OUR RAILROADS
TO-MORROW

OUR RAILROADS
TO-MORROW

BY
EDWARD HUNGERFORD

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922

Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.

Copyright, 1920, 1921, 1922, by
Curtis Publishing Co.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

CONTENTS

OUR RAILROADS TO-MORROW

OUR RAILROADS TO-MORROW

CHAPTER I

Even in Russia, where transport conditions to-day are the worst anywhere in the world, there has not been a complete railroad breakdown. The Russian railroads after nearly a decade of overburden are to-day functioning—after a miserable fashion, to be sure, but functioning none the less.

For, truth to tell, a necessary railroad structure may never break down completely. It may descend into the valley of deep woes, it may crawl on its stomach in the despair of seemingly hopeless disease, but it may never quite die. That is out of the possibilities of the thing. Dying, a railroad dying? It must never die. A factory, a merchandising establishment, even a whole town may struggle along fitfully for a number of years and then decide to quit, leaving but a forlorn group of ruins as a memento of vanished enterprise. But a necessary railroad may never quit. When a rail highway of any real importance ceases to operate, civilization itself, begins to crumble. For a railroad is a not alone life but also a life-giver. Upon it depends virtually all the life of the community it serves, not merely commercial life but political and social as well. Which means that the mere suggestion that the railroad structure should cease to function is unthinkable. And here thrusts to the front the vexing problem of how not only to enable it merely to live but to enable it to live in the fullest strength, to grow apace withal, to more than keep pace with the growth of the community that it is designed to serve.

For nearly a hundred years now we have been upbuilding the railroad structure of the world. America pioneered in its creation. Our fathers and our fathers’ fathers cannot now remember the day when the call of the iron horse was not heard across the land. The railroad train has become part and parcel of our lives. And even though in these days with our motor cars at the curb we may have come to scorn the railroad train for our own short travels, we know full well that it brings the milk to our doorstep, the coal to our bins, the provender to our larders. It helps weave the fabric upon our backs, build the shoes upon our feet, form the hats upon our heads. At every corner, every turn, we are dependent upon the railroad. Therefore there is not a man or a woman in the entire United States to whom its present plight should not be of the keenest interest and importance.

We were promised a complete solution of our transport troubles with the hurried passage two years ago of the Esch-Cummins Bill, now known officially as the Transportation Act. Have we reached that solution, or anything like unto a solution?

You do not have to ask the average man twice for an answer to that question. He knows. If he is a business man he knows doubly well. He knows that for the last ten years our American railroad system has been in something of a decline. A decade ago it was at the zenith of its efficiency. For eighty years it had been climbing upward; for the last ten it has been slipping backward. Oh, yes, I do know its war record. It was a fine record and one of which every American should be duly proud. There is hardly a physician, however, who has not seen a patient, terribly sick, under the stress of great emergency rise magnificently to a definite situation of supreme importance. So four years ago rose our sick man of American business. And now he has gone to bed more ill than ever before while many doctors quarrel about his case.

And still he functions. The sick-abed man of our American business still renders the all-necessary service that none but him really can render. Fortunately perhaps American business itself at this moment is not in the very best of health. One shudders to think what would happen if industry all the way across the land were again in its top notches of production. It is not the least of the perplexing phases of this all-perplexing railroad problem of ours—the question, when traffic shall again rise (as it certainly will) to normal volume, to say nothing of any abnormal volume, of how our weakened railroad structure will meet it.

That it recently withstood severe tests is of course no indication that it could again withstand such strains. All the way across the land our railroad functioned in the recent ordeals through which it has passed—which of course is not saying that it could do this again. It quite naturally worked at its best in the western sections of the land, where there are both less congestion and comparatively larger rail transport facilities. Yet as one came east he found the American railroad still meeting its responsibilities bravely and with a real degree of efficiency. One crossed the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Maumee, and still found the railroad functioning—the stout, pliable rod of its energy bending but never breaking. He came further east still, crossed the Susquehanna and then the Delaware, and still the rail carrier functioned. He came to the Hudson and found the battered and overburdened railroad machine still meeting its obligations, after a fashion at least.

Our railroad machine did not break even in New England, where conditions are and for a long time past have been almost at their worst; where for nearly two decades a high-grade community has been forced to pay penalty, and pay generously, for a grave accumulation of railroad errors. It was in New England that American railroading really began, with the construction in 1808 of a crude wooden railed line at Quincy, Massachusetts, whose horse-drawn cars brought granite from the quarries down to the water’s edge, whence it might go by sloop to Charlestown, where the tall shaft of the Bunker Hill monument was beginning to arise. It was in New England too that the first real railroad enterprise and development were shown; by the middle of the forties a group of energetic and profitable small companies rapidly expanded and offered genuine transport to six of the busiest and most rapidly growing States of the Union.

It is in that same New England that when one comes to-day he finds the picture of our national railroad machine almost at its very darkest—the stations dirty, unpainted, neglected; the passenger-cars and the locomotives in similar or even worse condition; the morale of the rank and file of railroad labor low in many different ways. Remember that it is not like this everywhere else within the land. It is particularly different out in the West. Take California; out there the stations almost invariably are clean and brightly painted, the broad lawns that surround them are in the pink of perfection, while the trains that enter and leave the stations are in full keeping with them. Engines, and the passenger-cars behind, are alike clean, fresh-painted, efficient in every detail of their appearance. Paint certainly does wonders. The cherry-red electric trains of the Southern Pacific never seemed brighter or more immaculate. I rode a little more than a year ago on a huge steam locomotive of the El Paso and Southwestern railroad. The brightness of her appearance, the efficiency of her performance, seemed to belie the fact that it was eleven years since she had left the big shop in Philadelphia where she had been born.

