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Trains Magazine 1965 August Cameras eye view of Chicago Union Station
Trains Magazine 1965 August
August 1965Volume 25 Number 10
NEWS - -- -5
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS12
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS -16
SHE KNOWS ALL ABOUT IT - 20
MOTIVE POWER SURVEY -22
A GENERATION PASSES -26
PHOTO SECTION: C.U.S. -28
DEFINE THESE DIESELS -47
2ND LOOK AT COMMUTERS-2 48
CHESSIE REMEMBERS- - 56
Railway post office 58Running extra 63
Second section62Interchange65
COVER: Milwaukee Road in the sunlight in Chicago Union Station-a portrait by John Gruber.
N&W: FROM COMFORT TO CHALLENGE
A HINT of the fine old small, solvent, steam-powered, do-it-yourself pre-Saunders Norfolk & Western Railway crept into the prepared text of Senior Vice-President Harry C. Wyatt when he took the rostrum in the Hotel Roanoke's ballroom to address an overflow crowd of 785 at the road's annual meeting last May.
"Until midnight October 15, 1964," said old-hand Wyatt (an N&W man since 1916), "we were a relatively small, compact property. The size was such that it was possible to have an intimate knowledge of every supervisor and a vast majority of the employees. It may well have been described as a comfortable position. At the stroke of midnight we grew up and the situation changed completely."
What happened at midnight was that N&W doubled its gross, enlarged its system from 2722 route-miles in 7 states to 7496 route-miles in 14 states and Canada, jumped its number of operating divisions and terminals from 8 to 22, boosted its employment from 13,755 to 32,064, became the second largest freight-car owner in the U. S., and suddenly began dispatching 603 instead of 244 freight trains a day. All this came about, of course, by virtue of an I.C.C. decision approving N&W's bid to merge with Nickel Plate through a stock exchange; lease and eventually buy Wabash; lease Pittsburgh & West Virginia (paying 2 million dollars outright for its cars and diesels); purchase Akron, Canton & Youngstown for 6.7 million dollars; and pay 27 million to Pennsy for its Sandusky Line affording a physical link between N&W at Columbus, 0., and its new possessions.
"Needless to say," said Wyatt in a bid for the railroad understatement of the year, "this was an exciting and challenging experience."
Wyatt was on tenable if not unassailable ground when he told stockholders that the combination end-to-end and parallel merger was of a magnitude never before experienced by the rail industry, for on that fateful midnight N&W's character as well as its complexion was forever altered. Whereas coal and coke accounted for 70 per cent of the old N&W's gross, general merchandise now provides 60 per cent of the new system's freight revenues. And whereas the old line's remotest outpost was once simply an overnight Pullman journey away, the run from Roanoke to the western end of the former Wabash at Omaha would
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