http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/13/obituaries/george-alpert-90-ex-president-of-new-haven-line-and-a-lawyer.html?mcubz=3
Nice to see Chet Huntley in a few scenes inside Pennsylvania Station.
C&NW had their act together.
Labour Union was always at loggerheads with indifferent management...lots of strife in those days.
The fine glow, pride and optimism for the future after the war had worn off completely and it was all about $$$'s and nothing else.
New world.
In 1949 I enrolled as a Freshman at MIT in Course Six, Electrical Engineering, with the intention of becoming a railway electrification engineer. I was also interested in music, and starting in my Junior year, started taking acoustics courses, with the idea of improving my hi fi set and enjoying music more. In addition to electrical engineering and some mechanical engineering, along of course with basic physics, mathematics, humanities, in the first half of my Senior year I studied transportation planning with Professor Ballsbaugh. When I asked why the extremely heavy emphasis on highway planning, with a bit on airports and canals and harbors, and very little on railroads, his answer was:
David, railroads have no future in the USA. If you want to become a railway electrification engineer, go to France and become a Frenchman.
But this was after I had already spent a summer as a junior engineer at EMD in LaGrange, had a cab ride in a little Joe, and was a good friend of EMD engineer Bob Konsbrook, who predicted that some day EMD would build electric locomotives. And my having a part-time job designing transformers in Winchester, having a B&M employees pass doing a SB thesis on diesel locomotive load regulator controls. But my Masters thesis was on binaural recording for concert-hall evaluation.
Anyway, Leo Beranek was a wonderful teacher of acoustics at MIT, arranged for my Army service as an ROTC graduate to be devoted primarily to advanced acoustics matters, and ended up being my boss at Bolt Beranek and Newman.
What I learned later was the Ballsbaugh had gone to the railroads to ask for subsidization of his department. They said they were a mature industry and needed no research. GM was happy to provide all the money Ballsbaugh requested.
An acoustical consulting career gave me a lot of wonderful train rides, however.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vau6VsjeyTM
The link is to a 1961 NBC News documentary.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.