Chương 129

Safety Not Guaranteed - American Rail Link in WW2

~4.824 từ • Bản dịch: milian

Written by @vilani99 and yours truly

Excerpts from Safety Not Guaranteed 33: American Rail Link

[0:01:16]

Zach: And now that we’ve talked about trains, let’s talk about trains. Welcome to Safety Not Guaranteed: The inter-bloc podcast about engineering failures, fuckups, and whatnot. I’m the resident aerospace Anorak Zach, he/him, and I put way to much fucking effort into this. Go!

Minerva: In these spaces, I go by Minerva, she/her, and I am, or at least was, a civil engineer. And is that a train taking a nap?

Hugo: I’m Hugo, he/they, and I’m the one that edits this stupid thing, and… fuck it, let’s go.

Zach: Once again, we’re going back to the early days of the United Republics for this one. And you picked this one, right?

Minerva: I did. In today’s class, we will be talking about the American Rail Link, and the clusterfuck that was the early years.

Hugo: Is this about the Pineville Junction Wreck?

Zach: Not entirely, but we’ll get to that. But first, here’s Some More News!

[0:15:09]

Minerva: First, we must hop into our Tardis, and take a little time warp to the start. Specifically, we need to examine the context of the American Rail Network, such as it was, right before the revolution.

Hugo: ‘Such as it was’ is doing a lot of work here I bet.

Minerva: You would be correct there. And let me explain why. So, around the turn of the century there was this thing called “the Railroad Anarchy.” Rail transport and logistics were controlled by a whole host of firms trying to undercut each other for contracts and investment money.

Hugo: For a while the Pennsy was basically running Pennsylvania like its own fiefdom, and you had to specify if you meant the President of the US or the Pennsy.

Minerva: Yeah, it’s some real Shadowrun shit.

Zach: Train Cyberpunk. Trainpunk. Is that anything?

Minerva: Probably yeah. So, once 1914 rolls around and some inbred Austrian dibshit gets shot -

Zach and Hugo, simultaneously: Owned.

Minerva: [chuckling] Yeah, Franz Ferdinand gets owned, and Europe kind of loses its mind. And for some fucking reason the American government decided to hop into that particular moshpit, and finds that the Rail Anarchy is uh. Not well suited for the sheer amount of logistics work that needs to happen to fight this war. So, all of the actual right-of-way was put under federal ownership and the Federal Railway Commission was established as an administrative and regulatory body.

Now, this works great during the war, but it completely runs all the rolling stock ragged, and leaves a LOT of maintenance issues from the haphazard rail expansion. Now, does the FRC use its power in the interwar to ensure that the recovery is smooth and ensure the Rail Barons run things well?

Zach: Let me guess, no.

Minerva: Ding Ding Ding! The value form folks! It fucking sucks! Yeah, by the time the depression hit the FRC had been diminished to that of simply maintaining the rails at the behest of the railroad barons.

Zach and Hugo: Boo!

Minerva: I concur. Anyways, the FRC officially maintained the rails, or at least that’s what they said, but the services and signals were run by said rail tyrants as Operating Companies. And they all had different equipment, different procedures, and all the other things that make it a nightmare to standardize, in spite of the FRCs best efforts. So you’d have the Pennsy running one standard, the Central running another, none of the signals are understandable to anyone else, so on and so forth. And that’s just one coast.

Hugo: Jesus fuck.

Minerva: Yeah, it was a total clusterfuck, and that’s not even taking into account just how bad a shape all the physical plants were in by ‘33 just from being worn ragged during the war, and all the deferred maintenance during the twenties and the Depression. And then… next slide please.

Minerva: MacArthur decided to do a little trolling.

Zach: I don’t know if I should boo or cheer.

Hugo: Critical Support for MacArthur.

