Word: rails
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cover) In peace, the U.S. railways, like the human circulatory system, are taken for granted. Only in war, when the crowded arteries pump hard, does the U.S. become conscious of their existence. Last week, the American people were conscious, as seldom before, of their rail system. The congestion, slowly worsening during four years of war, had reached the danger point under the heavy strain of troops deploying from Europe to the Pacific...
...from Europe to the U.S. some 30% faster than it had expected. In Manhattan, the great grey Queen Elizabeth, the Aquitania and other transports docked last week. In two days, they disgorged 39,695 G.I.s, the biggest disembarkation of the war. As the troops climbed into long lines of rail coaches and Pullmans, and rumbled off to camp, many a battle-weary veteran bitterly resented the way he was forced to travel...
...three years after Pearl Harbor, the U.P. spent $278,000,000. It bought 2,270 new cars, 136 locomotives. It laid 1,680 miles of heavier rail to carry the oversize freight trains that Jeffers knew were on the way. Though one of the U.P.'s fondest boasts is that its roadbed is better laid and better kept than any other road's in the U.S., it rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadbed. For the steep grades over the Great Divide it developed the world's biggest locomotive...
Many things went to make up the legend. Some were scandalous: the rail financing of the Credit Mobilier, the fiscal shenanigans of Rail Baron Jay Gould, the first great rail antitrust suit (when U.P. was forced to disgorge the railroads it had gobbled). But most of it was the stirring stuff of pioneering, typified by the track-laying gangs of wild Irishmen. They drove the rails of the U.P. west to meet the track-laying Chinese of the Central Pacific coming east, stood guzzling while the tracks were joined with a gold spike at Promontory Point, Utah...
...dogweary railmen, still working an average 51-hour week, are spread so thin that there is no one to operate more trains. With rail wages as low as they are and the skills needed for many of the jobs as high, there is small hope of making these two ends meet. Many a railman is convinced that the wisest thing to do is to furlough railroaders from the Army. Unless that happens, the railroads are keeping their fingers crossed. At best, they expect the present squeeze on civilians to last until next spring. At worst, they wonder if the wire...