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Trains Magazine 1966 February Steinheimer and the SP
Trains Magazine 1966 February Steinheimer and the SP
62 Pages
NEWS ------3
PROFESSIONAL ICONOCLAST5
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS -8
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS - - 12
NH IN HAPPIER DAYS - -18
OUR GM SCRAPBOOK - 8 - 20
TRACTION CLASSICS- - 26
PHOTO SECTION- - - 28
EL PASO & SOUTHWESTERN - 44
JET SEARCH FOR STEAM - 250
HOW TO USE US FANS
I "CAREFUL HANDLING" is the watchword of the industry's longterm efforts to reduce its lading damage claims. It might also be applicable to the relationship which exists between railroading and its layman enthusiasts. We raise the subject because last year a couple of diverse parties put out feelers praising and/or appraising us. First, Charles Luna of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen publicly lauded rail-fans and belabored management and unions for ignoring the fans' good will. Second, Editor James G. Lyne of the trade-press Railway Age wondered how such good will could be made "effective." Both gentlemen are intrigued by us and are angling to enlist our influence. We assume that Luna wants fans to help him upgrade the image of the working railroader, which took its licks during the work-rules dispute from management's featherbedding attack. We know that Lyne would have us aid the "cause" (i.e., the rails' rebirth as a growth industry).
We are, of course, flattered at this attention. More important, it offers us an excuse to re-examine free-lance railroad enthusiasm. What may estrange railroads, railroaders, and railfans is their dissimilar basic aims. As our iconoclast columnist reminded us last month [page 5, January 1966 TRAINS], a railroad is in business to earn a profit. Mr. Luna's membership seeks safe, remunerative employment. But fans as a rule are not in the avocation for the money. Their concern is voluntary, not subject to arbitrary direction. That very freedom is the essence of the fans' worth. The motivation is enthusiasm, not economics.
Fans are also unique. Of all basic industry and transportation, only railroading can claim the interest of a sizable, measurable number of enthusiasts whose support has underwritten two national organizations, two newsstand-circulated monthly magazines, and an expanding hard-cover book market.
Lyne reasonably asks for "some objectives on which virtually all fans could agree." We think this: Fans agree that the heritage of railroading, however irrelevant it may be to 1966's operating ratio, is satisfying to explore and worthwhile to preserve; fans also unite in the belief that railroading today is fascinating to watch, hear, and comprehend and that its value as a mass-transportation instrument must be passed along to the next generation.
Yet these common beliefs (we prefer that term to the activist word "objectives") do not imply a robot unity - a button that can be pushed to ensure X number of letters on a Congressman's desk in support of a given prorail legislative item. They imply individuals. And
individually the fans are at present far more productive to the "cause" than the industry suspects. For the Saturday afternoon fan, complete with camera and engineer's denim cap at trackside, is behind a desk or pointing to a blackboard or leaning over a dentist's chair or standing on a loading dock on Monday morning. He does not shrug off his concern for railroading come Monday morning and hang it in the closet like an extra suit. Rather, he remains as partial to the industry as a trainmaster or an investor with a portfolio of rail stocks. The difference, of course, is that the fan becomes concerned with railroading of his own volition, and that while he is interested in the cause, he is under no compunction to blindly support it.
And why should he? How many railroads actively supported Southern's long, lonely, expensive, yet ultimately successful fight to effect Big John grain rates? Perhaps more pertinent, who should the fan support in the roads' intramural quarrel over per-diem rates - the East or the West? Chicagoland roads want no part of the Administration's Federal aid program for commuters; Eastern carriers say they must have it to survive in the business. Which way the fan?
We say that railroading should neither take fans for granted nor underestimate their affluence. Rather, the industry should take these unpaid loyalists into its confidence, seeking an accommodation between the different but not necessarily incompatible aims of both, respecting the fact that fans know a damn sight more about the game than the faceless man in the street to which run-of-mine public-relations efforts are directed.
We're not starting from scratch, after all. An expanding 59-chapter NRHS, a 25th birthday for TRAINS, locomotive and car donations to fan-actuated museums, the increasing willingness of p.r. people to differentiate between sincere research pleas and the boorish request for 8 x 10 glossies of every engine class on the roster since 1900 - all these speak well for the future.
Another point: As an old, static industry, railroading finds difficult the recruiting of college brains required to automate and computerize itself back into a growth industry. The exception to the rule is the fan-on-campus. Unlike his fellow students, he is quite aware of railroading's enormous if unrealized potential - and if advancement and salary opportunities are attractive, he'll sign with Central instead of Celanese, SP over Stewart Warner, or TP&W rather than Texas Instruments. What's more, he'll produce a far better fresh generation of management than will his classmates in other industry because his brainpower
INSTEAD OF THE BOMB
How the mind wanders . . . mention in a caption on page 44 of the first atomic explosion on July 16, 1945, reminds me that on that date I was occupying a tent at an Army Air Corps basic training field in Wichita Falls, Tex. Frequent visitors to the base warehouses were spit-and-polish Katy 2-6-0's - dapper white-tired little machines that took at least one G.I.'s mind off rifle practice, K.P., and the obstacle course. Well, the bomb has proliferated since that summer, to put it tactfully. The Moguls are long gone, of course; and but for John Barriger, the MKT might have followed them to oblivion. It's too much to ask, but I'd like to have had the choice between saving (L the 2-6-0's and burying the atom.
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