Posted on 03/07/2009 7:48:34 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
Eddie Willers talks with the Anonymous Rail Worker in the corporate cafeteria, bringing him up to date. Dagny’s work on the John Galt Line is going so well the newspapers refuse to report it. The United Locomotive Works has gone bankrupt, and Dwight Sanders of Colorado has bought the plant. Dagny has moved into a little office near the back of Taggart Terminal, and Eddie feels badly about sitting in Dagny’s chair and taking credit for her work.
The office of the John Galt Line is on the ground floor of a half-collapsed building and is strictly a no-frills operation. Dagny is in town because she had rushed to New York upon hearing that Dwight Sanders had retired – and there was no trace of him to be found. In her office, an exhausted Dagny permits herself a small moment of weakness, longing for a man who can share her meaning of the world. Outside she sees the shadow of a man lingering near the door – but he leaves. Dagny rushes outside but sees only the rear entrance to Taggart Terminal. (No spoilers, please!)
Hank Rearden sells his ore mines to Paul Larkin to get around the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. Paul is consumed with guilt, and Hank is not interested in Paul’s rationalizations. Hank had earlier sold his coal mines to Ken Danagger, who was willing to sell his coal to Rearden at cost, even though that was illegal. Hank’s concern was not cost; he simply wanted to be the first to get the coal.
Wesley Mouch retires from Rearden’s employ to become the Assistant Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.
Hank and Eddie Willers have breakfast at the Wayne-Falkland. With the railroad in such poor financial shape, Hank wants to give Eddie a moratorium on the first payment for Rearden Metal; from his perspective it’s just good business. Eddie is shocked but takes the offer, feeling badly that this will help Jim Taggart and his friends. Hank says not to worry about them.
The American people are worried about whether the Rearden Metal bridge will stand, and they curse Hank Rearden amd Dagny Taggart for caring about nothing but money. Simon Pritchett, Claude Slagenhop, Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder are all fueling the chorus of public opinion while claiming that it arises spontaneously. Balph Eubank and Mort Liddy are the first signers of a petition from the Committee of Disinterested Citizens asking for a government study of the line before it can open.
But Dagny is thrilled. A union boss announces that he is not going to let his men run a train on her tracks, and Dagny throws him out of her office after giving him an ultimatum. Every engineer on the Taggart Transcontinental volunteers to run the first train. Pat Logan, engineer of the Taggart Comet on the Nebraska Division, gets the “demotion” to freight. Dagny is going to ride in the cab.
At the press conference, Dagny, with Hank in attendance, gives the media the details of the opening of the John Galt Line. She and Hank make it clear that their motive is profit, much to the discomfiture of the press. The first train will be a 4-locomotive mixed freight of 80 cars running the entire way at 100 mph. Hank volunteers to ride in the cab with Dagny and the crew.
Everything goes perfectly; in fact, the whole trip is a natural high. At 100 mph, the train streaks through the countryside and right through the Denver yards and station. It roars across the Rearden Metal bridge and comes to a halt at Wyatt Junction. Ellis Wyatt is positively giddy; he takes Hank and Dagny off in his convertible to his home. Over dinner, Wyatt tells them he is planning to extract oil from shale only five miles away in a magnitude previously unheard of. Hank, Dagny and Wyatt make great plans.
As they head for separate bedrooms, Hank pulls Dagny into his arms and kisses her brutally. Then he takes her into his bedroom and makes wild, hot, passionate love to her.
The Issue of Rail Speed Limits
At the time of the publication of the book, railroads were entirely responsible for speed limits on their tracks. A 1910 law, most recently upheld in 1996, refused permission for towns to restrict train speeds.
On the John Galt Line, blocks were two miles long. In the real world of railroading, blocks are of variable length. Each block begins with a signal tower that conveys the condition of the block by a red, yellow or green signal. In the earliest days, large balls on a pole were used, which is where the term “highball” comes from. Later came semaphores, and when the Pennsylvania Railroad switched to light signals, the lights mimicked the positions of a semaphore. There is no standardization of block signals in America today; each railroad has its own unique customs.
A railroad engineer is issued a booklet with each block on the line listed by milepost and with its designated speed limit. Railroads also use speed limit signs that are often coded separately for freight and passenger trains. The speed limit on a given block is determined by factors such as curvature of the rail and the number of grade crossings. Rail yards have much lower speed limits unless the yard possesses a separate bypass track.
As recently as the Fifties, a dispatcher might radio an engineer and say, “You own the railroad tonight.” This was a signal for the engineer to use his own judgment on following the posted speed limits. Today every rail line has track-side sensors, and every train has a FRED Unit (“friendly rear-end device”) where the caboose used to be. These tools gather data and use telemetry to pass it to the dispatcher. Thanks to these innovations, engineers with a heavy hand on the throttle are a thing of the past.
The Federal Railroad Administration now sets maximum speed limits on America’s railroads. The maximum speed for freight trains is 70 mph, and for passenger trains it’s 79 mph. Passenger trains on certain types of track with in-cab signals are permitted to go 110 mph, and Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor has its own speed limits with sections rated at 120 to 150 mph.
