Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 17

This may seem in itself a small matter, but much multiplied it comes to a real saving indeed. On a single important division of a single important freight-carrying railroad--the Susquehanna division of the Erie railroad, 140 miles of double-track--a careful test was made of the savings accomplished by the installation of electric block-signals within the first calendar twelvemonth after they had been put in service, supplanting old-fashioned manual block-signals. Over that division in a typical year there move the huge traffic of 2,322,070,451 ton-miles.

Under the manual block the year before, the Erie's train-despatching was by written train-orders sent by telegraph. The division was divided into two despatchers' districts, two men for each district, four men for the division, for each of the three eight-hour tricks, or twelve men for the twenty-four hours, in addition to two chief train-despatchers. Moreover the Susquehanna division had employed in the twelvemonth immediately preceding the installation of its automatic electric blocks 136 signalmen at forty-six intermediate stations who had been paid $94,752 on the eight-hour day basis. Even then it had sought to economize by closing down a number of its block stations at night to make a little saving on its pay-roll, even though the net result was to make its blocks excessively long in those hours and so slow up and greatly delay its train movement.

Contrast this with a despatchers' service of but six men--in addition, of course, to the two chief despatchers--for the entire division with no signalmen whatsoever (aside from the telegraph offices open at seventeen intermediate points instead of forty-six as of old, where the retention of an operator and the written train-order system was imperative), and we begin to see real savings. The Erie people took that first year of their automatic block operation and compared it with the twelve months immediately preceding when they had moved 2,137,868,274 ton miles of freight traffic over the Susquehanna division. With their new kink in scientific railroad operation they were able not only greatly to reduce their operating force but to increase their ton-miles per train from 254,054 to 274,217, a very considerable efficiency increase. In other words they not alone made the valuable saving in time from having fewer trains upon the line--the actual saving in that first year came to 697 trains--but an operating cost of $87,969. At the rate at which money was then worth, this was the interest on a capital investment of $1,759,380.

Project this to the entire main line of that railroad, 999 miles from New York to Chicago; remember that we have been considering but one 140-mile division of that main line, and savings begin to multiply. If the proportion of savings could be maintained the Erie would have been $630,000 ahead on its main line alone; if it could be carried to its branch lines too, the figure would run into a million dollars or more a year. Yet the Erie is less than a hundredth part of the route mileage of the railroads of the United States, of which a comparatively small part is yet equipped with automatic block-signals. To say that our carriers might save a hundred million dollars a year by the use of modern and scientific signaling alone would probably be a conservative guess. A million dollars a day, Mr. Justice Brandeis! It begins to look as if you had understated, not overstated the savings to be accomplished by our national transport.

We have by no means reached our limits in operating economies. That our practical railroaders, under the fearful spur of a terrific demand for great retrenchments, have done much is not to be denied. In some things, notably the creation of the big car, the big locomotive, and the big train, they not only have accomplished marvels but to-day they have probably approached the extreme limits of efficiency, if indeed they have not already actually pa.s.sed them. Recently they have increased the loading of the average freight-car and have speeded up its movement. On March 1, 1920, when the private operators took their roads back from the Government, they announced that they were going to try to make a "thirty-thirty" record--an average daily mileage of thirty miles (instead of the 22.3 which the United States Railroad Administration was then accomplishing) and an average loading of thirty tons (instead of the 28.3 tons which the Railroad Administration by almost superhuman efforts, including appeals to the patriotism of the shippers, had finally succeeded in reaching). Despite most unpropitious circ.u.mstances the railroad executives had virtually reached the mark that they had fixed for themselves when the industrial slump set in upon the land. And in a total movement of a million car-loads of freight a week (a fair standard for good business across the land) savings such as these are the equivalent of many new cars, particularly so at the times when our railroads find themselves short of freight rolling-stock. In an earlier chapter I showed how rapidly our total freight-car equipment has declined--in three years more than 125,000 cars. Yet the saving of but a mile a day in the operation of each car of our existing equipment is equivalent to the addition of 100,000 cars to it.

Our railroaders are expert already in the efficient use of the somewhat antiquated tools which they already possess. I have said long ago that man for man they are not excelled anywhere in the world in the small technical details of rail transportation. Their expertness was won in a hard school.

