Railroads: Toward the 21st Century Ltd.

(8 of 9)

No railroad man anywhere disagrees. Western Pacific President Christy announced last week that his road will make another effort to drop the California Zephyr next month. "You can't run a long-distance passenger service on nostalgia," he says. The nostalgia-covered Twentieth Century Limited made its final run for the Central last month. Southern Pacific's president, Benjamin Franklin Biaggini, who would like to chop off his Lark trains running between Los Angeles and San Francisco, says: "It takes a crew of 21 and the operation of a whole train just to move an average of less than two busloads of people. There are 10,000 airline seats available each day in each direction, and it is obvious that the people who fly them don't want to ride trains."

Rent-a-Train. The future of the railroads, quite clearly, lies in freight. And in anticipation of that rich haul, railroads all around the country are adding new equipment, with a handsome outlay of $3.45 billion over the past two years. The results are already impressive. The Pennsy, for instance, pioneered with "unit" trains, in which continuously linked cars carrying bulk cargoes like coal can bypass freight yards and switching delays because they never have to be uncoupled. Beginning with one unit train in 1964, the road now runs 550 a month. Illinois Central has gone a step farther and devised a rent-a-train plan that Hertz and Avis might envy. Under the system worked out by I.C. Marketing Vice President John Ingram, companies can rent an 86-car train for $1,000,000 a year, run it as frequently as they like. Illinois Central has so far rented out five such trains to grain companies.

Three-tiered automobile haulers have won back new-car haul business from trucks and saved the auto companies on freight charges as well. For other customers, railroads can offer everything from "rail whale" tank cars with 50,000-gal. capacity to "high cube" cars built with extra-high roofs for odd-size loads. Piggyback hauls, in which flatcars carry over-the-road trailers, have increased 385% in a decade, to 1,207,242 carloads. The Southern Pacific, for one, has seen its piggyback service grow from 18,000 tons twelve years ago to 2,200,000 tons last year.

Everywhere, trains are getting bigger —the Norfolk & Western recently ran a 500-car train that was pulled by six engines with radio-connected controls operated by a single engineer. Last week the Santa Fe inaugurated service of its Super C freight from Chicago to Los Angeles. On its first run it zoomed from city to city in 34 hours and 35 minutes, or five hours faster than Santa Fe's famed Super Chief.

Happy Marriage. Nothing is changing railroading more than the computer. Just about every Class I U.S. road has acquired some of the electronic giants to control the costly and time-consuming business of putting freight trains together, taking them apart, and keeping track of the cars. The Union Pacific has so far installed 53 computers in 37 yard offices, ties them all in with four master computers in Omaha by a 2,900-mile private microwave system; the line figures that the economies obtained are equal to having 3,000 additional freight cars on hand.