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Trains Magazine 1967 May Consolidations, Inc 2 Photos
Trains Magazine 1967 May
May 1967Volume 27 Number 7
NEWS ------3
PROFESSIONAL ICONOCLAST -5
RAILROAD NEWS PHOTOS -8
STEAM NEWS PHOTOS - - 12
DIFFICULT TO BE DISPASSIONATE 18
CONSOLIDATIONS, INC. - 2 - 20
PHOTO SECTION- - - 25
STEAM PULLED 'EM FASTER - 32
WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?- 47
SO VERY NEW - - - - 48
Railway post office 50Running extra 54
Second section53Interchange56
COVER: Mainline refueling in Tucson, Ariz., expedites Espee's BSM hotshot. Donald Sims photo.
JUST ASK A SWITCHMAN
IF Charles Edward Bertrand doesn't watch his step, he's going to disabuse some of the most cherished notions railroading has about itself. Sacrosanct with the industry are the ideas that trains can't compete with trucks on short hauls, that anything less than a unit train or piggybacker must be classified en route, that the operating Brotherhoods are intractable on work-rules changes, and that you need plenty of cars between diesel and caboose to make money.
Bertrand is president of the 1277-mile Reading, a road more straitjacketed than most by such holy writ because its average freight haul is just 109.8 miles vs. a national average of 470 miles. In Camel-back days Reading was a blue-chip property in spite of its compactness, because of coal, notably anthracite originated on line. But as coal traffic declined, and passenger losses climbed despite public aid, the road has had to scratch for a living. In four recent years - 1961-1964-it could come up with no net at all. Through tight cost controls, not to mention the turning of his salesmen into distribution people rather than cigar dispensers, Bertrand has pulled his road back into the black.
What perplexed the man, though, was the fact that his trains couldn't match the same-day service with which truckers won traffic right in his own back yard (e.g., between Philadelphia and Reading, approximately 60 miles). The railroad required three days: one to pick up a car and place it in a terminal; one to road-haul it to the yard nearest point of delivery; and one more to spot it at the shipper's dock. In theory, of course, in the Philly-Reading example, a Geep with no other commitments could grab the car, highball it past intermediate yards, and place it on the consignee's siding in 2 hours. Again in theory, a reduced three-or four-man crew should be able to handle such a movement; and that saving, plus the elimination of yard work, should make profitable a train of as few as five cars of most commodities.
The theorizing should have dead-ended at that point. Bertrand's "Bee-Line" scheme implied crossing through the iron curtains which union contracts drop between road and yard work as well as between one seniority district and another. Perhaps the reason Bertrand had the temerity to approach the Brotherhoods (representing engineers, conductors, and trainmen) was that he himself went railroading minus a college degree in 1937 as an Alton switchman and didn't move into management ranks until after World War II. So he explained the potential of Bee-Line to the unions. There was give-and-take on both sides, and in December 1966 the first Bee-Line train
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