Always it is as one comes further east that the American railroad machine grows more and more shabby, until in New England we see it at its worst. Our entire railroad structure, speaking nationally and subject only to a few exceptions, is worn down a bit. It is a shoe outgrown. It pinches. It pinches hard. Yet nowhere does it pinch harder than in New England. I hinted but a moment ago of the transportation machine there, twisted and bended and torn and all but completely broken. I spoke of the desolate appearance of many of the trains and of the stations. The Boston and Albany, it is true, has been something of an exception to this rule. The present condition of the Springfield station does not prove the exception however. Always a wealthy road, the B. & A. is compelled by its State charter to return to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all of its earnings in excess of an annual 8 per cent. It is hardly necessary to add that even in its most prosperous years the excess earnings went into the property. And in consequence the patrons of the road benefited. But that was yesterday.

It was yesterday too that Boston possessed a suburban service in which she could at least display some slight evidences of satisfaction. That yesterday is now quite gone. To-day the service is unquestionably the very worst in all this land. It is doubtful if any other large American city would tolerate for a month the sort of suburban service which to-day is doled out to the Boston metropolitan district. Ancient and dilapidated cars, pulled by equally ancient and dilapidated locomotives, are the sad lot of the Boston commuter. The records of the railroad companies themselves show that some of these ancient coaches date from as far back as the early eighties; many of them go back into the nineties. Nightly the trains are crowded, not only to the extent of their seating capacities, but well beyond them. Nightly the abominable overcrowdings of the New York subways are repeated throughout the Boston suburban zone, and with far less excuse.

In its appropriate time I shall discuss the large possibilities of electrification as it applies in particular to the Boston suburban zone. For the moment consider this New England corner as the darkest corner of a transportation picture which to-day has but few patches of brilliancy. As one goes from east to west however the picture brightens perceptibly. Do not forget that it is at its very worst in New England and perhaps at its best in California.

For the moment the freight service, nationally speaking at least, is not subject to the same criticisms as the passenger. (To the depleted passenger service we shall come in good time.) This for the simple reason that the traffic is not being produced across the land. A sadly depleted transportation structure easily can take good care of a sadly lessened freight traffic. But let our wheels of industry begin really to hum again and contemplating the present condition of our carriers, I shall fear a reversion to the conditions of the winter months of the early part of 1920, when one box-car took forty days to go from Boston to Chicago, a trip that easily should have been made in a fortnight, while another car but a few days later took fifty days for the same journey!

Yet, to be entirely fair, these runs were made in a winter which, by the official records of the weather bureau, was the worst that the country had known in thirty-six years.

All right. Let us be fair. We shall go back three years to 1917 before government control and the really big labor problems had been wished upon the railroads. The New England roads even then were already having a fearful time of it. The Boston Chamber of Commerce sent out questionnaires to the big shippers of the district asking for specific reports on all of the car-load shipments that they were making. When the questionnaires came back to it, all filled in neatly on the dotted lines and in the blank spaces, they showed the definite record of 2625 cars, quite enough to be fully representative of the entire situation. One New England land shipper reported that the fifty-nine cars which he had had in Chicago movement had ranged from thirteen to eighty-seven days in transit. (Remember, if you will, that a fair average for that journey is fourteen days.) One hundred and sixty cars bound to his siding from various Western points had together consumed 6709 days in transit. A reasonable time for their journeys would have totaled 2550 days. Detentions due solely to railroad delays had in his one case come to the considerable figure of 4159 days.

For the entire 2625 cars—in almost every case from the primary grain-markets of the West—the total transit time came to 109,569 car-days. Again the law of fair average time comes into play. Let me explain briefly how it is made. To the shortest time in transit between two given points an arbitrary of 50 per cent. is added. This makes the fair average. In practice it results that the average time to Boston from points east of a line drawn through Buffalo and Pittsburg is fixed at seven days. Two weeks are allowed from points west of that line and east of the Mississippi, three weeks from those east of the Missouri and thirty days from places as far distant as Montana. With this rule as a measure and taking the individual routings of each of these 2625 box-cars, the fair average time of all of them came to a total of 40,753 car-days. Subtracting this time from the total transit time as you have just had it, we get in a few months at the beginning of 1917 a railroad detention of 68,996 car-days, or an average waste of 26.2 days for each car. If this waste could have been avoided there would have been an additional use of 9856 cars for one week each, or 3285 cars for a three weeks’ period. The hard-headed railroad executives who continue to argue against a too elaborate car-building program must understand these figures and their full import. Nor can their brethren in the field be entirely blind to the success of the Car Service Commission of the American Railway Association in making an extensive and vastly bettered use of the freight equipment immediately at hand at that time and available all the way across the country. It takes a lot of time and money to build any considerable quantity of new freight-cars. It does not take much of either to make a better use of the cars already in operation. And this is the very thing that had been done to a certain extent, up to the beginning of the present business slump.

It would not be just or fair to assert or even to imply that all of the car delays which we have just seen occurred within the boundaries of New England. It is just as fair to assume that many of them came to pass in Montreal, or in Toronto, or West Albany, or East Buffalo, or Altoona, or Brunswick, as in West Springfield, or Cedar Hill, or Mechanicville. But when this point has been stated the fact still remains that the New England roads to-day are and have been for a number of years past fairly typical—certainly not exceptional—of the condition that prevails in certain other sections of the land, particularly upon the so-called “weaker lines.” The great trouble is that in New England there are virtually no strong roads. They are all down in the doldrums. Even the last series of rate advances by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which gradually are proving very profitable to many of the already strong railroads in the southwestern corner of the United States, have failed to bring relief to the already weakened properties in its northeastern corner.

