Hot Fight with Hoffa

In the long and bitter battle between the railroads and the truckers, the railroads are making new gains by inducing their opponents to defect. Their weapon: piggybacking, the carrying of freight-loaded truck bodies on railroad flatcars.

Truck piggyback service for general freight has doubled in two years, become the rails' most profitable single freight operation. Last week six of the biggest U.S. trucking firms joined in a new company to cooperate with the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad in building special piggyback terminals for general freight in Jersey City and Chicago.

All this has not gone unnoticed by Teamster Boss James Riddle Hoffa, a general who does not like to see his troops being ridden out of town on a rail. Piggybacking, claims Hoffa, has already cost the jobs of 20,000 teamsters. To fight the rails, he is pushing a new "tax" on truckers, requiring them to pay $5 into the union's welfare or pension funds, beginning next year, for every truck they Diggy back. Hoffa has already signed the irst such contract with Midwest truckers,

pressuring other truckers to sign up. He has also launched a full-scale public relations barrage against the railroads, loping to stir up support for an amendment to the Interstate Commerce Act that would limit the rails' power to undercut freight charges on piggyback runs.

Polite Rebuttal. The rails have gone a

tep farther than piggybacking. They have

developed their own three-deck, 15-auto

flatcars that are helping them win back a big slice of the new-car hauling business lost to truckers. Once, the railroads moved 75% of all new autos. But the truckers devised efficient trailers that undercut railroad charges, by 1959 had left the rails only 8% of the business. Now the rails are grabbing a bigger share by charging only half as much as truckers on long hauls. One reason: on a cross-country haul, each flatcar replaces at least three high-wage truck drivers. By year's end, Ford expects to ship 35% of its cars by rail, Chrysler 40%, American Motors 50%. Studebaker 70%. General Motors, which has widely scattered plants close to markets, ships less by rail than the others.

Ford Motor Co., where the Teamsters stand to lose the most business, is being subjected to the biggest mail barrage emphasizing the number of drivers being thrown out of work. Ford answers with a form letter politely pointing out that the Teamsters originally threw railroad workers out of jobs when they took away the rails' auto-hauling business, assures complainants that "trucks will continue to handle the majority of the volume of car shipments." On hauls of up to 300 miles, trucks are still more economical; but for anything longer, when drivers must be put up overnight, rails win hands down. Even Hoffa's $5 tax will not cut seriously into the savings on long hauls.

Hot War? The fight for auto freight may get rougher than words. The St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad, which developed the first three-level cars (TIME, Oct. 24), has already run into some mysterious acts of sabotage. Acid dumped from highway overpasses ruined the paint jobs on one shipment of 29 autos and on another of 150. The railroad had to pay $484,000 for the damage. Other railroads have had cars damaged by shotgun blasts or peppered with rocks. To guard the shipments, Frisco's auto trains now carry an extra caboose and an extra crew.

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