R.R. Re-grouping

R.R. Regrouping

The Pennsylvania Railroad, by means of an obviously inspired article in the Baltimore Sun, last week made a gesture towards resolving the stalemate into which the eastern trunk lines have moved themselves.

There are three established systems connecting the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River and anastomosing over the coal and industrial regions between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Those systems are the Pennsylvania, the New York Central and the Baltimore & Ohio.

Under halting organization is the proposed Chesapeake & Ohio system of the Van Sweringens (C. & O., Nickel Plate, Erie, Hocking Valley and Pere Marquette).

Thwarted thus far has been Leonor F. Loree's project of a fifth system in the same region (Wabash, Wheeling & Lake Erie, Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh, Delaware & Hudson, Lehigh Valley, Western Maryland).

A sixth project was developed but recently by Frank E. Taplin of Cleveland, who mines coal in the Pittsburgh region. He controls the short and profitable Pittsburgh & West Virginia; wants to buy control of the Wheeling & Lake Erie, control of which John D. Rockefeller Sr. recently sold to the N. Y. C., B. & O. and Nickel Plate. Promoter Taplin would also control the Western Maryland over which he would reach tidewater with Pittsburgh coal and Great Lakes grain and iron ore.

While those projects were being made presentable for the Interstate Commerce Commission's approval, the Pennsylvania remained remarkably quiet. Last week, through its Baltimore Sun agent, it demanded: " 1) A line paralleling the N. Y. C. along the Erie lake shore from or near Brockton, some 50 miles west of Buffalo, to Toledo; 2) Ownership or joint control of the Lackawanna as a means of relieving the present main line of the Pennsylvania from Harrisburg, Pa., to Trenton, N. J., of traffic congestion; 3) A short freight line from Chicago to St. Louis, preferably the Chicago & Eastern Illinois."

For the benefit of competing eastern trunk lines and to help resolve their standstill, the Sun writer had the Pennsylvania suggest that the Reading, the Central of New Jersey and the Western Maryland, each of which is demanded by two or more of the competitors, be neutralized. But, "it is announced, moreover, that any new plan that may be worked out must provide for what the Pennsylvania officials believe to be their vital needs [see above], if such a plan is to get anywhere. Also, it must take into account the Loree fifth trunk line plan, regarding that plan as a fact and not as a theory. . . . They are counting on another conference at an early date. . . . Failure to confer further, it was pointed out, would be a suicidal policy from a railroad standpoint. . . ."