As a matter of choice, or because their work requires it, general officers, and even the more important division and subordinate officers on some roads, travel in business-cars isolated from contact with their roads’ patrons, unable to learn, or indifferent to the opinion of the service their roads are rendering to the very people who furnish the revenue that makes the roads’ operation possible.It should not be lost sight of that while the public judges the roads through its most intimate contact with them (as passengers), it is this same public that in the final analysis will determinewhether the roads are to continue under the present form of management and control or whether some other method of operation shall be experimented with. It is also this same public which, as individuals, pays the country’s freight bills as shippers, consignees, or consumers.Assuming that it is a fact that almost all competitive tonnage is secured through “good-will,” is there any better way in which to impress a prospective shipper with the road’s efficiency than when he is a passenger? The things that were observed on this 8,000-mile trip seem to indicate that at least some managers do not appreciate the value of comfortable, courteous passenger service as a feeder of freight tonnage, or that they are unfamiliar with the manner in which their passenger service is being handled.
As a matter of choice, or because their work requires it, general officers, and even the more important division and subordinate officers on some roads, travel in business-cars isolated from contact with their roads’ patrons, unable to learn, or indifferent to the opinion of the service their roads are rendering to the very people who furnish the revenue that makes the roads’ operation possible.
It should not be lost sight of that while the public judges the roads through its most intimate contact with them (as passengers), it is this same public that in the final analysis will determinewhether the roads are to continue under the present form of management and control or whether some other method of operation shall be experimented with. It is also this same public which, as individuals, pays the country’s freight bills as shippers, consignees, or consumers.
Assuming that it is a fact that almost all competitive tonnage is secured through “good-will,” is there any better way in which to impress a prospective shipper with the road’s efficiency than when he is a passenger? The things that were observed on this 8,000-mile trip seem to indicate that at least some managers do not appreciate the value of comfortable, courteous passenger service as a feeder of freight tonnage, or that they are unfamiliar with the manner in which their passenger service is being handled.
This extremely fair-minded critic of the railroads then goes on to call attention to the utter absurdity of the roads’ attempting to operate on trains made up of perhaps but two Pullman standard sleepers and the rest very largely tourist-cars, day-coaches, and dining-cars that are attempting in their service and prices to rival the best hotels across the land. There is indeed much meat in what he says. The dining-car service is in a great many cases absurd.
It is apt in many cases to convey an impression of innate snobbishness, certainly not one of economy. It takes from ten to eleven men to operate an American dining-car of equal or less seating capacity than its fellow of Continental Europe, which rarely has more than four or five servants. The prices, to the average man traveling across the land and accustomed to stay in hotels of even a fair grade are not unreasonable. They merely are unflexible to the man or woman of limited means who is forced to ride long distances upon the cars and who is given little or no opportunity to alight at refreshment stations upon the way for the purchase of inexpensive foodstuffs. Thetable d’hôte, which is used so successfully and so economically (both from the point of view of the railroad as well as of its patrons) on the railways of France and otherEuropean countries, has been given few fair trials in the United States. The New Haven once had a famous “fixed price” dinner; so did, and I think still has, the Milwaukee. The Baltimore and Ohio to-day offers what it calls a “commercial traveler’s club luncheon” for seventy-five cents, which I honestly think is the best meal in the country for that price. But these are the exceptions. The rule is a cumbersome dining-car arrangement, with the itinerant eating-place attempting to rival a city restaurant in the variety of its offerings, at a vast cost and annoyance to most of its patrons as well as to itself.
I should be inclined to agree with the gentleman writing in the “Railway Age” as to the complete neglect of the executive officers of our railroads of a proper supervision of their train service had there not come to my eyes recently a confidential report made to the president of a large road from one of his secret agents. This secret agent was much different from the average one—hired usually to assist in the detection of some employee or employees suspected of pilfering or other malfeasance. She was a woman of good station in life, a fairly experienced traveler, and by temperament inclined to be both generous as well as honest. For weeks she rode up and down the lines of that railroad and its competitors—not upon a pass, oh, no—but with nothing whatsoever to distinguish her from other travelers. Her comments upon the service, shrewdly feminine, went to her employer in the form of the confidential report which was brought to my attention. The mashed potatoes in Dining-Car 4809 were weak and watery. “... The chef should have known enough to have prepared them in milk or cream, not in water,” her woman’s judgment added. The head porter in the big new hyphenated hotel in P. advised her to go to a competing point by the X. line and not by the road that was employing her. There was a discourteous ticket-agent in the office at G. And so it went.