Since that day, fifteen or twenty years ago, when the running expenses of our carriers began their long uphill climb, these men have been forced to great operating economies merely to make both ends meet. They have gone the limit in these savings. Now they must have more tools, bigger tools, finer tools. They must have electrification, better signaling, newer and larger terminals. Remember all the while that if they do not have them, and have them soon, it will not be the railroaders who will suffer primarily. It will be the communities that they aim to serve. Bigger and more modern tools will serve, it is true, to bring vast economies, but they will also help bring the United States a better railroad service, which is a point never to be forgotten.

To many of these suggestions your typical banker would reply that they were fine on paper but that in reality they cost money, a commodity in which the average American railroad is sadly deficient these days.

Yet what better way to obtain the money to pay for them than to announce the decision to adopt them with the sweeping economies that would follow in their wake? If A. is the village grocer and B. the local capitalist, and A. wishes to borrow money of B., does he go to him and talk this way?

"I'm sorry, B. but I've been up against it a good deal lately; they've put a lot of new and unjust rules upon me that tell me just how I must run every detail of my business. And things are going to get worse. I don't see just how I am going to pull through with my worn-out equipment and all."

A. never talks that way, not if he has any real hope of getting money out of the financier. He is more likely to argue after this fashion:

"Times have been pretty bad with me, to be sure, but I feel confident that I see daylight ahead. I've got to get some equipment, expand my business along lines that seem pretty sure to win, and turn some new tricks in my trade. Here's one or two of them."

That is the sort of talk that generally brings confidence, and with confidence, hard-cash loans. Our railroads might try a hand at it. If they should come with some pretty definite plans for the extension of electrification upon their properties, the modernization of their terminals, a better correlation between their service and those of the carriers upon the highways, the real development of the container system, better signaling, and all the rest of it, they might command better credit. Such things have happened. It is not unlikely that they would happen again.

There is one economy, however, that requires little or no plant expenditure--only vision for its introduction. All this while and I have not even touched upon it, the supreme economy which our national transport system may yet hope to accomplish.

For more than three quarters of a century we have had a great G.o.d in our American railroad policy--when we have had an American railroad policy.

That G.o.d has been labeled "Compet.i.tion." That he is a false G.o.d I should not be rash enough to say, for he is a very popular one, whose dignity is not rashly to be trifled with. But like some other forms of monarch, no matter how popular they may seem to be, he is a very expensive piece of property. Heresy? Not a bit of it! Listen to me.

On the outskirts of Vancouver, British Columbia, two great railroad pa.s.senger-stations stand cheek by jowl. Each would easily serve a European city of half a million population. Stated in railroad terms it would not be difficult to operate from thirty to fifty pa.s.senger-trains each day in and out of either of them. Yet neither of these is the main pa.s.senger-station of Vancouver--that is the Canadian Pacific terminal down on the water-front, at which arrive and depart more than half of the trains that enter and leave Vancouver each weekday. At one of these two outer stations, that of the Great Northern, three trains enter and three leave each day: at its neighbor, that of the Canadian National, but two are operated in each direction. One can only guess at the overhead and operating coast for each pa.s.senger who uses these architectural extravagances. At the Union Station, in Washington, where monumental construction is a bit more justified, this cost for each through pa.s.senger is now thirty-four cents. The railroads that run in and out of our Federal capital must carry their pa.s.senger a considerable distance before they equalize and overcome this high terminal charge and begin to make a profit upon him.

It would be a matter of but slight cost and great economy to place a connecting track between those two Vancouver pa.s.senger-stations, consolidate the business in one, and abandon the other, as a pa.s.senger terminal anyway. It would have been a far greater economy never to have built either, but from the beginning to have operated the Great Northern and Canadian National trains in and out of the commodious and centrally located Canadian Pacific Station. A great capital outlay would have been saved.

Why was not this done, you ask? The answer is easy. Compet.i.tion.

But Vancouver is in Canada, you insist. Very well; we shall hark to the vagaries of the Canadian railway situation at another time. For this come back across the international boundary. Spokane is not in Canada. It is a handsome, well-built city across whose civic heart there lies the disagreeable barrier of three trunk-line railroads; parallel and from one to two blocks apart. The right-of-way and station of any one of them could easily have handled the business of the other two. And not only would a large capital outlay have been saved, but Spokane would have been spared the existence of two Chinese-wall embankments through her business center.

