Word: freight
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...nation's largest rail system, Conrail has annual revenues of $3.3 billion, 90,000 employees and 34,000 miles of track crisscrossing the Northeast, stretching west to Missouri and north to Canada. Though most of its business is freight, it also carries 360,000 commuters each weekday to New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Chicago. For all these superlatives, Conrail continues to hemorrhage money because its equipment was in worse shape and its labor force was more featherbedded than almost anyone in Washington had suspected...
Conrail inherited such a hodgepodge of worn-out equipment that even after $600 million in repairs, much of the rolling stock is still unreliable. At any moment, 12.4% of Conrail's 140,000 freight cars are either laid up for repairs or on the verge of breakdown...
...schedule record. Throughout the sprawling system, the roadbed, key to a smooth ride, is being rebuilt. By year's end Conrail will have installed 13.9 million crossties and laid 2,787 miles of continuous welded rails. It also will have acquired 392 new locomotives and 5,900 new freight cars, paid for entirely by private financing...
Moving with the force of a runaway freight, a strike by railroad clerks swept the country last week and, before it ended, seriously snarled most of the nation's train traffic and threatened to derail much of the economy. If nothing else, the four-day ruckus showed just how dependent the U.S. still is on its rail system-and how quickly it can be disrupted by a single union...
...clerks for more than two months. But other B.R.A.C. locals, raising picket signs in sympathy, tied up operations at 74 lines in 42 states, idling up to 350,000 of the nation's half a million rail workers, stranding thousands of commuters and millions of tons of freight. President Carter stepped in after three days of chaos. Acting under the emergency provisions of the Railway Labor Act, he called for mandatory mediation of the dispute, which requires the clerks to return to work for a 60-day cooling-off period...