The USRA

[nachoman]

biL,
I believe you are correct. I guess I should have mentioned that "other" USRA to clarify my statement. The government run USRA and nationalization of the railroads, the topic of the original post, ended in 1920. The other USRA was as you said, a cooperation among the railroads without Unlce Sam's intervention. One could venture a guess that the lack of government involvement is WHY the second time around was much smoother. The private sector will ALWAYS outperform the same venture run by the government.

As I understand it, the WWI USRA really didn't get going until the war was almost over. This fact kinda initiated my curiosity about the subject. Apparently at some point during the war, certain people in the government felt that the private railroad system was not sufficient to handle a war of that magnitude. When you consider how many USRA designs were adopted long after the war was over - that probably means there was a lack of standardization prior to the war. I think a lot of railroads were scraping by with old, decrepit equipment, wood cars, and poor track standards. From what I understand, there were huge changes in railroad technology between 1895 and 1915, with larger locomotives, air brakes, superheaters, cast steel trucks, steel cars, and larger cars. If a railroad in 1915 was running 25 year old technology, that probably was not too compatible with the newer equipment of the day. By comparison, today's railroads are still running 25 year old locomotives and cars and most people wouldn't be able to tell what is 25 years old from what came out o the factory last year.

I am still wondering if the USRA mostly affected the class 1 railroads, or did the smaller lines (that weren't necessarily important to the war effort) also get affected.