Mean & Getting Meaner

In the 13 months since eleven unions struck the Florida East Coast Railway over a wage dispute, there have been some 200 acts of sabotage against the line. All told, 82 freight cars have been derailed, a station and a bridge burned, another bridge blown up, and $1,250,-000 damage done in one of the meanest railroad strikes in recent U.S. history. Last week it got even meaner.

A dynamite blast at a trestle near Miami sent 27 cars of a 91-car freight tumbling down an embankment into a stream. Three hours later, the railroad's only wreck-clearing derrick car in southern Florida was blown up. Later in the week, four boys found 45 sticks of dynamite wired to the main line tracks near Titusville, dismantled them barely minutes before a 70-car freight highballed by. And at week's end, another dynamiting near New Smyrna Beach derailed 14 cars.

Such incidents were bad enough, but perhaps even worse was a 48-hour disruption of construction at the Cape Kennedy (nee Canaveral) space complex, where 3,500 workers refused to cross picket lines set up by the strikers. The railroad has a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to haul heavy building materials to the cape. As a result of the picketing, 30 projects worth $200 million were closed down, including construction of the site where the Saturn rocket moon shot will be assembled.

A temporary restraining order, sought by the National Labor Relations Board to halt the picketing, was issued, and work got going at the cape again. But no one knew for how long.

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