Word: rails
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Halfway through the speech, the President got word that the rail strike had been settled-"on the terms proposed by the President...
...afternoon there were signs of storm. Wall posters at Manhattan rail terminals warned that train service might soon cease. Midtown telephone switchboards glowed and twinkled with extra calls. Business firms dismissed employes hours early. In trickles, then torrents, the city's half-million commuters headed for trains. So did thousands of nervous travelers. By 3 o'clock (Eastern Standard Time), vast, gloomy Penn Station was jammed. Both levels at Grand Central were packed with rumpled, sweating, anxious crowds...
...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...
Westward the Course. Hour after hour, 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...
Within 48 hours the rail strike had caused fringe unemployment. In a little more time whole industries would have faced shutdowns. This was averted. Feebly at first, then almost as surely as it had stopped, the sleeping giant stirred...