Hugo and Minerva: [Laughter]

Minerva: Yeah, the one truly authentic revolutionary of the Twentieth Century: Douglas MacArthur. Anyways, one of the things that let the good guys win the civil war is the control of rail hubs, firm agglomeration under War Syndicalism, and some absolutely incredible mobilization on the part of the Rail Union.

Hugo: Yeah they basically managed a full wartime logistics network with spit, hope, and the physical plant that happened to be in Chicago when the coup happened.

Zach: Genuinely awe-inspiring.

Minerva: It really is. So, the obvious necessity of maintaining a revolutionary hold over the railways led to the formation of the People’s Secretariat for Railways, with - next slide please

Minerva: - Robert Taft as its head.
Zach: Opportunist.

Minerva: Ehhhhh you’re not wrong. So, Taft and the Rail Secretariat were given three tasks. The first was to formally nationalize and standardize all rail operations in the UASR, from freight rail to local trolleys.

Hugo: It should be noted that trolley and commuter rail was “nationalized” insofar as the the firms operating them were broken up and the constituent parts were handed to Republic and local Soviets.

Minerva: Yeah, the All-Union Government wasn’t running the trolleys in, like, Shitsville, Indiana, but they were subsidizing and regulating them, and all the employees were Rail Union. But the passenger and freight services were under the Railway Secretariats purview. So, all the different railroad operators were agglomerated into a new thing, American Rail Link, which would be a single corporation fully owned by the All-Union Government. Now, I already mentioned the dozens of competing standards, and the fact that rolling stock and actual operations in America were under a single roof meant that, next slide please.

Minerva: The Yanks had to standardize all that shit!

Zach: MY EYES! THEY BURN

Hugo: This is a Harlequin Rover.

Minerva: Anyways, this harlequin train is, shall we say, a visual metaphor for the state of the Link in the mid 30s.

Zach: Those front wheels are ominous.

Minerva: I look to please. But yeah, that multicolored passenger train, the fact that the pilot wheels have left the rails, and the arguing workers, show how chaotic and messy the Link was. You have rolling stock that was only compatible via workarounds, company cultures clashing in spite of the efforts of the rail union, and signals that were not consistent outside of the former operating companies. But wait! There’s more!

Hugo: Oh no

Zach: Oh No

Minerva: OH YEAH!

Hugo: That does not look good.

Minerva: What’s also happening starting in the summer of ‘34 is the Rail Secretariat’s second task: regauging from Standard to Comintern Gauge, and all the pains that come with it.

Hugo: This is already an operation held together by Cheez Doodles and cum. Why add more to the fire?

Zach: Faster trains and national security. Can’t have the Britbongs and the Canucks invade and just use our lines with no hassle, don’tcha know?

Minerva: That and aligning with the gauge in the Soviet Union so they can send rolling stock back and forth if they ever need to. And as you can see here, it’s not always pretty. Of course, some things can be converted to run on the bigger gauge, but most things on rails are designed for a certain track and loading gauge: even if the tracks are the same, the amount of space you can shove things through will usually never be the same.

Zach: A perfect example of this is how the Old New York Subway lines had two different loading gauges, no thanks to the companies that ran it, so you could only run certain trains on certain lines. The B trains could be converted to Comintern gauge, but the A trains had too little space to allow that, so they’re some of the last operating trains in the Republics with that gauge.

Minerva: And adding this onto the previously mentioned growing pains, and it’s an outright miracle that the Link seemed to have mostly solved a lot of these problems by the time 1940 rolled around. Although, I will say this isn’t to say that the Link was a failure.

Hugo: Oh, god no.

Minerva: Yeah, we’re leaving out all the really important and impressive work that’s being done on electrification, computerization, all that shit, not to mention the third task: expansion and rationalization, which Taft, then Cannon, then Taft again -

Hugo: God the unity governments during the first period are so god damned confusing

Minerva: Yeah- but yeah, the Rail Secretariat did a pretty damn good job with its expansion and rationalization mandate, which is probably what prevented a total collapse when things got pretty hairy in ‘41 and ‘42.

