The U.P. Trail

(See Cover) In peace, the U.S. railways, like the human circulatory system, are taken for granted. Only in war, when the crowded arteries pump hard, does the U.S. become conscious of their existence. Last week, the American people were conscious, as seldom before, of their rail system. The congestion, slowly worsening during four years of war, had reached the danger point under the heavy strain of troops deploying from Europe to the Pacific.

It had come much sooner than expected.

According to the Army plan, the great mass of troops would reach the U.S. in November, when the railroads must find room for 1,500,000 troops. The Army was caught up in its own efficiency; it was returning troops from Europe to the U.S. some 30% faster than it had expected. In Manhattan, the great grey Queen Elizabeth, the Aquitania and other transports docked last week. In two days, they disgorged 39,695 G.I.s, the biggest disembarkation of the war. As the troops climbed into long lines of rail coaches and Pullmans, and rumbled off to camp, many a battle-weary veteran bitterly resented the way he was forced to travel.

Many sweltered in grimy day coaches, slept on the dirty floors, jeered at the sleek streamliners which whizzed past as they waited for hours on sidings.

The Tool. But many a civilian was no better off. They too waited in long lines in railroad stations, were jampacked into coaches, slept where they could find room to curl up. There was this difference, however: for the G.I.s, things would probably get better. (The Army was already experimenting with a plan to have them sleep in eight-hour shifts in Pullmans, thus triple the number of berths.) But for civilians things could only get worse.

Last week, the Office of Defense Transportation made it plain how much worse they might get. It ordered U.S. railroads to pool all their passenger and baggage cars, so that they will be on tap to meet Army demands. This was partly scare talk, to keep civilians off trains. But it was also a plain warning that, from now on, civilians will travel only at the pleasure of the Army.

The Job. The railroads had already performed a transportation miracle. By working men & equipment to the cracking point, U.S. railroads last year hauled 740 billion ton-miles of freight, more than twice the 1939 total. Passenger-miles trebled in the five years to 96 billion. The railroads had no choice. Part of this back-breaking traffic had been the 3,500,000 troops--and all the materiel needed to fight in Europe--that were shipped from East Coast ports. The railroads had done the improbable; now they must do the impossible. Miracle must now be piled on miracle. In the next ten months they must move as many troops across the U.S. as they had done in three years.

And this time they could not spread the job evenly over a network of eastern roads. The enormous load had to be carried by the seven thin western lines which finger out from the midwest, snake through the high, twisting passes of the Rockies and drop down from the high sierra to the key ports of the West Coast, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.

In this giant's job, the biggest share will fall to the Union Pacific. And the burden of the U.P.'s job rests on the muscular shoulders of the red-faced, hard-as-nails Irishman who bosses its 10,000 miles of track, William Martin Jeffers.

The Legend. The U.P. was conceived in war. In 1862, Lincoln ordered it built to tie the western territories more firmly to the Union. The U.P., main link in the first U.S. transcontinental railroad, has become a lusty, robust American legend.

Many things went to make up the legend. Some were scandalous: the rail financing of the Credit Mobilier, the fiscal shenanigans of Rail Baron Jay Gould, the first great rail antitrust suit (when U.P. was forced to disgorge the railroads it had gobbled). But most of it was the stirring stuff of pioneering, typified by the track-laying gangs of wild Irishmen. They drove the rails of the U.P. west to meet the track-laying Chinese of the Central Pacific coming east, stood guzzling while the tracks were joined with a gold spike at Promontory Point, Utah (see cut).

Of their wild Irish hell-raising, one chronicler wrote: "Champagne corks popped among the section bosses, barrels of whiskey floated the spirits of the laborers higher than the howls of timber wolves in the forests. Lurching between the roaring shacks they showed off their tricks of close-in fighting, western--and highly personal--marksmanship; their excitingly various ways of love-making . . . violent . . . dangerous. Timber-cutters charged down from their mountain camps and raided the effete shovel heavers like Apaches. The shovel-heavers raided back and returned with blood on the ends of their picks."

At the Bottom. Bill Jeffers was a product of this brawling frontier. His father, William, came over from Ireland's County Mayo in 1868 and, after laying his share of track, settled down to work as laborer for the U.P. in North Platte, Neb. There Bill Jeffers was born, in a tiny clapboard house that was usually crowded with railroad men, always swirled with argument (when all other topics were exhausted, they argued on ways & means of freeing Ireland). It was inevitable that Bill Jeffers should grow up to be 1) belligerent, 2) a railroad man.

He left school at 14, after fisticuffs with the teacher, to become a U.P. janitor and call boy. He had no boyhood to speak of, only work. His unboylike ambition was some day to become president of the U.P.

