Business: Needed: Freight Cars

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 to step up production to that rate. Only 5,800 cars were delivered in January, less than 7,000 in February. As a result, NPA, which had allocated car-builders 310,000 tons of steel monthly, cut the allocation 7%, or enough tor about 9,300 cars a month. NPA said it would increase the allocation when car-builders use all the steel they are getting.