"Very Bad Taste"

Big, progressive Timken Roller Bearing Co., a railroad supplier for 37 years, last week went out of its way to offend one of its best customers. In full-page newspaper ads, run in 23 U.S. cities, it stingingly rebuked the railroads for technical backwardness, urged them to avoid "serious freight congestion" by converting all their freight cars from friction bearings to roller bearings at once.

Roller bearings, said Timken's intrepid ad, would permit "one-speed" railroading (identical speeds for freight and passenger trains), would accelerate the whole defense program, save building many new cars. Other roller-bearing claims: 1) starting resistance reduced by 88%; 2) elimination of hotbox delay; 3) reduced maintenance costs.

Father of this brain child was a hulking ex-artilleryman from Georgia named Walter C. Sanders, who has bossed Timken's railroad division for 20 years. During all that time Sanders has had one passionate reverie: all U.S. railroad equipment on roller bearings--preferably Timken. His first break came in 1926 when the Milwaukee put roller bearings under its passenger trains. Now scores of U.S. streamliners, hundreds of crack passenger trains roll on rollers. But the whole U.S. coach and Pullman market is only 39,000 cars.

So Sanders went after the U.S. railroads' 1,750,000 freight cars. Results: practically zero. Railroad men thought roller bearings' proved success on passenger cars and locomotives was no sign they were the best thing for freight cars. Furthermore, they thought them much too luxurious for freight cars, would as soon put Pullman roomettes in cabooses.

To roller-bearing a single car (excluding new trucks) costs $750 v. $40 for friction bearings. To convert the whole car supply, as Sanders' ad urged, would cost well over $1,000,000,000 and take two-thirds of the whole U.S. 1940 output of alloy steel, which has plenty of other defense uses. Furthermore, road speed is not the chief railroad bottleneck. Freight cars average only two hours a day in transit; what slows them up is not their friction bearings but standing in terminals, loading, unloading and making up trains.

So railroad men were miffed at Sanders this week. He had reopened an old fight; worse, he had picked a time when the railroads were already in hot water with Government officials, were breaking their driving rods trying to prove they could do their part. Worse still, he had violated a century-old understanding between the roads and their suppliers: never break ranks. Said one Eastern railroad executive: "It was very bad taste."

But Sanders had not expected his ad to bring in a first-morning sheaf of orders (it didn't). He did it as a missionary gesture. Like most transportation bugs, Sanders expects a revolution in railroad equipment --perhaps after the war, when men and materials will be more obtainable, when vast fleets of cargo planes may force the roads to run 80-to 90-mile-an-hour freights or get off the tracks.

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