Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 5

With Mr. Hughitt absolute dictator of Chicago and Northwestern there was none to oppose his arbitrary dictum in regard to Mr. Aishton. The fact that Aishton had been reared upon the property, that his record upon it was not only good but great, apparently counted for nothing. He was dropped. He had offended "the old man." That was a heinous offense for which there was no possible excuse. Aishton's powerful friends in the railroad world rallied to his defense. They elected him president of the American Railway a.s.sociation at a salary reputed to be equal to that paid him by the Northwestern.

Apparently it is not only McAdoo who can afford to indulge his whim in personalities.

Before the Railroad Administration ceased its actual operation of the roads it began the restoration of much of the pre-war service, particularly of the pa.s.senger service. Soon after the signing of the Armistice and the removal of military pressure upon the carriers the important through trains that had been removed--the Broadway Limited and the Congressional chief among them--were returned to their former schedules, although not in every case with the same high degree of service as before. It was not, for instance, until the return of private control that the fastest trains between Chicago and the Pacific coast brought to their pre-war standard of approximately sixty-nine hours. The McAdoo administration as a war measure had lengthened this schedule to seventy-two hours.

Yet it was McAdoo who, once the war emergency was pa.s.sed, removed the half-cent-a-mile extra charge that he had established against people who rode in Pullmans or other forms of sleeping and parlor-cars and left the fare at a flat three cents a mile--where it should have been suffered to remain in the interest of the railroads themselves.

The Interstate Commerce Commission raised it to 3.6 cents a mile, upon hints from the private operators of the roads. It is but fair to add, however, that there are certain members of the commission who long ago had conceived the idea that the pa.s.senger-rates were not bearing their proper burden of the costs of railroad operation. It is these men who have to-day steeled their hearts against any lowering of pa.s.senger-rates to a point where the service might at least have some compet.i.tive attraction against that of the automobile, publicly or privately owned or operated. In all this discussion at the moment of the possible lowering of freight-rates nothing whatever is being breathed of a readjustment of pa.s.senger-fares, with the single exception of a recent bill pa.s.sed in the United States Senate for the enactment of a Federal statute compelling the roads to sell mileage-books at a low wholesale rate. This neglect of itself is, I think, a most unhealthy sign. While the 23 per cent. lowering of pa.s.senger revenues in 1921 as against 1920 is a fairly definite expression of that unhealthiness.

To my mind this is not entirely a question of the proper equalization of operating costs to revenues; the question of setting the tariffs of charges to a point where business shall again be attracted to the railroads, to my way of thought, is the real kernel of the problem. That is the way that the average merchant or manufacturer would look at the similar problems that confront him. To get the business the rates must be made attractive. If it then becomes necessary to reduce operating costs so as to exist at the lowered revenues, then the business man will move heaven and earth to reduce his costs.

Apparently the Interstate Commerce Commission does not see the question in this light. One understanding the complexion of its members.h.i.+p would hardly expect it so to see it. The commission is absolutely honest and, to a large extent, able; but it is generally dull. It has no traffic sense; no sense of salesmans.h.i.+p. It has no vision. It always looks backward, rarely forward. Being composed almost exclusively of lawyers,--long ago it was recognized apparently that it would be a fearful thing to place an honest, far-sighted, energetic railroad executive in its personnel,--it spends a great deal of time seeking for precedent. Therefore it hardly can be expected to look forward.

"What _is_ the precedent?" it keeps asking. "How has it always been done in the past?"

This is one of the very great reasons why our railroads to-day are not marching forward in step with the progress of the other great businesses of America, why so often they are called, and with such a deadly truth, "the sick man of American business," why they have lost so much of public confidence and of public support, why the morale not only of the rank and file but of many of the executives as well has come to so low a pa.s.s.

The railroads of the United States to-day, deprived of so much of their initiative by the Government, should at least be able to look to that Government for some real qualities of inspiration and of leaders.h.i.+p. Such qualities they need. Such qualities are not being given to them. The sick man needs medicine, physical and mental, not abuse. The Interstate Commerce Commission should be made into a doctor who can cure as most good doctors do cure these days, not by nostrums alone, but by good cheer and inspiration.

One or two things more, if you please, before we are done with this chapter.

