Transport: Track Deal

Famed is New York Central’s advertising slogan: The Water Level Route—You Can Sleep. The implication is that passengers on the Pennsylvania, New York Central’s great rival, are kept awake as their trains chuff up and over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh and Chicago. The same implication, to a lesser degree, works against Baltimore & Ohio whose line roughly follows that of the Pennsylvania through the mountains. Last week B. & O. made a move to take itself out of the shadow of the New York Central’s advertising.

Through a deal with New York Central’s Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad, 22 B. & O. trains between Washington and Chicago began using P. & L. E. trackage between West Pittsburgh and McKeesport as a short cut through the Pittsburgh gateway. Besides reducing running time from 20 to 45 minutes, the change will result in large savings in the operation of heavy freight trains, since the P. & L. E. tracks in the Pittsburgh area do not have the heavy grades met on some sections of the B. & O.*

*Not only in a trackage deal were B. & O. and New York Central linked last week. In Trenton, N. J. a Federal Grand Jury indicted both companies, along with Lehigh Valley, for granting illegal concessions to shippers by reducing storage and insurance charges to less than cost.