“Twice in one month recently, they sent me power (locomotives) that I rejected because they had no brakes or some other kind of mechanical malfunction.”īennie Loudermilk, a Bakersfield engineer since 1981, said locomotives used to be checked “on a daily basis by pipe fitters, electricians and machinists. “In the maintenance area, they just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and we feel it,” said Indio engineer Ray Brown, a Southern Pacific employee since 1961. Pera said the move represented a “centralization effort” permitted because of the greater efficiency of today’s locomotives: “They don’t need attention every 300 miles like they used to,” he said.īut many engineers disagree, saying the powerful machines they pilot are frequently in disrepair because they do not receive the consistent mechanical care they once did.
The railroad also shut down the bulk of its outlying maintenance yards, consolidating repair work at four major facilities-Roseville and Colton in California, Houston and Pine Bluff, Ark. Miles and miles of track were closed, hundreds of freight cars and locomotives were retired, and 5,000 jobs were cut through early retirement and an employee buyout plan that offered workers a one-time payment to leave. To survive the tough times, the railroad launched a massive cost-cutting program. In the three years that the merger effort was afoot, Southern Pacific lost about 10% of its revenues-or $200 million-annually. With its future uncertain, Southern Pacific had little motivation to expand, modernize or innovate, and the railroad’s financial performance was “lackluster” at best, said Benham, the New York consultant. It was almost debilitating,” company spokesman Jerry Pera said. It was a painful period for Southern Pacific: “There was tremendous demoralization among employees. then sought to merge its rail lines, but that bid was rejected in 1986 by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which concluded that the combination would be “anti-competitive.” A subsequent appeal also was denied, and the ICC ultimately ordered that one of the two railroads be sold. The newly formed Santa Fe Southern Pacific Corp. In 1983, Southern Pacific’s corporate parent merged with the owner of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. “Southern Pacific just hasn’t had as many of the profitable routes and commodities as some of its competitors.”Ĭompounding these troubles has been an extended bureaucratic stalemate over the railroad’s ownership. Keeler, a UC Berkeley economist who wrote a book about the railroad industry for the Brookings Institution. “The railroads that do well have reliable, profitable traffic like coal and concentrate it heavily along certain routes,” said Theodore E. Lumber, for example, is a major product hauled on its routes out of the Pacific Northwest, and the carrier is thus at risk during dips in construction. Unlike many other large railroads, which can count on a steady cargo like coal, Southern Pacific’s traffic base has proven more vulnerable to economic slumps and competition from trucking, analysts say. Once the acknowledged king of the rails in the West, Southern Pacific saw its star tumble in this decade, a period marked by mounting competition and uncertainty over the freight line’s corporate fate. The 1980s have not been kind to the Southern Pacific Transportation Co. “Things were looking brighter and everyone was feeling so much better and then, pow!” “It was sort of like a sock in the stomach,” one veteran trainman said of the crash. Their deaths, colleagues say, provided an ugly reminder that problems remain. On that day, the freight train bound for Long Beach derailed, leaving crewmen Everett Crown and Alan Riess crushed in a fist of mangled steel. In just eight months, many employees say, Southern Pacific has become an entirely new place to work, and optimism had been running deep-until May 12. Railroad spokesmen staunchly deny that even at its darkest days Southern Pacific ever allowed maintenance to deteriorate to a point where safety was at stake, and they point with pride to recent changes. Purchased in October by Denver-based Rio Grande Industries Inc., Southern Pacific has pledged to improve service to disgruntled shippers, expand and modernize its oft-maligned fleet of locomotives and sweeten unusually bitter relations between management and workers. Ironically, the San Bernardino wreck-one of the most destructive train disasters in recent history-comes as Southern Pacific is embarking on a course designed to polish its sullied image and retrieve the respect and business that have ebbed away in recent years. “Since 1983, (Southern Pacific) has operated like a disabled ship,” concluded Isabel Benham, a New York railroad consultant, in a report last year on the carrier’s financial woes.
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