The Box - Marc Levinson [87]
Three major railroads stood apart, unconvinced that the complications of loading trailers aboard flatcars were worth the trouble. In 1957, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania’s direct competitor, developed a service called Flexi-Van. Flexi-Van used containers—special truck trailers that could be separated from their undercarriages through the removal of four pins. It carried them on flatcars with turntables that swung 90 degrees. A truck would back up against the side of the flatcar, the driver would release the pins to detach the trailer, and the detached trailer, with no wheels, would slide from its undercarriage along rails built into the turntable. When half of the container was atop the turntable, the driver would engage an extra wheel beneath the truck tractor to move it sideways, into a position parallel to the freight car, moving the container and turntable along with it. The driver would then release the container from the truck and push the turntable the rest of the way into position. The procedure made Flexi-Van containers much easier to load than full trailers, and made it possible to load or remove a single container without disturbing any other part of the train. Flexi-Van moved at passenger-train speeds, delivering containers from Chicago to New York in seventeen hours.12
In the Midwest, the Missouri Pacific Railroad took an entirely different approach. The Missouri Pacific’s trucking operation used detachable truck bodies with hooks on the top. A driver would bring his truck alongside the train, beneath a wheeled crane wide enough to straddle both the train and the truck. The driver removed some pins to separate the trailer body from the undercarriage and then operated the crane himself to lift the container onto the railcar, with the entire operation taking less than ten minutes. The Southern Railway also chose containers rather than trailers as the best way to handle freight between the South and New England, where it had customers but no rail lines. By striking arrangements with truckers to haul the trailers between its terminus in Washington, D.C., and points further north, the Southern overcame its inability to send conventional trailers on flatcars through the low-ceilinged tunnels in Baltimore and New York. None of these three railroads, of course, could interchange containers with each other, much less with the railroads participating in Trailer Train. As with ship lines, so too with railroads: by the late 1950s, the drive to simplify freight handling had led to incompatible solutions.13
The railroads’ desire to expand piggyback left the ICC in a quandary. In the early days of piggyback, the railroads’ rates, like truck rates, had been based on the commodity being carried. Piggyback rates for any commodity were about the same as truck rates and a bit higher than rates for shipping in boxcars. That suited the regulators fine, because it let the railroads pick up a little traffic without shaking up the freight business. Pan-Atlantic’s combined water-road rates along the Atlantic coast were 5 to 7.5 percent below railroads’ boxcar rates, also in line with ICC precedents that let water carriers charge less for slower service. But then, late in 1957, the railroads tried to cut some piggyback rates to compete better against Pan-Atlantic and also Seatrain Lines, which carried loaded railcars aboard ships. Predictably, Pan-Atlantic and Seatrain objected that lower railroad rates would drive them out of business.14
As the ICC was trying to figure out how to help the railroads without hurting the ship lines, Congress intervened—with conflicting instructions. Congress wanted to “breathe into our whole system of transportation some new competition,” Florida Senator George Smathers explained. But while it wanted the economy to benefit from lower rates and new services, Congress also wanted to protect transportation companies and their workers. The result