With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the Korean National Railways (KNR) was confronted by a serious dilemma. Wartime mobilization required an increase in its transport capacity reinforcement, but the necessary material resources were lacking. To solve this dilemma, KNR reorganized its procurement process and established a labor-intensice railroad operation by means of increasing its operation frequency and train units. However, after the outbreak of the Pacific War, these measures ceased to be effective since KNR suffered from an extreme scarcity of management resources. Ultimately, this led to a transport crisis. After Korea was liberated from colonial Japanese rule in 1945, the Korean staff had to take complete responsibility for the operation of the railway network. But this led to a systematic crisis on top of the product-factor crisis because the Japanese staff who had been in charge of the upper strata of the internal organization had been dismissed and the railway network was divided into north and south. KNR had to develop new strata of Korean executives and set up a new procurement network under the command of the U.S. occupation forces. In conclusion, the operation of KNR by Koreans themselves began with the transition-period experiences which followed the 1945 Liberation.