One wonders who John Galt is. The name occurs at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged on a regular basis as though to say that someone is threatening the existence of some free enterprise, and in the case of the plot the survival of a railroad company.News of whi he might be or what influence he might have on the railway business seems to haunt the main characters at the beginning of the story who are stumped by a decline in the business health of a major industrial company: Taggart international.

There is a railway company owner and his sister who pick at each other for the way their railroad  company is being run, in the meantime there are forces out there we don’t understand that are encroaching on the existence of a rail company that needs to rely on industries it is going to supply and needs to find a steel company that will make cutting edge equipment and save it from its competition.

 Dagny, the operations manager of Taggart Railway, the leading company in the story is a woman with a destiny to mix her knowledge with those that would like to be in her position and those that would expect her to give up on being the head of a company that would burn itself out. She gets involved with other company people who would match her abilities and then bring her to shame but she had to compete just the same. This is the backdrop of this story that gives hope for a revamp of the competitive market, a market where competition is either wiped out or kept so that there is always a potential for improvement. The plot of the story also paralleled the objectivist thought that the author had when ficitionalizing the impact of free enterprise on the people serving big business in America.