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Trains Magazine 1965 April Rio Grande Government ownership of the rails
Trains Magazine 1965 April
April 1965Volume 25 Number 6
NEWS - -3
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS10
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS -14
HOSPITAL EXTRA WEST -18
RIO GRANDE REVISITED -20
PHOTO SECTION - -31
WHAT IS A UNION STATION? 42
MILKING TIME -48
Railway post office 50Running extra 55
Second section54Interchange58
COVER: F7's move eastbound D&RGW freight through Royal Gorge. Richard Steinheimer.
MAKING IT OFFICIAL
BACK in 1919 when the Government was still operating the railroads as a result of their seizure in World War I, union counsel Glenn E. Plumb had a vision. Why not, said he, have Washington buy the railroads from their owners but turn their operation over to a management corporation. Profits (and they were substantial in view of Plumb's estimated 70 per cent operating ratio) would be divided up between the employees and the Government. Once the net return to Government exceeded 5 per cent of gross revenues, the I.C.C. could step in and lower rates to compensate. The Plumb Plan, the slightest twist on the pleasant but illusive dream of the socialist, died in 1920. Thereafter the Brotherhoods supported, at least on paper, private ownership and operation of the rails.
In our time the union chiefs' temper has been shortened by technology and, ironically, by Government. Obliged to compete with transport agencies operating over publicly sponsored and nontaxed rights of way, railroading has lost most of its passengers and has barely been able to hold its own on tonnage (e.g., ton-miles hit a postwar high in 1964, yet showed less than a 2 per cent increase over 1947 despite the fact that industrial production has doubled in the interim). The railroads were unable to compensate for inflation with traffic growth, discovered that rate hikes were suicidal, and thus had no option but to force feed themselves on technology. As diesels and C.T.C. and automatic tie tampers and push-button yards and I.B.M. cards took hold, employment shrank. Whereas the rails had had fewer than a million employees on their payrolls in only two of the depression years (1932 and 1938), seven-digit employment vanished in 1957. Last year only 665,000 remained on the payroll.
Union reaction was to fatten pay envelopes (average annual earnings went from $3069 in 1946 to $7100 last year) and simultaneously freeze employment by artificial means (e.g., retention of firemen on diesels, operation of empty passenger trains, payment of a differential for use of train-radio). Nobody won but the rails' competition. The industry cut its employment in half but wound up with the same payroll in dollars because of wage boosts. And in spite of all, the empty train left Union Station for the last time, and the diesel fireman vacated the left-hand side of the cab.
The essential flaw in union strategy throughout all those bitter, dreary, strike-threatened years was a patent refusal to acknowledge the inevitable. Labor consistently, stubbornly declared that
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