THE OLYMPIAN
The crack train of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, drawn by an Electric Motor.
ORE TRAINS HAULED BY ELECTRICITY
Where the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul and the Butte, Anaconda,& Pacific Railways cross near Butte, Montana.
Now here is an undertaking—the harnessing of the mountain streams of Montana and Idaho and Washington toward the pulling of the freight and the passenger traffic of the newest and best constructed of our transcontinentals for half their run. Translated into the comfort of the passenger, it means that for a long night and two days that are all too short, the trail of the Olympian is dustless, smokeless, odorless; it means that the abrupt stops and jerking starts of even the best of passenger engineers are entirely eliminated. The electric locomotive starts and stops imperceptibly. It is one of the very strongest points in its favor.
And when you come to freight traffic—the earning backbone of the greater part of our railroad mileage in the United States—the operating advantages of the electric locomotive over its older brother of the steam persuasion are but multiplied. The electric locomotives of the Milwaukee, being the newest and the largest yet constructed, have missed none of these advantages. As the greatest of all these, take the single tremendous question of regenerative braking.
Up to this time no one has ever thought of transforming the gravity pull of a heavy train going downgrade into motive energy for another train coming uphill. Talk about visions! How is this for one? Yet this is the very thing that the Milwaukee is doing today—upon each of its heavily laden trains as they cross and recross the backbone of the continent. Its great new locomotives take all the power they need for the steady pull as they climb the long hills; but whenthey descend those selfsame hills they return the greater part of that power—sixty-eight per cent, if you insist upon the exact figure.
Perhaps you drive an automobile. If so you probably have learned to come down the steeper hills by use of compression—by a reversal of the energies of your motor, until it is actually working against the compelling force of gravity. Your brakes are held only for emergency. That is the only part which the brakes on a Milwaukee electric train play today. The electric locomotive in a large sense is its own brake. In other words, a turn of the engineer’s hand transforms its great motors into dynamos; gravity pulls the trains and forces the dynamos to turn—back goes the sixty-eight per cent of current into the copper trolley-wire overhead; over on the other side of the mountain somewhere a train ascending toward the summit feels instantly the influx of new energy and quickens its speed.
Here is the railroading of tomorrow thrusting itself into the very door of today. You certainly cannot accuse the management of the Milwaukee of any lack of vision. And perhaps it is only the highest form of tribute to it to mention the fact that the Great Northern, the strongest of the competitors in the Northwest, has been watching with keen interest the tremendous operating economies that electricity has brought to the road of the yellow cars and has already announced its intention of transforming at once its main line between Seattle and Spokane—200 miles—from a steam into an electrically operated line. The Great Northern, aseveryone should know by this time, is the first and the largest of the great group of Hill roads. And no one has ever accused James J. Hill, or the men who followed after him, of any lack of real transportation vision.
THE IRON HORSE AND THE GAS BUGGY
Theother day the convention of an important Episcopalian diocese was held in a large town in one of our eastern states. The general passenger agent of a certain good-sized railroad which radiates from that town in every direction saw a newspaper clipping in relation to the convention and promptly dictated a letter to his assistant there asking about how many passengers they had had as a result of the gathering. The reply was prompt.
“None,” it read.
The G.P.A. reached for his ready-packed grip and took the next train up there. He wanted to find out the trouble. It was not hard to locate. It was a pretty poor shepherd of a pretty poor flock who did not possess some lamb who commanded a touring car of some sort. And it was a part of the lamb’s duty, nay, his privilege, to drive the rector to the convention. They came from all that end of the state in automobiles. And what had in past years been a source of decent revenue to the railroad which covered that state ceased to be any revenue whatsoever.
This is only one of many such cases. Any county or state or interstate gathering held in a part of the country where road conditions are even ordinarily goodmay count on folk coming to it by automobile up to a 150-mile radius, ofttimes from much greater distances. It is not argued that the trip is less expensive; the contrary is probably invariably true. Only today folks have the cars, and a meeting in an adjoining county gives a welcome excuse for a little trip. Need more be said?
Only this. Those same folk might otherwise have gone upon the cars. And the railroad’s assistant general passenger agent could have sat down beside his typewriter and written a neat little letter to his chief calling attention to the increased business resulting from the meeting of the Grand Lodge of the X.Y.G.C. this year as compared with that of last—the inference being nearly as clear to the chief as to the man who had created the aforesaid increased business. Multiply these lodge meetings, these conventions, these convocations; add to them high-school excursions and picnics and fraternity field-days almost without number; picture to yourself, if you will, the highways leading to these high spots of American life crowded with private and public motor cars of all descriptions and you can begin to realize a serious situation which confronts the passenger traffic men of the big steam railroads. Upon the eastern and western edges of the land, where highway conditions have attained their highest development, the situation is all but critical; in the central and southern portions of the country it is already serious.