In the course of this book I shall refer more than once to the deplorable New England situation. I have referred just now to the fearful delays to freight originating there in the last fairly normal period of private operation, giving full heed to the fact that many if not most of these delays occurred outside of the actual New England territory, in order to emphasize the absolute unpreparedness to-day of our national railroad structure should great freight traffic demands be made upon it once again. In a merely introductory chapter I cannot expatiate at length upon the reasons that have led to this bad condition nor attempt to give the methods by which it may possibly be corrected. I merely am trying to paint in brief a picture that has all too few high lights. In the course of this book I shall attempt gradually to fill in some of the details.

All these things, and many others too, are upon the face of our present railroad situation in this country. When one goes beneath the surface matters are even worse. If one is a security-holder in rails he does not have to study Wall Street reports to see the saddening decline in dividend payments—either average or cumulative. It is he who long ago began to smell the rat. And the news that in the railroad the employer and the employee have been slipping further and further apart until a seemingly unbridgeable gulf has come to exist between them, that the executive personnel of our railroads of to-day is growing on in years with little or none to replace it, that no steps whatsoever are being taken to bring our railroad structure up to the necessities of to-day—to say nothing of to-morrow—is not news to him.

Perhaps the most pathetic of all these declines is that of the fine tradition of American railroading—the thing which in war days we learned to call morale. It was that tradition that used to make the farmer’s boy, as he stood in the field and watched the express sweep by, yearn to become a railroad president. In a less romantic and far more concrete form it enabled the old-time railroaders to fight against fearful conditions at times—against the blizzards of midwinter in the north, the blazing midsummer of southern deserts, flood, pestilence—come what might, that old-time railroader was ready for it.

It was the survival of that tradition, the fine fiber of its long-created morale, that enabled our railroads to make such a fine war-time performance. And it is its lessening, the gradual passing of the old-time railroader with none of his caliber to replace him, that is one of the tragedies of our railroad situation of to-day.

To Americans these things still will come as more or less of a surprise. They may have felt themselves fairly remote from actual railroad responsibility. They may have been depositors in the saving-banks downtown or holders of policies in the insurance companies, and yet have quite forgotten the millions of dollars of railroad securities in the strong-boxes of these great fiscal institutions. The financial ramifications of the railroad as well as its social and commercial ones are far-reaching indeed.

Once again, it is because of this intertwining of the railroad with the every-day life of the American community in its every phase and relation that the growing seriousness of its present predicament becomes a matter of so large national import. Our transport problem is no academic matter. It is very real, very human, very close to every one of us. I did not overstate when I said that the railroad to-day was life itself to us. And because it is life, our life if you please, its present serious problem is very much our business.

If we should go back and begin at the beginning we should find our American railroads in their beginnings small individual units, in many cases personal properties, like a store or a bank or a factory, and seldom correlated. Even the gages of our pioneer roads did not always agree, and in at least one case purposely so. The early builders of the Erie felt that by laying down a six-foot gage for their enterprise they would succeed in keeping their freight-cars and other equipment on their own property and under their own eyes. In this purpose they succeeded admirably. They also succeeded in keeping the freight-cars of other railroads, bringing valuable interchange merchandise, off their rails, with the eventual result that that railroad, twenty years after it was first laid down, was forced at great trouble and expense to bring its track to the standard width.

There was much that was crude and experimental about those early roads—a condition that was of course bound to exist. The traveler who went abroad upon them quickly became aware of all this. In the beginning he would change cars four or five times between Albany and Buffalo; and when fifteen or sixteen years later the railroad had extended itself all the way out to Chicago there were three or four more changes to be made. To-day a solid train from New York or Boston to Chicago or St. Louis is so much a part of our regular order of things as to cause no comment whatever. Yet even to-day one cannot ride across the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific without a change of cars—that is, not in the United States. In Canada he can do it quickly, easily, comfortably. Of which much more in good time.

The lack of convenience in the handling of freight was equal to if not greater than that in the handling of passengers. Of through routes there were none. Freight bound from five hundred to a thousand miles or more was repeatedly transferred and retransferred. The fact that until the late seventies two such important links of the important New York-Chicago routes as the former Lake Shore and the New York Central and Hudson River railroads had gages varying a little more than an inch, and so necessitating an elaborate mechanism at Buffalo for the transfer of the trucks beneath the freight-car bodies, shows the fearful lack of rail correlation everywhere across the land. Indeed it was hardly a decade before, that a state of near civil war had been precipitated at Erie, Pennsylvania, by the efforts of the Lake Shore railroad to standardize its gage through that town. The townsfolk, urged and led forward by local hotel-keepers and bus-drivers, had stoutly resisted the change.

In railroad rate-making and accounting of every sort conditions were even more chaotic. There were no standards. You could hardly expect a group of several hundred widely separated and highly individualistic railroads to have uniform bookkeeping practices when in many instances there were not enough standards in the building of their cars to enable them to be coupled together into a single train.

And yet with all of this wretched system, or lack of any system whatsoever, those little railroads of yesterday had many, many things in their favor. Their very individuality was an asset. The fact that they were owned and operated by men who lived upon their lines or very close to them was a still greater asset. The railroad executive of those days understood from first-hand knowledge and intimate personal contact the problems as well as the opportunities of the communities that he was trying to serve. And a third and still greater asset was the close personal relationship that he might enjoy with his employees. On a railroad owning from twelve to twenty locomotives he might know, and almost invariably did know, not only each of those engines individually but the men who ran them. In fact in those days it was customary for a locomotive to be named and to be assigned to a permanent crew of engineer and fireman, who immediately began to take a surpassing pride in the upkeep of their craft—in keeping her boiler black and shiny and her brasses and her nickel-work gleaming like new.

In these days the brass and the nickel and all the rest of the former gay trimmings have departed from the locomotive. Its boiler is no longer shiny. On the average American railroad, locomotive upkeep has become an all but forgotten art. The names and the individuality have gone from its engines. They are assigned to crews out of the roundhouses in a very systematic and utterly unsentimental way. Yet something very definite has been lost.

