Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 7: The Moratorium on Brains (Part 2) - The Tunnel Disaster
This is the single most devastating sequence in Atlas Shrugged. I’ve read a lot of novels. I grew up reading Soviet literature where grim endings are basically a genre requirement. And nothing prepared me for the Taggart Tunnel disaster. Not because of the death toll, but because Rand makes you watch every single decision that leads to it. Every coward, every buck-passer, every man who chose not to think.
The Engine Goes Down
The Comet is crawling through the Colorado mountains at night with Kip Chalmers aboard, a political nobody who thinks he’s somebody because he has friends in Washington. He’s got a rally in San Francisco and he’s already late. Then the engine hits a split rail on a curve and goes off the track. Nobody’s killed, but the Diesel is done. The conductor tells Chalmers that the rail was worn out, that they knew about it, but Mr. Locey cancelled the replacement.
The conductor’s face says everything. He looks at Chalmers like the catastrophe is somehow his fault. And honestly? It is. The whole system of pull and favors that put Chalmers on this train is the same system that left the rail unrepaired.
The Chain of Cowardice
What follows is one of the most painful sequences I’ve ever read. Not violent. Not dramatic. Just a chain of phone calls where every single person refuses to take responsibility.
The night operator calls the station agent. The station agent calls Dave Mitchum, the new division superintendent. Mitchum is a mediocrity who got his job through a chain of political favors so tangled it reads like a conspiracy flowchart: James Taggart traded his sister’s private life to Wesley Mouch for a rate increase, Mouch demanded a job for Mitchum as a bonus, Locey pushed Mitchum into the first opening. The man who actually held the job quit when they gave away his spare Diesel engine.
Now Mitchum stands in his office at Silver Springs, surrounded by three experienced railroad men, and he asks the question that defines this entire chapter: “What are we going to do?”
The answer is simple. Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher, lays it out clearly. They cannot send a train through the eight-mile Taggart Tunnel with a coal-burning engine. The ventilation system is broken. A coal engine in that tunnel means carbon monoxide filling a sealed space for the full length of the run. They need to hold the Comet at Winston until morning, wait for a Diesel freight coming from San Francisco, borrow its engine, and pull the Comet through the tunnel safely.
It will delay the Comet by twelve to eighteen hours. But everyone on board will be alive.
That should have been the end of it.
Kip Chalmers and the Power of Pull
But Kip Chalmers has a rally. And he has been taught, in college, that the only effective means to make people act is fear.
He storms into Winston Station and screams at the station agent. He sends a telegram to James Taggart in New York, threatening consequences. Taggart panics and calls Clifton Locey. Locey panics and sends an order to Mitchum: “Give an engine to Mr. Chalmers at once. Send the Comet through safely and without unnecessary delay.”
Then Locey drives to a roadhouse with his girlfriend, making sure nobody can find him for the next few hours.
This is the key. The order says “an engine” but doesn’t say which kind. It says “safely” but doesn’t define safe. It’s designed so that if anything goes wrong, Locey can claim Mitchum misunderstood. And if things go right, Locey gets credit for decisive action. The whole thing is a trap, and Mitchum knows it.
I’ve seen this pattern. I’ve seen it in Soviet bureaucracy, I’ve seen it in corporate hierarchies, I’ve seen it anywhere people get promoted for connections instead of competence. The vague order. The missing superior. The plausible deniability built into every sentence. Rand didn’t invent this. She just described it so precisely that it hurts.
Bill Brent Says No
Mitchum tries to reach anyone above him. The general manager at Omaha has resigned. The assistant is away for the weekend. The one executive he does reach says “do exactly as Mr. Locey says” and hangs up.
So Mitchum types up deliberately vague orders. He tells the road foreman to send “the best engine available” to Winston. He tells the trainmaster to summon a crew for “an emergency.” Then he tells Bill Brent to sign the order sending the Comet through with coal-burning Engine Number 306, while Mitchum himself drives off to another station, supposedly looking for a Diesel that doesn’t exist.
