Caged Eagle

The Colorado Eagle—streamliner, daily including Sunday—rolled into St. Louis' Union Station and disgorged its passengers, among them Washington-bound Bess Truman. Conductor J. M. McFarland turned in his train report. "Well, that's that," he sighed. "Tomorow I think I'll do some hunting." Eighty-five minutes later, the busy Missouri Pacific Railroad (the nation's ninth largest) wheezed to a stop, shut down by a strike of its 5,000 engineers, firemen, enginemen, conductors and trainmen.

The yard at Dupo, Ill., second largest freight-car interchange point in the world, was a lonely desert of empty tracks. Train riders in the ten states in which the road carries 12,000 passengers daily scurried about for other means of transport. Thousands of Midwestern and Southern business firms, which ship 250,000 tons of freight each day on the MoPac, bid frantically for trucking services to deliver their raw materials and their products.

At issue was a $3,000,000 accumulation of old arguments over the MoPac's operating rules. The four Brotherhoods and MoPac's management had tried for six years to negotiate a settlement, exhausting most of the machinery of the Railway Labor Act. The railroad repeatedly offered to submit the cases to arbitration but the Brotherhoods, arguing that the claims were not the kind that could be arbitrated, consistently refused. Last week they refused again and this time headed for the roundhouse.

As the strike tightened, the railroaders mistakenly began stopping trains of the St. Louis Southwestern railroad (Cotton Belt), which uses a section of MoPac's tracks. Next day, union officials got their pickets straightened out, gave the highball to ten stranded Cotton Belt passenger and freight trains.

The MoPac's clientele could not quite believe the railroad and Brotherhoods would hobble the lower Midwest's transport system for long. A hastily assembled citizens' committee persuaded both sides to sit down and seek a way to end the tie-up. But early this week the MoPac was still struck and motionless.