Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2021

The Formalization of Extermination – The Wannsee Conference – WW2 – 126 – January 23, 1942

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Jan 2021

Nazi Germany’s “Holocaust by Bullets” has already claimed over a million lives over the past 8 months; this week German authorities hold a conference to streamline and systematize the process of extermination. Gas will now be the preferred method of murder. The Japanese are murdering Allied soldiers that fall into their hands as they advance ever closer to Singapore. The Soviet offensive continues along the entire Eastern Front, but the orders and objectives grow ever more confusing and chaotic. In North Africa, Erwin Rommel launches a surprise offensive against the Allies and make a lightning advance the final two days of the week.

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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man
– Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…

Sources:
– IWM SE 4819
– Mil.ru
– Bundesarchiv
– ammo by Nociconist, Fruits by Icongeek26, Oil Tank by Mangsaabguru, from the Noun Project
– JoJan from Wikimedia Commons
– Yad Vashem 1427_85, 2CO1, 4613_360

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
– Rannar Sillard – “Easy Target”
– Flouw – “A Far Cry”
– Fabien Tell – “Weapon of Choice”
– Reynard Seidel – “Rush of Blood”
– Edward Karl Hanson – “Spellbound”
– Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
– Johannes Bornlöf – “The Inspector 4”
– Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
– Rannar Sillard – “Split Decision”
– Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
– Christian Andersen – “Barrel”
– Cobby Costa – “From the Past”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

The dangers of depending on “experts”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren considers the vastly expanded role of “experts” in our public discourse:

Having no degree in either field, I try not to write what will be contradicted by an expert. On the other hand, “expert” has become a murky concept. Once we had to distinguish only between demonstrated credible experts, and villains. Common sense could usually tell them apart. But with the growth of our “sophistication,” the category of villainy has been much expanded. We have a category of institutionally credentialled experts who aren’t exactly liars, but more like what Harry G. Frankfurt defined as “bullshitters.” They struggle to remain plausible, but are using their expertise to advance interested views. And, having such motives — in opposition to the plain pursuit of truth — they seek publicity, and angle to obtain it.

As Dr Frankfurt hinted, in his short philosophical treatise on this topic (On Bullshit, 2005), these can be, and usually are, more trouble than old-fashioned liars. For a real liar knows he is lying, and can be caught out. By comparison, the modern media expert avoids what is strictly checkable, not only to protect himself, but from indifference for truth. He is, according to me, the intellectual descendant of the mediæval Nominalists, adumbrating words, not realities. While less intelligent than his predecessors, he carries on the tradition of saying that something is true because he says so.

“Consensus science” is of this nature. In it, truth can be negotiated, or imposed. While the weather next Saturday will be known to the living, a prediction for much later in the century has no meaning. From the number of variables in play, I can tell you with certainty, that woke “climatologists” are talking bosh; and every signature on their consensus I may add to my list of persons to ignore. This is elementary stuff: and I do try to stick to what is elementary, and foreseeable.

The success rate, for elaborate predictions, remains, at this point in our history, zero-point-zero. But it is becoming so also for the present, and past. The Batflu, here, is current primary example. Owing to obvious manipulation, we cannot know much about its effects. In rough terms, we can know that they are exaggerated, because almost every expert has a vested interest in getting the numbers up, and those who disagree will be punished. The same is true for all the popular remedies, including such nonsense as mangle-wearing, and obsessive social distancing. No legitimate research lies behind either, so we must assume the purposes for various lockdown orders are not actually the Batflu.

The Great Wine Blight

Filed under: France, Greece, History, Italy, Middle East, Science, USA, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 9 Sep 2020

In the 19th century, the Great Wine Blight threatened the very existence of grapes. But the pestilence brought into Europe by American vines was eradicated by the use of those very same vines. The History Guy recalls how American indigenous vines saved the wine industry, and how you can help to preserve its future.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

Special thanks to Stone Hill Winery, Hermann, Missouri:
https://stonehillwinery.com

You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:

https://www.thetiebar.com/

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by CDH

#history #thehistoryguy #wine

QotD: The “returned ballot”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In Canada we used to have — still have, according to a friend who should know — the excellent institution of the “returned ballot.” It is my usual way of voting. I can write with some confidence that it has never won.

Here’s what you do. You go into the polling station, show your ID (in Canada voters must identify themselves). The officer crosses you off the voting list, and gives you a ballot. Then you say, “I wish to return this ballot.” He says, “Thank you, sir,” and takes out his returned ballot book. (It need be nothing special: a school exercise book will do.) He copies your name into that, along with your address. (It is the only way to get your preference recorded.) You thank him, then wander off through the boobs who came to vote for somebody.

