AMERICAN COAL FAMINE.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 70, 23 March 1907, Page 6

AMERICAN COAL FAMINE.

TRAINS HELD UP AND ROBBED

NEW YORK, Feb. 2. The reports of the scarcity of coal throughout the North-West, and of the desperate efforts the people of that section have made to secure fuel, do hot seem to be exaggerated. Driven by the failure of the Northern Pacific to deliver any coal whatever at their railroad station, a crowd of residents of North Yakima, Washington, held up two trains loaded with railroad coal on January Bth and helped themselves to hundreds of tons. A train of twenty-seven cars was stopped on the main track of the Northern Pacific in front of the North Yakima station, directly across the street from a police station. The hoppers on the fifty-ton gondola-cars were loosened and the tracks were piled with coal, quickly blocking the cars and the entire main line. As soon as the train stopped scores of citizens of North Yakima pressed over the sides of the cars and commenced throwing the coal to the ground. At the same time wagogns of all sizes and descriptions came from every direction and were backed up to the track. Business men, whose residences were without coal, mounted the cars, shovelled coal into the waggons and carried it home. Children and women dragged coal away in hand waggons and on sleds. There seems to have been no concerted .action, no prearranged plan of attack. The whole town seemed to have gone coal-mad at once. Many people who took waggon-loads from the cars had these loads weighed at a nearby waggon scales, and subsequently paid for what they had taken. Everyone was perfectly willing to pay, apparently, if he could only get coal. But there was no coal to be had in all North Yakima until the train was attacked. The police seem to take no interest in the matter, and it was not until late in the night that tne empty cars could be pulled on to a siding by the railway officials, allowing a numoer of passenger trains to get through which had been stalled for several hours while the citizens had been forcibly replenishing their coal cellars. [.There is great indignation throughout the country against Harriman and other railway magnates who will not allow their trains to carry coal because they can be hilly occupied with more remunerative freights. The preat prosperity throughout the country has given the unprecedented call on railway stock, which is quite unable to handle all the freight offering, and through failure to secure trucks a

number of coal mines are working slow time, while people in many parts of tho country are famishing for fuel. It has been a severe winter, and the shortage of coal has been greatly felt. On the Pacific slope the railways are burning Australian coal, costing £2 per ton. The cargoes arirving by vessels from Newcastle are mopped up by tho coal monopolists, and do not ease the situation to the ordinary consumer.]