Viewing page 95 of 99
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
28 As I've written, On September 11th I went to Schenectdy to work on a so—called "car spotting study" in the Schenectady Works and I spent the following six weeks on this project. It is a perfect example of a lost opportunity to record a very interesting experience and thereby fail to retain much value from it as far as I personally am concerned. All I have from my own notes of the time are the dates (September 11th to October 20th), that I was keeping no notes on the study because our reports cover the whole thing thoroughly, and that during the course of the study we visited New York, Albany, Cleveland, Akron, Detroit and Chicago. As for the reports, I should imagine that after forty years all copies of them hit the incinerator long ago and even if not, I wouldn't have much idea whom to contact—-as far as I'm concerned they're GONE. So about all I have besides the dates and list of cities, is my memory and after four decades, that's fairly empty. But it was the biggest, most important and most interesting job I had in 1933 and I'm sure was responsible for getting me back on a five-day week besides. So I'm having a fling at it, that is, the business side of it since I've already covered the personal side to what extent I could. Also what follows is what I [[underscore]]think[[/underscore]] the problem was and what we did to study it and what the Company did about it as a result. A freight rate customarily included one switching movement by the line-haul railroad when the car was picked up at the plant of the shipper and one additional movement when the car was delivered at the plant of the consignee. This is very much simplified but this was the general idea. For any additional switching service like, for example, making a second "spot" of a car at the consignee's plant, the railroad [[underscore]]could[[/underscore]] impose an additional charge. However, because of intense competition between individual railroads as well as railroads with other carriers, considerable extra service of this kind was done without charge. To complicate the situation still further, many large plants had their own intraplant railroad systems which not only did the internal plant switching for which the railroad had no responsibility, but also frequently did some or all of the switching included in the freight rate and was duly compensated by the railroad. Sometimes such intraplant railroads, like the East Erie Commercial Railroad at the Erie Works, for example, was a common carrier because they performed services for other shippers or consignees who happened to be located on their line, or were ready to perform such services. Erie Art Metal Co. was such a concern, being located on the East Erie Commercial just east of Bldg. 60 on the GE test track which was part of the East Erie. Such a railroad was a corporate entity although like the East Erie, may have been owned 100% by the proprietary company--GE in the ease of the East Erie. If a common carrier, such an intraplant railroad got a slice of the freight rate for performing such switching service as the line-haul
