Decline and Abandonment
Competition with a growing population of automobiles riding on state paved highways and Depression caused growing unemployment led to a decline in C&LE passenger business. Freight business remained adequate, but the Lake Shore Electric connection at Toledo was an essential link to shippers in Cleveland. In 1938, LSE's freight agents and handlers struck for higher pay. The LSE had no funds to survive a strike and it immediately shut down and began to dismantle. For the C&LE this meant a dramatic collapse in its freight business. It hung on briefly by trying to work with trucking lines to replace the LSE, but it could no longer operate the guaranteed next morning at 8am schedule. The C&LE abandoned a few months later in 1939. Although there is little in the present literature regarding the LSE agent's strike, obviously their union did not expect it to lead to LSE's total abandonment with permanent unemployment for both the agents and everyone else employed by the LSE, a very dire situation in the middle of the Depression with 25% national unemployment. This strike brought down the LSE in 1938, the C&LE in 1939, and eventually the Indiana Railroad in 1941.
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Famous quotes containing the words decline and, decline and/or abandonment:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)