Word: freights
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under Russell, the Southern Pacific has concentrated on research and electronics to improve its service, developed a hydraulic, shock-absorbing coupling gear that permits freight cars to be slammed together without damage. The Southern Pacific has saved itself $1,000,000 yearly by putting inventories under the control of an electronic brain. In a new $7,000,000 switchyard at Houston, it installed a radar-electronic computer control system that shunts a freight car to its proper track, computes weight, windage, distance, then brakes the car to a gentle coupling...
Progress' Casualties. Russell has virtually written off passenger operations as a perpetual profit-loser, but his freight business grows as new companies move in. Every day at least one new company chooses a site on S.P.'s right of way; 15,000 new freight cars are on order. Southern Pacific's 1954 net of $48.7 million made it the third most profitable U.S. railroad (after Union Pacific and Santa Fe), and 1955 profits reached $56 million. To continue to earn such good profits, Russell believes that railroads must change with the times. Instead of carping about airlines...
...rise 70%, on collectives 100%. Incentives are a calculated feature of piatiletki: 55 million workers will be in regular employment, the planners say, with wages up 30%; there will be 50% more technicians and specialists and more than twice as many hospital beds. Airports are to be reconstructed, air freight is to be doubled, and new fast passenger planes are to ply feeder routes. But, faithful to the Leninist dream (in Russia, electric light bulbs are ironically called Ilyich after Lenin's patronymic), the big story was electric power: an overall increase from 160 to 320 billion kilowatts...
...withdraw the application, and at week's end it seemed that McGinnis would have no second chance to head the Boston & Maine. Was McGinnis really necessary? In its nine months without a president, the Boston & Maine ran on time, improved its commuter service, picked up new freight business and clicked along from a $2,745,000 deficit to a $2,352,000 profit...
...tried, after the McGinnis fashion, to win the public esteem. He jazzed up the New Haven's freight cars with an eye-catching black, white and Chinese vermilion paint job. (The color scheme was concocted by Lucile McGinnis.) He inaugurated an electronic reservation system, and offered free caboose rides to Cub Scouts. But his public-be-damned attitude kept slipping through. Although 63% of the New Haven's business comes from passengers, McGinnis has an illconcealed conviction that commuters are a liability. He has seemed to go out of his way to aggravate every bad situation and antagonize...