Republican Snowplow

The only railroad of any size owned and operated by the U. S. Government* is the Alaska Railroad, 500 miles long, finished in 1923, running from coastal Seward to the biggest city in Alaska's interior, gold-mining Fairbanks (pop. 2,101). A dour, 69-year-old, spectacled, Republican Swede named Otto Frederick Ohlson is its top man. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who has jurisdiction over A. R. R., does not oust Ohlson from his $14,500 job because in eleven years Republican Ohlson has reduced its annual operating deficit from $1,000,000 to the break-even point: 1936 $17,444 loss, 1937 $172,066 loss, 1938 $76,704 profit, 1939 $19,831 loss (exclusive, of course, of any return on the $73,000,000 which the Government sank in the railroad).

In an ordinary year's work Otto Ohlson has to cope with: temperatures to 50DEG below zero, 20-foot snowdrifts, avalanches, live glaciers, moose caught in the tracks, and, in the northernmost part, perpetually frozen subsoil that requires a special roadbed. During 110 days of summer he has truck competition. In winter sled-trains, including bunkhouses on runners for the crew, slide up & down Alaska's snowy roads behind five-ton caterpillar tractors. The Richardson Highway, only road in to Fairbanks (not fit for wagons until 1910), does not run away with Ohlson's traffic, because the Government charges commercial trucking on the Highway $9.20 per ton toll and because Ohlson gets permission to cut his freight rates each summer as soon as the roads become passable for trucks.

In the winter he puts them back up again. Then they are about 30% above the U. S. average. Passengers pay six cents a mile. His schedule is six trains per week in each direction in summer, three in winter. In general it costs so much to get things to Fairbanks that in Fairbanks TIME and a nickel bottle of Coca-Cola each sell for 20-c-. A haircut costs $1.

Not long ago Otto Ohlson laid up "B2" (a Dodge sedan fitted with railroad wheels to carry Ohlson on inspection tours over his lonely tracks) and "went outside" (Alaskan for getting out of Alaska-A. R. R. employes get a 26-day vacation with pay each year so they can do it). Last week in New Deal Washington Republican Ohlson was getting ready to ask Congress for an appropriation of some $5,000,000 to build a 14-mile cutoff to the sea some 66 miles above Seward (see map) to make the Fairbanks-to-the-States run faster and cheaper. Because the U. S. is jittery about its Alaskan defenses (Russian Siberia is only 50 miles from the westernmost point of Alaska), and because the Army's two newly authorized air bases are on the A. R. R., Ohlson had hope of getting it.

*Other six Government roads combined have 277 miles of track. Biggest is the profitable, 132-mile Panama Railroad (ColOn to Panama).

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