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11

The next man I shall cover undoubtedly represented one of the most flagrant examples of miscasting that occurred I the war effort in Washington. He was the head of the Motive Power Section of the Transportation Equipment Branch and reported to Dr. Stevenson. His name was Carroll Hanly and he had come from an assistant roadhouse foreman's job on the Pennsylvania Railroad, having headquartered at Harrisburg roundhouse as I recall it. He was in his 30s, was small, had a broken nose, and looked like an average punch-drunk pugilist. He was a bachelor and had taken a small apartment in Washington where he lived with his aged and widowed mother. At heart eh was a good guy and within his limitations he was probably a good steam locomotive maintenance man. But in this WPG job he was simply p to his neck in a situation that he couldn't possibly have been expected to handle successfully. I don't know who selected Carroll for the job but whoever it was must have been stoned when he did it. I think the major emotion that Carroll excited in both clients and associates was compassion for someone in a deep and desperate bind. The general problem was this: In anticipation of war conditions, the railroads had placed orders for large quantities of road steam locomotives not only to beef up their motive power fleets but also to replace worn out equipment and anticipate restrictions on locomotive purchasing, which, of course, was the purpose of L-97. Moreover, the railroads had ordered locomotives to meet their own specifications and this meant about as many types of locomotives as railroads buying them because there was no standardization in steam locomotives and every chief of motive power had his own pet ideas. So here was American Locomotive, Baldwin and Lima loaded up with locomotive orders from dozens of railroads and each road wanting priority over its competitors and also wanting locomotives to its own specs. The builders, under L-97, had to be told by WPG what to build and customer priority. So representatives of both customers and builders descended upon Washington en masse to press their cases in the case of the railroads and to get instructions on what to do in the case of builders. I wasn't in the inner sanctum when all this went on so I don't have any real details but I have heard that it was a madhouse. And the man whose job it was to straighten out the mess was Carroll Hanly who a few weeks before, had been sharing the responsibility of operating a Pennsylvania roundhouse. It was almost unbelievable. They said that Hanly would spend many days in the swankiest hotels in Washington rushing from room to room conferring with railroad presidents about what they could have and I guess few were satisfied. Also he had to confer about special design features with chiefs of motive power and chief engineers of the locomotive builders and make decisions on what should be supplied and what rejected. He was the czar. I guess he got carried away by all this attention and made hasty decisions that weren't good or weren't consistent, also promises