Transport: Store-to-Door Delay

Truckmen say that railroads are foolish to bewail the loss of less-than-carload shipments to the highways because the roads must handle such freight at a loss anyway. Railroadmen, on the other hand, want all the business they can get. With the Interstate Commerce Commission’s approval, a group of roads in the West and Southwest last January started “store-to-door” service. At both ends of the rail haul the roads furnished trucks to pick up or deliver freight free of charge.

Although freight rates are lower and truck costs higher in the East, the store-to-door scheme seemed like a good thing to Eastern roads. For two years the Pennsylvania had been providing store-to-door service at a nominal additional charge. The New York Central, Erie, and Baltimore & Ohio made plans for free pick-up and delivery, with the added provision that a shipper who wanted to use his own trucks was to get a rate discount of 5¢ per 100 Ib. Encountering no I. C. C. objections, these three roads were to start service last week. A flurry of advertising appeared. B. & O. arranged for its trucking to be handled by Keeshin Cartage Co., a subsidiary of the mushroom transcontinental trucking empire of formidable John Louis Keeshin (TIME, Sept. 2 et seq.).

Since the other roads were setting up their own dray services, independent truckmen raised a mighty howl to the I. C. C. The Express Owners Association of New York declared that the store-to-door plan would double the railroads’ cost of handling small freight without turning up a dollar of new revenue, implied that it was a barefaced truck-busting trick. “Monopoly! Discrimination! Cutthroat competition!” were among the charges displayed on their trucks. Loudest of all came the cry of “Rebate!”—that nasty word which has stirred up so much legislative trouble for the roads in the past. Threatened, if the plan went into effect, was a strike of New York’s 5,000 truck operators and their 24,000 employes. The I. C. C.’s ten members, political appointees all, pondered. Fifteen hours before the service was scheduled to start, the Commission suspended its permission for store-to-door delivery until Nov. 1, said it would study the matter, hold further hearings.

As truckmen threw hats in air, it was the railroads’ turn to howl. More vociferous still were the protests of shippers who saw their chance for lower store-to-door costs go glimmering.