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Trains Magazine 1961 July Nevada Northern
Trains Magazine 1961
July 1961Volume 21 Number 9
NEWS -3
NEWS PHOTOS --8
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS?12
DOTS AND DASHES -18
THE PIONEER LIMITED?20
NEVADA NORTHERN -32
PHOTO SECTION36
WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?45
ROUND THE WORLD - 646
Railway post office 52Of books & trains 54
Second section54Running extra55
Interchange 58
THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY OUT
I SYMPTOMATIC of what's wrong with railroading is this: Whereas the directors of the Association of American Railroads recently and unanimously approved a Magna Carta for Transportation, they did not authorize the A.A.R. to spend a single penny to implement the program in newspaper, magazine, outdoor, radio, TV, or any other form of commercial advertising. So much for the industry's faltering faith in its only pancea: human persuasion. For what ails railroading is not technological but political. Elsewhere frequently it's different. Britain urgently needs automatic couplers and continuous braking on its freight equipment. Australia requires a common gauge. Japan is running out of track capacity between major cities. But our problem is not so tangible. We can move, say, 16,000 net tons of coal between diesel and caboose without pulling a drawbar or running away downgrade, but we can't charge a trainload rate because the higher carload tariff holds an umbrella over some parallel barge line. We can load 161 commuters into an air-conditioned bi-level car and propel it along at a mile a minute, but we can't equate our fares with those of the competition because the railroad is taxed and the expressway is not. We have a container which can be interchangeably carried by flat car, truck, or ship, yet the Government frowns on rail ownership of road and water carriers which would realize the benefits of a total transportation system.
The tangibles we got; the intangibles we ain't got. It's that simple.
Currently, the railroads are merger minded, and we would guess out loud that considerably more p.r. talent and legal fees are being expended with management blessing upon who-gets-whom than on the aforementioned Magna Carta. Once more, too, we find ourselves preoccupied with tangibles. If two competing roads parallel each other from A to B with 200 miles of railroad apiece, it's usually obvious that there is one railroad too many and that merger could save X number of dollars by abandonment of duplicate facilities. Those are very tangible, predictable dollars, as hard and as genuine as the candy jawbreakers we used to buy as kids. But mergers do not of themselves eliminate the day of reckoning; they postpone it.
Says Chairman Ben W. Heineman of the Chicago & North Western: "Today there is a magic word in railroad circles - a word that many people think will solve the ills of the railroad business. . . . This word is, of course, merger. It wasn't so long ago we had another magic word
- and that word was dieselization." Precisely. The savings of F7's over 2-8-2's were real in 1950 just as those of mergers are in 1961, yet they're largely eroded in the rot of the political status quo.
It's time, therefore, for the rails, in Heineman's words, "to exercise their political franchise as vigorously as possible and in every legitimate way that they know." The railroads require advertising push, roving truth teams, effective lobbyists, capable speechmakers - every and any legitimate persuasive aid toward restoring the industry to that dominant influence in U. S. transportation to which it is entitled by virtue of efficiency. But we're not going to convince anyone of railroad salvation until railroad management itself is convinced there is no other way out of the gathering storm.
Central is still the gadfly
They called the late Robert R. Young a gadfly. A gadfly is a horsefly that bites cattle. And it was an apt word for the little Texan who mercilessly needled the industry and Wall Street until he had made good his ambition to control New York Central. Today Central continues the gadfly tradition as it strives desperately to deal itself in on an Eastern merger. The No. 2 road in the nation in size but not financial strength has been working, so far without success, to create a three-way NYC-C&O-B&O combine. Chessie control of B&O, minus NYC, would be what Central calls "nothing but a piecemeal approach" and one which would do "irreparable damage" in the East. Now Central has come up with an alternative: inclusion in the pending N&W-NKP-Wabash merger. Among the benefits: Central could "save" N&W the 27-million-dollar cost of acquiring Pennsy's 105-mile Columbus-Sandusky (0.) branch in order to bridge the gap between N&W and NKP rails. Regardless of outcome, Central has asked the I.C.C. to consider all pending Eastern merger proposals in one hearing because they're so interrelated; the Justice Department has seconded the motion.
Said Pennsy Chairman Jim Symes with obvious irritation: "They seem to think the Pennsylvania is trying to build a railroad empire so big it will be difficult for them to compete." That, as it develops, is exactly what Central thinks.
The passenger picture
Does the Broadway Limited make any money? A stockholder asked the question at Penny's annual meeting and was told by Chairman Jim Symes that Nos. 28 and 29 gross 5 million dollars a year. They would have to take in 71/2 million to
SAYS WHO?
WE read the other day that a British aviation pioneer and businessman, Sir Percy Hunting, had predicted penny-a-ton-mile air freight rates by 1970 as well as carriage of payloads of 200,000 pounds on planes. We would not question the technicalities. Judging by Russian rocketry, man is capable of hoisting any weight to any altitude. But the economics of the tariff proposed by Sir Hunting is something else again. Is this cent-a-mile rate based on the raw out-of-pocket costs of flying this super airliner - or does it include developmental costs of the plane as well as airport and traffic control charges? We'll wager this is "cheap transportation" equal to the farce of the same name on our waterways.
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