Zach: Wasn’t the Northeast Corridor dispatch system one of the early systems that inspired Cybersyn?

Minerva: Yeah! Like, this was still a massive, massive improvement over what Taft and company had inherited in ‘33.

Hugo: Yeah, it just wasn’t ready for what was coming

Minerva: That’s the hitch yeah

—————————————-

————————————-

Excerpts from Rush Loving,Trial By Fire: American Rail Link from the Civil War to the Arduous March(New York, Pathfinder Press, 2013)

Chapter 4: A Rocky Start
…
January 1938 marked the end of the Links Management Purges [1]. Brought on by the Revolt of the Cadres in 1937, the politically reinvigorated Rail Union and newly-minted People’s Secretary for Railways James Cannon took advantage, initiating a series of wildcat strikes and snap workplace elections, clearing away the “dead wood” of the Links management. Taft had an earned reputation as being pliable to his Communist superiors, but this pliability went both ways. As the Link coalesced through 1933 and ‘34, a good deal of the low- and mid-level management from the old rail tyrannies had managed to secure positions within the Link (mostly by taking advantage of their old positions to win elections, or using their resumes to get in the top positions appointed by the Rail Secretariat), or the Rail Secretariat’s bureaucracy. This meant that a good deal of interpersonal rivalries and corporate culture clashes were held over despite the best efforts of the Rail Union.

But this “dead wood” did not survive 1937. The Great Lakes were (and still are) America’s rail hub, and the Revolt of the Cadres easily spread into that sector. A new wave of dedicated communists were swept into management, typically from the working rank-and-file. The last remnants of the old rail tyrannies were removed, and a new, integrated workplace culture emerged as the old management either got along with the program or left the Link. The Union, with help from Cannon and the all-Union WCP, had made it exceedingly clear that the workers of the Link, not Secretariat-appointed management, would have the ultimate say in Link operations…

By 1940, much of the early issues were seemingly solved, with the entire network having been converted to Comintern gauge, and the old company cultures had been stamped out or integrated. The entire Northeast Corridor had been electrified, and the experiments in computer dispatching were going extremely well. Throughput was up, passenger satisfaction was at an all-time high, and the preparations for a potential revolutionary war with the imperial powers was going smoothly. The Link was shaping up to be a rousing success story for state-worker joint management, despite the early growing pains.

Then Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

Chapter 5: A Wartime Network

The opening of the European front of the World Antifascist Struggle in 1940 was the greatest load shock the American railway system had experienced since the Civil War, and quickly eclipsed it as Salgado brought the war to South America later that year. In addition to the massive amount of freight needed to move material through and from American industry, the Link needed to ferry passengers from all over the country to ports holding troop ships bound for the Soviet Union and Argentina. While the Link was able to handle this at first, over the course of the first year of the war the strain of wartime logistics began to take its toll.

Part of the problem was throughput. While the rationalization and consolidation plans had been an overall success in peacetime, they had unwittingly created chokepoints that would only become apparent once traffic picked up. The accompanying expansion plans had mostly corrected this throughout the late 1930s, but severe choke points were still apparent in two places: the Rockies, and the Cascades. An infamous anecdote details a troop train bound for Seattle being stuck in the Cascade Tunnel for twelve hours due to a traffic jam with trains carrying war materiel and raw materials. Another example was the infamous Jam of 42, when trains took up to a week to traverse Pipestone Pass. While these were largely caused by dispatcher and signaling errors, these incidents spurred further expansion. However, the plans were estimated to take at least a year. Until then, traffic across the passes would simply have to be reduced.

