for all the railroads, and Congress recognized that bankruptcy laws needed revision. The Chandler Acts of 1938-9 provided a new form of relief for railroads, allowing them to restructure their debt while continuing to operate. The LVRR was approved for such a restructuring in 1940 when several large mortgage loans were due. The restructuring allowed the LVRR to extend the maturity of its mortgages, but it needed to repeat the process in 1950. The terms of the restructurings precluded dividend payments until 1953, when LVRR common stock paid the first dividend since 1931. In 1957, the LVRR again stopped dividends. In 1944, the LVRR's gross revenues came close to $100,000,000 which was a milestone for the railroad. Two final blows fell in the 1950s: the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, better known as the Interstate Highway Act, and the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. The interstate highways helped the trucking industry offer door-to-door service, and the St. Lawrence Seaway allowed grain shipments to bypass the railways and go directly to overseas markets. By the 1960s, railroads in the East were struggling to survive. The Pennsylvania Railroad in 1962 requested ICC authorization to acquire complete control of the LVRR through a swap of PRR stock for LVRR and elimination of the voting trust that had been in place since 1941. It managed to acquire more than 85% of all outstanding shares, and from that time the LVRR was little more than a division of the PRR. The Pennsylvania merged with the New York Central in 1968, but the Penn Central failed in 1970, causing a cascade of railroad failures throughout the East. On June 21, 1970, the Penn Central declared bankruptcy and sought bankruptcy protection. As a result, the PC was relieved of its obligation to pay fees to various Northeastern railroads—the Lehigh Valley included—for the use of their railcars and other operations. Conversely, the other railroads' obligations to pay those fees to the Penn Central were not waived. This imbalance in payments would prove fatal to the financially-frail Lehigh Valley, and it declared bankruptcy just over one month after the Penn Central, on July 24, 1970. The Lehigh Valley Railroad remained in operation during the 1970 bankruptcy, as was the common practice of the time. In 1972, the Lehigh Valley Railroad assumed the remaining Pennsylvania trackage of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, a