Here was a railroad taking a primary but a genuine steptoward selling its transportation to its patrons. It is not enough that the railroads are making better “on time” records with their trains—their press-agents are putting out reams of propaganda these days to that effect: there is something more to real service than this. Return once again to our friend of the “Railway Age.” He says:
Do railroad managers expect their ticket-sellers to be salesmen in the generally accepted meaning of the term or do they reserve this function for passenger agents? A man who found that he must make a hurried trip to a destination several thousand miles distant called at a consolidated ticket-office to purchase his ticket. The purpose of his trip required that he visit certain cities en route but he found that the ticket seller was unable to tell him how to arrange his trip so as to include these cities. He consulted other ticket-sellers with no better success and then informed the writer of his predicament. The writer telephoned to the passenger agent of a road over which a portion of the trip must be made and a traveling agent was immediately despatched to the prospective passenger’s office who furnished him with all the information he required.This prospective passenger was a man who had held important positions in the engineering department of railroads for years, but he did not know that railroads provided this service for prospective passengers. Subsequent investigation disclosed the fact that travelers are entirely ignorant of the services that city, district, and traveling passenger agents are prepared to render them.
Do railroad managers expect their ticket-sellers to be salesmen in the generally accepted meaning of the term or do they reserve this function for passenger agents? A man who found that he must make a hurried trip to a destination several thousand miles distant called at a consolidated ticket-office to purchase his ticket. The purpose of his trip required that he visit certain cities en route but he found that the ticket seller was unable to tell him how to arrange his trip so as to include these cities. He consulted other ticket-sellers with no better success and then informed the writer of his predicament. The writer telephoned to the passenger agent of a road over which a portion of the trip must be made and a traveling agent was immediately despatched to the prospective passenger’s office who furnished him with all the information he required.
This prospective passenger was a man who had held important positions in the engineering department of railroads for years, but he did not know that railroads provided this service for prospective passengers. Subsequent investigation disclosed the fact that travelers are entirely ignorant of the services that city, district, and traveling passenger agents are prepared to render them.
The answer to most of these criticisms is again that some twenty years ago the traffic men ceased to be a really vital figure in the organization of most of our American railroads. For more than twenty years they have been forced willy-nilly into policies of the most stringent economy, with the very natural result that the operating man, the man who could be counted upon to make the largest economies in the operation of the railroad, came into his own. To-day there is hardly an important railroad in the United States which is not headed byan operating man. Operating men do not as a rule have much traffic sense. It is a faculty that is born in some men, while others can never even understand it. It is a good railroad operating man indeed who can manage to acquire a real respect for transportation salesmanship and then give a real coöperation in attaining it. Yet that is perhaps as vitally an important thing as our railroads need to-day.
For despite large measures of criticism that may be leveled against it, the railroads of the United States are beginning more and more to tender a real degree of service once again to their patrons; not of course to be compared with that which they gave ten or twelve years ago. It may be many years before they attain that standard again, if indeed ever they do. But the service that theyarerendering they are failing utterly to sell to their public, all for a lack of real salesmanship. The average man in the street neither knows or believes that the roads have made large strides in the restoration of many of their services, both freight and passenger. In fact in his mind there has arisen a certain intangible but fairly fixed idea that our railroad structure, both in its plant and operation, has begun to become something dangerously near obsolete. The skillful propaganda of the advocates of the motor-bus and the motor-truck, the fanciful tales spread about the future commercial possibilities of the aëroplane, have begun to make him inwardly question whether the steam train is not about ready now to be classed with the stage-coach and the canal-barge. The railroads of the United States in a supreme—and possibly a final—opportunity for setting forth the many, many merits and strengths of their present position, with a few conspicuous exceptions, are failing to grasp that opportunity. They are neglecting transportation salesmanship.
We have seen in this book, and we shall continue to see, how traffic has been created upon the railroads overseas. In the past we have built railroad traffic here in the United States. In our railroads of to-morrow it will be done again. Something of the past can be repeated to-morrow. Witness AtlanticCity; originally a lightly-built summer resort which did all of its business in about two months of the year and hibernated for the other ten. It was the railroad—railroad coöperation, if you please—with its advertising that made Easter upon the Boardwalk one of the great stated functions of the American social calendar. Railroad advertising made Glacier National Park; to an appreciable extent the other great National Parks across the land. Railroad advertising made the Northwest, the Southwest, California, Florida, the New Orleans Mardi Gras.
The most thoroughly advertised railroad upon the North American continent is probably the Canadian Pacific. The next is the Santa Fé. And it is estimated that of the round-trip tickets sold in an average year from Chicago and points east to the Pacific coast more than 70 per cent. of them read Santa Fé one way and Canadian Pacific the other. The best advertised single train in the land is the Twentieth Century Limited. And it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the best patronized one. Does transportation salesmanship pay?
Let us return to our muttons. We were talking of competition. It has been said that it is competition—and competition alone—that has forced transport salesmanship. Undoubtedly this is partly true. It is one of the best arguments that can be made for the retention of our extravagant competitive system of rail transport. But upon analysis it will be seen that the advertising examples that I have just shown have been directed almost exclusively to the promotion of through long-distance trains. I have not seen the Santa Fé or the New York Central or the Canadian Pacific often stressing the advantages of travel in their short-haul, non-competitive territories. Last spring, and again this, the hoardings of London Town were setting forth the glories of the immediate vicinage in such color and beauty and appeal that one wished to close down one’s desk and hie himself off into the open country—a ride on the train, and a ride on the train in again.
