Forty-Eight Hours

What had it been like?

All afternoon there were signs of storm. Wall posters at Manhattan rail terminals warned that train service might soon cease. Midtown telephone switchboards glowed and twinkled with extra calls. Business firms dismissed employes hours early. In trickles, then torrents, the city's half-million commuters headed for trains. So did thousands of nervous travelers. By 3 o'clock (Eastern Standard Time), vast, gloomy Penn Station was jammed. Both levels at Grand Central were packed with rumpled, sweating, anxious crowds.

As the 4 o'clock strike deadline drew near, masses of people pushed and shoved for any train gate which opened. When they reached trains, many climbed in through the windows. Special after special rumbled off with passengers shoulder to shoulder in the aisles. But at 4, the crowds stood clotted thickly as ever in the stations. For a while many stayed angrily on. But in an hour most had gone, and soon footsteps echoed emptily in the great terminals.

All up & down the railroad systems of the Eastern Seaboard, the same silence. Acres of freight cars, brooding herds of grimy locomotives stood in quiet rail yards at Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Jersey City. At dusk, signal lights glowed green along thousands of miles of rail. The tracks were clear--and empty.

Westward the Course. Hour after hour, time zone to time zone, the strike moved west. Engineers and trainmen walked quietly away from cars and locomotives in Cleveland, Memphis, Kansas City, St. Paul. Chicago, the nation's greatest rail center, was stopped cold, like a three-ring circus halted in mid-show: 25,000 loaded freight cars stood dead on the tracks and 93,750 through passengers were marooned. Muskegon, Mich, felt the strike too: one 1911 locomotive and two wooden cars were tied up. It was the same at Fargo, N.D. (where the Great Northern's crack Empire Builder ground to a stop) and at high little towns on the mountain divisions and in the yards at Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

Not all trains stopped; company executives jumped to the throttles of some name trains and ran them. Travelers on one Manhattan-bound special toasted each town they passed to keep their spirits up, arrived at Penn Station hardly able to walk. The sound of lonely locomotives only emphasized the nation's paralysis. During the 48 hours of the strike, only 100 of the country's 17,500 scheduled passenger trains, only 240 of 24,000 freight trains, ever turned a wheel.

Got a Cot? The effects of the tie-up were immediate. Hotels brought out cots, opened lounges as dormitories (200,000 people were stranded in New York alone). Automobile traffic swelled; crowds mobbed bus terminals and the airlines. There were runs on food stores and gas stations in dozens of U.S. cities.

Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Circus, which had been stuck in New York during the coal strike, got stuck again--this time in Boston, while a baby giraffe was born in a tent. In Lancaster, Pa., city firemen were routed out at 4:30 a.m., had to couple up long hoses to water a trainload of 2,000 thirsty hogs. There was chicken trouble, too--hundreds of automatic incubators were hatching thousands of eggs every hour. Unable to ship the new arrivals, owners gloomily planned mass drownings.

In the first 24 hours, the U.S. tie-up had jammed traffic on Mexican railroads, communicated itself to Canadian lines. Fortunes in ripening crops--lettuce at Salinas, citrus fruits at Redlands, vegetables in the Rio Grande Valley--faced destruction.

Within 48 hours the rail strike had caused fringe unemployment. In a little more time whole industries would have faced shutdowns. This was averted. Feebly at first, then almost as surely as it had stopped, the sleeping giant stirred.

Some trainmen grumbled that the strike was over--without all demands won. But all over the nation, just as quietly as they had climbed down, men in faded blue overalls now mounted their cabs again. Trainmen went back to work. The gloom in roundhouses was brightened by the sudden yellow glare from fire doors. By midnight, on almost all the 337 strikebound roads, locomotives drummed through the darkness with throttles back and Johnson bars in the corner. More slowly, freight trains took up their grinding journeys. In railroad stations lines reformed at ticket windows. Baggage appeared; redcaps toiled. The Government turned the roads back to their owners.

Almost at once the great strike seemed like a remembered dream, vivid, difficult to believe, but hard to forget.

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