Problem in Logistics

All week long empty boxcars from the East clattered into Midwest terminals. As fast as the cars arrived, the railroads routed them to prairie lines, where more than a billion bushels of corn and wheat from last year's harvest lay unshipped.

The railroads were racing against time and waste, but from the Panhandle to the Dakotas the worried farmers doubted that the railroads could win. There were just not enough cars to move the mountains of grain before millions of bushels of high-moisture-content corn, now piled in the open, rotted in the spring rains. And by late May a new crop of winter wheat would be ready.

Last week, as the recurrent seriousness of the food situation hit home once again (see U.S. AT WAR), grain shippers and elevator operators deluged the Office of Defense Transportation with appeals for help. Gist of the appeals: ODT should get tough and force Eastern railroads to return thousands of cars belonging to Western railroads. As the appeal was made, such grain-hauling roads as the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Chicago Burlington & Quincy, and Chicago Rock Island & Pacific had only a little over half of their own cars on their lines.

The Fact of War. But the bitter truth was that there was not much ODT could do. The Eastern railroads were using Western cars to keep war freight moving. Northern Pacific boxcars that should have been shunting wheat from Dakota towns to flour mills at Minneapolis were loaded with Army freight for the Pacific.

As a result, flour mills were preparing to ration flour to bakers. Several Western railroads resorted to the last-ditch measure of shipping wheat in coal cars.

The Secretary of the Kansas City Board of Trade reckoned that the railroads should have 140,000 cars in service to move last year's wheat from the country elevators. But even if the Eastern railroads could spare that many, cars for delivery to the Midwest, there was not much chance of the cars staying there. Last week the grain trade reported that the Army was in the market for 140 million bushels of wheat, 900,000 tons of flour for shipment overseas. Thus as fast as cars arrived in the West they would be loaded with Army grain and flour and shipped back to the Eastern Seaboard at the rate of 35,000 a month by midsummer.

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