A much larger issue was the state of the rolling stock: while nearly all of it was new and up-to-specification, there wasn’t enough of it to accommodate both demand (passenger and freight) and the rotating wartime maintenance schedule Link planners had drawn up in 1938. After a meeting with senior Link and Railway Union personnel, and the Revolutionary Military Committee, second-time Peoples Secretary Taft (having been reinstated to his old post as part of the wartime Unity Government) ordered the Link to abandon the rotating maintenance schedule: all available rolling stock would be put to use, with maintenance being done when there was time to spare. This resulted in a regime of deferred maintenance that, while allowing for a much higher initial performance than otherwise possible, had a ruinous effect on the Links rolling stock. Such was the rate of attrition that while the Links manufacturing capacity was left relatively untouched by wartime requisitioning and rationing (other than a pre-arranged export quota for the Soviet Union), it was only barely able to meet replacement rates.

Finally, and possibly most severely, the Link faced a critical personnel crisis. The reality of conscription and the calling up of reserves created an initial manpower crunch that compounded the above problems. Already deferred maintenance was further deferred as time-strapped maintenance workers conducted what was essentially triage on the rolling stock they were able to get their hands on. Traffic jams were, in part, due to errors on the part of overworked signallers. And engineers on the trains themselves were overworked close to or past the point of exhaustion.

The Union made official complaints, but were mollified with conscription deferments for Link employees, and some relatively minor changes that did nothing to fix the actual problem: the Link was systemically unprepared for war. It would take the Pineville crash (detailed in the next chapter, and in Daughens magisterial The Pineville Wreck) to spur action from the all-Union government and the Rail Secretariat.

—————————————-

[1:42:42]

Minerva: So, because of this fuckin asshole, what was fundamentally a peacetime network - despite efforts to expand its capacity - is forced into operating in a war economy, and everything that isn’t bolted and welded to the floor is being rushed to support the effort, and you leave barely enough room for maintenance and resting, so things start getting-

Zach: Bumpy?

Minerva: I was gonna say crashy, but it works.

Hugo: How did they get a train up there? That roof should not be as intact as it is.

Zach: It might either be a freakishly light locomotive, or a freakishly strong building. And I’m not sure which one’s more impressive.

Minerva: Gigachad roof aside, you start seeing workers slip up, and equipment starting to fail. And as seen in previous episodes, that leads to all sorts of incidents and accidents happening, such as fights leading to runaway trains, things getting stacked on top of things they shouldn’t be stacked on, and all sorts of janky messes that would have caused several different heart attacks in any other scenario, like that man holding the brake lever.

Hugo: And it’s a safe bet to assume that they did little to change things?

Minerva: They did slightly more than that, but to little effect.

Zach: And this was in spite of the Rail Union pointing all these issues out with increasing frustration.

Minerva: But what would truly force the hand of the Rail Secretariat would happen in a sleepy little town just fifteen minutes from Charlotte. And on a cool spring morning on the 20th of March, next slide please.

Hugo: Oh no

Zach: Oh No

Minerva: Oh Yeah!

Hugo: Jesus fuck!

Zach: That’s putting it mildly.

Minerva: On that date, a coal train hauling coal through the town of Pineville derailed, and bisected the town along the main line, all in the span of a minute.

Hugo: That was quite quick.

Zach: Tends to be the thing with disasters: loads of buildup, but the climax is swift, often over before you could really process it.

Minerva: Two people - the conductor and a trainspotter, were crushed by the wreckage and were put into intensive care at the local hospital, the engineer and fireman had been caught in the boiler explosion of their locomotive, a class DD steam locomotive, number 31958, and had coated the tender behind them in what could be charitably described as ketchup.

Hugo and Zach, simultaneously: Jesus fuck.

Several bystanders at the crossing and in the nearby cafe escaped with little to no injuries, with a total of two dead and 22 injured.

Zach: I guess they’re lucky that there’s not as many people that were killed from it. Damn that’s fucked of me to say.

