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When war began in Europe in September 1939, American railroads were still recovering from a decade of depression. Passenger and freight traffic remained far below their 1929 levels, as did employment and manhours. Military demands soon put an end to excess capacity, however, and by 1943 the carriers were straining to meet the colossal increase in traffic. Predictably , the boom swamped the longer-term forces that had been improving safety, and accident rates rose from their Depression-era lows, but the increase was in fact quite modest. Two decades of research and investment in new technologies and procedures that enhanced both efficiency and safety now paid off as the railroads carried the arsenal of democracy to war. With the end of war in 1945,secular trends reasserted themselves.The railroad technological network generated a host of improvements, many of which had war or prewar origins, and which yielded safety and productivity gains. As a result, most forms of safety steadily improved down to the mid-1950s. But the decline in traffic that had begun in the 1920s also resumed. By the 1950s less-than-carload freight was increasingly shifting to trucks, while passenger traffic was collapsing as automobiles and airplanes stole the carriers’ market. In addition, union work rules and wage pressures raised costs while stultifying state and federal taxes and regulations contributed to railroad woes. Returns on investment sank to abysmal levels and by the late 1950s many eastern and Midwestern lines were in serious financial trouble. Deteriorating finances curbed both investment and safety work. Partly as a result while passenger risks fell unevenly, employee safety worsened for nearly two decades after 1957 and freight derailments rose, 10 SafetyinWarandDecline,1940–1965 Safety, like every other worth-while thing, must be bought and paid for. It is not cheap . . . there are no bargains. —Frank Cizek, Superintendent of Safety, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, 1943 The [Interstate Commerce] commission persistently prove[s] it is not a qualified judge of [the railroads’ safety] by preventing them from making enough earnings to provide for their total needs. —Railway Age, 1947 271 272 DeathRodetheRails becoming for the first time a public issue. The erosion of safety progress undermined the existing regulatory bargain; in 1966 Congress transferred control of railroad safety from the ICC to the newly formed Federal Railroad Administration and four years later federalized control over nearly all aspects of rail safety. CarryingtheArsenalofDemocracy,1939–1945 The expansion of railroad output from 1939 to the wartime peak in 1944 is without any historical parallel. Passenger miles quadrupled, rising from about 22 to nearly 96 billion while freight haulage more than doubled,from 335 to nearly 741 billion ton miles. To accomplish these Herculean feats the carriers increased manhours about 70 percent even as the Selective Service skimmed off many long-time employees. New entrants to the railroad labor force jumped from 239,000 workers in 1939 to 820,000 in 1942. A tight labor market also sharply raised turnover. By 1943 the carriers were hiring women and high school boys, yet labor shortages remained widespread. The Delaware & Hudson, which had seen resignations and dismissals all but vanish in the 1930s, lost nearly one-quarter of its force in 1944.1 Trading Safety for Victory As wartime demands raised traffic density from Depression-era lows, and employee experience and supervision declined, worker safety deteriorated, with fatality rates rising one-third from 1939 to their wartime peak in 1942. Indeed, the wartime years represent one of the few times when we can directly observe safety being traded for increased output. Derailments, which had averaged around 4,000 a year in the 1930s, rose to 9,379 in 1945. Accidents from transverse fissures jumped, as the carriers’ detection programs were unable to keep up with traffic growth. While most derailments involved freights, passenger fatality rates from derailments, which had been zero in 1935, ballooned to 1.87 per billion passenger miles in 1943—a level not seen in decades. The Atlantic Coast Line (ACL) seemed particularly derailment-prone. In 1941 two passenger train derailments caused serious injuries, and on December 16, 1943, near Buie, North Carolina, a transverse fissure spilled one passenger train onto the track in front of another, killing seventy-seven people. Less than a year later, on August 4, 1944, another broken rail killed forty-seven on the ACL near Stockton, Georgia. The Pennsylvania’s turn came on September 6, 1943, when a hot box broke an axle...

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