By Land and Sea 105 



Their performance under war handicaps indicates that they 

 will be ready, willing, and able to give a good account of 

 themselves against all competitors in postwar years. 



Reporting on "the battle of transportation," the Office of 

 War Information pointed out that the heavy blow delivered 

 by Nazi submarines to intercoastal shipping through the 

 Panama Canal, and to coastwise shipping along the Atlantic, 

 had thrown a heavy burden on the railroads. Before the war 

 emergency, said the OWI, one tanker used to leave the Gulf 

 ports almost every hour with oil for the seventeen Eastern 

 states and the District of Columbia, now known as District I. 

 One million five hundred thousand barrels of oil a day were 

 delivered to that region by water. Customarily only five or 

 six thousand barrels a day were delivered by rail, virtually 

 all of it special products such as asphalt, liquefied petroleum 

 gases, and wax. Now East-coast tankers are few (the exact 

 number of those in service is a war secret) and the railroads 

 have taken over Eastern oil deliveries in a larger measure than 

 was believed possible even by themselves when the emer- 

 gency first arose. 



"Somewhat less than in the case of oil, but still to a strik- 

 ing extent," the OWI reports, "the railroads have assumed 

 the major burden of coal deliveries to the Northeast. New 

 England, which in 1939 received three-quarters of its bitumi- 

 nous coal by collier, is now receiving over half by rail. . . . 

 New York, which is more easily served by rail than is New 

 England, now receives no collier deliveries from Hampton 

 Roads." 



In addition to the above shipments, the railroads are mov- 

 ing to ports quantities of Army and Lend-Lease exports which 

 dwarf anything in the country's history. In 1942 they car- 

 ried 638,000,000,000 ton-miles of freight, an increase of a 

 third over 1941, which had been the peak year, and OWI 

 says the figure cannot help but rise in 1943. 



