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Show iEU ARRAY RAIL ! SERVICE YOURiG GIANT i Achievements of Yankee Transportation Men in France Great. Fifty Thousand Operate 1500 Engines and 5000 Cars Over There. 9houffh tho averasc American has a 'Somewhat adequate conception of the magnificent achievements under heavy odds by the flk'htlnff men from this nation na-tion on the western front, there Is a branch of tho service which Is vitally Important, but which has accomplished It! titanic tasks to the accompaniment ot tho minimum of publicity. This Is the railroad service, in which 40,000 men keep 1500 engines and 5000 cars moving from j tho ocoan to tho trenches. The giant ac- comnllshments necessary to keep the Americans advancing are given in some ( ; detail In a recent Issue of the Stars and , S-tripcs, a. newspaper published by the 1 overseas forces. The article follows: Out of the holds of ocean liners moored In docks at French ports the claws of , kiant cranes are lifting 150-ton loco- - motives and swinging them onto tracks. Blue-ovcralled men climb into the cabs of theno locomotives, water pours into their boilers, fires blaze under the steam , tubes, throttles are pushed open and Xubguls from American trunk lines start for tho middle of France before the . change of the tide that laps the dock piling. It Is as simple as running ,.n automobile out of a box car and start-liig.lt start-liig.lt away under its own power. Fbrtv thousand American soldiers and imjO American officers today are operating operat-ing ouo thousand American locomotives and five thousand American freight cars as big as the tunnels of the country coun-try will give clearance over five thousand thou-sand miles of railway track in France. And In July one year ago two men sat at a table under the trees along a boulevard boule-vard In a city of Franco talking over i tlie plans for the American army's rail- : road-tn-bc In Fiance. Today the railroads that grew out of those plans are hauling every day a load u' sixty pounds for every soldier of the Aatferlcan army In France hauling a load for every man as heavy as his marching pack, and doing it every day In the year. All the Rail Stare. Sitting at desks In a certain stone building in France in a barracks. in rooms where French soldiers once slept aire a hundred or more men whose names Were at the top of the roll of peacetime America's railroad achievements. General Gen-eral superintendents, traffic managers, terminal superintendents. presidents and vice presidents, chief engineers. Speight, passenger, construction and " maintenance experts are enrolled In the railroad of a year's creation, working in army anonymity for a road whose letterheads letter-heads carrv no lists of executives. The doors of their .offices bear the titles of generals and colonels, majors and captains cap-tains and lieutenants. Behind them they Ipfl five-figured salaries. A modest lieutenant lieu-tenant colonel ,was the manager of an American city, a peacetime Job that paid him $15,000 a year because he refused to take more. And night and day along the oOOO miles of trackage more than the main lines of the Pennsylvania the 40,000 - soldiers of the army transportation department de-partment go on with their regular jobs. They are pushing shell-laden cars up to the farthest railhead under the cover of night. They are coaxing laboring engines and loaded trains up steep grades and through tunnels all the way from the ocean to the army centers up -along the rivers with famous names. All Waits Transportation. Quartermaster and ordnance supplies, the baggage of every officer and man. the steel gliders, the timbers, the concrete con-crete and the coal for the work up ahead all arc dependent on the work of the t0.Cjj00. Half of- the 40,000 are at work along the huge docks at the new ports the- American army has created in France. nd these railroad men a year ago were at the throttles, on the tenders and the "crummies" of freight trains moving past the snow lines over the Rockie's; on the transcontinental trunk line fliers; running through the plains of- Texas and the woods of Oregon or Maine: in the classification yards of Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City and Now York: in the roundhouses of Pittsburg Pitts-burg and Omaha and New Orleans. Todav they are soldiers, and more than In name only. They learned In the unwritten but stern code of practical railroading rail-roading all about orders. They had been used to making out orders and acting on them for years. Unload Ships at Once. Tho world has already been told how thirty ports with miles of docks, gigantic unloading machinery, warehouses and cold storage plants are being brought Into being, so that sixty-three big ships can be unloaded simultaneously. In some harbors where boats of great draught must' stav In channel, lighters must oe used. A record of unloading 30,872 tons in one day was recently made at one of the ports. An unloading crane, one that was standard on the Great Lakes for handling mountains of ore between vessels and railroad cars, was redesigned with a gain In capacity for work of almost one-third. So fast are vessels now unloaded and started on their return journeys that .here are now in the holds of big liners I " tons of railroad iron and steel, used as ballast, that have traveled back and forth over the Atlantic seven or eight tiroes. Time can't be spared to unload it, and anyway Its use as necessary bal-Md'rSt bal-Md'rSt Is probably as urgent as the use for which it was destined in France. The time saving extends to the freight cars and locomotives. By the American Ameri-can car checking system officers know alwavs where any particular car is at any time of the day. what it is loaded with, and when It will be available for . new' use. French Lines Enlarged. To work efficiently tho transportation department has had to enlarge many ' e-xisting French lines and terminals, l.-rV 100-pound rails Instead of the sixty-arid sixty-arid eighty-pound ones of some of the French lines, and establish big shop. An American car-bullding company has built a huge plant in France, where It Is erecting freight cars for the government govern-ment at actual cost. The wheels, beams and other parts of the cars come over "knocked down." One freight yard established in France has 257 miles of sidings, and th s will be dwarfed by another which will have 10,1 miles. . . , The railroad officers say they found the rhysic.il condition of the French railways they took over remarkably good, considering the war use tney had seen More than 10o0 miles of new track were laid to connect up existing 1 French lines which had to bo changed i for big locomotives and thirty-ton cars. Instead of ten-ton ones. he uso of M Rlrbrakes. standard on American equlp- II ment was amazing to French railroad m men 'of the old school. Special water 3 tanka had to he ronstructed for the big 4 SStmotieves. Scoop wa er troughs be-I be-I tween the tracks aro to be built. Trains I r.f unheard-of length are being sent over French lines, and tunnel clearances are ,bont the, only limit to the possibilities r.f Improving service. |
