L. Stanley Crane is not spinning.
His Nazi Green Team took over the Happy Family RR Red Team lock, stock, and barrel. Then they changed the whole culture into incompetent, bumbling LAMCO Nazi chic.

You fellers are both old... And relics of the former railroads that once were competitors. For many years Uke was under the impression that *cy*'s N&W was the red team that force-fed the Southren (Green team) into a marriage of sorts, which became today's LAMCO.

Perhaps Uke has been duped by the pair of you working together...

Uke wrote:

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N&W was the red team that force-fed the Southren (Green team) into a marriage of sorts, which became today's LAMCO.

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It was Claytor brotherly love that started when Red Team ordered some NW locomotives in the Southern configuration (with the "F" on the "F"ront) in 1975. Bob Claytor was NW; W. Graham Claytor was Green Team Southren. Graham took a timeout as Secretary of the Navy for Jimmy Carter. Enter L. Stanley Crane. Make no mistake about it, while SecNav, Graham and Bob were still running their railroads and prepping them to merge. Anti-nepotism rules prohibited the brothers from being together post-merger, so they developed a two-headed Red/Green tag team scheme.

Mixed in with struggling SCL-Family Lines & C&O/B&O procreating to form CSX in 1980 put immense pressure on NW/Southren. Deregulation in 1980 was creating strong pressures to eliminate marginal railroads.

Mixed in with highly profitable RedTeam - "all you gotta do is have a monopoly and roll black rocks downhill and rape your captive customers and be very nice to your stockholders". And, put the rest of the cash in the bank, not the railroad.

Mixed in with highly profitable GreenTeam, who hated taxes and hired lawyers. "If you don't want to pay taxes, you be very nice to your stockholders, Nazi the fuck out of your employees with discipline and shitty contracts that you cheat on. But, put as much of your profits back into the railroad to be able to not pay taxes."

When they married, you had a Red Team who had barely started laying welded rail, was a scrap yard on wheels and had locomotives the Pennsylvania Railroad had bought for them to dieselize when the Pennsylvania Railroad was insanely profitable. They also had a double management structure from always having enough management hired to break a strike (from the 1978 clerks' strike. Bob Claytor ran his own trains from ROKE/Mecca to the place where they dump coal into the ocean). By having a snowstorm of whitehats always on the payroll, NW never really acquired very many competent managers who knew anything but how to roll rocks downhill on steel rails.

And, you had a GreenTeam with lean Nazi goose-stepping managers just looking for red meat and a physical plant that was well-maintained with best-in-the-industry equipment and rolling stock. They also had a headquarters on K Street that imprinted the Congress with the image of "Look Ahead, Look South" as the face of the railroad industry.

They merge, Red had the cash, Green had the Nazis. Red team started as the leader team in 1982 because CASH is king.

"Snippy" still bet on the Nazis because NW wasn't very good at railroading outside of rolling rocks downhill.

By 1985, Red was eating up cash as Green started making inroads into the mentality of plowing free cash into the railroad plant. The subtle changes 1985-1990 was the cross-pollination of Red/Green managers to get the ugly Thoroughbred Gray. In a reverse Sherman's March, the Nazis left Dixie and started kicking Red Ass. Red guys couldn't believe that they could really get fired for breaking the same rules they had broken forever. ("Line crossover switches back? YGTBSM!") The Nazis didn't blink. They just goose-stepped.

As the cultures merged, it seems the Southren Nazi mentality won and the NW double management/incompetent managers scheme carried on. Now, you have twice as many stupid Nazi wannabes as needed trying to run a railroad that tolerates no free thinking and loves blind obedience to unnecessary, crushing, overburdensome rules. They think they can program a computer to do it. But, in the meantime they are looking for humans who will act like computers. Except, they can  blame humans for every fuckup. Blame a computer, you're blaming the manager who thought he could program it to work correctly.

-- Edited by Snippy on Tuesday 10th of April 2018 05:20:20 AM