Concern, restlessness, and hope are all justifiable, and each of you likely is experiencing all of these in varying proportions as the pandemic, subsequent restrictions and the results of each are playing out. This is uncharted territory in that this strain of virus is "novel" and therefore has not been encountered before. However, calamities have occurred and no doubt will occur again. In researching for this article, I looked to the AREMA archives for comments and reactions of our forebears to the pandemics of the past. The largest pandemic in the railway era was in 1918 and 1919, commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu. It had a worldwide toll of more than 40 million lives. One would think that previous association presidents of that era would have discussed the effects of such hardship and distress on both their colleagues and the railway industry. Surprisingly, they didn't. Instead, there was much talk about the important role of the railway engineer in the Great War (World War I, 1914-1918). While that is understandable, even more intriguing were discussions of concerns that carry forward to this very day. The following excerpts are from Volume 21 for the Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Convention of the American Railway Engineering Association, p 19-26.
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