Many times through rr history, railroads planned to merge but forced to scuttle those plans due to overregulation or other issues like bad maintenance practices of one partner.

What are some botched mergers you all would have been interested in seeing happen?

May I suggest that this is a topic more relevant to the railfanning board?

That being said, I know of one merger Rock Island wishes would have happened-- for about 10 years.

Nickle Plate-Lackawanna, instead of Erie-Lackawanna would have made much more sense geographically, and may have kept both roads out of mega-mergers a lot longer, and more solvent. This combination was proposed but didn't go anywhere.

I remember reading that around 1975, Santa Fe was at least considering taking over Erie-Lackawanna, but decided not to due to the condition of the E-L.

I know Robert R. Young wanted to merge NYC with C&O and B&O, and PRR wanted in on the N&W-Wabash-NKP merger. Funny, because that's pretty much how things ended up after Penn Central and Conrail.

I think a Sante Fe- PRR merger would have worked. It would have given us the first true transcon, Sante Fe and PRR had worked together on other ventures thru the years.

NYC liked working with UP from time to time.

A PRR-Southern merger would have been good too. They had a lot of freight and passenger traffic in common.

A major factor was that nobody wanted the expensive commuter service in the Northeast. Note NYS&W unilaterally stopped running their service and all the other roads went bankrupt.

The merged N&W DID have EL with their ownership of DERECO but again there was that commuter service.

Phil Mulligan

It was initially proposed that the Chicago Great Western merge with Kansas City Southern. If this had happened, much of the CGW would probably still be around today. Instead, CNW took over the CGW and eventually abandoned almost all of their trackage.

Anyway, it would've created an interesting route profile - one that is actually quite similar to the US portion of CPKC.

BN/Milwaukee Road for Lines West...

GTW/MILW: bid was turned down by ICC and believed to have been the saving grace of the GTW if they managed to get the MILW.

GTW/CRI&P: The GTW couldn't decide whether to bid on the CRI&P or MILW. the GTW decided to bid on the MILW after considering the track conditions of the Rock Island. UP as we all know would take the Rock Island instead.

There was talks between the Soo Line and CGW in the early sixties. I believe the Soo ended the talks.

My old boss is a big proponent of an EBT/RGS merger...

It seems I might have heard somewhere that direct interchange may have been small problem. Dunno. Couple sticks of rail and a few ties and we could have had a winner there.

Feel free to absorb the DSP&P as a bridge road. That leaves you only having to fill in the two gaps between Ridgway and Gunnison, and between Denver and Robertsdale...

"My old boss is a big proponent of an EBT/RGS merger..."

Didn't he do that merger in On3?

Phil Mulligan

The Teleportation portal technology wasn't robust enough to use, yet.