UPS had a big sorting terminal in Springfield MA. When I was with RoadRailer in the early 1980's and we were working with UPS to propose a Conrail Roadrailer network, the principal nodes initially were to be North Jersey or NYC (serving UPS Secaucus), Worcester (serving UPS Springfield and Boston generally), Toledo (serving UPS Toledo) and Chicago (UPS Chicago--don't recall exactly where that UPS terminal was located). A great plan, nixed by CR because they wanted to protect their piggyback operation. EL would have gone along with it, whether for the right reasons or because they had no choice. In 1981 the UPS people often waxed nostaglic over the service they got from EL. The flip side of the story is that UPS drank EL's blood during the early 1970s with the rates they extracted. $178 per trailer between Chicago and NY is the number that sticks in my mind. Conrail's intermodal department was fiercely determined to obtain the true value of what they produced and by 1981 I believe UPS understood that this was necessary. The death-rattle shakeout of an overbuilt Eastern rail network could deliver windfall benefits to the customer only so long, especially with the Interstate highway expansion nipping at their heels. I understood from RoadRailer founder Bob Reebie that Spector bought into EL (about 1962?) because the stock was beaten down, but that the Interstate expansion pretty much overtook any hope of using EL for Plan I motor carrier freight other than UPS. It was a misbegotten idea anyway. The LTL truckers needed something like 20-22 hours of railroad running time between NY and Chicago to deliver second morning LTL. NYC could do it, and did, with the SuperVan trains. EL found out that they could not do much better than 24 hours, and that was only with 60 MPH track speed for trains under 4,000 tons, which really was not sustainable on 112 and 115RE stick rail with lots of curves, as Maxwell concluded about 1966. Such books as Fred Frailey's Blue Streak Merchandise make it fairly clear that there was a nationwide "speed race" during the early Sixties, which was the only way many railroads knew how to respond to the loss of motor carrier traffic to the expanding Interstates and related highways. There is something both pathetic and admirable that this was the only way they knew how to respond. Jim Gerofsky--I have just reviewed your train symbol list. Thank you for the effort you put into it. It brings a lot of things into focus for those who are interested in freight operations and markets. I can appreciate how much work it entailed. WDB The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List Sponsored by the ELH&TS http://www.elhts.org ------------------------------
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