Red Cross Blood Donor Car

A Southern Railway baggage car is busy around Birmingham these days in a new and important occupation-helping the local chapter of the American Red Cross in the work of collecting whole blood and blood plasma for the sick and wounded in hospitals here and overseas.

Loaned by the Southern Railway to the Birmingham Regional Blood Center of the American Red Cross, the car was officially delivered to the local chapter on Sunday, October 5, remaining on public display at the Southern Railway passenger station in Birmingham that afternoon.

Coupled with a baggage car loaned by the L&N Railway; the Southern's car helped form a two-car blood mobile unit which started on October 8 an 80- day tour of various plants of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Division of United States Steel to collect blood donations from plant workers.

Southern Railway loans Birmingham Chapter of American Red Cross a baggage car to be fitted out as a traveling Blood Donor Center for use at industrial plants in the area.

The interiors of the two cars are completely fitted out to accommodate the entire blood donation operation from registration and examination of prospective donors (not all are accepted) to the rest-and-refreshment period that follows the seven to nine minute sojourn on a padded table.

A doctor, five or six nurses and twelve volunteer Red Cross workers make up the staff of the car. The volunteers serve as nurses' aides, stenographers and canteen workers.

Interior of the Southern baggage car, showing padded tables where donors lie while blood is taken.

This is the first bloodmobile-on-rails in the South, although the idea has been used in the East and West, It is impossible to say in advance how many pints of blood will be donated before the car ends its run.

Two things, however, are certain: the blood will be needed; and somewhere, sometime, it will tip the scales from death to life-perhaps for your son or the boy next door, whose luck ran out on Sniper Ridge or Triangle Hill. * * *