Word: piggybackers
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...their prized new rolling stock. Union Pacific blocked its main line 30 minutes at Green River, Wyo., while Vandivert photographed three different types of power plants used in mountain hauling. Southern Pacific trainmen, not to be outdone, tape-measured the 4,745-11. length of an 87-car piggyback freight train, laid out the same distance along California's San Luis Obispo horseshoe curve and carefully spotted the train for Vandivert's dramatic storytelling picture of piggyback hauling...
Many railroads are frank to admit that they are out to dominate piggybacking, argue that it is a matter of economic necessity. From 1939 to 1954, the railroads' share of intercity freight slumped from 63% to less than 50%, while the truckers' share jumped from 10% to 19%. Now, with the help of piggybacking, the roads hope to win back lost ground. Last year truck business slipped to 17.7%, while railroads just about held their own. Says Southern Pacific's Assistant General Freight Agent Ray F. Robinson: "Ninetynine percent of our piggyback business is business we never...
...biggest piggybackers, the Pennsy and the New York, New Haven & Hartford, have elaborate cooperative programs to handle truck-company trailers as well as their own, provide such economical service that more and more highway companies are putting . their trailers on flatcars for trips of 500 miles or more. Drivers' wages (as high as $175 a week), highway taxes and equipment costs are so steep that some truckers are thus able to snip as much as 9? per mile from their 30?-per-mile highway costs. By going piggyback, says the Rail-Trailer Co., which solicits business for the railroads...
...trouble, say truckers, is that piggyback's impressive savings may prove their undoing. They fear that while short-run profits may rise, piggybacking leaves the door open for railroads to steal away bigger and bigger chunks of the freight market with their own trailer fleets. Says the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, some of whose members look on piggybacking with a jaundiced eye: "Let's say the ABC trucking company operates a fleet of 1,000 power units and 1,500 trailers from the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard. Then the company decides to use piggyback. It disposes...
...event, piggybacking is here to stay. And for all their arguments, truckers will have a tough time selling their worries to any U.S. motorist who has crawled painfully up a long grade behind a line of exhaust-spewing tractor-trailers. Atop the same mountain grades where the Southern Pacific has its piggyback signs, another series of signs has been put up by California citizens' committees. Their message: "Write your Congressman. Make U.S. 40 four lanes." Either that, or, as the Southern Pacific says, put the trucks on piggyback...