Here is one of the big hard-coal roads up in the northeastern corner of the U.S.A. Its president lays much stress upon the value to the property of itsanthracite holdings and carryings. Yet he is far too good a railroader to ignore the value of its passenger traffic. Because of this last his road has builded huge hotels and connecting steamboats. In past years its passenger revenues have even rivaled the tremendous earnings of its coal business. Because, however, of the competition of the automobile these have slipped backward for the past few years. And the president of the road has reasoned it out in an ingenious fashion.
“There are 4,339 motor cars licensed in Albany, Troy, and their intermediate towns alone,” he says. “If each of these carried three passengers twenty-five miles a day for a year their passenger-miles would equal those of our entire system for the same time.”
A passenger-mile, as we know already, is one of the units in estimating the traffic revenue of a railroad. It is passenger-miles, by the hundreds and the thousands, that the railroads of New England are losing today. When one stands beside one of the well-traveled pathways of the Ideal Tour, the Real Tour, or the Mohawk Trail and sees touring cars loaded to the gunwales with luggage go whizzing by him, ten, twenty to the hour, he begins to realize this.[10]More than 50,000 visiting automobiles were registered in Massachusetts this lastsummer. There were last year in the United States, 2,445,664 automobiles. With a carrying capacity averaging five persons to a car—12,000,000 persons all told—they can seat three times as many persons as all our railroad cars in the country combined. Not all of these folk would travel by train if there were no motor cars. Some of them are riding for the pure joy of automobile touring. But many of them would go to the mountains or the coast anyway and so make a large addition to railroad passenger revenues. The vast increase in trunks handled over reasonably long distances by the express companies in these last few years is, in itself, something of an index of the volume of this through business, which is today traveling by motor.
Now cross the country and take a quick glimpse at the situation in the Northwest. The president of an important steam road at Portland—which in turn controls both city and interurban lines extending out from Portland and Spokane—is peculiarly qualified to speak of the situation there.
“Our road has suffered severely from this new form of automobile competition,” he says. “We lost last summer quite a proportion of our passenger business moving from Portland to the beaches because of thecompletion of a hard-surface wagon road between it and them. We were compelled to withdraw several local trains, to lay off a number of trainmen because of this new competitor. With us the question is vital. It is still more vital with our electric interurban properties. Throughout California, Oregon, and Washington this class of railroad has suffered most severely from motor competition, and with the decreased cost and increased effectiveness of the automobile I expect such losses to increase rather than to diminish. In all these states there have been large expenditures for improved highroads during the past five years; many times under the guise of providing easy and inexpensive transportation for farm products to markets. But these highroads instead of being built from the transportation centers out into the producing region, so as to serve the farms, have almost invariably paralleled steam and electric lines. As a result the transportation companies have been heavily taxed to construct and maintain highways for the benefit of competitors who are carrying both passengers and freight in direct competition with them.”
The Southern Pacific, whose lines cover California like a fine mesh, has been hard hit by this new form of competition. The fine new highways and the even climate of the Golden State, which brought the jitney to its highest strength there, are giving stimulus to its bigger brother—the long-distance motor bus. These have multiplied in every direction until today there are central stations in the larger cities, providing waiting, smoking, and reading rooms in charge of a jointemployee, who usually acts as starter and information clerk and is liberally supplied with large printed schedules advertising automobile service to various points. From these stations the routes radiate in almost every direction; one may ride from San Francisco to Stockton, 80 miles; or to Fresno, 200 miles; connecting there with a public automobile for Los Angeles, some 250 miles farther. From Los Angeles there are still more routes: to Bakersfield, 124 miles over the new Tejon Pass route; to Santa Barbara, about 100 miles; to San Diego, about 125 miles, and from San Diego on to El Centro in the Imperial Valley, another 116 miles.
These routes are generally covered with touring cars—generally second-hand but tried and capable of efficient and reliable service. But there is a tendency toward larger cars, where the volume of travel warrants; several companies operating large busses, seating from twenty to twenty-five persons each. A very good example of this is the Peninsular Rapid Transit Company, which operates between San Francisco and San Mateo and between San Mateo and Palo Alto.
Fares by automobile in California are generally somewhat lower than the railroad fares. There are instances, however, where the fares are equal and yet the motor cars enjoy the bulk of the business, perhaps from their ability to pick up or discharge passengers anywhere along the route—in town or in country, perhaps from their frequency and flexibility of service. Several attempts made by the railroads to regain their traffic by reducing rates have shown these things to be real factors in the situation.
As far as the Southern Pacific is concerned, it finds today that the automobile has taken the bulk of its one-way and round-trip short-haul business, leaving it the long-haul and commutation traffic. In some instances the gasoline buggy has helped itself to long-haul traffic as well; as between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, where the distance by motor car over the wonderful new Tejon Pass highroad—to which the Southern Pacific, as chief taxpayer in California, has contributed most generously—is but 124 miles, against 170 miles, the shortest rail distance. The gasoline buggy can climb grades and round curves that the iron horse may not even attempt.
