Penn Central coal train, 1975

an F unit lash-up headed by an F7A passes through Cleveland Ohio, September 1975

Penn Central was created by the merger on 1 February 1968 of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) and the New York Central Railroad (NYC). The New Haven Railroad (NH) was added to the merger at the insistence of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) on 1 January 1969. The combined railroad operated 20,083 miles (32,314 km) of road (40,985 miles/65,945 km of track) at the end of 1970, not including the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad (P&LE) and Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines (PRSL).

Financial problems were behind the merger but it didn't help - Penn Central declared bankruptcy on 21 June 1970. Long distance passenger trains were seen as a major factor in this which led the Nixon administration to create Amtrak the next year. Over-regulation by the ICC on pricing was another major problem, but this wasn't addressed; the result was that the Ford administration nationalised the PC and five smaller, failed northeastern lines, into the Consolidated Rail Corporation, known as Conrail, effective as from 1 April 1976.

Deregulation in the 1980s helped turn the organisation around; eventually Conrail was bought by CSX and Norfolk Southern in 1999, and split between them.