Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line by Gregory L. Schneider

2015; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ens.2015.0088

1467-2235

Simon Cordery,

Transport and Economic Policies

Reviewed by: Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line by Gregory L. Schneider Simon Cordery Gregory L. Schneider. Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. xx + 380 pp. ISBN 978-0-7006-1918-4, $39.95 (cloth). The story of the long, slow death of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad Company (CRIP) is well known. A staid, highly respected Granger Road falls on hard times, along with the rest of its industry, as automobiles, trucks, and airplanes siphon off traffic. A suitor willing to buy and save it appears in the form of the Union Pacific Railroad (UP), but a decade of delays by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) dooms the merger. When the green light to proceed is finally given, the UP has lost interest and the Rock Island limps on before being dissolved and sold off in segments. Rock Island Requiem goes behind these generalities to detail the drawn-out decline of the CRIP, which began in March 1962 when it opened merger talks with the UP. Two years later, the corporations forged an agreement in principle and the UP submitted it to the ICC in September 1964. Five years after that, the Justice Department approved the merger, which is when things got really interesting. Opposition from neighboring railroads and nervous shippers slowed proceedings to a crawl, and the CRIP stopped maintaining its physical plant, which deteriorated to the point at which there was more slow-order track than not. When the ICC finally authorized amalgamation in November 1974, the UP and its would-be merger partner, the Southern Pacific, had lost interest. Unable to secure financing, the CRIP declared bankruptcy in March 1975. Even though it was the beginning of the endgame, that was not the end of the story. Gregory Schneider of Emporia State University explores in great detail how and why the bankruptcy Trustee, William Gibbons, believed “the Rock” could be saved despite the external forces arrayed against it and the desire of its largest shareholder, Henry Crown, to liquidate it. Though it was running low on cash and providing unreliable service, the Rock ran trains into 1979, when a terrible winter and a crippling strike resulted in court-ordered liquidation the next year. Selling the lines took four years, and not until [End Page 225] 1988 did the Rock Island (by then an asset-holding company called the Chicago Pacific Corporation) finally cease to exist. Along the way, Schneider shows how Rock Island chairman Jervis Langdon tried desperately to negotiate with other railroads during the merger proceedings and how his diplomacy was blocked by the UP. By 1974, things were so bad that the CRIP was living from hand to mouth, with insufficient cash on hand to meet payroll and additional capital impossible to secure. Approaching the United States Railway Administration for loans proved increasingly frustrating and, though in 1977 the government of Iowa tried to resuscitate branch lines in the state, Crown urged the court-appointed trustee to liquidate the railroad. When the corporation ran out of cash, the sell-off began. As Schneider writes, this was an incredibly successful venture in which the creditors lost nothing. Emblematic of the cash value of CRIP assets was the bidding war between two rival railroads for the Rock Island “spine line” between St. Paul and Kansas City, which pushed the price up from $76 million to $93 million. Schneider places the Rock Island case into its historical contexts to explain the wider significance of the bankruptcy. Those contexts include government regulation and its multiple failures; national politics and why the federal government privileged East Coast railroading over the Midwest when it created Conrail but allowed the Rock to expire; the declining railroad industry of the Midwest; how other lines stabbed at the merger to derail it; and legal squabbles over how the merger should be handled and how the bankruptcy should unfold. Schneider labels his work a “policy history” (p. 9), but it is much more than that. This is a very human story. He introduces the main characters evenhandedly, including executives on competing railroads who caused frequent delays to ICC hearings...