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EVENT
"One Man Wrecking Crew: How Ben Heineman Derailed the Rock Island-Union Pacific Merger"
 | Thursday, October 10, 2013
3:00pm - 5:00pm |
The late Ben Heineman was the chairman of the Chicago and North Western Railway Company and a leading management figure in post-World War II railroading. In 1961, after the Union Pacific and Rock Island Railroads began merger discussions, eventually culminating in an official ICC application to merge the two companies, Heineman used every opportunity to delay and to derail the merger, which would have damaged his railroad company and possibly even led to its collapse. He did this by threatening a hostile takeover of the Rock Island, focusing in the ICC hearings on a new proposal to redraw the western map, and developing his own merger proposals to counter the UP and Rock's attempts to remake western railroading.
How Heineman accomplished this task will be the subject of Greg Schneider's talk before the Sandhouse Gang. Drawing on research from his recently published Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line (University of Kansas Press, 2013), Schneider will reveal how one figure made a huge difference in the outcome of the merger discussions and what impact Heineman had on western railroading.
Speaker Bio: Greg Schneider is a Professor of History at Emporia State University in Kansas. He is the author of, most recently, Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line (University Press of Kansas, 2013). He is currently working on a book on the railroad industry and government between World War One and World War Two, with the working title "Government Rails: The American Railroad Industry in Prosperity, War and Depression, 1917-1945." He has received grants to fund his research from Earhart Foundation, the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society and the Richard Overton Research Fellowship from the Lexington Group on Transportation History. He is a native Chicagoan, receiving his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago and he lives in Topeka with his wife and two children.
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