Minerva: The bigger problem, however, was the fact that the wreckage was blocking the way of almost everyone. For one, the town itself was split in half by the rail line, turning the wreck into a roadblock that effectively prevented any movement within the town. And two, the town was directly on the Southern Corridor, which ran northeast to Charlotte and South to [Insert name of TTL Charleston here]. This meant that the wreck created a massive week-long jam on that part of the line, hampering, if not outright stopping, any and all movement of passengers and cargo by rail.

Hugo: That’s somehow worse than some jams on the ring roads around Havana.

Minerva: Ohhh that’d be a good episode. I’ll add that to the queue.

Zach: At least the Rail Secretariat acted swiftly right?

Minerva: For once, yes. And that was largely because such a massive jam, and its effects on the logistics end of the war effort, could not be ignored, lest the fascists take advantage of it. The wreckage and spilled coal on the tracks themselves would take a week to be cleared for trains to pass through, but two weeks would pass before the Pineville was no longer bisected by a sideways train.

Zach: I would not want to be those guys, that’s for sure.

Minerva: Which brings us to what the direct causes were, and the investigation into the wreck had yielded a few main causes. Care to guess what some of them were?

Zach: I’m guessing… deferred maintenance, overworked crew, and being the one rail link in that area?
Hugo: The bearings might be involved.

Minerva: You all would be correct. Congrats on reading the notes

Zach: Not a problem.

Minerva: From this investigation, the main identified causes were the lack of maintenance, the journal bearings on the cars running hot as a result of that lack of maintenance, and the crew having been overworked to the point that they were unable to try and minimize the risk of wrecking.

Hugo: And all of that was as a result of said problems with the Link in the war, right?

Minerva: Pretty much. And on top of that, the fact that the Southern Corridor was the only major link to Charlotte and it’s other surrounding towns and cities was cited as the main reason why the jam lasted as long as it did. And with the problems identified, let’s take a look at the solutions that were pursued to solve said problems. Next slide please.
—————————————-

—————————————-
Chapter 7: Wartime Problems, Wartime Solutions

Pineville was the wake-up call the Railway Secretariat needed. One crash, clearly caused by overwork and deferred maintenance, had essentially cut the east coast in half for two weeks. Freight and passengers had to be diverted west of the Appalachians if they needed to move north or south. This effectively tripled the traffic along these lines[2], threatening a cascade of knock-on accidents. It is frankly a miracle that this did not happen before normal traffic could resume along the Southern Corridor.

In an April CenExeCom meeting, Taft layed out the sorry state of the Link in a blistering twenty-two minute speech. Using the Pineville wreck as a framing device, Taft walked his audience through the problems of chronic overwork, deferred maintenance, and the sorry state of the Links rolling stock. He ended the speech with the following:

“Comrades, the issues I have spent the last twenty-odd minutes detailing have myriad roots. But to me, the common thread is this: chronic mismanagement at the highest levels of the Rail Secretariat. And the buck stops at me. I allowed management from the old rail tyrannies into key positions in American Rail Link. I acquiesced, despite the correct protests of the Union, to punishing schedules and quotas that overworked the Links workers and physical plant. When these issues became apparent, I did not respond in time. As such, I would like to tender my resignation.”

This immediately caused an uproar in the committee’s meeting chamber. In a private meeting the next day, Premier Reed scolded Taft for his dramatic speech and resignation, later being quoted as saying “in your desire for self-flagellation you have given me yet another fucking crisis to deal with.” Nevertheless, he said he would recommend that CenExeCom accept Taft’s resignation. After a confirmation vote in the CenExeCom, Taft was succeeded as People’s Secretary of Railways by James P Cannon for the second time in less than ten years.

…

Cannon immediately went to work, along with the Rail Union, using the Pineville wreck and its aftermath as a bludgeon to, by hook and crook, beat the resources and concessions to get the Link into wartime shape out of the all-Union government. He by and large succeeded, with Jack Reed giving him a “blank check” to get America’s rail infrastructure performing at the level it would need to to win a global total war.