It is obvious that turning the Rio Norte Line into the John Galt Line involved a complete re-engineering. The first freight train runs at 100 mph around curves and grades, which would imply a total rebuild. (That train today would have been restricted to 70 mph.) It even runs through heavily populated Denver and the Denver station and yards at 100 mph, which today is an absolute no-no.
What is even more interesting is that the ride was smooth and quiet with jointed rail; welded rail hadn’t been invented yet. I often wonder if Rand didn’t anticipate the invention of welded rail decades in advance.
The Disappearance of the Adversarial Press
Traditionally, the American press was highly adversarial. Every town had a Democratic newspaper and a Republican newspaper, and there was no line separating news from editorial content. You read the paper that reflected your political bias.
After World War II, however, that changed. Thanks to media consolidation, eight companies today control most books, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, radio stations and movie studios. Because of this, the mass market reflects a bland, corporatist, internationalist liberalism, quite different from the muscular liberalism that shaped America in the 20th Century. This is the liberalism of the intellectual, not the lunch bucket. This bland liberalism defines itself as “the American Center”.
In the Sixties, younger journalists became the avatars of advocacy journalism, in which Radical Leftist opinion was marketed as bland liberalism. Over time, advocacy journalism became the norm and today dominates the media.
Some Discussion Topics
I’ve not read the entire book, but I now have an educated guess as to who it may be..I won’t tell and I may be completely off base, but it will be interesting to see if I’m correct..
That's the part of the story where Rand loses me. For example, what was up with the bleeding arm? I read the whole book, and I never saw a point to it. Rand herself reportedly had an affair that her husband knew about. As the story goes on, she seems to be trying to justify it. At least, that's what I read into it.
I had the same problem and have found that in some cases it works best to have the story read to me when I find the writing style too ponderous. In the case of Atlas Shrugged, I bought the unabridged version on CD off of ebay. I then listened to it for almost a month on the way to work and back and as I drove around doing chores. It took me almost a month to get through all 50 CD’s, but it was well worth it and extremely enjoyable. I now see what all of the fuss was about.
Once again, thank you very much for taking the time to lead this AS discussion.
Re: the building Dagney chooses to lease an office in and its run down condition (and the other comments through the book describing the physical condition of cities & communities — excepting Galt’s Gulch, of course).
I rode the AMTRAK FRom Newark to WDC in the spring of 1996. I was struck by the rotted and abandoned factories and buildings I saw along the way. Reminded me of AS.
I am reminded of AS now as I see abandoned buildings and For Rent signs in FRont of what had appeared to be triving businesses as recently as January.
Please add me to your PING list!
at least on this thread, the 1st post contains links to all the prior chapters so that should help
I think the sex thing is more than just Dagny’s character. I think a lot of it is Rand herself. If you read The Fountainhead, Dominique Francon has pretty much the same sexual appetite as Dagny and the scene with her and Roark by the quarry is one of the most important of the novel. You say Rearden would have said no, but Roark didn’t, and Rand clearly approved of Roark.
Even We The Living, which is her first novel, and not really as philosophical and more traditional that Atlas and the Fountainhead, has a main female character in Kira who also has hot, rough sex. I even read a book that has a bunch of short stories written by Rand and unpublished stuff and it’s there too.
I think Rand pretty much wrote the main female characters(Dagny, Dominique) with a lot of herself in mind and they’re having wild, animal sex with the male heros and ideal men like Roark and Galt and Rearden represents her desire to the same. Just her own added fun to the book. The rough sex is probably how she liked it and if you read some of what Branden and others wrote, it’s no surprise.
I don’t relaly think the sex is all that important in the overall philosophy. It’s like in spy novels like Bond or a bunch of others where a male author has his hero have hot sex with a bevy of babes. Don’t foregt she also began her career in Hollywood so she probably still retained a touch of the romantic and the show in her later works. It’s like if there’s a movie out about serious things but it also has a nude scene with Angelina Jolie or Kate Winslet, it’ll draw a bigger audience. See The Reader, for example. I mean, she was intimately involved with the film version of The Fountainhead and casting and picked legendary swordsman Gary Cooper as Roark. No coincidence there.
I just finished the book.
One gets an entirely different reading at fifty-three than one did at fifteen, to say the least.
And how she so accurately predicted the political direction of the country before what I consider the pivotal era of the early Sixties (Any of Moynihan’s objective analyses of that era “Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding”, “Miles to Go” contributed to my opinion of same) just astonishes me.
I pledge to restrain myself.
But the roots for it were set in the early Sixties (see my earlier post), when OEO and the first round of anti-poverty programs were initiated using principles like "the people of the areas we intend to help should run the programs intended to help them"- overlooking the fact that in virtually every case, these people lacked the training and skillsets to do so.
And the foundation for "intentions trump results" was laid when the failure of these programs was ignored and yet more programs were developed. Or, as Sowell so eloquently put it in the subtitle for Visions of the Anointed: "Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy".
And anybody who doesn't think *that* can be stamped on about two-thirds of the pages of Atlas Shrugged is clearly not paying attention.
That would be We, The Living.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.