My Forty Years with Ford

14. Mr. Ford Buys a Railroad

CHAPTER 14 Mr. Ford Buys a Railroad all the many fantastic things the Ford Motor Company tackled, I put the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railroad at the top of the list. The idea of buying this worndown -to-the-flanges, 38o-mile line was fantastic. Equally fantastic was the achievement of nonrailroad men in making the road pay and in selling out at a 250 per cent profit. Behind it, then a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, was the threat of Federal regulation and compulsion that was to plague Henry Ford so much in later years. We automobile men didn't want to run a railroad, but we were driven to it because this appeared the best solution to a vexing problem. By 1920, Ford was producing a million cars a year—more than the railroads could swiftly deliver. The bottleneck was freight shipments. The country had emerged from a world war with a badly run-down railroad system just then being turned back to private ownership after government operation. Especially in the Detroit area, where the automobile industry was concentrated, service and available rolling stock were at their worst. With motor transport on the increase and threatening their revenues, railways had little incentive to help auto manufacturers. 180 MR. FORD BUYS A RAILROAD l8l Still worse was the delay in getting shipments through to our branches over the country. The lockup of goods in transit piled up, and the money tied up by these delays was far above our experience and then current estimates. The greater the delay in shipment of materialsthe more we had to enlarge our inventories. This in turn necessitated ordering more materials and added further to freight delays. To break this vicious circle and keep our supplies moving, our traffic department had men stationed at every interchange where one rail line met or crossed another. Our branches had traffic men haunting freight marshaling yards in their territory. And as soon as spotters located cars with "Ford Motor Company" on their destination labels, they went after the railroad people with blood in their eyes and fire on their tongues. Irregular delivery of parts to our branch assembly plants raised operation costs and wrecked schedules of delivery to dealers. Superhighways and haulaway cars with half a dozen new autos riding them piggyback were then hardly known. Even so, throngs of dealers came to Detroit for delivery of cars at the factory and drove away over the road to their agencies. This irregular demand knocked orderly operation of our Highland Park and Rouge assembly lines galley-west, and there was much biting of nails and shattering of the Third Commandment over this tangled problem. The solution came by accident and in a way that had never occurred to the many agile minds pondering the situation. Construction of the River Rouge plant depended upon widening and dredging the river, which was authorized by an act of Congress. But before shipping could move up the Rouge, several stationary highway and railway bridges had to be replaced by new bascule bridges of a type wherein the roadway across the stream was weighted at one end and so delicately balanced that it lifted like a box lid to allow the vessel to pass through the channel. 182 MY FORTY YEARS WITH FORD Among the railway crossings to be removed and replaced was one which took tracks of the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railroad over River Rouge to Zug Island. This road was a rattletrap freight route connecting Detroit and Toledo with the Ohio River. Its president, Frederick Osborn, met Frank Klingensmith, our treasurer, in New York. "The project to widen and dredge the River Rouge," he said, "has caused a crisis for us. Our road lost money during the war, my father paid its deficits out of his own pocket for two years and has decided he won't do so any more. A new bridge will cost $400,000 and no banking house will take our bonds for that amount." Since Ford Motor Company had initiated the River Rouge improvement, Osborn suggested that it buy the necessary $400,000 of bonds. Klingensmith realized that any more delay would hold up the river widening; that if the D. T. & I. couldn't raise the money there'd be no drawbridge. "Come on out to Dearborn," he said to Osborn, "and explain this matter to Mr. Ford." When Osborn went to...