Rolling Rents

Champ Carry, the hefty (6 ft., 220 Ibs.) president of Pullman, Inc. took an agonized look at his freight-car orders one day last fall. The big postwar backlog of freight-car orders had nearly disappeared, and Pullman's three freight-car plants had all but shut down. Yet Carry knew that U.S. railroads needed freight cars; more than half of the 1,762,239 cars in the U.S. are rattling antiques more than 20 years old. There was plenty of business if Carry could find" someone with the money to finance car buying for the cash-short railroads.

Carry found his man in white-thatched, pink-cheeked Thomas I. Parkinson, president of the $5.3 billion Equitable Life Assurance Society. Last week Parkinson announced a smart new solution to the problem. Equitable will buy cars from Pullman and other manufacturers (in payments spread over five years), and lease them to railroads on 15-year contracts. Gossip among railroad men was that the rent will be less than the $1.75 a day which roads now charge when they swap each other's equipment. When the contracts expire, the roads may return the cars to Equitable, or rent them for another ten years at 20-c- a day. "We think," said Carry, "that the railroads will see that it will cost less to rent modern cars than to repair and maintain aged ones." At week's end Champ Carry, who calls most rail presidents by their first names, was ready to sign up his first major railroad under Equitable's plan.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.