Word: railroads
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Five of the nation's 69 Class I railroads-the major companies that account for 99% of rail traffic-already are bankrupt. The Interstate Commerce Commission last month listed another twelve, including the Chicago and North Western, Erie Lackawanna and Rock Island, as "marginal," meaning that they could go broke at any moment. As a whole, the industry is making money, but pitifully little. Railroad net income in 1971 totaled $355 million, or 2.7% of revenues-and much of that came from non-railroad operations. That is not enough to attract the loan money necessary to repair and modernize...
...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...
That seems a minimum program to give the railroads a chance to pull out of their difficulties. It certainly will not solve all the problems: railroad management must learn more modern ways, and the Government must get tougher with rail unions that insist on featherbedding forever...
...with a truckload of melon--where he peddles most of them on the streets, manages to rip the Fillmore East off for an order of 40 melon at $5 apiece, and ends up hawking a lot more from the Fillmore stage between sets of a two-night Grand Funk Railroad orgy. And in a post-script, the journal looks back from April 1971 at what happened to Jeffrey Golden in the summer...
Died. Jeremiah Milbank, 85, financier and philanthropist; in Greenwich, Conn. A Wall Street banker and heir to a railroad, banking and manufacturing fortune, Milbank set up the Institute for the Crippled and Disabled after World War I to help train permanently injured veterans and civilians. In 1928 he established the original pilot study of poliomyelitis, which led to formation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. A longtime friend of Herbert Hoover, Milbank was a large contributor to the Republican Party and served as eastern treasurer for the G.O.P. National Committee during the 1928 and 1932 elections...