The railroads generally wormed themselves out of the joint terminal arrangements which McAdoo had made for them, and made in almost every instance to the great comfort of the traveling public. The Southern Pacific expelled the offensive big Santa Fe and the almost equally offensive little Western Pacific from its ancient station and "mole" at Oakland opposite San Francisco. The Pennsylvania prepared to do the same thing with the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh Valley at its station in New York. This last move was not carried out. I had something to do myself with preventing it.

The question arose in my mind at the termination of Federal operation: What will the Pennsylvania do with its chief compet.i.tor there in its fine station upon Manhattan Island? Will it do the obviously compet.i.tive thing and thrust the Baltimore and Ohio out, along with the Lehigh Valley into the bargain? A little questioning developed the fact that that was its precise plan. The question of rental charges did not enter into the situation. The Pennsylvania was not direct in its explanation; it did not say, as it might honestly have said: "We built this big, expensive station as a compet.i.tive move, and we do not purpose to share the fruits of our enterprise with a compet.i.tor who did not share the great risk of the undertaking." It merely said that there was not room in the station for the fourteen daily trains of the Baltimore and Ohio and the eight of the little Lehigh Valley. It was handling 175 of its own trains there, and about 275 of the Long Island in addition, but it could not find room for twenty-two other trains.

Here was railroad compet.i.tion showing its most disagreeable side to the public weal. The man who lived at Martinsburg, West Virginia, or c.u.mberland, Maryland, or virtually any of the other non-compet.i.tive points of the Baltimore and Ohio was to be penalized henceforth in the name of compet.i.tion. Having enjoyed great comfort and facility under the non-compet.i.tive plan of the United States Railroad Administration in the use of the Pennsylvania Station in the heart of Manhattan, he was now to be shoved back into the old station at Communipaw, just below Jersey City, with its slow and c.u.mbersome ferry connections across the Hudson River. It was not likely that he would henceforth become an enthusiast over the compet.i.tive system of railroading.

The whole thing seemed so absurd that I took it upon myself to mention it in the public prints. That apparently did the trick. Publicity ofttimes does. The Pennsylvania changed its position; in a big and graceful and generous way it waived what apparently were its obvious compet.i.tive rights in the situation, and invited both the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh Valley to remain at least for some years to come in its great New York pa.s.senger terminal. The invitation was accepted with alacrity.

Most of the consolidated ticket-offices still remain, although there is a constant disposition among the more independent of our separate railroads to break away from them. Theoretically offering far better facilities to the traveler than the separate city offices, practically they rarely do this. For one thing, despite their brave show of mahogany and other fine forms of office fittings, they frequently are under-manned, particularly in seasons of heavy travel. And a man in a hurry going to one of them frequently is compelled to wait an outrageously long time. The fact also remains that the so-called weaker lines that use them seem so submerged as hardly to have a fair chance at the compet.i.tive traffic. A small railroad can make a large showing with an attractive office in the heart of a big city. Relatively it outshadows its neighbor.

Where the individual roads have remained in the consolidated offices up to the present time, it has been largely the result of a laudable desire to stand by their fellows. The Railroad Administration forced some one line in each large city to a.s.sume the rental of the consolidated offices. In Chicago, for instance, the ten-year lease (at $65,000 a year) of the consolidated ticket-office fell upon the broad shoulders of the Burlington. With the exception of the Northwestern system, which showed a particular antipathy to the late Railroad Administration, virtually all the large roads have remained with the Burlington.

There is moreover an economy argument in the consolidated office that is not without its appeal to the railroad executive. The only question in the mind of his traffic expert is whether the economy argument is not completely overcome by the additional business to be gained by a red-hot compet.i.tive little separate office. Of course if all the lines coming into any large city should maintain red-hot compet.i.tive little separate offices the gain would be theoretical rather than real. There might be some pa.s.senger traffic actually created by the brave showing of the separate offices, but I think that it would be negligible.

