The Broadway Limited‘s dining car may have been well managed, but the rest of the railroad was not. Part of the problem was the NYC and PRR cultures were completely different. Part of the problem was the decline of the northeast industrial belt. But the main problem was probably that the executives who ran the railroad hated each other and spent too much time trying to undercut one another and not enough time managing the operation.
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On June 21, 1970, the railroad filed for bankruptcy, shocking both Wall Street financiers and Washington DC politicians. One idea that quickly emerged was that the railroad was brought under by money-losing passenger trains. I doubt this was true; while the passenger trains didn’t help, the freight trains weren’t making money either. In any case, it took just four months after the bankruptcy for Congress to take one of the bills being promoted by Haswell’s NARP and pass the Rail Service Passenger Act, creating the entity that became known as Amtrak.
If the ICC report of 1959 hadn’t focused on how to preserve passenger trains rather than let them die; if Claiborne Pell hadn’t persuaded Congress to offer federal support for improved passenger service; if Anthony Haswell had not created NARP in 1967; and if the Penn Central hadn’t gone bankrupt in 1970, then Amtrak today would probably not exist. While some may be glad that the federal government is supporting passenger trains, others–including Haswell himself–are so dissatisfied with Amtrak’s service that they think it would probably be better to simply let the trains go.