The more things change...

[ocalicreek]

$1 a day went a LOT farther back in the 30's than it does now. I heard out of $30 a month, $25 was automatically sent home. Talk about a stimulus package! Those meals the workers ate had to come from somewhere. The money sent home was spent in local economies, not some multinational corporations. Plus, when WWII rolled around, we were ready to mobilize with an army of healthy young men accustomed to taking orders and ready to serve a country they had literally worked to rebuild.

Sorry to stray off topic too far, but while so many of us model the period of the American High, the post-war diesel to transition era, I prefer the grittier 20's & 30's with a little residual deco styling and depression-era grime. With nearly a full historic cycle passed since then, we can even romanticize such a dark and turbulent time in our history between the wars. At least on my RR I can!

Galen

[Fluesheet]

Labor was dirt cheap - that's why so much of it was used. It was so cheap, that railroads avoided mechanization which was more costly.

I guess it's all relative. The quoted section that started this thread (and later discussion in the same section of the book that the quote was pulled from) suggests that the railroads were actively engaging mechanization wherever it was feasible.

I say relative because obviously what constitutes "cheap" then vs. now is different, and even heavy mechanization then would probably seem pretty pitiful to a modern viewer!

Matt

[Brakie]

$1 a day went a LOT farther back in the 30's than it does now. I heard out of $30 a month, $25 was automatically sent home. Talk about a stimulus package! Those meals the workers ate had to come from somewhere. The money sent home was spent in local economies, not some multinational corporations. Plus, when WWII rolled around, we were ready to mobilize with an army of healthy young men accustomed to taking orders and ready to serve a country they had literally worked to rebuild.
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Actually that was not the Union wage for track workers in those days..Even a factory paid more then that famous $1.00 a day that is often used..You see a lot of people fail to realized there was lots of union jobs back then that paid good hourly wages..IIRC a $1.00 a day was "soldiers pay" for unskilled laborers doing odd jobs that nobody wanted like cutting logs or working in a independently owned small saw mill that's common in the Southern States..