A RAILROAD REPORT TO AMERICA

[Music] museum [Music] the steam locomotive is almost passed from the american scene in favor of the diesel but behind the engine two out of three passenger cars and one out of three freight cars are today 25 years old or over this equipment is expensive to replace costs have gone up and some railroads insist that they make no money out of passenger service anymore last year the railroads as a group earned less than an average four percent one railroad president has asked how can you renew equipment on a railroad that earns less than four percent and you have to borrow the money at five and a half percent one great early american railroad builder james j hill once said a railroad is in partnership with the land upon which we live and walk it will prosper only when the land or its owners prosper the condition of equipment old and new has a great deal to do with whether a railroad prospers or does not the first part of the story of american railroads then is old equipment and loss of passenger service part of the trouble dates from the last war from pearl harbor on american railroads carried 90 percent of all military supplies and equipment 97 of the troops no bomb fell on any american train during the war not a foot of track was blown up but the railroads had stretched their resources to the limit and paid the price after the war in worn out and battered equipment and then came new competition the rails were no longer the only highway for american transportation the family motor car 54 millions of them the bus carrying 285 million passengers a year the airplane carrying 41 million passengers a year in the post-war years even the planes were beginning to move into the freight carrying field trucks began carrying freight long haul and even more important short convenient halls the barges traveling the inland waterways were getting more and more business and then there was something new on the american scene pipelines were carrying natural gas and oil from one part of the country to another texas was joined to new york a distance of 1300 miles by a natural gas pipeline known as the big inch this was such formidable competition that some railroads began laying their own pipelines along their own rights of way in the last 25 years the drop in railroad passenger travel and freight carriage between cities has been substantial nevertheless it is also true that the tonnage carried by the railroad since the war has improved steadily in fact they're carrying more freight today than all forms of transportation carried in 1939 although these forms of transportation have had a larger share of the post-war boom than have had the railroads part of the trouble is due to government regulations h.h vaughan is an executive of the pennsylvania railroad he expressed these views quite frankly mr vaughan and other railroad executives complain of being forced to run uneconomic services chief of which is the commuting business the business of carrying suburbanites to and from their place of work one out of every two trained passengers is a commuter yet the commuters account for less than 13 of the total passenger revenue on some passenger trains everything is done to pamper the passenger first class trains carry the conveniences of a hotel and passengers expect it if the railroads insist that they lose money on their first class service most railroad men are encouraging second-class travel which is much more economical to operate many of them think in terms of serving light pre-cooked meals at your seat airline fashion and there are some of them who would like to do away with the dining car entirely the dining cart is typical of the dining car service which is one of the stellar tractions of railroad travel it is a symbol of the dining car service created by the railroad industry for advertising purposes it is a dining car service which experienced travelers seek out to assure comfortable leisurely travel in the light of this it is strange that some railroads are trying to make a dining car another vanishing american dining car should not and cannot be a tool which will pay for itself the dining car cannot be done away with it is firmly entrenched in the american sea and deeply rooted in american railroad tradition the problems of the men who run the railroads and the men who work on them are many there is the question of terminals and stations and the accommodation and service to passengers there is the costly maintenance of right-of-way that area of land running on both sides of the tracks themselves today railroad costs are high and railroads pay their own way down to every last spike they're starting from the bottom at the road bed they're using welded rail today joining short lengths into solid sections a quarter of a mile long this cuts maintenance costs and makes for a smoother ride they are starting at the bottom inside the railroad station at the ticket counter in new york's pennsylvania station busiest in the country electronics and the largest closed circuit television installation gives speedier service to the customer who wants a reservation for a coat seat a pullman chair or sleeping car space on a busy holiday this counter makes 17 000 reservations and saves each customer six minutes of time the railroads want enough riders back to make trains profitable again they also believe that they will not get freight the profitable end of the business unless they have passengers first the railroads are fighting to get the passengers back and their tools are television electronic controls facsimile transmitters facsimile transceivers and automatic ticket printers the job which once took eight minutes now takes two minutes steam is now a curiosity on american rails the diesel has taken over it's a question of economy a saving to the railroads of at least a billion dollars a year but every old-time railroad man mourns the passing of steel and dislikes the diesel's blaring [Music] behind the powerful diesel with its multiple units the railroads are building a new train into the trains they're putting modern design new metals new materials new methods there is no