There is genuine feeling among many of the railroad companies of the land that the new competition is unjust. They make a good case for themselves. Complaints are coming in from the rail carriers all the way across the land. New York has appropriated and expended nearly $100,000,000 in building a system of improved highways over the entire state. Like the highways of California, they, too, are superb roads. Not only do they link all the big cities and the big towns but they sometimes stretch for many miles through the fastnesses of the forest—you may drive for twenty miles through the Adirondacks on as perfect a bit of pavement as any city park may boast and yet not pass more than one or two human habitations in all that distance. All of which is glorious for the motorist and his friends, to say nothing of the hotel keepers and the garage owners on the route. But how about the New York Central Railroad, which coversthe greater part of New York State like a web and which, because of the fact that it is its chief taxpayer, becomes automatically the heaviest contributor to these highways? It knows that every mile of improved road that is completed is going to mean a lessening of its revenues from local passenger traffic. And it can have, from that point of view, small comfort from seeing the increasing list of motor-car owners in the New York State towns.
For the moment leave the purely pleasure uses of the motor car. Consider a commercial possibility that is increasing almost overnight. The auditing departments of concerns that have from 50 to 500 salesmen out in the field are beginning to acquaint themselves with gasoline and tire performances. They soon will have need of such special knowledge. A single case will illustrate:
Two drummers working out of Syracuse—the one for a typewriter concern and the other for a wholesale grocery—decided to cooperate. Together and out of their own funds they purchased an inexpensive car—had its body so adjusted that back of the driving seat there was a compartment large enough for a goodly quantity of samples and the valises that held their personal effects. They had figured that upon many of the local lines of railroad, operating but two or three trains a day in each direction at the most, they could not under the most favorable conditions “make” more than four towns a day. From twenty to thirty per cent of their time was spent in the lobbies of hotels or country stations waiting for the up local or the down.With their automobile they now can get out of a town as soon as their business is done there. And during the past three months they have averaged six towns a day.
Here is a possibility of the automobile that the railroad can hardly afford to ignore. One big New England road noted in a recent month that its sale of mileage books—a form of railroad ticket designed particularly for the use of commercial travelers—had declined nearly twenty-nine per cent since the high-water mark three years before. Investigation on its part showed that the drummers all through its territory were beginning to get automobiles. The houses that employed them were encouraging them, either helping in the part purchase of the cars or, in some cases, buying them entirely. They, too, had discovered that their salesmen, no longer dependent on the infrequent train service of branch lines, could “make” more towns in a day.
Here is our ubiquitous branch line bobbing up once again. It is a problem which seemingly will not down. For branch-line passenger service is closely related to this last phase of automobile competition. It is the opinion of a good many shrewd railroaders—as well as our own—that the big roads have not always given proper attention to the full development of this phase of their traffic. Some of the big roads—some of the smaller ones too—have given this traffic, oftentimes valuable in itself and never to be ignored as feeding possibility of main-line and competitive traffic, little or no attention. Other roads ignore it.
“It is unprofitable,” they tell you, with exceeding frankness. “If there is any money at all in the passenger end of the railroad it is in the long haul. We have our branch lines and of course we shall have to continue to operate them, as best we can. But they are the lean of our business. And we have to get a lot of fat on the long-haul traffic to even up with this discouraging lean.”
It is because of this theory—very popular in some transportation circles—that so many branch-line railroads have today no more, in many instances even less, trains than they had twenty or thirty or forty years ago. The constant tendency has been to cut down service upon the branches. Such cuts generally come in the recurrent seasons of railroad retrenchment. But the trains cut off are rarely restored. For one thing, the branch-line railroad does not often run in a genuinely competitive territory. For another, there is apt to be less protest from a string of small towns and large villages than from one or two large cities with boards of trade, whose secretaries are eternally nagging the railroads.
Yet these small towns and villages—ofttimes the nucleus and the birthplace of our best Americanism—and even the isolated crossroads have some rights.[11]One of the largest of these is the right of communication.Some of them, under the shrinkage of the train service of the single branch-line railroad that has served them, have found themselves in turn shrinking and hardening. The popular-priced automobile may yet prove the salvation of these towns. The tavern at the crossroads has been repainted and is serving “chicken and waffle” dinners, the general store thrives anew on its sale of gasoline and oil. But best of all, the folks in adjoining villages visit back and forth. They mix and broaden. The intercourse that they were denied by the railroad has been given them through the agency of the automobile.
Come now to the public use of the automobile. And, although many railroaders profess to scout at the automobile carrying passengers for pay and state their belief that the increasing number of privately owned and operated cars represents their real problem, yet the motor bus operating ’cross country begins to bear, in its relation to the steam railroad, a strong resemblance to the effect of the jitney upon the traction road. In this last case the opposition quickly reached a high and dangerous volume and then subsided. The reasons why the jitney, after being hailed with high acclaim all the way across the land, has disappeared from the streets of more than half our American cities and towns, are not to be told here. It is sufficient here andnow to say that, save in the South and the extreme West, it has ceased to be a formidable competitor of the trolley. But as the jitney of the city has diminished, its brother of the country roads has grown. And the various regulating boards, city and county, while generally looking upon the city boy with a forbidding look, have given nothing but encouraging glances to his country brother.
