Cars Loadable

U. S. railwaymen who are proud of their prestige breathed freely last week for the first time since the middle of October. They felt safer because their business was falling off--weekly carloadings were down from October's peak of 861,198 to 785,901. The slump spelled no disaster to U. S. business, for it was a seasonal drop (adjusted)

H. L. Hamilton, who sold G. M. on the idea of going into the business and has been smart enough to carry on as Electro-Motive's president, explains: each oil-burning Diesel switcher brings its purchaser an average yearly operating saving of about $17,000. Sour-grapes reason given by Hamilton's competitors: with the amount of traffic which General Motors can dangle before the railroads, it could sell them dog sleds.

A story was going the rounds last fortnight that General Motors liked the railroad equipment business well enough to go in further, thought it was a good idea to put some millions of its enormous resources into buying a piece of Pullman Co. Pullman, No. 1 freight and passenger car builder, can produce 2,370 passenger cars a year, 74,700 freight cars. Conservative railroadmen shuddered, in spite of G. M.'s cheap financing aid, efficient engineering methods, at the idea that an automobile outsider should shoulder into the railroad aristocracy. To not so spry U. S. rail-engineering, it would hold out the promise of a good shaking up at the hands of a top-notch engineering organization.

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