Off with Their Heads

When crafty old (now 84) Frederic Christopher Dumaine got control of the New York, New Haven & Hartford two years ago, he figured that he could run a railroad just as well as the next man, and maybe better. Although railroad management was new to him, Financier Dumaine went right to work. That meant, first of all, cutting costs to the bone. He had learned the technique—slash wages, cut the staff and sales force, eliminate such "frills" as advertising—in such earlier business ventures as New Hampshire's Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. and the Waltham...