To the Pacific

The railroads are getting up steam to handle the greatest long-distance transportation job in their history--the overland haul of tens of thousands of U.S. troops, and equipment, on their way from Europe to the Pacific. By last week the big freight push to the West had already begun.

In a 72-hour period during V-E week the Army Transportation Corps stopped 6,500 freight cars rolling to East Coast ports with war materials. Within a matter of hours, orders were issued that sent the cars loaded with war materials clattering to Pacific ports.

That rush of westward traffic was peanuts to what the roads will be handling late this summer, when the heat will really be on. By August the transports shuttling across the Atlantic will be landing 350,000 men a month into sleepers and coaches for a fast trip to regrouping centers. Local traffic will spurt as the groups are furloughed home, then return to camp for regrouping.

The Freights. The mountains of westbound scheduled freight for war theaters are a bigger problem than troop movements When the monthly traffic over the western railroads shoots from the present 148,000 cars to 173,000, each of the seven railroads that snake their way through the Rocky Mountains will be loaded to capacity. A hot box, or a derailment on a single track grade up from the Great Plains, will call for fast rerouting of freight flowing through the rail-terminal bottlenecks at Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans (see cut).

The man who will keep it all moving west of the Mississippi, where the arteries thin out, is tough, able William Franklin Kirk of the Missouri Pacific Railroad Co., on loan to the Office of Defense Transportation. Bill Kirk is no novice at playing the western railroad keyboard for all it is worth. After some two and a half years of watching over a swelling torrent of war freight, Railroader Kirk is reputed to know every siding west of the Mississippi River.

During that time he has diverted more than 272,000 carloads of freight from one railroad to another, cleaned up the mess that Pearl Harbor made of West Coast ports, generally won the respect of railroadmen for his nimble thinking.

But now he is up against three problems that are beyond his control: 1) when war traffic is heaviest on his western railroads they will also be swamped with orders for tens of thousands of cars to move what seems likely to be the greatest wheat harvest on record; 2) he will be robbed of additional tens of thousands of cars that will be sent east with relief shipments of foodstuff for Europe; 3) if shipping is not immediately available, West Coast ports may not be able to unload freight as fast as the railroads will be able to deliver.

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