Empire Transportation Company was founded in 1865 by Joseph D. Potts and became a multimodal freight transportation subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It owned oil tanker cars and used them to transport refined oil for mostly independent oil refiners during the era of John D. Rockefeller's and Standard Oil's oil refinery mergers of the 1870s. The company also owned grain freight boats on the Great Lakes and oil pipelines in the oil regions of Pennsylvania. When the company attempted to buy and build some oil refineries in 1877, Standard Oil bought the company. Penn Central merger, Conrail and today The controlling, non-institutional shareholders of the PRR during the early 1960s were Henry Stryker Taylor, who was a part of the Jacob Bunn business dynasty of Illinois, and Howard Butcher III, a principal in the Philadelphia brokerage house of Butcher & Sherrerd (later Butcher & Singer). On February 1, 1968, the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with its longtime arch-rival, the New York Central Railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad absorbed the New York Central and eventually went by the name of Penn Central Transportation Company. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) required that the ailing New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad (NH) be added in 1969. A series of events including inflation, poor management, abnormally harsh weather, and the withdrawal of a government-guaranteed $200 million operating loan forced Penn Central to file for bankruptcy protection on June 21, 1970. In May 1971, passenger operations, including equipment, were transferred to a new government-subsidized company called the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, or Amtrak. This was devised to relieve the Penn Central (and other railroads) of money-losing passenger service. Penn Central rail lines, including ex-Pennsy lines, were transferred to Conrail in 1976, and eventually Amtrak received the Northeast Corridor and Keystone Corridor lines. After Conrail was divided between the Norfolk Southern Railway and CSX Transportation, most of the former Pennsy's remaining trackage went to Norfolk Southern. The few parts of the Pennsylvania Railroad that went to CSX after the Conrail split were (1) the western end of the Fort Wayne Line across western Ohio and northern Indiana, (2) the Pope's Creek Secondary in Maryland, just to the east of Washington, (3) the Landover Subdivision, a former Pennsy freight line in DC which connects to Amtrak's ex-Pennsy Northeast Corridor and CSX's ex-B&O Alexandria Extension on the north end and CSX's RF&P Subdivision on the south end via the