If infinitely patient Isaac Burton Tigrett, 65, can get control of the bankrupt midwest Alton Railroad Co., as he was all set to do last week, he will have reached a goal he set for himself 34 years ago. Rail roader Tigrett's goal: to tie together a rail system reaching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes.
By the standards set during the Harriman-Hill-Gould era, 34 years represents a long time to create a railroad empire. But Ike Tigrett was never in any great hurry.
He immensely enjoyed taking over bits & pieces of broken-down railroads in the Deep South, linking them together, and making them work for a profit. The end product of this patient toil is the prosper ous 1,970-mile Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Rail-foad Co., that links Mobile and New Orleans with East St. Louis.
Last week Tigrett was in Manhattan dickering with the bondholders' protective committee of the Alton. He got the committee to agree to swap $45 million of Alton 35, due in 1949, for $23 million of G.M. & 0. 4% income bonds, and 328,787 shares of common stock.
Sidetracked. When Ike Tigrett graduated from Union University in Jackson, Tenn. in 1898 he had $800 and a desire to become a banker. In a tiny town near Jackson he rented a building, scrawled the word "Bank" on the window, and built a cashier's cage out of chicken wire. In the cage Tigrett roosted anxiously for several days until the bank's first customer entered, opened an account with a deposit of $50.
Tigrett's bank grew slowly. But Tigrett's reputation as a man with a head for figures spread rapidly. When local capital ists rashly decided to build a 48-mile rail road, the Birmingham & Northwestern Railroad, they elected Tigrett treasurer, a position which incidentally included the job of raising the money to keep the rail road running. In 1911, he became president of the B. & N.W., soon was elected a director of a neighboring railroad, the struggling Gulf, Mobile & Northern Rail road Co. Eight years later, largely because nobody else was interested in managing the G.M. & N., Tigrett was elected its president.
The G.M. & N. was not much of a rail road. It did not go any place of industrial importance after it left Mobile and struck out into Mississippi & Tennessee. The roadbed was so bad that freight trains were often held to" a top speed of 6 m.p.h.
One freight, snailing over a 33-mile stretch of track, was derailed 16 times.
Over the Hump. Ike Tigrett kept on buying up tottering railroads whenever he could get them at bottom prices, and used them to tap new sources of traffic for the G.M. & N. In 1933 he leased the New Orleans Great Northern Railway Co., which soon gave him a line into New Orleans and a chance to bid for export-Si -import freight traffic. In 1940 Tigrett bought the Mobile & Ohio Railroad Co.
That took him into East St. Louis. It also gave him an integrated system that be came the current Gulf, Mobile & Ohio.