The Little Lines That Could

Many of the nation's great railroads owe their size to the fusing of shorter lines over the years. The New York Central grew out of 400 independently constructed and operated lines, and the mighty Pennsylvania was forged out of 600 separate lines. But many of the short lines stayed short--and today they play a little known but important role in the shadow of the giants. The U.S. now has about 450 short-line railroads, whose trackage varies in length from less than a mile to 200 miles. Far from dying out, the short lines are prospering in many places; in Texas five have been started since World War II.

Tidy & Tiny. The short lines bear such quaint names as the Arcade & Attica, the Belfast & Moosehead Lake, the Hoosac Tunnel and Wilmington and the Tweetsie. Most of them are operated by small businessmen for whom railroading is still a shirtsleeve job and the romance of the rails a pleasant bonus. But apart from a handful, like North Carolina's Tweetsie, and the Reader Railroad in southwest Arkansas, which have made their puffing steam locomotives colorful and profitable tourist attractions, romance is not what the short lines are run for. Says an Interstate Commerce Commission official: "There's money to be made in short-line railroads these days if you know how to go about it."

The short lines go about it by specializing in such bulk commodities as grain or ore, servicing isolated factories, mines and installations that have been bypassed by the main lines. Most of them can survive because they carry no passengers, have comparatively low property valuations, few employees (some get by with a dozen) and small tax and debt loads. Many short lines are terminal or switching operations owned by bigger roads, or bridge lines that run between two big roads. But the short-haul roads, which perform on a small scale the same functions as the big lines, are the heart of the short-line system. Often they depend on one or a few industries for their livelihood. The dependence is sometimes so great, in fact, that some roads are "captive" lines set up by companies just to serve their plants. U.S. Steel owns twelve short lines, and Bethlehem Steel owns seven.

On Chicken Feed. Even the independent carriers lean heavily on a few customers. The Bath & Hammondsport in upstate New York does practically all of its business hauling wines from the state's wine district. The Camino, Placerville & Lake Tahoe, which clears about $6,000 annually, services two northern California sawmills. The Virginia Blue Ridge Railway, only 17 miles long, does most of its business hauling bulk freight for a quarry and an American Cyanamid plant in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In the interest of self-survival, the short lines are often even more aggressive than their big brothers. When the failure of local industries threatened its existence, Maine's Belfast & Moosehead Lake built a chicken-feed plant along its line, leased it to an operator and began a feed haul from the plant to the Maine Central. In Texas, where every one of the 13 short-line railroads is making a profit, Veteran Railroader Joseph P. Kerr bought the tenmile, three-diesel Georgetown Railroad five years ago, persuaded nearly a dozen plants to locate along his line, and last year netted $118,000.

Linking North & South. Some lines prosper because of quirks of nature or of men. The biggest, busiest and most profitable of the bridge roads is the 129-year-old Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac, whose 117-mile main line between Washington and Richmond--protected from competition in earlier decades by its part-owner, the state of Virginia--is still the only coastal link between North and South. All North-South traffic takes the R.F. & P.; over it daily thunder 23 passenger trains and ten freights bound from one to another of the six Class I roads (the Pennsy, the Southern, and the merging C. & O.-B. & O. and Atlantic Coast Line-Seaboard) that have controlled it jointly since 1901. Gathering 80% of its traffic from its bridge operation, the road last year cleared about $4,000,000 on operating revenues of $24 million.

For all their glamour and hustle, short lines will go on being short. Their less than 2% share of total rail revenues last year was a tiny tweet amid the mighty roar of the main lines. Mergers, of course, still take place. The Lehigh & Susquehanna disappeared last year into the Reading, and the Mohoning & Shenango into the New York Central. But one thing is certain: in 1964, the nation's short lines are too various, too scattered--and too content with their tiny place in the sun--for another Pennsy or Central ever to emerge from them.

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