You could scarce expect a modern railroad president whose system may own three or four thousand locomotives to know any considerable number of the men who operate them. Yet here is the loss. On that little road of yester-year the president not only knew his engine crews by name—generally calling them by their first names—but his conductors, his station-agents, his telegraphers too. And knowing them, understanding them, working with them in almost every case, there was no labor-union problem to confront him. There were no unions then for the simple reason that there was no necessity for them. The labor-union upon the railroad with all of its problems for the management came definitely as an effect of its super-consolidation. And the railroad tradition began to fall.

Even after the first steps in the inevitable consolidation of our various lines had begun, when for instance the six railroads in the three-hundred-mile stretch between Albany and Buffalo had been merged into the first New York Central, this intimate sense of personal relationship remained for a long time.

The statue of William Bliss, president of the Boston and Albany railroad, which stood for many years in the lobby of the old Kneeland Street Station in Boston, typified it. When the Boston and Albany was the Boston and Albany it was the pride not only of its employees but of all New England. But when, in accordance with the general railroad practice of the moment, the Vanderbilts took it over upon a long lease and painted out the old name, placing “New York Central” upon the cars and locomotives, New England rose in its anger, and it was not appeased until a shrewd executive, going to Boston from New York, reversed the new order of things and painted the beloved old name back again upon the equipment. After which serenity ruled once again along the lines of the “Albany,” as the Boston people to this day love to call it.

What’s in a name? More than you can imagine. I asked a shrewd brotherhood man once what the New York Central had sacrificed in operating efficiency when it had chosen to paint the names “Lake Shore,” “Michigan Central,” and “Big Four” from its western constituent lines, and he said that he guessed—it really is anybody’s guess—that 50 per cent. would be about right. The Pennsylvania system, with a great deal of real wisdom and long vision, not many months ago decided to divide itself into four large regional operating divisions, all to be known however under the general title of Pennsylvania System. Yet an old passenger conductor with whom I have ridden these great many years between New York and Philadelphia confessed to me his great personal regret at the passing of the fine old name, “Pennsylvania Railroad.”

“I feel as if I had buried an old friend,” said he. So felt others, and a little later the Pennsylvania dropped the “system” from its official name and came back as the good old Pennsylvania Railroad once again.

A few miles further south the people are still grieving over the loss of the “Cumberland Valley,” one of the earliest railroads of the land—incidentally a Pennsylvania constituency and one which until the recent change had held its name and its individuality. Across the land the thing repeats itself again and again. Away up in the northwestern corner you will find people to-day lamenting the renaming of their chief railroad system into the Union Pacific.

“We were proud of the name ‘Oregon-Washington Railway,’” said one of the really big men of that community not long ago. “It was a good railroad and we felt that in no small sense its goodness reflected that of this particular corner of the U. S. A.”

If this feeling comes to the patrons of these railroads how much more distinctly must it come to their workers? In subsequent chapters in a pleading for a division of our national railroad structure into shorter operating units, despite the ponderous suggestions of the Transportation Act, I am going to refer to the fact that in this country a half-dozen or so of the small railroads (“small” at least in a comparative sense) are the best operated and hence the most profitable lines in the land. And incidentally, despite the great tangle of red tape that the government system of railroad control has spun about them, they still enjoy comparatively friendly relations with their labor.

With the fundamental idea of railroad consolidation one can have no quarrel whatsoever. It was inevitable. It came logically and sequentially—in some ways before many folk were really aware of it. When a very few years after the close of the Civil War the merger of the Grand Trunk railroad was accomplished—a single system of nearly four thousand miles, stretching all the way from Portland, Maine, by way of Montreal and Toronto to Detroit (a little later, on to Chicago)—America stood aghast. And yet what were four thousand miles to be compared with a single system of twelve thousand miles of main-line track—nearly one-twentieth of the total mileage in the United States, upon which moves one-seventh of the traffic of the nation? And yet here is but one of three or four big twelve-thousand-mile systems that our land holds.

In our Yankee version of the English language we dearly love that word “big.” Yet is it not now a fair time to ask what that bigness has really cost us? Granted that with a certain amount of real aid from the state it has given us through rail and through car routes of an amazing multiplicity—even though one cannot cross the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a through car, unless it be a freight-car—that it has simplified vastly our tariffs, our ticketing and our way-bill systems, it certainly is failing to-day in many, many instances to give us the high degree of service which our railroads themselves have educated us to expect. As I said at the beginning our transport service to-day is appreciably poorer and the rates a great deal higher than they were a decade ago, while the personnel problem of our railroads, in their executive ranks as well as in the ranks of the great mass of their labor, has become a matter of real alarm.

In this book I am going to give scant attention, if any, either to the scandals or to the triumphs of railroad finance for a half-century past in this country. Neither am I going to hark back to the evils of multiple and ofttimes conflicting regulation of our carriers by the Federal and the forty-eight State governments. Both have been pretty thoroughly treated over and over again. And so we shall assume, first that the railroads must be properly financed in order to function at all, and second that the principle of regulation by the state is so thoroughly established by this time as to be removed from the field of controversial argument; while the perplexing factor of many and ofttimes annoying conflicts between the State regulatory bodies, or between them and the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission, is being solved automatically by the steadily increasing usurpation of the individual rights of the various States by the centralized government at Washington.

The problems upon which I shall prefer to linger in this book are those that concern the physical side of our national railroad structure, future as well as present, its operating problems as well as its purely human ones, in these last including not merely the very human problem of the men and women who work upon the railroad but those who ride upon it or otherwise become its patrons. Granting the great importance of its questions of finance and of state regulation, I still feel that these last are of still greater portent to its future. With these properly solved, finance and regulation, to a large extent at least, will solve themselves. A national railroad structure well operated, with efficiency, with economy, with vision, with a broad human relationship, will not have to worry very much about the sale of its securities or about interference from fussy regulatory bodies. I think that this may be fairly set down as a fundamental fact in our argument.

