The record of their operating departments against these fearful conditions is a record of which the American railroads long may be proud. Superintendents, trainmasters, general superintendents, and general managers moved into their biggest yards and lived there for weeks and months at a time--in private cars, bunk cars, and cabooses--right on the job. But the odds against them were overwhelming. It was not until the warm days of early summer that the congestion was relieved and the railroads able to lift the embargoes that, in self-defense, they had been forced to place upon the freight. It is already known that the congested conditions are being repeated in the winter that ushers in 1917--probably in even worse measure. And the railroads even after a comparatively dull summer are not much better prepared physically to meet the situation. To have made themselves ready for any such flood tides of traffic as were visited upon them last winter would have meant the radical reconstruction of many great terminal and interchange yards as well as the building of cars and locomotives by the thousands--involving, as we now know, the expenditure of great sums of money. And this seemed out of possibility, although the orders for new rolling stock in the first ten months of 1916 exceeded the entire orders for 1915. You must remember that it is one thing to order rolling stock in these piping times of prosperity--quite another thing to obtain it from manufacturers far behind their orders and greatly hampered by shortages of fuel, of labor, and of raw material. Here once again the railroads are greatly hampered by their lack of fresh capital. A little while ago--until the unprecedented floods of traffic began to descend upon them--the railroaders, big and little, all the way across the land saw their only relief in a granting of further increases in their rates, both freight and passenger. Even today the best-informed of them will tell you that the necessity still exists--must sooner or later be met--when the war tides have ceased and business in America returns to its normal levels once again. For while traffic may return to normal levels, the prices of both the railroad's raw material and its labor will not descend so rapidly, if, indeed, they descend at all.