Word: freighting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...down the railroad systems of the Eastern Seaboard, the same silence. Acres of freight cars, brooding herds of grimy locomotives stood in quiet rail yards at Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Jersey City. At dusk, signal lights glowed green along thousands of miles of rail. The tracks were clear-and empty...
...time zone to time zone, the strike moved west. Engineers and trainmen walked quietly away from cars and locomotives in Cleveland, Memphis, Kansas City, St. Paul. Chicago, the nation's greatest rail center, was stopped cold, like a three-ring circus halted in mid-show: 25,000 loaded freight cars stood dead on the tracks and 93,750 through passengers were marooned. Muskegon, Mich, felt the strike too: one 1911 locomotive and two wooden cars were tied up. It was the same at Fargo, N.D. (where the Great Northern's crack Empire Builder ground to a stop...
...keep their spirits up, arrived at Penn Station hardly able to walk. The sound of lonely locomotives only emphasized the nation's paralysis. During the 48 hours of the strike, only 100 of the country's 17,500 scheduled passenger trains, only 240 of 24,000 freight trains, ever turned a wheel...
...dispute ever a few cents an hour pay raise or the provision of ice water in freight train cabooses is a matter of momentary concern. The fundamental question is "Where is the dividing line between private rights and public responsibility?". This nation has recognized labor's right to negotiate with management through the medium of collective bargaining; but collective bargaining becomes no more than a meek petition unless labor can back its requests with a strike or the threat of a strike. It is tyranny for the government to say "Thou shalt not strike" to workers in a private industry...
...strike endangered the welfare of the whole nation; in a week it would have drained the life blood from our industrial system. The cost of every day of the strike was the lives of thousands of Europeans who are depending on grain which last week lay useless in American freight cars. The strike could not continue and under great pressure the President took drastic action which scared the Railway Brotherhoods back to work. As a strictly temporary stop-gap Mr. Truman's program is barely tolerable, and as a permanent policy it is unthinkable...