Background
Prior to 1930, railroads were the primary freight haulers in the United States. Then, during World War II railroads also moved much of the war materiel for the U.S. armed forces. But despite that, railroads lost freight traffic to the growing trucking industry.
In the eastern United States, the region’s railroads were hurt financially by the rapid decline in coal tonnage as the nation increasingly shifted to oil in the 1960s. A consequence of the shift was that between 1967 and...