It had almost 4,600 locomotives and more than 140,000 freight cars.Ĭongress awarded it $2.1 billion in stock and assistance, and it was off and running. Included in it were the previously mentioned railroads plus Lehigh & Hudson River and Ann Arbor, a Midwestern road that had fallen under control of Penn Central. Eventually it created what became known as Conrail, which started service – no joke – on April 1, 1976. The United States Railway Association was incorporated to rationalize the 17,000 route-mile system and keep rail service fluid in the region. 9785 was the first piece of Conrail rolling stock in 1977 and remained in the catalog through 1979. Lionel introduced a Conrail boxcar a year after federal authorities created the railroad. Others followed, either into insolvency or precipitously close: Central Railroad of New Jersey, Lehigh Valley, and the Reading Co. First to fall into bankruptcy were two of the biggest, Penn Central and the Erie Lackawanna. The short version is, railroading in the northeastern United States was on the ropes in the early 1970s due to a variety of factors including regulation and a bloated network. The formation of the Consolidated Rail Corporation is well documented in books like The Historical Guide to North American Railroads. The historic merger left no mark at the old toy train maker. Not even the highly publicized marriage of the New York Central to archrival Pennsylvania RR could get Lionel brass off the dime.īasically, Lionel and its rivals just shrugged their shoulders at the resulting railroad, Penn Central. Earlier mergers that had created the Erie Lackawanna, and Seaboard Coast Line railroads in the 1960s had spawned no rolling stock. But it wasn’t the first locomotive to appear for the new railroad. One of the more popular early models Lionel produced in Conrail paint was the No. Fundimensions, the division of General Mills then licensed to manufacture and market Lionel trains and accessories, announced an O gauge boxcar with Conrail graphics in the 1977 consumer catalog. The first Lionel Conrail cars and engines came shortly after the federal government created the railroad in 1976.
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