Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 18

A few weeks ago (January, 1922) the New Haven announced another extensive slash in its pa.s.senger-train service. Its service was already but a mere sh.e.l.l of what it was twenty, or even a dozen years ago. It gave decreased travel as a reason for the slash.

But what was the New Haven doing to gain new business? Was it advertising?

Was it improving the intensive details of its service? Was it trying to induce people to go in odd hours upon its trains? Not a bit of any of these. It was reducing trains. It controls the night boats upon the Sound--and operates these upon the same schedules upon which they were operated more than fifty years ago, save as they gradually are being permitted to die of dry-rot and so are eliminated. For at least a quarter of a century not one improvement has been made in the operation of the Fall River Line. And even when the press of midsummer traffic forces a double service in each direction each night no one in the management has the initiative to suggest "staggering" the schedules so as to give any diversity of service whatsoever.

I should be the last to suggest that the New Haven make a low rate from New York or Boston for the Yale-Harvard or the Yale-Princeton games. It would be the height of absurdity to lower the rates when the traffic at full standard rates rises to a tidal wave which demands the full operating resources of the property for its handling; and that it always is well handled does credit to the New Haven's potential powers of operation. Yet there are times when it might well afford to make an attractive excursion-rate between New York and Boston. Some of its existing trains between these two cities move at awkward hours and with an incredible slowness. They naturally are not crowded trains. An occasional attractive rate upon these trains alone might, and probably would, result in filling them to their capacity, while the people that traveled upon them would not in any large measure be those that ordinarily travel at the regular rates. The success for many years past of the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio in operating week-end excursions between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington ought to have been of some educational value to the New Haven, but apparently it was not.

I have no grudge against the New Haven. On the contrary, I have naught but sympathy for a railroad which earns upwards of $60,000,000 a year from its pa.s.senger traffic alone and yet shows so little knowledge of fundamental merchandising principles. Yet it is all too typical of many of its fellows. In my boyhood days in northern New York the annual event of the autumn was the big excursion to New York City. It ran at half-price and in crowded pa.s.senger-cars--parlor-cars, sleeping-cars, and coaches by the dozens. It attracted people who never went to the big city on the regular trains and at regular prices.

It has been a number of years now since the last of these excursions was operated. The people who used to ride on them do not go to New York any more, unless perhaps by automobile once in four or five years. Their traffic is lost to the railroad to-day. When they contemplate the regular rates--twelve to fifteen dollars in each direction, in addition to $3.75 for a lower berth each way--and put them alongside of that famous old round-rate trip of but $7, they decide that it is easier to stay at home or wait until Uncle John buys his new flivver and then run down with him.

When the Interstate Commerce Commission, yielding to certain influences both within and without it, put up the pa.s.senger-rates, it felt gleefully that it had done a very clever thing. Never before had it shown so pathetically its lack of real vision in the railroad question. Freight traffic--not always, but to a large extent--must move, no matter what the rate. But pa.s.senger traffic is a temperamental and a whimsical thing--never more so than in this golden age of the automobile. You may lead it to water but you cannot make it drink. You may put up the rates but you cannot make people ride. For a correct answer ask the executives of the New England roads who have been so steadily clamoring for pa.s.senger-rate advances. Already I have referred to a 23 per cent. loss in pa.s.senger traffic in 1921, as compared with 1920. It is impossible to debit this entirely to prevailing hard times. It comes in large measure from hard feelings.

The national feeling of resentment against the present pa.s.senger advances recently has found expression in the measure introduced in the United States Senate for the restoration of the mileage-book (also touched upon in an earlier chapter) as a low-priced inducer of travel at wholesale--a measure which at this writing seems certain of pa.s.sage--with its rate to be fixed at three cents a mile or a trifle less. For once the Interstate Commerce Commission missed its usual astuteness in trying to gage the public demand.

Why not sell the mileage-book at a little lower cost than the railroad mile at retail? Can I not buy two dozen pairs of shoes for less than twenty-four times the cost of a single pair? And is it not good business anyway for a railroad to try to get its existing patrons to ride more miles as well as to gain brand-new patrons, along lines which I have already suggested?

In Belgium and in Switzerland one may buy the equivalent of a card-pa.s.s upon an American railroad, good for a week or a fortnight or a month, according to the price paid. During the extent of its life it is good for unlimited travel by the person whose photograph it bears. The French have an even better system. For a matter of five or six hundred francs one purchases a similar card which for the ensuing twelvemonth gives the right, not for unlimited travel, but for the purchase of an unlimited number of tickets at one-half the regular prices; after which, for the holder of the card, the game inevitably becomes one of buying enough separate tickets to beat the first prices put down for the card.

