George McNear ownership and disputes
By the early 1900s, the Peoria area became a primary hub for multiple class I railroads with their own direct routes to the area, including the CB&Q and the PRR. The TP&W consequently began to operate at a financial loss from declining traffic, and in the mid-1920s, the railway fell under receivership. During that time, the railway's passenger operations experienced ridership losses, since some newly paved state highway roads paralleled their trackage. The CB&Q and the PRR both attempted to absorb the TP&W, but in 1926, the railway was purchased for $1.3 million by George P. McNear Jr., who was a former New York Central (NYC) executive and investor.
George McNear became the TP&W's newest president, and he quickly brought the railway out of receivership by selling some of their property for $500,000, including a terminal facility to the Peoria and Pekin Union Railway, and he floated a bond issue for $800,000. One of McNear's other tasks for the TP&W was the abandonment of their surplus CB&Q connection in Lomax, which was replaced with a new connection with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (Santa Fe). The railway began marketing their operations as a bypass route around the congested railroad traffic of Chicago and St. Louis, to which multiple surrounding railroads favored.[2]
The TP&W also worked to upgrade their equipment roster and to speed up their freight operations, and they discontinued their passenger and mail operations. In 1937, the TP&W purchased six H-10 class 4-8-4 "Northern" locomotives (Nos. 80–85) from the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). The H-10s were the lightest 4-8-4s ever built for a North American railroad, weighing only 361,000 lb. They were equipped with 69 in diameter driving wheels, 23.5x30 in cylinders, and a boiler pressure of 250 psi, and they produced a tractive effort of 51,000 lbf.
Under McNear's leadership, the TP&W became one of very few railroads in the United States to turn profits during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite his successful efforts to reorganize the TP&W, McNear became unpopular with labor unions; McNear enforced his own personalized labor rules and methods, to which all thirteen of the TP&W-tied unions disagreed with, and they initiated multiple unsuccessful labor strikes to restore the railway's previous conventional rules.[2]
On December 28, 1941, another TP&W strike was initiated, after the TP&W announced a new wage scale and another new set of rules. The strike was quickly stopped on March 21, 1942, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered for the federal government to confiscate control of the TP&W to have the railway aid the ongoing World War II effort, and John W. Barriger III was appointed their federal manager.[2] In 1945, when World War II ended, control of the TP&W was returned to George McNear, but the thirteen unions instantly reinitiated the strike.
The strike lasted for nineteen months, and it involved multiple shootings; on two separate occasions, some gun shots were fired into an automobile with non-union employees and into a locomotive cab; on February 6, 1946, some armed guards hired by the TP&W shot five strikers (two killed; three wounded) at Gridley, Illinois.[2] McNear had the TP&W shut down after the latter incident, but in December 1946, federal judge J. Leroy Adair ordered for the railway to resume operations, and he issued an injunction to prevent interference from strikers.
On the night of March 10, 1947, George McNear was shot and killed while walking back to his home from a Bradley Braves basketball game during a power outage.[3] McNear's murder case remains unsolved, but it was believed to be connected to the lengthy strike. Following McNear's death, the TP&W fell under control of McNear estate trustees, and Frisco Railway executive J. Russell Coulter became the TP&W's newest president.[2] In May 1947, Coulter restored most of the older labor rules, and the strike quickly ended.[2]
The labor strike disputes resulted in 50% of the TP&W's traffic being lost, and they resulted in some traffic employees and executives leaving the company, but by the early 1950s, the railway regained their lost traffic and profitability under Coulter's leadership.[4] One task Coulter did for the TP&W was to purchase a fleet of ALCO and EMD diesel locomotives to dieselize their roster, and the process was completed in October 1950. The railway boosted the marketing of their operations as a bypass route and an originator for Peoria traffic, and they boosted their interchange traffic with the PRR, the Santa Fe, the CB&Q, the Minneapolis and St. Louis (M&StL), the Nickel Plate Road (NKP), and the New York Central.[4]
