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ComeHome, Little Box Cor, Come Home

\X/ITH all the current fireworks over the Y Y price of lumber, a perennial problem that may in the long run be far more seriousthe boxcar shortagehas been overlooked. When the current hairpulling over lumber prices has faded as topic number one, as it inevitably will when supply inevitably catches up with demand, we have a nagging suspicion that the box car shortage will still be with us, though, hopefully at less of a crisis pitch than at present.

But why should the industry always be plagued with recurring shortages of this vital link in the distribution process? Lumber and plywood prices react to the laws of supply and demand. What law of economics, we would like to know, causes these shortages that crop up with the dependability of a bad penny?

We're familiar with the current reasons for the shortage: (l) grain shipments to Russia,

(2) a booming economy, (3) fewer cars available, (4) California's March I inventory tax,

(5) poor utilization of available cars, plus other assorted rationales. These are this year's reasons. But most of them were last vear's reason. and the reason during the serious crunch in 1966, and for all we know, were long in the tooth during the storied days of thi: narrow gauge lines during the Wild West days of the last century. Why must it be so? It isn't as if the current scarcity of rolling stock comes as any surprise. It was forecast before the ink was dry on the contracts selling the grain to Rusbia. The plywood assn. and the WWPA, just to name twq have had their specialists on the problern for years. Yet it continues. Why?

It is difficult to believe that this sort of demand, so predictable that shortages are virtually an annual event, can't be solved with a supply of rail cars suitable to expedite the shipping the West needs done. The railroads have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years improving lines and buying new rolling stock, yet the problem continues. Why?

Perhaps the plywood association has the only real solution when they recently wondered in print if the best hope "may be the energetic pursuit of alternative methods of transportation."

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