Snowbound

The manpower and equipment shortage caught up with the Eastern railroads last week.

Since mid-December, when the first of a series of blizzards and icy gales lashed at their overloaded lines, the roads had done more than their usual best to clear the tracks. But main-line trains slowed to a crawl: the crack Twentieth Century Limited was ten and a half hours late on one scheduled run of 17 hours from Chicago to New York City. Freight was delayed and congestion grew faster than it could be relieved.

Finally in many a busy freight yard traffic came to a stop while trainmen groped for switches beneath snowdrifts. Then the nation was in serious trouble. Two hundred thousand freight cars were tied up in the East by one of the worst transportation crises on record.

When last week's cold wave sent temperatures to 18DEG below zero at Portland, Me., to 16DEG below at Binghamton, N.Y., the Association of American Railroads decided it was time for drastic action. With the approval of the Office of Defense Transportation, A.A.R. clamped a tight three-day embargo on all non-Government freight moving east of Lake Michigan and north of the Chesapeake and Ohio lines in Virginia.

Heat and Power. Almost immediately the East found out how shockingly low its stocks of coal and oil had fallen.

Most serious of all was the coal shortage at the steel mills. Bethlehem Steel Corp. said that some of its war-busy plants had less than a two to three weeks' supply of coal v. a six weeks' normal working reserve. Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp. closed down 44 of its open-hearth furnaces. The Cleveland plants of the Republic Steel Corp. cut operations by half.

Coal deliveries were limited to consumers who had less than a five-day supply, and then only one ton was allowed each customer. In Manhattan, coal was cut off for museums, libraries and places of amusement. In many New England and upper New York State communities, schools and public buildings closed.

Coal producers warned the railroads that, unless empty coal cars were high-balled back to the mines, production of coal would have to be cut. For lack of cars to load, the Pittsburgh Coal Co., one of the largest U.S. bituminous-coal producers, closed twelve of its 16 mines. As many as 37 mines in western Pennsylvania were shut down at one time. The daily coal loss: 70,000 tons. But at week's end all but four had reopened.

Fuel-oil stocks dropped rapidly as whole trains of tank cars were flagged down in the West to wait until the East had dug out of the snow. Oil stocks on the Atlantic Seaboard were one and a half million barrels short of a year ago, when reserves were uncomfortably low.

Food for Man & Beast. Nearly a million Eastern dairymen and poultrymen anxiously peered into their feed bins. With no cars to load, the grain mills at Buffalo were more than 80,000 tons behind in their shipments. Six of the largest grain and flour mills closed down.

As far west as Minnesota and Kansas, grain-elevator operators felt the pinch for cars. In Nebraska farmers cried that 100 million bu. of corn (one-third of Nebraska's bumper corn harvest last year) would spoil unless they got cars to move the grain to storage elevators.

The supply of fresh fruits and vegetables to Eastern markets was curtailed. Two hundred carloads of perishables from Florida were shunted onto sidings. Shipments of meat from Western packing plants were blocked.

More Snow & Ice? Whether the 72-hour embargo had given the railroads time enough to dig themselves out of their trouble was still a question this week. Long trains of empties were snaking across the bleak landscape, headed away from the congested terminals. Dozens of passenger trains were canceled, and their high-wheeled engines ignobly coupled to strings of empty boxcars. By week's end the roads hoped to have caught up again, unless. . . .

Along the busy railroad lines in the Northeast, engine smoke hung low and heavy over the rails. Railroad men gloomily marked it down as a sure sign that more snow was on the way.

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