Long before the clear Washington morning had broken which succeeded that stormy April evening of 1917 when the United States first entered the World War, the railroad executives themselves had been feeling that there would need to be correlated and cooperative effort to make the rail transport system of the country adequate to meet the new and added burden to be laid upon its already sadly bended back. Not many weeks after that terrible August, 1914, the United States was feeling the reflection of the world disturbance, although feeling it in some unexpected ways. In August, 1914, few people in this country if any dreamed of the tidal wave of industrial production that was soon to all but overwhelm us, when Bridgeport turned (almost overnight, it seemed) from a sleepy Connecticut manufacturing town into an overcrowded metropolis wherein people by the hundreds slept nightly in the railroad station, and the new county almshouse was transformed into an overflow hotel; when Akron, Ohio, ran wild with prosperity, growth, and overcrowding; when drowsy old Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, became a bedlam of industry and Chester, Pennsylvania, the same; when Detroit, well used to rapid growth, now leaped ahead toward the million mark; and when so also in a large degree did Wilmington, Delaware, and Youngstown, Ohio, and Trenton, New Jersey, and Rochester and Schenectady, New York--dozens of other communities like them. Manufacturing plants worked night and day and doubled and trebled and quadrupled themselves in a matter of mere months; half-abandoned shipyards sprang into life and extension; mines were dug with a furious speed into the rich subsurfaces of mother earth--production everywhere. And everywhere the chief burden of all this was coming upon the back of the American railroad, and coming at a time when it could ill afford any overload. As even a casual student of the situation easily understands, for the six or eight years before the advent of 1914 most if not all of the railroads of the United States had been in a period of serious retrenchment. Soon afterwards the beginning of the present and national increases in the cost of living had become an appreciable burden to them, not so much (as we shall see before we are done with this book) in their wages as in their cost of coal and other materials. They had endeavored to meet this increase in one expense in the conduct of their business by cutting down in other expenses. "Economy" and "efficiency" had become real catchwords to them. In both of these they accomplished much. At least so it seemed in 1914. Their economies up to that time, compared with the ones that have been achieved since then, were almost as nothing.