Carrier Cudgeling

First the railroads asked for a 15% freight-rate rise. ICC said 5.3% was enough. Then they asked for a 15% wage cut. Franklin Roosevelt's Railway Fact-Finding Board said No. This left the railroads, stretched between the engine of rising costs and the caboose of lagging traffic, with no recourse but legislative aid. So Mr. Roosevelt asked three railroad officials and three railroad labor officers to prepare proposals for Congress.

Hard at work ever since October, cudgeling their brains four days a week with the aid of a battery of experts, have been the six railroaders--Presidents Martin Withington Clement of Pennsylvania and Ernest Eden Norris of Southern, Vice Chairman Carl Raymond Gray of Union Pacific, Chairman George McGregor Harrison of the Railway Labor Executives' Association, President Bert Mark Jewell of the Railway Employes' Department of A. F. of L. and President David Brown Robertson of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. Last week, after Messrs. Gray and Harrison again conferred with Franklin Roosevelt, the committee finally reported.

Their train of thought was hardly streamlined. After a preamble, which laid the industry's troubles to Government "favoritism" toward certain competing forms of transport, they listed proposals very similar to those formulated at the President's behest last April by the Splawn Committee of three ICCommissioners (TIME, April 18).

Last week the six railroaders echoed the Splawn recommendations for repeal of land-grant freight rates for Government traffic, creation of a Transport Board to supervise all transport, creation of a special railroad court to handle reorganizations, loosening of RFC purse strings, and relieving ICC of the necessity of certifying that roads borrowing from RFC are not in need of reorganization. Only major additions were pleas for a flexible rate structure adaptable to changing business conditions, for equal taxes on competing forms of transport, for terminating ICC sponsorship of consolidations.

Two topics were notable by omission-- labor and funded debt. The latter is significant since Senator Burton K. Wheeler, chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee which will chaperon the report in the Senate, firmly believes that top-heavy funded debt is the roads' chief ailment. Knowing this and well remembering that the similar Splawn proposals died in Congress, the railroad industry last week was not too sanguine of legislative help. But Franklin Roosevelt still sat pretty, for if Congress again refuses to act he cannot be blamed.

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