The French railways are non-competitive, yet bow to no one in the thoroughness and the attractiveness of their advertising—the quality of their transportation salesmanship. It is a part of their intensive railway management. Is it not about time that we heard a little more of intensive management of our railroads, both in their operation and in the solicitation of their traffic? Here is a vital principle of transport in the United States—speaking generally now and not specifically of the railroads alone—that apparently has been considerably overlooked in recent years. In a large sense it is an economy as well. I think that I have shown by this time the economy and necessity of systematically developed transport applied evenly to the entire land, and not, through the efforts of that false god of competition, spread thick here and thin there.
This vital principle was completely overlooked in the minds of the politicians who as a tentative American railroad policy gave us a “competitive consolidation” of our roads. Seemingly competition was indeed their god.
“How can such fine industrial cities as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids thrive and continue to thrive without railroad competition?” they asked, apparently forgetting that for many years such fine industrial cities as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence have not alone lived but thriven and continued to grow greatly without railroad competition. In the old days before it had entered upon its financial skylarkings and was content to remain a well-ordered servant of its community, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad showed that it could render in a non-competitive territory service quite as good as its fellows of the competitive territories. Competition was not the thing that made or broke the New Haven service; it was income, outgo, human morale, even regulation, if you please, but not competition. The vision of Charles S. Mellen that New England should one day become a great non-competitive railroad territory was a very real and a very far-sighted one. It is onlywith the method by which he sought to bring it into actual being that one may beg to differ.
In no other land of the world is the competitive theory in transport being pushed forward to-day. In fact the tendency is decidedly in the other direction. It was to observe this tendency—the distinct effort to eliminate competition and bring coöperation and harmony between European railway properties—that I journeyed overseas not long since. And in the next of these chapters I shall set forth some of my observations on the regional railway situation in France (where it has long obtained) and in Great Britain (where it is just now being established), particularly as our future prospects here in the United States are affected.
In the meantime, our competitive system continues to remain one of our pet railroad extravagances. Remember that the mistakes that Mr. McAdoo made in his direction of the Federal Railroad Administration were quite overbalanced by the obvious economies that he was able to make the moment that he had eliminated the competitive factor in our national transportation machine. As he was able more and more to overcome the long established competitive feeling between the railroad executives—to no small extent, perfectly natural and human personal jealousies—the more he was able to effect and extend these economies. The Railroad War Board which the railways had appointed early in 1917 and which was in many ways an anticipation of the coming of Federal control, despite its good intents and honest endeavors and real results, was constantly hampered by this competitive feeling even between its members. Yet as we have seen it lacked the autocratic power of the government director-general, and so it failed and had to be replaced. And the obvious war-time economies—the direct routing of traffic, the pooling and interchange of equipment, the joint representations and the like—came into being.
To accomplish these things nationally and permanently, to lessen competition rather than to increase it (no sane man imagines that we are ever to succeed entirely in removing thecompetitive element), may yet mean the complete reorganization of our national railroad system. Yet even so radical a step need not be regarded as either fatal or impossible. It is entirely within the possibilities to-day that our privately owned and operated railroads, at least as they are at present constituted, may fall. There is but little in the present situation to make one optimistic as to their future success, along the present lines at least.
The sole alternatives to private ownership and operation are government ownership and operation. To the majority of Americans the very idea of a further governmental control is extremely distasteful, to put the matter mildly. To them railroad nationalization is a very real menace. Yet the menace cannot be avoided by merely singing a song of hate about it. It can be overcome and finally prevented by some definite national plan or policy in regard to our roads—a simple thing in which for a number of years past we have been sadly lacking. If such a plan means their radical reorganization we must begin. And the sooner the better.
THE REGIONAL RAILROAD OVERSEAS
Thebeginnings of the railroad across the Atlantic were so very slightly in advance of our own that they may be regarded as contemporaneous. In Great Britain, where the railroad as we know it to-day was born, the conditions of its infancy were much the same as in the United States. In Continental Europe they were considerably different. There military necessity quite overbalanced immediate commercial needs. There the first railroads were dictated by the international strategists. From that day to this their expansion has been directed by the same necessity.
Yet granting at the outset that the needs and opportunities of the European railways are in many ways different from those of ours, there remains the fact that to-day there is much over there that our railroaders of the United States might and should learn. There is also a good deal that the European railroad men might and should learn from some of our big operators and traffic experts—but that phase of the problem is not germane to this book.
