The Wreck of the Penn Central
It took ten years of laborious planning and extensive negotiations to create the mammoth Penn Central Railroad, the largest railroad in United States history. When the leviathan was finally born of a merger between the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads on February 1, 1968, the event was hailed as a great day for railroading. But the baby giant survived only 867 days. The crash of the Penn Central set a new record, this time for the largest bankruptcy the United States had yet seen.