Bag of weenies is the individual most responsible for the "Rape of the SP". He used it as a cash cow to "diversify", which was good for stockholders, in the long run, but lead a to a period of rapid decline at the end of the 1970's and early '80' leaving it a "second" tier property, when deregulation occurred.

The spinoff's like Sprint are now legendary. And then there were really interesting acquisitions like the Banknote printers, that made folks scratch their heads. Many of these were set up to benefit management, way more than stockholders (at least at the time....), and screwed both employees and shippers.

Some of this was inevitable, given the overcapacity and competition facing capital intensive industries like choo-choo's in a high inflation high interest rate period that lasted nearly 15 years. Some of it was a result of changes in the world, economics, and society that affected many capital intensive "rust belt" industries, that RR's depended to heavily on to maintain a low velocity "carload" traffic base, at the time the interstates had just been largely completed. Bag o' weenies, while a disaster for the SP we loved, was just listening to the "common" wisdom on Wall Street, and acting accordingly.

Krebs, as we note from some of the nonsense posted here, gets a lot of bull thrown at him for picking up this mess up, but he didn't make it happen, he just dealt with it. He let folks like Rollin Bredenburg and Mike Burke loose, and provided capital to start the intermodal revolution, by ordering the first articulated bi level container cars and build the ICTF. Things that had sprung from John G. Kneiling's prescient imagination, that no one had really done before, which saved the RR industry.