The Passenger Nightmare

This winter, commuting to Manhattan and Philadelphia has turned from a burden into a nightmare. Almost every working day, thousands of passengers shiver in the unheated and unlighted cars of stalled trains, while others wait on windy platforms for trains that never arrive or are from 30 minutes to three hours late. The crisis has produced protest meetings and a threat by the New York Public Service Commission to file suit against the Penn Central Railroad for inept performance. It has also cost businesses millions of dollars in lost man-hours and added to the general malaise of city life.

Stuart T. Saunders, chairman of Penn Central, which runs most of the commuter lines into Manhattan and Philadelphia and more than one-third of all the passenger trains in the U.S., offers no hope of improvement without Government help. "To reverse the deterioration of passenger service," he says, "we must have substantial assistance."

Real Estate Riches. Last week the Department of Transportation proposed a Comsat-type public corporation called Railpax, which would take over commuter and other passenger trains. But there is considerable doubt whether the Administration will endorse the Government subsidies that Railpax needs.

Penn Central executives contend that their line lost $73 million on passengers in the first nine months of 1969. The company will show an estimated $30 million in consolidated profit for the year, largely from its rich real estate operations; earnings will be down from $90 million in 1968. The Penn Central's $6.5 billion assets include four Manhattan hotels and a 24% interest in Madison Square Garden, real estate in Florida, Texas, California and Georgia, and a 7,600-mile oil pipeline system. Such holdings make many angry travelers skeptical about Saunders' protestation of poverty. Many are convinced that this winter's scandalous service is a deliberate attempt to drive them away and have the Government take over the business. Penn Central executives deny any plan to downgrade service, but in 1968 the company spent $14.2 million less on passenger service maintenance than four years earlier.

Merger Confusion. The railway men have no shortage of excuses. For years, the rising losses on passengers were partly offset by profits from freight. But the freight business was hit hard by the merger two years ago between the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. The two railroads had separate freight yards in many cities, and in the post-merger confusion thousands of cars went to the wrong yards, causing costly tangles. The merger was also accompanied by the abrasive sound of personalities grating on each other; the scramble for a declining number of management jobs is not yet over. Since the tie-up, about 700 surplus executives have retired.

The costs of the merger were wildly miscalculated, and Penn Central is still trying to devise a computer-based information system to keep managers up-to-date on all of its activities. It also suffers from an archaic labor contract, under which an engineer is paid for a day's work for every 100 miles that he travels; if he rides the high-speed Metroliner, for example, he gets 41 days' pay ($111) for each round trip from Washington to New York. The railroad chiefs complain that they cannot afford to buy enough costly new passenger cars.

Still, those obvious problems do not excuse the Penn Central for failing to live up to its responsibility to give the public at least decent service for the money that it collects. If the nation's largest railroad is unable or unwilling to provide that service, there is a strong argument for bringing in a higher authority. The U.S. is the only major industrial nation that does not give massive government aid to passenger railroads. The much-envied railways (of such nations as Germany, Italy and France) are either state-owned or subsidized. Railpax may not be the solution for the woes of the long-suffering U.S. passenger, but it would be a start in the right direction.

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