The Journals of Ayn Rand (109 page)

The hood of a black car looks like a mirror and reflects objects ahead and the sky.

The effect of rocks at sunset—a dark gray, flat silhouette of rocks against shadows of mountains which are dark gray and barely suggested.

The mountains. The approach to a small town. The train and sparks at night. The fireflies.

The mountains in Wyoming.
A base of rock, rising from a green slope, with brush, pines and a smooth green cover that looks like moss rising up on the rock. The moss and brush vanish gradually, and the pines go on struggling up, in thinning strands, till only a few drops of single trees are left, going up. At the top, there is a naked rock, with snow in the crevices. The snow looks as if a handful had been thrown violently into a crevice and had splattered up the sides, in single rays.

The mountain peaks look very close, as if rising a very short distance from the road—until one sees the tiny size of the pine trees near the top.

A small town
is seen in the distance, rising from the plain, as a solid line of bushy green trees, with roof tops among them—and, rising above trees and roofs, a few round, silver water-tanks that look like huge pearls. The water tanks compete in height with the church spires. The water tanks win.

A train
moving at night looks like a solid streak of lighted glass—the band of the windows—and a streak of sparks flying above them in the opposite direction.

The fireflies
rise from the grass at dusk like slow sparks, moving at floating angles, just a bit slower than sparks of fire, and paler—they have a cold, white, metallic sparkle.

New York skyscrapers
look like solid structures of lighted glass, in the evening, when all the windows are lighted. As it gets later, the buildings assume black shapes again, with only a few lighted windows scattered among them, and an occasional row of vertical lights, like a row of buttons—the lights of a stairwell.

New York skyscrapers in the fog look as if the closest ones can be seen in every detail, but behind a thin blue smoke; in the next row, the details are blurred, simplified to essentials; farther on, the buildings are simplified to mere shapes; and beyond that, they become blue shadows, in faint silhouettes.

A plain and town,
seen from the height, with the unusual effect of long, straight, thick bands of clouds low in the sky above them, at twilight, so that it looks as if part of the sky were a lake beyond the town, and the clouds were the strip of the other shore.

The steel mills.
When a heat is being poured, the smoke is semitransparent, like waves of heat, and the outlines of smokestacks behind it look as if they were shimmering.

There is red smoke, orange-yellow smoke, blue smoke—and thick, rich, satin-lustrous coils of smoke rising out of smokestacks, that look like mother-of-pearl.

There is a great abundance of power lines in steel mills, long, many-stranded bands of wire.

The silhouette of the steel mills in Lorain, Ohio, standing against the sky.

The rust colored water of the river at the steel mills in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

The odor of sulfur and the constant metallic clatter, like the sound of grinding wheels.

The approach to Pittsburgh
(on the way east): From the parkways, to the old, vertical houses on steep hillsides, to the slums, with narrow, cobblestone streets—then the sudden view of the river and the blurred silhouettes of skyscrapers—the rise to the triumphant goal and spirit of the place, of the great effort that made it.
Pennsylvania
—green mountains, some plains, many hills. Ohio-hills and some plains. (The Patrick Henry University should be on a bluff over Lake Erie.)

Indiana
—flat plains, dull.

Illinois
—flat plains.

Wisconsin
—hills in the eastern part, more plains in the west. Wisconsin has a great many
pines;
also some birch trees. The road goes up and down, more than in curves. The road going up a hill rises straight up, almost vertically, before the driver, then lowers as one approaches, almost as if folding over and lying down like a bridge being lowered before you.

Minnesota
—hills in the eastern part, flat, dull plains in the west. South
Dakota
—flat plains and terribly dull up to the Missouri. Desert-like hills and plains west of the Missouri. The hills gather, tighten and grow as one approaches the Black Hills region. Here—rock and pines. The view from near the Wild Cat Cave—a huge spread of mountains, green and filled with pines. The pines look small as weeds. The mountains are slashed in places, in straight, vertical cuts, as if cut to show the layers of rock under the smooth green cloth covering them.

The view of a lake at sunset: straight, thin, black shafts of trees with a spread of gold beyond and above them—the sky and the water of the same glowing yellow color.

(For Galt and Dagny: When he carries her to the town in the valley, he does not hold her in the impersonal, wholesome manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It is an embrace—even though nothing in his manner suggests it and his face shows no emotion. It is merely the fact that his whole body is aware of holding hers.) A line of telephone poles at each side of a straight road going off into the distance: the poles grow shorter and the spaces between them narrower, until they become like a picket fence in the distance. Clouds at sunset, covering the sun: only the edges of the clouds are like bright fire—against a clear blue sky, with the clouds faintly grayer, deeper blue; the edges are like a net of thin neon tubes—or like a map of winding rivers (or a map of railroads) traced in silver fire.

How long would it take to lay rails through the Colorado section? How long from Cheyenne to El Paso?

How much would the San Sebastian Line cost (300 miles)?

Key men of railroad company? Of Operating Department?

Day of operating vice-president?

Who assigns freight cars?

Who supervises the construction of a new line?

[
Previous jobs :
]

Day:
Requests for expenditures and additional help, and matters of discipline of employees. (Half of time on line, the rest in office.)

Coal
—very crucial. (Burn 600 cars of coal a day.)

[Railroad] ties good for 20 years.

Rails good for 10-12 years.

Rails are moved from high speed track to yard track.

Steel bridges—keep them painted to avoid corrosion—members replaced when corroded or obsolete (in regard to weight of locomotives and trains). Abutments must be watched.

Lay rails: 6-8 months.

Main line—automatic signals.

Side lines—manual signals.

If they went back to manual system, could operate only 10% of present traffic.

Radio communication between engineering and yard masters, between engineers and signal men, between front and rear of train. American Association of Railroads can give arbitrary orders for cars. Five miles of side-track to reach a mine: $300,000. (San Sebastian Line should be about $50,000,000.)

A union proposal to put an engineer and fireman in each unit of a Diesel.

130,000 employees working for New York Central Railroad, about 1—3% are appointive positions. This small group
are
the brains.

About 5,000 men are under Mr. Borntrager; only about 100-150 are appointive.

Car Service Department: 300 people, only six to eight appointive positions. If these men were gone, there would be chaos in two or three weeks.

Somebody has to coordinate all the machine records—unless somebody can do it, a machine economy
cannot function.

Cannot get drilling steel, explosives. Steel came—they put in wooden stringers for missing pieces. They have rocks to blast—heavy equipment wears out very fast, many replacements are needed—they have no drills—equipment wore out—they have to resort to chipping, hand-work. The brains saved money, now it will cost much more. Have rails, but have no specialists to build frogs and switches.

(Unions are always trying to encroach on appointive positions—constant, silent battle. [Management] has the right to appoint the station agents (freight and passenger); unions claim that positions are not big enough, an ordinary man from the ranks could do it on seniority basis. Mr. Borntrager would run a railroad better if he could appoint twice as many people. Would like to take young man and raise him from position to position (from the ranks), but he cannot do it.)

Signals are very intricate mechanisms; couldn’t get
copper
—so they use steel wire; signals fail. Spend a horrible amount of money—and get a makeshift thing when you get through.