(This is a Antique Trains - The Magazine of Railroading, J...)
This is a Antique Trains - The Magazine of Railroading, July 1955. It is in very fine readable condition with general wear due to age and use. It measures 11 x 8 1/4" of interesting info and articles on railroads and trains
https://www.amazon.com/Trains-Magazine-Railroading-Straight-Pennsylvania/dp/B00LOV68VY?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00LOV68VY
He was born on July 8, 1897 in Glen Osborne, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, the son of Frank H. Symes and Clara Heckert. His father was a lifelong employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad (retiring as a baggage master), and the younger Symes resolved to make the railroad his career as well.
After completing Sewickley High School in 1914, he enrolled in a secretarial course at the Carnegie Institute of Technology to prepare for a clerical position.
In 1916 the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) offered him a job in Pittsburgh as clerk and car tracer if he would play on the semiprofessional baseball team it sponsored. He accepted.
In 1920, Symes became chief statistician for the PRR's Cleveland-based Lake Division. Two years later, he entered the operating department--the traditional route to executive management--when he was named division freight movement director.
In 1923, when Clement became general manager of the Central Region (which included the Lake Division), he promoted Symes to regional train movement director.
In 1926, Clement went to the railroad's Philadelphia headquarters as assistant vice-president in charge of operations. Symes soon moved up to become general manager of passenger transportation for the Western Region in Chicago.
In 1929, Symes was transferred in the same capacity to the Eastern Region, based in Philadelphia. When Clement was appointed acting president in 1934, he promoted Symes to chief of freight transportation for the entire railroad. In this capacity Symes became interested in national issues affecting the railroad industry.
He served as a member of President Roosevelt's Eastman committee--created to encourage voluntary reduction of the nation's overbuilt rail network--and in 1935 took a leave of absence from the PRR to serve as the Association of American Railroads' vice-president for operations and maintenance.
Living in Washington, D. C. , for the next four years, Symes had a front-row seat as railroad executives, academics, and politicians discussed various strategies--including consolidations and mergers--to enable railroads to compete more effectively with other modes of transportation. In 1939, Symes returned to the Western Region, first as general manager and then as vice-president.
In 1947, Symes became vice-president of operations, historically one of the final stepping-stones to the railroad's presidency. But he drew fire from his colleagues when he proposed to replace the railroad's 4, 100 steam locomotives with diesels. Clement himself finally embraced the $400 million program, eventually recognizing the economies inherent in the plan. It was a huge undertaking, and the PRR did not fully retire steam until 1957. Meanwhile, the PRR's financial health deteriorated. It recorded its first net operating deficit in 1946, and its postwar operating ratio (the portion of gross revenues used for operations) rarely fell below 85 percent.
Obsolete rolling stock, a physical plant exhausted by wartime demands, competition from highway and air transportation, too many money-losing passenger trains, and the economic decline of the industrial Northeast were but a few of the railroad's difficulties.
In 1949, Clement created the post of board chairman as a way to give up running the railroad but remain a national spokesman for the PRR and the railroad industry. The presidency went to Walter S. Franklin, and Symes became vice-president (executive vice-president in 1952).
In 1954, Symes finally became president. It was once again the railroad's highest office, the chairmanship having been abolished with Clement's retirement in 1951.
He warned that if railroads were not given more flexibility in setting rates, and if government subsidies remained lopsided in favor of highway users and airlines, bankruptcy and government ownership were inevitable. His forecasts went largely unheeded. Finally, Symes returned to an idea that he first studied in the 1930's--consolidation. Mergers, he argued, would allow railroads to eliminate redundant services and facilities and would reduce labor costs.
For the PRR, he proposed in 1957 a merger with archrival New York Central. The two lines had many similarities. They served the same type of industrial customers in the Northeast and Midwest, were heavily burdened by passenger services, operated numerous parallel lines, and were experiencing serious financial problems.
His suggestion initially met with skepticism among New York Central executives. But by 1960, fearing that it might be shut out by other Northeastern roads studying consolidation, the Central opened talks with the PRR. Within two years, the stockholders of both companies had approved the merger, and hearings began before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Symes retired from the PRR on September 30, 1963, shortly before the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) approved the merger with the New York Central. (Since 1959, he had been the company's chairman of the board, a title revived from the Clement era. )
He continued to serve as a PRR director through five years of litigation that followed the ICC's decision. On February 1, 1968, the Pennsylvania and New York Central joined to form the Penn Central. Symes stayed on an additional year as director. The merger failed to produce the results that Symes had promised. The Penn Central continued the downward spiral of its predecessors and in 1971 became the largest American company to that date to enter bankruptcy.
When reorganization plans failed, the federal government--ironically, as Symes had prophesied--stepped in to form the Consolidated Rail Corp. (Conrail) from the Penn Central and other bankrupt Northeastern lines.
The Penn Central fiasco finally convinced Congress of the need for regulatory reform. Bolstered by government deregulation of the railroad industry, Conrail eventually began posting impressive profits--as Symes had predicted railroads would do if given freedom of the marketplace. Symes's thinking about mergers was theoretically sound, but he chose the wrong partner for the PRR.
The Pennsylvania and New York Central were too similar. Their merger magnified their problems while diluting their strengths. Nor, surprisingly, did Symes sufficiently appreciate the depth of the century-old rivalry between the two roads.
"Red team" versus "Green team" clashes undermined management through the Penn Central era. However, the Penn Central set a precedent for numerous subsequent mergers that strengthened the railroad industry and reaped many of the benefits he had envisioned.
Symes died in Feasterville, Pennsylvania.
After becoming a railroad president, Symes pressed forward on three fronts. First, he implemented a modernization program on as large a scale as the railroad's finances would permit. Projects included construction of two facilities in the "world's largest" category: an automated classification yard at Conway, near Pittsburgh, and the Samuel Rea car building and repair shop at Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. The PRR also led the industry in adopting intermodal truck trailer-on-flatcar shipments--Truc-Train, in PRR parlance. Second, Symes preached the gospel of regulatory reform.
(This is a Antique Trains - The Magazine of Railroading, J...)
On September 27, 1919, he married Fern Elizabeth Dick, also a PRR clerk. They had one daughter, Jeanne Doris.