Transportation salesmanship?

Properly played it is one of the most subtle games in the world, and one of the most fascinating--and for the railroad, one of the most profitable.

We have seen a good deal in the public prints in the last few years about the prime necessity of nationalizing the railroad in the United States in a far more thorough fashion than has ever before been even attempted. One of the potential dangers which forever faces a land as physically great as ours is the inherent possibility of its falling apart through its sheer size and weight. Under certain circ.u.mstances it might not be particularly difficult for us to disintegrate as a nation into groups of separate States, in fact if not in name--groups of States not particularly sympathetic or cooperative. We have had in our history already one very tragic instance of this very sort.

In order that this ever-present potential tendency may be overcome it is highly important that every possible measure be utilized toward binding the country more and more closely together. Transportation--railroad transportation in particular--forms an ideal binder. Utilized to its fullest degree it means that New England will know California better, and California New England. And each, knowing the other better, will understand better, sympathize better, cooperate better. If Minnesota goes to Louisiana and Georgia to Montana, each becomes more understanding, more tolerant, more closely bound, in almost every conceivable fashion.

Pa.s.senger traffic, brought to a high degree of development, will make such understanding possible. Little else can do it even half so well. Freight traffic will not do it--not at least to any particularly large degree. A better circulation of national periodicals will help; this ever-present problem of encompa.s.sing our perplexing problem of nationalization, of making a group of forty-eight separate States, separate in climate, in soil, and even to a perceptible degree in racial and language characteristics, into a more coherent and closely-knit state, was one of the most potent arguments advanced against the introduction of the postal zone system in this country.

But even the national circulation of publications will not accomplish quite as much as travel. The Easterners who journey to the west coast each winter are to-day full of understanding of the problems out there--what the j.a.panese question really means to the Californians and the whys and the wherefores of most of the lesser questions that perplex them. If there were as attractive rates from Los Angeles to Boston and New York as there used to be from Boston and New York to Los Angeles, the Californians might in turn be a little more tolerant at times of the political situation in Ma.s.sachusetts or in New York. It is intimate knowledge that makes for real understanding.

To make my point even clearer let me take you far overseas with me--to Italy in the days before the coming of the World War. The Italian Government even then saw a most imminent necessity for far better national thought and understanding. How by practical planning could it best accomplish such a thing? A little study quickly enough showed how: by not only letting Italians see every corner of their land but by urging them to do so.

So a most attractive ticket plan was developed. In practice it worked somewhat after this fashion. A resident, let us say, of Milan, in the great high plains of the north of Italy, might have business which called him to Florence. When he went to Milan Union Station--or whatever it is that pa.s.ses for a union station in Milan--the ticket-agent, who was well schooled in the active art of selling transportation, attempted to beguile him into buying a little longer ticket--to Rome, perhaps. His bait, his selling ammunition, if you will, was a rate per-mile from Florence to Rome much lower than that prevailing between Milan and Florence.

Very well, suppose that our resident of Milan was prevailed upon to go down and spend that long-promised week-end in the city by the Tiber.

Bargain-sales have always spelled attractiveness, to men as well as to women.

"If only you would continue on to Naples," suggested the ticket-seller, "you would find the supplemental fare so slight as to be a mere nothing to your purse."

Very well again. Date the pasteboard up to Naples. Perhaps it would be a little warmer, a bit more balmy down there anyway than in old Rome.

"From Naples to Messina, it is a mere nothing, and the climate is still lovelier, and the supplemental fare much less per mile than even that from Rome to Naples."

With the final result that the prospective traveler at Milan would probably find the Italian state railways about ready to make him a present of the island of Sicily if only he would have the graciousness, and the very good sense, to extend his voyage to and around that fascinating place.

Now turn that rule back. Henry Blank finds his way into the Grand Central or the Pennsylvania Station in the City of New York. He has a business errand which will carry him six hundred miles west of the Hudson River--for the first time in his life. He plans to go to Cleveland, stay two days there in which he will do the work of six, and then come right back to Broadway once more. But the ticket-seller--the expert seller of transportation--has studied the Italian school of railroading.

"Make it Toledo or Detroit," he hints, "and we will make the mileage rate from Cleveland to either one of those towns a flat three cents a mile, instead of the 3.6 cents which the Interstate Commerce Commission made the law of the land in August of 1920."

