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New Blood. No matter how railroaders sizzle over Young's iconoclastic methods, in their cooler moments they all admit that he has done a good job in putting Alleghany Corp. on its feet. He paid off some $78,000,000 of its debt, sold off companies in the red, worked to get some of the bankrupt roads out of receivership and simplified Alleghany's structure so that last year it made an estimated $1,700,000 (not including $655,000 received for reorganization bonds credited to cost). He has also done an excellent job in operating C. & O., although railroaders usually shrug this off with the explanation that C. & O., as a big coal carrier, has always been a big moneymaker.
Nevertheless, Young has cut the debt of the C. & O., the Pere Marquette and Nickel Plate by $100,000,000. He has gathered enthusiastic operating men about him, notably Robert Bowman, 55, the intense president of the C. & 0. and Pere Marquette, and Robert Purcell, 35, vice president and C. & O. general counsel, as quick-witted as he is amiable. Like Young, many of them are young enough in railroading not to know the things which old railroaders are dead sure can't be done.
Actually, U.S. railroads are not as moss-backed as Bob Young sometimes seems to believe. Although Young has talked much about passenger comfort, the C. & O.'s crack passenger trains are no better than those of other lines, probably because the C. & O. is chiefly a freight hauler (biggest load: coal). And the big roads are spending money like tipsy brakemen for new equipment, nearly $1 billion in all. But it is also true that the roads are not doing enough to win back the passengers lost to buses, planes and autos. This year, due to higher operating costs and falling traffic, many U.S. roads will still end up in the red. Bob Young feels that if the roads get in the red and stay there, the Government will step in and take them over. He says: "That's the last thing I want to see but that's what we'll have if the railroads don't wake up."
No reformer for reform's sake, he wants the roads to improve for their own financial good. As a sample of the kind of wholesale reform needed, Bob Young has ordered $28,000,000 worth of new coaches and sleepers for the C. & O. lines, plans to replace every coach now in use. Some of his other passenger-catching gadgets: movies in lounge cars, credit cards permitting passengers to charge tickets, meals, etc. (started this week), telephones which can be operated from moving trains, news tickers, games for children & adults. Most of all, he believes that the railroads must spend as much as $100,000,000 a year to advertise and promote their new equipment.
Bob Young thinks that all the railroads really need can be brought about by prodding, and that he is the logical man. to do it. Says he happily: "The goddamned railroads are 30 years behind the times. But maybe in a few years we'll get them to where they're only twenty years behind."
* An amateur versifier, Young then wrote: Sad are my thoughts for I am forty . . .