The Breaking Point

In their desperate effort to move more troops than ever before, on top of holiday crowds, U.S. railroads have spread men and equipment paper thin. Last week they snapped in a dozen places. On the Pacific coast veterans overflowed regular military installations and had to be quartered in ships tied to piers while they waited from four to six days for eastbound trains. In the San Francisco area alone, more than 50,000 homesick G.I.s sweated out Christmas.

The problem there was getting the railroad cars to the West Coast over the spindly western roads. To do the job, the eastern roads stripped themselves to pool some 2,000 passenger cars. On the Western Pacific, long strings of New Haven and Boston and Maine commuter coaches deadheaded through Feather River Canyon, far from home. Lehigh Valley and Florida East Coast coaches swayed and rattled over the Rockies on the single tracks of the Great Northern and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific.

Still there were nowhere near enough cars to move the 329,000 troops now pouring into the country each week, along with the hordes of holidaying civilians who were gadding about as never before.

And then the staggering railroads in the east and middle west were knocked to their knees by the heaviest burden of all: a record-breaking blizzard (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The New York Central's Gardenville yards, a key point just outside of Buffalo, were buried under five feet of snow. In one day, only two freight trains managed to pull out of Gardenville, which normally handles 50 to 60 trains a day. At sidings throughout the north and east, tired, cursing railroadmen struggled to throw switches half covered with snow and ice, kept on the job 16 hours a day. Thousands of men were recruited to dig out the railroads.

Crack passenger trains limped into terminals as much as 20 hours late. In Chicago's Dearborn station, some 15,000 civilians stampeded to get aboard trains, lost shoes and baggage in the struggle. City and military police were called on the double-quick to quell the riot. The New York Central Railroad stopped the sale of all tickets on trains eastbound from Chicago. In Washington's Union Station, "recesses" were called for hour periods to help clear the jampacked station. All over, passengers missed connections, had no choice but to camp in stations.

By week's end, railroads had just about dug their way out of the piled-up drifts. But the outlook was grim. Hollow-eyed, bone-tired railroaders who paused long enough to look at their calendars found that officially winter was but a few days old. Snow and ice, worst of all their troubles, had just begun.

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