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.

  November, 1947

  [AR prepared the following questions for her interviews with personnel of the New York Central Railroad.]

  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?

  November 22, 1947

  [The following notes are from an interview with A. H. Wright, vice-president of operation and maintenance for the New York Central Railroad. Describing this interview later, AR remarked: “[Mr. Wright] was seventy years old and retiring, and I remember thinking how shocked he would be if he knew that he would become a thirty-four-year-old woman in my novel. ”]

  [Previous jobs :]Yard clerk during the day, filling in as brakeman at night.

  Trained crews and examined men on operating rules in office of train master.

  Assistant train master in largest freight yard (Syracuse, N.Y.).

  Train master on another division.

  Assistant superintendent, then superintendent of N.Y. water and marine operations.

  Assistant general manager of eastern lines.

  General manager.

  Key men: Division superintendents: operating costs and service to the public.

  General manager: coordinates work of division superintendents.

  Engineer of maintenance of ways: maintenance of tracks, buildings and bridges.

  General superintendent of motive power and rolling stock.

  Signal engineer: construction and maintenance of all signals.

  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.)

  [The following notes are from an interview with K. A. Borntrager, manager of freight traffic for the New York Central Railroad.]

  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.

  For construction:

  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.

  November 25, 1947

  Notes on Visit to Inland Steel [In Chicago, IL]

  Railroad rails are shipped in gondolas. They are picked up by an overhead crane (magnetic), six to ten at a time, and deposited on cars inside a building. Walls of building can be open.

  Process of rail making (approximately): Iron from blast furnace (“caste”)—steel from open hearth furnace ( “heat”)—steel is poured into ingot molds—ingots go to blooming mill and are rolled into billets (for rails and structural shapes) or slabs (for sheet, plate, etc.). Final shape of rails is done by three sets of rolls (mills). (The shape is the rolls themselves.)

  Steel heat: the metal is white, not red or orange. It has no suggestion of flame, only of a blinding white liquid. There is a violent red glow in the rising smoke—a shower of white sparks—and bits of metal that fall on the floor and start flaming. When the ladle is full, you see nothing but black and white, a blinding white liquid boiling and running over, spilling with a kind of wasteful, arrogant prodigality. The white rivulets on the side of the ladle turn to a glowing brown, then to black metal, like icicles, and start crumbling off. The slag in the slag-ladle on the side starts crusting over in thick, uneven, brown ridges, like the earth’s crust. Small flames appear in the cracks. As the crust thickens, two or three craters appear, with white liquid metal boiling slowly.

  A steel mill rolls steel; a foundry casts it (in sand molds).

  Coke ovens. The coke is pushed out like slices of toast. It crumbles like red-hot walls, in layers and in sudden cracks.

  From Mr. Fred Gillies (general manager): The attempted embargo on freight cars for deliveries to steel plants—by the government. Excuse—they do not empty cars fast enough. Reason—bureaucrats want freight cars to ship coal to Europe. (Stopping the country’s production for the sake of looting.)

  A plant was built by the government during the war, at a cost of 25 million dollars. Twice the capacity that was ever needed or used (six open hearth furnaces—only three were used). Company that wanted to buy another such plant was refused permission by government (anti-trust law), so they did not bid on this one. No one has bid on plant. It is now used by the government as a warehouse for war surplus—clothes, candy, etc. (!)

  Diesel freight engine with four motor units weighs 464 tons.

  Tractive force when starting—220,000 pounds.

  Average load of boxcars—27 tons. (Weight of boxcar—20 tons.)

  One-hundred-car trains would weigh about 5,000 tons.

  Bridge: 1,650 feet—38,000 tons of steel.

  December 19, 1947

  Have instance of rotten, inherited capitalist who wants to be nationalized—with payment, of course. He doesn’t want the responsibility of running his business, he wants to make a profit on the government paying him off at more than the business is worth, and he uses political pull to get that.

  The kind of knowledge, judgment and intellectual initiative which is needed for production (the article on oil in the Texaco magazine)—and the bureaucrats’ method of evasion, double-talk, avoidance of the responsibility of the clear-cut and the specific. Show how and why production cannot be achieved by such method.

  January 5, 1948

  Notes for Labor Rules

  Unions forbid their members to run more than a certain number of miles per month. Why? To keep jobs for more men than is necessary? To whose advantage is that, except the union bosses who get extra dues? At whose expense is this done? At the expense of the abler men of the union, who have no right to advance, no right to work as long and make as much as they otherwise would have.

  If we suppose that all the members are equally able—still, some are extraneous and should go into other work. This system only has the effect of collective, organized mediocrity—it provides that no man in the profession is going to work harder than the others, so that all will be kept at a certain level of effort and income—I suppose on the assumption that it makes them less subject to the dangers of change of job with the growth of progress and the need of fewer men in their profession. This is organized stoppage of progress—as is any case where effort and ability are artificially stopped or limited. Also—this keeps the better, abler, more ambitious men out of the profession.

  Does this really protect them in their jobs, even the mediocre men? Or does it create artificial dangers of protracted unemployment? And, of course, it holds their living standard down, by stopping general progress. Actually, industrial progress which cuts jobs in one old line, creates more of them in several new lines. The readjustment or transition should not be difficult or involve periods of unemployment—in a free economy (because it is gradual). [Union policies are] instances of the savage or animal “range of the moment” psychology in an industrial civilization that functions on the long range principle of the intellect.

  Unions are organized against the better members of their own profession.

  (For pay rates of railroad labor, see This Fascinating Railroad Business [by Robert S. Henry], pp. 405—407.)

