Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 19

This extremely fair-minded critic of the railroads then goes on to call attention to the utter absurdity of the roads' attempting to operate on trains made up of perhaps but two Pullman standard sleepers and the rest very largely tourist-cars, day-coaches, and dining-cars that are attempting in their service and prices to rival the best hotels across the land. There is indeed much meat in what he says. The dining-car service is in a great many cases absurd.

It is apt in many cases to convey an impression of innate sn.o.bbishness, certainly not one of economy. It takes from ten to eleven men to operate an American dining-car of equal or less seating capacity than its fellow of Continental Europe, which rarely has more than four or five servants.

The prices, to the average man traveling across the land and accustomed to stay in hotels of even a fair grade are not unreasonable. They merely are unflexible to the man or woman of limited means who is forced to ride long distances upon the cars and who is given little or no opportunity to alight at refreshment stations upon the way for the purchase of inexpensive foodstuffs. The _table d'hote_, which is used so successfully and so economically (both from the point of view of the railroad as well as of its patrons) on the railways of France and other European countries, has been given few fair trials in the United States. The New Haven once had a famous "fixed price" dinner; so did, and I think still has, the Milwaukee. The Baltimore and Ohio to-day offers what it calls a "commercial traveler's club luncheon" for seventy-five cents, which I honestly think is the best meal in the country for that price. But these are the exceptions. The rule is a c.u.mbersome dining-car arrangement, with the itinerant eating-place attempting to rival a city restaurant in the variety of its offerings, at a vast cost and annoyance to most of its patrons as well as to itself.

I should be inclined to agree with the gentleman writing in the "Railway Age" as to the complete neglect of the executive officers of our railroads of a proper supervision of their train service had there not come to my eyes recently a confidential report made to the president of a large road from one of his secret agents. This secret agent was much different from the average one--hired usually to a.s.sist in the detection of some employee or employees suspected of pilfering or other malfeasance. She was a woman of good station in life, a fairly experienced traveler, and by temperament inclined to be both generous as well as honest. For weeks she rode up and down the lines of that railroad and its compet.i.tors--not upon a pa.s.s, oh, no--but with nothing whatsoever to distinguish her from other travelers.

Her comments upon the service, shrewdly feminine, went to her employer in the form of the confidential report which was brought to my attention. The mashed potatoes in Dining-Car 4809 were weak and watery. "... The chef should have known enough to have prepared them in milk or cream, not in water," her woman's judgment added. The head porter in the big new hyphenated hotel in P. advised her to go to a competing point by the X.

line and not by the road that was employing her. There was a discourteous ticket-agent in the office at G. And so it went.

Here was a railroad taking a primary but a genuine step toward selling its transportation to its patrons. It is not enough that the railroads are making better "on time" records with their trains--their press-agents are putting out reams of propaganda these days to that effect: there is something more to real service than this. Return once again to our friend of the "Railway Age." He says:

Do railroad managers expect their ticket-sellers to be salesmen in the generally accepted meaning of the term or do they reserve this function for pa.s.senger agents? A man who found that he must make a hurried trip to a destination several thousand miles distant called at a consolidated ticket-office to purchase his ticket. The purpose of his trip required that he visit certain cities en route but he found that the ticket seller was unable to tell him how to arrange his trip so as to include these cities. He consulted other ticket-sellers with no better success and then informed the writer of his predicament. The writer telephoned to the pa.s.senger agent of a road over which a portion of the trip must be made and a traveling agent was immediately despatched to the prospective pa.s.senger's office who furnished him with all the information he required.

This prospective pa.s.senger was a man who had held important positions in the engineering department of railroads for years, but he did not know that railroads provided this service for prospective pa.s.sengers.

Subsequent investigation disclosed the fact that travelers are entirely ignorant of the services that city, district, and traveling pa.s.senger agents are prepared to render them.

The answer to most of these criticisms is again that some twenty years ago the traffic men ceased to be a really vital figure in the organization of most of our American railroads. For more than twenty years they have been forced w.i.l.l.y-nilly into policies of the most stringent economy, with the very natural result that the operating man, the man who could be counted upon to make the largest economies in the operation of the railroad, came into his own. To-day there is hardly an important railroad in the United States which is not headed by an operating man. Operating men do not as a rule have much traffic sense. It is a faculty that is born in some men, while others can never even understand it. It is a good railroad operating man indeed who can manage to acquire a real respect for transportation salesmanship and then give a real cooperation in attaining it. Yet that is perhaps as vitally an important thing as our railroads need to-day.

