Hays T Watkins Jr

Hays T. Watkins Jr., a soft-spoken Kentuckian who made the CSX merger a classic success, is dead at the age of 96. Watkins died Friday July 22 2022 after complications from a fall, his son Tom Watkins has reported. In 1978 Watkins, chairman of the Chessie System, approached Seaboard Coast Line about a union, and he and SCL’s new CEO, Prime F. Osborn, negotiated the deal. The two shared the title of CEO, and half the company’s top officers were from the Seaboard and half from the Chessie. Even the board was split evenly, and the headquarters was set up in a neutral city, Richmond. Two years into the merger Osborn, 67, retired, and Watkins became CSX’s sole CEO. By the mid 1960s Watkins was C&O’s vice president-finance, and in 1971, following the Penn Central bankruptcy, he was chosen the railroad’s president and chief executive. He was selected in part because he had foreseen the pending bankruptcy of Penn Central and had buffered the C&O’s car-hire accounts with PC, reducing the Chessie’s loss. One of Watkins’ greatest achievements was the transformation of the railroads into a multi-modal company. He bought a gas company to hedge against rising fuel costs, and with it came a pipeline company and the nation’s largest barge line. Then he formed a trucking subsidiary and bought Sea-Land Service, the world’s largest container line, making CSX one of the world’s premier transport companies. Decades later most of Sea-Land and the barge line were sold. Watkins retired in 1991 after a 40-year career that spanned some of the industry’s most tumultuous years. Watkins was born in the Louisville suburb of Fern Creek, Ky., on Jan. 26, 1926. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green Business University (now Western Kentucky University) in 1947 and a master’s degree from Northwestern University in 1948, and served in the U.S. Army. He is survived by his wife of 72 years, Betty; son H. Thomas Watkins III; three grandchildren and a great grandchild.