{"product_id":"antique-west-shore-railroad-stock-certificate-treasures","title":"Antique West Shore Railroad Bond Certificate 🚂 $1000 Due A.D. 2361, 1930s-1960s Orange","description":"\u003ch2\u003eDue in the Year 2361? 🚂 Antique West Shore Railroad $1000 Bond Certificate, Orange\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 14\" x 9 1\/2\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/V4hOv_6f6j0\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e🚂 \u003cstrong\u003ePrincipal due January 1, A.D. 2361.\u003c\/strong\u003e That date is engraved on the face of this bond and again on its back, and it exists because a sleeping-car king held a grudge against a Vanderbilt, a brand-new railroad bled itself to death in a fare war, and J. P. Morgan put the warring railroad men on his yacht and kept them there until they made peace. The West Shore bond is the paper that settlement left behind: a thousand-dollar promise, backed by the New York Central, that runs out to the last day of a 475-year lease.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🧾 What this document is\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt names itself in its engraved banner: \u003cstrong\u003eFirst Mortgage Guaranteed Bond\u003c\/strong\u003e, and on the back docket, \u003cstrong\u003eGuaranteed 4 Per Cent First Mortgage Registered Bond, $1000\u003c\/strong\u003e. This is debt, not stock. The West Shore Railroad Company \"promises to pay … ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS at the office of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Company in the City of New York,\" with interest at four per centum per annum, payable on the first days of January and July.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe fine print on the face tells you exactly where it sits in history. It is one of an issue \"Coupon and Registered, of like tenor, to an amount not exceeding in the aggregate Fifty Million Dollars,\" all secured by a mortgage or deed of trust dated the \u003cstrong\u003efifth day of December, 1885\u003c\/strong\u003e, made to the \u003cstrong\u003eUnion Trust Company of New York\u003c\/strong\u003e as Trustee, covering the railroad's franchises, equipment and property in the States of New York and New Jersey. The top of the sheet repeats the ceiling in small engraved capitals: \u003cstrong\u003eIssue limited to $50,000,000.\u003c\/strong\u003e If four consecutive interest payments were missed, the principal fell due at the holder's option. The bond was not valid until the Trustee signed the certificate on the back.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePrinted by the \u003cstrong\u003eAmerican Bank Note Company, New York\u003c\/strong\u003e, on heavy bank-note paper, 14\" x 9 1\/2\" ~. This listing covers West Shore registered bonds across the \u003cstrong\u003e1930s-1960s\u003c\/strong\u003e; the photographs show one example of the design.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e😠 Pullman's grudge and the railroad nobody needed\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe company behind it was incorporated on February 18, 1880, to do one thing: run a second trunk line up the west bank of the Hudson and across the state to Buffalo, parallel to William H. Vanderbilt's railroad the entire way. Its money came from outside the Central's orbit. \u003cstrong\u003eEdward F. Winslow\u003c\/strong\u003e, of the banking house Winslow, Lanier \u0026amp; Company, became its chief financier, and \u003cstrong\u003eGeorge M. Pullman\u003c\/strong\u003e, who had been shut out when Vanderbilt put Wagner Palace sleeping cars on his trains instead of Pullman's, put in money of his own. Railroad histories tell it as revenge, and the board bears that out: General Horace Porter, a Pullman Company vice-president, sat as a director.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBetween 1881 and 1883 the company built 435 route miles, including a tunnel bored through Bergen Hill to reach the river at \u003cstrong\u003eWeehawken, New Jersey\u003c\/strong\u003e, and a tunnel carried beneath the grounds of the Military Academy at \u003cstrong\u003eWest Point, New York\u003c\/strong\u003e. Passenger trains began running between Jersey City and Newburgh on June 4, 1883, reached Albany on July 9 and Syracuse on October 1. The Weehawken terminal opened in 1884 with five ferry slips and sixteen passenger tracks, trading passengers onto boats for Manhattan.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e💸 A fare war to the death\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eVanderbilt answered with rates. The Central cut its freight charge between New York and Albany from twenty-five cents a hundred pounds to ten, and New York to Utica from thirty-two cents to fifteen. The New York to Chicago passenger fare fell from $12 to $10.50, then $9, then $8. The West Shore matched every cut it could and could not survive them. Vanderbilt's own complaint, as the Central's side remembered it, was that the upstart carried no new business at all: \"All the business the road does is stolen from the Central.\" In 1884 the West Shore was declared bankrupt and handed to receivers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Central had its own knife out by then. Vanderbilt backed the \u003cstrong\u003eSouth Pennsylvania Railroad\u003c\/strong\u003e, a line aimed straight at the Pennsylvania Railroad's heartland, and the Pennsylvania's men were rumored to be eyeing the bankrupt West Shore as a way into New York. Two of the biggest railroads in the country were each building a road whose only purpose was to hurt the other.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e⛵ The peace made on the Corsair\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn July 1885 J. Pierpont Morgan, who sat on the Central's board, summoned Chauncey Depew of the Central and George B. Roberts and Frank Thomson of the Pennsylvania aboard his yacht, the \u003cstrong\u003eCorsair\u003c\/strong\u003e. The story goes that Morgan made plain the boat would not come back to its pier until they had a deal. Accounts differ on where it went: one has the yacht steaming up the Hudson as far as Garrison and back down to Sandy Hook, the other has it cruising slowly in the East River and the Sound. They agree on the ending. Roberts gave his word, and the Corsair Compact divided the spoils: the Central would take the West Shore, and the Pennsylvania would take the South Pennsylvania.