On a certain day last summer, I rode with Henry Sewall from Frederick, Maryland, to Baltimore. Henry is a coffee-colored Negro of unusually prepossessing dress and manner. He owns a seven-passenger motor car of 1916 model and a fairly popular-priced make. He keeps his car tuned up and clean.
I found the two of them in the main street of Frederick—just in front of one of the town’s most popular hostelries. The car bore a placard stating that it would leave for Baltimore, forty-six miles distant, at five o’clock and that the one-way fare for the journey would be $1.50. I asked Henry Sewall the time that I might reasonably expect to be at my hotel in Baltimore. He showed his even white teeth as he replied:
“’Fore seven ’clock, suh. Ah’ve been known to do it in less.”
I glanced at the time card of the railroad that connects Frederick with Baltimore. It is a particularly good railroad, yet the afternoon train that it runs over the “old main line,” as it calls that branch, left Frederick at 4:50P.M.and did not arrive at a station, some ten “squares”—one never says “blocks” in Baltimore—from my hotel, until 7:30. Mileage and fare werepractically the same as Henry Sewall’s, but the train made numerous intermediate stops. And Henry announced, with the Negro’s love of pomp and regulation, that the laws of the state of Maryland would not permit him to stop and pick up passengers between Frederick and Baltimore—his license with the imposing state seal in its corner especially forbade that.
I rode with Henry. The softness and the sunshine of a perfect day in early summer, the knowledge that the old National Pike over which we were to travel was in the pink of condition, that we were to pass across the Stone Jug bridge and through the fascinating towns of Newmarket and Ellicott City was too much to be forsworn. And we had a glorious ride—the car filled and but one stop of ten minutes at the delightful Ellicott City, where Henry changed tires. But even with this detention I was at my hotel promptly at seven o’clock.
Henry makes the round trip from Baltimore to Frederick each day of the week, excepting Sundays, when his car is for general charter. Even on rainy days Henry’s car is almost invariably filled—he manages to carry eight passengers besides himself. With a maximum earning capacity of twenty-four dollars a day and an average of only a very little less, Henry is earning a very good living for himself, even when he figures on the cost, the wear and tear, and the depreciation of an automobile which is being driven about 100 miles a day.
There are many Henry Sewalls in and around Baltimore. Maryland today claims to have the finest highroads of any state in the Union. The cross-countryjitney busses have not been slow to take advantage of this. They start at regularly appointed hours from a popular-priced hotel in the heart of the city and the hours of their arrival and departure are as carefully advertised and as carefully followed as those of a steam railroad. When they are all starting out in the morning, the scene is as brisk and gay as it must have been at Barnum’s Hotel in the Baltimore of nearly a century ago, when, with much ado and gay confusion, the coaches set out upon the post roads—for Frederick, for York, for Harrisburg, for Philadelphia, and for Washington.
Yet the railroads that radiate from Baltimore have not seen fit to fight these newcomers for the traffic of from ten to fifty miles outside the city. They have made particularly serious inroads upon the earnings of one of the smaller of these steam lines, which ordinarily derives a very good share of its earnings from its suburban traffic. There are good and sufficient reasons for the big railroads to hold their peace. Take Henry Sewall’s opposition. The direct rail route to Frederick from Baltimore is a line exempted from through passenger trains and very largely given over to a vast tonnage of through freight. The officers of the road have from time to time given thought to the possibilities of increasing the local passenger service on that very line. To do so, however, on the generous plans that they had outlined among themselves would have meant either one of two things—either they would seriously have incommoded the movement of the through freight—which is a railroad’s largest sourceof profit—or else they would have been compelled to add a third track to that particular line. The income from the increased local passenger service would not justify the expense in either of these cases. Therefore this railroad can afford to be indifferent to Henry Sewall and his gasoline coach.
Yet there is a broader way of looking at it. Out from my old home town in northern New York there radiates today nearly as complete a system of motor-bus routes as that from Baltimore. We have almost 300 miles of superb new state highways in Jefferson County. And Watertown—our county seat—is a hub of no small traffic wheel. These busses, despite the arduous winters of the North Country—Watertown is reputed to have but three seasons: winter and July and August—keep going nearly the entire year round. They are of course patronized all that time. And the railroad which serves almost the entire North Country loses much local passenger traffic as a result of them. It is the same system that I have just quoted as being the largest taxpayer in the state of New York—the chief contributor to its $100,000,000 system of highways. Yet it, too, is not fighting these jitney busses. On the contrary, one of its high traffic officers said to me just the other day:
“We realize that the automobile is hardly apt to be a permanent competitive factor in any long distance passenger traffic—and that is the only passenger traffic in which we see any real profit. And there is a still bigger way of looking at it. Every automobile that goes into the sections of New York which we servemeans a movement of high-grade freight—the tires, the gasoline, the oils, the innumerable accessories that it constantly demands, mean more freight. Besides this, if the automobile is developing the man on the farm or in the little village we shall, in the long run, profit. The development of the entire state of New York means the development of our railroad.”