Cannon’s program centered around four points: rationing, expansion, improvement, and diversification.

Rationing would entail a sharp reduction in traffic by temporarily cutting down on “non-essential” traffic, primarily by instituting sharp limits on long distance passenger travel for non-military purposes, and working with common planning agencies to ensure that as much freight that could be moved off of trains was transferred to other modes of transportation. This would be a strictly temporary measure until the second point of Expansion came into effect.

Expansion would entail additional manufacturing capacity being allocated to the Link from wartime production. This would allow the Link to make rolling stock at above replacement rates, growing the fleet and allowing the rationing to be eased over time. The Defense Secretariat reluctantly acquiesced to this, understanding that a small decrease in manufacturing capacity was better than being unable to get materiel into the theater of operations. Formerly shuttled train works were reactivated, and three plants originally tasked with aircraft and tank production were re-fitted to produce boxcars and locomotives for the Link. By the end of 1942, new rolling stock was rolling off the production lines at quadruple the previous rate, and the train fleet was expanding rapidly, even with a higher replacement rate due to raised standards.

Improvement would be the umbrella under which the implementation of technological innovations would fall. Computerized dispatching and electrification had been a smash success on the northeast corridor, and the plan was to apply these methods across America, in order to ensure the larger fleet would not create enormous cascading traffic jams. The expansion of the “Northeastern Model” was sold on the basis that it would both reduce manpower requirements, and would be key to the coordination of the newly expanded rail fleet. It wouldn’t go into full effect until after the end of the war, but the new system would be a key in the Link’s success throughout the Arduous March.

Finally, diversification was a proposal to expand and improve non-rail transport infrastructure outside of the Rail Secretariats purview, with the objective of taking pressure off of the rail network. These were sometimes rather mundane, such as the abortive attempt to implement surface road truck trains. Others were much more ambitious, such as the Midwest Waterways project under the Maritime Transport Secretariat and Merchant Marine.

Initially, it was a relatively simple expansion of the barge fleet serving the Great Lakes, Erie Canal, and Hudson River, and a re-dredging of the Illinois-Michigan Canal connecting the lakes to the Mississippi basin. This would allow the lake-canal-river routes to move considerably more freight, simultaneously expanding capacity while taking pressure off of the rail network. By 1943, this plan expanded into a canal connecting Lake Erie and the Ohio River, and the transformation of the Illinois-Michigan Canal into the much larger Illinois Waterway. This would create another connection between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, alleviating traffic across the Illinois-Michigan Canal. With the Entente becoming unexpected allies, this would also have the unexpected benefit of giving the Canadians an additional route to move men and goods through. While the war ended before it could be completed, the Illinois Waterway and Ohio Waterway paid their dividends over the course of the Arduous March and beyond.

Taken together, these measures would allow for pressure to be taken off of the rolling inventory and allow for the resumption of the rotating maintenance structure. It also meant that the resulting service was considerably more efficient and effective. The Four Points, as the broader project of improving the Link and the broader American infrastructure network came to be known, would continue through the war, and well into the Arduous March.

—————————————-

[2:32:12]

Minerva: So, what did we learn today?

Hugo: Don’t dive into re-gauging dick-first when you’re expecting a global war in less than twenty years, I guess?

Zach: Waterway transport is cool.

Minerva: Yeah, there’s probably something here about diversifying your logistics networks early and often.

Zach: Yeah. Right, that’s an episode. But before we go, we have a segment on this show, we call, Shake Hands with Danger

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[1] “Purges” here just means mass firings/votes of no confidence: most of those removed from the Link ended up leaving the Link for other work or just moving from a management position into the rank-and-file. Demotion more than execution.

[2] Due to the higher density of ports in proximity of the Southern Corridor’s right-of-way, and the increased industrialization of Cisappalachian New Africa, the SC is designed for, and typically handles, roughly double the traffic as its Transappalachian counterpart. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation

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