It was to study some of the features of European railway operation that might be applicable directly to our railroads of the United States that I journeyed not many months ago across the Atlantic and down the westerly nations of Europe. Central and Eastern Europe still were in transport chaos and so could be expected to give little or nothing to one who wished to see their railways under anything even faintly approaching normal conditions. But in Great Britain, in France, in Spain, and in Italy, the railways were functioning well—extremely well, when one came to consider the very great burden so recently put upon them. The last two of these four nations may, however, bedismissed immediately from present consideration. Neither the density of population nor the traffic conditions of either Spain or Italy makes their transport problems of great interest or value to the United States. But Great Britain or France may hold the key to a real solution of our most vexing transportation problem of the moment.
In area these two closely built and industrial nations are not far apart. Ireland is not included in the comparison; in this chapter, however, we are not going to give consideration to the Irish railways. They too are not germane to the discussion, even if conditions in Ireland were even approximately normal to-day, which decidedly they are not.
The area of France is roughly speaking about equal to that of our five great industrial States reaching from New York to Chicago—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This section of the United States contains but about thirty-five millions of people, as compared with forty millions of French, yet it has approximately twice the railway mileage. The French have buttered their area pretty evenly with their railway transport. We have not. In these five industrial States of ours there is not only in many cases gross duplication and excess of plant—in most cases due to the effects of overstimulated competition—but in other cases considerable territories even to-day inadequately provided with railroad facilities. Our bread is by no means buttered evenly.
Neither is Great Britain’s. Like ourselves she built her transport plans to meet the exigencies of actual conditions from year to year. Add to this her very irregularity of conformation; her chief city, and forever her traffic hub, situated nowhere near the center of the congested island, but almost in an extreme southeastern corner of it; her other great cities, seaport and inland industrial centers, scattered here and there and everywhere as the chance fortune of long centuries dictated and separated by high ridges of mountainous hills. Take conditions such as these and you have the beginnings of a transport problem that even at the outset would bewilder the wisest oftraffic experts, given the rare opportunity of devising an entire new railway system for the United Kingdom.
Of course, no such wise or scientific scheme of planning her railways was ever possible. They grew, as I have just said, out of necessity. From the crude beginnings of the Stockton and Darlington and the Liverpool and Manchester, almost an even century ago, they advanced clumsily until nearly twenty years ago, when the last of the trunk-lines forced its way into London and the competitive development of the British railway system was virtually ended. The strategy of thrusting a new line here, of building a connection there, of piercing into this town or that so as to get the business away from the other road, then became history. Thereafter the chief problem of the British railway manager, like that of his fellow executive in the United States, became that of supplying proper transport to a nation that refused to “stay put,” but insisted upon growing, even to an unthinkable size. In the years of its railway development the population of Great Britain has increased from fifteen or sixteen millions to well over forty-two. In a single one of her cities more than seven million people are now resident.
Yet, as might have been expected the clumsy competitive system of building railroads has not given her a really adequate rail transport plant. Her bread also is extremely badly buttered. Great industrial sections as those around London or Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester or Sheffield, her coal districts, are ofttimes much more than adequately provided with railways. And there still are sections of the small island—to traverse its extreme length one goes a distance roughly equal to that from New York to Buffalo—which are not even to-day properly provided with rail transport. These are, it is true, rather thin pickings. The competitive system has wotted not of them. It never spreads the butter evenly. The butter goes where it is worth the most, and nowhere else. Too much butter goes in certain localities. England has begun to learn that lesson.
In France the development of the railroad proceeded far more slowly. Such ever was the way of the French. From the beginning their Government took a firm hand in the matter. It saw that French railways were planned, primarily from the military necessities of the country but also from its many peaceful ones. If all of this at first had the effect of retarding railroad construction it also has resulted in giving France the best national plan of rail transport in the entire world. In 1842, sixteen years after the beginnings of railway development in Great Britain, it was still possible in France to determine in what definite direction her principal lines should be put down. In that year a statute was passed settling this vital question in so comprehensive and generally satisfactory a fashion that the uneconomical duplication of the rail systems of both the United States and Great Britain was almost entirely avoided; while within the next three or four years definite beginnings were made in the regional allotment of the land to the several railway systems, orréseaux, which have continued with but one or two important changes down to the present day.
In contrast to England and Scotland, France presents an almost ideal field to the primary planner of railroad lines. If Paris, forever her chief commercial and social hub, is not in the precise center of the republic, it is at least near enough to permit the devising of a railway plan in which most of the chief lines form roughly the spokes of a great wheel radiating out from Paris as a hub. Five of the regional systems of France, herréseaux—the Nord, the Est, the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, the Paris-Orleans, and the Etat—operate these great spokes. The Nord takes the segment of the wheel which touches upon the English Channel, from Le Tréport-Mers all the way east to Dunkirk and the Belgian line. To the east of it lies the Est, touching the Nord at Soissons and Laon and after also touching the newly-acquired lines of Alsace-Lorraine reaching as far into the southeast as Belfort.
