Pigs & Pigs

Two days after Patrick B. McGinnis chided New Yorkers for "being satisfied to travel in the subways like pigs," homeward-bound commuters last week were packed like porkers into Grand Central Terminal (see cut), awaiting trains delayed more than two hours by a locomotive fire on McGinnis' New York, New Haven & Hartford Rail Road. The fire snarled 20 New Haven trains and 21 New York Central trains that use the same tracks into Grand Central. It was the latest and one of the longest New Haven delays since McGinnis won a heated proxy fight and took over the road in April 1954.

The New Haven shows a $3,300,000 jump in operating income this year, de spite a $1,400,000 drop in passenger revenue. The improvement is at least partly the result of stepped-up freight service, e.g., interline piggyback service (a phrase that wryly amuses sardonic commuters), which was extended last week to the Midwest. The New Haven has laid 27,000 tons of new main-line track in 1955. But it has also shaved its maintenance bill. To maintain 3,200 miles of track and hundreds of bridges and stations, it spent $11,484,819 for the first eight months of 1955 -- $2,400,000 or 17% less than in the same 1954 period.

Pat McGinnis has a personal interest in maintainance: he spends more than half his time riding the New Haven in his comfortably furnished private car.* To most passengers, the most notable change on the New Haven since McGinnis took over has been the bold use of color on its rolling stock and on some Cape Cod and Westchester County stations. Last week McGinnis' dark-haired wife Lucille, a onetime interior decorator, was riding the New Haven with Detroit Architect Minoru Yamasaki, bent on "perking up" the road's dark and dingy stations in what McGinnis calls (he "grey-flannel-suit area," i.e., Connecticut's commuter country. "Hell," explained McGinnis, "for another nickel you might as well make a thing look good."

* Which is always attached to "through express trains running on time; Mr. McGinnis never uses the commuter trains," a spokesman explained recently, denying newspaper stories that the car was on a commuter train stalled for 69 minutes by 1) a washout, 2) engine failure, and 3) bridge construction.

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