Untold Story of the Survival of the Penn Central by Donald Prell - HTML preview

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Postscript

 

It is now 2010 and the only surviving characters in this  story are my son Owen and myself. In 2008 the world  experienced some monstrous bankruptcies --- Lehman  Brothers being the largest with $615 billion in debt. In 1970  when the Penn Central Railroad filed for bankruptcy it had  debt of only about $3 billion; however at that time it was the  largest failure ever sustained by an American corporation.  Memory is mercurial and the downfall of the Penn Central is  considered ancient history. None-the-less, it is worth revisit-  ing as a case study in what to avoid business-wise, and what  role serendipity can sometimes play in avoiding disaster  scenarios.