The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean has but two spokes ofthe wheel into the Paris hub but it is the largest of the privately owned French railways, reaching from Belfort to Cette upon the Mediterranean shore and serving between the Swiss and the Italian gateways to say nothing of the Rhone valley and the Riviera. Immediately next to it in turn is the Paris-Orleans, with Toulouse and Bordeaux as its chief southerly terminals. At these cities it joins the southerly Midi system, which also meets the P.-L.-M. at Cette.
The Etat or State railway with its lines from Paris to the west and the southwest of France completes the great railway wheel. A little more than a decade ago it absorbed the fairly important but always unprofitable Ouest system. Up to that time the government railway had been the least important of all the French properties. Its lines, reaching down chiefly into the rather poor districts of the Vendée and the Charente, were distinctly unprofitable. In 1908 a French gentleman by the name of Georges Clémenceau succeeded in extending the beneficent influence of the state to the almost equally unfortunate Ouest system. Since then the State railway of France has become distinctly important, geographically and politically, but not particularly so in any other way. Its annual deficit has never been overcome. Matters have now come to a point where it is proposed that system be leased to a private corporation for operation. The government can no longer carry on with it. Its suburban service alone sustained a deficit of 100,000,000 francs in 1921.
At the present moment, however, all the French railways are operating at a loss variously figured at from a million francs a day upward. Since the beginning of the World War, a total deficit of something considerably more than a billion dollars has been achieved. Yet the roads themselves are still paying their dividends—the privately owned and operated properties of course. These are guaranteed by the Government under special legislation that goes as far back as 1857. In the early days of the recent war, when even the formerly profitable Nord, Est, and P.-L.-M. began to run toward heavydeficits, special legislation was hurried through by the Government to insure continued interest in the proper operation of the essential lines of rail transport by the simple and entirely human process of maintaining the dividends, even though the taxpayer paid the difference. The difference steadily grew greater. Wages increased 327 per cent. in six years, the staff—due chiefly to France’s very literal interpretation of her new eight-hour law—from 355,000 to nearly 500,000, about 41 per cent. And despite an increase of 25 per cent. in freight and passenger-rates—afterwards increased to a total of 70 or 80 per cent. for passenger and 140 for freight—the operating ratio of her railways swung from 57 per cent. in 1913 to the ridiculous and impossible figure of 125 per cent. in 1920.
Important and vital as these things are, however, to the Frenchman, they have no great concern with the phase of the international railroad situation that is under our immediate scrutiny—competition, and with it the inevitable and wasteful duplication of lines and other features of any national transport plant. If the French railway system had been burdened with these wastefulnesses, one shudders even to think of the consequences. The French railways would not then be close to bankruptcy, they would be entirely involved in it and so completely broken that all France would be prostrated—the bitter tragedy of Russia repeated along the west coast of Continental Europe.
In my opinion it is because of the simple and entirely economic placing of her railways that they have been enabled to withstand at all the terrible and multiplied burdens that have been placed upon them in the last seven years. The judgment of the men who first planned their general locations has been completely vindicated again and again in the really supurb way in which they bore their all but overwhelming war burdens, and more latterly in the way that they have handled the almost equally important and vexing problems of the after-the-war period. Both speak volumes for the inherent morale of theFrench railways, to say nothing of the grit and the endurance of the Frenchman himself.
We started a moment ago to show how these regional and generally non-competitive railways of France were laid down upon her map. We likened the main lines of the Nord, the Est, the P.-L.-M., the Paris-Orleans, and the Etat to the spokes of a great wheel with Paris as their hub. Outside of these five greatest regions there lie the two others—the Midi and the recently acquired lines in Alsace-Lorraine. The first of these, as we have just seen, occupies important territory just north of the Pyrenees; the second is indicated by its name. It has not yet been determined what shall be the ultimate operating plan of the lines in Alsace and in Lorraine. They may be parceled between the Est and the P.-L.-M., but it is more than likely that they will continue to be operated as a separate system. France long ago saw the viciousness of bringing too large a railway property under a single operating direction.
The plan is almost perfectly regional. The only important exceptions are where a long arm of the Paris-Orleans goes at right angles to the parent stem and up into the heart of the Etat territory (to Nantes and to Brest), and where the Etat in turn has a rather roundabout line from Paris to Bordeaux, the chief external point of the Orleans system. (It is possible that in the contemplated return of the Etat to private operation this line may be handed over to the Paris-Orleans. It would be a logical step in the French regional plan.) Still one almost always goes to Nantes upon the P.-O. and rarely ever to Bordeaux upon the Etat, while to Marseilles or to Lyons there is absolutely no alternative to the P.-L.-M. To go to Rheims or to Strasbourg one must use the Est, to Boulogne or to Calais the Nord. There is no choice other than the Etat for reaching Rouen or Le Havre from Paris.
