Word: rollers
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...progressive Timken Roller Bearing Co., a railroad supplier for 37 years, last week went out of its way to offend one of its best customers. In full-page newspaper ads, run in 23 U.S. cities, it stingingly rebuked the railroads for technical backwardness, urged them to avoid "serious freight congestion" by converting all their freight cars from friction bearings to roller bearings at once...
...Roller bearings, said Timken's intrepid ad, would permit "one-speed" railroading (identical speeds for freight and passenger trains), would accelerate the whole defense program, save building many new cars. Other roller-bearing claims: 1) starting resistance reduced by 88%; 2) elimination of hotbox delay; 3) reduced maintenance costs...
Father of this brain child was a hulking ex-artilleryman from Georgia named Walter C. Sanders, who has bossed Timken's railroad division for 20 years. During all that time Sanders has had one passionate reverie: all U.S. railroad equipment on roller bearings-preferably Timken. His first break came in 1926 when the Milwaukee put roller bearings under its passenger trains. Now scores of U.S. streamliners, hundreds of crack passenger trains roll on rollers. But the whole U.S. coach and Pullman market is only 39,000 cars...
...Sanders went after the U.S. railroads' 1,750,000 freight cars. Results: practically zero. Railroad men thought roller bearings' proved success on passenger cars and locomotives was no sign they were the best thing for freight cars. Furthermore, they thought them much too luxurious for freight cars, would as soon put Pullman roomettes in cabooses...
...Committee Chairman Tom Connally of Texas and toothy, grey-shocked John W. McCormack, House Majority leader, the strategists started the bill through the mill in the House first, thus bypassing the usual dragging delay of the jogging Senate pace. By starting the bill in the House, with a steam roller set to pancake all opposition, the Administration hoped this week to rip the bill through to passage in two days of closed hearings, two more days of limited debate, and shoot the bill over to the Senate by week...