Trainman News

By Land, Air and Water

C&O Men Try Out Competitors
To See What Makes Them Tick

OLD POINT COMFORT, Va.— One Chesapeake & Ohio passenger traffic salesman who hitchhiked 225 miles here from Washington to attend the recent departmental staff meeting reported dependability "poor, mainly because of delays at terminal points."

He also said luggage handling was poor, personnel varied and safety questionable, but the 225-mile trip cost him only 55 cents.

You see, he was one of 60 C&O passenger traffic salesmen who came to the parley by all other competitive forms of travel—air, bus, auto, boat and hitchhiking, at the direction of Thomas J. Deegan Jr., C&O vice-president in charge of passenger traffic and public relations, to find out what the competitors had to offer the traveling public.

They picked up plenty of information—so much, in fact, that Deegan announced passenger salesmen and other department officials will be given two weeks a year, in addition to regular vacations, to take a trip by other means of transportation or on other railroads.

"Next year we will have a wealth of material available for our annual meeting which no other railroad in the country will have," Deegan said.

The passenger salesmen found the competitors are doing a good job in some respects, but in many others there is much room for improvement.

In air travel, they found poor handling of baggage at arrival points, and they also reported that transfer and waiting time before departure and between stops sometimes took more time than the plane's actual flight time. Additional costs—taxi and limousine service, extra charges for overweight baggage—upped their total trip costs by as much as one-third of the original cost of the ticket. They found that reconfirming reservations, especially at transfer points, was confusing.

On-Time Performance Bad

Those who rode the buses found the buses didn't maintain too good an on-time performance. Condition of the terminals was poor, there was frequent crowding and delays in boarding buses owing to lack of reservations and long trips were tiresome. Another complaint resulted from poor information service at ticket windows.

Increasing costs because of toll roads and "alarming" driving hazards were reported by the auto group.

One autoist said: "You feel like you're taking your life in your hands when you travel by auto these days, with trucks taking over the roads on weekdays, and the Sunday drivers out on weekends."

The C&O salesmen traveled to the meeting from points in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Louisville, Huntington, Charleston, Washington and Richmond.