periods will be measured by months or by years, it is fruitless at present to guess. This depends on many reasons, beginning with the international situation and ending with the degree of single-mindedness and steadfastness of the working class.
The second period is the period of machine-building in the interests of transport and the storage of raw material and fuel. Here the core is in the locomotive.
At the present time the repairing of locomotives is carried on in too haphazard a fashion, swallowing up energy, and resources beyond all measure. We must reorganize the repairing of our rolling-stock, on the basis of the mass production of spare parts. Today, when the whole network of the railways and the factories is in the hands of one master, the Labor State, we can and must fix single types of locomotives and trucks for the whole country, standardize their constituent parts, draw all the necessary factories into the work of the mass production of spare parts, reduce repairing to the simple replacing of worn-out parts by new, and thereby make it possible to build new locomotives on a mass scale out of spare parts.