One has oneself, in effect, just voted for “none of the above.” This is the theory.

In practice the officer, who may or may not speak English or French, but probably needed the money, looks puzzled and a little frightened. He has no idea what you are talking about. You dig in, to provide a patient lesson in elementary civics. He won’t have a book, but you have brought along a cahier with “Returned Ballots” written on the cover in large capitals with a felt pen, and some heraldry doodled above it. To be helpful, you have already written your name and address on the first line. He consults all the other polling staff then says, “Thank you, sir.”

When, later, you check the results, you will not find a single returned ballot mentioned. Perhaps you were counted among the spoilt ones.

Now if you had been counted, and had persuaded a plurality of your fellow citizens to do likewise in, say, the riding of Parkdale (about one-in-four would triumph in most Canadian ridings; one-in-six if the turnout were low enough), the election is annulled. A by-election must then be called, in which none of the previous candidates may stand.

David Warren, “Let’s be practical”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-09-15.

January 23, 2021

Innovation is infectious … you catch it from other innovators

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

An interesting notion on how people innovate or invent is discussed in Anton Howes’ latest Age of Invention newsletter:

… my research on the Industrial Revolution has yielded a general model of how to think about it.

Core to the model is the observation that innovation spreads from person to person. It is a mentality, that we pick up from others. Of my sample of inventors, active c.1550-1850, the vast majority of them had had some kind of contact with an inventor before inventing anything themselves. So far, I’ve found evidence of that contact for about 83% of them, and for the remainder we frankly know next to nothing about them anyway. On the balance of probability, I suspect that all inventors had and continue to have such prior contact, even if the evidence has been lost to the mists of time.

Supposing I’m right about this — and there’s also more recent evidence from the largest and most detailed ever study of modern American inventors to support it — then such exposure to an inventor is the ultimate cause of innovation. Everything else we worry about when promoting innovation, from funding to intellectual property rights, or from education to social acceptance, is in a sense downstream of it.

Absent any exposure to inventors, people simply don’t become inventors. Knowing about invention as an activity is a necessary precondition to becoming an inventor yourself. The vast majority of people never innovate, for the very simple reason that it never occurs to them to do so. People are faced with problems all the time, but they generally have all sorts of pre-existing responses to them. Famine? The millennia-old response was to tighten belts or starve. Not to try to innovate with agricultural techniques. Trade route collapse? The millennia-old response was to take the hit, or try to shift to other familiar markets. Not to try to send ships into the icy unknown. As I’ve noticed time and time and time again, necessity is not the mother of invention. It only appears that way in retrospect — it’s when faced with a crisis that pre-existing inventors step forth to solve problems in ways they had already been investigating. Without them, there would be no such innovative response. Crises have an effect on the direction of invention — that is, on what problems people identify and then try to solve — but not on its underlying supply.

But this is not to say that exposure to an inventor is sufficient. Supposing you do meet an inventor. Your contact might be too fleeting to have an impact, or you might not be predisposed to be inspired by them. You might lack curiosity, or be distracted by some other preoccupation. Or perhaps the inventor you met might not be an especially inspiring person. Some people are simply more interesting than others. So from an initial spring of people who come into contact with inventors, we can immediately narrow the flow of new inventors down to those for whom such exposure actually had an impact.

But we then have to narrow it down further. Of the people who have met an inventor and been inspired by them, some might be distracted by other activities, or be dissuaded by social barriers, or lack the resources to tinker around with things, whether it be money or time.

History Summarized: Atlantic Exploration

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Europe, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jan 2021

So you just conquered Iberia, and you’re wondering where to go from here? It’s a more common conundrum than you might think. Consider: a big wooden floaty house that goes splish-splash in the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway, this is a video about Portuguese and Spanish (erm, Castilian) exploration in the Atlantic during the 1400s. Please note my deliberate decision to Nope on out at the turn of the 1500s.

This topic was requested by our longtime patron Antonio Juarez! Thank you Antonio for supporting our work and helping to provide entertaining educational content.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal; lectures from Great Courses Plus “1571: Spain, Portugal Encircle the Globe” by Donald J. Harreld, “Renaissance and Exploration: New Horizons” by Jennifer McNabb, “Portugal’s Great Leap Forward” by “Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius”

TRACKLIST: “Scheming Weasel (faster version),” “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”, “Local Forecast – Elevator” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

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Scott Alexander returns

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Having been driven from his original blog due to a doxxing threat from a New York Times reporter, Scott Alexander has resumed his public blogging, this time on Substack:

Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.