He learned telegraphy. At 19 he was a train dispatcher. On his salary of $110 a month, he married Lena A. Schatz, a rural schoolteacher, and took a short time off for his honeymoon. It was his last vacation for 35 years.

The Way Up. From then on, Bill Jeffers' career reads like the biography of most railroaders, who miss few rungs on their way up the gritty ladder. He was a switchman, yardmaster, trainmaster, division superintendent, general manager and assistant to the president. In the tough, hard-working game of railroading he was tougher than anyone else, and worked harder. If his authority was questioned, he frequently settled the argument with his iron fist. Once, months after the event, he decided that a Chicago hotel manager had insulted Mrs. Jeffers. Bill Jeffers walked into the hotel and floored the so & so.

Usually he worked twelve to 16 hours a day. He likes, on the basis of an eight-hour day, to brag that he has already worked 100 years for the U.P. During those 100 years, he had little time for friends or reading--beyond westerns and detective stories. He spent long weeks prowling the 10,000 miles of U.P. track, sometimes on foot. He learned literally every inch of it and, according to legend, the first names of some 10,000 U.P. workers. Hard on his employes, with a business eye he humored the slightest whims of passengers. When a woman complained about the cuspidors in a chair car, Bill Jeffers had them taken off the train.

The Top. By 1932, when he moved to Omaha, he knew the U.P. so well that President Carl Raymond Gray mostly let Bill Jeffers run it. Jeffers ran it, and with a hard hand. Many U.P. workers thought him tyrannical; all of them feared his red-faced, explosive wrath. Said one worker ruefully: "You do anything that isn't exactly according to the book and you'll soon find out who's running this road."

Bill Jeffers was willing to overlook one honest mistake, but usually fired a man for his second. One day he fired his brother because he wasn't doing his job the way Bill Jeffers thought he should. Nor did Bill Jeffers' rise affect his father. Until he died some 13 years ago, old William Jeffers continued to work for the U.P. as a laborer who never earned more than $55 a month.

Despite his harshness, Jeffers won and held a reputation for scrupulous fairness, and for never asking anyone to do anything that he wouldn't do himself. Once, when he was general superintendent, he ran a rotary snowplow for 120 hours, opened the main line for traffic. The railroad brotherhoods, with whom U.P.'s relations are so cordial that there has been no labor trouble since 1903, regard Jeffers as a hard, fair bargainer.

Out Tradition. Jeffers was hard but not hard-shelled. He cracked tradition with the low-fare, de luxe chair-car trains which U.P. started to run from Chicago to the coast in 1934. He followed this up in 1935 with the second streamlined train, the tiny three-car City of Salina, the first of the seven streamliners which U.P. now operates.

Only last week, Bill Jeffers' faith in the lightweight streamliners, with their low center of gravity, was again justified. When the City of Los Angeles jumped the track near Dunlap, Iowa, at 80 m.p.h., only one car turned over and no one was seriously hurt.

Improvements in service and equipment Jeffers could understand, but he had no patience with luxury for de luxe sake. When Board Chairman W. Averell Harriman proposed the U.P.'s skiing resort at Sun Valley, Idaho, Jeffers said disgustedly: "The only thing I ever did with snow was to shovel it the hell off the track. Now you want to play with it."

As the Showman. But when Jeffers became U.P. president in 1937, Big Bill developed a broad streak of Hollywood showmanship, a liking for lavish dinners --and the publicity and good will they brought the U.P. When he was crowned King Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backwards), an honor given each year to a leading citizen of Omaha, he decked himself out in silk knee breeches, a 35-lb. train, and a crown perched on the side of his head. His own battery of cameramen were on hand to take his picture. So attired, Jeffers presided over, and paid for, a dinner so lavish that Ak-Sar-Ben hastily barred such parties in the future to keep their new kings from going bankrupt.

His most memorable dinner featured a "flaming sword" course of lamb saddle impaled on a blazing sword; red, white & blue uniformed waitresses and a parade of waiters with ice cannons on trays, lit by flashlights and giant sparklers.

The Rubber Boss. When Jeffers went to Washington in 1942 to straighten out the rubber program, his loud ways proved effective. Critics sneered that all he had was a "good publicity man." But plain citizens were delighted at the way he exploded at Congressmen and "bunglers." He bulled through half of the rubber program at a time when a battering ram was more effective than a reasoned argument. When he went back to his $75,000 a year job with the U.P. (later he carefully collected the 97-c- which Uncle Sam owed him on his $1 a year salary), the rubber program was unkinked and well under way.

Actually, Jeffers had a keener perception of war's realities than some of his critics. Back in 1939, he had stoutly spoken up at Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the heart of the isolationist Midwest: "We must make no mistake about it. It is up to the American people to support the Allies with ammunition and supplies whether we like it or not." These remarks roused the ire of many an isolationist, and posters were even circulated urging passengers to stay off the U.P., but Jeffers went right ahead getting himself and his railroad ready for war. He laid out an enormous spending program to improve the U.P.

