Freight With Next Morning Delivery
President Conway knew that the real key to financial survival by the new C&LE was to dramatically improve freight business and revenues. Freight facilities were rebuilt and relocated, and better rolling stock was acquired. Freight trains also faced the same limitations as the line's passenger cars with operation on downtown streets, often a source of complaints by town councils. See photo, for an example of an interurban's tight turn at town corners. Freight and express business steadily improved as measured by documented tonnage increases each year. The line's freight agents and sales force worked hard to sell the C&LE to shippers and were able to take business away from the steam railroads by guaranteeing overnight delivery by 8am the next morning, something that the competing steam railroads could not do. This is impressive considering that the distance from Cincinnati to Toledo was around 200 miles and from Toledo to Cleveland another 115. The travel time plus terminal transfer time Cincinnati to Cleveland was accomplished from 5pm the prior evening to 8am the next morning. Deliveries were so fast and predictable that a General Motors refrigerator plant in Moraine City (near Dayton) shifted to the C&LE as its primary shipper and provided the C&LE with in-plant loading tracks. Both freight and passenger revenues jumped and the C&LE appeared to have a good future, but as the Depression deepened, revenues and profits began to fall.
Read more about this topic: Cincinnati And Lake Erie Railroad
Famous quotes containing the words freight, morning and/or delivery:
“Man, she looked as though she’d been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world. Yet, in spite of this, I got the impression of beauty. Not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about when you’re with your wife. But a natural beauty. A beauty that’s almost homely because it’s so real.”
—Martin Goldsmith, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Al Roberts (Tom Neal)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There was no speculation so promising, or at the same time so praisworthy, as the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)