Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines

Company History: Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines was launched in 1933 to combine the lines of the Pennsylvania and Reading from the Philadelphia-Camden area to the New Jersey coast at places like Atlantic City and Cape May. There were four parallel lines in this general direction and the traffic was mostly passenger and mostly seasonal. There was just too little business for Pennsy and Reading to fight over so the P-RSL would be a separate railroad jointly owned by PRR and RDG to rationalize the routes. At the time of the launch, P-RSL had 413 route miles, all in the state of New Jersey.

Two of the lines were electrified with 3rd rail and used electric MU cars to haul passengers. These cars also had trolley poles for a short segment in town where the close proximity of grade crossings made operation with 3rd rail impossible. The rest of the operations were behind steam. P-RSL had their own steam fleet that was augmented with power from its parents.

Successor/Parent History: The Consolidated Rail Corporation, commonly known as Conrail (reporting mark CR), was the primary Class I railroad in the Northeast U.S. between 1976 and 1999. Conrail is a portmanteau of "consolidated" and "rail" from the name of the company.

The U.S. federal government created Conrail to take over the potentially profitable lines of multiple bankrupt carriers, including the Penn Central Transportation Company and Erie Lackawanna Railway. With the benefit of industry-wide regulatory requirements being reduced (via the 4R Act and the Staggers Act), Conrail began to turn a profit in the 1980s and was turned over to private investors in 1987. The two remaining Class I railroads in the East, CSX Transportation and the Norfolk Southern Railway (NS), agreed in 1997 to split the system approximately equally, returning rail freight competition to the Northeast by essentially undoing the 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central Railroad that created Penn Central. Following Surface Transportation Board approval, CSX and NS took control in August 1998, and on June 1, 1999, began operating their portions of Conrail.

Brief History: The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles' Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.