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the structure of regulation. Plan I let truckers serving the general public—common carriers, in legal parlance—collect the cargo from shippers, put their trailers on a train, and split the revenue with the railroad, but only if the train was operating along a route that the truck line had authority to serve. Plan II allowed the railroad to own trailers and deal directly with shippers, but the shippers might have to use their own trucks to haul the trailers from a rail yard to the final destination. When it became clear that these conditions would not allow piggyback freight to prosper, the ICC approved other plans so that railroads could move trailers, or even flatcars, owned by freight forwarders or by shippers themselves. This was a huge relief to the railroads, whose financial woes were making it increasingly hard to come up with the money for new investments. Looser regulation opened the way for piggyback to grow.9

Piggyback solved a difficult operational problem for the railroads, the inefficient use of their enormous fleets of boxcars. U.S. railroads owned 723,962 boxcars in 1955 but got very little use from them. The typical boxcar spent as little as 8 percent of its life under way, earning revenue. The rest of the time it was a warehouse on wheels, waiting on sidings to be loaded, unloaded, or added to a train. The fact that piggyback flatcars could be put back to work as soon as the trailers had been removed freed the railroads from their role as unwilling providers of free storage. For shippers, on the other hand, piggyback, like containerization, initially offered few real cost advantages. Every railroad used different types of cars, so one railroad might be unable to unload a trailer from a flatcar originated on another line—a serious problem, given that no railroad spanned the entire country. Loading was cumbersome, often done “circus style”: empty flatcars were lined up end to end, with metal bridges between them, and a truck backed each trailer along the decks of the cars to the last empty position. Most flatcars carried just one trailer, so making up a train could require switching and coupling a very large number of cars. Volume was too small for the railroads to justify the investments needed to make piggyback a truly efficient service. In addition to these operational deficiencies, the Teamsters union, whose members drove most intercity trucks, opposed a system that reduced the need for its members’ labor, and it negotiated contracts that penalized truck lines for shipping trailers by train. Piggyback was a tiny business: although thirty-two railroads carried trailers on flatcars in 1955, total traffic amounted to only 0.4 percent of the railroads’ carloadings.10

In July 1954, the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad began service between New York and Chicago with 50-foot flatcars carrying a single trailer apiece. Within months, its daily TrucTrains to Chicago and St. Louis, equipped with new 75-foot flatcars, were carrying hundreds of trailers each way. The Pennsy signed up 150 motor carriers to pick up and deliver the trailers, and soon had a $100-million-a-year business. It created a research-and-development department—a highly unusual step for a railroad—and charged it with improving TrucTrain. The biggest hurdle, TrucTrain’s managers decided, was that the Pennsy could not transfer loaded cars to many connecting railroads. In November 1955, TrucTrain was incorporated as Trailer Train Company, and other railroads were invited to buy in. The idea was simple: instead of each railroad’s operating its own small trailer business, Trailer Train would handle truck trailers nationwide. It would own the flatcars, collect revenue from truck lines, and pay the railroads to haul its cars over their tracks. At the end of the year, any profit would be divided among the railroads that had become shareholders. Trailer Train started small, operating barely 500 flat-cars in 1956. Other railroads quickly joined the enterprise, allowing Trailer Train to gain economies of scale beyond the reach of individual railroads. By 1957,