Compet.i.tion--a great G.o.d, indeed! It is compet.i.tion that keeps alive the farce of separate pa.s.senger terminals upon the harbor "moles" of Oakland, despite the fact that the trans-harbor ferry-boats that serve them use the same common terminal at the foot of Market Street, San Francisco.

Compet.i.tion makes two elaborate pa.s.senger terminals in Seattle do the work of one; keeps three stations alive and eating up overhead and operation in Los Angeles; runs to its nth degree of extravagance in the small city of Tucson, Arizona, where a magnificent edifice in a park--at first glance you would be sure to call it the town's Carnegie Library--serves as a competing pa.s.senger terminal for a railroad which runs but two pa.s.senger-trains a day in and out of it.

West, you say? All right, come East. Within the last two years there has been opened in the outskirts of the city of Richmond, Virginia, a very expensive and elaborate pa.s.senger-station development for which there was no call whatsoever. It is the so-called Union Station of the Atlantic Coast Line and the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac railroads and replaces the badly located and inadequate Byrd Street Station which they had used almost since the days of the Civil War. That Byrd Street Station deserved to be abandoned does not come into the question. The point is that there was no need whatsoever to build the elaborate new station away out in the outskirts of the Virginia city. For Richmond also had upon her Main Street a comparatively modern station already used by the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Southern railroads which, with a slight adaptation and enlargement, could easily have been brought to meet the needs of the two other roads entering the town.

Why was this simple step not taken? Why not the large capital outlay saved? Compet.i.tion. The Atlantic Coast Line felt that it could not have its trains entering and leaving the same station as its compet.i.tor in Richmond, even though it is doing that selfsame thing in Charleston, in Savannah, and in Jacksonville. Compet.i.tion; compet.i.tion and a little foolish pride.

"Pride; but not foolish," says the big railroad executive, who stands at my elbow and whose eyes fall upon these paragraphs. "It is this sort of pride, the pride built up from compet.i.tion, that long ago brought our American railroads to their high standards of service perfection."

A pretty theory that, but will it last? What is the actual compet.i.tion to-day between, let us say, New York and Chicago? They are two first-grade railroads of the highest type connecting these two chief cities of the United States and four more, of a second grade, yet in themselves quite excellent railroads. On each of the two first-grade roads there are five or six fine express-trains in each direction each day. Long ago we have seen in the pages of this book how each has one train making the journey in precisely twenty hours, to the exact minute, and how formerly these trains did the trip in eighteen hours, also to the precise minute. After the wise step of the lengthening of the schedules, these two American "super-trains"--I think that I may safely call them such--remained exactly the same on the two supposedly competing roads, despite the fact that the distance between New York and Chicago on the one is 911 miles and on the other 979. Why does not the Pennsylvania with its shorter route beat the New York Central on its schedules all the while? Is it because its mountain ranges take so much longer to traverse than the much advertised "water-level route" of the Vanderbilt system? Possibly, but I doubt it.

The real reason is that the schedules of all these so-called competing trains are regulated by agreement between the so-called competing roads.

There is a multiplicity of these agreements. The Pennsylvania has its own rails between New York and Buffalo, the two chief terminals of the original New York Central road, but it may not advertise to carry through pa.s.sengers between these two cities, in exchange for which the New York Central will not advertise to carry through pa.s.sengers on its own rails between New York and Pittsburg, the two chief terminals of the original Pennsylvania.

Compet.i.tion? It is a neat phrase.

Similar minimum pa.s.senger-schedule agreements rule the service between Chicago and the Twin Cities (St. Paul Minneapolis), Chicago and St. Louis, Chicago and Kansas City, St. Louis and Kansas City, Chicago and the Pacific coast points--elsewhere across the land. When a few years ago the Post-Office Department sought to establish a really fast mail-train service between Chicago and St. Louis--a train that would make the 283 miles in six hours--it found no enthusiasm whatsoever for the project in the four so-called competing railroads that connect those cities and who long before had fixed their minimum running time between them at a rather leisurely eight hours in order to suit the necessities of the slowest and the most roundabout of the four. Eventually the Post-Office Department carried its point and the Chicago and Alton to-day carries a through mail train from Chicago to St. Louis in six hours and ten minutes. But the regular pa.s.senger-trains still remain at the old slow running-time.

