Riding the Pennsy to Ruin: A Wall Street Journal Chronicle of the Penn Central Debacle

In 1968, two huge U.S. railroads, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, combined into a behemoth that was supposed to help revolutionize the U.S. railroad system. In 1970, the merged railroad went bust. How did it happen?How did one of the largest corporations in America end up in bankruptcy court? How could any company lose a record $431 million in one year? And equally important, how could this gigantic company go down without pulling a lot of other corporations down with it? The Wall Street Journal, a unique newspaper that is the second largest daily in America, probed for and found the answers to these questions. Its reporters bring you the inside story about the bickering, the confusion, the politics that hurt the big company. And they tell you more - about a group of officers who bailed out of the company just before its problems became public knowledge, and about a big brokerage firm that led a double life in the months just before the railroad's collapse. This book, which contains a dozen or so of the more important and interesting stories The Journal turned up, is a chronicle of a classic case, the likes of which America had never seen in the past and isn't likely to see again in the future.