Berth Rates Up

After only two weeks' deliberation, the Interstate Commerce Commission last week granted the Pullman Co. an increase in berth rate's (TIME, Sept. 8), from 1% to 48.9%, depending on the type of sleeping service and distance traveled. The boosts will amount to about $13 million a year. The company had claimed it needed them to offset increasing costs and decreasing traffic.

As no public hearings had been held, ICC allowed 20 days for anyone to challenge the increases. By week's end no one had. But Railroader Robert R. Young, whose Chesapeake & Ohio is one of the 57 railroads that now own Pullman, informally rapped ICC.* "It's a pity," said he, "that the company is getting an 'increase in fares on the old junk that's now in use."

The day after ICC granted the Pullman boosts, all U.S. railroads were at its door with a new request for freight increases-- needed, they said, to make up for a 15 1/2-c--an-hour wage raise to 1,000,000 employees. The railroads, which had asked ICC in July to increase rates an average of 16.7%, now asked that this be raised to 27%. The proposed new rates would cost the nation's shippers $1,873,000,000. . . .

In an all-out effort by some airlines to attract more aerial freight cargo, United, American, and Pennsylvania-Central last week were pressing the Civil Aeronautics Board for permission to reduce their freight rates on a number of commodities an average of 33 1/3%, putting them just a few cents higher than those on railway express.

*Young was rapped himself last week by the Office of Defense Transportation. In nationwide advertising last month, Young had cried that some railroads, particularly those with routes between Chicago and California, deliberately slow down freight trains by mutual agreement to eliminate competition. Replied ODT: in the first half of 1947, all Western roads maintained faster freight-train speeds than Young's C. & O. Countered Young: "Statistical lies," inspired by the prejudiced ICC, of which ODT Director J. Monroe Johnson is a member.

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