OCR Text |
Show Neglected Railroads Totter Into Republican Depression . The Union won the Civil War principally because their troops and track crews could lay rails faster than Southern cavalry could tear them up, thus keeping the Union forces supplied with a better flow of arms and equipment equip-ment than the Confederates could muster and distribute. The railroads provided dependable depend-able transportation necessary for the opening and settling of the West, and the expansion of our nation to the shores of the blue Pacific. After World War I, there began be-gan a steady decline of rural population, upon which railroads depend for their peacetime business, busi-ness, and many of the roads went bankrupt in the mid-depression years of Herbert Hoover. President Franklin D. Roosevelt Roose-velt began a rehabilitation of the nation's railroads. Soon troop : trains were shuttling back and forth across the country, taking starving young men from such impoverished areas as the southern south-ern states and the eastern seaboard's sea-board's teeming cities of unemployed, unem-ployed, into the wide open spaces of the west, where they did a heroic work in conservation, as 1 CCC boys. j This gradually eased into a j plan for the preparation for the second World War, which was becoming seemingly inevitable, and the railroads began a comeback come-back in earnest that put them into position to do an almost unbelievable un-believable job of national transportation trans-portation throughout the war years. They continued on through the Korean conflict. But now that we are on an allegedly peacetime basis, a Republican peace, that is, once again the railroads, like the non-ferrous metal mining industry, have been forced to shift for themselves. Not only that, Republican policies poli-cies in agriculture have forced a steady diminishing of rural homes and small farms, dotted all along the nation's railroads, from which the roads have in the past derived so much of their traffic and revenue. Still another time, a Republican Republi-can national administration has fumbled the ball, has turned victory into defeat and humili-tried humili-tried and tested old friends as ation, and has let down such the American railroads. n Another great segment of American industry, its railroads, have about slipped over the edge of the Republican economic precipice prec-ipice that already has swallowed up agriculture, agricultural machinery, ma-chinery, the non-ferrous metal mining industry of all western states, and the huge timber enterprises en-terprises of . the Pacific northwestern north-western states. The railroads are struggling valiantly with every means they have at their disposal, but they are fighting a losing battle. Some of the big eastern lines have gone a long way toward merging, in an effort to reduce operating expenses ex-penses and overhead. Most of them have installed the most efficient rolling stock and other machinery possible in a further effort toward efficiency and modernization. But they are still slipping, and have reached the point where they must inevitably fail without with-out governmental subsidy, or without definite national economic eco-nomic planning that will assure them of sufficient traffic to maintain main-tain themselves in a healty condition. con-dition. This is not a new thing. a vice, already, in this cen-j , Republican national ad-1 ministrations have allowed the I nation's railroads to fall to pieces as their reward for faithful service serv-ice performed, also twice, on a, gigantic scale, in the defense of this country. Believe me, it is very much to the advantage of the American people to replace our railroads in a healthy condition and keep them there. Without our marvelous American Amer-ican railroad system, we could . easily have lost either or both of the two World Wars in which we were victorious. So heavily did our military establishment lean upon railroads rail-roads for transportation that this factor even entered into our ,Tracks construction. At one Rfie, it was estimated that our barracks needs could be reduced one-fourth because that proportion propor-tion of the personnel of our armed services were perpetually in motion, aboard the nation's trains, either going some place or coming from some place! Likewise, the number of grain cars loaded and in transit was considered a large and fairly stable factor in our national capacity to store wheat. |