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The manufacture of passenger cars was shut off in 1942, not started again until six weeks ago—too late to ease the present crisis. Belatedly, this spring, the Army also ordered 1,600 troop cars. WPB has issued high priorities for the manufacture of 664 passenger cars, but the bulk of them will not be delivered till December at the earliest. If deployment continues to move faster than its schedule, the Army will have to dip into the civilian supply again.
Equipment is only part of the problem; the rest is manpower. The War Manpower Commission gave the railroads no better a deal than did WPB. For nearly four years of war, the railroads' key men were steadily drained into the armed forces. Not till last May, after the roads had lost 300,000 men to the services, were they granted top manpower priorities.
Now the dogweary railmen, still working an average 51-hour week, are spread so thin that there is no one to operate more trains. With rail wages as low as they are and the skills needed for many of the jobs as high, there is small hope of making these two ends meet. Many a railman is convinced that the wisest thing to do is to furlough railroaders from the Army. Unless that happens, the railroads are keeping their fingers crossed. At best, they expect the present squeeze on civilians to last until next spring. At worst, they wonder if the wire-taut rail system will stand another winter like last year's.
*In World War I, the U.P. was one of the few roads that the Federal Government made money on. After the Government took over, it paid U.P. $77,785,522 rent for the two years of operation, cleared $19,800,000 from freight & passengers.