Originally posted by JazzRemington+October 25, 2007 02:20 pm--> (JazzRemington @ October 25, 2007 02:20 pm)
Young Stupid
[email protected] 25, 2007 12:49 pm
Well, the trains were controlled by the union during the Spanish Revolution, and they seemed to work pretty well.
That is to say more formally: I generally agree with blackstone. I suggest giving control to the union, in consultation with the people in the areas where the train runs.
If I recall correctly, the tram and train services run the anarchists were more efficient than before the war. They also managed to get the services up and running within a few short days (I think it was between 2-4).
Organizing a train schedule might be a mess in the beginning, but eventually things will become smoother. I think there are programs where people can design routes, but I'm not completely sure. [/b]
Tom Wetzel describes the Revolutionary Railway Federation, which was the organization that operated the railway network, in his brilliant essay Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution. He states,
The Madrid-Zaragoza-Alicante (MZA) was a large, privately owned railway
that operated the mainlines from Madrid to Barcelona and Valencia, and the mainline along the Mediterranean coast. On July 20th, with street-fighting still going on in Barcelona, militants from the CNT railway national industrial union told the management of the MZA they were fired. The workers were taking over. The electric commuter railway operating out of Barcelona was also seized, and the railways were merged together into a single network. This takeover was initiated by the CNT union but the UGT soon came along. Each union had about an equal proportion of the railway workforce. The train operating crews, who had a more militant tradition, tended to belong to the CNT. The station agents, railway clerks, and yardmasters tended to belong to the UGT.
The new organization formed to operate the railway network was called the Revolutionary Railway Federation. The coordinating committee - called the Revolutionary Committee - consisted of six UGT members and six CNT members. Except for a full-time executive director, they all continued to work at their regular job. For each section of the railway line and each station, a committee was formed of delegados elected by a local assembly. In the bi-weekly assemblies, the proposals of the committee would be either approved or disapproved by the workers.
The railways had been operating at a loss even before the civil war, due to growing automobile use. To improve efficiency of the transport network, the railway federation undertook to do an extensive survey of transport services with the assistance of the CNT transport unions. They mapped the various bus, motor freight, and commercial shipping services. They discovered that various poor rural areas had no public transport services. Meanwhile, there was multiple duplication of services along the coastal corridor. As a result, the CNT transport unions agreed on a plan to eliminate some services competing with the railway such as the coastal maritime shipping line, and create new bus and motor freight services for unserved rural areas. The railway built a new branch line in a rural area of Aragon to serve both the villages and the nearby labor militia on the Aragon front(33).
http://libcom.org/library/workers-power-an...tion-tom-wetzel (http://libcom.org/library/workers-power-and-the-spanish-revolution-tom-wetzel)