Some of these bastards did go to gaol, as with Twin Cities Rapid Transit in Minneapolis-St Paul - from the Minnesota Historical Society :
“The fall of the streetcar empire
On the national scale, there is some belief in a conspiracy led by National City Lines (NCL) to destroy all the streetcar systems in the country — a debate that is still going on. NCL was bankrolled by GM, Standard Oil and Firestone, and they made a practice of buying up struggling transit systems and replacing all of the streetcars with buses. We do know that NCL, except for one connection, played no role in the scrapping of the Twin Cities’ streetcar system. We did that ourselves, thank you.
D.J. Strouse was president of Twin City Lines from 1936 to 1949. Under his leadership, profits were plowed back into the company. He was a strong believer in streetcars and began a modernization campaign with the purchase of 141 new PCC streetcars in the late 1940s.
Charles Green was a Wall Street financier who owned some TCL stock. He demanded that TCL start paying dividends and waged a proxy fight in 1949 to gain control. Once in charge, he drastically slashed service and maintenance and was determined to convert to an all-bus system by 1958. His legal counsel was a local lawyer, Fred Ossanna, who had connections to local mobsters.
Green’s tactics were a public relations disaster and, in 1951, Ossanna waged a successful battle against him for control of the company. However, Ossanna continued to slash service and at one point threatened to terminate all service in St. Paul. Ossanna reportedly raised enough money to buy 25 new buses and went to GM, which offered to finance a complete conversion from streetcars to buses on very favorable terms. Thus began, in 1951, a 25-month conversion during which 758 streetcars and 351 older buses were replaced by 838 new GM buses.
The link to NCL was “Barney” Larrick who was hired by Ossanna to speed the conversion. He had overseen NCL’s conversion from streetcars to buses in Los Angeles.
It turned out, however, that Ossanna and others had been taking kickbacks from scrap dealers as hundreds of miles of steel rails and copper wire were salvaged. In addition, hundreds of older streetcars were burned to salvage the scrap metal. Ossanna, Larrick, and others were convicted and sent to prison. Lyndon Johnson pardoned Ossanna in the mid 60s. Barney Larrick appeared in a documentary Taken for a Ride in the late 90s. He remained adamant that every decision made in LA and the Twin Cities had been necessary.”
Tony G
> On 20 Sep 2017, at 7:09 pm, Robbie Smithzoqaeski@... [TramsDownUnder] TramsDownUnder@...> wrote:
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> I've heard similar stories from right across the States. It might have been Cincinatti where the city councillors who voted to close the streetcars were rewarded with Cadillacs for their service to the auto industry. Even though the entire thing was corrupt to the core, it never did end up going to the courts because there were sufficient loopholes in the laws to make the anti-competitive practices borderline legal.
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> The same happened in other countries: Sydney's trams were torn up as soon as the government could get away with it, and the NSWGR was dismantled from the inside through political meddling; Auckland's public transport was obliterated by their infatuation with the motorway; the UK lost all their tram lines and a huge mileage of branch lines under the Beeching report. The French closed a lot of their branch lines, and then spent so much money on the TGV that their Lignes Classique are in a pretty poor shape. Coup after coup in South America largely destroyed their functioning railways, helped along by American interference. There's a similar tale of neglect brought about through war in post-colonial Africa.
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> Politics and ideology kept the railways going in the Soviet Bloc—I guess the military men knew how important the railways are for heavy industry and as military supply lines. The system pretty much fell apart during the capitalist robber-baron days of the 90s immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has only recently recovered somewhat, though Soviet vintage electrics and diesels that could rival an Alco for smoke still predominate.
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> The exception to the rule seems to be Central Europe, and the Germans in particular, as well as Japan. They weren't immune to closing lines, they just didn't systematically destroy their functioning systems in the same way that virtually everyone else did. And it's not like they didn't build autobahns and multi-lane roads either. What makes the Germans and Japanese so different? Japan, at least, can be explained away by the high population density dictated by a difficult topography. Germany, not so much.
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> Robbie
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> On 20 September 2017 at 17:27, Tony Gallowayarg@... mailto:arg@aapt.net.au [TramsDownUnder] TramsDownUnder@... mailto:TramsDownUnder@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
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> Looks like I left the “had” out - “Indiana Railroad and a few other properties HAD to take on MU's debts”.
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> I hate sounding illiterate.
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> Tony G
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>> On 20 Sep 2017, at 5:07 pm, Tony Gallowayarg@... mailto:arg@aapt.net.au [TramsDownUnder] TramsDownUnder@... mailto:TramsDownUnder@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
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>> Before my house fire I had a book about the Atlanta street railways and interurbans. In the foreword was a quote from Walter Chrysler that was in an interview published in a transit industry magazine, the Street Railway Journal I think.
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>> In this interview explicitly Chrysler stated it was the wish, aim and hope of the auto industry to drive the (privately owned) public transit industry out of business. I’m sure the date this was published was 1930, just as the Depression was hitting public transport ridership and revenue hard.
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>> At the same time GM was organising its National City Lines subsidiary to take over these distressed properties, the US supreme court was using the anti-trust legislation to separate traction operations from the power companies that owned them, forcing arguably viable traction companies into the hands of GM and NCL, and the collapse of Samuel Insull’s Midland Utilitities holding company that controlled the three big Chicago interurbans, the Indiana Railroad and a few other properties to take on MU’s debts forcing them all into bankruptcy.
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>> It wasn’t an easy time for the industry, with other factors as well (life expired plant and rolling stock needing replacement for example) that made it easy for companies to buy relatively cheaper buses and run on roads rather than renew their rail assets. What’s remarkable is anything survived this period. WW2 gave the industry a temporary boost, due to fuel and tyre rationing, but postwar the destruction continued and was stupidly replicated elsewhere, like here.
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>> Tony G
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