Word: conrail
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...Government bought itself a lot of headaches during the 1970s when it created Conrail, the freight rail system in the East, and Amtrak, the national passenger railroad. At the time, the entire rail business was chugging toward the scrap pile. More than a decade of refurbishing and streamlining, however, has given railroading a shiny new look. Amtrak and Conrail, stoked by $18 billion in subsidies, have rebuilt their equipment and images...
...faces what may be an even tougher task than running a railroad: getting out of the business. In an effort to uncouple itself from Conrail and Amtrak, the Reagan Administration is causing a commotion among the country's railroads and many of the people who use them...
Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole set off howls of protest last week when she announced that the winner of a lengthy bidding battle to buy 85% of Conrail is Norfolk Southern railroad of Norfolk, Va. (The remaining 15% is owned by Conrail employees.) The $1.2 billion purchase would unite two of the three dominant eastern railroads and forge the largest U.S. freight line, with 34,000 miles of track. The third big railroad, CSX, which runs the Chessie and Seaboard lines, complained that the merger would create a giant that would flatten rivals like pennies on a rail. Some companies...
...comparison, Conrail has made a full-throttle recovery. Formed in 1976 from the bankrupt Penn Central and six other failed lines, the Consolidated Rail Corporation cost the Government about $7 billion before it began turning a profit in 1981. The line earned an estimated $500 million in 1984, up from $313 million in 1983. To reach that goal, Conrail cut its work force from 100,000 to 39,000, trimmed track mileage from 17,500 to 14,000 and turned over passenger lines to state authorities in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. The company won major concessions from...
...Nixon Administration rejected a company plea for $200 million in loan guarantees. Bankruptcy, however, turned out to be only an intermediate stop. To keep the railroad running, the following year Washington provided up to $125 million in guarantees and later absorbed the company's rail operations into Conrail, the Government-run railroad. Now a diversified manufacturer (1983 sales: $2.5 billion) with operations ranging from energy exploration to the production of missile systems-but not the railroad business-the reorganized Penn Central earned $19.7 million last year...