Word: icc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week ICC Examiner J.A. Prichard tartly recommended that the application be turned down. He said the road should be a profitable operation, but was actually trying to lose money. At Morenci, it had allowed its tracks to be torn up and given its right of way to the New York Central. (The owner, a Columbus scrap-metal firm, said it had been ordered out for want of a franchise.) The owners' real object, said the examiner, was to go out of business so that its trackage, bought for only $33,-450 in 1933, could be sold as scrap...
...Commission was getting alarmed at its own generosity to U.S. railroads. Since war's end, it had given them six freight-rate boosts. Yet freight revenues were declining; in the first half of January, carloadings were 11.2% below last year. Last week, in its annual report to Congress, ICC guessed why. It thought that railroads might be pricing themselves out of business...
Because of higher rates, the railroads were losing more & more business to trucks, which were hauling 12% more than a year ago, and barges, which were carrying 20% more. "Rate increases," said ICC, "may be carried to the point where they are largely self-defeating." As an example, it cited the fact that while the Railway Express Agency, Inc. got three increases totaling 46% last year, its revenue decreased...
Instead of higher rates, said ICC, U.S. railroads should step up efficiency and cut costs by "bold experimentation with new devices and methods . . . imagination and ingenuity...
Heavy Freight. The railroads, whose freight rates have gone up 41 to 43% since war's end, will ask ICC for another 8% boost, railroad traffic executives decided at a Chicago meeting. If granted, the increase would add another $400 million to the nation's freight bill. (The total increase so far: $2.1 to $2.5 billion...