As to what constitutes good operation, efficiency, economy, vision, broad human relationship, there will of course come more than one opportunity for an honest difference of opinion. It is in the sincere effort to gain the real current of forward-looking opinion upon these great questions of our national transportation problem that the writer for the last sixteen years has traveled many thousands of miles across the United States and Canada and has interviewed hundreds of people in railroad circles and out. For more than a dozen years past he has foreseen the present crisis. The coming of the World War hastened it a bit perhaps but the crisis was inevitable. A drifting policy, which ofttimes was no policy at all, followed by both the railroad and the various groups of persons that assumed to control it, has brought us almost to the edge of supreme catastrophe.

Go back with me once again to the beginning. Remember if you will that the railroad in the United States to-day is a little more than ninety years old. For eighty of those years it was in a state of steady and healthy development and progress. For the last ten or twelve of them it has not only been in a state of arrested development but narrowly approaching entrance into a state of decadence.

For eighty years the American railroad grew, and grew heartily. It financed its own growth and, consisting very largely of independent units, financed itself quite readily and as a rule locally. It kept its physical facilities, track and rolling-stock and all the rest of it, abreast if not ahead of actual traffic requirements. About the beginning of the present century, as presently we shall see, it began to feel the burden of greatly increased material costs, and of taxation also. It met these added costs, without any very visible addition to its revenues, by holding rather tightly down on its pay-roll and by adopting large operating efficiencies and economies. For a while these sufficed. They had to suffice. Appeals to the State and Federal regulatory commissions for increased rates were generally vetoed pretty promptly. Since the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 these regulatory boards had increased steadily in strength and in prestige. They felt their oats. And many did not hesitate to deny the applications of the roads for rate increases.

In 1906 something happened which in later years was to loom large in American railroad history. Congress, under a considerable pressure from President Theodore Roosevelt, passed the so-called Hepburn Bill, radically amending the Interstate Commerce Act and giving the I. C. C. an almost unbridled authority over railroad rates. The Interstate Commerce Commission could not itself authorize changes in the tariffs of the carriers but it could, and frequently did, veto any changes that the roads themselves saw fit to make.

Parenthetically it may be stated that even though this increase of power granted to the big Federal commission stirred up something of a competitive energy on the part of the State regulatory commissions to supervise more carefully than ever before the operation of the railroads through their respective bailiwicks, it also marked the long beginning of the end for the State boards; as far at least as our steam railroads are concerned. As I have said already, it is still another of our difficult national question-marks in which the old, old problem of States’ rights again shows its disagreeable face. Eventually it probably will be ended by shearing these State boards of virtually if not absolutely all of their supervision over interstate railroads; and the I. C. C. long since has shown marvelous ways in which this phrase may be extended to cover even the tiniest of apparent intra-state lines.

The passage of the Hepburn Bill put the first quietus upon the development of the carriers. Soon after, they began to cease large additions to their plants, even though the nation that they served went steadily ahead in its development, by leaps and by bounds. Yet for full ten years after 1906 the net earnings of the carriers continued to increase, in pace with the great growth of the nation and its industries in those selfsame years, until under the war stress of 1916 and 1917 they had come to the astounding total of almost a billion dollars a year “net operating income,” which under the rigorous accounting systems of the Interstate Commerce Commission signifies the amounts available for paying interest and dividends and making permanent improvements. In other words the deterioration of the national railroad structure had begun well before the maximum of net earnings had been reached, and by the end of 1917 had reached so serious a stage as to threaten a possible breakdown—I am using this last word advisedly—or at best a fearsome congestion and uselessness, in the face of one of the gravest national crises that the United States has ever had to meet.

Confronted with such a possibility President Wilson did not hesitate. He took no chances. With the supreme powers which were his as the war leader of the nation he reached out and took over the railroads and made them a direct agency of the national conduct of the war, under the name of the United States Railroad Administration, placing them under the direct and autocratic control of William G. McAdoo, secretary of the treasury and a man with not only a large knowledge of railroad finance but with a degree of success as an actual railroad operator—of the short but busy Hudson and Manhattan rapid transit lines connecting New York, Jersey City, Hoboken, and Newark.

There has perhaps been no single activity of the Wilson administration and its conduct of the war more seriously discussed and criticized than its control of the railroads. Even the gigantic expenditures and manifest blunders of the Shipping Board have been passed quickly by, to linger upon those of Mr. McAdoo and his fellows in the Railroad Administration. Yet when all has been fairly considered the Railroad Administration in its brief twenty-six months of life accomplished some very creditable things, and some not so creditable—some of these obvious, some others most unexpected and strangely outré. It was obvious for instance that a highly centralized, automatic, and supreme control could obtain large operating economies by completely obliterating competition and could by appealing to the traveler and the shipper in the role of a sadly harassed government, obtain a coöperation that no private agency might ever obtain.

Because the brief history of the Railroad Administration enters so very vitally into any consideration of the railroad situation in the United States both to-day and to-morrow, I shall come to it for the next chapter of this book. For the final paragraphs of this, consider once again the present lowered efficiency of our rail transport in this country. That it has been bettered in some of its phases since its relinquishment by the government I shall not deny; that it has been bettered in some of the most vital of them I shall dispute until the end. The proofs are too easily at hand. And so the reading of them may lead us into a really intelligent understanding of the situation.

What’s the matter with our railroads?

That question is being asked hundreds of times each day by business men all the way across the land—from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, from north to south and back again. These men, keen in their perception of many of the great and perplexing problems assailing the United States at this moment, frankly admit their lack of an understanding of the railroad one. They are torn by a vast conflict of statements and of opinions. Skilled propagandists succeed only in adding to the confusion. Apparently nowhere is an independent voice raised in the interest of the common citizen of America, the man who perhaps is not a wholesale user of our overland transport but who realizes from personal contact each time he makes a shipment of his goods or goes himself abroad into the land that our national railroad has suffered a vast deterioration within the last decade, that it no longer functions with anything like the high efficiency that it had attained say twelve or fifteen years ago.