Here then is regional railway operation brought to almost perfect operation, with competition all but eliminated. For remember, if you please, that it never is completely eliminated.Even if one were to go to the final degree of consolidation and centralization, competition would not be entirely gone. In France, even if the Paris-Orleans no longer reached Nantes or the Etat Bordeaux, even if every mile of rail were brought under a single autocratic and absolute head, there would remain the competition of her unified railway with those outside the republic, and within it the natural competition, let us say, of towns north of Paris with towns south for the traffic of that metropolis; east would forever be pitted against west. You can no more entirely remove competition in business than you can the risings and the settings of the great sun. But you can remove the absurd phases, the obvious extravagances of competition—particularly in transport. Remember always, if you will—I purposely reiterate the point—that some fine day you can cease to regard the motor-truck, the inland waterway barge, the interurban trolley, and the steam railroad train as competitors, but rather in the proper sense, each as agents of that great function of life, transportation, and so in some time or place properly correlated. And you can begin by regarding the railroads together as at least a single efficient one of these agents, and not as a lot of quarreling small boys dissipating much of their energy through their trivial disputes. This is the lesson that the railways of France bring to the rest of the great world of transport.
Their division into seven great operating units—but always carefully correlated units—is only for the purposes of proper supervision. We have seen in a previous chapter how easily the efficiency of a single railroad may be thwarted by permitting it to grow to an untoward size. And before I am entirely done I shall hope to show you that even in a regional railway scheme, which applied to the United States might contemplate as many as forty different railroads—different in name and in operating organization—there must be a distinct effort toward a strong centralization of certain functions; notably financing, traffic solicitation and control, and the staff study of advanced operating methods of every sort. Alongthe first two of these lines theréseauxof France have as yet accomplished but little. There has been up to the present time but little centralization of their control, although steps now are being taken toward that end. In the opinion of some of the wisest of Frenchmen to-day, such steps are not only the next in their railway development but certain to come to a successful head. Only the confusing problem of a single state-owned and operated system has prevented their being accomplished this long while.
But in the standardization of operating methods and practices much already has been done in France. Four companies, the Etat, the Midi, the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, and the Alsace-Lorraine have formed an organization with the rather formidable title ofL’Office Central d’Etudes du Matériel de Chemins de Ferfor this purpose. This extremely active organization is divided into four departments, one in charge of tests, one for locomotive design, a third for car design, and the fourth to handle railway electrification.
Progress already has been made too in drawing up plans for various types of standard locomotives. A study has also been made of standard designs for freight-cars of special types, such as tank-cars, steel-cars, and the like. Some very interesting tests have been made of refrigerator-cars for the movement of fish and of fruits. Incidentally it may be said that before the coming of the World War there was little or no refrigerator-car movement in France or anywhere else in Europe, and this despite the remarkable advances made in the United States in this form of traffic for at least twelve or fifteen years before. To move safely certain low-test materials for the manufacturer of explosives across tropical seas it was necessary for two French manufacturers to produce ships equipped with elaborate refrigerating devices. The technical knowledge which these men so gained in the manufacture of ice-making machinery they are now prepared to turn to good account in the production of refrigerator-cars, while the rapid development of France’s wonderful new territory south of the Mediterraneanpromises a growing area sufficient to produce a plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables not only for her cities, but for those of a large part of the rest of western Europe as well.
Perhaps the most interesting work, however, done up to the present time by the central study office of the French railways has been upon the development of electricity as a practical working power for their lines. (I made passing reference to this in an earlier chapter.) As yet they have lagged in this work. The Etat operates a dozen miles of electric standard railway between Paris and Versailles. The comparatively new Paris terminal of the P.-O. has electric operation for perhaps another dozen miles outside of the Gare d’Orsay. There are a very few isolated electric high-speed lines here and there across the face of the land. In these things the French do move slowly. But they generally move pretty thoroughly, and to-day they have developed a very marvelous plan for the electrification of at least one third of their entire railway mileage.
As a beginning a bill was passed in May, 1921, authorizing a company to develop the vast potentialities of the Rhone water-power—so vast as to be estimated to save France six millions of tons of coal a year, which is quite a factor in a country that does not in the average year consume more than sixty million tons.
This new scheme will mean the immediate construction of eighteen great power-houses along the upper reaches of the river, with a total development of 1,100,000 horse-power. The chief users of this huge supply of clean and inexhaustible power will be the City of Paris, and the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean railway. It is proposed that all the rail-lines in the huge quadrilateral between Bellegrade, Lyons, Marseilles, and Vintimille shall be completely electrified.
In the opinion of distinguished French engineers this single enterprise will be far the greatest, from an economic point of view, ever undertaken in France. Yet this is but the beginning. The Paris-Orleans has also ambitious plans under whichit expects to bring electric energy, water-generated, to more than one-half of its 3250 miles of line. The Midi, running for miles along the base of the Pyrenees, has abundant opportunities for this cheap motive-power. Its management is unusually progressive and it may be expected to take advantage of these in the not distant future.
The net result of this great national economy will be the annual saving of many millions of tons of coal in a land which has no fuel to spare, which is indeed dependent upon coal importations for her very existence, let alone the development of her industries.
