Re: Perlman's Legacy.

As has been pointed out but ignored by too many Perlman haters: Perlman did not run the DRGW; he was their engineering department head. He had nothing whatsoever to do with preservation (or not) of DRGW steam locomotives. Keep bashing him for that if you will, but it's all phoney - The engineering people on any railroad have virtually no influence on such things.
NYC was already mostly dieselized when he went there as president. It was also almost bankrupt and falling further each day. You may disagree with his methods, but he did pull the NYC bnack from the brink (while PRR dithered and whistled int he dark) and turned it into the strongest half of Penn Central. BTW, how many of you remember that merger with PRR was NOT his first choice? He knew PRR was a slug, and wanted to merge NYC with C&O, which would have made a very strong railroad, and would have left PRR to merge with N&W, of which it held 1/3 ownership anyway.
Perlman also brought WP back from the brink of near-bankruptcy, as well.
It's funny to see people who weren't even born when all this was going on castigate the man for flaws and sins real and imagined. I guess there are not many of us left who remember what sorry shape physically and financially many of the railroads were in during the late 1950's and throughout the 1960's and 1970's. Without the Perlmans and Brosnans and other no-nonsense railroaders during those dark days, the industry would long ago have become a giant Amtrak.
Wonder how much, or how little, steam would have been preserved then?