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe bankrupt company went under the hammer at foreclosure to Morgan, Depew and Ashbel Green. The reorganized West Shore Railroad Company issued $50,000,000 in new 4 percent bonds, and half of them went to the holders of the old $50,000,000 of West Shore bonds, which paid those investors fifty cents on the dollar. That is the issue this document belongs to, and it is why the mortgage date printed on it is December 5, 1885. The Central took the road on a lease that started on New Year's Day 1886 and ran 475 years, with the privilege of renewing for another 500. Add 475 to 1886 and you arrive at 2361.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏔️ What the deal left behind in Pennsylvania\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe losing half of the Corsair Compact is the part most people drive through without knowing it. Work on the South Pennsylvania stopped on September 12, 1885, with roughly 62 percent of its tunneling bored. The half-dug mountain tunnels, which had cost the lives of 26 workers, were abandoned so suddenly that the legend says laborers simply dropped their tools and walked off the job, and the whole enterprise became known as \u003cstrong\u003eVanderbilt's Folly\u003c\/strong\u003e. More than half a century later the graded roadbed and the old tunnels were taken over for a motor road, and in 1940 they became part of the \u003cstrong\u003ePennsylvania Turnpike\u003c\/strong\u003e, the country's pioneering long-distance superhighway. The same yacht ride that put a 2361 maturity on this bond paved the way for the Turnpike.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🛤️ The West Shore after the war\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith the Central in charge, the West Shore's straighter, easier grades made it chiefly a freight railroad. It stayed a separate company for 67 years, until it was one of seven subsidiaries merged into the New York Central Railroad on June 20, 1952, but its 1885 bonds stayed outstanding, which is why registered West Shore bonds kept being written up for new holders long after the lease began.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePassengers drifted away as the Hudson was bridged and tunneled for cars: the George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937, and the Tappan Zee Bridge and the New York State Thruway followed in the 1950s. Through trains between Weehawken and Albany ended in 1958, and after a long legal fight the Central was allowed to drop the last commuter trains to West Haverstraw on December 10, 1959. The rails did not go away. After Penn Central, the 1970 collapse and Conrail, the old West Shore became CSX's \u003cstrong\u003eRiver Subdivision\u003c\/strong\u003e in 1999, running from North Bergen Yard to Selkirk Yard near Albany, and freight trains still pass through the tunnel beneath West Point, under Thayer Hall.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🦅 The engraving\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe vignette across the bottom of the face is a river landscape engraved in black: highlands rising on the far shore, a two-masted steamship and a sailboat out on the water, a three-stacked steamboat tied up at a pier beside a water tower and dockside buildings, and at the right a steam train running along the near shore with smoke rolling back from the locomotive, under a leaning tree. Behind the text of the bond a huge orange \u003cstrong\u003e$1000\u003c\/strong\u003e is printed as an underprint, and a scalloped rosette in the upper right carries \u003cstrong\u003e$1000\u003c\/strong\u003e again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the left, an interlaced \u003cstrong\u003eWS monogram shield\u003c\/strong\u003e sits over a spray of leaves, above the panel carrying the maturity and a flowered cartouche for the bond number. An orange corporate seal sits at the lower left. On the back, the tall orange docket repeats the name, the 4 per cent, the $1000 and the 2361 date, the place of payment, and the interest dates of January 1st and July 1st. Beside it, a bald eagle with spread wings stands on a rocky outcrop inside a ruled circle, flanked by lathe-work rosettes of the kind bank-note engravers cut to defeat counterfeiters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e📜 Registered, not coupon, and the paper trail that proves it\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA bearer bond of this issue carried a sheet of coupons to clip twice a year. This is the \u003cstrong\u003eregistered\u003c\/strong\u003e form: the owner's name was written onto the face, the bond was \"transferable only on the books of said West Shore Railroad Company at said office by the registered owner in person or by attorney, upon surrender hereof,\" and interest went to the holder of record. No coupons belong with it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe back shows the machinery. A \u003cstrong\u003eGuarantee\u003c\/strong\u003e panel pledges that the Central \"hereby guarantees the punctual payment of the principal and interest of the within bond,\" and on the photographed sheet it is executed by the New York Central Railroad Company as successor to the original guarantor, the name the Central took after its 1914 consolidation. The Trustee's Certificate on the photographed sheet names the original trustee, Union Trust, with \u003cstrong\u003eCentral Hanover Bank and Trust Company, Successor\u003c\/strong\u003e printed beneath. That bank chain is its own piece of Wall Street history: Union Trust joined Central Trust in 1918 to form Central Union Trust, which merged with the Hanover in 1929 to create Central Hanover, which in turn combined with Manufacturers Trust on September 8, 1961 to become Manufacturers Hanover.