may have been changes, but here again we don't think a case had been made for safety there.

Mr. MACDONALD. I don't want to get, if you will pardon me, off the track because we are not hearing that bill, but I was very surprised when Mr. Menk stated that the Federal Government "has been right in enacting much legislation and in imposing certain-Federal-regulation on industries where a given need is plain and where only governmental action can bring relief," and I am now quoting from your statement on page 5.

But I also recall, because I asked the gentleman to supply the information, and I don't know if it was Mr. Chesser, but someone testified that there had been 7,000 accidents during one year, in the last year. Don't you think that 7,000 accidents is a rather substantial number?

Mr. MENK. Yes, sir.

Mr. MACDONALD. In that case, if nothing is being done to prevent these accidents, don't you think the Federal Government should set up some standards to be followed if, obviously, the States aren't doing so?

Mr. MENK. I don't know what he related the 7,000 accidents to. We also put some testimony in the next day with a witness representing the industry which broke down these figures, but I understand Mr. Boyd yesterday said the railroads were extremely interested in safety, and to say that nothing is being done is certainly not a fair statement. We have a tremendous safety program.

Mr. MACDONALD. I am not saying that nothing is being done. What I am saying is what has been done isn't enough if there are 7,000 accidents during a given year. You protest that your standards are very high. I don't ride your railroad so that I don't know whether they are or not. I just take your word for it, but what would be wrong with other railroads coming up to the standard that you say that you maintain because obviously something must be wrong if there are 7,000 accidents a year.

Mr. MENK. First of all, I don't think our standards are any higher or any lower on our railroad. On our railroad we had 406 reportable accidents in the year 1967. Of that number, after thorough investigation, a great number were as a result of employee negligence. People are human, and human beings make mistakes.

In the year 1967 in train accidents there were four injured, employee negligence caused three, and other causes, one. There were 245 train service accidents where employee negligence was developed as the cause for 155 and other causes were 96.

I agree that nobody should get hurt, nobody should get killed, but how in the world we are going to, by legislation, make people safethere is nothing wrong with the standards that we have on the railroad today, sir. The standards are fine. The rules are the best that can be devised, and we can't have a supervisor standing behind every employee on the railroad to see that he complies with them.

Mr. MACDONALD. I don't mean to interrupt you, but my time is limited. I don't think that it is probably a very good rule if the testimony I heard given about this new type of coupling operation is correct. It seems to me to be a constant hazard.

Do you have that kind of coupling?

Mr. MENK. I didn't hear the testimony and didn't see it. What is the coupling?

Mr. MACDONALD. Well, as I recall it, and it was a week or 10 days ago now, the railroads put through a type of coupling that goes to the side instead of joining on, and I am obviously not an employee of the railroads and never have been but according to testimony it sideswiped many employees, caused many casualties to hands and caused some deaths.

Mr. Chessner is sitting behind and he can tell you what type it is. Mr. MENK. Oh, cushion underframe. I don't quite agree. I of course don't agree with Mr. Chesser that if the employees do the coupling function with minimum precaution that they will be injured. This isn't any coupler that goes out the side or anything like that.

It is the same coupler except it is encased in an underframe that provides cushioning for the car. It is just simply a long drawbar and I assume he is talking about the pin lifters.

At any rate, I don't believe that these long drawbars are cause for personal injury in themselves if the employee maintains the caution that he should maintain. Working on a railroad is a dangerous thing just like being a housewife is a dangerous thing.

Mr. MACDONALD. Right. I quite agree with you and this is why there are hearings. Perhaps the bill isn't drawn in the best possible way. It is a fairly all-encompassing bill and this is what the hearings are held for so that we sitting here can hear testimony in confrontation.

You say one thing and the brotherhoods say another and we have to make up our minds as to what is the true fact and not 100 percent believe you or 100 percent believe the other side but just take a preponderance of the evidence and thereafter pass out a bill which will do what it is intended to do.

My last question is this: If you spent as many million dollars as you say you have, and I believe you, on safety, what makes you think that the DOT can come up with tougher regulations than you selfregulate yourself and, if you are self-regulated up to the standards of this bill, then it wouldn't really affect you one way or the other, would it?

