Word: railroads
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...Penn Central railroad made an unscheduled stop just short of chaos last week. Within hours after 28,000 members of the United Transportation Union shut down the line in 16 states an emergency back-to-work law was whipped through both houses of Congress and jet-shipped to San Clemente where President Nixon signed it in the middle of the night. That Perils of Pauline save marked the eighth time in six years that Congress has had to intervene at the last minute to prevent or stop a major rail strike...
...latest crisis was right out of a grade-B melodrama. A bankrupt railroad was being struck by a union that had seen better days over the fate of 5,700 superfluous brakemen. A bankruptcy court ordered a reduction in the work force last December, and management decided to drop the brakemen through attrition. Even though no workers were to be fired, the union's president, Al Chesser, did not care to see his ranks depleted, and he authorized a strike. Before Chesser's men went back to work some 160,000 commuters had to find alternate ways...
...provides for a 90-day cooling-off Period and calls on the Nixon Administration to submit a plan within 45 days for the preservation of essential rail service in the Northeast. One of the first problems facing the planners is how big the Penn Central net should be. The railroad has some 20,000 miles of tracks, including scores of little-used spurs to sparsely populated areas; much of this money-draining mileage will have to be abandoned. Chesser has suggested that the Government buy Penn Central's right of way, repair the sadly deteriorated tracks and then...
...countries, Zambia and Rhodesia were forced into an uneasy cohabitation by economic necessity. Zambia needed Rhodesia to transport half of its copper to the Indian Ocean port of Beira in Mozambique for shipment to world markets; Rhodesia needed the $25 million a year that the copper shipments brought its railroad in transit revenue. The arrangement-a triumph of pragmatism over politics-has now been scuttled by a series of guerrilla attacks by exiled black Rhodesian rebels who operate under an umbrella organization called FROLIZI (Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe-the African term for Rhodesia). After a particularly bloody outburst...
...shipments) he could force the Zambian government to crack down on the rebels. The scheme backfired badly. Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, who had previously given the guerrillas little encouragement, promptly stopped shipping copper through Rhodesia, a move that could mean financial disaster for the country's money-losing railroad. "History may prove it was the wrong decision," Smith conceded last week...