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Trains Magazine 1961 October German diesel-hydraulics D&RGW SP
Trains Magazine 1961
October 1961Volume 21 Number 11 (Table of contents September 1961)
NEWS---3
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS6
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS8
HIS 25,000TH PHOTO16
WHAT WENT WRONG?18
ROUND THE WORLD - 928
BEEBE PONDERS PULLMANS36
MOGULS AND MIKES-38
THE SEMMERING STORY43
Railway post office 50Second section53
Running extra54Interchange58
MANAGEMENT'S ACHILLES' HEEL
HEAVEN knows, it has been mandatory that the railroads economize (or "streamline," to use the press-release terminology) their operations in our time lest they wind up insolvent before the Government can make those legislative reforms necessary to keep them privately owned. So-called miracle managements, imported either by invitation or by proxy contests, have hauled one carrier after another back from the brink of disaster; the list includes such divergent properties as Central, Katy, North Western. Many others have undergone agonizing internal reappraisals in an effort to turn up executives with the know-how and fortitude to clean out expensive orthodoxy. These have not been nice jobs. Nobody enjoys furloughing men with 20 years' seniority or more - or telling a big shipper that he can't get cars spotted after 4 p.m. because the second-shift yard engine was cut off to save money. Nobody, we suppose, really likes to collect garbage, either, but somebody has to. We've met a few of these presidents and haven't as yet encountered a genuine ogre among them. They smile, have families, fish or golf, and otherwise behave like respectable, understandable human beings.
Still, we wonder if they don't sometimes unnecessarily complicate life for themselves by pinching pennies where the saving isn't worth the cost or a more imaginative approach is available. Show us a miracle management, for instance, and we'll show you a spartanized or curtailed employee magazine; poor if any public relations; drab diesels; and/or a frustrated passenger traffic manager. These have become such familiar earmarks of new management direction that one suspects the International Correspondence Schools may soon include them in a direct-mail course on how to avert railroad bankruptcies. It is true that it costs measurable dollars and cents to print magazines and press releases, to run passenger trains, to paint diesels. No one could intelligently argue the point. But that's not the total or sufficient answer.
Example: If employee house organs do indeed have a useful function (and it is the consensus of industrial labor relations experts that they do), then a railroad requires such a medium of internal communication more than most other industries simply because the railroad is such a far-flung organization with a payroll scattered across several states and concentrated only in shop or HQ locations. Again, the chief enemy of morale is unemployment. Sever this house-organ link with management just as jobs are being cut off, multiple tracks are being reduced to single iron, trains are being consolidated, and agencies are being closed, and the affected men often and understandably subscribe to the mismanagement charges levied in their union papers.
Example: In unit-cost, a $180,000 diesel unit is one of the industry's costliest tools. In terms of public visibility, a freight diesel has a daily exposure of almost 143 miles vs. 451/2 for a freight car. Finally, a diesel is the essence of the modernism we've all been bragging that the rails implement whenever earnings permit. So on the excuse of savings, once-splashy units come out of their overhauls in solid, uninspired hues that vie with one another for mediocrity and lack of interest. A few roads, most recently Canadian National, have proved that it costs not a penny more to paint a locomotive attractively. Yet the obvious is apparently so obscure that some roads don't know what car owners found out years ago: black shows dirt faster than almost anything else.
Example: How can a management publicly claim, "We want passengers," and simultaneously refuse to honor a Rail Travel Credit card? Or complain about dining-car deficits, yet openly discourage use of the diner between established meal hours as either a snack bar or a cocktail lounge? Or on what grounds can weekend excursions from metropolitan areas be soft-pedaled when suitable commuter equipment, power, and crews lie idle?
Regardless of management's motives, such maneuvers leave people disgruntled and employees embittered at a time when the industry desperately (and that's the word) needs external good will and internal morale. Just ask around. Ask us.
Look who's courtin' whom!
Unto itself, little 862-mile Chicago & Eastern Illinois is no prize so far as fiscal stability goes. It's beset with an inherently short freight haul, too much competition, high terminal costs. Revenues have remained fairly constant over the past 10 years but costs have not; in 1951 C&EI posted an operating ratio of 76.8 per cent, netted 2.19 million dollars; last year the operating ratio stood at 81.2 per cent and the road suffered a 1-million-dollar loss. A concerned management has tried to marry off the wallflower but without success. A Barriger-backed proposal to merge C&EI and Monon never got off the ground. And after Mopac-C&EI negotiations broke off last year, the small line knocked desperately on the door of C&O-NYC-B&O - but got no answer.
But now look. Missouri Pacific has purchased 1 million dollars' worth (14 per cent) of C&EI's stock and bonds in what is billed as a protective measure
Continued on page 11
FENCE STRADDLING
THOUGH we firmly believe in the value of publishing overseas material in this magazine (and think a majority of you concur), there's no denying there are dissenters. But we think in this issue all of us can have our cake and eat it too. On page 43 the internationalists can ride Austria's famous Semmering Incline-and the See-America-Firsters can forget the scenery and concentrate on the locomotives, which bear Rio Grande and Southern Pacific colors. And on page 28 there's an opportunity for all those intrigued by the Orient to climb aboard Japanese National Railways. For those who couldn't care less, why take a seat anyway -
it's the seatbox of an Ameri can-
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