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe large assignment panel, \"For Value Received … hereby sell, assign and transfer unto …,\" has a witness line, a box for documentary stamps and room for a bank's \u003cstrong\u003eSIGNATURE GUARANTEED\u003c\/strong\u003e stamp. On the photographed example the assignment is completed and stamped by guaranteeing firms, and punch-cancellation holes run through the face, the vignette and the back, the mark that took an old certificate out of circulation. None of that is damage; it is the record of a bond that was bought, held and handed on.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e📅 The range, and the piece you receive\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese were issued to one holder after another for decades, so the listing covers the \u003cstrong\u003e1930s-1960s\u003c\/strong\u003e. The design is the same throughout; the number, the name, the hand-completed dates, the officers' signatures, the stamps and the placement of any cancellation all differ from sheet to sheet. In his own long-standing words:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e14\" x 9 1\/2\" ~ Picture is of a 1940s all look the same except some of the later have a small Penn Central label to denote the ownership change. Some of these decades are very uncommon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe NYC bought the New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railway on November 24, 1885, and renamed it the West Shore Railroad, leasing it for 475 years from January 1, 1886. What makes this bond really neat is the principal and interest owed all came due on 2361 and you were just to show up to their office to collect. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWest Shore has a long and storied history provided service from New York City via Weehawken, New Jersey to Albany and Buffalo. This line became part of Penn Central in 1968 and passed to Conrail in 1976 after Penn Central's 1970 bankruptcy. It is now under the control of the huge conglomerate CSX.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy pictures seriously can't do it justice!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eImagine hanging this vintage historic collectible on your wall as home decor in any room! Stock certificates are another thing that is limited in supply and once they are gone into museums and collections, they will be hard to get. They are such historic documents with so much history behind them. The first stock certificate was issued in 1606 by the Dutch East India Company. 407 years of history later the Walt Disney Company issued one of the last paper stock certificates from a major corporation in 2013.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese had to be done on heavy paper stock, almost like a dollar bill but stiffer and more durable, which makes them stay vibrant and new looking for a long time. The other very unique thing about stock and bond certificates is they have all kinds of interesting signatures, and you honestly never know whom you will find. Almost all stocks are signed by the company President and Secretary. Some collectors research the other signatures and historic significance, and it adds so much provenance and value to an already valuable item.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ Questions People Ask\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhy is a railroad bond due in the year 2361?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBecause the lease that handed the West Shore to the Central began on the first day of 1886 and ran 475 years. The bond's maturity is the end of that lease.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIs this a stock certificate or a bond?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA bond: a 4 percent first mortgage registered bond of the West Shore Railroad Company, with principal and interest carrying the Central's guarantee. Collectors file it with railroad stocks and bonds under scripophily.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhy are there no coupons?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe issue came in coupon and registered forms. This is the registered form, which paid interest to the owner named on the company's books, so it never had coupons.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat was the Corsair Compact?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe July 1885 agreement J. P. Morgan brokered aboard his yacht Corsair between Vanderbilt's Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Central took over the bankrupt West Shore and the Pennsylvania took the unfinished South Pennsylvania Railroad, ending a rate war that was ruining both.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhy do dealers call it a \"400 year junk bond\"?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is a collectors' nickname for the long maturity and the West Shore's bankrupt past. In fact the bond had the Central standing behind it, and the old West Shore bondholders it replaced took fifty cents on the dollar in the 1885 exchange.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat decade will mine be from?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSomewhere in the 1930s-1960s. They share one design; some later sheets carry a small Penn Central label.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWho printed it?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe American Bank Note Company of New York, whose imprint appears at the foot of the back docket.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat size is it?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e14\" x 9 1\/2\" ~.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat do the holes mean?\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePunch cancellation. 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