Mr. MENK. I have no idea, sir what regulations they are going to come up with. The bill doesn't say.

Mr. MACDONALD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Well, hypothetically if your standards are so high that you have few casualties as you state you do have, wouldn't it seem unreasonable that DOT would come up with standards that you would have to work your own standards up to. Maybe they are not after the type of operation that you are president of. Maybe they are after some other sort of operation in which the State boards which regulate them perhaps are not as tough as the States through which your trains go.

Mr. MENK. Well, the only thing I can say, sir, is that you said maybe they are not. I don't know what they are after, the bill doesn't say. We don't know how the standards are to be set. We resist the indication in the bill that our own employees are going to be the people that administer it, the union employees, if you please. I think anybody on this committee can see that this could cause in my opinion utter chaos. For instance, we have got 115-pound rail which we think is perfectly adequate and the record shows it is adequate. The possibility could exist that somebody in the DOT and maybe not as knowledgeable,

probably not as knowledgeable in our business as we are, could come along and say, "You have to lay all 132-pound rail," when it costs $150 a mile to lay 132-pound rail, for no reason. I admit this is hypothetical and may be farfetched.

Mr. MACDONALD. I agree.

Mr. MENK. In the reading of the bill I don't think it can be refuted that they might have the authority to do it.

Mr. MACDONALD. I would doubt it very much.

Mr. MENK. I would too, sir.

Mr. FRIEDEL. Thank you, Mr. Macdonald.

Mr. Devine.

Mr. DEVINE. I have no questions.

Mr. FRIEDEL. Mr. Dingell.

Mr. DINGELL. I have no questions.

Mr. FRIEDEL. Mr. Brown.

Mr. BROWN. I do have some questions, Mr. Chairman, and I would like to ask that you look at this booklet.

Do you have a copy of that?

Mr. MOLONEY. Mr. Homer's presentation.

Mr. BROWN. Yes, a supplementary memorandum, the "Railroad Safety Record." This has raised a number of questions for me which I would like to go over briefly with you if I could.

I think that the most economical way, from the standpoint of time, is with reference to the tables. I won't press the question of No. 3. Í think that is a matter for discussion some other time. But I do want to ask a question on table 3 because you have just made reference to the average weight of rail per yard. Why has that changed? Mr. MENK. Why has the average weight gone up?

Mr. BROWN. Yes.

Mr. MENK. Because of heavy traffic, longer trains; because of the technology that the steel companies have benefitted by; because of heavier wear on the rail. It wears longer than lighter rail.

Mr. BROWN. Does this make a stronger rail?

Mr. MENK. Yes.

Mr. BROWN. Why has there been so little new rail laid according to the statistics on table 3?

Mr. MENK. Well, counsel just handed me a statement here. I suppose you want to stay with this one.

When we lay new rail the practice is to take the rail out that has not been worn out but it is accepted that it has weaknesses at the joint where the batter occurs, to take the old rail out and go through a process of what they call propping which takes off about 30 inches or so off the end and then they redrill the bolt holes and relay it.

So if you happen to talk about rail you talk about the new rail that is laid and in addition to upgrading of the secondary lines.

In 1961 there was 287,878 tons of new rail laid; in 1967, 406,060 according to our record.

Secondhand rail, which is this replacement rail, 470,391 tons in 1961 and 581,091 in 1967. So that, we have been relaying consistently more rail.

Another thing, Mr. Brown, that happened is that we have made ourselves available to several processes. First we have better detection.

Secondly, as I explained, the new rail we laid is practically fissure free. We don't have the problems we had years ago.

Mr. BROWN. Before you go any further, let me just make a point. You select 1961 and 1967 in the figures you just gave. However, going back to the forties and the early fifties, the amount of new rail laid and the amount of replacement rail laid, although the figures are not shown here, seems to be much higher or in the area of 1945-1,822,000 short tons of new rail laid.

Why that radical change?

Mr. MENK. Well, during the war we had tremendous traffic. As a result of the war the railroads, as all of us know, were actually overburdened with traffic and, of course, use is what wears rail out. So that during the war period and in the immediate postwar period it was necessary to lay or relay unusually high amounts of rail.