one single modernization program in this country there are as many as there are major railroads 112. this is the pennsylvania railroad's experimental lightweight car pioneer iii and the new haven railroad self-powered cars which make it possible to split a train into sections for spur line service and general motors aero train built for one third of the cost of a standard train and this is the santa fe's high level el capitan [Music] for 120 years the floor of every car passenger or freight in the united states measured four feet and three inches exactly above the rails this was the height of the freight platform from which the first bale of cotton was unloaded in 1830 now at last the rule is broken this is the pennsylvania's new low-level tubular train the keystone [Music] and the chicago burlington and quincy zephyr this is the new haven's telgo train the talgo is hitting 103 miles an hour since the war the railroads have spent 12 billion dollars mostly on equipment in the next 10 years they will double it passenger christian of economics it is cheaper for a trucker to ship his trailer from chicago to new york by train than it is for him to drive it there the system began on the new haven railroad and it was nicknamed a piggyback today it is the railroad's fastest growing source of freight business the pennsylvania sends two truck trains a day from chicago to new york via pittsburgh on passenger train schedules that's me and my tractor coming off the flat car right now my name's mike devlin and i'm a piggyback trucker and these are 25 tunnels they're loading now and they're jacking them tight you know some yards i just dropped my trailer at the front door and the yard's own two-wheeler takes her away you see he's got a cab he can ride backwards and forwards and even sometimes sideways like a crab no matter how the cars lay on the switches he can load him you know you got to respect these railroad guys they got safety on the brain and how you see they cable and block up those trucks so you'd think they was on their way to mars instead of pittsburgh and after one guy gets through inspecting another guy inspects and when he's through still another guy checks him and only when everybody is satisfied does that baby start to roll now from pittsburgh to new york's about 400 miles i made a trip thousands of times myself well maybe hundreds and it says traffic jam to 400 miles as you ever want to crawl along in low gear because these babies are hard to push now on the other end there's a guy just like me you see i put him on and he takes them off and a single rig like mine can handle maybe 18 19 tonnes a day maybe more it depends on the length of the city run you know it's a smart angle for both the railroads and the truckers they save equipment save time and they make money and they keep the customers happy because now we can do a real door-to-door delivery simple as abc those doors though sometimes are hard to make reclaiming a strip of marshland along the ohio river the pennsylvania built the largest and most modern push button freight classification or marshalling yard that there is from one end to the other conway yard is four miles long it is a thousand yards wide it contains 165 miles of track what you're about to see in operation is the largest automatic freight yard in the united states a handful of men do the job many times their number did before this is electronics this is automation in railroads going around the engine when he comes back up off the hill go around the 200 track on bp2 the car inspector's going to get on ce2 right away i'll be on it as soon as i get that engine off i told the man back there to cut that engine off and get him right out of there okay ordered the 6 30 p.m order on ce2 that'll be good no help on guns no help on hoppers all right you need ce2 no power at all the yard handles freight trains very much the way the dealer handles a pack of cards the incoming trains are the old hands thrown into the center of the table the yard gathers them up shuffles them and deals them out fresh one of the men who look here at west conway before its arrival we get information of all the cars in the train what they carry and where they are bound for when the train arrives the scanner stops his check he and ali 2033 are gone bno 329 o16 a box cnn j 63 568 a flat 12 622 a box 11 303 are gone np 25 579 a box wecx 129 a tank i see 25 580. how should the cause of the incoming train be rearranged the machine answers the questions the machine gives the order one to the eastbound hump conductor another to the eastbound retarder operator and another copy for the general yardmaster we push the cars up over the hump where they are cut off sometimes they come down in single car cuts sometimes they come down in twos and threes the home conductor sends the first car to one of 54 tracks by pressing a button all the switches line up ahead of it electronic circuits decide how fast a freight car should go down into the hump electronic circuits apply the brakes but whenever he decides to the retarder operator can interfere and apply a little extra braking power himself before we had electronic retarders every car had a brakeman riding it down the hump deciding as he went how fast to let his car roll now instead of hundreds of brakemen for chronic equipment the new freight is ready this train does not of course carry all the cars of the old train to carry some of them the rest will follow shortly in other freight trains conway yard processes four to five cars a minute 2500 to 3 000 cars on each eight hour shift or the equivalent of 60 maximum length freight trains a day each one a mile and a quarter long the efficiency is the biggest fully automatic freight yard anywhere it may not be tomorrow more are on the drawing boards in operating economies alone conway yard will repay its 34 million dollar investment in under four years the savings to the country as a whole are even larger because of conway yard and of developments like it railroad men do look to the future with hope now there's one more point to make before to conclude our railroad story this is a pamphlet written by