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Show file DESK EDITORS From the South Tasadena Review, Re-view, South Pasadena, Calif.: Featherbedding on the railroads is said to cost some 500 million a year. This is not only money from the railroads but from each and every customer across the nation. An example of how feather-bedding feather-bedding runs up the cost Is that a train pulling out of Los Angeles has to change the crew every one to two hundred miles. This was about the distance that a train could make back In 1900. so the unions want that as a day's work. Take the aviation Industry; the airlines, altho a few years ago they also had to refuel every hundred miles or so, now they expect the same crew to take the whole flight to New York or Europe. Not that the one crew on a railroad should take it all the way, but they should have a 7 or 8 hour day. At the present time it takes about 20 crews to take a train across the country and even if this could be cut down 10 it would be a great help to every consumer When a train pulls out, on the front end of a diesel they have an engineer, a fireman, and a front end brakeman and some times a front end conductor. If this were changed so that there were TWO engineers and the one NOT running the train do all the extras like being the front end brakeman, or conductor, then the operation would be that much simpler plus the fact that there would be two engineers to operate the train for a safer run. They expect the Dining car crew to go all the way, steward, cooks, waiters, as do the pullman porters, but the engineers, firemen, fire-men, brakemen, conductors, all are only capable of making a run of 100 miles. The truck competition has put in sleeper cabs so that one driver can sleep while the other drives to keep the truck moving across the highway, without having to stop while the crew rests. The barge lines operate as a ship at sea and the barges are pushed continuously up &nd down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. They did this in the main to give service serv-ice so that they could take the freight away from the railroads, by scheduled delivery. And in the case of the barge lines on the Mississippi the railroad running along each bank is being "feather-bedded out of competition. |