent, giving it virtually complete ownership. Although L & N headquarters remained in Louisville, its officers presided over fewer and different functions than they had in earlier decades. The once mighty L & N system had become in effect a subsidiary in a larger entity.2
Then, in November 1980, the first stage of what seemed an inevitable mega-merger took place when Seaboard Coast Line Industries joined with the Chessie System, itself the product of a 1973 merger combining two proud and historic lines, the Baltimore & Ohio and the Chesapeake & Ohio, as well as the Western Maryland. The new company, which took the antiseptic name of CSX Corporation, planned to let the two rail systems function separately while coordinating operations and other activities as much as possible. Like most of the rail holding companies born after 1960, CSX diversified into a variety of interests besides transportation, although the railroads continued to provide most of its assets and revenues. This arrangement lasted only until January 1983, when Seaboard’s five “Family Lines” merged into one new company, the Seaboard System Railroad. At that moment the L & N ceased to exist as a separate entity.
But the merger mania did not stop there. Late in 1985 CSX announced plans for a major reorganization that over the next few years combined the former Chessie roads and the infant Seaboard System Railroad into one giant railroad, CSX Transportation—itself a division of the larger CSX holding company. By 1987 this restructuring was complete. In 1995 this colossus led the nation’s railroads in operating revenues and had become one of two great systems east of the Mississippi River. In 2000 it operated 1,500 trains daily across twenty-three states. No city could find in the railroad’s name the slightest trace of its roots or components, yet within its labyrinth of corporate charters could be found a significant part of the railroad history of the South. Louisville, once the center of the L & N rail universe, became the Midwest region headquarters for CSXT.
A similar fate befell the two great giants of eastern railroading, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Once the most powerful and prestigious systems in the nation, they ran afoul of hard times and in 1968 did the unthinkable by combining to form the Penn Central in what proved to be one of the most bungled and ill-starred mergers of all time. Two years later the Penn Central crashed into bankruptcy and in 1976 became part of a new corporation called Conrail, which also swept into its shaky structure a host of other bankrupt roads including the Erie, Jersey Central, Reading, and Lehigh Valley. Conrail limped along until 1999, when most of its mileage was parceled out to CSX and the Norfolk Southern—the latter a concoction formed by combining two major southern systems, the Southern and the Norfolk & Western.
Back in 1888, during a meeting of rail moguls seeking ways and means of relief from their constant wars and fighting, Collis P. Huntington—the man who created not only the Southern Pacific but the Chesapeake & Ohio as well—declared that “When there is only one railroad company in the United States … it will be better for everybody concerned, and the sooner this takes place the better.”3 The “One Big Railroad” never happened, but it has drawn nearer to realization than anyone of Huntington’s generation ever dreamed. Today four mega-systems dominate the American rail map: CSXT and the Norfolk Southern east of the Mississippi River and the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) west of it.
Like their eastern counterparts, both of the western giants followed the familiar pattern of absorbing one rival after another. The Union Pacific gobbled up the Chicago & Northwestern, Katy, Missouri Pacific, Western Pacific, and Southern Pacific, among others, while the BNSF enfolded the Burlington, Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Spokane, Portland & Seattle, St. Louis & San Francisco, and Santa Fe into its enormous system. Every one of those systems, like the L & N, represented a conglomeration of lines large and small that had been built or acquired over the years. A huge part of American railroad history now dangles somewhere on the family trees of only four systems.
Thus has the tangled trail of consolidation led to the demise of nearly all the familiar railroad company names, logos, and landmarks during the past century, and especially the last thirty years. Today many people are surprised when told that the railroads are not only still around but carrying huge amounts of traffic. Their puzzlement stems from the fact that most people knew the railroads firsthand only as passengers, even though the passenger business had always been the smallest and least profitable part of the railroads’ work. As the railroads gradually unloaded the despised passenger business onto a newly created government corporation called Amtrak beginning in May 1971, they all but vanished from the eyes of that large segment of the public that did not work for, ship goods on, or live near a rail line. Between the mergers and the dropping of passenger traffic, then, the railroads lost their identity in two important ways.
And all this has happened in the thirty years since this volume first appeared.
Many years ago, the fine singer Jean Ritchie recorded a song called “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” which mourned the passing of a played-out coal mining town. It is a beautiful and nostalgic song, and today it rings true in quite another way. The system of railroads built and acquired by the L & N over the years continues to operate and do a thriving business. The tracks and all their appurtenances are still there, but they have long since lost their original identity and become anonymous components. The railroad still serves most of the same cities and towns, but the L & N don’t stop there anymore.
Maury Klein
East Greenwich, Rhode Island
1. United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 2:728; United States Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997 (Washington, 1997), 643. The Interstate Commerce Commission in 1911 began classifying railroads according to what became a sliding scale of earnings. For an explanation of the classification system see Statistical Abstract 1997, 616.
2. Basic information about the L & N during the period after 1970 is taken from Charles B. Castner, Ronald Flanary, and Patrick Dorin, Louisville & Nashville Railroad: The Old Reliable (Lynchburg, Va., 1996). I am grateful to Charles B. Castner for supplying information in the same helpful manner as during the original research for the book.
3. Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986), 437.