Duluth to Moscow?

"I think," wrote Fred R. Cutcheon of Madison, Wis. to Barren's weekly, "that it is about time we stopped playing Hitler's game and took advantage of the one route between the two continents that is not subject to the submarine menace." Mr. Cutcheon is a tall, white-haired, retired utility executive and electrical engineer. He is appalled at estimates of Allied shipping losses (around 500,000 tons a month), figures the cost of sunk ships plus cargoes as at least $2,000,000,000 a year--not to mention the damage to the Allied war effort. His figuring gave Mr. Cutcheon an idea that by now is almost an obsession: a railroad from Duluth, Minn, to Moscow, U.S.S.R. He envisions a great flow of war freight carried by rail to Alaska and Bering Strait, across the 36-mile water gap by car ferry to Siberia, and so on by rail to Moscow and way stations. He gives that distance as about 7,000 miles and the cost of a double-track line as about $700,000,000--or one-third what the Allies are now losing annually on the seas.

A spur line into the parched maw of Free China would solve the problem of getting help to Chiang Kai-shek--if he was still there when the spur was built.

At the line's weakest link, the Bering Strait water jump, Mr. Cutcheon believes dense mine fields and constant, massive air patrols would give ample protection.

In publishing Mr. Cutcheon's letter, Barron's editors made the obvious comment that it was an "unusually interesting" idea, but threw cold water on it because of the time element: the war might be over before the line was finished. Mr. Cutcheon, however, had another idea--extending the Alaska highway to Bering Strait and moving freight there by truck. That raised the possibility of a truck route paralleling the rail route all the way to industrial Russia, and perhaps built first.

Anyway, it was an idea.

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