I believe the Southern Railroad and L&N also played the "stop the train where it's at when the court orders a shutdown" stunt. The Southern would also get an OK from a state commerce commission to stop service on one line within that state. In the next state, the train would operate from one middle of nowhere place near the state line to another no place. Since no one wanted to ride from nowhere to nowhere, they would have an excuse to kill the train in the neighboring state.
Well, there's a difference between that and the stunts described above. It is one thing to get oddly truncated services (such as the Pelican stopping at Bristol, for an off-the-cuff example) and entirely another to cut service in the middle of a travel cycle and/or with passengers onboard, discontinuation notices or not. Also, I'd argue that the partial operations you describe are a side-effect of messy policy and stupid states (i.e. it would have made more sense if a state, noting that service X was a through service, gave permission to cut the service as soon as permission was given by the neighboring state to cut things back...i.e. Florida would give someone permission to cut train X back to Jacksonville, and permission to cut it back the rest of the way once Georgia agreed to allow a cutback to Savannah) while mid-run cuts are ridiculous (at the
very least, I'd argue for requiring the railroad to offer return passage to their starting point on that train free of charge...hey, the cars have to get back somehow!).
