3) The only reason the Erie ever built it was to move freight from Buffalo area to NYC area. When that traffic shrunk, there was no on-line business to keep it solvent, a condition made worse by the redundancy of the Erie Lakawanna merger.
its not quite as simple as that..
you cant really say "the only reason the Erie built it"..
it WAS the Erie! the entire Erie..(originally)
thats like saying "the only reason the PRR was built was to ship goods between Pittsburg and Phildelphia"..
thats only a very small part of the whole story.
and it was much more than just Buffalo-NYC..
it was the entire Great Lakes industrial complex to the huge markets of the East Coast..not just New York City..
instead of "Buffalo to New York City" it was more like "the entire Western USA to the entire (industrial) Eastern USA."
(in the 1850's Chicago was the "west coast"!
the Erie was BIG! it was Huge, it was a major major very important American railroad..
much different from the pitiful single-track line remaining today.
I dont think the Erie had any major problems keeping solvent until after WWII..it basically ran an entire century as a healthy railroad.
And the redundancy that hurt the Erie wasnt caused by the EL merger..
the redundancy existed before the merger.
Erie
DL&W
NYC
LV
PRR
too many railroads running the Buffalo/Chicago to "the east coast" route.
The EL merger actually DEcreased the redundancy!
because the newly formed EL basically abandoned the Lackawanna mainline west of Binghamton..took one player out of the game.
the redundancy was a problem long before the merger.
im just sticking up for the greatness of the Erie!
the Erie was much more than just the last 40 years..
Scot