  For Labor Troubles (Chapter XI)

  Pat Logan and other good engineers do not get any advantage out of the John Galt Line—the higher speed only reduces their working time and they have to loaf the rest of the month, while unemployed engineers from the closing railroads flock to get part of this work, part of the new, fast runs.

  The unions immediately raise the costs of the operation of the John Galt Line, when the economy of operation is so desperately needed.

  With the shortage of engines and cars—they demand to limit the length of trains, thus requiring more engines and cars, without making full use of the ones available.

  Management and inventors do everything in their power to exercise their genius to raise the productivity of employees. The employees do everything in their power to hamper and prevent this—yet demand raised pay.

  Union’s demand for engineer and conductor for the “guest” line in case of emergency when train is routed over tracks of another line.

  Demand for extra men on each Diesel unit.

  Extra day’s pay for breaking a train in half and taking the two sections over a hill individually—in mountainous country.

  Union’s excuse for limiting train length—the caboose jerks ! ! In the case of passenger train—the “poor conductor” has too much work! !

  (See the “Railway Progress” article for quotes of union leaders’ attitude toward “those locomotive giants” and for examples of paying employees twice for work not done.)

  The added expense cuts the slim profits of the stockholders who need their own money desperately—show this concretely, as one of the results of what happens when the John Galt Line does not pay. (This leads to the ruin of the Colorado stockholders—the first pressure is on Ellis Wyatt.) (Ted Nielsen—no Diesels.)

  The “limitation of ability”: Rearden is forbidden to produce more than Orren Boyle is able to produce. The reason: “Rearden is destroying Boyle’s market and chance at a livelihood.” (Same principle—Pat Logan and the bums who cannot run a big train, but Logan’s opportunity to run more trains is stopped.)

  At the same time—the “Fair Share Law”: Rearden has to supply everybody, while he is not allowed to produce. Here—the rise of Mouch, who shrugs when the contradiction is pointed out to him: “Everything is a contradiction—we act on the expediency of the moment.” Mouch wants Rearden to fail, so that all business can be nationalized.

  January 17, 1948

  The judge on strike in the valley: “I was supposed to be the guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made of me the executor of the vilest injustice ever perpetrated on earth.”

  The legend of Prometheus who took the fire back, until men called off their vultures. (It is probably Francisco who tells [Dagny] this.)

  January 30, 1948

  For Chapter IX: The John Galt Line

  The reaction of the public as it watches the progress of the John Galt Line: those who sympathize and admire; those who are honestly neutral and watch with a growing sense of sympathy, not knowing its real reason and not knowing anything about the business or technical part of it; those who hate it and want it to fail, in interested malice, like Orren Boyle, or in the pointless malice of the men of destruction, like James Taggart, Bertram Scudder, Philip Rearden; but the most vicious ones (?), the truly evil, are those who watch with cautious interest, the safe-players and middle-of the-roaders, who want somebody else to take the risks, then get ready to grab the benefits.

  James Taggart’s attitude must be shown clearly: when things go well, he is not happy about it, he is insidiously sarcastic; when things go badly, he is scared, but there is a strange undertone of gloating pleasure in him at the same time. This last, without his conscious admission to himself, is his gratification of his real desire—the wish for destruction.

  Philip Rearden’s attitude must be shown: he is not involved like Taggart, but his essential attitude is the same. In his case, it is the plain joy of seeing Rearden fail—then he is not the only failure, his great brother can fail, too, the great brother isn’t as great as he thinks, etc.

  February 8, 1948

  Note for Galt’s Speech

  The whole issue in the world is between the men who want to work under compulsion and the men who don’t. Well, those of us who don’t work as slaves leave the rest of you free to do it; go right ahead, organize any kind of slavery for yourselves among yourselves. But don’t try to impose it on us and don’t expect us to accept it. We don’t need you. We don’t seek to force you—we rest on the principle of voluntary relations among men. But you—by your very premise—admit that you need us, since you find it necessary to use force against us. Well, it can’t be done.

  And as for those who wish to rule, who think they don’t want to work under compulsion, but want to exercise compulsion upon others to make them work—the same applies to them. If they think work can be done under compulsion, they know nothing about the nature of work. If they find it necessary to use compulsion on others, it means that they need something from those others. Well—we refuse it to them. They think they want to force their inferiors. What about us—the men of ability, their equals or superiors? Do they think they can force us? And as to those they think are inferiors, what is the standard when force is involved? If they believe that they cannot deal with a man’s intelligence, because he hasn’t any, force will not give it to him. If, by their own definition, they are the men of intelligence, what do they need from the stupid ones and what do they fear?

  Chapter IX: The John Galt Line The Ride

  The sense of movement—and the achievement it represents. Dagny’s feeling—the sense of achievement and triumph.

  The overall mood—the real kind of joy. (“It is so easy—and so right!”)

  The philosophical meaning—life is motion, the essence of man’s life is the achievement of a purpose he has chosen, and any purpose of man can be achieved only through his reason.

  Dagny thinks of Nat Taggart and the initials on the first train ever to cross the continent. This is the first new Taggart Line or venture in many generations.

  The people gathered to watch the train (on hills, on city station platforms) —as in the old days.

  The guard of honor along the way.

  Dagny and Rearden: The physical sensation is the same as that of the ride: the ride is physical, but its only meaning is spiritual, the physical sensation of pleasure in the flying speed through space is given only by the spiritual knowledge of what made it possible, of one’s achievement. The feeling of: “I am flying here—and I made it.”