All this time the receivers had been busy on a plan, which they presented in January, 1894. By leaving out of consideration some $5,000,000 of car trusts they arrived at the figure of $12,500,000 for the floating debt. This they proposed to cover by the issue of $6,000,000 in 6 per cent ten-year trust certificates, based on the stock of coal on hand, and by $10,000,000 in 5 per cent collateral trust bonds then in the treasury of the Reading Company. They hoped that a balance of $2,500,000 would then remain available for working capital or other purposes. General mortgage coupons were to be funded for five years, although the receivers planned to have a syndicate formed to purchase at par for cash the coupons as they matured, giving to the bondholders in each case the choice between receiving money or coupon trust certificates for the interest due. There was to be no formal reorganization, no cuts in charges, nothing but a provision for the floating debt and for a temporary funding of interest payments; and this was the more feasible because the Lehigh Valley lease had been by this time abrogated and the New England extensions definitely abandoned.[268] It will be remembered that to the plan of May, 1893, it had been objected that the provisions contrived to bring in the floating debt ahead of previously existing liens, and were a premium on a kind of financial juggling too common among American railroads. This plan, therefore, avoided a new issue of bonds, and used only what the treasury already possessed. The coal notes were obviously unobjectionable, and served at the same time to utilize the unsalable stock which the management had earlier accumulated. If their value should prove small the loss would fall on the holders of the floating debt and not on the owners of the general mortgage bonds; while the return to the company was assured by arrangement with Drexel & Co., Brown Bros. & Co., and J. Lowber Welsh on the one hand, and the Finance Company of Pennsylvania on the other. On the whole this plan was gentle even to tenderness with the creditors of the road, and its failure revealed clearly the bondholders’ state of mind. The holders of the general mortgage refused to fund their coupons for five years, they refused to fund them for two years, and they insisted that foreclosure proceedings should be instituted unless they should receive immediate payment of their interest. “In view of this,” the receivers were forced to remark, “it would be idle for [us] to continue the efforts to readjust the affairs of the company....”[269] The trouble with the receivers’ scheme was not that it demanded large concessions,—much larger had been asked and granted in 1887,—but that the general mortgage bondholders felt that on the one hand the road was very nearly earning fixed charges, so that in the contingency of a foreclosure sale their interests would be reasonably safe; and on the other that a