Business & Finance: Troop Movement

From branch lines, storage yards and car shops, long strings of empty passenger coaches this week clattered toward U.S.

Army camps in the South and Southwest. It was the opening maneuver in a crucial U.S. railroad campaign. The roads were preparing, on top of rush civilian passenger traffic, to move at least 500.000 soldiers on an average-800-mile trip home for Christmas—the greatest long-distance passenger movement in railroad history.

Railroad general staffs have laid plans for this campaign for months. Head-tohead were the A.A.R.’s Military Transportation Section and the Quartermaster General’s men. At first the Army debonairly planned to give all its men the regulation ten-day leave, starting Dec. 21. The railroad men shuddered. They anticipated the greatest mail load on record, plus a December holiday civilian load of over two billion passenger-miles, and they did not want 800 million soldier-miles dumped on top of that all at once. They persuaded the QMC to stagger its leaves: men who live near camp can leave Dec. 26, but men living a great distance away get 16 days, and the bulk of this movement will start Dec. 13, before the civilian peak. On that night, solid trainloads of troops will start to highball through the railroad gateways at Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Chicago, thence fan out like Panzer divisions to all parts of the Northeast, where nearly half the men live (see map).

At some 200 Army camps and posts, A.A.R. and railroadmen have gone over the Army’s lists, showing the length and dates of leave and the destination of each soldier. For each soldier an itinerary has been prepared to his home and back (some camps will paste these to each ticket). For each special car and special train, there is a detailed timetable. On all trains M.P.s will try to keep order.

The roads will need more than 2,200 extra coaches (total U.S. supply: 37,000), plus 1,000 Pullman tourist sleepers which, minus porters and bedding, will be used as coaches. The Pennsylvania alone will handle more than 300 special trains, will detrain some 50,000 men at Manhattan, has appealed to their mothers and sweethearts not to stand around in the already crowded station. Longest haul: a three-train caravan from California’s Fort Ord via Southern Pacific to Chicago. Lightest bottleneck: the two-track Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac, which is the only link between three Southern roads at Richmond and the Northern roads at Washington. Shuttling more than 150 loaded specials to the already crowded Washington gateway in four days, R.F. & P. train crews will earn juicy overtime checks.

Next to moving them, toughest problem is to feed the men en route. Some trains will be 14 to 16 cars long, with 600-800 passengers; even if there were enough dining cars in the U.S., their use would be unpractical. Stewards of all roads have held many a meeting. Result: more than 250 baggage cars have been fitted out with portable gas stoves and converted into mess cars, to serve hot coffee, soup, sandwiches, pies. Coffee will cost 5¢, sandwiches and pies 10¢. Some Western roads will stop the trains while men eat in station restaurants, others will put box lunches aboard.

At a special rate of 1¼¢ per mile (each soldier buys his own ticket) the railroads will collect $12-15,000,000. But with regular passenger business barely breaking even at 2½¢ per mile, the 50% cut in troop fares, plus the costly deadheading of empty equipment, may mean a net loss on the movement. Even so, the operating men love it. Weaving specials and extra sections around and between locals and freights, riding one thundering string close upon the taillights of the train ahead, listening to the pounding of heavy drivers as they roll over the divisions—those are the things they know how to do, those bring the grey hairs they can know they earned.

* Average normal passenger haul, not counting commuters: about 100 miles.