Blank hesitates. The ticket-seller does not.

"While if you can be tempted to go on from Toledo or Detroit to that smart young town, Chicago," he urges, "we will bill you at the intervening distance between them at a mere 2.75 cents--a historic percentage, you will remember. From Chicago to the Missouri River, two and one half cents a mile. Two cents a mile flat on the next big lap, down to El Paso or Albuquerque or over to Cheyenne or Denver; lower all the time you go further west--until that New York-Cleveland ticket that you are buying of me now, Mr. Blank, will carry you all through California at a cent and a quarter a mile. You cannot afford to stay out of California at such a rate."

And there is a strong probability that he will not.

My friend, the old railroader, snorts at this suggestion:

"What do you think that the California railroad commission is going to say about some fellow from Boston riding all over their State at a cent and a quarter a mile, simply because he bought a ticket from South Station down to Providence, and had it extended once or twice?" he asks. Then adds: "I don't _think_; I _know_. They will say, 'Very good, Mr. Southern Pacific, if you can afford to carry him at a cent and a quarter a mile, you carry the man in Stockton, who wants to go up to Sacramento or to Marysville, at the same identical rate per mile. That's fair, and it's our business to make you be fair!'"

At first glance it would seem as if the venerable traffic man is right; a second and third one however will show the possibilities of his being quite considerably wrong. If the railroad commission at Sacramento has one half the advertising sense that the rest of the Californians possess it is going to recognize that here is the way to popularize its States--in the best and broadest sense of the word, to nationalize it. Moreover, it will know that the man who buys a ticket from San Francisco or Stockton to Sacramento or Marysville will have his own opportunity to extend it, in just the same way and upon exactly the same basis. He can go riding all over Cape Cod at a cent and a quarter a mile, while the people around about him will be paying their 3.6 cents. _Quid pro quo_; turn about is fair play, and all the rest of the fine copy-book maxims of our boyhood days.

In front of me lies the hand-book of the Italian state railways in those blessed days of before-the-war. From it I find that I could have started from the Milan Union Station and made a circular trip through Bologna, Florence, Rome, Pisa, Genoa, and Turin back to Milan again for 157.5 lire, first-cla.s.s or, at the then rate of exchange, a little more than thirty-two dollars. As a matter of fact the ticket sold at exactly the same rate from any other point upon this designated belt and from it was good in exactly the same way. We are using Milan here merely as a convenient point from which to study the system.

But suppose the ticket-agent in that brisk manufacturing city of the North sold us Venice--a little side-trip off the main circular route, up the line from Padua and back again to Padua before we were ready to go on to Florence and to Rome. The inclusion of the side-trip added but 8.9 lire to our original pasteboard, or less than two dollars. Suppose that we wanted not only Venice but Naples--this last, considerably more of a side-trip.

We could retain Venice and do Naples as a side-trip from Rome, and still have our first-cla.s.s round-trip ticket, going one route to Rome and returning by another and entirely different one, at 187.9 lire, or about $37.50, as we were then wont to figure it; while the period of availability of the ticket was lengthened from thirty to forty-five days.

Here is another point, seemingly unimportant, but really filled with a good deal of importance, particularly when one comes to view it from the standard of transportation salesmanship. In the days before the war the various parlor-car services of our railroads, whether owned and operated by the Pullman Co. or by the railroads themselves, had a minimum seat-rate of twenty-five cents. War-time administration ended this and fixed the minimum at fifty cents, to which presently was added a 50 per cent.

surcharge for the benefit of the railroads, with the result that if a pa.s.senger is to ride but a mere fifteen or twenty miles in a parlor-car he is charged the outrageous figure of seventy-five cents for the privilege.

These short-haul riders of other days came to a considerable total. They helped fill the parlor-cars and so not only to add an attractive revenue but to maintain a service which, in many portions of the country at least, is a necessity. Yet apparently no one either in the railroad field or in the Interstate Commerce Commission has enough vision or salesmanship to order the minimum rate reduced. It goes, like a good many other things in the railroad situation to-day, by default, and just so far lowers the service standard.

Our railroads in recent years have faced a new and formidable compet.i.tor in the rapid development in the United States of the automobile and, in consequence, of the improved highroad upon which it is wont to travel. I have called attention to this point before and wish again to emphasize it.

Whether the privately owned and operated motor-car or the motor-bus operated for public patronage, it is a serious compet.i.tor to them. Yet how have they faced its compet.i.tion, its steadily increased lowering of their pa.s.senger business? Have they met it with return compet.i.tion? Alas, no.