What’s the matter with our railroads?

It is a fair question, and one that demands a fair answer. Why should not our railroad structure in the United States to-day be rendering service at least as good as that which it rendered but ten or twelve years ago? Is it man failure, either in the lists of the rank and file or in those of the executives? Is it, as has been charged frequently, interference by the Federal and State governments or, to put it in a gentler fashion, over-regulation by these same agencies? Is there lack of intelligence or vision or human understanding? If so, just where are these lacks?

It is to the answering of these questions that the writer puts his sixteen years of intimate and personal study of the American railroad and, as he has just promised, takes up that problem on April 5, 1917, the day that the United States of America officially entered the World War overseas.

CHAPTER II

Long before the clear Washington morning had broken which succeeded that stormy April evening of 1917 when the United States first entered the World War, the railroad executives themselves had been feeling that there would need to be correlated and coöperative effort to make the rail transport system of the country adequate to meet the new and added burden to be laid upon its already sadly bended back. Not many weeks after that terrible August, 1914, the United States was feeling the reflection of the world disturbance, although feeling it in some unexpected ways. In August, 1914, few people in this country if any dreamed of the tidal wave of industrial production that was soon to all but overwhelm us, when Bridgeport turned (almost overnight, it seemed) from a sleepy Connecticut manufacturing town into an overcrowded metropolis wherein people by the hundreds slept nightly in the railroad station, and the new county almshouse was transformed into an overflow hotel; when Akron, Ohio, ran wild with prosperity, growth, and overcrowding; when drowsy old Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, became a bedlam of industry and Chester, Pennsylvania, the same; when Detroit, well used to rapid growth, now leaped ahead toward the million mark; and when so also in a large degree did Wilmington, Delaware, and Youngstown, Ohio, and Trenton, New Jersey, and Rochester and Schenectady, New York—dozens of other communities like them. Manufacturing plants worked night and day and doubled and trebled and quadrupled themselves in a matter of mere months; half-abandoned shipyards sprang into life and extension; mines were dug with a furious speed into the rich subsurfaces of mother earth—production everywhere. And everywhere the chief burden of all this was coming upon the back of the American railroad, and coming at a time when it could ill afford any overload.

As even a casual student of the situation easily understands, for the six or eight years before the advent of 1914 most if not all of the railroads of the United States had been in a period of serious retrenchment. Soon afterwards the beginning of the present and national increases in the cost of living had become an appreciable burden to them, not so much (as we shall see before we are done with this book) in their wages as in their cost of coal and other materials. They had endeavored to meet this increase in one expense in the conduct of their business by cutting down in other expenses. “Economy” and “efficiency” had become real catchwords to them. In both of these they accomplished much. At least so it seemed in 1914. Their economies up to that time, compared with the ones that have been achieved since then, were almost as nothing.

So the railroads were none too well equipped to meet the strain of greatly increased business that the war overseas thrust upon them. Their supply of locomotives and cars was inadequate. The track equipment upon which they ran their terminals and yards and their shop facilities were, if in good repair, at any rate in most cases no longer generous. And that prized possession of the American railroad of yesterday, the morale of its men, the thing that I shall call “the fine tradition of our American railroading” again and again and again before I am done with this book, was already on the wane.

So to an economic agent already sadly overburdened if not actually crippled was to be given also the serious and the urgent business of transporting soldiers and sailors and their munitions, a United States army of a size never before conceived, supplies in a vastness heretofore deemed incredible. Long before Woodrow Wilson’s signature was dry upon the dreaded declaration of war the War Department experts were making detailed plans for the enlistment, the training, the supply, and the transport of the new army that was to go overseas. They involved many things, most important among them the creation of thirty or forty great concentration and training camps and huge ports of embarkation.

To meet these needs the already swollen manufacturing industry of the land was spurred into fresh efforts of production. More factory buildings went up, more shipyards were established—we were talking about the “bridge of ships across the Atlantic” those days—more abandoned mines were put into activity once again.

All these things were a fearful burden upon a national railroad structure that was from the beginning inadequately equipped for a proper handling of them. Yet how did the national railroad structure meet this added burden set upon its badly bended shoulders? The answer is—like a good American citizen. Up to that April night, without a really efficient or concrete central body, it already had sought to create one. It took the ancient and somewhat archaic American Railway Association, shook new life into it, and on April 11, 1917—six days after the war declaration—established at Washington what was known as the Railroad War Board. For the personnel of this board the national railroad structure sought out some of the very best of its executives: Fairfax Harrison of the Southern railway, Hale Holden of the Burlington, Julius Kruttschnitt of the Southern Pacific, Howard Elliott of the Northern Pacific, Samuel Rea of the Pennsylvania, and Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio. The first five of these men were made into the active war board and immediately moved themselves to Washington where they set up a permanent headquarters. Mr. Willard already was prominently identified with the business of the organization of this country’s part in the World War as chairman of the Council of National Defense, which was then doing a very great work of hurried preparation for the conflict, but which President Wilson afterward saw fit to relieve of most of its power and responsibility.

At the request of the American Railway Association Mr. Willard became an ex officio member of the Railroad War Board and was in constant consultation with it. So did Edgar E. Clark, a valued member of the all-powerful Interstate Commerce Commission at that time and a veteran railroader of wide experience, having risen to the rank of conductor and in time become the head of the great brotherhood of that branch of railroading.