And that is a platform on which no business—no matter how large or how small it is—can ever lose.
But is there not a possibility that the railroad can regain some of the traffic that it has lost, temporarily at least, to the motor car? Is it not possible that the derided branch line may not be changed from a withered arm into a growing one? Amputation has sometimes proved effective. There is many and many a branch-line railroad, which probably should never have been built in the first place, whose owners have been wise enough to abandon it and to pull up the rails. Old iron has a genuine market value. Go back with me once again to the time when the trolley began to be a long-distance affair. We have seen already how a good many steam railroad men looked with apprehension upon their branch lines—and with good cause.
For a time it did look as if the electric railroad might become a genuine competitor of the steam railroad. A good many interesting fantasies of that sort got into print. An enterprising interurban trolley company over in Illinois put on trolley-sleeping cars between St. Louis and Springfield and St. Louis and Peoria. It was said that the day was coming when a man would ride in atrolley limited all the way from Chicago to New York—a real train, with sleeping cars and dining cars and Negro porters and manicures and an observation platform. The Utica (New York) Chamber of Commerce got tremendously excited over the matter and went all the way out to St. Louis and back in a chartered car taken right out of the press of traffic in Genesee Street.
But the trolley, as we have seen, has not proved a competitor of the steam railroad. It has become in almost every instance a feeder and as such is a valuable economic factor in the transportation situation. There have been no more sleeping cars placed on trolley routes, but a little time ago I found a Canadian Pacific box car on the shores of Keuka Lake, more than ten miles distant from the nearest steam railroad. A trolley road had placed it there, on a farmer’s private siding. And he was packing it full of grapes—grapes to go overseas from some big Canadian port upon the Atlantic.
Such possibilities of the trolley line to the steam railroad point to similar feeding possibilities of the automobile—but of these very much more in their proper time and places. Let us still continue to study the possibilities of the branch line.
The other day I chanced to travel upon a certain small brisk railroad that runs across a middle western state. In my lap was a time card of that line and I was idly following it as we went upon our way. Halfway down the long column of town-names, I saw a change. In other days a passenger for the enterprising county shiretown of Caliph had been compelled toalight at the small junction point known as East Caliph and there take a very small and very dirty little train for three miles, which finally left him at a clump of willows by a brookside—a full dozen hot and dusty blocks from the courthouse square which marks the geographical and commercial center of Caliph.
That branch-line train has disappeared. In its place a line on a time card reads “automobile service to Caliph,” and at the junction I saw a seven-passenger touring car with the initials of the railroad upon its tonneau doors. The motor bus takes you to the door of Caliph’s chief hotel, which faces that same courthouse square. The branch is unused, except for occasional switching. There is no expense of keeping it up to the requirements of passenger traffic, nor of maintaining a passenger station. The hotel serves as this last and at far less expense. And the cost of running the automobile over three miles of excellent highway is far cheaper than that of running a railroad train. The chauffeur is an entirely competent conductor and ticket-taker. And between passenger runs he can be used to carry the express and baggage on a motor truck. His own opportunities for development are fairly generous.
Recently the automobile has been placed upon the railroad rails—with astonishing results as to both efficiency and economy. I saw one of these, not long ago, working on a small railroad running from the Columbia River up to the base of Mount Hood. The superintendent of that railroad—he likewise was its agent,conductor, dispatcher, engineering expert, and chief traffic solicitor—had purchased a large “rubberneck” automobile, had substituted railroad flange wheels for the rubber-tired highway wheels, and was not only saving money for his property but also giving much pleasure to his patrons. A ride in a dirty, antiquated, second-hand coach behind a smoky, cindery locomotive is hardly to be compared with one in a clean, swift automobile, riding in the smooth ease of steel rails. So successful had the experiment proven that he was having a closed automobile made for winter service upon his railroad—with a tiny compartment for the baggage, the mail, and the express.
A series of interesting experiments conducted by the army along the Mexican border recently showed another way in which the motor truck could well be made an active ally and agent of the railroad. Special T-rail wheel flanges were designed to fit outside of the heavy rubber tires that carry the cars over highways. It is the work of a very few minutes to slip these steel flanges on or off the wheels. Which means that the motor truck may follow the lines of the railroad as far as it leads, giving many more miles of performance for each gallon of gasoline consumed; and then, when the rails end in the sand and sagebrush, may strike off for itself across the country in any direction.
THE MOTOR-CAR UPON THE STEEL HIGHWAY
How much better this than the smoky, dirty cars of yester-year!
THE ADAPTABLE MOTOR-TRACTOR
Equipped with flange wheels and hitched to a flat-car train on a logging railroad,it makes a bully motor-truck of real hauling capacity.