The convenient universally interchangeable mileage-book that McAdoo installed (with his name printed upon each third tiny coupon) has been retained with all of its universal privileges, up to the present time at least. But no longer with the name of McAdoo brightly displayed. It still represents no saving to the purchaser over the price of individual separate tickets, though offering a certain convenience in the checking of through baggage, in making Pullman reservations and the like. Yet the putting through of the Senate bill authorizing the Interstate Commerce Commission to reduce its price bids fair at last to lead toward a correction of this precise phase of the situation. Gradually a pretty well-defined feeling is being developed that railroad pa.s.senger-fares in the United States to-day are entirely too high. "Not more fares but more riders" is a slogan which a young man who is developing traffic for street railways is using, with telling results. His slogan is quite as applicable to the steam railroads. They apparently have brought their pa.s.senger-rates to a point where the riding, always a variable and uncertain quant.i.ty, no longer is attracted to their trains. And this is an hour when the motor-car is steadily gaining strength as a compet.i.tor of the railroad.

The flat abolition of the stop-over privilege which some enthusiastic railroad traffic expert urged upon McAdoo is now being slowly worn down again, at least to the point where most of the stop-over privileges that were in existence in pre-war days have now been restored. The traffic departments of our various railroads all the way across the land at last are beginning to unbend. The traveler is beginning to regain his old-time privileges.

We do progress.

CHAPTER V

THE PRESENT-DAY SITUATION

Yet our progress is by no means rapid; it easily may be described in the one word "halting."

In the opening chapter of this book I directed attention to the ravages in the service of our national railroad structure that any man can readily find for himself. To discover, specifically, how the pa.s.senger train service across much of the land has been depleted he has but to turn over the pages of that ponderous tome, the "Official Guide of the Railways of the United States." The many, many trains of yesterday that are missing to-day even after the partial reparations to this important branch of the railroad's social obligation to the nation that the Railroad Administration made after the war crisis show the deletions that have been made. There too he might find how the speed of most of the trains that remain is slackened.

I have no argument to present for the excessively fast train in the United States; it is a risk and an extravagance that we can well afford to do without. One of the shrewdest moves that the New York Central and the Pennsylvania systems made was, some seven or eight years ago, when they lengthened the running time of their fastest New York-Chicago trains from eighteen to twenty hours. There is little doubt that the New York Central, at least, could operate a train between these two cities in sixteen hours or in a very few minutes in excess of that time by the use of the long straight tangents of its Michigan Central subsidiary across the southerly portions of Ontario and Michigan. But at what strain upon the men back of the enormously efficient machine, at what great risk to life and property!

Despite the proverbial reputation of the American for great haste in everything, we have had but little desire in this country for extreme high-speed trains such as our friends overseas take such keen delight in boasting about. A few years ago the world was running riot on train speed.

We had our two rival eighteen-hour expresses between New York and Chicago, to say nothing of the once famous Empire State doing the 440 miles between New York and Buffalo in exactly eight hours. It was that train which a short distance west of Rochester once reached the unofficial speed of 112-1/2 miles an hour, and held it for several minutes. There were a dozen mile-a-minute expresses between Camden, opposite Philadelphia, and Atlantic City, divided between the Pennsylvania and Reading systems. The latter road, in connection with the Central Railroad of New Jersey, ran fast expresses each hour of the day between Jersey City, Communipaw Station, and the Market Street terminal in Philadelphia, a distance of ninety miles, in an hour and fifty minutes. And the management of the New Haven was purposing to establish a four-hour train between New York and Boston--229 miles.

In those days our British cousins were maintaining our pace, or possibly going it a little better. Competing roads on each side of Great Britain all the way from London up to Aberdeen, its northernmost large city, were at each other's throats. The London and Northwestern and the Caledonian railways, working together, operated a train from London to Perth which on the greater part of its run was scheduled for actual operation at 49-1/2 miles an hour and which was given but two hours and five minutes for the 117-3/4 miles between Carlisle and Stirling. Finally the compet.i.tion reached a point where these roads--the so-called "West Coast route"--had a regularly scheduled train from London to Aberdeen, 540 miles, in eight hours and thirty-two minutes. This was considerably better than the East Coast route--chiefly the Great Northern, the Northeastern, and the North British railways--ever succeeded in doing. Their best regular schedule, even though their route was seventeen miles shorter, was eight hours and forty-two minutes.

The best regular trains on the crack Chicago and Alton, the shortest route between Chicago and St. Louis, take to-day seven hours and forty-five minutes to traverse the 284 miles intervening between those two important cities. It is 451 miles across level country from Chicago to Kansas City by the double-tracked Santa Fe--a distance ninety miles less than by the West Coast route from London to Aberdeen--yet the Santa Fe's best train between Chicago to Kansas City takes eleven hours and twenty-five minutes for the run. And even then it is not permitted to carry pa.s.sengers; the best pa.s.senger time is five or ten minutes longer. I do not think that we Americans can be called speed crazy.