Yet great as this huge economic step will yet prove itself for France, it still will remain secondary to her wisdom of the long-ago in the simplification of her entire operating system by means of the sensible and logical regional railway plan, with its consequent huge basic economies. France at the beginning started right. She is even to-day reaping the benefit of them. To-morrow when her other economic conditions shall have readjusted themselves she will reap a far greater benefit. The largest achievements of her regional plan are still in the future.
England has long since taken note of the situation in her neighbor just across the Channel. She has seen her own salvation in the French solution of the extravagant luxury of railway duplication. And even a traditional British prejudice against borrowing an idea from another nation has finally been broken down—in this particular instance very much broken down. Yet it is entirely probable that, had it not been for the coming of the World War, the Briton still would be enjoying the wasteful luxury of the excess service which his extravagant competitive system—very much like our own—had given him for many years. For it was extravagance, nothing more, nothing less, that led each of the three railways binding the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, about thirty miles apart, to run an hourly service between those cities. The trains mightrun two thirds or three quarters empty, and frequently did, but the pride of the London and Northwestern, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Cheshire lines was upheld. Competition is a great upholder of pride.
Along came the World War, and England from the beginning very much in it. The burden placed upon her railways was huge. To meet it they were placed under governmental control at the very outset and their services, aside from the military ones, bared to the bone. Such luxuries as three trains to the hour in each direction between Liverpool and Manchester were immediately abolished. Under a coöperative plan the trains between those two great English cities were, to use the phrase of the engineer, “staggered”—placed in a triple alternation, which gave virtually the same headway between them but with an operation of a little less than one third the former number of trains. The passenger was merely asked to show enough ordinary intelligence to study the time-tables and find from which of three passenger terminals his train of a given hour would start.
The astonishing feature of the entire thing was the lack of complaint from the traveling public which followed this wholesale reduction of train service. Everywhere throughout Great Britain it was the same. Competing trains between many of her busiest centers, arriving and departing at virtually the same hours but traversing separate routes, were consolidated, due regard being given to the necessities of intermediate towns which might happen to be served by but a single one of the road; and a war-time service was given for five years that was astonishingly good. Not perfect, of course. The Englishman traveling was forced to sit a little closer in his seat, sometimes compelled to wait in queues at the wickets to buy his ticket, occasionally, in the absence of porters, to handle at least some of his own luggage at the terminals. But there was very little hardship about all of this, and a tremendous resultant economy.
Great Britain will never go back to her old extravagances of the days of unbridled transport competition. True it is thatsince the signing of the Armistice her railway service, both passenger and freight, has been radically increased, but to nowhere near the point that it had reached in 1913. Fine frills, like the running of fast non-stop expresses between London and the ocean landing at Fishguard, in South Wales, to cite a single instance out of many, have been abandoned; never to be taken up again in your day or mine. The harsh necessities of vast economies born of a great war, the huge increases in labor and fuel and raw material costs that followed in its wake, do not encourage frills. Out of them came the demand for permanent sweeping economies that resulted in the passage of the important Railways Bill by Parliament in August, 1921, after many hard weeks of exhaustive study.
To bring fifty-four almost entirely competitive railways into four almost non-competitive ones and insure a governmental control of rates and other charges sufficient to bring the constituent roads a rate of return equal to that which they were receiving in 1913—here in brief is the chief purpose of the extremely lengthy Railways Act, supplanting all transport legislation that had gone before. It is the most drastic business move that England has accomplished in many and many a day. Upon it are pinned the hopes of a thinking people. And because, following in the steps of the long-established regional systems of France it has become a high hope for our extremely muddled rail transport situation in the United States, it is well worth at least a little detailed study.
The south coast of England runs at a distance from London of from sixty miles upward, as it extends both east and west of Brighton, the nearest point to that great city. Three separate systems connect it with London: to the extreme east the affiliated Southern and Chatham railways, made familiar to thousands of Americans who have used them as an essential link between Victoria Station and the beginning of the Channel crossing at Dover; the London, Brighton, and South Coast; and the London and Southwestern, this last line reaching as far west as Plymouth, down in Cornwall. In a sense it may be said thatthese three railways are regional railways within a region. Each has fairly definite and non-competitive territory. Each serves its own principality, and serves it admirably. To make a region out of these three railways is no problem at all. It is solved, almost before it is begun.
