#46 No Wat to Run a Railroad by Stephen Salsbury ISBN#0-07-054483-2 363 pages.
I've just finished my third book about the failure of the PennCentral. I've got a sort of a trilogy thing going there. I wonder if The Hobit ever rode a PC commuter train.
To start out, I did not like reading this book. The reason is, it's more of a book about business practices and accounting, than a railroad book. As I got into it, it got much better. Because of the author writing from a business failure perspective, it gives a different angle to PC, and I feel that I learned some things I did not know from the other books about PC.
In a nutshell,Salsbury lays out that,an accountant(Bervin), an operating man(Perleman) and a political-minded lawer(Saunders), cannot revive two railroads on the long term downslide by merging them into one big mess without a plan. After reading this book, I feel that Bervin was not the rat I thought he was, and perhaps Saunders is.
You'll like this book, if you're into: railroad history,PRR,PC,Conrail(maybe)or railroad business.
I'm tempted to start a thread about the slow death of the Pennsylvania Railroad, as I think that would be interesting. First, I may have to raid the inter-library loan system with requests for books about dreadnoughts and such. And when you think about it,when Von Spee saw the tripod masts at the Falklands, why didn't he just put into port, and start firing? The end result may have been somewhat the same, but the best German gunners may have found an achilles heel on a battlecruiser, don't you think?