Great Britain also has now slowed her trains down. She progressed that way before the beginning of the war. A nasty accident or two close to the beginning of the century was responsible for the change; while the war itself, as in this country, slowed the fast train schedules to a vast extent. Now her service is back to its old general standard of reasonable (but no longer excessive) high speeds in almost every direction out of London. There are abundant service expresses running in an even four hours between that city and both Manchester, 184 miles, and Liverpool, 193 miles. Compet.i.tion is supposed to have forced this service. Compet.i.tion is forever supposed to be forcing service. Yet on the non-compet.i.tive Great Western railway I rode, but a few months ago, from London to Bath, 104 miles, in an even two hours, while across the Channel, I had ridden, but a few weeks before that, over the war-struck Eastern railway of France ninety miles from Paris to Rheims in just sixty seconds less than an even two hours.

We have slackened our running time appreciably in the United States these days; very wisely, I think, in the case of the twenty-hour trains between New York and Chicago. As a matter of fact the Twentieth Century Limited, doing the 979 miles of the longer high-speed route between those two cities, from 2:45 o'clock one afternoon (Eastern time) to 9:45 o'clock the next morning (Central time), still makes a remarkable train performance.

The Pennsylvania still has two or three of the mile-a-minute flyers in service between Camden and Atlantic City--59.7 miles in fifty-seven or fifty-eight minutes. The Reading has one or two of its flyers left, not only between those points, but between Philadelphia and Jersey City.

Yet this is about all of the mile-a-minute work. From here the slackening in time is appreciable until we come to the comparatively slow performances of the high-grades between Chicago and the cities that lie back of it. The New Haven no longer talks about a four-hour train from New York to Boston; it has lengthened its schedule between those cities. There also has been a slight lengthening of the one-time high-speed schedules between New York and Was.h.i.+ngton. There has been a let-down. The once proud Empire State Express now takes nine hours instead of eight to go from New York to Buffalo, while out upon the Pacific coast the tremendously high-speed expresses of the Santa Fe between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Saint and the Angel, which we saw but a little time ago being summarily dropped by the McAdoo administration, have never been restored.

They are not likely to be restored.

The Southern Pacific takes thirteen hours and one-half for its best express between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a run of 475 miles. But a moment ago we saw the West Coast system of England doing 540 miles in eight hours and thirty-two minutes, and keeping it up month in and month out. Similarly the S. P. takes twenty-nine hours and ten minutes for its best train between Portland and San Francisco, a distance of 773 miles. It is 517 miles from Paris to Ma.r.s.eilles; the best regular express train between those two cities makes the run in twelve hours and thirty-three minutes. It is 652 miles from Paris to Nice; a regularly scheduled pa.s.senger train does it to-day in seventeen hours. And yet the French railway executives promise that they will do much better.

In these things we are not progressing. Take once again the worst of our national transport picture, the vexed New England situation. I have just referred to the slight lengthening of the time of the fast trains between New York and Boston, rather than any expected possible shortening of their schedules. The New York-Boston services of both the New Haven and the Boston and Albany roads are not typical, however, of the service that is being given New England these days; if it were there would be no large cause for complaint. It represents in fact the very top notch of the pa.s.senger service of the six most congested States in the Union, the very States which by all right and sense should to-day be enjoying the best pa.s.senger service, not the worst.

We have seen already the deplorable state into which the suburban service in and out of Boston has long since fallen. Boston is not all of New England, even though some Bostonians may so believe. Take the case of the Fitchburg. The Fitchburg started off as a railroad with good prospects.

For it was bored the spectacular Hoosac tunnel (4-3/4 miles in length), upon the completion of which the Fitchburg became the short-line between Boston and both Troy and Albany. The lordly Boston and Albany meanders magnificently through the high hills of the Berks.h.i.+res, and takes much longer for the process.

Unfortunately the little Fitchburg road never had much of a chance for its money. The close traffic alliances between the Boston and Albany and the New York Central, which preceded the actual leasing of the one road by the other, gave it little or no chance for through freight between New England and the West. Its short mileage and well-built line availed it nothing.

