Word: railways
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Barely a week after the lifting of the Berlin blockade, the city echoed to the blast of gunfire and the shouts of angry mobs. Trouble started over the fact that Berlin's city railways and elevated lines, which are controlled by the Russians, paid their workers in East zone marks, although most live in the Western sectors. Those workers wanted their wages in West marks (the only legal tender where they live, and four times the value of the East marks). Last week, 16,000 workers of the non-Communist Independent Railway Workers Union walked...
...Soviet-run German railway authorities thought they knew what to do about that; they ordered strikebreakers into action. Armed trains bearing police reinforcements and carloads of young Communist shock troops began to pour into West Berlin elevated and railroad stations. The strikebreakers barricaded themselves inside a dozen Berlin stations...
...crowbars and clubs, battled with the Red strikebreakers. At the Tempelhof station, Major General Pavel A. Kvashnin, Soviet transport chief, barely got away when strikers tried to rough him up amid cries of "Kill him! Hang the fat swine!" When strikers stormed the Schöneberg elevated station, Communist railway police inside unleashed four police dogs. When this did not stop the strikers, the police gave up and were escorted through the crowd, to shouts of "Go back to your Russian masters...
This week, after at least one death and a total of 1,200 injured, the strikers still held some of the West sector stations, but the Red railway administration, which by then had run in hundreds of strikebreakers and guards, seemed in no mood to give in to their demands. Said Union Official Christian Hanebuth: "We cannot fight on physically against their guns." But next day, 3,000 strikers and their sympathizers went right on fighting, tried to storm the railway station at the Berlin Zoo. Communist police fired on them, killing a 16-year-old boy. British authorities sharply...
...railway and airline offices on the Canadian side of the Canada-U.S. border many a U.S. citizen queued up last week and bought his ticket from a Canadian agent. In the same offices, almost every mail brought letters from the U.S. with orders and checks for plane and train tickets between U.S. points. More & more Americans were getting wise to the fact that they could get bargains in transportation by buying their tickets in Canada...