By JOSHUA TRUDELL, Telegraph Staff

                         BILLERICA, Mass. - In 18 years of existence,                   Guilford Transportation Industries has followed and expanded on the tracks laid down by its once dominant predecessor, the Boston and Maine Railroad.
With more than 1,500 miles of rail in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, as well as the Canadian maritimes, Guilford's web spreads all over New England, linking
Mattawamkeag, Maine, with Rotterdam Junction, N.Y. Guilford was started in 1981, when Alcoa and Gulf Oil magnate Timothy Mellon of Guilford, Conn., swooped in and bought the Boston and Maine, Maine Central and Delaware and Hudson railroads, all of which were in or near bankrutpcy. The company is based in Billerica, Mass., and has an
office at the Pease International Tradeport in Portsmouth for its recently purchased Pan American Airways.
Mellon and his father-and-son team president David Fink and vice-president David A. Fink have a reputation of being some

of the
hardest bargainers in any industry in New England, which has not endeared them to either state governments or other railroads in the region, according to many industry sources.
Frankly, they don't care."We usually don't start these fights, but if it happens, we will do what we think isright, and if it means going to court, we will," vice-president Fink said. "If peoplewant to make those comments and do it without the facts - it's a free country."        It's also a free country for lawsuits, and Guilford has been involved in many since its birth.
"When people make comments and allegations, we'll take them to court, and most times we'll win," Fink said.As for its financial health, Fink says: "We're a privately held company. We don't release financial information. We're profitable and we're growing." However, the revenues for the company were pegged at between $100 million and $200 million in a recent Trains magazine story. A 1994 estimate of revenues, found in a Lexis-Nexis database search, set the company's revenues at $140 million, most of which

is held with Bank of Boston in Guilford, Conn.
Mellon reportedly lives in Guilford, and named the company after his hometown.
Since Mellon took a chance on what seemed to be a trio of dying railroads, Guilford has been surrounded by controversy starting when the company initiated harsh cost-cutting measures that resulted in instant unpopularity with railroad unions.
The high point of Guilford's unpopularity was in the mid-1980s, when the company attempted to lease the Maine Central and Boston and Maine lines through the Springfield Terminal Railway, one of Guilford's smallest subsidiaries.
At the time, Springfield had a much more management-favorable contract with the United Transportation Union, with lower minimum wages and more work-rules  flexibility. Guilford asserted that because Springfield was the operator of the system, all workers were under its contract, according to news accounts. That resulted in two bitter  strikes, both of which had to be settled through federal arbitrators.
After several years of legal

wrangling, the Interstate Commerce Commission partially overturned an arbitrator's decision that the
employees were right, and as a result, the employees voted to get rid of the UTU contract and replace it with nine separate craft unions.
The strikes that shook the company are old history now, Fink said, citing six-year labor agreements now in place with 16 unions. Fink said that his father and Mellon never thought about giving in to the strikers.
"My father told them that if you do that (strike),
I'm going to run the railroads,"
Fink said, "and he did. My father and Mr. Mellon are not that type - when they decide to do something, they see it through."
By the 1990s, those legal problems were resolved,
but others were arising, as Amtrak charged that Guilford was not properly maintaining track line for the Montrealer, a New York to Montreal passenger run. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court,       which found for Amtrak.
By law, freight railroads are required to carry Am

(Continued on page 5)