Eventually it fell into the hand of the Boston and Maine and became, in large part at least, a local line, taking from the New York Central and the Delaware and Hudson such freight as the Boston and Albany would not or could not take. Yet for years it kept up a brave show. It ran between Boston and Buffalo and Chicago and Detroit and St. Louis sleeping-cars a-plenty. It had an excellent dining-car service too.

The dining-cars are gone from the Fitchburg these days. It has become indeed a very secondary stem of the Boston and Maine. Two parlor-cars ply their way daily on slow trains between Boston and Troy; recently a Boston-Buffalo sleeper was added to the service. The road has lost not only its name but its personality and its service too.

What is true of the Fitchburg is equally true of the erstwhile Housatonic.

Equally true also is the fact that twenty-five years ago the best train between Pittsfield and New York made the run in an hour's time less than the best train on that line consumes to-day. There were more trains too, just as there were more trains then on the New Haven and Northampton line, the Connecticut River, the New England, the Boston and Providence, and a dozen other little individual roads that long since lost their name, their prestige, their individuality, and, what is far more important, their intimate personal touch with their patrons and their employees.

The main line express trains of the New Haven between Boston and New York, either by the way of Springfield or by Providence, have not lost their excellence to-day, neither have the main line express trains of the Boston and Albany nor the Boston and Maine's trains to Portland and points far beyond, although there are none too many of them and they are none too generous in their accommodations. It is in the branch line trains, just as in the branch line stations, that the New England pa.s.senger service has not progressed but has distinctly retrograded.

Descend beneath the obvious. Ignore even the sickening decline in railroad dividends, whether average or c.u.mulative--the records of Wall Street will give you all that you want of these--and come to the deterioration of the roads as shown in hard and unsentimental figures. The condition of the locomotives and cars of almost all of our railroads had begun to decline seriously even before the days of the Railroad Administration. When that supreme governmental organization came into being it pledged itself to return to the carriers their properties at least as well and as fully equipped as upon the day it took them over. It did not quite succeed in doing this. The extent to which it failed, by the statistics referring to freight-cars alone, was as follows: In 1917, the year of private railroad operation immediately preceding those of government control, our national transport structure had 2,479,472 freight-cars, which was much less than it should have had. The roads had failed to build enough equipment to keep pace with the overwhelming increase of traffic, which almost at the very beginning of the World War had been thrust upon them. Under almost all circ.u.mstances they found it necessary to "sc.r.a.p" or otherwise remove from service approximately 100,000 worn-out cars each year. For several years before 1914 their construction of new cars had barely more than kept pace with this annual loss.

Yet under governmental operation things went from bad to worse; despite its orders for 100,000 box-cars the Railroad Administration did not buy enough cars to keep pace with those that were being sc.r.a.pped. In 1918 the total freight-car equipment of our carriers had declined to 2,397,943, in 1919 to 2,361,102, in 1920 to 2,352,911--in other words a total decline since 1917 of 125,561--while the normal increase of our transport plant called for an increase of at least twice this number of cars and certainly admitted no decrease whatever.

In this connection, I think that it is at least worth a paragraph in pa.s.sing to notice that in the seven years ending with 1913 our railroads increased their freight traffic 39 per cent. In those same years they added 315,000 freight-cars and 8,100 freight locomotives to their existing equipment. In the seven years that ended with 1920 the traffic increased again--virtually in the same ratio, 38 per cent.--but only 143,000 freight-cars and 4200 freight-locomotives were added to the total rolling-stock. In 1921 but 20,000 new freight-cars were purchased and but 250 locomotives of all types. It is no wonder that many of our railroaders now view with real apprehension any return of heavy traffic.

Moreover not only the number but the condition of the individual cars has declined. A small Eastern city which I know very well indeed is a brisk point in interchange freight. It is also a water port of fair importance, to which a large number of coal-cars come in the average summer and autumn. Last autumn I noticed that many of these cars were in a pathetic state of disrepair. The yardmaster explained it to me.

"The first time they come through from the mines," he said, "they will have their hoppers braced with a bit of timber so as to keep all the coal from spilling out upon the tracks before they even reach here. Somehow that timber will get lost before the car gets back to the mines again. The mine-bosses will put in a flooring this time. Fine business, that! The hoppers won't work at all then, and thirty tons of coal have to be shoveled out by hand--at the present price of labor!"