The French railroads run again.

The French railroads run again. At the heels of the Allied armies which drove the German invaders from France, an army of 15,000 U.S. Transport Corps soldiers under Brigadier General C.L. Burpee rebuilt within five months from "D-Day" (June 6, 1944) 2,400 kilometers of double and single track railways which had been hammered in turn by the British Royal Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the German Luftwaffe, as well as being destroyed during the ground fighting. Of the 11,800 locomotives possessed by the French railroads before the war, only 2,800 were running September 1, 1944. By November 2, the number in service increased to 4,200 and by December 31, the figure is expected to reach 6,000. In addition,. nearly 400 U.S. locomotives lent to British railways prior to the landings in Normandy were shipped to France and Belgium. The rebuilding with permanent of temporary structures, and in the order of their importance to traffic, of the 4,000 bridges destroyed by war is being carried out steadily. Two of the most important, the Maintenon viaduct between Paris and Chartres and the railway bridge at Orleans, are scheduled to be ready for traffic by the end of November, 1944. A member of a U.S. railroad unit, Private Larry Timmons (center), of Atwater, Ohio, walks across the tracks of a railroad yard in Brittany with two French mechnics with whom he works on the repairing of bombed and otherwise damaged railwy engines. Timmons, formerly a machinist, is helper on an American railroad. He is one of the thousands of skilled workers who were brought from the U.S. to help restore the French railroads and rolling stock to speed the transportation of material and supplies to Allied armies on the Western Front.