Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 14

This same situation is being repeated to-day in the State of New York, where more than $100,000,000 already is being expended in the creation of some eight thousand miles of highway, which already is being ground to pieces under the heavy wheels of the motor-truck. Against this highway improvement are issued bonds with an average life of fifty years. The road, used as a freight line, goes to pieces in seven or eight years. The result is a financial _impa.s.se_ that even a schoolboy should be able to fathom.

What is true of Ma.s.sachusetts and of New York is equally true of California or Ohio or Pennsylvania or New Jersey or any other State that has gone to great trouble and expense to upbuild an elaborate system of improved highroads for itself. And the roads are not alone too lightly built, but in a majority of cases they are entirely too narrow for heavy motor-truck traffic. To this last almost any motorist can testify. He can contribute almost numberless personal experiences of trying to pa.s.s these bulky box-cars of the highway-box--cars which, in about nine cases out of ten, really have no business there.

For do not forget that one of these biggest motor-trucks does not carry, or should not be permitted to carry, more than five tons of freight upon the public highroad, while a really good freight-train upon the railroad will carry all the way from three thousand tons upwards, and with a working crew of, at the most, six or seven men. To carry this minimum bulk of merchandise in five-ton trucks would entail the services of six hundred trucks and at least six hundred men. To this statement one of my friends, who is a real enthusiast in regard to motor-trucks, takes vigorous exception:

"That isn't a fair comparison," he sputters. "How about the other men who work the railroad--the despatchers, the shop-forces, the gangs of trackmen--all of them?"

To which I reply: "How about the gangs that keep up the highway?" The fact that the motor-truck operator does not directly pay the wages of these men does not mean that he, or some one else, does not pay them indirectly, through taxes. And garage and shop-costs are quite as much a part of the cost of upkeep of the motor-truck as of the locomotive.

It seems to me, however, that we are beginning to miss the real point and pith of the thing. Let us grant the motor-truck some of the obvious things that are in its favor: the vastly increased proportionate energy of the internal combustion engine over that of the steam locomotive, no matter what may be its fuel; the flexibility and economy of the unit over that of the electric motor in districts and upon lines of comparatively light volume of traffic. These advantages the motor-truck has already shown where it is given the opportunity of a well-paved highroad. Upon a bad road there is little economy in its use. It thrives best upon the roads which were built, primarily at least, for the comfort of the pa.s.senger automobile.

But suppose we improve upon that well-paved highroad. There is not a concrete nor an asphalt highway in the world that is comparable with the polished surface of the smooth steel rail. The tractive power of any unit increases vastly when it is used--often as high as twenty-five times.

In other words, and to drop simile, we take off the expensive rubber tires of the motor-truck and subst.i.tute for them the steel, f.l.a.n.g.ed wheels of the railroad-car or locomotive. Presto! We have a completely self-contained locomotive far lighter than the lightest practicable steam locomotive and running at about a 35 per cent. power economy, while with that locomotive we combine the freight-car or the pa.s.senger-car, or both.

"If it were not for the gasolene-motor unit I should not be able to operate this little road to-day," says the general manager, superintendent, and all-around Pooh-Bah of a short-line up in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania.

I know precisely what he means. His oil comes from near-by wells. He buys it at a great economy. His good-sized truck--it will carry seven or eight tons of freight or pa.s.sengers--is enabled to make six round-trips a day over twelve miles of line at far less cost than a small locomotive and train would involve for but two round-trips a day. In other words he has tripled his service, with inevitable beneficial results to the pa.s.senger-traffic of the little road, and has made real savings in his operating costs. A road which otherwise would have been added to that appalling total of abandoned railroad mileage for 1921 has been saved, to the great benefit of the communities that it serves.

Not long ago I rode from Kane to Mount Jewett, twelve miles across the hills of that same northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. I wanted to catch the northbound flyer of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg railroad out of the latter town. Between Kane and Mount Jewett there stretches a rather remote branch of one of America's largest and best operated railroads. It was in the dead of winter and I should have preferred to ride upon a railroad train. But one train a day and missing the important connections gave me no opportunity whatsoever. I was forced to ride in a motor-bus upon a slippery ice-coated highway. Twenty-three other persons, the most of them also trying to catch the northbound flyer of the B. R. & P., were doing the same thing. The bus made four trips a day in each direction and the driver said that it was not only good business but steady. He charged seventy-five cents for the ride in each direction, which was something more than six cents a mile. A good many people complain at paying more than 3.6 cents a mile upon the rail, but they are not usually short-haul riders.

