Hair-Raising Tales

When Traffic Expert Danny Arnstein troubleshot the Burma Road, he found some bad bottlenecks. Bottlenecks just as bad are checking the flow of war traffic over U.S. roads.

The bottlenecks have long been there, but only now are they making men's hair stand on end. The 700,000 U.S. hire motor vehicles which last year carried over 50 billion ton-miles of freight now find about half their loads are war materials (in the case of some trucking companies, it is 90%). And delivery of war materials is recklessly held up.

Nowadays many a trucker, rooted out of bed at night, is called upon to climb behind awheel and high-tail over the road to deliver a load to a waiting ship, or a defense plant slowed down for a lack of parts. (A few hours after Pearl Harbor, a seven-truck caravan rumbled out of Massachusetts with freight for a Pacific convoy, despite a Midwest blizzard made the transcontinental run in eight days.) Trucks move heavy tonnage of foodstuffs and supplies to Army camps; make hour-by-hour deliveries of parts from subcontractors to prime producers. Tractors (engine and cab units) now work around the clock seven days a week, shuttling trailers better than 400 ton-miles a day. Big haul-away units that once delivered a million automobiles yearly are being refitted to handle ambulances and army-type vehicles.

But for trucks, interstate commerce, which the Constitution guarantees shall be unobstructed, is about as free as a traffic jam. State regulations (chiefly on vehicle weight and length) stop them in every direction. Pennsylvania, sprawled athwart main east-west as well as north-south routes, limits vehicles' weights to 19 1/2 tons (way under that of bordering States). Kentucky, like a feudal baron astride the routes from the Midwest to the South, limits weights to 14 tons (liberalized last year from 9 tons), and exacts toll from highway commerce. Other blockades: Kansas (where trucks have to line up for hours to pass through ports of entry), South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Illinois, South Dakota, Texas.

Because of these bottlenecks, truckers cannot load their trucks to capacity, or must unload from one large vehicle to several smaller ones. Goods for Army & Navy as well as for defense factories are held up for hours--hours that are just as perilously lost at the beginning of the trek as in the last ten miles behind the battle line. Some hair-raising case histories:

>A truck carrying 20,756 lb. of fresh meat from Baltimore to North Carolina's Fort Bragg was fined $82.25 for overweight at Woodbridge, Virginia. Overweight or not, trucks must wait two to six hours in line to be weighed.

>In Illinois, the axle load limit is 16,000 lb., over-all length limit for tractor and trailer combination is 35 feet, compared to 18,000 lb. and 40 feet in many other States. Truckers carrying Army shipments--loaded by the Army in sealed trailers and shipped on Government bills of lading--are repeatedly stopped and fined. (They cannot break Army seals to redistribute loads.)

>In Delaware a truck was held 24 hours, the driver jailed because a load of Army supplies en route from New England to a Southern camp exceeded the State's weight limit.

>One operator serving Fort Knox and important defense plants paid Kentucky fines totaling $14,651 in a year. Average delay per truck, 24 hours. Average fine, $24.50 (of which the State of Kentucky gets $1.75; the rest goes to local fine grabbers).

>A rush-order load of parts necessary to complete anchor chains consigned to a New Jersey shipyard was 4,100 lb. over Pennsylvania's weight limit. A local magistrate collected a fine of $52.52, held shipment 24 hours until a second truck was dispatched to carry the over-poundage.

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