These ideas may seem visionary—advanced, perhaps. They are nothing of the kind. They are new, but they do represent the practical working of the great opportunity in branch-line railroading. And the gasoline-propelled unit railroad coach is no longervisionary, no longer even to be classed as a mere novelty. This adaptation of the automobile idea in the form of a single gasoline-propelled car, which combines baggage and express and smoking and day-coach compartments in an efficient compactness, has been a tremendous help to many railroads on their branch-line problems. These cars require a crew of but three men against a minimum crew of five men on the old-style steam train for branch-line service. They are clean and they are fast. And they have aided many railroads to increase their branch-line operation without increasing their operating cost—in many cases making actual savings. It is well for the big men who own and operate the steam railroad to remember that no matter how rapid may be the spread of the automobile or how permanent its extensive use, there will always be a large class of travel-hungry folk who must ride upon some form of railroad. There are people who, if financially capable of owning a car, are incapable of running it, and cannot afford a chauffeur. And the difficulties of owning an automobile increase greatly when one comes to live in the larger cities. The local line situation is not nearly as bad as it looks at first glimpse. There is a business for it if the railroader will devote himself carefully to its cultivation. Remember that in many cases he has sought so long for the larger profits of long-distance business between the big cities that he has rather overlooked the smaller, sure profits of the local lines. And it is interesting to know that the railroad of the Middle West which concededly maintains the finest local service is the one road that made no active appearance in arecent hearing in which the roads of its territory sought increased passenger rates. Despite the fact that many of its competitors have said that its local service is expensive and generous to an unwarranted degree, it found that its net profits on its passenger earnings were proportionately higher than those on its freight!
This road runs parlor cars upon almost all of its local trains, sleeping cars where there is even a possibility of their getting traffic. A big eastern road has just begun to follow this parlor-car practice. It builds and maintains its own cars. There are no expensive patent rights to be secured in the making of a parlor car. A double row of comfortable wicker or upholstered chairs, a carpet, lavatory facilities, and a good-humored porter will do the trick. And the train and the road upon which such a simple, cleanly car travels at once gains a new prestige. In an age when travel demands a private bath with every hotel room, a manicure with the haircut, and a taxicab to and from the station, a parlor car is more of a necessity than a luxury. And it is surprising to notice its earning possibilities upon even the simplest of branch lines or on one local train.
One thing more—a rather intimately related thing, if you please. We have spoken of the railroad automobile which runs up the public highway from East Caliph to Caliph and return. Let us consider that particular form of transportation service of the automobile in still another light. A man who went up into one of the great national parks on the very backbone of the UnitedStates this last summer was tremendously impressed with both the beauty and the accessibility of the place. The one thing was supplemental to the other. This man was impressed by still another thing, however.
The railroad which had brought him to a certain fine and growing city at the base of the mountains—a most excellent and well-operated railroad it chanced to be—had a branch line which ran much closer to the national park, upon which it was spending many thousands of dollars in advertising, both generously and intelligently. In other days park visitors took this branch—four-in-hands or carriages from its terminal for the thirty-mile run up through the canyon and into the heart of the park. With the coming of the automobile all this was changed. The motor car quickly supplanted the old-time carriages, even the four-in-hands themselves. In a short time it was running from the big city below the base of the mountains and the railroad was taking off one of its two daily trains upon the branch in each direction. Then, after only a little longer time, it was making a truce with its new competitor—so that its through tickets might be used, in one direction at least, upon the motor cars.
An excellent idea, you say. Perhaps. But I know a better one.
This same man rode last summer upon one of those motor vehicles all the way from the big city up into the heart of the park—some seventy miles all told. He is a man who owns an excellent touring car at his home—back East. Perhaps that is the reason why he did not enjoy this run out in the West. For the caron which he rode was a truck-chassis upon which had been builded a cross-seat body, with accommodations for some fifteen or sixteen passengers. It was the only practical way in which a motor vehicle could be built in order to compete with the railroad at its established rates of fare. Yet he did not enjoy the run, at least not until they were across the long forty-mile stretch of plains and up into the foothills of the Rockies. And then he and his were a little too tired by the slow, if steady, progress of the low-geared truck-chassis, to really have the keenest enjoyment of the glorious park entrance.
The point of all this is that the railroad which owns and operates that branch line ought also to own those excellently managed motor routes that radiate from its terminals through one of the loveliest and most rapidly growing playgrounds in all western America—perhaps own and operate a chain of its own hotels as well. It would gain not only prestige by so doing, but traffic as well. For back of its own advertising of the charms of that superior place it would set the guaranty of its name, of its long-established reputation for handling passengers well.
There are plenty of places in the United States where this may be done—and done today. The Southern Pacific is widely advertising a motor route through the Apache country and the Salt River valley of Arizona and in connection with its southern main stem between El Paso and Los Angeles. The success of its radical traffic step on its part may yet lead it to a correlation with its service of many wonderful motor runs overthose superb roads of California, as well. Similar opportunities are open to the Burlington, the Milwaukee, the Union Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande, the Great Northern—all of them railroads not ordinarily blind to traffic opportunities of any sort whatsoever.