Here was a steam railroad losing its traffic by default. Obviously it might not be able to put a steam train on that little run--in all probability a worn-out engine with two worn-out and dirty cars--and make a successful opposition to the motor-bus, but I think that with its own well-planned motor-unit operated on frequent headway and in connection with the trains at its terminals it would regain for the railroad a large portion of the lost traffic. Unfortunately, as I have said, this was a remote branch line. Yet the president of the railroad of which it is a branch has much pride in the thought that he loses nothing in the efficiency of the operation of his property because it is merely widespread. He honestly and sincerely is trying to build up its service, to repair the inroads made into it during the period of Federal administration. He has done wonders in a few short months. But, largely because he is but a man and not a super-man, he cannot know everything about his remote branches of this sort. He cannot even build up an organization that will know it. No president of a 4,000-mile railroad ever can. Which is one of the large evils to be charged forever against the absentee landlordism method of operating our railroads.

In a certain Eastern State there is a small railroad of about 130 miles in length which narrowly escapes being known as a real short-line railroad.

The fact that the road's annual earnings barely exceed a million dollars just bring it within the Interstate Commerce Commission's cla.s.sification of Cla.s.s I railroads. It traverses a rough mountain region. Its business is largely seasonal. In the summer it hardly can secure enough pa.s.senger-cars and locomotives to handle its tourist business. In the winter it can hardly find enough pa.s.sengers to justify the operation of two small trains over the line, while at all times its freight traffic is inconsequential.

When first I came to know this property a dozen years or more ago it operated three pa.s.senger-trains a day the year round over the entire system--the main line and two branches. But that was before the day of the compet.i.tive motor-buses and the improved highways that now parallel almost every mile of its trackage and for which, as a heavy taxpayer, it has contributed rather liberally. Its local fare at that time was fixed at three cents a mile, although a State law compelled it to sell mileage books at the rate of two cents a mile.

Both the compet.i.tive motor-buses and the compet.i.tive privately owned and operated automobile have gradually decreased its pa.s.senger earnings, although the resort locality that it serves has grown steadily in prestige and patronage during this last dozen years. It met the compet.i.tion of the gasolene locomotive upon the highroad, how? By cutting its all-the-year train service to two trains a day and gradually raising its fare to five cents a mile. People who have to go from one end of its main line to the other, about 110 miles, are still likely to patronize it. The motor-bus is hardly more effective in the long haul than is the motor-truck. And in the really bleak days of winter its snug little pa.s.senger-cars, well lighted and warmed, have more appeal than the poorly lighted and heated motor-buses that traverse the State highway.

Yet that is about all. At all other times it is the motor-bus that has the prestige and the popularity. It reaches into the heart of the towns it serves; the little railroad's pa.s.senger-stations are not well located--not in every instance, at any rate. It stops to receive or discharge its pa.s.sengers at virtually any point along its route. It is clean. And in summer it is not only cleaner but cooler than the steam train.

But suppose that this little railroad should devise or find a good gasolene-unit pa.s.senger-bus and, fitting it with f.l.a.n.g.ed wheels, operate it five or six times a day, over its main line at least. It might be compelled to retain one steam train a day in each direction because of the milk, the mail, and the express business along the route. The other four trips could easily be made with the gasolene-motor units.

At the outset there would be real frequency of service, a very great point in attracting any volume of pa.s.senger business. A commercial traveler who goes up its main line to-day and who sought to do any business even in the fairly large towns along the route could hardly make the trip in one direction in less than a week. The result is that most of the drummers to-day have their own automobiles and make the round-trip in three or four days. With the two-trains-a-day service they frequently found that they could complete their business in a village within the hour, after which they would have to wait perhaps five or six hours before the train came along which would carry them to the next town. Now they can clean up their business in a village, whether it takes fifteen minutes or an hour and fifteen, and be off to the next town as soon as they are done with all of it, while a real volume of traffic is lost to the railroad.

A service of five or six trains a day, such as I have just suggested, would bring a great part of it back. The inconvenient location of this small railroad's pa.s.senger-station in its chief town easily could be overcome by having its gasolene-unit train stop at the princ.i.p.al street crossings through the community and a real flexibility of service rendered. The fact that the railroad's gasolene-car was a little heavier, a little warmer, a little better lighted than its compet.i.tor of the paved highway would be a talking point in its favor. Added to that the facts that the gasolene motor-car of the steel highway is protected at all times by the f.l.a.n.g.e of the rail--skidding is not an infrequent accident upon the paved road--and by the telegraphic order--collisions are not unheard-of things upon the State highways--and operated by a skilled and trained employee are other talking points that would have quick appeal to any man of advertising sense. We shall talk of these last possibilities again when we come to discuss those of selling transportation. In the meantime bear them in mind as strong arguments in favor of the possibilities of the individual small railroad or small branch of the big railroad. If these feelers wither and die to-day, it can only be the fault, in most instances, of the men who control them--at least of their lack of far-sighted vision.