These instances might be multiplied. Have I shown enough now to make my point? When you go between New York and Chicago on either of the two highest-grade roads that connect those cities you ride on virtually the same trains--the Pullman equipment that each carries is standardized down to the finest details--at the same rates of fare, in the same running time, and in and out of pa.s.senger terminals equally advantageously located. The only deciding points between the two roads are such minor ones as whether you prefer the excellent griddle-cakes of the Pennsylvania's diners or the excellent ham and eggs of the New York Central's; the scenery of the Alleghanies or that in the valley of the Mohawk. Are these not rather fine distinctions to hold up as a real compet.i.tion?

Compet.i.tion did not bring the excellence of these trains, any more than it prevented the removal of their comfortable observation-cars a short time since, through agreement. Compet.i.tion did not force the Santa Fe into its wonderful equipment of overland _de luxe_ expresses with their whole fleets of solid compartment-cars. Compet.i.tion has never given the United States a through train from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We have to go up north into our rather thinly populated neighbor's country, Canada, to find such travel boons. Compet.i.tion has never given a really creditable service between New York and Montreal, the two metropolitan centers of the great sister nations of North America.

The idea that compet.i.tion is an essential to real railroad service is gradually dissipating. People are coming slowly but very surely to realize that no public utility is in its essentials compet.i.tive. And this despite the fact that Congress through the expression of its Transportation Act has given a formal approval to the idea that the only thing that can save our sick man of America business is a retention if not an extension of our compet.i.tive system of railroading, through the adoption of a "compet.i.tive consolidation" plan. This is the scheme upon which the experts of the Interstate Commerce Commission have been engaged these many months past and of which the first outlines have recently been issued.

The very expression of this principle within the Transportation Statute shows that a huge extension of the size of our individual railroad units is now contemplated despite the fact, long since recognized, that many of them have already gone beyond the limits of efficient operating supervision and management. Upon this point alone a whole book might be written. It is sufficient here and now to say that, with a few exceptions that prove nothing whatsoever, the only railroads that are to-day being successfully operated in the United States are the small railroads (small in comparative sense at least), properties like the Boston and Albany, the Lackawanna, the Bessemer and Lake Erie, the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburg, the El Paso and Southwestern, to single out but a few--railroads operated as individual units and by men who are not only on their ground but in close and constant personal touch with every inch of it. That genius of American railroading, Harriman, more than a decade ago recognized this point when he began the decentralization of his railroad properties, placing five presidents upon them west of the Mississippi River, each with all but autonomous powers. The Pennsylvania has more recently recognized it in the construction of four regional systems within its giant property, each in many essentials a separate railroad and to a large extent separately operated. It has made good beginning but has not yet gone nearly far enough. The principle stands recognized, however, that you can reach a point and pa.s.s it where your obvious economies and strengths of centralization are offset by the disadvantages of having created a top-heavy and almost unworkable machine. There comes a point in the growth of any railroad system toward mere bigness where, like the locomotive and the box-car, efficiency is pa.s.sed and inefficiency comes in again.

In the Middle West there is a manufacturing city which in recent years has grown remarkably, both in population and in industry. In ten years the first increased from 35,000 to 99,000 people. It is served by two railroads, one a main line of an important Canadian property and the other the main line of a small and fairly local railroad. The lines of a very large American system are but fourteen miles away, cross level country.

The first of the two railroads that actually enter X. is operated from Montreal, when it is not actually operated from London, England.

Apparently it has not yet heard of the rapid growth of X., for it has done nothing whatever to increase its facilities to keep pace with that growth; even its officers rarely pay X. the honor of a pa.s.sing visit.

The second of these two roads gets the business. Its headquarters are but sixty miles away. Its president, its general manager, its superintendent, and its traffic manager are vigorous young men who are forever running up to X, and dining or lunching with its Chamber of Commerce and its manufacturers--they call half of them by their first names. They are alert to the necessities of the town and of its people. But they operate a small railroad. They are not burdened with the detail or the worry of five thousand miles of line, or ten thousand or even twelve. It takes super-men to run systems such as these last. And (unfortunately, perhaps) we have not as yet bred super-men in the United States.

