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Looking to the future, the industry wants to compete with its rivals on even terms all across the board. Says Illinois Central President Johnston: "We should be in every mode of transportation." Years ago the Illinois Central and the Union Pacific wanted to get into the airline business, but were turned down. Other roads are eager to get into barge lines and bus lines: the Erie, Lackawanna and a dozen other roads are anxious to merge to combine facilities and cut costs. The Southern Pacific has built a $35 million pipeline, first for the industry, to carry oil from Los Angeles to Arizona, is considering another $16 million line from San Francisco to Nevada. Southern Pacific President Donald J. Russell also has teams of geologists out combing the road's thousands of acres of Western land, looking for oil and revenue-producing metals while the Santa Fe has already diversified with uranium, is fast becoming a major producer.
The Eisenhower Administration is well aware of the industry's problems. In 1955, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Transport Policy flatly proposed that the law be rewritten to make clear that neither ICC nor any other Government body should undertake to allocate and divide the U.S. transportation market. Bills are brewing in Congress to modify ICC's hold on the industry, and ICC itself proposes a list of 26 changes to streamline its operations and speed up rate hearings.
But until such help arrives, U.S. railroaders will have to go it alone. They know that they still have a big public-relations job to do before they can live down their past. As Central President Alfred E. Perlman says, "People think of the airplane in terms of heroes like Lindbergh. But when they think of railroads, they think of robber barons. We're cursed with that reputation." Yet as every U.S. railroad man also knows, the best way to win back both the public's confidence and their lost markets is by more cost-cutting modernization and better trains. Says Chesapeake & Ohio President Walter J. Tuohy, "We believe -railroads are in the midst of a decade of unprecedented growth. But the cardinal need of railroad management today is the courage and imagination to live in the future. It has only been in the past few years that we have learned to stop following the past."