Donald J. HeimburgerCritiques

A little disappointing. The technology of railroads in wartime brings together two of my interests, but I have yet to find a good book on railroads in WWII. The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich was practically unreadable and had next to nothing about the actual wartime use of the DNR; the current book, Trains to Victory, has a lot of pictures of trains, various advertisements by railroads on how they were contributing to the war effort, and a few not-very-informative little side-bar type notes on the actual use of railroads in the war. What text there is is not very well organized; I suppose it was intended to allow the reader to pick up little details here and there while looking at the pretty pictures. Gleaned this way:

* the Office of Defense Transportation banned sleeping cars for routes under 450 miles.
* the ODT also ordered that all refrigerator cars be “made available” for ordinary freight (sounds like that strategy might have backfired since it would limit civilian nutrition; no comment by the authors).
* the War Production Board banned research, design and development of new steam locomotives during the war; the authors claim that contributed to the rapid takeover by Diesels. I find this a little dubious, since
* the WPB also banned development of new Diesels, which the authors say led to the post-war dominance of the General Motors FT class.
* the Army designed a few specialized freight cars, artillery ammunition cars for coast defense units, triple-deck bunk cars, troop kitchen cars, and military hospital cars.
* the Army took over the Alaska Railway and the White Pass and Yukon for the duration
* all “Mikado” class locomotives were renamed “MacArthur” class, to the extent of painting out the “MK” on engines and replacing it with “MAC”.
* 12.5% of freight traffic was military; I had expected it would be larger than this but it probably only counts direct military shipments.
* Military freight dropped dramatically in 1945 but military passenger increased tremendously as troops were redeployed.
* Baldwin manufactured a number of Lend-Lease locomotives for Russia; each of these took two flatcars (one for boiler, one for running gear) because Russian gauge was wider than US standard.
* The Army experimented with adjustable gauge Diesels; they were not a success.
* the Army operated a railroad training base at Ft. Eustis, Virginia, to allow troops to practice with foreign locomotives and rolling stock.

The pictures, while numerous, are strangely limited; most showing equipment and many showing troops are from very early periods in the war. Thus we see a lot of flatcar loads of M3 Grant and early M3 Stuart tanks, but no Shermans. I suspect censorship was rapidly imposed on freight train photographs. There are a great many photographs of locomotives, as is typical in railroad books. Not a bad coffee-table railroad book but not very useful for figuring out how the railroads were actually run in wartime.