All these things were a fearful burden upon a national railroad structure that was from the beginning inadequately equipped for a proper handling of them. Yet how did the national railroad structure meet this added burden set upon its badly bended shoulders? The answer is--like a good American citizen. Up to that April night, without a really efficient or concrete central body, it already had sought to create one. It took the ancient and somewhat archaic American Railway Association, shook new life into it, and on April 11, 1917--six days after the war declaration--established at Washington what was known as the Railroad War Board. For the personnel of this board the national railroad structure sought out some of the very best of its executives: Fairfax Harrison of the Southern railway, Hale Holden of the Burlington, Julius Kruttschnitt of the Southern Pacific, Howard Elliott of the Northern Pacific, Samuel Rea of the Pennsylvania, and Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio. The first five of these men were made into the active war board and immediately moved themselves to Washington where they set up a permanent headquarters. Mr. Willard already was prominently identified with the business of the organization of this country's part in the World War as chairman of the Council of National Defense, which was then doing a very great work of hurried preparation for the conflict, but which President Wilson afterward saw fit to relieve of most of its power and responsibility. At the request of the American Railway Association Mr. Willard became an ex officio member of the Railroad War Board and was in constant consultation with it. So did Edgar E. Clark, a valued member of the all-powerful Interstate Commerce Commission at that time and a veteran railroader of wide experience, having risen to the rank of conductor and in time become the head of the great brotherhood of that branch of railroading. The Railroad War Board came into being committed to the idea of a single continental railroad in the United States as a war-time measure; please mark this fact for future reference. Indeed that efficient and economical idea had been in the heads of some of our practical railroaders for a good many years before the coming of the World War. But any steps that they might take toward it then seemed to bring them afoul of the Federal statutes--particularly the so-called Sherman Law--and in imminent danger of the penitentiary. Now, however, there seemed to be the faint ghost of an opportunity to gain some of the obvious practical advantages that naturally would inure from a centralized control of our national railroad structure.