weekly to each. Domestic service has expanded
steadily since 1950 but varies throughout the year to provide more
frequent trips during the holiday and tourist seasons.

The line carries some cargo but an insignificant amount when compared
with other modes of transportation. It has, however, begun to carry a
more significant number of passengers. This traffic increased from less
than 40,000 in 1950 to about 780,000 in 1969. Each year since 1965 it
has carried approximately 100,000 more passengers than in the year
preceding.

Pipelines

Most liquid petroleum products and natural gas are moved via pipeline.
The largest network of liquid lines serves the large oilfield in the
Ploiesti area and the smaller one in west-central Walachia. They connect
the fields with refineries and transport the refined products to Danube
River ports and to Constanta on the Black Sea coast. Lines also transfer
crude oil from the Moldavian oilfield to its refineries, but there were
no lines in 1970 to transport finished products from those refineries.

Natural gas is piped to all parts of Transylvania from sources in the
center of the province, but the Carpathians are an obstacle to its
distribution to other parts of the country. One major line crosses the
Transylvanian Alps to serve the Bucharest area, and another crosses the
Moldavian Carpathians through Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. It serves areas to
the southeast as far as Galati, on the Danube River.

Merchant Marine

The country has a small, but growing, merchant marine. Although most of
its ships are new, the more than 100 percent increase--to nearly 0.5
million deadweight tons--claimed to have been achieved between 1967 and
1969 was accounted for by less than a dozen ships, consisting of two
tankers and some bulk cargo carriers that were built in Japan. The
government releases no official statistics on its merchant fleet, but
fragmentary information indicates that before 1967 it consisted of about
thirty-five ships. One of them was a 2,000-deadweight-ton
passenger-cargo vessel, and there were a few tankers totaling something
over 100,000 deadweight tons. The remainder were freighters, averaging
about 5,000 deadweight tons each.

Statistics on goods transported by sea substantiate the size and growth
of the merchant marine fleet. Until about 1960 it had relatively little
importance, but by 1966 cargo carried was almost ten times that of 1960,
and by 1969 it had again tripled. The