Memo Leak Says American/US Airways Merger To Result In Layoffs

Conrail was a joke but was formed with an earlier attitude that we saw about the financial meltdown a couple of years ago, Penn Central was too big to fail. Through the multiple bankruptcies and reorganizations, somebody should have seen it coming rather than just being thrust into it. While there are many fallen flags that made up Conrail, it shows that the entire Northeast was overbuilt. When Claytor came off of Southern to take over Conrail, one of the first things he noticed was the difference between the 2. On the Southern, about every 2 miles there was a spur for a factory. On the PC, it was basically metro to metro with a lot of mainline in between and a big part of that was RR driven, hence the reason for the industrial concentration in the Northeast, and was also an incentive for a lot of those folks to come south, to get away from the metro costs or simply to have room to expand. After long last, when the sell off of Conrail came, NS and CSX, a result of non government consolidations and mergers themselves, took over what could be made profitable and there is still a healthy competition between the 2. In such a capital intensive industry, like the airlines, bigger is not always better. All that said, we must realize, as a country, whether highways, air, or rail, that we must have an infrastructure and not all that can be maintained by private enterprise.