In the East, the Boston and Maine, the Maine Central, and the Central Vermont railroads are confronted with dozens of such possibilities of developing through supplemental motor routes in the White Mountains and the Green Mountains; the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the Alleghenies should be filled with opportunities for the Delaware and Hudson, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Chesapeake and Ohio railroads. To establish such routes only needs a few things—the detailed and detached attention of an alert young traffic man, with his nose well above conventions and precedents, working with a man schooled in the operation of motor vehicles upon a large scale. To this partnership add a competent advertising man, give a little money at the outset—and the trick will be turned. And I am confident that if it be well turned, the railroad will never wish to turn back again.
MORE RAILROAD OPPORTUNITY
Letus now bring the motor truck into consideration. So far we have not taken it into our plans. And yet it is the phase of automobile competition that some railroad men frankly confess puzzles them the most. For it hits close to the source of their largest revenue—the earnings from the freight. It is a transport of things rather than of men. But that is no fundamental reason why it should not become as much an ally and a feeder of the railroad—as the passenger automobile, for instance.
The possibilities of the motor truck, under the development of good roads, which already has grid-ironed the two coastal fronts of the United States with improved highways and placed them here and there and everywhere throughout the interior, are large. A wholesale meat vendor in Philadelphia has used motor trucks with specially designed refrigerator bodies to distribute his wares not only through the immediate suburban territory in southeastern Pennsylvania and in adjacent New Jersey, but right up to the very doors of New York City, itself. Florists, whose greenhouses dot the Illinois prairies for fifty miles roundabout Chicago, today are using fleets of these vehicles to bring their wares at top speed either to suburban railroadstations or down into the heart of the city itself—although this last is somewhat unsatisfactory owing to the crowded streets of downtown Chicago. The motor truck is coming into increasing use in Oregon and in Washington and in California. It is proving a disturbing competitor to the small railroads upon the larger islands of the Hawaiian group. And a company has just been formed to introduce a motor-truck freight service to certain railroadless parts of China—which are supplied with ancient but very passable highroads.
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WHEN FREIGHT IS ON THE MOVE
The past two winters have seen the great black-breasted yards of all our American railroads congestedwith traffic almost to the breaking point. Executives, high and low, have lived in the yards for days andweeks and months at a time trying to relieve the congestion. This terminal yard of the West ShoreRailroad at Weehawken, N. J., opposite New York City, is typical of many, many others.
Come back to the United States. Last winter, when the railroads of the East struggled under a perfect flood tide of freight, due to the rush of war munitions toward the seaboard for transshipment, they were compelled to issue embargoes. That means, plainly speaking, that for days and sometimes weeks at a time they were compelled to refuse to accept or deliver many classes of freight. They gave their first efforts to moving coal and milk and the other vital necessities for the towns which they served with the rigors of an unusually hard winter to combat. It was a long time before the embargoes were all raised—even with all the big operating men in the East working from eighteen to twenty hours out of twenty-four—in many cases living in their private cars set in the heart of the most congested yards.
Bridgeport was one of the towns that was hardest hit by these embargoes. While it is served by a single railroad, it is upon the main stem of that road—a system that is reputed to be well equipped for thehandling of high-grade freight. But the conditions were unusual, to say the least. Bridgeport found herself transformed almost overnight from a brisk and average Connecticut manufacturing town into one of the world’s greatest munition centers. Prosperity hit her between the eyes. For a time people slept all night in the railroad station because they had nowhere else to go. And the fine new county almshouse was hurriedly transformed into a huge hotel. Bridgeport swarmed with people. A single munition factory there employed close to 20,000 people.
The railroad, long since hemmed in by the growing factory town, could not rebuild its yards overnight. Neither could it look for relief toward the other Connecticut towns. They, too, were making munitions and were in turn congested. But by far the worst congestion of all was at Bridgeport. The railroad people worked unceasingly, but for a time to apparently no purpose. And for a time it was almost impossible for a package to reach Bridgeport from New York or the West.
In this emergency the motor truck proved its worth. It so happens that there is a factory in Bridgeport which manufactures a very heavy type of motor truck. It put one of these in service between its plant and New York—fifty-six miles distant over the well-paved historic Boston Post Road. It brought emergency supplies of every sort to the factory doors. So efficient did it prove itself in everyday service that a group of Bridgeport manufacturers and merchants formed themselves into a transportation company and placedother trucks in daily service between their town and New York. And a little later when the New York terminals became glutted with freight and hedged about with embargoes, the manufacturers of Bridgeport began having freight billed to them at the local freight houses in Newark. They extended their motor-truck service to that busy Jersey town and so saved themselves many dollars. When, in the course of a few months, the congestion was removed and freight conditions at Bridgeport were normal once again, the motor-truck service along the Post Road disappeared. It could not compete with the freight rates of the railroad.[12]
But its possibilities as a feeder are enormous. Only a few days ago I stood beside the desk of the traffic vice-president of a big trunk line and looked over his shoulder at a huge map spread there. It showed the main line and the branches of his railroad—from all these, stretching, like a fine moss upon an old oak, the improved highroads. The mapmaker had done more. By use of colors he had shown the automobile stage routes upon these roads—those that carried freight and those that combined two or three of these classes of traffic. The vice-president frankly confessed that he was studying to see what practical use he could make of these feeding motor routes.
