The Journals of Ayn Rand (96 page)

The last one:
a crucial branch is closed to get track for the last, main line.
Without the industries served by the branch, the main line cannot exist for long. (This is “living off capital.”)

The collapse of TT’s freight train bridge:
the last break. Most of the other rival lines are gone by then. (This is the “helplessness before nature.”)

Disorganization (chaos):
no fuel where fuel was expected for the

Comet’s last ride. (This is the plain moron’s inability to understand the need of work and action.)

The “transportation pull”
deals: Major (and fatal) example of it—“help to a needy section which has an industry the country ought to [support].” At a crucial harvest time (when there is a good harvest after several bad years), Taggart unexpectedly refuses trains and cars to the farming section involved and uses these trains for the “preferred” section. Result—hunger for the country, farmers go bankrupt and quit, banks close, endless industries suffer—and TT, returning to its old branch, finds itself running it at a loss, yet unable (and afraid) to close it—“the section must be revived, this is just
temporary.”

Minor examples of the same method—deals on a smaller scale, involving individual shippers, through which the “gambler-speculator” industrialists ruin the few remaining producers. Each time—there is a final loss to TT.

(These are the “second-handers’ motives” in action.)
Incident of the death of a section
(the first one in the story, as part of the plot): TT closes its branch—one man in the section attempts to organize a pony express—the collective begins to hamper him with rules—John Galt tells him to stop—the section dies. (This illustrates parasite methods and [what happens in] the absence of a creator.)
Specific incident of an industry closing because of the railroad’s failure:
Loss of crucial, irreplaceable freight in switching yards’ tie-ups and snarls. Later—freight found in some most incongruous place. (Incompetence.)

A major traffic snarl:
through break-down of signals or telegraph service. (Incompetence.)

The return to flags and lanterns.
(Retrogression.)

The progressive disappearance of:
diners, sleepers, air-conditioning, heating, water, lighting. And of: refrigerator cars, stock cars, tank cars. (Retrogression.)

The progressive deterioration of motive power:
The use of old locomotives, and locomotives ruined just to make one run. (The parasite’s “range of the moment.”) The looting chicanery to get locomotives from other systems—a barely veiled highjacking called “nationalization,” which the looters claim is “temporary, just for the emergency.” [They pass] some law such as that the remaining locomotives belong to the one who can “prove” the biggest “public good,” a grotesque kind of “priorities.” (The absence of inventors and “living off capital.”)

In connection with this:
an incident of a locomotive high-jacked by Dagny (against priorities).
Their own locomotive was taken through “priorities” by someone else.

The tunnel collapses
—it cannot be repaired and reopened—miserable, shaky, make-shift steps to run the railroad around it by
going back to the rusted remains of an older, pre-tunnel era.
(The “return of nature.”)

One incident of a disastrous flood
in which a line is destroyed and cannot be repaired. The section dies. Memories of how such disasters were repaired in the past. (The “return of nature.”)

One incident of a crucial train run
in which a great deal is at stake (in the plot), and the failure of the train destroys it. The failure is due to a cause that seems infinitesimal on the surface (like one loose screw in the rails), but is really huge as an indication of the cause behind it, of the second-handers in charge and the bestial idiocy of their methods. (Incompetence.)

In connection with lumber industry—the untreated ties and the result.
(Lack of inventors.)

The “equal rates” introduced by Taggart (“for democracy”) that ruin the more distant farming sections (or a distant but growing and heathy industry that should have had a future). (Second-handers’ motives.)

Incident of Taggart deciding that a competitor is ruining him,
that everything would be all right if it weren’t for “unfair competition”—so he ruins the competitor (with political help) and finds that he can’t run the line and that people won’t use it. This one can be connected with the first death of a section. (Second-handers’ envy, and idea that the job creates the man.)

Accidents:
one major railroad wreck directly connected to Taggart’s methods, and a few lesser ones (each progressively worse than the one before). Minor accidents and breakdowns—constantly. (This is plain, eloquent, screaming destruction—the direct physical expression of the essence, purpose, and final result of the parasite.)
One incident of a new invention taken over and the inventor kicked out.
Then the parasites don’t know how to use it and have to abandon it. It can be a young engineer with a new engine as a solution to their power problems. Or it can even be an invention of Galt‘s, possibly an early one—and he has now vanished—and Dagny looks for him, not knowing his name, she merely wants “the man and the brain who could do this.” (This is “the moron with the dishwasher.”)