Alton Railroad Company

The Alton Railroad Company was an Illinois entity formed in 1933 but which filed for reorganization on November 25, 1942, in order to extinguish its fixed debt of more than $45 million. It filed in federal court in Chicago under Chapter 77 of the Bankruptcy Act.

Though short-lived and unsuccessful, its name became the lead party on a lawsuit filed by numerous railroad companies in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, which from there went to the D.C. Circuit and while that appeal was pending it went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court then rendered, over dissent, its precedent-setting conservative decision of R.R. Ret. Bd. v. Alton R. Co., 295 U.S. 330, 55 S. Ct. 758 (1935).

History[edit]

The railroad existed from only 1933-1942, but operated the same railroad line that has long served passengers traveling between St. Louis and Chicago with a stop in Alton. Currently the rails are owned by Union Pacific, and Amtrak trains run on those same tracks.

Supreme Court case[edit]

The Supreme Court case involved virtually the entire railroad industry, listing 134 Class I railroads in alphabetical order, starting with the Alton Railroad Company.^[1]

The lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of Railroad Retirement, which was a compulsory pension system for the railroad industry and a prototype for Social Security.

The 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional in May 1935, based in part on how the unconstitutional provisions were not severable from the rest of it. Two years later, after FDR's court packing scheme and "the switch in time that saved the Nine," the Court upheld Social Security in a 5-4 decision in Helvering v. Davis.

Congress, meanwhile, revised Railroad Retirement and reenacted it in a slightly different form, which remains good law today. A federal agency, the RRB, is similar to the Social Security Administration but headquartered in Chicago where it occupies a massive building filling an entire city block on the near north side.

References[edit]

1. ↑ https://casetext.com/case/alton-r-co-v-railroad-retirement-board