[PRCo] Holding Companies

[Fred Schneider]

What I would love to know more about, Mr. Rockwell, and this is an  
expansion of the previous subject on underliers, is the whole topic  
of holding companies.     But to understand it we would need annual  
copies of all of the McGraw's Directories or the Poor's or Moody's  
Public Utility manuals.   We know that President Franklin D.  
Roosevelt had a "hard on" for the utility pyramid companies and he  
wanted to rid the nation of such companies.   Probably the one he  
most despised was Electric Bond and Share Company, which was owned by  
General Electric, the money from which has formed the nucleus for  
today's G E Credit Corporation and something like 30 million Master  
and Visa credit cards worldwide.

I know that EBASCO owned power, gas, light, and trolley companies in  
something like 20 or 22 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and  
some foreign countries.   It was a wonderful way for General Electric  
to sell hardware just as National City Lines was a great way for  
General Motors to sell buses.   Should we even bother to ask why the  
Lancaster Birney car, of which I am custodian for the Manheim  
Hysterical Society, has GE 263 motors, GE K36 controllers, a CE CP27  
compressor, GE strip heaters, GE edgewound resistors (I had to  
replace them with a competitor's brand last year because GE isn't in  
that market any longer).  If you don't understand it, Conestoga  
Traction, Lehigh Valley Transit, Williamsport Passenger Railways,  
Jersey Shore Electric Street Railway (now we have about 450 miles of  
track compared to Pittsburgh 650), Pennsylvania Power and Light Co.  
and United Gas Improvement Company were the Electric Bond and Share  
properties in Pennsylvania.

Another huge one was Stone and Webster Utilities Corporation.   I  
could never find any new patents on the so-called Birney car to make  
it unique.   The really important thing here was that Charles Oliver  
Birney designed a car that would work in enough Stone and Webster  
properties that once his purchasing department started ordering them,  
American Car Company could go to all the other companies and say,  
"Look what we can build for you cheap ... and it runs cheap...."    
How big was Stone and Webster?   Add together all the trolley lines  
controlled by that one Boston-based organization, and they were  
almost all small companies in small towns (even Dallas was a small  
town in those days), and you have more cars and more track that  
Chicago Surface Lines ran.

It would be a great research project for someone wanting to  
understand electric railway finances.