"PUSHER" AND RAILWAYS

Marlborough Express, Volume L, Issue 155, 3 July 1916, Page 3

"PUSHER" AND RAILWAYS

RUSSIA ENDS A SCANDAL.

TRAINS' THAT DIP APPEARED

(Manchester Guardian.1)

The opening 'day.l? of the new session of the Duma were • marked by vehement attacks upoVi tho Adminis.tratiori, and some of the mqst severe strictures referred to the Railway Department as it was administered' under;Mv llukhloff, recently retired, Even before the war the Russian railwayv system had been inadequate to meet the meeds of the rapidly growing economic development of the Empire, but the war threw upon it a new gigantic burden with which it was the more difficult to oope as the railways still remained outside the competence of tlie military authorities and thus subject to all the disadvantages of conflicting needs of the civil population and of the war. Thus as' late as October; last the Novoe Vremya (October 21)' pointed out that the railways were still working ] under the old ti a flic .regulations of peace-time, by which perishable j goods, such as. cut . flowers,] mineral waters, beer and _ wine,; enjoyed a preference in transit over j non-perishable, goods, such as corn, ! coal, and sugar, with ' the result that about \ this time, when, Moscow was suffering acutely: fr<)rn; lack of sxip- | plies of all kinds, trains upon trains w.ere pouring in there bringing millions of bottles of a ■ certain! mineral /vater—its name, '-Kuvaka," has-since become a password throughout the .Empire—from aGaucasion source, the property,, as the Den of .October 29 hinted, of .a. ■•personage." What made matters' worse was^that the provinical: governors, acting independently of the military authorities, '■' Kad.in many places, iri order to safe- ■, guard tlie local food supplies, entirely •prohibited their export, and even transit, thus bringing about an unequal distribution not only of the foodstuffs in the Empire, but of the, rolling stock, too,' since all supplies thus : kept back were, in the absence of warehousing facilities, placed in railway wag^oris—this with the express permission of M. Rukhloffi himself—and sealed that no ono could touch them. Tho result of this policy was a; congestioii of. the rolliriig stock at" numerous stations ,and a blocking of entii o lines—-a. circumstance which .provKl ■nltniist fnt:il when the great stream of refugees. begaa to pouiv t

< fro,n the western provinces. In Moscow alone, we read in the Novoe Vremya of, October £2, there stood on the station lines no fewer than. 5000 waggons unloaded and at Petrograd 2000. "A lack #f rolling stock," wrot-3 the paper, "and at the same timo the arrival of 1,000,000 poods of mineral water—what sort of management is it?" PURLOINING TRUCKS. But tho worst feature of all was tho wholesale corruption which this state of affairs produced throughout the railway administration, and which made th© reigning confusion worse confounded. There arose a regular traffic in. waggons between stevtionmasters and customers, 1 chiefly through agents who becatro known by the .suggestive name of "pushers'' or "oilers." The proceduro was simple enough. The statdonmasters would .shunt somo waggons on a sidoline or seal them enpty, and tiheji offer them through tho "pushers" to firms in need of goods. Or the firms themselves would,' find out tho '•pushers." who, with the connivance of th© local railway authorities, would empty the goods from the sealed w:\ggons and plaos them at the disposal of the firms. Frequently (as told by a correspondent in the Retch of December 16) a waggon loaded with such "contraband" goods' would bo coupled to a pacing train and pushed on to another railway < s/octor, where another agent would repeat the operation, untif the goods arrived at their destination. In the Retch of January 9 we find a story told by th© chairman of tho Tiflis Municipal Committees (which had Uii- enro oi woiuidcd soldiers), hosv lw obtained ooal for tiho military hospital. He had need .jf tbveo '.vaggons of coal. He h:id ordered them iro'm thj Khamkoff district, but knew they would come in "abour thice 'year^' time" if they wer-t ie, tho ordinary way. He sent # telegrams to various places but without result ' Then," ?aid ''tho i-hairman, "a man came. 'You want coal?' he a«ked. 'More than anything, else in tho world.' .'l'll supply you at 7o kopecks ppr pood.' 'How will you do it?' 'That'« not your business. You pay the money ' and you your coal.' The money was paid and in a fortnight's timo tho hospital had its coal." THE LOST TRAIN. Ag;>in, wo read in the Novoe. Yrcmya. of December 5 how a whole tram consisting of twenty-eight wag}gors loaded with 28.000 poods of coke had left the. coal mines in Donetz district for a Tula ironworks on September 28 and never reached its ■dostii'ation, having completely disappeared on the way, so that no on« knew to that day (December 5) what had become of it. Obviously some "pushers" had got hold of it and sent it to some other destination. One could quote many stories Irom the Russian press, each more incredible than tho other, yet t very often authenticated in law courts. Tho latter have discovered, for instance, that at a certain station in the Caucasus the ptationmastor used to stop every train that passed, uncouple a waggon or two on the pretext that they were "sick,' 5 leave them at the station, and then' forward the>n through the "pushers" -to various firms (Retch, December 12). Another discovery of theirs was that a large train which had left Warsaw at the time ,of the evacuation for Moscow with machinery of a certain large factory never reached its destination, but was brought down to Rostov, where it was still standing on Janvary 23, the date when the story appeared in the Rostiv Retch. The dismissal of M. llukhjoff from his post as Minister of CommunicaJtioßs was a result of this scandalous state of affairs in his department. Since then his successor, General Trcpoff, has been doing his best to lemWy the evils—apparently with good results.