NEWS that the Supreme Court had approved the merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads was warmly received in the editorial offices of TIME. Nearly half the staffers commute by rail, and many of them brought questions to Associate Editor Spencer Davidson, who was writing the cover story. Did the merger mean that they would soon be riding in newer, cleaner cars? Would the schedules be more reliable? Conductors less surly?

A commuter himself on the Long Island Rail Road, Davidson listened patiently to quite a few gripes and some tall tales fresh from trackside, then told his colleagues that he was not overly optimistic. Little in the research filed by TIME reporters across the country indicated that complaining commuters were in for much immediate relief. In fact, Washington Correspondent Juan Cameron, who interviewed Stuart Saunders, discovered that the busy boss of the country's biggest railroad seldom rides by train himself. He prefers autos or planes, and Cameron suspects he knows the reason. He took a trip in one of the Pennsy's private "company" coaches, and reports that it was spartan, overheated, and far from the sybaritic comforts of the days of the rail barons.

Freight pays more than passengers these days, and freight handling is the railroads' biggest business -- a subject on which Davidson is a home expert. His family playroom in Manhasset, L.I., is monopolized by a vast and ever-expanding model-train layout, on which he and his children vie for time at the controls. "We have all freight cars -- no passenger cars," he says proudly. "It's a very modern railroad."

Senior Editor Robert Shnayerson, who wrote the Essay on auto insurance, also received an adequate supply of free advice from colleagues who happen to be policyholders. He heard all the old tales of hardhearted claim adjusters, sky-high premiums, canceled insurance. Shnayerson sympathized, but when he recounted how he had solved his own automobile problems, he had the distinct feeling, he says, that no one was ready to follow his lead.

A Manhattan apartment dweller, Shnayerson found that his car and its insurance were getting too expensive to justify the trouble of hunting down parking places. "I took direct action," he says. "I drove the bloody thing to the Sanitation Department instead of leaving it on the street--one of maybe five or six citizens who made the effort that year. And on delivering the car, which was still in good running shape, I was met by disbelieving Sanitation men who tried to persuade me either to keep it, sell it, or give it to them. Then they saw I was serious and ordered it sent to the execution grounds on Randalls Island, where in seconds it was mashed into a suitcase-sized blob of steel."

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