Peoria and Eastern Railroad under Penn Central ownership

[fishbelly]

Was there some sort of agreement with the formation of the Penn Central that allowed the P&E to keep their logo on the cab sides while wearing the Penn Central paint scheme?

[lvrr325]

From what I gather reading some pages the NYC only owned 81% of it and was unable to fully merge it. Presumably the logo was retained to help identify their equipment, it may have been leased to the P&E directly and needed to be easily identified from other PC equipment.

I see also a story that the line wasn't initially going to be included in Conrail and there was some consideration of buying it out to go independent, like the P&W in Connecticut.

[stevewagner]

I'll throw in a couple of Peoria & Eastern memories in case they may be of interest.

As an undergraduate student at Oberlin College in Ohio, about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland, in 1964-1968, whenever I heard a locomotive horn and wasn't in class I'd run south of "downtown" to try to see the train, a local freight that could go as far west as Norwalk on the former Lake Shore & Michigan Southern mainline that had become a branch when the New York Central built a line closer to Lake Erie. (The line through Oberlin has been abandoned for years now.) The usual power was a black NYC Geep (either GP7 or GP9, without dynamic brakes) in the cigar band scheme. But sometimes it was a similar loco, also black, but with a Peoria & Eastern herald on the sides of the cab. The P&E itself was considerably farther west.

In April 1970, the year before Amtrak started up, I went on a lengthy expedition (for me), riding passenger trains as far from the Boston area as Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. In Champaign, where the real Peoria & Eastern crossed the Illinois Central, I saw three P&E 50' boxcars, still wearing NYC's bright Century Green sides (with black roof, ends and underbody, I think) with big "cigar band" herald, but with Peoria & Eastern road name and the "Quicker via Peoria" slogan with a shooting star or comet. This was two or three years after the creation of Penn Central. I doubt that cars wore P&E paint schemes in interchange service as long as many Gulf, Mobile & Ohio freight cars did after that line was merged into the IC; I saw plenty of those on the old Chicago & Alton and elsewhere as late as 1987 or so (and cars in full Lackawanna, not EL, paint, in and near Syracuse, NY, as late as 1981, 21 years after the EL merger.)

Branchline Trains produced a styrene kit for P&E cars like the ones I saw, but I think only of the three road numbers produced had the slogan with outer space logo. I have that one and really hope to get to build it. Kadee produced assembled PS-1 boxcars in a similar paint scheme but without the distinctive logo and slogan. Whether that paint job was ever actually used on 40' AAR 1937 design boxcars like an Athearn NYC car to which I'd added P&E decals earlier or a similar Athearn car decorated by Bev-Bel I don't know. If anyone else does know, please post accordingly or send me a private message if you don't think it would interest others on this forum.

[peoriaman]

Sept 14, 2020 22:14:29 GMT -8 lvrr325 said:

I see also a story that the line wasn't initially going to be included in Conrail and there was some consideration of buying it out to go independent, like the P&W in Connecticut.

Ironically, the P&E wound up being the line Conrail kept; PC's other Peoria line was ex-PRR and what still remained of it in 1976 became part of Illinois Terminal.

[thebessemerkid]

Peoria must have been a heck of a place for variety.