The Railroad War Board came into being committed to the idea of a single continental railroad in the United States as a war-time measure; please mark this fact for future reference. Indeed that efficient and economical idea had been in the heads of some of our practical railroaders for a good many years before the coming of the World War. But any steps that they might take toward it then seemed to bring them afoul of the Federal statutes—particularly the so-called Sherman Law—and in imminent danger of the penitentiary. Now, however, there seemed to be the faint ghost of an opportunity to gain some of the obvious practical advantages that naturally would inure from a centralized control of our national railroad structure.

Three great things, however, the War Board lacked. The first was the financial backing of the Government. No matter what broad plans for efficiency it might and did adopt—and that they were effective plans the statistics of their results most clearly show—the railroads lacked the financial resources to go into a market where rising labor and raw material costs were being reflected directly in tremendously increased prices for locomotives and cars and rails and every other what-not that goes to the making and maintaining of a railroad. On the contrary they watched the value of their securities drop as they listened to the demands of their employees for higher wages.

Beyond the War Board’s local authority, it had no real centralized control, no genuine supreme power. After all, it was but a group of men—big men, powerful individualists, each of them. They had been reared in powerful roads, roads of great traditions. They had been competitors, powerful competitors. Coöperation, at the best, was no easy pathway for them.

Remember always that the Railroad War Board lacked authority. It could not even compel its own member roads to fall in line and stay in line toward the formation of the single national railroad system. And as for the shipper, it could only go to him on bended knee and beg his coöperation. And of all the shippers the Government was perhaps the worst of all. It is our own beloved Uncle Samuel who is a most obdurate and unreasonable old fellow when he takes it into his head to become a patron of the railroad. If he is a passenger and in gold lace and khaki he may come into the train and demand that it be stopped and started to suit his own convenience. That frequently is done. And as a shipper he was forever letting his boys—Food and Fuel and Ships and a lot of others too—place priority orders upon their shipments, to the immense complication of the entire railroad situation.

The Railroad War Board began slipping in November, 1917. The hard early winter of that year finished the job. The inspectors of the Interstate Commerce Commission at various terminals and division points (themselves none too friendly to the War Board) began filing by telegraph their reports of delayed cars and trains, and the members of that commission, at the suggestion of the President, began framing a bill supplementing the measure of August, 1916, which had permitted him to take over the lines in case of a national emergency, and outlining the plans for the step as well as for the protection of the security-holders of the properties. The plan was in Mr. Wilson’s hands early in December and he decided that McAdoo—who seemed to stand in an impartial and aloof position from all the properties and who had not only a rapid transit electric railroad experience at least, but remarkable acumen in financial matters—ought to have the job. McAdoo sought to decline it. I honestly believe that he never wanted it. The President insisted. The weather grew more inclement, the railroad rod bent further than ever before. Then on the eve of Christmas something happened. A great American railroad stood in the shadow of bankruptcy. Other receiverships were to follow upon its heels. Such a calamity was unthinkable. The die was cast. The White House moved, and moved quickly. McAdoo accepted his new responsibility and on December 28, 1917, became director-general of more miles of railroad than any one man—even the late E. H. Harriman—had ever even dreamed of controlling.

William Gibbs McAdoo took hold of his new job with a pretty firm grasp. He said that he was going to “do things” and apparently he meant to keep his word. With one stroke of the pen he abolished the abominable priority orders and with another he doubled the demurrage charges upon freight-cars—two vastly important executive steps toward a bettering of the entire railroad situation. The rapidly retiring Railroad War Board, confronted by the increasing conditions of congestion upon the roads, at the eleventh hour sent an urgent request to the various lines that they at once reduce their passenger services at least (it had been suggested that their entire public service be suspended for several days)—suggestion which in some cases was acted upon with more enthusiasm than judgment. There was many a division superintendent who saw a chance to take a death-crack at that unprofitable, unhealthy, money-eating 11:08—or was it the 5:15? In other days a stern State commission probably had stood to forbid him, in the public interest, removing a train which might have had an average of seventeen passengers a day. Now the authority of the State commissions, even to a large extent of the all-powerful Interstate Commerce Commission, had largely been superseded.

The Pennsylvania, which for many years past has had the major share of traffic between New York and Washington, had asked a little time before to have its fastest express between the two cities, the almost internationally famous Congressional Limited, made an excess-fare train, like the Merchants’ Limited from New York to Boston or the Twentieth Century from New York to Chicago. The commission, on the very eve of McAdoo’s accession, refused. The road withdrew the world-famous train despite the fact that it was running to capacity and announced that thereafter all trains between New York and Washington would carry but one parlor-car each.

Now it happens that this route was and still is of tremendous commercial importance, not alone for the movement of freight but for the movement of men, big and little, in government service as well as in essential private business, back and forth between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and the great territory that lies behind all of these cities. McAdoo’s quick judgment saw the need of clean, comfortable, quick transit for these men and ordered the famous train back again, even though it did not then regain its historic name nor quite all of its parlor-cars, nor run at quite as brisk a pace as heretofore.

McAdoo is no fool. Even his bitterest enemies—and he has plenty of them—will admit that. His moves from the very beginning of his overlordship of the railroads were generally marked with extreme shrewdness. And although he does not coöperate well he showed himself possessed of a genius for organization as well as for coördination. Yet almost as soon as he stepped into the office on the ninth floor of the new Interstate Commerce Commission building that had been hurriedly set aside for the use of the director-general of the railroads, he impressed into service the various working subcommittees of the Railroad War Board, but courteously and promptly dismissed that Board itself.

With the Railroad War Board out of the way the director-general moved quickly toward finding a substitute for it. At the beginning he said that he was going to try to surround himself with the ablest and most experienced railroaders in the land—an advisory board, which would be in effect a railroad cabinet, divided so as to include a man from each of the great interests already concerned in national rail transport, one representing operation, another maintenance and equipment, another finance, another traffic, another public service and accounts, another law, still another labor.

