Railroads: Buying Off the Commuters

Why any hapless commuter would want to bump to work on the wheezing New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad defies reason. Dusty seats, dirty floors, sooty windows, one toilet, no towels, no drinking water—that is what he gets. But 200 oldtime commuters (average age: 55) who prefer such rigors to taking buses or their own cars ride the 36-mile commuter run from New Jersey's bedroom suburbs to North Bergen, where buses hook up with Manhattan. Last year the line collected $47,289 in revenues from passengers—and lost $200,000 on them. Former owners did everything to shoo off the commuters, even to removing newer cars and replacing them with 50-year-old cars —but all to no avail. Last month New York Real Estate Man Irving Maidman, 66, became chairman after having bought control of the line for $1,500,000. He promptly came up with some new ideas to drive away passengers.

Like most railroaders, Maidman wants to concentrate on freight, but he picked a startling way to get rid of commuters: he offered to buy them out. If they would agree to a cutback in service from three round trips daily to two one-way trips at peak hours, he would put on a comfortable, air-conditioned streamliner. More important, if the 200 commuters agreed unanimously to his scrapping all commuter services, he would pay them $1,000 each. How to identify all those eligible to collect? Says Maidman: "The conductors know all the commuters on the line." At week's end, a poll showed that six out of seven of Maidman's persistent commuters planned to spurn the $1,000 and continue to bump it on the Susquehanna.