It could be put down fairly as a lack of far-sighted vision of our steam railroaders, who at last are beginning to see the economic possibilities of the gasolene-unit pa.s.senger-car these days, if only to supplement the present extravagant steam trains upon their local lines and turn no point nor part of their economy toward the benefit of their patrons. In other words the point that I have just made of the mountain railroad, which could bring back its traffic by using its gasolene-units to make six trips a day instead of the present widely-s.p.a.ced two trips of the steam trains, applies with equal force elsewhere across the well-built portions of the country. Such a method at first sight will not appeal to the average steam-railroad operating man, schooled as he is to bow deep before those twin G.o.ds of the train-mile and the car-mile. Increased train-miles?

Impossible. Not impossible. I will go further and say that it will be quite impossible for the average steam road to make any headway whatsoever against motor-bus compet.i.tion until it increases its train-miles, at least, radically. Frequency of trains is, as we have seen, the real test of pa.s.senger service. The gasolene-unit has made it possible to meet this test and still achieve real operating economies. It will be a vast pity if it is not installed generally, with this high service purpose in view.

For the moment we have been concerning ourselves with the pa.s.senger opportunities of the motor-truck mounted upon the steel rail. Its freight opportunities are not less impressive. When with the inevitable correlation of the container (the huge steel packing-box for the prompt handling of package and other freight) the f.l.a.n.g.e-wheeled motor-truck upon the branch-line is made a perfect supplement to the box-car upon the main line, we shall have something that begins to approach really efficient modern transport upon our American railroad.

Mr. Cabot in his "Atlantic" article upon the New England situation, from which I have already quoted, draws attention to the obvious and striking a.n.a.logy between New England and Old England, both in the congestion of population and in the character of industry and of traffic, and then asks why it is that New England should not be served with the same form of railroad transportation with which Old England has been served these many years, and with great success. He draws attention to the futility of using huge box-cars, such as those that are used in the long-haul business of the central and western parts of the country, and criticizes sharply the employment of Western railroad executives in the New England territory--men who have been schooled particularly in the movement of long-distance freight.

Certain it is that Old England--every part of Great Britain--knows well the efficient handling of short-haul freight-traffic. The ten-ton goods-wagon (at the most, fifteen) of the British railway is a small unit, easily handled, if necessity arises, by a horse or two at a country station. It is an inexpensive unit too; and being inexpensive England is able to have over a million freight-cars for her 25,000 miles of line as against but a little more than two million for 265,000 miles of railroad in the United States, which makes much for the flexibility of her railway freight service.

Moreover the freight-traffic of Great Britain is virtually an overnight service. Ordinary package-freight over there moves with much of the celerity and ease of the express in this country. Goods despatched from London terminals in the late afternoon are at Bristol or Manchester or Liverpool or even Glasgow and Edinburgh the next morning. While it is obvious that if the high-speed gasolene pa.s.senger-unit is introduced to any large extent in this country, we also shall have to speed up the freights that are interlarded between them, which will naturally mean the larger use of a high-speed and improved steam locomotive of comparatively moderate weight, and the use of comparatively small swift freight-trains, we shall have to abandon, for this sort of service at least, our American fetish of the excessively long and the excessively heavy freight-train.

For the moment we have permitted ourselves to drift away from the gasolene-motor unit upon the railroad track. Up to this point I have stressed the stripping of the rubber-tired wheels of the ordinary heavy motor-truck and the subst.i.tution of f.l.a.n.g.ed steel wheels in their place.

There is a compromise to this plan which is at least worth a pa.s.sing paragraph of attention.

Down in the Imperial valley of southern California there was built a dozen years or more ago a small steam railroad, eleven miles in length, connecting the somewhat isolated village of Holtville with the Southern Pacific at El Centro. It eked out a fair sort of existence until the coming of the automobile truck and the improved highway began to cut sadly into its earnings. Its little pa.s.senger-train then found that it could not compete with the motor-bus. Its earnings fell to nothing. The situation was most discouraging. It looked as if the little railroad, into which a considerable amount of capital had been poured, would have to be abandoned.

It was not abandoned. Some inventive genius over in Los Angeles devised a motor-truck with a different sort of wheel than had ever been seen before.