Yes, labor. Labor at last was to sit in the high council of railroad transportation. That had a new sound in the game. Yet McAdoo was quick to include it in his plans. And at that time he added:

“I am putting in men of no partisan views—partisan neither to capital nor to labor. In every case I have tried to select men who will inspire confidence. I want men of broad vision.”

The man who dug the great tunnels under the Hudson River when every one else had pronounced the project as chimerical could hardly stand accused himself of any lack of vision. Moreover McAdoo’s selections in nearly every case justified his words. He began by choosing as his right-hand assistant and general adviser Walker D. Hines, an extremely able New York lawyer, who in the forty-seventh year of his life was chairman of the board of the Santa Fé. On the average road the chairmanship of the board of directors is likely to be a sort of sanitarium for retired executives. Not so with the Santa Fé. Its late president, E. P. Ripley, the man who was instrumental in bringing it out of bankruptcy and up to its place as one of the greatest single systems in the United States, ten or twelve years ago was seeking a young man who could represent the road in New York, and represent it with the proper authority. He found such a man in Hines, then barely turned forty, and he never regretted his choice. Moreover Hines, in a brilliant legal connection with the Louisville and Nashville before going to the Santa Fé, had begun to acquire his remarkable knowledge of railroad conditions in virtually every section of the land.

The Santa Fé has always had much good motive-power, human and mechanical. McAdoo chose two of this first class, Hines and Edward Chambers, its former vice-president in charge of traffic. These men formed the beginning of his advisory cabinet. To them he added gradually several others—Henry Walters of Baltimore, chairman of the board of the extremely sound and conservative Atlantic Coast Line; John Skelton Williams, controller of the currency, who had been not only the president but really the creator of the Seaboard Air Line; Carl R. Gray, at that time president of the Western Maryland railroad and now occupying a similar post upon the Union Pacific; and Judge John Barton Payne, who also had served as chairman of the Shipping Board and as secretary of the interior.

Offhand these looked like good appointments; in reality too they were good appointments—able men in every instance; men of the broadest experience. But the men on the inside—those who have a thorough understanding of the wheels within wheels in the working of the big national railroad machine—saw more in these appointments than a mere search for transport ability.

“Walters and Williams,” they said, “Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line. It’s a hard dig at Fairfax Harrison.”

They were referring of course to the brilliant young president of the Southern railway, who was the chairman of the Railroad War Board, constituted, you will remember, as a war measure by the railroads themselves. In that job, and against no small odds, Harrison had won a fair measure of success. He felt keenly the slap at him in the McAdoo selections; he felt another when he was virtually deposed from the control of the railroad which had been his great pride and ambition, and young Mr. Markham brought down from Chicago to be the McAdoo generalissimo of all the roads in the southeastern corner of the land at Atlanta. Yet that last thrust was hardly greater than the first, when the ranking heads of the two railroads which had been the hottest enemies of the Southern in that which it regarded peculiarly as its own territory were lifted to eminence, while the president of the Southern was permitted to retire to Richmond as merely its corporate head, without one atom of authority over the operation of his road.

Those who know Fairfax Harrison know how these two blows must have cut. He is a man of intense pride as well as patriotism, a railroader who almost plays the lone hand but plays it very well indeed. A gentleman to the core, born of the gentlest of Virginia blood and lineage—his father private secretary to Jefferson Davis, his mother a gifted American novelist, his brother one-time governor-general of the Philippines—his pride in his family has for years past been exceeded by his pride in the railroad which, as a logical successor to the late Samuel Spencer, he had been upbuilding. Fairfax Harrison himself is a literateur of no small merit. He has made translations of the classics, while to him has long been ascribed the composition of an essay in Latin on the proper carving of Virginia ham. Yet I dare say that in none of his literary excursions has he ever reached greater charm than in the booklet which he wrote eight or nine years ago on the tragic sacrifices made by the men of the Southern who strove to keep their road open and in operation during the terrific floods of 1913.

Yet Harrison was not the only man to be reduced menially as well as physically by the director-general of railroads. Carl R. Gray, himself one of the most lovable men in the business, was then president of the Western Maryland. He came to it from a high office with the ’Frisco. That railroad, originally a small local affair largely financed by the city of Baltimore and for many years terminating at Hagerstown in the Cumberland valley, had been built, largely by Rockefeller capital, through to Cumberland and Connellsville (by connection to Pittsburg), paralleling the main stem of the Baltimore and Ohio for virtually the entire distance. It was a real thorn in the side of the B. & O. Mr Gray was quickly elevated to a high post in the Railroad Administration. This was a distinct thrust at Daniel Willard.

It will be recalled that the distinguished figure of Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore and Ohio, loomed large in the Railroad War Board. Mr. Willard was doomed to feel the displeasure of official Washington. Just why, I never have been able to understand. He went to the service at the very outbreak of the war and gave himself unreservedly to Mr. Wilson and his associates. And at the very hour of the Armistice he was in army khaki, prepared to sail overseas to undertake the operation of the entire system of French railways, which were beginning to go down under their terrific burden of more than four years.

Yet Mr. Willard’s reward for all of this was removal from the actual operation of his road. Samuel Rea, the president of the Pennsylvania, suffered a similar fate. Yet this was not all. An official order was sent out from Washington to the effect that these presidents were to be deprived of the use of their official cars—the phrase “private-car” long since has come into disrepute; it smacks too much of junketing. A fairly circumlocutious method was offered by which these gentlemen could occasionally avail themselves of their cars. They declined to avail themselves of so patronizing an offer. Mr. Rea’s car finally was assigned to an operating officer of the Railroad Administration; Mr. Willard’s gathered dust for two long years in a corner of the train-shed of Camden Station, Baltimore.

Mr. McAdoo’s answer to the quiet but strenuous protests that went to the supreme authority at Washington against his treatment of Mr. Willard and Mr. Rea was extremely disingenuous. He disclaimed personal feeling and said that his act was the following out of an established policy. Officially that policy was thus stated in his own words: