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Trains Magazine 1959 January D&H ore hauler Traction in the tropics UP eccentric
Trains Magazine 1959 January
January 1959Volume 19 Number 3
NEWS - -5
NEWS PHOTOS -8
NO. 1 ON THE BELL14
400 ON STILTS -16
UNEXPECTED ENGINES20
FAR EAST GETS DOMES25
HERSHEY CUBAN28
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER40
NIGHT EXPRESS50
Railway post office 52Second section 56
Stop, look & listen 54Running extra57
Of books and trains 54Interchange57
COVER: D&H scene, Jim Shaughnessy; 4-8-4, courtesy UP; Hershey Cuban, W. D. Middleton.
QUIT ROCKING THE BOAT!
IF we assay the evidence correctly, organized railroad labor is on the hot seat and is blowing up a mighty smokescreen to take public attention off its dilemma.
Unlike the unions representing automobile and steel workers, railroad labor is wedded, for better or for worse, to a troubled, regimented, nongrowth industry. Yet the Brotherhoods can scarcely admit that railroad financial poverty exists lest it prejudice their case at the bargaining table - and lest part of the cause for that poverty be pinned on labor itself. The pattern was on display during the Smathers hearings in the spring of 1958. Despite the fact that testimony was being taken on the "deteriorating" railroad situation, labor contended that the industry was in excellent financial shape and that the competitive ineffectiveness of the roads could be blamed on stand-pat management.
This practice of making ogres of management is necessary, of course, lest too many discover that the status quo element in railroading is not the men who sign the checks but those who run the trains. Years ago the Brotherhoods made it patently clear that they had no intention of modernizing their contractual relations to keep pace with such tools as C.T.C. and diesels. The damning evidence is that no change has been made in basic-day mileage (100 miles for enginemen, 150 miles for trainmen) since 1919; that labor recognizes no essential difference between the fireman's role on steam and on diesel power; and that the telegraphers are answering the station dualization program with a demand to arbitrarily freeze employment at existing levels.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the Brotherhood approach isn't working. Railroad employment averaged 1,663,896 during 1926-1930, slid to little more than a million in the depression, picked up to 1.4 million at the height of the war, and has fallen since. In 1957 employment went below a million for the first time since recession times in 1938, and last year it hit the lowest point since the year 1900. A unionist might well counter that if management had enjoyed free rein there would have been even fewer jobs sooner. Which is true. But those jobs would be secured today by a healthy, far more competitive industry.
This, in turn, lays open the implication that industry solvency is not considered inseparable with union existence, that the Brotherhoods feel that Government ownership would sustain present contracts in the event private operation could not. This conclusion, if it exists in union thinking, is a dangerous risk. There is abundant evidence from abroad that many a state- operated railway in Europe would never tolerate such things as two men on a diesel or electric locomotive, and the touchy labor relations and back-to-the-wall cost-cutting of British Railways since nationalization hardly paint a picture of a
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