Up the Line

Making railroads pay has long been one of the toughest challenges a U.S. businessman can face. Last week two executives who have been uncommonly successful in meeting that challenge moved on to new and bigger jobs. Louis W. Menk, 47, will leave the $100,000-a-year presidency and board chairman ship of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Co. to take over as president and chief executive of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Co., succeeding Harry C. Murphy, who is retiring at 73. Jack E. Gilliland, 56, who has been a vice president of the Frisco since 1958, will move up to become its president and chairman.

Menk got into railroading as a telegraph messenger when he was 19, be came president of the Frisco in 1962. By cutting back passenger service and automating freight yards, he raised earnings to an eight-year high of $7,123,356 last year -- a performance that won him the attention of Burlington directors. In moving to the larger Burlington (8,546 miles of track v. the Frisco's 5,054), Menk measurably increases his challenge. Though the road's freight and passenger revenues rose last year, income fell $1,012,306 to $20.3 million, is down another $6,011,000 so far this year. Menk is expected to shake the Burlington up, plans to make heavy use of computers to analyze operations.

Those operations may soon become considerably more complex: the Interstate Commerce Commission is now studying a proposed, long-pending merger that, if it approves, would stitch together the Burlington, the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific into the nation's longest railroad.

Gilliland made his own contribution to the Frisco's good profit picture in the late 1950s, when he coordinated the road's industry-leading development of two-and three-decker automobile carriers. Last year the Frisco hauled 250,000 cars and trucks on tracks that run through nine states (but come no closer to San Francisco than Floydada, Texas).

Like Menk, Gilliland looks to computers as a vital tool for further streamlining operations. The management itself is already streamlined. Frisco executives are young (average age: 45). Gilliland started as an office boy for the Santa Fe when he was only 14 and, despite five years of night school, never earned a college degree. These days most future Frisco executives come to the railroad straight out of college.

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