I’m happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta.

Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It’s related to English “rationality” and “arithmetic”, but also “art” and “harmony”. And “right”, both in the senses of “natural rights” and “the right answer”. And “order”. And “arete” and “aristos” and all those other Greek words about morality. And “artificial”, as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively “reign” and related words about rulership, and “rich” and related words about money.

(also “arthropod”, but insects creep me out so I’ll be skipping this one)

The dictionary defines ṛta as “order”, “truth”, or “rule”, but I think of it as the intersection of all these concepts, a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest. What are the laws of thought? How do they reveal themselves, at every level, from the flow of electricity through the brain to the flow of money through the global economy? How can we cleave to them more closely, for our own good and the good of generations still to come?

In practice, articles (another ṛta relative!) here tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics. The political posts sometimes stray into choppy waters, and I have immense sympathy for people who are sick of that and prefer to pass.

As with most Substack blogs, it’s a subscriber-supported effort with limited public posts available to non-paying subscribers (like me).

How .22LR Ammo is Made

Filed under: Business, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lucky Gunner Ammo
Published 16 Apr 2020

We were offered a rare glimpse into Federal’s rimfire plant in Anoka, MN to watch how .22 LR ammunition is made. We all know the basic components involved — each cartridge consists of a case with primer, propellant, and a bullet. Watching them all come together on a massive scale with a choreographed dance of modern automated machinery is a surprisingly gratifying experience.

Special thanks to our friends at Federal Ammunition and Vista Outdoor for the invitation!

Support our channel. Buy ammo from Lucky Gunner!

QotD: “Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm”

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This side of the veil, instead of looking for the “gene for intelligence”, we try to find “polygenic scores”. Given a person’s entire genome, what function best predicts their intelligence? The most recent such effort uses over a thousand genes and is able to predict 10% of variability in educational attainment. This isn’t much, but it’s a heck of a lot better than anyone was able to do under the old “dozen genes” model, and it’s getting better every year in the way healthy paradigms are supposed to.

Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm. For years, basically all candidate gene studies were fake. “How come we can’t find genes for anything?” was never as popular as “where’s my flying car?” as a symbol of how science never advances in the way we optimistically feel like it should. But it could have been.

And now it works. What lessons can we draw from this, for domains that still seem disappointing and intractable?

Turn-of-the-millennium behavioral genetics was intractable because it was more polycausal than anyone expected. Everything interesting was an excruciating interaction of a thousand different things. You had to know all those things to predict anything at all, so nobody predicted anything and all apparent predictions were fake.

Modern genetics is healthy and functional because it turns out that although genetics isn’t easy, it is simple. Yes, there are three billion base pairs in the human genome. But each of those base pairs is a nice, clean, discrete unit with one of four values. In a way, saying “everything has three billion possible causes” is a mercy; it’s placing an upper bound on how terrible genetics can be. The “secret” of genetics was that there was no “secret”. You just had to drop the optimistic assumption that there was any shortcut other than measuring all three billion different things, and get busy doing the measuring. The field was maximally perverse, but with enough advances in sequencing and computing, even the maximum possible level of perversity turned out to be within the limits of modern computing.

(This is an oversimplification: if it were really maximally perverse, chaos theory would be involved somehow. Maybe a better claim is that it hits the maximum perversity bound in one specific dimension)

Scott Alexander, “The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-09-13.

January 22, 2021

Canada’s Governor General resigns, avoiding dragging the Queen into another Canadian political drama

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh notes in Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter:

The Right Honourable Julie Payette, 29th Governor General of Canada (October 2, 2017 – January 21, 2021).

When NP Platformed saw Robert Fife’s Globe and Mail report this morning, our thought was that leaking the news of the report’s completion was an obvious political manoeuvre. (You know how a fife works: put some wind in it, and it will play a tune for you.)

Even a prime minister as callow as the current one would not want to try firing a governor general, which would require the personal intervention of the Queen. This would be a failure in itself, a blot on Canada’s copybook, even if the PM had the support of other parliamentary parties.

As hours passed, the thought naturally occurred to us: why should Payette be making anyone wait for some written report anyway? We know she has sometimes balked at most of the easily identifiable parts of her job, including travel to ceremonies and (for heaven’s sake) giving royal assent to legislation. Hired to be a dynamic female STEM mascot (for a Liberal government, sort of), she somehow degenerated, with unseemly speed, into an immured princess from a fairy tale, evidently driven half-mad by some faerie spell.

