Word: railroads
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...3/4-lb. 1958 budget is a staggering array of proposed expenditures, including $587,000 for relocating Botanic Garden greenhouses in the District of Columbia, $26,500 for installing new bowling alleys in the Panama Canal Zone and $590,000 for purchasing 50 hopper cars for the Alaska Railroad (but no new funds for the Joint Congressional Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, which must try to get along on the money left over from the $22,500 appropriated...
...Erie, Pa. last week, Alfred E. Perlman, president of the New York Central Railroad, ushered in a new symbol of 20th century progress for his venerable old line. Throwing a switch on a signal box (see cut), he formally opened a new 163-mile, electronically regulated stretch of double track between Cleveland and Buffalo. With the new system, the longest in the U.S., only two men seated before a light-studded control panel at Erie can automatically control all traffic between Cleveland and Buffalo...
...products of modern technology mark a radical departure from the 19th century, when railroads held U.S. transportation in virtual monopoly, and the public could be damned. Even as late as World War II, U.S. railroads had an antiquated plant far behind other industries. Cars, buses and planes started eating into passenger revenues; the booming young trucking industry, along with barges and fast-expanding pipelines, cut into freight traffic. Between 1943 and 1949 the railroad share of the $30 billion U.S. transportation market crumbled from...
Gone are the old mossbacks whose railroads ran by steam and tobacco juice. Today's operating man is younger and more flexible, an efficiency-minded innovator who spends his working hours figuring ways to apply 20th century technology to his 19th century railroad. A typical example is Downing Bland Jenks, trail-blazing 41-year-old boss of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Says he: "You don't have to look 50 or 100 years ahead to see what railroading is coming to. We could operate our whole system automatically right now, if it weren...
...through darkness; a modified version keeps watch on car-axle journal boxes, flashes a signal when the box gets too hot. Coming soon on the Rock Island: centralized TV to keep an eye on crossing gates, plastic train wheels to cut down noise, electronic brains to handle railroad accounting chores...