In the three years after Pearl Harbor, the U.P. spent $278,000,000. It bought 2,270 new cars, 136 locomotives. It laid 1,680 miles of heavier rail to carry the oversize freight trains that Jeffers knew were on the way. Though one of the U.P.'s fondest boasts is that its roadbed is better laid and better kept than any other road's in the U.S., it rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadbed. For the steep grades over the Great Divide it developed the world's biggest locomotive (4-8-8-4), the 132-ft. "Big Boy," and bought 25 of them. The smartest trick of all was to install centralized traffic control on nearly 400 miles of U.P.'s single track, which gave it many of the advantages of double track. The whole 302 miles between Daggett, Calif, and Caliente, Nev. is now controlled by one operator in Las Vegas, sitting behind a battery of levers and buttons.

As two trains thunder along the single track, approaching each other, the operator simply presses a button and switches one into a passing track while the other whizzes by. Then the train on the passing track is switched back to the main line. Many of the tracks are long enough so that neither train even has to stop. Result: by cutting down the running time of trains, this system permits the track to carry 50% more traffic, saves some 150,000 man-hours a year, releases seven locomotives and 229 freight cars a day for other routes.

Like other roads, the U.P. has been starved for manpower. Yet Bill Jeffers, by using women for many a tough job, has managed to boost his working force from 35,000 to 60,000. He opened a school for women telegraphers, even put women to work as brakemen. By these and other tricks he has stretched U.P.'s workers and equipment till they were able to move 7,156,785 passengers last year and handle 37,000,000,000 ton-miles of revenue freight, up 185% over 1939. While doing this, he has set the best safety record of any big U.S. railroad. His books make nice reading, too. On U.P.'s operating revenue of $159,444,197 in the first four months of this year.* U.P. shows a net profit of $11,440,666 ($4.55 a share on its common stock).

Now, Bill Jeffers has one more improvement in mind. He plans to move soon with his wife and adopted daughter from Omaha to the West Coast, so that he can keep an even closer eye on his railroad. He has no doubt that the U.P. will do its job, that the long trains of troops and freight will be at the ports when the ships are there to take them. But he wants to be there to see for himself.

In Los Angeles he has bought a big, tree-shaded house, next door to Comedian Bob Hope. At 69, Jeffers is only five months away from the age at which U.P. presidents usually retire. But to any suggestion that his move west has any connection with retirement, his square face turns a light shade of purple.

"Hell," he snorts, "quit as long as there's a war on?"

Trouble Ahead. And now that the big push is actually starting, there seems small chance of Bill Jeffers quitting. He knows, as well as his fellow railroadmen, that too many things can go wrong and knock the best plans galley west. Traffic at Los Angeles is already near the port's capacity. At San Francisco, government freight is arriving at the rate of 13,000 cars a day v. only 1,000 a year ago. Smooth, efficient management here, as on the East Coast, is keeping ports and railyards from becoming clogged.

But none of these roads, nor the rest of the U.S. railroads, have all the equipment they want, even though they have spent the whopping sum of $2 billion for equipment and improvements since war began. If they had, the Army might now have nearly all the coaches and Pullmans it wants, without crippling civilian travel. The plain fact is that WPB, with the tacit approval of the Army, has shortsightedly kept the roads on starvation rations.

The manufacture of passenger cars was shut off in 1942, not started again until six weeks ago--too late to ease the present crisis. Belatedly, this spring, the Army also ordered 1,600 troop cars. WPB has issued high priorities for the manufacture of 664 passenger cars, but the bulk of them will not be delivered till December at the earliest. If deployment continues to move faster than its schedule, the Army will have to dip into the civilian supply again.

Equipment is only part of the problem; the rest is manpower. The War Manpower Commission gave the railroads no better a deal than did WPB. For nearly four years of war, the railroads' key men were steadily drained into the armed forces. Not till last May, after the roads had lost 300,000 men to the services, were they granted top manpower priorities.

Now the dogweary railmen, still working an average 51-hour week, are spread so thin that there is no one to operate more trains. With rail wages as low as they are and the skills needed for many of the jobs as high, there is small hope of making these two ends meet. Many a railman is convinced that the wisest thing to do is to furlough railroaders from the Army. Unless that happens, the railroads are keeping their fingers crossed. At best, they expect the present squeeze on civilians to last until next spring. At worst, they wonder if the wire-taut rail system will stand another winter like last year's.

*In World War I, the U.P. was one of the few roads that the Federal Government made money on. After the Government took over, it paid U.P. $77,785,522 rent for the two years of operation, cleared $19,800,000 from freight & passengers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.