In Buffalo last week, General Mills temporarily closed down the world's largest flour mill (3,700,000 Ibs. daily). For lack of freight cars, the company was unable to ship its flour to market. The shortage also hit grain shippers in the Grain sit where old-crop wheat was piling up-one Colorado town with 300 carloads to move could get only 30 cars. The Association of American Railroads said that the U.S. was facing the worst shortage of freight cars in railroading history
Worse still, though Washington's defense planners had set the country's needs at 10,000 new freight cars a month, car-builders had failed...