We got caught up and then of course we went through a sort of, in the late fifties, economic decline and didn't have the money to buy rail. But we got pretty well caught up on not only rail but crosstie insertions and now we are at a period where in my judgment at least from my experience we are laying enough rail every year so that the railroad will be perpetually maintained at the level that will handle the traffic that it bears.

Mr. BROWN. The crossties laid in replacements seem to have declined rather regularly from the total of 50 or 60 million crossties. back in the thirties. The percentage of crossties replaced has gone down from 5.9 to 1.6 percent in recent years.

Does this speak to less miles of track, or certainly not the percentage decline. Is there any reason for the reduction in tie replacement?

Mr. MENK. The treating process for wood ties has become much more effective. In fact a lot of these ties back in the thirties I would suspect were untreated white oak ties which deteriorate in a matter of 10, 12, or 15 years. We have raised the average life of a crosstie now by reason of better treating processes, injection treating, to something between 39 and 40 years per tie.

We have also because of our cyclical maintenance where we go over the track about every 6 or 7 years, much better statistics and we do a better job of inspecting the ties and taking them out. I might say also that to a very small extent now concrete ties are coming into being and their life is estimated at something over 50 years so that the life of a tie is longer which results in fewer insertions per year.

Mr. BROWN. Let me move on to another area although I want to ask one final question.

I gather that the laying of heavier weight rail for some reason requires its replacement less often. It seems to me that if we got heavier weight rail because we got heavier traffic they might wear out at the same rate.

Mr. MENK. There is a considerable difference between 112-pound which used to be generally the standard and 132-pound rail.

I couldn't support this by any statistics I have here but in my opinion the volume hasn't increased to the extent of equalling the heavier weights of rail and the techniques that we are using for grinding down rail and so forth and improving the whole structure of the track, and the mechanization we have, I feel that this would be significant.

I think the rail is going to last a lot longer under the practices we have now for handling it.

Mr. BROWN. Let me move on to table 4 which talks about mileage protected by centralized traffic control for all railways of the United States. The percentage protected is not indicated here but my question is: Is centralized traffic control good or bad or more safe or less safe? Mr. MENK. Well, CTC is much safer than the old train order methods. I can speak with some authority on that. I am an old train dispatcher myself. Where the switches are remotely controlled and where you have built-in signal indications which provide the speeds that you go and gives you advance warning of being able to stop, CTC has been a great boon to safety, again assuming that the employee complies with the rules.

In CTC a man could go by a red signal. He wouldn't do it but he could go by at 60 miles an hour just as he can in train order territory. Mr. BROWN. I gather that there is little significant, if any, controversy between unions and rail management about centralized traffic control and its advantages.

Mr. MENK. I think not.

Mr. BROWN. What about radio installations? I got the impression that there was some dispute from the safety standpoint on the advantages of radio installations between railway labor and rail operators. Mr. MENK. Mr. Crotty so testified in bringing out cases where some accidents had occurred which he alleged were the result of improper use of radio,

There again the radio in maintenance of way is a secondary device. I consider it a safety device. I made a little demonstration the other day of the way they are using train service. It use to be if you had 100 cars that the brakeman would get out on a hill and climb a bluff and get on top and signal them back.

Now, all he does is take his radio and say, "Back up four cars, three cars, two cars," and the coupling is made. Certainly anybody will agree that this is much safer than the old hand way.

Mr. BROWN. Let me move on to table 6. I think, perhaps, the indictment here on the question of safety is a little more specific.

Why has the percentage of defective freight cars increased so significantly since the period 1931-66 and then, if I may ask the next question which is a converse of that, why has the percentage of defective locomotives not improved significantly?

It seems to be in a rather stable level. Then if you will look at the next page, why the increase in the number of locomotives ordered out of service on table 7, the far side of table 7. This would indicate that while the percent of locomotives found defective has not substantially changed in all years taken together, the number of locomotives ordered out of service as a result of those defects has increased. Is that because there are more locomotives, because there are less locomotives, or because the defects were found to be more severe ?

Mr. MENK. Well, the diesel locomotive is a relatively new machine. It didn't come into heavy use until about 1947 which was when we started buying diesel locomotives in great volume.

I would suppose that the locomotives ordered out of service has increased because those locomotives are getting older, the fleet has aged in its entirety and that

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