SEQUELS: Working on the Railroad

Patrons of the nation’s most ill-run railroad got encouraging news last week. Major General William H. Draper Jr., onetime (1947-49) Under Secretary of the Army, was expected to be appointed sole trustee of the bankrupt Long Island Rail Road, which in the past nine months, in two accidents, has killed no passengers.

Draper, 56, amateur magician and Wall Street investment banker, doesn’t know how to run a railroad, but he does know how to run a business (he is vice president of Dillon, Read & Co., was General Clay’s economic expert in Germany).

Any improvements Draper might make would be welcomed by case-hardened daily commuters—300,000 of them scattered from Montauk to Manhattan. But some of the jostled and jaded, who have been through Long Island “reorganizations” before, reserved judgment when they heard that Draper might keep resigned Trustee David Smucker as operating manager. Smucker became operating head of the Long Island in 1949, was on the job at the time of both wrecks.