{"product_id":"antique-1885-1934-railroad-bond-set-west-shore-new-york-central-pennsylvania-the-feud-j-p-morgan-ended-on-his-yacht","title":"Antique 1885-1934 Railroad Bond Set 🚂 West Shore, New York Central, Pennsylvania, the Feud J.P. Morgan Ended on His Yacht","description":"\u003ch2\u003e🚂 What Railroad War Did J.P. Morgan End on His Yacht? Three Antique Bonds From the West Shore, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e West Shore 14\" x 9 1\/2\", New York Central 15\" x 10\", Pennsylvania 15\" x 10\" ~ All three punch-cancelled, with coupons. They vary a little one to the next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThree real railroad bonds, and between them the three companies at the center of one of the best fights in American business. If you've never held one, a bond is simply a loan on very fancy paper. You handed the railroad your money, and it handed you this, promising to pay you back on a set date and to pay you interest along the way. The rows of little tickets attached are coupons. Twice a year you snipped one off and cashed it for your interest, which is where the old name \"coupon clipper\" comes from, for somebody living off bond money. The holes punched through each sheet are how it was cancelled once it was finished being money, like a conductor punching a ticket.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou get all three, each drawn from my stack, so numbers, signatures and how many coupons are left will differ from the ones pictured.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🛌 It Started With a Sleeping Car Grudge\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWilliam H. Vanderbilt's New York Central ran up the east bank of the Hudson, the river people liked to call America's Rhine. His lines ran sleeping cars from the Wagner Palace Car Company, which Vanderbilt money financed, and not from George Pullman's. Pullman had a grudge, and he had money. So he was among those who put up the cash to build a whole second railroad right alongside the Central, on the opposite bank.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat was the West Shore, built in 1881 to 1883, from Weehawken, New Jersey, straight across the river from Manhattan, north through Haverstraw, Cornwall, Newburgh, Kingston and Catskill, then west through the Mohawk Valley to Buffalo. Its president was General Horace Porter, Ulysses S. Grant's wartime aide, who was a vice president of Pullman's company at the very same time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e💸 The Fare War\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwo full railroads up one river valley did exactly what you'd expect. They cut prices to steal each other's riders until a ticket from New York to Chicago fell to eight dollars at one point. It bled both, and the newer West Shore, with less money behind it, went into receivership by June of 1884, barely a year after it opened. Receivership means a court puts a caretaker in charge because the company can't pay its bills.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou could feel it up in Albany County. The Fullers correspondent of the Altamont Enterprise duly noted the slashed fares of 1884. Local legend has Aaron Fuller talking the railroad into a depot at Fullers Station far grander than Guilderland Center's, $6,000, the story goes. And when the West Shore ran an excursion down the Hudson to Iona Island, Guilderland Center alone bought 75 tickets.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eVanderbilt saw the whole thing as the Pennsylvania Railroad barging into his home ground, so he hit back with a railroad of his own, the South Pennsylvania, which he, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick pushed across the Alleghenies straight into the Pennsylvania's backyard.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e⚓ Aboard the Corsair\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe story goes that this got settled on J.P. Morgan's yacht, and it did, just not quite the way it usually gets told. In July of 1885 the banker summoned Chauncey Depew of the New York Central and George B. Roberts and Frank Thomson of the Pennsylvania aboard the Corsair, and the boat cruised slowly through the East River and Long Island Sound while they talked it out. Not up the Hudson, whatever you've heard.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMorgan's deal stopped work on the South Pennsylvania, with its right of way to be sold to the Pennsylvania, and the Central agreed to take over the West Shore once it had finished going through receivership. People took to calling the unfinished South Penn \"Vanderbilt's Folly,\" but its tunnels got the last word: when the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in October 1940, it ran through six of them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e📜 Bond One: West Shore Railroad, 1885\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the paper the peace treaty left behind. On December 5, 1885 the old West Shore was sold at foreclosure, meaning sold off to settle its debts, to Morgan, Depew and a third man, Ashbel Green. They reorganized it that same day as the West Shore Railroad Company, the name on this bond, and rented the whole thing to the Central. Turn the bond over and there's the guarantee, the New York Central promising to stand behind it. The railroad the West Shore was built to fight ended up backing its debt.