Though they were abandoned and taken up many years before I was born, several of the nearby towns in my area were once proudly served by the Texas & Pacific Railway. When I pass by the remnants of the old roadbed, an interesting thought often enters my mind: If the Texas & Pacific was an independent and still around today, what would be on their rails? Imagine a modern T&P. No acquisition by Missouri Pacific in 1976, and no majority ownership by any other railroad for that matter. Just a free standing, wholly independent railroad. A ton of locomotive brochures from EMD and GE would've made their way to management's desk over the years, but what do you think would've been settled on and purchased by the railroad and continue to be in service right now? With the smaller size (regional or small class 1) of the road limiting purchases to only conservative numbers of new units, I feel there'd still be many second generation EMD diesels on the roster. Lots of SD40-2s and GP38-2s come to mind, many might even be upgraded to Dash 3 specs. Perhaps a modest fleet of new GE Dash 9s would've been bought in the late 1990s to replace some of the oldest SD40-2s for mainline service. But what do you imagine? I envision the T&P using a slightly simplified version of the attractive orange and green paint scheme that its GP7s wore. But then again, they might've completely changed colors altogether.....what comes to your mind? The imagination is powerful!
I have T&P being absorbed by parent/controlling company MP on October 15, 1976. My notes also show MP took control in April of 1923.
Seems like I read 1976 is when they were finally under 100% ownership and locomotives no longer had T&P lettering on the Mopac buzz saw herald, though I think they were under about 75% ownership by Mopac for many, many years before that. I've been known to be wrong though!
I did some digging around, but could not locate my paperwork from MPHS. So tried their web site: http://www.mopac.org/corporate-history/74-timeline-mp-and-predecessors Could not spot anything relating to my notes for 1923. Maybe it was a long ago typo or something. Anyhow, the 1976 date is correct.
What we also end up dealing with is control as opposed to outright ownership. My reference material shows that by the end of 1957, MoPac held 76.9 percent of T&P stock. Formal merger discussion at the time centered on the notion of a nominally independent road (comparison to SP and SSW) as well as financial repercussions of a legal merger, so at that point the two were maintained distinct although the paint schemes used (TP sublettering on MP scheme) showed that they were, in practice, part of a single system at that time.
The T&P kept its identity for the same reason that the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe, the Texas and New Orleans, and several others did. For a great many years, Texas state law demanded that any railroad operating in Texas be headquartered in Texas. So, those roads which preferred to operate out of another state, but had tracks in Texas, had to have a subsidiary headquartered there. I'm not sure of the date that law got repealed, but it was well after WWII.
Subsidiary companies such as the SL-SF & Texas RY; the SSW Railway Company of Texas. I believe it was about 1954 when that Texas law went away.
