Trailers On Trains

Residents near the tracks of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific have recently noticed passing trains of flat cars bearing trailer vans, two to a car and painted canary yellow with red wheels and a blue diamond insignia: "KEESHIN -- Dependable Service." That such trailer-trains marked the birth of a new composite form of transportation became generally apparent last week when the Manhattan banking house of Lehman Bros. bubbled over with news that it is backing Keeshin Motor Express Co. of Chicago with enough money to make it the first nationwide trucking company. Backbone of the new company will be a coordinated truck-rail service.

A Keeshin truck used in conjunction with the Rock Island consists of a motor unit coupled to a trailer. On short hauls the whole truck goes over the road. On long hauls it goes over the road to the nearest railroad terminal point, where the trailer is uncoupled, loaded on a flat car, shipped to the terminal nearest its destination. There another Keeshin motor unit picks it up, delivers it, completes a door-to-door shipment.

The expanded company will be called Keeshin Transcontinental Freight Lines, will have as its president a heavy-set onetime truck driver named John Louis Keeshin. "Jack" Keeshin entered the transportation business in his own right when he was 13. His territory was Chicago's rowdy West Side, his equipment a horse & wagon given him by his father. For the elder Keeshin, a poultry dealer, the gift was one of desperation. Son John had ended a short and stormy career in his freshman year of high school by getting in a fracas with his physiology teacher, quitting school. To escape truant officers he had then toured the U. S. in freight cars. When he returned, his father had let him drive a poultry wagon but Jack demanded a wagon of his own, got one. In a few months, with what he could borrow from his father and what he earned taking veal and chickens to market, he was able to buy his first motor truck.

If, as truck drivers insist, their vocation contains much romance in 1935, it was high adventure in 1913. Truckman Keeshin's first 40-mile trip to Joliet took over two days in a truck which had two cylinders, candle-burning headlamps, hard rubber tires, no windshield. When he was stranded overnight, he bought eggs from a farmer, boiled them, four at a time, in his radiator. On one cold night a bearing burned out. With bonfires to keep warm, Jack Keeshin spent the night under the truck repairing the motor. When he tried to crawl out his back was frozen to the ground.

Truckman Keeshin turned his earnings into more & more trucks until now he has 550, which cover the region from Omaha to Buffalo. In the office of his Chicago garage he works seven days a week, often until midnight. His only diversion is checkers. His only luxury is a Pierce-Arrow sedan which he drives to & from his rented home in suburban River Forest.

Up to last fortnight Jack Keeshin had not borrowed a dime in 23 years. But Lehman Partner John Hertz, who was also reared on Chicago's West Side, heard of the Keeshin truck-rail service. Lehman Bros. offered Mr. Keeshin "all he needed" to buy new trucks, extend his routes to both coasts, arrange with other railroads to carry Keeshin trailers. Mr. Keeshin accepted.

U. S. trucking is still the province of nearly 300,000 independent trucking outfits. For years Mr. Keeshin has been trying to persuade truckmen to stop cut throat competition, fix rates. Says he : "There simply was not sufficient honor among them to stick together." Like most big truckmen, he finally asked for Federal regulation. Last week Mr. Keeshin was prime proof of the contention that the new Motor Carrier Law, placing trucks under the Interstate Commerce Commission (TIME, Aug. 19), will help both railroads and big trucking companies at the expense of small, hand-to-mouth trucksters.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.