Opinion: A Shakespearean Merger

In the mid-1960s, the Norfolk & Western Railroad laid a commemorative plaque at a location in Roanoke, Va., where the company was based in those days.

The local newspapers were invited to cover the event and the cameras began snapping gleefully when reporters and photographers noticed that the plaque read: “NORFORK & WESTERN.”

The railroad’s management pulled out all the stops, cajoling, pleading, threatening in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the picture from being published.

A proud company, the N&W hated mistakes.

So did the Southern Railway, which traces its roots to the first steam locomotive to be used in scheduled service, named “The Best Friend of Charleston,” and whose former bosses, Graham Claytor and Stanley Crane, were so widely respected they went on to also head Amtrak and Conrail, respectively.

Neither company lost that pride when they merged to form Norfolk Southern.

And you can tell similar stories about the predecessors of CSX, which are a bit more numerous — Chesapeake & Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio, Louisville & Nashville, Seaboard Coast Line, and their predecessors.

Proud companies that believed they could dismember and absorb Conrail with none of the problems suffered by their younger cousin to the West, the Union Pacific Railroad. (The Southern Railway and Baltimore & Ohio were already established companies when UP was built, in the late 1860s, with land grant money.)

But these proud companies were wrong. They have stepped in something and it looks a lot like the noxious stuff that mired Union Pacific when its merger with Southern Pacific demonstrated it had failed to learn its earlier misadventures in absorbing the Chicago and NorthWestern.

It is almost Shakespearean: Norfolk and Richmond, set to divide their spoils, ignored the warnings of three rattled spirits labeled UP, SP and CNW, and, for their hubris, were brought low.

Out. Out. Damned computer glitch!

It remains to be seen whether the problems of these two railroads will reach the proportions to be called a meltdown, but whether they do or not, one cannot avoid an obvious question: How?

How can companies generally accorded credit for having good management and exemplary operating practices, spend more than a year planning for something that turns into such a notable screw-up?

How can intelligent, computer-literate people not be aware that their computers are going to start designating loaded cars as empty?

How can you fail to deal with differences in the ways you call out train crews?

In all that planning process, wasn’t there some clue that there could be a problem?

Strange as it seems, maybe not. Because you can’t ever plan for what will happen when human beings begin a new set of interactions with other humans and with machines.

With NS and its piece of Conrail, you had two different operating philosophies and ways of doing things.

This is not to say that one is superior to the other. But NS is the new owner. Should they have changed their practices to suit the former Conrail employees they hired?

Clearly not. But, one can’t help wondering: With all that preparation time, couldn’t they have done something?

Is the fault with the way mergers are carried out — preventing them from exercising real control over their new property until a specific date when it is sink or swim time?

Perhaps there isn’t any real answer except to say that there will always be digestive difficulties when one big railroad tries to gobble up another — or even a significant piece of another.

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