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Trains Magazine 1965 September Doomed to obsurity Steam out of Scranton
Trains Magazine 1965 September
September 1965Volume 25 Number 11
NEWS - - -3
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS -10
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS12
IF THEY'D ONLY KNOWN -18
CGW ECCENTRICS - -20
NAME THE NATION! - -25
DOOMED TO OBSCURITY -26
STEAM OUT OF SCRANTON - 28
TIME SUSPENDED48
Railway post office 50Running extra 54
Second section52Interchange57
COVER: DL&W 4-6-4 1151 (renumbered) on display at New York World's Fair. By LeMassena.
NEEDED FROM CANADA: AN ANSWER
ONCE upon a time railroad passenger equipment, in common with streetcars and trolley buses, went to Mexico as the trains it had formed vanished from the Guide. We recall car expert Arthur D. Dubin (of SOME CLASSIC TRAINS fame) remarking happily that the National Railways of Mexico had intact and in one train virtually the entire consist of the fabled 1938 20th Century Limited - a landmark creation among equipment enthusiasts.
But no more. Today the buyer of secondhand U. S. rolling stock is Canadian National, which has purchased and refurbished Reading's Crusader, Milwaukee Road's Skytop sleepers and full-length Super Domes, and Pullmans from (to name but two) NYC and Frisco. The reason, of course, is CN's about-face on the passenger business. Ten years ago privately owned and operated Canadian Pacific was the bullish passenger operator, leading the way with domes and RDC's, and publicly owned CN fumed that no one in North America made any money on passengers, that the road would be better off financially if it gave every prospective diner 50 cents and told him to eat elsewhere, and that frills such as domes were not the answer. Then both systems reversed themselves. CP came to the conclusion that there had not been and was not going to be any payoff on its huge 42-million-dollar, 173-car investment in plush and domes and stainless steel, that there was an inexorable shift of passengers to automobiles and jets, that three-fourths of the road's annual 24-million-dollar passenger deficit could be attributed to transcon services.
CN quit being bearish, hired a career civil servant named Pierre Delagrave to run its passenger business, and began experimenting with something called Red, White & Blue fares. The reduced rates for off-peak travel put enough riders back on rails to intrigue Montreal headquarters. What had been an experiment in the Maritimes became systemwide policy as CN went unblushingly about serving coffee on the house, arranging bingo games in its lounge cars, revamping its ticket forms, rebuilding existing cars and buying more from the U. S., and even adding train-miles to accommodate the crowds that returned to union station.
No one is more cheered by these external trappings of success than TRAINS. We admire Mr. Delagraves' agreement with his boss's conviction that "a passenger is the most precious and perishable commodity the railways carry"* and applaud his knack for slicing through the red tape of ticketing, fares, and schedules
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