The main job, the essence of the governor general gig, is to be above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife in the proverb. The mere whisper of abusiveness or of clownish behaviour involving public funds ought to have been enough to settle things, possibly with a convenient health excuse. (If she offers one now, it can only provoke snide laughter.) The vicereine is, in our system of government, the passage through which national honours flow from the sovereign. The mention of “honour” in connection with this Governor General was becoming mighty awkward. She should have our thanks for doing the right thing today.

Japan’s Only Pacific “Ally” – Phibun’s Thailand – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 Jan 2021

Thailand’s prime minister and de-facto dictator Plaek Phibunsongkhram imported European fascism, nationalism and militarism to his country. But when Japan’s threat to South-East Asia became imminent, Phibun didn’t know what to do. His story is one of utter indecisiveness and opportunism.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Sources:
IWM HU 675
Portrait of Plaek Phibunsongkhram, courtesy of 冯銮披汶 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
From the Noun Project: people by ProSymbols, tick by akash k

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Hypocrisy is bad (for mere humans) but ostentatious hypocrisy is reserved for the powerful

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren notes the two very different kinds of hypocrisy on display during these fallen days:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

Hypocrisy is often dismissed as a humdrum moral vice; rather as pæderasty, or buggery, or commissioning abortions: things considered very grave in the past, but now quite acceptable among progressive persons. One feels almost cruel, or envious, to criticize the adept hypocrite. How dare we try to withdraw the air in which he lives and breathes? “Zero tolerance” is directed at more serious vices, such as having wrong opinions, or voting Republican.

As Paul Valéry said, “Power without abuse loses its charm,” and when, for instance, a governor who proclaims crippling Batflu restrictions is seen ignoring them, he is outraged. His critics are his opponents, he reasons; they really ought to be investigated first!

A milder, general criticism is sometimes made, about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. How is it that prominent environmentalists burn so much jet fuel in their travels from one conference to another, at the world’s most lavish resorts? Shouldn’t they go about in sackcloth and ashes, as they tell us to do?

This is to misunderstand their hypocrisy. We assume they are motivated by greed, and the love of pleasure, the way we would be. But why must it be piled on so thick? Many a jetsetter hardly uses the jacuzzis. He takes a quick shower, because he has another aeroplane to catch.

Yes, most people are attracted to the sumptuous, but in a fine and private way. They rarely encourage the paparazzi, or wish to be watched over their fences and walls. They hire security, to scare trespassers away. Servants, up to a point, must be endured, but in the past they could be ignored, the way we ignore appliances. I may not have a toaster, but I do have a stove, and could swear that it is staring at me. But it was manufactured in the 1960s, so I needn’t fear it has an Internet connexion. And besides, if it did, it wouldn’t be reporting to the tabloids, but to technical staff. We try to ignore them, at least so long as we can pretend they are equivalent to our maids and butlers.

Shooting the M3A1 Grease Gun

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Mar 2018

The M3 (and its followup improved M3A1 model) was the United States’ answer to the high cost and manufacturing complexity of the Thompson submachine gun. The M3 “Grease Gun” (because really, that is what it looks like) was a very inexpensive weapon with a stamped and welded receiver and only a few milled parts. It also had the slowest rate of fire of any World War 2 submachine gun at about 450 rounds/minute. Its weight, compactness, and controllability made it almost universally preferred over the Thompson, at least by soldiers who had to carry and fight with either of them.

The Grease Gun is reputedly extremely controllable because of its low rate of fire, but this is my first time to actually try shooting one. Will it live up to that reputation?

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QotD: The enclosure movement, in historical fact and in Marxist imagining

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider, for example, that the tenfold increase [in the population of London] was in the period before the expropriative parliamentary enclosures of Marxist legend, when state fiat was used to deny smaller farmers their ancient, customary rights to use the land near their villages. While the very first of these enclosure acts appeared as early as 1604, parliamentary enclosure only really got going from the mid-eighteenth century. Instead, for the period in question, enclosure happened in a piecemeal way, with the open fields gradually dissolving as farmers exchanged or sold their tiny strips of land, over time amalgamating them into larger, privately controlled plots. With ownership concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, it became relatively easy to gain the unanimity needed to suspend common rights. The process played out in myriad ways all over the country, sometimes with amicable agreement and voluntary exchange, sometimes with ruthless monopolising of the land, with the already-large owners systematically buying out their neighbours. In some cases it involved the consolidation of existing arable land, in others it meant the conversion of forest, heath, marsh, or fen — the traditional “wastes”, to which the poorer villagers might have had various customary rights to gather firewood for fuel, or to graze their cattle, or to hunt for small game — into land that could be used for farming or pasture.

