Editor's Notes

– The exciting transportation innovation'"RoadRailer'"featured in Bill Burt's March cover story has been passing its operating tests with flying colors. The photo below shows a train of the trailers-with-railroad-wheels whizzing along the rails of the Richmond, Fredricksburg & Potomac, a subsidiary of Seaboard Coast Line. RoadRailers have also been test-run on the Union Pacific, whose financial vice-president Thomas Graves called it "possibly the breakthrough the railroads need" to cut fuel costs (Business Week, Apr. 27).

– Correction, please. In our April Trends column we reported on the efforts of business firms to set up the first private high school for blacks in South Africa. One of the participating firms was identified'"erroneously'"as Shell Oil Company (a US firm). In actuality, the firm is Royal Dutch Shell, the Dutch multinational. We apologize for the error.

– Sam Blumenfeld's 1979 article in these pages, "Why the Schools Went Public" (Mar.), presented brand-new historical research that showed how America's thriving 19th-century private school system was undermined and displaced by what became today's public school system. Sam has expanded that thesis into a book'"Is Public Education Necessary?'"published in May by Devin Adair. He was recently interviewed on Philadelphia radio station WCAU on the subject of the book. His original REASON article, meanwhile, has been distributed to 2,000 Idaho public school principals and administrators and university department heads in that state. It is the subject of an essay contest sponsored by the Boise-based Center for the Study of Market Alternatives. It has also been reprinted for use in economics classes at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

– More reprint requests keep coming in. The Environmental Information Center in New York has reprinted Adam Reed's "Who Caused Three Mile Island?" (Aug. 1980); it's even available on microfiche. San Francisco's Cato Institute has reprinted Murray Rothbard's "America's Libertarian Revolution" from our July 1976 Bicentennial Issue; the reprints will be used in Cato's summer seminars this year. The Exec-u-Scope newsletter, published by Cambridge Associates, will now be excerpting REASON articles for its 100,000 subscribers. Karl Hess's "Living in Freedom" from our 10th Anniversary Issue (May 1978) is being reprinted in Karl's new newsletter, Survival Tomorrow. Even our inimitable cartoon feature, Rudebarbs, is being reprinted, most recently in Norwegian in Ideer Om Frihet, published in Bergen, Norway. And our interview with economist Art Laffer (Apr.) is being translated into Swedish for the Stockholm-based magazine Contra.

– Two of our contributing editors have made upward moves. Alan Reynolds has left his position as vice president for business and economic research at the First National Bank of Chicago. In May he moved to Morristown, New Jersey, to become chief economist for Polyconomics, the consulting firm headed by Jude Wanniski, author of The Way the World Works. At about the same time David Brudnoy moved his top-rated Boston radio talk show from WHDH to 50,000-watt WRKO. The latter offered him a more attractive contract, along with a transmitter capable of reaching most of New England. Brudnoy also does a weekly interview show on WNAC-TV, writes a thrice-weekly syndicated newspaper column, and reviews movies for the Boston Herald-American.