Brent says no.
Quietly. Without drama. Just: “I won’t do it.”
Mitchum threatens him with the Unification Board. Brent understands perfectly that tomorrow, Mitchum will deny giving the order. That the paper trail has been built to frame Brent as the one who sent three hundred people to their deaths. Brent sees all of it. And he quits on the spot.
Mitchum punches him in the face. Brent gets up, bleeding, looks at the trainmaster and road foreman standing in the doorway, sees that they understand everything, and also sees that they won’t help. He walks out.
The only competent man in the room leaves. And now the order falls on a frightened young night dispatcher who still believes that railroad executives know what they’re doing.
Everyone Looks Away
What makes this sequence unbearable is the internal monologues. Rand gives you the thoughts of the road foreman, the trainmaster, the conductor, the switchman. Every one of them knows what is about to happen. Every one of them has a reason not to speak.
The road foreman thinks of his wife and children. Under Directive 10-289, if he defies his employer, the Unification Board can bar him from any job. He can’t risk his family’s survival to save three hundred strangers.
The trainmaster lost his brother to suicide on May 1st, the day the directive was issued. His brother was a young genius of an engineer. The trainmaster tried to get a newspaper to publish the story. The editor refused because it would be “bad for morale.” After that, the trainmaster stopped caring about anyone’s life or death.
The conductor thinks of the passengers who accepted Directive 10-289, who looked away while the Board destroyed innocent people. Why should he risk himself to save them?
One by one, they all step aside. The original engineer quits and walks into the mountain darkness. A drunk named Joe Scott, reinstated by the Board after causing a major wreck, volunteers to drive. “I’ll get her through, if I go fast enough.” The conductor signals the train forward and then quietly steps off the back and vanishes.
Kip Chalmers grins. “Fear is the only practical means to deal with people.”
The Passengers of the Comet
And then Rand does something that divided readers for sixty years.
She lists the passengers. One by one, car by car. The sociology professor who taught that individual ability is of no consequence. The journalist who believed compulsion is moral for “a good cause.” The schoolteacher who taught children that the majority decides what is right. The mother who tucked her children into the berth above her while her husband enforced the directives, saying “I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt.”
The philosophy professor who taught that there is no mind, no reality, no logic, no principles, no rights, no morality, no absolutes. Rand interweaves his teachings with the questions nobody asked that night: How do you know the tunnel is dangerous? Why do you claim trains cannot move without proper motive power? Why shouldn’t you be bound by the law of cause and effect?
Some people hate this passage. They say Rand is justifying mass death, that she’s celebrating the punishment of ordinary people. I don’t read it that way. I read it as Rand tracing the line from ideas to consequences. Every person on that train held beliefs that, when put into practice, led directly to the system that killed them. Not one of them pulled the trigger. But all of them loaded the gun.
The last thing they see, as the Comet enters the tunnel, is Wyatt’s Torch burning on the distant mountainside. The fire of a man who refused to let them take what he built.
My Take
I had to put the book down after this chapter. I’m not exaggerating.
Rand spends dozens of pages building the disaster not with explosions but with phone calls. With vague orders and missing executives and men who knew better but said nothing. The tunnel doesn’t kill those people. Cowardice kills them. The system of pull and evasion and “it’s not my responsibility” kills them.
I grew up in a system like that. Where the factory explodes and nobody signed the order, where the bridge collapses and the engineer who warned them was fired two years ago, where the report was written but the editor wouldn’t publish it because it was “bad for morale.” Rand wrote this in 1957, but she could have been writing about Chernobyl.
The Taggart Tunnel disaster isn’t fiction. It’s a blueprint. And it happens every time a society decides that connections matter more than competence, that feelings outrank facts, and that nobody needs to be responsible because responsibility is someone else’s job.
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This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.