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Trains Magazine 1967 January A toast to the Fs Train time in tunnel 37 Photos
Trains Magazine 1967
January 1967Volume 27 Number 3
NEWS - --3
PROFESSIONAL ICONOCLAST5
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS8
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS -12
A TOAST TO THOSE F'S -18
MEET MISS MARIE - -20
GARDEN OF RAILROADING24
PHOTO SECTION - -29
WHAT WENT WRONG -36
TRAIN TIME IN TUNNEL 3746
Railway post office 50Of books & trains 53
Second section52Running extra56
Interchange 57
COVER: The camera of Richard Steinheimer peers intently inside a P.F.E. reefer journal box.
PROFESSIONALLY, privately, corporately, and personally, we like passenger trains - and we have the R.T.C. bills, route-mile records, expense accounts, insurance loans, ticket stubs, and experiences to prove the point. Indeed, we hold the passenger train second only in our regard to that function which makes it possible, railroading itself.
What perplexes us, therefore, is how to acknowledge the mail from those readers who think that the magazine somehow has sold out on the passenger train and is complacently watching the varnish disappear without raising an editorial finger in its defense. The letters are fairly uniform in their content. We are urged to mount a "Save the CZ" campaign to rescue the domeliner from Western Pacific's train-off petition; to damn Southern Pacific for the effrontery of its withdrawal from the passenger trade; to render unmitigated praise unto Canadian National for its demonstrable ability to woo people back aboard trains; to ban Prof. George Hilton from our columns because he had the gall to testify in favor of the Lark's demise; and to publish a variety of formulas for salvaging what's left in the Official Guide, from Take-Your-Car-With-You concepts to blunt demands for Federal subsidies.
Our rejoinder is essentially this: what about net? For if there is no profit incentive in carrying people on trains, then rail passenger carriage has ceased to be a business and we question the morality of seeking to further impose its deficits upon the industry. In 1965 U. S. passenger trains lost more than 420.8 million dollars - more money, that is, than a railroad as big as B&O grosses. Expressed another way, the rails spent almost $1.40% in expenses for each $1 of passenger service sales. This is the loss as computed under the famous I.C.C. formula - the index so often taken to task by Prof. Stanley Berge of Northwestern University on grounds that it includes shared costs for such facilities as signals and bridges and track which would be needed for freight even if all passenger service vanished. The formula, in turn, has been defended variously by an independent research foundation, by another professor in a book, and by this magazine in an April 1959 issue-length examination of the passenger dilemma. Regardless, passenger trains lose money on a solely-related-expenses formula which, in 1965, charged varnish with a bit more than $1.04 in costs for each $1 of sales.
So, like it or not (and we, in common with our correspondents, do not), we are obliged to start with the premise that passenger trains lose money and therefore are eligible for diagnosis. At this juncture our critics chorus that passenger trains are in the red because the rails have driven people away with bad service: information phones that are never answered, surly crews, aging equipment, late arrivals, slow schedules, dirty depots, noncompetitive fares, lack of advertising, et al. And of course they're right. We can't take seriously a Powhatan Arrow that departs Norfolk at 5:30 a.m. and doesn't get a diner until 10:35; or a
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