The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry

2. Meeting the Blue-Eyed Jew from Minnesota

2 Meeting the Blue-Eyed Jew from Minnesota Life on the Southern Railway in the mid-1960s was interesting for McClellan because this was one of the most progressive railroads in the United States. It was automating its maintenance operations , both in the shops and on the tracks themselves. McClellan’s boss, Bob Hamilton, had outraged his competitors at all the other railroads by developing a new jumbo hopper car that enabled the railroad to cut the price it charged for hauling feed grain from the Midwest to the chicken farmers of the Southeast. The marketing department was building the first computer system for tracking the movement of freight cars, three giant IBM computers in a massive operations room atop an old freight warehouse in downtown Atlanta. Overseen by a former air force colonel, the computer system was based on the one used by the Strategic Air Command to track its bombers. The computer center was tracking thousands of freight cars so that any shipper could call the Southern and find out where his carload of merchandise was, right down to the train it was on and the station it had just left. For all that, McClellan was getting bored. The Southern was relatively well-heeled, basking in the affluence of the Sun Belt, 11 Meeting the Blue-Eyed Jew from Minnesota where new plants seemed to be opening every month and transportation companies were sitting on markets they had never dreamt of. This was actually a drawback for someone like McClellan , because profitable railroads tend to be highly disciplined and comparatively predictable. A less affluent company seemed to harbor more venturesome people, and in 1966, after four years at the Southern, McClellan took a job as an analyst at the New York Central System. His boss, marketing vice president Bob Hamilton , had adopted McClellan, sometimes breaking the railroad’s rules to get him special passes to ride trains, and McClellan was showing no appreciation. Hamilton was so angry when McClellan resigned that he threw an ashtray at him. The lure that really made him decide to move had nothing to do with his job or the working atmosphere. He went because the New York Central promised he would have an engine pass that would get him not merely onto passenger trains but into the cabs of all the Central’s locomotives, from its fastest passenger train to its slowest freight. It was a senseless reason for a job change, but it was a fitting prelude to the odyssey upon which he was embarking . He was joining a company known for its free-wheeling marketing department, thanks to its president, a Jew from Minnesota with piercing blue eyes named Alfred E. Perlman. A man who did not hide his impressive brilliance, Perlman, like McClellan, had fallen in love with trains as a child. He had worked his way through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a summer section hand on the Northern Pacific, and after he was graduated he went back to the NP, eventually becoming a maintenance supervisor . Now he was one of the first Jews ever to lead one of those bastions of WASP America, a major railroad. Perlman had taken charge of the Central in 1954 after a flamboyant Wall Street maverick named Robert R. Young had won a seven-year takeover battle for the line. At the time the Central was one of the world’s most vaunted carriers, the gold-plated legacy of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and his family. When he found he was going to win the proxy fight, Young had begun looking for an innovative operating man to be the Central’s president. He quickly sought out Perlman, who had turned around the bank- 12 The Men Who Loved Trains rupt Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, and on the evening of May 25, 1954, they met at Young’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers. Young, who had controlled the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway , had annoyed the other industry executives by running ads attacking the fact that U.S. railroads failed to offer coast-to-coast passenger service. He cited the claim that a hog could move all the way across the country without changing cars but a person could not. As soon as they started talking, Perlman swept aside any small talk about their careers or the New York Central and abruptly challenged Young’s claim about...