Re: NJI&I to Wabash at Pine
|
Garth Groff and Sally Sanford <mallardlodge1000@...>
Gary, Interesting data for a rather obscure railway. I've always been intrigued by the rather grandiously-named New Jersey, Indiana & Illinois. The line was actually built by the Singer Sewing Machine interests, and was named for the three states where Singer had plants. The line was sold to the Wabash in 1926, but retained as a separate railroad, which probably got the Wabash a bigger cut of any freight payments. For an 11-mile line the NJ&I had a pretty impressive fleet of boxcars. Actually Sudebaker wasn't going that strong in 1953. They had serious production delays bringing new models to the market, Ford and GM were in a price war that hurt Sudebaker more than each other, and the production/sales costs of each Studebaker was much higher than comparable GM or Ford products. The next year they merged with failing Packard, which was probably the worst decision Studebaker could have made. What I consider the most beautiful car of the 1950s, the Studebaker Hawk couldn't save them, though the 1960 Lark bought them some time. Fleet sales also kept them going; California, for instance, heavily bought Studebaker autos and pick-up trucks, but the actual profit per unit must have been pretty low. I learned to drive in a 1962 Studebaker Lark, an ex-California Forestry Service car, but that's beyond our period of interest (as well as irrelevant to our discussion). Yours Aye, Garth Groff 🦆 On Mon, Mar 8, 2021 at 1:07 PM Gary Roe <wabashrr@...> wrote:
|
|
|