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Trains Magazine 1967 June GG1 curtain call Consolidations, Inc 3
Trains Magazine 1967 June
June 1967Volume 27 Number 7
NEWS --3
PROFESSIONAL ICONOCLAST -5
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS8
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS -12
GG1 CURTAIN CALL - -18
OUR EARLY, EARLY MOVIE23
PHOTO SECTION - -29
CONSOLIDATIONS, INC. - 338
OSCAR GREENE, RAIL PREXY - 46
Railway post office 50Second section 52
Of books and trains 51Running extra 53
Interchange 57
COVER: Pennsy GG1's shrug off an evening rain in Enola Yard. Portrait by Richard Steinheimer.
YOU CAN'T BUY A TRAIN
ONCE AGAIN U. S. railroads didn't order any freight trains last year. Instead they signed up for about 1500 diesel units and 75,000 cars. It's not that the rails wouldn't let the suppliers' salesmen in the door. There are no ads for freight trains in the trade press. The rolling stock manufacturers make only locomotives and cars. Which leaves train construction in the lap of the yardmasters. It's up to them to assemble enough cars bound from A to B to gross $20 or more a mile, to tie on enough diesels to top the ruling grade en route and/or average X mph, and to get all these out of town. Presto - a train.
Trouble is, the freight train is ultra-perishable despite its drama, weight, and earning power. One terminal away, at the most two or three, there sits another yardmaster who is employed to disassemble the train and reduce it to diesel units and cars. No less an authority than President Herman Pevler of Norfolk & Western testified to the brief life span of most freight trains when he acclaimed through (with no intermediate classification) New York-Chicago schedules as a goal of mergers yet in the blueprint stage.
There are exceptions to the rule. These shuttle between points up to 1000 miles apart, relaying usually coal but also ore, wheat, automobiles, truck trailers, containers, et at.; and - depending on the credibility of their press releases - they remain coupled, employ captive power, and bypass yards. These trains are so unlike other trains that they're called unit trains (i.e., diesels and cars that stay together).
Regardless of their yellow stripes, wholesale rates, better-than-average turnaround times, and publicity, these unit trains are really born of common-law marriages. Even the brand-new ones utilize conventional power, couplers, braking, and center sills, the proof being, of course, that all of their locomotive units and cars are separable and thus are able to mingle and mate freely with any of the country's 1.8 million freight cars and 27,700 diesels. Such movements, though - however belated (Pennsy, a pioneer, didn't begin unit-train coal haulage until 1963) or imperfect - have conclusively proved that trainload markets exist, that shippers and receivers will adapt their facilities to take advantage of trainload rates, and that the I.C.C. will endorse such rates.
All pictures are of the actual item. If this is a railroad item, this material is obsolete and no longer in use by the railroad. Please email with questions. Publishers of Train Shed Cyclopedias and Stephans Railroad Directories. Large inventory of railroad books and magazines. Thank you for buying from us.
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