The link below will take you to a Time magazine article from Monday, Aug. 01, 1932, that discusses the "Mighty Merger" plan for eastern railroads that was proposed by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) at that time. Had this merger taken place there would have been 4 railroad "systems" in the eastern U.S., excluding New England and the Southeast: Pennsylvania, New York Central, B&O, and C&O. The ICC wasn't telling the railroads to do this; rather, they suggested that they would approve such a merger. If you are interested in railroad history, I highly recommend this article.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,744057,00.html
Now here are some comments we received via email from Nate Clark, a B&LE fan (Bessemer & Lake Erie RR). Nate brought this article to our attention in his email. I have done some slight editing of Nate's email.
Had this plan gone through, the B&LE would have long ago become part of the Chessie camp, along with NKP+ERIE+PM+W&LE.
(from the article)
"Chesapeake & Ohio, with the Van Sweringens' Nickel Plate (Buffalo-Chicago-St. Louis), Erie (Jersey City-Chicago-Cincinnati) and PereMarquette (Buffalo-Detroit-Chicago) gets 24½% of the total trackage. Instead of Lackawanna, as proposed originally by the I. C. C., it is given LehighValley (New York-Buffalo) which puts its system into Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station. It also gets a branch of the Lackawanna to Oswego. Other C. & O. roads: Bessemer & Lake Erie, Wheeling & Lake Erie."
(from the article)
"Before operating staffs can be merged and economies effected, each of the Big Four has much to do. C. & O. must arrange to buy Lehigh Valley from Pennsylvania and the closely held Bessemer & Lake Erie from U. S. Steel Corp."
When this stillborn merger proposal was made back in the early Thirties the B&LE had only ten Texas-type locomotives (2-10-4) on the property. They would eventually have 47. Had the Bessemer's merger with this "other 'C' railroad", which had already passed a first phase of ICC approvals, gone through, the remaining Texas-types would maybe never have been delivered, as the C&O may have instead assigned their higher-drivered T-1s version of the 2-10-4 (69"drivers vs. the 64" CB&Q M-1 style on B&LE). The B&LE also would never have been trod by orange and black diesels, starting a decade-and-a-half or so after when the merger might have been, nor would headquarters have remained in Greenville, PA...although the Chessie's Cleveland Terminal Tower HQ would actually have been about a 5-miles-closer move than Monroeville was under GLT, a half-century later!
The C&O's coal and ore docks at Toledo may have been favored over P&C's Conneaut facility, though the water distance vs. rail miles to Pittsburgh may have still allowed the P&C facility to survive in a C&O universe. There was no mention in the article of the Union Railroad, so it is likely that it was not to have become part of C&O, too. Besides, the URR would not have reached any other part of the expanded C&O empire to the south, so it is not as if the B&LE/URR would have become part of a through route. Still, one can only speculate on how the entire U.S. rail map -- let alone the B&LE's-- might look in 2008, had this proposal of 75+ years ago come to fruition.