The railroads either have railed against the new-comer in their pastures or else have merely reduced their service, with the immediate result that still more traffic is diverted from their trains. In some parts of the country this loss of traffic has come to a serious pa.s.s. In certain portions of the State of New York the local service of the railroads is now reduced to a point lower than it has been for the last sixty years.

The British railways have also had to face the same sort of compet.i.tion.

It grew particularly acute in the three months of the great coal strike of 1921, when they were compelled to reduce their services of every sort to an absolute minimum, and the motor-bus or char-a-bancs burning an entirely different sort of fuel jumped into the breach in every corner of the United Kingdom and rapidly increased its services. But as soon as the strike was broken and the railways were enabled to return to their normal services they began to meet compet.i.tion with compet.i.tion. They underbid the char-a-bancs for traffic, in both rates offered and service rendered, and they have quite regained their own again.

Yet they did not wait for this crisis to calculate the pa.s.senger possibilities of the motor-car, particularly in regard to their own traffic. When the gasolene-propelled unit was still a strange new-comer upon the highways the English railways were beginning to adapt it to their uses and to correlate it with their services upon the steel highways, with the result that to-day in almost every corner of the British Isles gasolene motor-cars and char-a-bancs are being operated in connection with and as feeders to steam lines. In a similar way two great French railroads, the Paris-Orleans and the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, have long since correlated the motor omnibus with their steam lines--in the one case in the district of the Touraine and in the other in the Fontainbleau, the Alps, and the Riviera territories.

The opportunities for such correlated services are just as great to-day in the United States as in Europe, if not greater. The railroads that serve the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White and the Green mountains, the Rockies, and the Sierras could well afford to develop motor-bus routes as auxiliaries to their routes that already reach into these charming fastnesses. The Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific complain of the compet.i.tion of the motor-bus along their lines that parallel the Pacific coast, yet have done nothing to meet such compet.i.tion or to correlate with it. To-day the Northwestern Pacific terminates in the small city of Eureka, in the beautiful Humboldt County section of California, two hundred miles north of San Francisco. By the creation of a motor-bus route almost due east to the line of the Southern Pacific near Dunsmuir, a circular trip of unusual variety and beauty could readily be established.

The Southern Pacific has already made beginnings along this line by the establishment of a highly successful rail and automobile route through the Apache Canon. The success of this route, even though its beginnings are none too conveniently located, ought to encourage the establishment of others. The opportunities are real--there and all the way east of there, right to the Atlantic Ocean.

One of the most pathetic features about our American railroad situation is the almost entire submersion of the traffic manager and the things for which he is supposed to stand. Upon most of our roads the selling of transportation rapidly is becoming a lost art. There are a few exceptions of course, roads which, like the Santa Fe, still show a genuine belief in pa.s.senger traffic and its possibilities by not only advanced advertising methods but by a careful attention to the infinite details of the service.

But these roads are very greatly in the minority. The majority of the lines are seemingly quite content to sit supinely and indifferently take such traffic as may be forced upon them.

In a recent issue of the "Railway Age" a railroad officer comments quite sharply upon this fact. He shows some of the difficulties that the average pa.s.senger meets when he is forced to ride upon trains that may be designated as "fairly second-cla.s.s" in their accommodations, calls attention to the apparent indifference of the employees, and then proceeds to comment as follows:

As a matter of choice, or because their work requires it, general officers, and even the more important division and subordinate officers on some roads, travel in business-cars isolated from contact with their roads' patrons, unable to learn, or indifferent to the opinion of the service their roads are rendering to the very people who furnish the revenue that makes the roads' operation possible.

It should not be lost sight of that while the public judges the roads through its most intimate contact with them (as pa.s.sengers), it is this same public that in the final a.n.a.lysis will determine whether the roads are to continue under the present form of management and control or whether some other method of operation shall be experimented with. It is also this same public which, as individuals, pays the country's freight bills as shippers, consignees, or consumers.

a.s.suming that it is a fact that almost all compet.i.tive tonnage is secured through "good-will," is there any better way in which to impress a prospective shipper with the road's efficiency than when he is a pa.s.senger? The things that were observed on this 8,000-mile trip seem to indicate that at least some managers do not appreciate the value of comfortable, courteous pa.s.senger service as a feeder of freight tonnage, or that they are unfamiliar with the manner in which their pa.s.senger service is being handled.