A weary veteran of U. S. railroading is the bankrupt, 108-year-old Erie. In her gilded years she fell in with bad companyflamboyant Jim Fisk, piratical Jay Gould, pious Daniel Drew. Together they manipulated her back and forth from bonanza to bankruptcy, got her known as the "Scarlet Lady of Wall Street." Exhausted, the Erie had collapsed three times by 1895. Then she reformed. Under Van Sweringen control, she became a respectably operated road. But her capital structure never really recovered from Jay Gould's attentions, and she never again paid a dividend on the common. In 1938 Erie chugged into...
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