Word: railroads
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Passenger fares should be slashed as soon as war ends-perhaps even right away, for advance publicity. (Said one railroad big shot, in recommending a 1?-a-mile coach fare-less than half present rates-at once: ". . . Nibbling at fares will do no good. . . . There's no use making our previous mistake of hanging on to high rates until our trains are empty." Also suggested: a nationwide, standard base rate instead of "the present impossibly complicated passenger tariffs," which have been an inviolate tradition of the railroads for generations...
...Most passenger equipment is outmoded and should be completely replaced with fast, streamlined trains. (One railroad executive admitted: "One of the radical departures is to consider the comfort and convenience of the passenger." Another: "The open-section Pullman car is as extinct as the dodo." Another: "We will never buy another heavyweight car . . . car builders will be swamped with orders for [streamlined] equipment...
...slow-footed railroads this was heady talk. But, for the first time since the last war, they are in a position to mean what they say. By the end of next year according to an Investment Bankers' Association estimate, railroad funded debt will be down to $8 billions, almost a third less than in 1932, when fixed charges were 30% higher than railway operating income. With this new financial freedom of action assured, airlines and bus lines full of plans for a postwar passenger boom could well ponder the warning words ot the jubilant railroad man who told Railway...
They used to call it the "Misery & Short Life," and the "Maimed & Still Limping." But last week the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad Co. finally came out of one of the longest receiverships in railroad history. And the bondholders who have stayed with it through 20 long years of bankruptcy finally had a good thing...
Worms & Snails. The M. & St. L. was a rackety, poor man's railroad long before it slipped into receivership in 1923. Begun in the '70s by Minneapolitans eager to challenge Chicago's monopoly of Midwestern railroading, the line stretched itself into 1,690 miles of jerkwater track running north & south across Minnesota and Iowa, with branches to Peoria and Leola, S. Dak. It never got to St. Louis-and from the day its first track was laid, it was more often in than out of the courts. Its debt was too high, its farm traffic too meager...