Inside there were the f.l.a.n.g.ed wheels for the contact upon the steel rail, and, just outside of these, heavy rubber-tired wheels for use upon the highway. The problem of that little road, both for freight and pa.s.senger traffic was solved. No longer must it await the pa.s.sengers and goods who found their way to its station at thriving and growing El Centro. Its combination trucks took the city streets very easily; they could go to any hotel or merchant's door, receive pa.s.sengers or freight, and then, making their way to the railroad terminal, by a simple mechanical device mount the rail and go hurrying off to Holtville, with the tractive advantage of the steel rails over even the well-paved dirt road that already I have shown you. Moreover it became no longer necessary for the road to go to the expense of train-despatching. If two of its "trains" met midway on the line, by the use of this same ingenious mechanical device, one of them could remain on the rails and the other go to the earth surface alongside of it. This then became the ordinary operation of the line, that trains going east upon the track had the right to the rails, while those going west would take to the dirt. What could be simpler?

The flexibility of the gasolene-motor unit is indeed astounding. It is not inconceivable that a device such as I have indicated should be so extended as to permit a motor-truck or pa.s.senger-car unit to go far beyond the limits of the rail terminals. In other words, why should Holtville be the terminal of the Holtville interurban? If there is a load of freight eight miles to the east of it, why not send the "train" on the highway for that eight miles to let it pick up the freight.

The correlation of the highway with the steam railroad is a topic of almost unending fascinations. By it the branch lines of our big roads and the main stems of our small ones may be continued almost indefinitely.

There undoubtedly are many cases where it would be both more practical and more profitable for the railroad to abandon the branch line entirely and use in its stead the nearest parallel highway. Into this possibility there enters, of course, the question of the congestion of that parallel highway. One of the arguments that I have just used for the placing of the motor-truck upon the railroad track is to give a much needed relief to the highroad. Yet here, as in so many other places, one cuts the cloth to meet the situation. In one instance it might be most advisable to use the highroad as a supplement to the railroad track; in another it would be a great mistake.

This entire prospect has vast ramifications. In Great Britain the railways already are moving toward a use of the highroads in direct compet.i.tion with the trucks and steam lorries of the independent traders. Their moves are not being made without opposition. At this moment it is difficult to tell whether or not they are to be given permission to go to the highroads themselves and there fight it out with their newest compet.i.tors. But whether they gain this point or lose it, the fact will remain that they show a real vision in the very suggestion. To an impartial observer it seems as if a railroad which almost always, if not absolutely always, is the largest taxpayer in any community would have certain inherent rights in the public highway which it is taxed so heavily to support.

But whether or not ideas such as these are practical things or merely the fancies of a dreamer, the fact remains that our American railroads, obsessed by the possibilities of through or long-haul freight traffic, have as a rule ignored the vast extensive possibilities of the short-haul, which may be set down as one of the d.a.m.nable heritages of our compet.i.tive railroad system. They do this intensive cultivation of traffic far better in France, which long ago discarded the compet.i.tive principle as both foolish and extravagant. Let me ill.u.s.trate.

Not many months ago I found myself in the little, obsolete Atlantic fishing-port of Les Sables d'Olonne, in the Vendee country almost half-way between St. Nazaire and La Roch.e.l.le. Up to the stout stone quays of that picturesque enclosed harbor there ran three types of railway, each of them rather typically French. The first was the standard-gage (four feet, eight and one half inches) branch of the State Railway system which connected Les Sables d'Olonne with a main line, and so, with all the rail lines of the rest of France and of Europe. There was a sixty-centimeter (twenty-four inches) narrow-gage also at the railway terminal and the quays; as well as a third at the harbor-side of but forty-centimeter gage.

This last interested me tremendously. Its tiny rails, s.p.a.ced a bare eighteen inches apart, seemed so inefficient; and yet they told me that it had been in successful existence for many years past.

"It is the _poisson_ line," they explained.

"The what?" I asked.

"The road that reaches out along the beaches and brings the fish into the big ten-ton cars that await it here at the railway terminal," was the further explanation. I understood. That was correlated rail transport--the tiny engine (it was hardly larger than those that are operated for the delectation of children at country fairs) and its little cars were an active and efficient feeder for the big main railroad system of the republic. Intensified transport, in its largest sense.

Later that day, as we drove from Les Sables d'Olonne, we rode for a long distance alongside the sixty-centimeter line. Its rails were placed inconspicuously in the greensward beside the national highway. It followed that highway for many miles, dipped and rose when the highroad dipped and rose, and when the highway came to a culvert or a narrow bridge the little railroad, without hesitation, curved its way and shared the narrow bridge. At one town we met the train--there was only one upon the line, going up in the morning and back again at night--but it had a stout and immaculate twenty-five-ton locomotive which hauled three or four light pa.s.senger-cars and six or seven cars filled with local freight.