It was significant that the railroad should be making so careful a study of its new competitor, that it should be taking the first beginning steps to recognize it not as a competitor but rather as a friend and an ally, a feeder which eventually may be the means of bringing much traffic to its cars. The motor truck running over a well-paved highway can easily reach a farm or factory situated far from the steel rails.[13]It may savethe construction of expensive and eventually unprofitable branch-line railroads just as the passenger automobile or motor bus has begun to save the building of unprofitable street-car lines. If the farm fails or the factory burns down, never to be rebuilt, the railroad does not find itself with an expensive and utterly useless branch line of track upon its hands.
There is still another great freight-traffic opportunity for the sick man of American business. It lies in the perfection and development of a standard unit container. The idea is not, in itself, entirely new. A goodmany men have been studying for a long time to develop a practical receptacle that will obviate the necessity of constantly handling and rehandling freight—always a great expense both at terminals and at transfer yards. The remarkable development of the automobile truck during the past five years has only emphasized the vital need of some such universal container.
An ideal receptacle of this sort would be built of fiber or of steel—better still, a combination of the two. Such a container would roughly approximate in size the body of a small motor truck. Two of them would fit comfortably upon the chassis of a large truck—three or four, upon the frame of an electric car—for either city or interurban use. The regulation freight car of the steam railroad would then consist of trucks and frame—builded to receive from five to seven of the standard containers. These containers would also be able to fit in the low hold decks of a steamship with a great economy of room and therefore with a great efficiency of service.
The manufacturer then would load the containers in his shipping room. Some of them destined through under seal to large cities, such as New York or Chicago or Philadelphia; others, carrying a variety of products to small places, would be addressed to recognized transfer or assorting points. This last method would be exactly similar to that employed by the post-office department or the express companies in handling their daily flood tides of small parcel traffic. The use of the universal container would be directed more particularly, however, to heavier freight, both in individualpackages and in bulk. Coal or grain or lumber would hardly be sent in a container. It might be possible, however, to ship flour and sugar in the universal container, and entirely without the expense of wrappings.
From the manufacturer’s door—whether it were at street level, or in a community industrial building fifteen floors above the street—the container would go to the railroad frame car. By use of small-wheeled trucks or overhead tractors it would be carried first to the waiting chassis of the motor truck—in case the manufacturer was not able to command railroad siding facilities for himself. The motor truck would carry it to the freight terminal—overhead crane would make short shift of loading the container and its fellows upon the frame car.
The rest of the journey would be that of ordinary freight, save that at the destination the shipping process would be exactly reversed—the motor truck performing its part of the work again, if necessary, and the container going direct to the merchant or manufacturer with the least possible delay and with no expensive intermediate handlings, with their consequent labor expense as well as the possible danger from breakage.
This idea is not chimerical. Also, it is not inexpensive. It requires much study to work out the details and when these have been brought into practicability it would require much money for the initial investment in containers. They would have to be built in large quantities, in order to justify the large immediate expense to adapt any number of freight cars, terminals, and warehouses to their use. But as to theirefficiency and their ultimate economy, few transportation men who have given much real thought to the subject, are in doubt.
Such schemes quickly ally themselves with the entire problem of terminals.
“Terminals?” you say, and immediately think of what we were discussing a few minutes ago—the Grand Central station and other monumental structures of its sort. But those were passenger terminals. And now we have come to the great opportunities to be found in the handling and the development of the freight.
Perhaps you are not impressed with the importance of freight terminals. They are not the impressive gateways of large cities; but in many, many senses they are the most important. Through them pour the foodstuffs—the meats, the fish, the vegetables, the fruits, the milk, the clothing, the fuel, the thousand and one things, necessary for the comfort of man and his luxury. Bar those gateways but for a single day and then see the panic that would overcome your city.
While we were speaking of the new Grand Central station and the important step it typified in the economic and efficient progress of our country, we called attention to the allied facilities that were springing up roundabout it—hotels, clubs, office buildings, auditorium, all of them more or less closely affiliated with the business of the great north gate of a metropolitan city. Is there any reason why the freight gateways should not be the housing places of affiliated industries—industries,if you please, more or less dependent upon the rapid movement of either their raw material or their finished products? Suppose that the railroads were ever to seek out and solve that fascinating problem of the universal unit container. Would not the most fortunate manufacturer be he whose shipping room, his entire modern and concentrated factory as well, was so close to a comprehensive freight terminal as to permit the handling of his containers, his other freight too, by means of chutes or elevators—with even the motor truck, to say nothing of less modern forms of city truckage, entirely eliminated?