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow look at the due date: January 1, A.D. 2361. Not a typo. The Central's lease ran 475 years starting January 1, 1886, and that lands exactly on 2361, with the privilege of another five hundred years after that. It's a $1,000 \"First Mortgage\" bond, mortgage working the same as on a house, with the railroad's own property standing behind the loan and these bondholders first in line. Up top is an engraved Hudson River scene with steamboats and a sailboat working past the mountains. The coupons are worth $20 each.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e💰 Bond Two: New York Central \u0026amp; Hudson River, 1898\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis bond came thirteen years after the yacht, and it's from the very company whose office the West Shore bond is payable at. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt folded the two railroads into one on November 1, 1869, and the bond's own embossed seal says so: CONSOLIDATED NOV. 1, 1869.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt paid for a takeover. On February 4, 1898 the board agreed to buy up the stock of the Lake Shore \u0026amp; Michigan Southern Railway, which carried the Central's line on to Chicago, paying with up to $100,000,000 of these bonds. The Lake Shore stock was pledged to back them, and that's why LAKE SHORE COLLATERAL runs across the sheet. Collateral just means something put up to guarantee a loan.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLook who was on the 1898 board: William K. and Frederick W. Vanderbilt, and J. Pierpont Morgan himself. Chauncey Depew, the man Morgan called to the Corsair, had been president since 1885 and moved up to chairman that April. This one promises to pay \"in gold coin,\" and it was built to run a full hundred years, due February 1, 1998, with coupons worth $17.50 in gold each.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🏛️ Bond Three: Pennsylvania Railroad, 1934\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRoberts and Thomson's railroad, forty-nine years on from the yacht. The Pennsylvania was chartered in 1846 and billed itself as \"The Standard Railroad of the World,\" and yes, it's one of the four railroads on the Monopoly board. Engraved across the top is the original Pennsylvania Station in New York, the great McKim, Mead \u0026amp; White building opened in 1910 and torn down from October 28, 1963 to 1966, a loss that helped bring about New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission. Printed underneath the text in huge pale letters, to foil copycats, is PENNA. R.R. CO.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere's what I like best: read the three promises together. The 1898 bond says gold. By 1934, gold was gone. Congress threw out gold promises in contracts on June 5, 1933, and this bond pays only \"in such coin or currency of the United States of America as at the time of payment is legal tender for public and private debts.\" Legal tender means whatever the government says counts as money that day. It's dated July 1, 1934, and it was due July 1, 1984.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🤝 How the Fight Finally Ended\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe two rivals on Morgan's yacht stayed rivals for another eighty-odd years, right up until they gave in and married each other. In 1968 the Pennsylvania and the New York Central merged into Penn Central, and in June 1970 that collapsed into the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history up to then. What was left went into Conrail in 1976. The West Shore's own track outlived them all: CSX has run freight over it since 1999, and that bond still isn't due for more than three centuries.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🖋️ One Printer Behind All Three\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll three came off the presses of the American Bank Note Company of New York, formed in 1858 when several of the top security printers merged to fight counterfeiters. It helped print the Union's first federal paper money during the Civil War, and its green ink is the reason paper money got called greenbacks. You can see that same green on the West Shore and New York Central bonds. The hobby of collecting old stock and bond paper has its own name, scripophily, and pieces tied to famous vanished railroads are a big part of why people get into it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHang them side by side in a den or a train room and you've got the whole feud on one wall. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Curated Gift Sets","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68148952989928,"sku":null,"price":64.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/hero_91c76b09-93f3-44cf-a2ac-02e7e5ebb914.jpg?v=1794189623","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-1885-1934-railroad-bond-set-west-shore-new-york-central-pennsylvania-the-feud-j-p-morgan-ended-on-his-yacht","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}