WASTE & INEFFICIENCY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1939, Page 7

WASTE & INEFFICIENCY

LN RUSSIAN HEAVY INDUSTRY i I RAILWAYS IN BAD STATE. j LIMITS ON POSSIBLE SUPPLIES FOR GERMANY. Can the Soviet Union supply Germany with manufactured war material, and. if so. in what quantity and of what quality? 'rhe "Manchester Guardian" gives an answer to this question drawing its information from official Soviet publications. Regarding the transport system as Russia’s greatest weakness, it points out that according to Malysheff. the Commissar for the Construction of Heavy Machinery, the plan of production has not been kept up to either during 19.38 or since. The Commissar finds three main shortcomings in the production of the most important of the heavy machines the locomotives: (1) inadequate utilisation of the capacity of the locomotive building works, especially the principal ones, such as Kolomna. Putiloff. and Sormovo; (2) almost incredible waste of raw material and of construction machinery: <3> entirely inadequate quality of turn-out. which is technically below the minimum standard for modern engines. Malysheff states that during the last year 1500 modern lathes in these works remained idle; they were too modern, and there were no specialist workers who could use them. The lathes used were worked only to 44.9 per cent of capacity; the automatic and quasi-automatic lathes were frequently out of action. MUCH SPOILT WORK. Malysheff states that the percentage of spoilt work is intolerable in the "model" Kiroff works: for instance, work to the value of 20.000.000 roubles was spoilt during the production year 1938-39. He finds, moreover, that the clerical work connected with orders usually takes longer than the actual construction of the locomotives. The scrap metal lying about in the workshops at the Kiroff works totals, he says, 85.000 tons; the loss caused by incapacity to make proper use of the equipment he puts at 23.000.000 roubles. “To remove the scrap from the works yard would require 18 trains.” He estimates the value of this scrap at 20.000,000 roubles.

The tale is much the same at Kolomna. The metallurgical workshops spoilt output to the total value of 900.000 roubles, and 300.000 hours’ work of the modern lathes was wasted, "equivalent to 16.000.000 roubles, or 80 locomotives of the ’SU' type." Lathes were out of action for 62,000 working hours —"50 ’SU' locomotives." comments Malysheff. Sometimes, he reports, the technical standard of work is ridiculous. At Kolomna "there are 1857 engine-builders at work, and about a thousand of them are occupied entirely on repairing defective work from the lathes." In all the world outside Russia we might search in vain for a works at which parts are turned at the lathe and subsequently adjusted by hand by the en-gine-builders. This, however, according to Malysheff. is the regular procedure in the Soviet locomotive works. “THIRD QUALITY” RAILS. The constructors and designers at these works have not yet grasped the possibility of assembling mouldings; consequently they build gigantic moulds in which these are cast whole, with the result that the percentage of condemned castings is enormous. All this accounts for the poor or bad quality. as a rule, of the engines produced by this commissariat. As for the finish, it is the poorest imaginable. Rails as a rule are so bad that 20 per cent are useless. The commissariat for "black metals” itself calls its output of rail “third quality." The commissariat lias come under the criticism of the "Krasnaya Zvezda." the organ of the Red Army, and the "Trud," selfstyled organ of the trade unions. These illustrations are sufficient to show that in Russia, where the roads are unusable, the principal means of transport correspond neither in quantity nor in quality to the needs of a modern war and are incapable of dealing rapidly with large consignments of goods to a foreign country.