Back on the Rails

As more and more people cram into the big cities, the problem of moving them from place to place becomes in creasingly acute. More autos are not the answer: in some big cities, cars often have to move at the pace of a slow walk. Desperate for a way to reduce the growing crush, cities are seeking to improve their mass transit with new ideas, new systems and new equipment. Last week American Machine & Foundry announced that 18 U.S. cities are considering elevated monorail systems. Pittsburgh is building a one-mile experimental "skybus" expressway over which remote-control trains of rubber-tired buses will be guided by an I-shaped center rail. And the President fortnight ago ordered the Commerce Department to study plans for a high speed (about 150 m.p.h.) rail service along the 380-mile "megalopolis" between Boston and Washington. It would cut rail time from 8 1/2 hours to four.

Comfort & Speed. All this activity --and a surge in orders for more conventional equipment -- has transformed the nation's transit-car makers from a sick industry only five years ago into a healthy one today. The three major carbuilders this year expect to ship 700 cars v. an average of 425 cars per year since 1956. Last week the New York City Transit Authority tested twelve newly delivered stainless-steel subway cars made by Philadelphia's Budd Co., the first of 600 cars-- at $114,700 each -- that will be the largest subway order in history. The St. Louis Car division of General Steel Industries is busy building 162 air-conditioned aluminum cars for the New York Port Authority's Hudson Tube line to New Jersey, this month completed the last of 430 picture-windowed World's Fair cars for the New York subway. Pullman-Standard is building 180 air-conditioned, 65-m.p.h. cars for the Chicago Transit Authority.

Up to now, the boomlet has come chiefly from the five big U.S. cities that still have rapid rail transit: New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia. But Atlanta and Washington, D.C., are planning new systems, Philadelphia is already engineering one, and even Los Angeles is toying with the idea. San Francisco, having broken ground for a three-county, $925 million system -- the nation's biggest in more than half a century -- is testing four systems of computer-controlled train operation proposed by General Electric, Westinghouse Electric, Westinghouse Air Brake and General Signal. With all this going on, industry experts predict that annual sales of all types of transit equipment will soar from today's $100 million to $660 million by 1980.

Buying at Home. The newest spur to transit building comes from the Administration, which has asked Congress for a $225 million appropriation to get the 1964 Mass Transit Act rolling. The law is expected to stimulate $600 million worth of transit-car purchases over a decade, also mean an additional $400 million in sales for such busbuilders as General Motors and the Flxible Co. of Dayton. Whatever the total, U.S. equipment makers will get all of it. Congress tacked a little-noticed "Buy American" proviso into the law.

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