How this process played out all depended on extremely specific, local conditions. But on the whole it was slow — piecemeal enclosure had been happening to varying degrees since at least the fourteenth century. It’s hard to see how such a sporadic and piecemeal process could have led to such consistently and increasingly massive numbers flocking specifically to London. Indeed, the fact that they singled out London as their target suggests that this narrative might have it back-to-front. Some economic historians argue that it was the prospect of higher wages in the ever-growing metropolis that induced farmers to leave the countryside in the first place, selling up or abandoning their plots to those they left behind. Rather than enclosure pushing peasants off the land and into the city, London’s specific pull may instead have thus created the vacuum that allowed the remaining farmers to bring about enclosure. Otherwise, why didn’t the peasants simply flock to any old urban centre? The second-tier cities like Norwich or Bristol or Exeter or Coventry or York would all have been far less dangerous.

Anton Howes, “London the Great”, Age of Invention, 2020-10-20.

January 21, 2021

Fallen Flag — the New York Central System (part 2)

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the history of the New York Central System by George Drury (part 1 is linked here). The New York Central was one of the biggest and most economically powerful American railways for over a century before the postwar boom turned into the economic disaster of the 1960s and 70s, as passengers and freight switched from rail to road — partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded Interstate Highway System — and air and the decline of northeastern heavy industry and mining hit the established eastern railroads very hard:

The New York Central System was the largest of the eastern trunk systems from the standpoint of mileage and second only to the Pennsylvania in revenue. It served most of the industrial part of the country, and its freight tonnage was exceeded only by the coal-carrying railroads. In addition it was a major passenger railroad, with perhaps two-thirds the number of passengers as the Pennsylvania, but NYC’s average passenger traveled one-third again as far as Pennsy’s. NYC did not share as fully in the post-World War II prosperity because of rising labor costs, material costs, and an expensive improvement program, especially for passenger service.

During 1946–47 Chesapeake & Ohio purchased a block of NYC stock, becoming the road’s largest stockholder. Robert R. Young gained control of the Central and became its chairman in 1954 as part of a maneuver to merge it with C&O. One of his first acts was to put Alfred E. Perlman in charge of the NYC.

Under Perlman NYC slimmed its physical plant, reducing long stretches of four-track line to two tracks under centralized traffic control, and developed an aggressive freight marketing department. At the same time NYC’s passenger operations were de-emphasized. On December 3, 1967, just before NYC and Pennsy merged, the Central reduced its passenger service to a skeleton, combining its New York–Chicago, New York–Detroit, New York–Toronto, and Boston–Chicago services into a single train and dropping all train names (including that of the legendary 20th Century Limited) except for, curiously, that of the Chicago–Cincinnati James Whitcomb Riley.

The Central’s archrival was the Pennsylvania Railroad. West of Buffalo and Pittsburgh the two systems duplicated each other at almost every major point; east of those cities the two hardly touched. Both had physical plant not being used to capacity (NYC was in better shape); both had a heavy passenger business; neither was earning much money. In 1957 NYC and Pennsy announced merger talks.

The initial industry reaction was utter surprise. Every merger proposal for decades had tried to balance the Central against the Pennsy and create two, three, or four more-or-less-equal systems in the east. Traditionally PRR had been allied with Norfolk & Western and Wabash; NYC with Baltimore & Ohio, Reading, and maybe the Lackawanna; and everyone else swept up with Erie and Nickel Plate. Tradition also favored end-to-end mergers rather than those of parallel roads.

Planning and justifying the merger took nearly ten years, during which time the eastern railroad scene changed radically, in large measure because of the impending merger of NYC and PRR: Erie merged with Lackawanna, C&O acquired control of B&O, and N&W took in Virginian, Wabash, Nickel Plate, Pittsburgh & West Virginia, and Akron, Canton & Youngstown.

Tradition aside, though, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania merged on Feb. 1, 1968 to form Penn Central.

Pages 1-2 from the July 1962 publicity booklet produced by the Penn-Central Merger Information Committee to inform the public on issues concerning their proposed merger. This pages shows various statistics showing Eastern railroads in decline.
Wikimedia Commons.

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