Nor is the east coast of England to the north of London and right up to and beyond the old Scottish border difficult to bring into a single region. Three more or less parallel railways—the Great Central, the Great Northern, and the Great Eastern—occupy the eastern counties all the way up to York, 188 miles north of London, where the Northeastern has its real beginning and occupies the extreme northeastern corner of England as an absolute monopoly. This last line reaches within fifty-eight miles of Edinburgh. As a matter of operating convenience, however, its locomotives run all the way through to that ancient Scottish capital, traversing the final fifty-eight miles upon the rails of the North British company. Perhaps no better instance may be shown of the absurdly small typical English railway of to-day than to realize that within the 392 miles that lie between London and Edinburgh—no distance at all upon our American railroad map—the through fast expresses run upon three separate railways. The only condition we have that parallels and exceeds this is the operation of the Baltimore and Ohio’s through trains from New York to Philadelphia, which traverse the rails of three roads—the Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, and the Philadelphia and Reading—in the short ninety miles that intervene between Manhattan Island and the entrance to the B. & O.’s own rails.
The British railroaders have long recognized the absurdity of the railway that is too short just as they are able to point the finger of fine scorn at our many railroads that are entirely too long. More than a decade ago these four roads of the eastern counties of England sought to anticipate the present grouping principle of the Railways Act by an amalgamation of their properties into a single, succinct regional railway property. The proposal was bitterly fought in Parliament and thendefeated. Great Britain had not then become convinced of the extravagance of the competition principle in transportation. It was necessary to have a war to teach her that important economic lesson.
Almost as the northeastern corner of England is the undisputed principality of a single system so does a single railway, the Great Western, stretch alone directly west from London and almost completely dominates its territory. To bring it into regional grouping with any of the other important British railway systems has been well-nigh impossible. After a number of futile attempts the professional and amateur railroaders who have been attempting the solution of the regional plan for Great Britain have given up the idea. They have found that they could only combine the Great Western with the Cambrian and some other less important Welsh roads, and now they have let it go at that—a single well-developed region of some 3650 miles, well contained and, with the exception of a single long arm thrust up into Liverpool, fairly compact.
In the center of England rested the difficult part of the entire problem of working out a rational and economic regional plan. In the succeeding and final chapters of this book I shall show how in the two inner industrial centers of America, the one just east and the other just west of the Mississippi River, we shall come to two territories where the working out of a pure regional plan is virtually impossible. So it is in central England. Two great railways, possibly the two greatest in all Britain, the London and Northwestern and the Midland—occupy that industrial area with a perfect interlacing of lines, and at every corner of it fight energetically for its traffic. Other railways enter slightly upon it; as we have just seen, the Great Western with its line through Birmingham up to Liverpool, the Great Central and, in its northerly reaches, the cross-country Lancashire and Yorkshire. This last line has however recently been absorbed by the London and Northwestern. Ittoo anticipated the decisions of the Railways Act and comes into any grouping the largest single system in Great Britain, with considerably more than four thousand miles of line, a system roughly comparable in size and volume of traffic with our own Baltimore and Ohio, although in its history, as well as in the traditions of its personnel, more closely analogous to the Pennsylvania railroad.
To have attempted to separate the important London and Northwestern and Midland systems would have been to break down completely the whole spirit and plan of the British regional system. Therefore they have been brought into a single grouping, and with them the Lancashire and Yorkshire of course, the North Staffordshire, the Furness, the Caledonian, the Glasgow and Southwestern, and the Highland companies—the last of these, as their names indicate, Scottish lines.
Here then are four railways created out of fifty-four—some 24,500 miles of line as compared with the 27,000 miles of French railway. The groupings have followed the lines that I have just shown and take the names of the Southern; the Northeastern, the Eastern, and the East Scottish; the Western; and the Northwestern, Midland, and West Scottish groups respectively. The smaller and comparatively unimportant lines of the United Kingdom fall easily into some one of these four great regions. For a time Scotland itself represented a rather perplexing problem. The energetic young British minister of transport, Sir Eric Geddes, stood stoutly for the retention of all the Scottish railways in a separate, distinct, and strongly unified group. In this he was opposed. The old-time competitive idea that there should be at least two separate and rival routes from London up into Scotland—the one on the east coast and the other on the west coast of Britain—would not down. Geddes gave up. Then for a time he proposed a generous compromise in the form of two separate Scotch groups, one upon each side of the island and connecting with the Eastern (English) and the Northwestern andMidland groups at York and Carlisle respectively. But even in this he was beaten. Scotland lost her railway autonomy. Her lines will be merged and as entities forever lost in the sweep of the two larger groups of the entire kingdom.
Geddes has stood in his position in regard to the Scottish railways for the regional plan in its purest form. His theory was excellent. But it had to give way to hard-headed practice. It often so happens. Remember always, if you will, that railroad competition has been a great god in Britain as well as in the United States. Yet competition is not to be too hardly judged, even by the loftiest of idealists. It has its good points, and they are many. Most of the fine excellences of our railroad service in this country were built up in its hottest competitive period. That is irrefutable. It is entirely probable that if we had not had that competitive period we should not have had a service even comparable with the high standard of excellence that we reached a decade ago. The point is that within the last generation genuine competition has ceased to exist between our railroads; the sham of it that remains is a fearful drag upon any really economical operation of them to-day.
Only a few years ago Lord Monkswell, the distinguished British student of railway problems, said: