Excerpts from Power in motion: A history of North American RailLink (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1994)

In terms of employment, revenue and effective market capitalization (however haphazardly we may estimate it), the statutory corporation North American RailLink has been among the largest corporate entities in the world since the moment of its creation. Founded in 1934 as American Rail Link, the corporation has remained the resolute monopoly on rail traffic in the North American continent, expanding further in the postwar era when it merged with Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, serving as a binational body jointly administered by the two fraternal republics.

A creature of the Transport Secretariat, the size of RailLink coupled with its relative statutory independence has caused it to be frequently accused of being the small wheel turning the larger one. At its peak, RailLink was the largest owner and operator of toll roads and road bridges, as well as the rights-of-way of what would become the federal Autobahn network, utilising its political influence to push most projects into the hands of its Construction and Engineering Administration.

Utilising the resulting toll collection, RailLink would self-finance many of its own initiatives outside of general appropriations from the All-Union government, ensuring the supremacy of rail transport in freight and passenger service in no small part due to throttling its competitors.

[…]

Chapter III: The master builder

…[John] Fabrio’s* rise to power within American Rail Link began in earnest in the spring of 1934. In amalgamating all the railroad companies into a single state enterprise, “the Link” came into possession of massive ancillary business interests. A period of divestment was inevitable. Many stalwarts from the administrations of the old companies were extremely conservative about this. They may have gained the provisional trust of the communists, but old habits died hard. Choices of pruning lines and divesting ancillary property interests were fought at every step, often irrationally.

In its initial form, the Link was a bloated entity inheriting all the inefficiencies of the previous period of the “Railroad Anarchy”. And amidst this struggle, one former Pennsy man would rise to the top. Fabrio had the good fortune to “come up from the ranks” in the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the good sense, sincere or not, to become one of the latter-day communists of the American intelligentsia.

Thanks to his role in marshalling former Pennsylvania Railroad assets to support the Reds in the civil war, Fabrio’s star would only rise. The son of a railroad fireman, who dropped out of high school to support his family after his father’s demise in a train derailment, the bright young man would eventually earn the charity of his employers and would be sent to the then-Carnegie Institute of Technology where he would learn civil engineering. This charity did not inspire undying loyalty; rather it stoked resentment in him as he returned to work for his old employers.

If there was one master passion for Fabrio, it was the desire to build. Rising in the Pennsylvania Railroad’s engineering department, he landed a role in the planning of the Southern Pennsylvania Road and Turnpike in 1929.

The Turnpike, as it became known, was Pennsy’s last victory over long-time rival New York Central. In the transition from nationalisation to the new Operating Company format after the Great War, the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the charter of the defunct Southern Pennsylvania Railroad, a scheme from the 1880s by rival industrialists associated with New York Central to build an alternative line from Harrisburg to Pittsburg along a lower-grade route through the mostly empty southern part of the state.

The ambitious scheme had failed due to the high engineering expense, and major industrialists intervened to head off the brewing price war that threatened to upend the industrial economy of the North East. With the growth of the automobile in the 1920s, Pennsylvanian automobile clubs began to lobby for a major highway between the east and west Pennsylvania as an alternative to the very long, crawling route through the mostly unimproved roads of the Pennsylvania hinterland. Pennsy jumped on the chance to use the proposed turnpike (a vernacular name for a turnstile, used as a synecdoche for a tolled route) project to complete a newer, more efficient line to move freight and passengers across the Allegheny Mountains.

The expanded right of way would include a double-track railway as well as a divided, controlled access concrete highway. The route would be fully grade-separated from the outset, with toll controlled access. Pennsy sold the project with the promise of rehabilitating existing engineering works of the former Southern Pennsylvania scheme, including unfinished tunnels, and was able to obtain a generous grant of £10.28 million, and authorization for a matching bond from the government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, along with £6.37million in cash. The project would be owned and operated by a subsidiary, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Authority, allowing Pennsy at least the theoretical option to insulate its books from expenses.

The project turned into a money pit for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The existing embankments, road bed and tunnels turned out to be almost entirely unfit for purpose, forcing an extensive redesign. The modern tunnel boring machines, purchased at Fabrio’s insistence, proved to be the only saving grace. Way over budget, additional bonds and private capital loans were extended.

Owing only to the mass depressing of wages by the Depression, the project lumbered on. By July 1932, principal construction was complete. One track was laid, and engineering work began on traction power systems to tie into the 11 kV system at Harrisburg, but the automobile road bed was still months away from completion. In the chaos of the coming political crisis, the system largely remained unused until the Civil War, where it was rapidly pressed into service by the Red Army to move troops and supplies.

[…]

Winding the clock forward to 1934, Fabrio was now the head of the Link’s Construction and Engineering Administration. The now finished Southern Pennsylvania line had relieved passenger and freight congestion on the Pittsburg-Harrisburg old main line. Electrified, it now extended the “Keystone Corridor” from Philadelphia all the way to Pittsburg, allowing one-seat rides without time-consuming locomotive switching, and simplified the movement of freight across the Allegheny Mountains.

There’s also a nearly finished controlled access highway, with installed toll booths, that thus far has been under the exclusive domain of the military. Passing back into civilian hands, there were many within the Link who wanted to get this troublesome asset off the books, returning the highway sections of the right-of-way and associated infrastructure, including multiple service plazas, to the Pennsylvania Bureau of Public Roads.

But what had been a financial boondoggle was now a major asset. Utilising his accumulated influence within the Link, Fabrio blocked the retrocession of the Turnpike. The huge debt incurred to build the Turnpike was dramatically reduced by the revolution, invalidating most of the bonds and loans held by proscribed organisations and exiles. The remaining bond debt that had been incurred would now be repaid at face value by a dramatically devalued dollar. The tolls that would’ve been used to repay the bonds were now a major revenue source for further capital projects, as well as a mechanism to protect the common carrier regulated railroad from unfair competition from less regulated road-borne competitors.

The Link would go on to duplicate this process in the post-war era, utilising its immense construction assets to build new tolled expressways along its modern main lines, utilising tolling revenue to attract more bonds and grants from provincial governments to finance new infrastructure projects. In a careful balancing act, the price of tolled expressways ensured that revenue collection was high enough to be sustainable while still subsidising the price of passenger tickets.

[…]

Fabrio’s great stroke of genius while serving as head of the CEA was turning the disparate engineering and construction assets of the amalgamated railroads into the country’s largest public works system. Utilising the immense economies of scale provided by the world’s largest corporation, the CEA would become the default primary provider of geotechnical engineering and infrastructure projects. The machines and work crews would be kept in constant motion, shifted around the country on the public works projects of the central government’s Social Works Administration.

Contrasting work cultures were broken down by hiring outside of the railroad industry for managerial talent. Drawing heavily from party members with engineering backgrounds, the Link’s backbone would be an organisation run by and for engineers, a Marxism by-way-of mechanical engineering. And they would have a hand in many of the great works of the recovery, including hydroelectric dams, bridges, canals and viaducts. The most (in)famous, the rehabilitation and rationalisation of the rail industry, included the perhaps overly enthusiastic project to regauge the tracks to 1524 mm broad gauge, a plan whose pay off time was measured in decades.

As head of the CEA, most of the important regulatory decisions for the modern shape of the railway system came from Fabrio’s desk. The three (later four) tier railway electrification standard was one of his personal brainchilds: 750 V DC for subways and trams, 3 kV DC in metro rail and electric mainlines west of Chicago, and 12.5 kV AC in mainlines in the east of Chicago electric territory (later supplanted by 25 kV AC power for new trunk lines and systemic upgrades).

[…]

The term ‘engineer’ was once synonymous with war; specialist soldiers tasked with operating great siege engines or the building of earthworks for military purposes. In warfare in the twentieth century, it has taken on a particularly logistical focus.

During the administrative disasters befalling the Link in the Second World War, much of the ongoing major projects were at risk of being rendered surplus to requirements, with their resources and manpower liquidated to serve the war machine elsewhere.

Fabrio’s first feat, and likely the one that pushed him into the role as chairman of the directorial council of American Rail Link, was saving the cross-harbor tunnels in Metropolis from the axe. The largest industrial and port city in the country had long been hampered by horrendous bottlenecks for freight traffic into its core. Massive feats of engineering would be required to link the major port rail facilities in Jersey City to Brooklyn or Manhattan. Freight destined for core New York City had long been faced with two equally unattractive options.

The first was the labour intensive and time-consuming process of detraining freight cars, shunting them onto rail barges, and floating them across the busy New York Harbor to their eventual destination, to be retrained and sent to their final destinations. The alternative was sending rail traffic on a 451 km detour known as the “Selkirk hurdle”, to the southernmost extant rail bridge on the busy Hudson River shipping channel, nearly all the way to Albany.

The cross harbour tunnels would clear this hurdle, dramatically reducing shipping times as well as clearing out major space from yards for other development. But it would take a small army of men to run the tunnel boring machines, move the nearly 500,000 cubic metres of resulting pulverised rock and earth, and assemble the reinforced concrete tunnel interior, to say nothing of laying the rail and electrical catenary.

The military was keen to put those men in uniform, so Fabrio did what any self-respecting master builder would do: he broke ground on the project ahead of schedule, whipped his engineers into three-shift, around-the-clock work to complete the initial design work, and transferred workers from the ongoing North River Tunnels to put the Cross-Harbor Freight Tunnels into full-staffing, creating the appearance of a sunk cost if the project was cancelled. This gave Fabrio the leverage he needed to present his case to the War Production Commission.

Fabrio’s presentation to the Commission focused on one thing only: clear the bottlenecks. Just as Lenin had noted the truism that a chain was only as strong as its weakest link, a pipe is only as fast as its bottleneck. The Link was busy clearing the bottlenecks, and it would damage the war effort to allow the logistical bottlenecks to continue. An imposing man, standing 187 centimetres, could often be seen physically domineering members of the Commission in one-on-one meetings.

[…]

Fabrio had effectively mortgaged his career on the success of a single project. Cross-Harbor Freight had been promised to be completed in record time, and if it failed it would be the end of his career, and the undoing of every other planned infrastructure project of his administration. He had bet everything on a new tunnel boring method the CEA had developed to increase speeds and reduce costs. The suite of engineering techniques is now variously called the Link tunnelling method or the sequential excavation method.

In principle, the Link method is a design-as-you go process, exploiting the strength of native rock mass to provide the primary tunnel support during the boring process, reinforcing the rock face with a thin layer of shotcrete immediately aft of the tunnelling face. The continual measurement and monitoring of the tunnel conditions then guides engineering work, beginning with the use of flexible, active supports, progressing to the closing of the invert—the bottom portion of the tunnel—to create a load-bearing ring of reinforced concrete.

Fabrio was on the work site for much of the work on the project, with behaviour bordering on micromanagement.The Cross-Harbor Freight Tunnel was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. When he was not, he was in-motion in a specially prepared “headquarters train” with much of his senior staff, a now iconic consist of Art Deco styled light-weight Pullman car rebuilds, usually hauled by an Altoona GG-1 electric locomotive. As work progressed to his satisfaction, he would bring along VIPs up from DeLeon City to witness the wonders of modern Link engineering.

The original Cross-Harbour Freight Tunnel consisted of two parallel single-track tunnels, connected by a smaller third service tunnel in the middle, running a 9.1 km stretch from Jersey City’s Greenville Yard to Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge branch line. Completed in sixteen months, they remained in service for their primary purpose for forty-two years before eventually being supplanted by the John Fabrio Tunnel, an immortalisation of his legacy on the region. Presently, the old tunnels have, post-modernisation, been transferred to the MTA’s rapid transit network.

Despite its original name, electric passenger service followed after on the tunnels, utilising the expanded capacity to relieve bottlenecks at peak demand. Using the caché earned by his on-time performance, Fabrio was able to preserve the Tribeca Access project, as well as move forward with the recovery of the Civil War damaged Mid-Town Hudson car tunnel, and in doing so made a fait accompli the Link’s intended expropriation of the transit assets of both the Metropolitan Port Authority as well as the Triborough Bridge Authority.

[…]

The continued process of revolving leadership in the Railway Secretariat after the Pineville Disaster created a power vacuum that the ambitious new guard in the Link were eager to capitalise on. And with the transit of troops and resources to the Soviet Union severely throttled, and the opening of the Pacific War dramatically shifting transport and industrial demands, major change was urgently needed.

What would become the 1942 Infrastructure Addendum to the Second Five Year Plan had its genesis at the April 1942 meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council. Of special note, Alfred E. Perlman, Chairman of American Rail Link, and much of his senior division leadership were summoned, including Fabrio. The RMC was concerned with the movement of freight and troop trains to the West Coast, and solutions to the bottleneck of supplies. Cooperating with Longshoreman Chairman Harry Bridges, the Link proposed a suite of capital and organisational measures.

The most expensive of which was restarting electrification of all main lines to Chicago. The half-finished work was bottlenecking rail traffic to the most important rail hub in the country. Nearly everything that went west of the Mississippi River would wind up in Chicago. Eliminating locomotive changes would cut down on shipment times and increase reliability. The retirement of the steam locomotives on these vital corridors would relieve the run-down process of older steam engines. The newer electrics were more reliable, and required smaller support crews.

Concomitant of this process was ramping up production of both electric and diesel-electric locomotives, a costly change that would require the freeing up of engine production assets that had been committed to marine diesels or tank engines.

But freight must also be in motion, yet the fate of the average freight car is to spend most of its time waiting at yards. Millions in additional funds were secured to ensure that freight cars were sorted, entrained and moved quickly. For this, the refitting of major train classification yards into hump yards, patterned off the new Selkirk Yard. The sorting of freight cars would be eased through the use of electromechanical computers. Crude by modern standards, the system of teletypes and punchcard computers could automatically relay the destination, content and position of every car in a train, allowing it to be efficiently sorted for the next leg of its journey.

Automated maintenance-of-way equipment could reduce the vast armies of workers needed to keep the rails inspected and in top performance. The schlepping of large amounts of parcelled goods before last mile delivery would be streamlined through the adoption of intermodal containers. Even the traffic on the rails themselves would be optimised, utilising the signals system to control the movement of trains with greater precision.

Taken together, these reforms would ultimately put thousands of workers out of a job, a sensitive topic in any country, least of all a ‘worker’s state’. But the exigency of the war ensured it would be done, regardless of the opposition. Workers were slowly growing accustomed to the notion that they would be taken care of even if made redundant.

[…]

Fabrio’s career path would be determined in August 1942, when in recognition of his accomplishment, and to shield him from the people he had politically bludgeoned into accepting his demands, he was promoted to Chairman of the Iranian Extraterritorial Division of the American Rail Link.

The Extraterritorial Division has worn many hats over its existence. In the present day, they are chiefly concerned with the export of technology to other countries, providing engineering and construction assistance, and thus the sale of major durable goods like electronics and rolling stock. But some of the Extraterritorial Divisions, such as the Iranian one, have been the entire Link replicated in miniature.

The Iranian Link had its origins in the 1940 Democratic Revolution, overthrowing the Shah and instituting a people’s republic as a cross-class democratic front with nominal communist leadership. In the early years of the new republic, problems with continued resistance and the end of many foreign operators in the country caused considerable economic dislocation.

The Imperial Iranian Railways, the state owner and operator of the rail system, had imported technology to build the country’s primary railway, the Trans-Iranian Railway linking Bandar Abu Nuwas (then Bandar Shahpur) to Bandar al-Tabatabaei (then Bandar Shah). The Trans-Iranian had been engineered by the Danish firm Kampsax, who subcontracted sections to multiple other foreign construction concerns for building. Completed on-time, the railway itself had largely been operated by a German Krupp subsidiary in the short period before the revolution, using rolling stock and personnel from the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The revolution resulted in a total halt to rail operations, the damage of significant portions of the right-of-way, and the wrecking or evacuation of rolling stock and port facilities.

A contract had been concluded in January 1941 for the American Rail Link to rehabilitate and operate the railways, training local personnel to eventually take over. When Fabrio arrived in the country in September 1942, this work had yet to be finished. His predecessor, Alfred Roose*, having been ordered to reguage the lines, had been unable to fully restore service. While Roose* could say with truth that he had not been given the resources to succeed, his performance with the resources given to him had not been satisfactory. With the military involved, needing greater throughput for the Iranian corridor than could be provided by trucks, the problem had to be fixed.

Fabrio’s first priority, which he pursued ruthlessly, was getting trains moving at any speed. Remaining damaged and un-regauged sections would be rehabilitated to the minimum standards needed to allow slow speed traffic. As time and resources permitted, they would be improved again. To secure rolling stock to begin moving freight, he was able to requisition a large number of Alco RSD-1 diesel-electrics awaiting transit to the Soviet Union which had been bottlenecked by the closure of the Vladivostok route. The remaining still serviceable German and British steam locomotives would be removed from revenue service at the earliest convenience, but in the meantime Fabrio ordered engineering crews to begin salvage operations of wrecked locomotives thought to be suitable only for scrap to keep the remainder in operation

By October, the trains were running, operated almost entirely by American crews. The hiring of Iranians was greatly complicated by the needs of Iran’s war effort against Turkey and Iraq. The moribund Iranian State Railways unable to hire at market rate, and unable to requisition against the military’s manpower needs. Fabrio resolved this by directly hiring Iranians at the same wage-rate as Americans, paid in American dollars.

By December, the Trans-Iranian Railway was averaging 5,100 tonnes a day of traffic. This would further improve to over 7,000 tonnes in May with the completion of track rehabilitation, and the Iranian Division expanding its operations in the Caspian port of Bandar al-Tabatabaei. Funds were secured for a line extension to the Trans-Caspian Railway in Gazanjyk, providing through service to the Soviet railway network.

Beginning with the harvest season in 1943, Fabrio began a new commercial operation, utilising the Link’s truck freight subsidiary to purchase agricultural products for export to the Soviet Union as food aid, obtaining the new surpluses generated by agricultural mechanisation at fair prices, utilising a portion of the Agriculture Secretariat’s budget for food requisition. While it amounted to a small portion of the deliveries to the Soviet Union, it accomplished two important goals for Fabrio. It improved trust and goodwill with the Iranian populace, especially the peasantry being prodded into large collective agriculture operations, and perhaps most importantly, it padded the freight numbers of materiel being moved by the Iranian Link.

[…]

By year end 1943, the Iranian Division was truly operating as a miniature clone of its parent. Fabrio had sponsored the establishment of modern engineering colleges in Tehran to supply a future generation of engineers, a Construction and Engineering Division to transfer skills on building and maintaining rail infrastructure, a Signals and Operations Division to coordinate traffic on the lines, making the Link the largest employer of Iranian women at the time, as well as re-establishing commercial freight and passenger services.

Even as traffic improved on other lines of communication into the Soviet Union, utilisation of the Iranian corridor remained high, contributing to the surge of men and war materiel that brought the war to a United Nations victory.

Fabrio would remain as Chairman of the Iranian Extraterritorial Division for the duration of the war and beyond, ending with the hand-over of operations to the Democratic Republic of Iran, with the establishment of the Iranian Rail Link, and the symbolic transfer of the keys to the headquarters in Tehran to his Iranian successor, Hossein Maki.

After a short-stint serving officially as director-without-portfolio on the Link’s Council of Directors, Fabrio would be elected its Chairman in January 1947… *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation