Word: freighting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With empty pockets ostentatiously turned out, and hats in their hands, the railroads called on the Interstate Commerce Commission last week. Humbly they asked for a 25% increase in freight rates. They also wanted to keep the 10% wartime boost in passenger rates...
Costs, said the Class i railroads, were postwar, freight rates prewar. Examples: prices for materials were up one-third, and will rise another $167 million this year. Wages, boosted 16? an hour last week for the roads' 1,300,000 workers, have increased almost 48% since Pearl Harbor. Without the rate increase, the roads said, they could not buy new equipment, like the vermilion-and-grey streamlined Pacemaker freight train (with panel smoke deflectors on the locomotive) which the New York Central is starting between New York and Niagara Falls. Nor could they avoid a loss this year...
Chances are that ICC will give the roads a freight rate increase, although not till after hearings. And it will probably be whittled down to somewhere around 18% to 20%. ICC will probably point out that the roads are not as badly off as they seem, because: 1) the railroads, hard hit by the wartime excess-profits tax, will get large refunds under the carryback if taxable earnings drop sharply; 2) fixed charges will be some $100 million less than in 1941; 3) railroad debt has been steadily reduced during the war years...
...pays the freight? The U.S. taxpayer, through the Department of Agriculture, which makes parity payments in cash (i.e., subsidies) whenever the combination of loans and marketing quotas fails to pull farm prices up to parity...
Most underwriting, cashing in on low interest rates and a sellers' market, was in refinancing ($4.6 billion, a record). But new-money issues, nearly zero in wartime, when the Government paid the freight, started popping forth as soon as peace came to Europe, were blossoming thick & fast going into 1946. As the pastures grew green again in private financing, the volume of U.S. long-term Government issues faded off from a 1944 high of $52.4 to $47.3 billion...