Fifth Trunk Line
While electrical engineers, supply men, mechanical and transportation experts conferred at Atlantic City (see p. 31), railroad magnates gathered importantly at the Bankers' Club, Manhattan, for the monthly luncheon of the Eastern Railroad Presidents' Conference. Competition was their theme, the new tariff of the Illinois Central their particular problem.
A rate war loomed as anxious presidents noted that under the joint schedule of the Illinois Central and the Redwood Line, manufacturers could ship steel from Chicago to New Orleans (912 miles) as cheaply as from Buffalo to New York (390 miles). "Unduly preferential," they cried, technically. They explained: Eastern railroads should serve Eastern shippers, benefiting by short rail hauls to the Atlantic, low water rates to the Pacific. Cutthroat reductions by the I.C.R.R. will divert traffic to Chicago, thence to New Orleans, thence by the Redwood Line to the coast.
Irate, the magnates ordered an investigation, discussed a possible appeal to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Their tempers were not improved by word of the I. C. C.'s decision to allow the Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railway to build 38 miles of new line from Cochran's Mill (Pa.) to Connellsville (Pa.), over the protest of competing lines, Pennsylvania, Nickel Plate, Baltimore and Ohio, Wheeling and Lake Erie.
In this apparently innocent extension, magnates saw pregnant and disquieting possibilities. At Connellsville, the P. and W. Va. branch will connect with the Western Maryland road, forming what may develop into a new through route from Lake Erie and the steel producing country to Baltimore, via the Wheeling and Lake Erie and possibly the Wabash. All eyes were focused on a Cleveland coal producer,* owner of the P. and W. Va., 45% stockholder in the W. and L. E. Was Frank E. Taplin to be the successor of Leonor Fresnel Loree, reviving the carefully laid bogey of a fifth trunk line? Magnates pondered.
* North American Coal Corp., largest individual producer in the U. S. in 1927.