LABOR: Caged Eagle

The Colorado Eagle—streamliner, daily including Sunday—rolled into St. Louis' Union Station and disgorged its passengers, among them Washington-bound Bess Truman. Conductor J. M. McFarland turned in his train report. "Well, that's that," he sighed. "Tomorow I think I'll do some hunting." Eighty-five minutes later, the busy Missouri Pacific Railroad (the nation's ninth largest) wheezed to a stop, shut down by a strike of its 5,000 engineers, firemen, enginemen, conductors and trainmen.

The yard at Dupo, Ill., second largest freight-car interchange point in the world, was a lonely desert of empty tracks. Train riders in the ten states in which the road...

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