Do not laugh. I know myself what this idea would be in the United States--a copper wire above the center of the track, separate bridges at the little creeks and rivulets, rock-ballast perhaps, standard-gage, even private right-of-way and _big_ trolley cars--how we Yanks do love the sound of that word "big"!--running every hour up and down the line.

Economy? Nonsense. Why speak of the thing? We are rather proud of our interurban trolleys in many parts of this land. But the average interurban stockholder is not very proud of his holdings in them. We have seen the disaster that has come to some of them in New England. Few of them to-day are earning any money; in fact the greater part of them to-day are fighting bankruptcy, despite heavily increased rates and forced operating economies of a sizable nature. Many of these roads should never have been built, particularly where they paralleled existing steam railroads. That was a grave economic mistake for which we are now paying. The lines that led out from the steam roads should have been correlated years ago. That they were not was due generally to a very stupid pride that veiled itself as conservatism.

Yet these little French narrow-gage lines, if they have not made "big"

money, certainly have not lost. In the years before the coming of the World War they would generally average about 2 per cent. annually upon the investment. But this was not the point. Locally owned and managed they were not built primarily for profit but as a convenience to the communities that they served. Please remember this. In Paris I once found a man who had built many miles of these small railroads.

"Cheap?" said he, in reply to one of my questions. "Of course they are cheap. That is the point of it. They rise and fall with the contour of the highroad because that saves expensive grading work. But you will notice that the highroads that they follow almost invariably are in the fairly level portions of France, and so the grades are not such that a well-designed locomotive, even if a fairly small one, cannot traverse them without difficulty. The lines curve sharply to make the highway bridges--but separate bridges would cost money and our narrow-gages primarily are cheap railroads. And our little locomotives are not bothered with the curves. They are extremely well-designed for their own purposes, and so when our line makes a right angle from one highroad to another, because a long easy curve would mean a separate right-of-way, possibly tearing down houses into the bargain, our well-designed locomotive brings ten or twelve or even thirteen loaded cars around that sharp turn in the highroad with little or no difficulty."

The Frenchman rose and came around his office table, pointing his finger in my face.

"Don't you see? Can't you understand?" he went on. "We have saved that immensely costly thing that you Americans call 'overhead.' The owners of one of these little roads of ours have not tied up a small fortune for every mile of them in grading and bridge-work and copper wire and power-houses. Our locomotives are small--always well-designed, mind you, and so not so very expensive, yet only one or two or three are required for the entire service of our average narrow-gage. The best of these cost far less than the smallest dynamos, to say nothing of car-motors, while the poorest of them will haul our little cars."

There is a big lesson for America in these little roads. All of our highways are not improved highways; only a very small proportion of them are, in fact. It will be many, many years before any large proportion of them are completed. One shrinks at the very contemplation of so vast a task, while, as I have said, there is a growing disinclination against the use of our new paved roads as railroad tracks, particularly for heavy freight service. The most of them are too narrow; and even the wider roads are gradually pounded to pieces by the all-year use of ponderous motor-trucks. Remember that the average life of the best of the highways in the State of New York, where the manufacture of these roads has reached a high degree of perfection, is but seven or eight years at the most.

Suppose that we were to begin the business of laying down light narrow-gage lines along many of the important highroads of the United States--not parallel to our standard railroads but in every case feeding in or out of them. They would not have to be more than twenty-four or thirty inches in gage and they could be built in the same efficient and economical way as those in France.

For pa.s.senger traffic roads these baby railroads would be as nothing. But for the handling of goods, particularly of farm produce, they would offer a rare opportunity. It is not every farmer that can afford to own a motor-truck; in fact if he were to do really sharp bookkeeping in regard to such a mechanism he would find that it is only the large farmer who really can afford its use, not alone from the point of view of the cost of its upkeep but also because of its "overhead." Understand that for such farmers a small narrow-gage railroad as this--the feeder to a branch or main line of some standard steam railroad, running all the way from ten to twenty miles in length, inexpensively laid down alongside the highway and equipped with a single small locomotive (with perhaps one held in reserve against emergencies) and from one hundred to two hundred small four-wheeled flat-cars--would be a boon, and the capital outlay would be comparatively slight. It ought to be built and operated by the farmers that it would serve. With never more than a single train upon the line at one time, there would be no danger of collision, no necessity of a despatching system, while the method of operation would be simplicity itself.