James Sloss
James Sloss, who had lived on Chicago's North Shore and was an executive with Sears, Roebuck & Co., Chicago, died in November 1988 at age seventy-eight in Newton, Massachusetts. He had moved, with his spouse Priscilla Stern Sloss, to serve on the MIT engineering faculty in nearby Boston, 1972-82.
Sloss as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1930s had explored in his 1932 bachelor thesis the concept of less than full carload (LCL) boxcar rail freight shipping. His significant typescript study was entitled Store-door Collection and Delivery: of Less than Carload Freight as a Defence Against the Menace of Motor Truck Comptetion and as a Restorative to the Railroads of a Very Lucrative Traffic (146 pp., plus 24 leaves).
He pursued this less-than-carload (LCL) approach to distribution at Sears and also for the military in World War II. Arthur Dubin recounts that during Sloss's 1940s military service with trains in this country he also met and worked with Rogers Whitaker, better known as the author E.M. Frimbo of the New Yorker.
During his tenure at MIT Sloss was author or co-author of a number of articles and published studies on rail transportation, both in developing countries and also concerning the dynamic changes in freight service during the 1970s. For example he was the lead author with two co-authors of An Analysis and Evaluation of Past Experience in Rationalizing Railroad Networks, over 200 pp., in 1975. An example of his international work while at MIT is An Assessment of the National Railway’s Performance and Potential Role in Meeting the Commodity Transport Requirements of the Republic of Colombia, also from 1975, 156 pp., a report for which he was the lead co-editor.
Upon his death Mr. Sloss's substantial railfan collection of timetables, books, photographs, maps, etc. was donated to the Special Collections unit of the Lake Forest College library, as part of the Elliott Donnelley Railroad Collection.
Arthur H. Miller
November 2, 2009