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How did a nation like Poland, constructing socialism in the wake of World War II’s mass destruction, approach maintaining and repairing tools, machinery, fuel and power systems, or ships and railways, while contending with persistent capital and skills shortages and episodic political upheavals? How did individuals and households manage to secure repair services for personal possessions which could not readily be replaced, or for residences which were deteriorating? How were tasks like making spare parts, providing timely service, or reusing waste materials framed and restructured in socialist spaces? How did such efforts and outcomes emerge ca. 1950-1970, and with what consequences for agriculture, industry, transportation and everyday life? This article undertakes to reconstruct socialist M&R practices within Poland’s planned economy across three domains: railway and ship transportation, services to persons and families, and enterprise operations in agriculture and industry.From their inception, transportation capabilities depended fundamentally on rigorous maintenance and skilled repair work, without which railway systems would collapse and ships would founder. Yet in financially-strapped Poland, sustaining such competences proved daunting if essential, not least because failure-prone steam locomotives could not be readily replaced with the “modern” diesel-electric successors the industrialized West increasingly adopted. Families faced different challenges in getting everything from shoes to watches to window frames repaired. As planners focused relentlessly on factory and farm output, “non-productive” services for households withered: artisans aged and replacement trainees, facing uncertain earnings, sought factory work instead; securing materials and supplies outside plan allocations was difficult, even illegal; and low, state-regulated prices for tasks prioritized consumers, not providers. In industry and agriculture, maintenance and repair could not proceed in the absence of spare parts (in tens of thousands of types). Yet production plans offered machinery and tractor builders’ bonuses only for finished goods; making parts was a time-waster that undermined achieving earnings supplements. This led to desperate tactics, as firms sent technicians on the road to “chase” components in warehouses, at comparable enterprises, or in scrap yards. Only in the 1960s were regional repair centers for tractors organized, as were roving teams of skilled workers, who traveled, for example, to papermaking plants with broken machinery. By that point, however, investments across the economy had underperformed for decades, due to deep, persistent deficiencies in technical and organizational coordination.