The road that is but fourteen miles away should have come into X. with its rails a full dozen years ago; it should, that is, if the compet.i.tive system is all that its friends proclaim it to be. But it, too, is managed from a city nine hundred miles distant. Its president is as near a super-man as I shall ever hope to know, but nine hundred miles is nine hundred miles, and the line that runs so near to X. is but a minor branch of a vast system that seemingly at least has hundreds that are more important. And so it loses the freight.

The mere statement that the large railroad cannot be operated intensively or otherwise successfully without personal contacts will be disputed bitterly. I shall be asked: How about Napoleon? Did he not succeed in inspiring a vast army with a morale that no other army before or since has ever had? Personal contacts were almost out of the question for him. Yet were there not men by the tens of thousands who had not even touched the hem of his garments or laid sight upon his countenance who gladly would have laid down their lives to save his?

To these questions the answer is that we have not as yet succeeded in breeding Napoleons very generally. We work with the clay that is within our hands. And our human clay works best at short range, and almost always the shorter the better. The president of a little railroad does not have to be a Napoleon to inspire confidence and affection and enthusiasm among his workers. Almost any real man will do, if the road is not too big. And he will merely need to know his men, to understand them, and to let them understand him.

If this is true in the technical operation of a railroad it is even more true in another great phase of its management--its salesmanship.

Long-range transportation salesmanship is to-day a real fundamental weakness of our American railroad. Let me ill.u.s.trate. Here is its compet.i.tor in the form of a local truckman coming along and, if you please, not keeping within his proper economic bounds, but soliciting business up to a hundred-mile or a 150-mile haul. He probably is "Tom" to his fellow townsman, a personality, a real human being, and not a mere machine. A corporation is always at a handicap. And other things being equal, or even a little against him, he gets the business.

In earlier chapters of this book I have set down what has seemed to be the real opportunity for the redemption of the branch-line and local services of our railroads, by the use either of small electric or of gasolene-motor units, but in all cases with such a frequency of headway as to render theirs a genuine service. Yet I would not give a fig for such a step if it could not be handled for the railroad by a competent executive right on the spot--no matter now how small his rank or t.i.tle as long as he has real authority to go ahead or act. A canny minor executive of my acquaintance suggests that the average division superintendent should be given large traffic salesmanship authority. There are some things against such a plan, and many things in its favor.

But it seems to me that the installation of a motor-bus service on a branch or group of branches of any railroad is a local salesmanship and an advertising problem, as well as a merely operating one. The schedules should be carefully thought out in advance, and with some regard to the convenience of the people who are expected to make use of them. They cannot be properly made from a hundred miles away. In fact it would be a good idea to have a neighborhood referendum in regard to these schedules.

As an advertising device alone it would be well worth while, while the trained soul of any good advertising man would suggest local "copy" for the newspapers of the vicinage calling attention to the safety features of the motor-bus upon the railroad as compared with that lack when the selfsame vehicle travels upon the highroad. Without such intensified study and promotion methods I cannot believe that the mere introduction of the small pa.s.senger unit upon our standard railroads is going to meet with any p.r.o.nounced success, either for the roads or for their patrons.

Now we are dipping into the edges of a fascinating topic indeed and one that recently has sunk into a rut in the United States--transportation salesmanship. In these late years the traffic managers of our railroads have either become glorified rate-clerks or else trained special pleaders before the Interstate Commerce Commission or the State regulatory bodies.

There is no department of railroading in which initiative seemingly has died so dire a death as in the traffic department. There, too, precedent rules, and seemingly with an iron hand. No man dares defy it.

The other day the British railways went back to their ingenious before-the-war plan of making very low rates for week-ends, but always upon trains that were not ordinarily crowded. If a man wanted to start out on a Sat.u.r.day and return say on a Sunday evening or even early Monday morning, a most attractive rate lured him into the adventure. It was obvious that the rate would not be taken advantage of by business men--to the real disadvantage of the regular commercial rates--as little or no regular business can be transacted over the week-end; while a certain disinclination to ride at the high regular rates--high to-day in Britain, as everywhere else in the world--is overcome by the bargain-counter quality of the rate itself. And new riders are gained.

This is good business. It is real business. It is more; it is traffic science upon a railroad. For it is the genuine creation of business.