Who Else Wanted to Buy B&M

I have read about various companies talking to Alan Dustin and the trustees in the early 1980s about buying B&M. We all know that Guilford put in a winning bid. Who else looked at it? Was Buck Dumaine/BAR a conterder?

I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but I didn't hear anything about other potential purchasers at the time, and haven't read anything substantial since then. MEC would have bought Portland - Worcester, probably, and CV might have bought the parts of the Conn River they didn't already own, but nobody wanted the Boston metro area and the Fitchburg Division - Conrail had just dropped the MBTA contract and the B&M had taken it over, along with several branches CR didn't want. It would have been biting off more than they could chew for the P&W; Worcester - Gardner was useful, and they would have liked access to the CV as well, but I can't imagine anything beyond that. The era of RR venture capitalists didn't arrive until the effects of the Staggers Act were visible to anyone except the senior Mr. Fink.

Some fellow with an old Yankee pedigree from around Hamilton, Mass. made a last minute bid for the B & M early in 1983. He matched the Guilford/Mellon offer, but he was quickly dismissed. He had the money but no plan for making a reorganized B & M work.

I've never understood why the B&M, MEC and BAR never become one railroad system. One thinks of the BAR in its halcyon days, with Buck Dumaine at the helm, and conjectures about how well-run the MEC and B&M might have been. That said, however, the loss of the potato business (no thanks to Penn Central) would probably have made a major dent in things.

Even in the pre-Guilford era, Northern New England was in decline as both a producer and a consumer. The Interstate system siphoned away significant amounts of time-sensitive traffic. MEC's decision to go it alone -- think the Independence class of locomotives and the maintaining of traffic through St. J for rate-division advantage -- worked against appearances of cooperation with the B&M, further marginalizing the B&M's attractiveness. On top of those issues, throw Conrail and improvements to its physical plant before the decision to sell it off was made, and the B&M, especially west of Ayer, would have seemed a risky acquisition.

Response to trainsinmaine re: combination of New England roads. Find yourself a TRAINS MAGAZINE of the 1950-52 era. The New England roads CV, B & M, BAR, MEC, NYNH&H, RUT with the Boson & Albany thrown in for good measure, proposed one New England-wide system. There were full-page ads with each road's logo and some text. It usually was the inside of the back cover.