Railroads: Presidential Turntable

U.S. railroads are learning to shift their presidents as smoothly as they shuffle freight cars in pushbutton yards. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad needed to find a replacement for Louis W. Menk, a much-sought-after executive who moved to the presidency of the Northern Pacific Railway early this month. So the Burlington last week simply reached around the corner from its headquarters, near Chicago’s Union Station. Its choice: William John Quinn, 55, president of the rival Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. Quinn stuffed his briefcase a bit more than usual shortly before noon on the day of his election, walked around the block and took up his new job.

Grandson of a locomotive engineer, son of a prominent trial lawyer, Quinn got into railroading as a lawyer for the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (now officially called the Soo Line), went to the Milwaukee in 1954 as general solicitor. As its president since 1958, he concentrated on putting the 10,524-mile Milwaukee road in favorable shape for a merger (now pending before the Interstate Commerce Commission) with its chief competitor, the Chicago & North Western Railway. Ironically, he also battled against another proposed merger he now must help to promote: that of the 11,800-mile Burlington with the Northern Pacific and Great Northern. While at the Milwaukee, Quinn argued so persuasively that the Northern Pacific-Great Northern-Burlington get-together would hurt the Milwaukee that the ICC last April turned it down. A petition for reconsideration is pending.

After accepting Quinn’s resignation, the Milwaukee directors immediately picked his onetime aide, Curtiss Edmund Crippen, 58, to succeed him. “I’ve been building for this job since 1930,” says Crippen, who began working on the Milwaukee that year as the $125-a-month boss of a field-survey crew. A civil engineer (Minnesota, ’30), he rose through operating jobs to be general manager of western lines, became Quinn’s assistant in 1958, and three years later moved up to vice president of finance and accounting. Crippen plans to push his own road’s merger “with every resource,” and to keep fighting the Burlington’s. Though each of the old associates delicately insists that he does not want to hamper the other, a collision seems inevitable.