Top Railroader

The world's biggest privately owned railroad moved a hard-driving engineer into the front cab last week. Norris Roy ("Buck") Crump, 50, a veteran railroader who began his career as a 16-year-old track laborer, was elected president of the Canadian Pacific Railway Co., the $2 billion transportation empire, largely owned by U.S. and British investors, that is Canada's richest corporation.

The great backbone of President Crump's domain is 17,000 miles of railway through the most populous areas of Canada, and some 4,000 miles of branch lines into the northern U.S. Midwest. C.P.R. telegraphs, grain elevators, stockyards and abattoirs border the tracks. At principal stops are C.P.R.'s 15 hotels, including Quebec's famed Chateau Frontenac and the tourist meccas at Banff and Lake Louise. The company operates a fleet of ocean-going liners and freighters, as well as Canadian Pacific Air Lines, with routes to Asia, Australia, Latin America and Europe. C.P.R. also controls Consolidated Mining & Smelting Co., the world's biggest lead and zinc producer, coal mines in the Rockies, and oil and gas wells in Alberta.

C.P.R's new $75,000-a-year boss left school in his teens to work on the railroad at 40-c- an hour. Later, Crump finished high school in night classes, took a leave of absence in 1926 to earn a railway mechanical-engineering degree at Indiana's Purdue University. He was hired back as a night foreman, advanced through various jobs until his combination of hard-rock experience, engineering skill and business talent paid off with the top vice-presidency in 1949.

In recent years, as aging (69) President William Mather cut back his own schedule, Vice President Crump shouldered much of the management. He directed the railway's dieselization program, cut costs and built up the profit margin ($27 million in 1954) despite a drop in revenues. Buck Crump has traveled nearly every mile of C.P.R.'s far-flung system, often in the engineer's cab, has a first-hand knowledge of his company's multiple enterprises and is known by sight by nearly every one of his 87,000 employees.

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