Word: freight
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...intricate truck-train-plane system that hustles copies around the world. Distribution accounts for an astonishing 25% of the Trib's total production costs. The per-copy price is high, ranging from 28? in Paris to 75? in Tokyo, because most papers must be shipped out by air freight or chartered plane. Advertising rates are astronomical; it costs as much to place an ad in the Trib as in the Washington Post, which has more than four times the circulation. Yet there is no shortage of advertisers or readers. Nowadays, only 18% of the audience lives in France...
Labor costs now consume 600 of every dollar spent to move freight by rail. The industry deals with 15 major unions that are never hesitant to strike. Right now, the United Transportation Union, representing engineers, brakemen, firemen and conductors, is planning to strike Penn Central in June, when a Government-imposed cooling-off period expires. Seventy-year-old work rules force railroads to pay train crews a full day's wages for every 100 miles traveled -a distance that the fastest diesel locomotives cover in two hours. Some states require trains to carry "full" five-man crews. Says Alan...
Management policy has been equally archaic. Railroads have rarely attempted to put an aggressive salesmanship effort behind their services, a trick that truckers were quick to learn. That failure goes far to explain the drop in the railroads' share of intercity freight traffic to 39% now from 56% in 1950. Some railroads also have paid out in dividends more than they earned in profits, a practice that did much to bring the Penn Central down...
...Government also has bled money from the railroads. Under Section 22 of the Interstate Commerce Act, passed in 1887, railroads have been pressed into hauling Government freight free or at reduced rates. That hurts because the Government is now the railroads' largest customer. Through the ICC, the Government has further sanctioned an impossibly complicated railroad rate structure. The ice maintains an unindexed file of 43 trillion different rates on varying weights of varying commodities moving varying distances. The general level of rates is both too high and too low: too high to prevent traffic from fleeing to competing carriers...
...basic problems. The Administration and the industry would permit the railroads to abandon tracks that produce little or no profit, speed up and simplify rate-making procedures, and forbid discriminatory taxation of railroads by states and localities. The Administration, in addition, would eliminate the preferential treatment given to Government freight...