RAILROADS: End of the Line

Robert Ralph Young was a bantamweight scrapper (135 Ibs.) with heavyweight ideas, who came out of obscurity as a Wall Street speculator to become the most powerful and most debated railroad tycoon of his day. As board chairman of the New York Central, the nation's second biggest railroad, and an important voice in several other roads, Bob Young had collected all the prizes of a champion battler: wealth, power, glittering friends (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor et al.), palatial homes in Palm Beach and Newport.

One morning last week, in his 25-room Palm Beach mansion, where he spent three months...

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