For despite large measures of criticism that may be leveled against it, the railroads of the United States are beginning more and more to tender a real degree of service once again to their patrons; not of course to be compared with that which they gave ten or twelve years ago. It may be many years before they attain that standard again, if indeed ever they do. But the service that they _are_ rendering they are failing utterly to sell to their public, all for a lack of real salesmanship. The average man in the street neither knows or believes that the roads have made large strides in the restoration of many of their services, both freight and pa.s.senger. In fact in his mind there has arisen a certain intangible but fairly fixed idea that our railroad structure, both in its plant and operation, has begun to become something dangerously near obsolete. The skillful propaganda of the advocates of the motor-bus and the motor-truck, the fanciful tales spread about the future commercial possibilities of the aeroplane, have begun to make him inwardly question whether the steam train is not about ready now to be cla.s.sed with the stage-coach and the ca.n.a.l-barge. The railroads of the United States in a supreme--and possibly a final--opportunity for setting forth the many, many merits and strengths of their present position, with a few conspicuous exceptions, are failing to grasp that opportunity. They are neglecting transportation salesmanship.

We have seen in this book, and we shall continue to see, how traffic has been created upon the railroads overseas. In the past we have built railroad traffic here in the United States. In our railroads of to-morrow it will be done again. Something of the past can be repeated to-morrow.

Witness Atlantic City; originally a lightly-built summer resort which did all of its business in about two months of the year and hibernated for the other ten. It was the railroad--railroad cooperation, if you please--with its advertising that made Easter upon the Boardwalk one of the great stated functions of the American social calendar. Railroad advertising made Glacier National Park; to an appreciable extent the other great National Parks across the land. Railroad advertising made the Northwest, the Southwest, California, Florida, the New Orleans Mardi Gras.

The most thoroughly advertised railroad upon the North American continent is probably the Canadian Pacific. The next is the Santa Fe. And it is estimated that of the round-trip tickets sold in an average year from Chicago and points east to the Pacific coast more than 70 per cent. of them read Santa Fe one way and Canadian Pacific the other. The best advertised single train in the land is the Twentieth Century Limited. And it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the best patronized one. Does transportation salesmanship pay?

Let us return to our muttons. We were talking of compet.i.tion. It has been said that it is compet.i.tion--and compet.i.tion alone--that has forced transport salesmanship. Undoubtedly this is partly true. It is one of the best arguments that can be made for the retention of our extravagant compet.i.tive system of rail transport. But upon a.n.a.lysis it will be seen that the advertising examples that I have just shown have been directed almost exclusively to the promotion of through long-distance trains. I have not seen the Santa Fe or the New York Central or the Canadian Pacific often stressing the advantages of travel in their short-haul, non-compet.i.tive territories. Last spring, and again this, the h.o.a.rdings of London Town were setting forth the glories of the immediate vicinage in such color and beauty and appeal that one wished to close down one's desk and hie himself off into the open country--a ride on the train, and a ride on the train in again.

The French railways are non-compet.i.tive, yet bow to no one in the thoroughness and the attractiveness of their advertising--the quality of their transportation salesmanship. It is a part of their intensive railway management. Is it not about time that we heard a little more of intensive management of our railroads, both in their operation and in the solicitation of their traffic? Here is a vital principle of transport in the United States--speaking generally now and not specifically of the railroads alone--that apparently has been considerably overlooked in recent years. In a large sense it is an economy as well. I think that I have shown by this time the economy and necessity of systematically developed transport applied evenly to the entire land, and not, through the efforts of that false G.o.d of compet.i.tion, spread thick here and thin there.

This vital principle was completely overlooked in the minds of the politicians who as a tentative American railroad policy gave us a "compet.i.tive consolidation" of our roads. Seemingly compet.i.tion was indeed their G.o.d.

"How can such fine industrial cities as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids thrive and continue to thrive without railroad compet.i.tion?"

they asked, apparently forgetting that for many years such fine industrial cities as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence have not alone lived but thriven and continued to grow greatly without railroad compet.i.tion. In the old days before it had entered upon its financial skylarkings and was content to remain a well-ordered servant of its community, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad showed that it could render in a non-compet.i.tive territory service quite as good as its fellows of the compet.i.tive territories. Compet.i.tion was not the thing that made or broke the New Haven service; it was income, outgo, human morale, even regulation, if you please, but not compet.i.tion. The vision of Charles S. Mellen that New England should one day become a great non-compet.i.tive railroad territory was a very real and a very far-sighted one. It is only with the method by which he sought to bring it into actual being that one may beg to differ.

In no other land of the world is the compet.i.tive theory in transport being pushed forward to-day. In fact the tendency is decidedly in the other direction. It was to observe this tendency--the distinct effort to eliminate compet.i.tion and bring cooperation and harmony between European railway properties--that I journeyed overseas not long since. And in the next of these chapters I shall set forth some of my observations on the regional railway situation in France (where it has long obtained) and in Great Britain (where it is just now being established), particularly as our future prospects here in the United States are affected.

In the meantime, our compet.i.tive system continues to remain one of our pet railroad extravagances. Remember that the mistakes that Mr. McAdoo made in his direction of the Federal Railroad Administration were quite overbalanced by the obvious economies that he was able to make the moment that he had eliminated the compet.i.tive factor in our national transportation machine. As he was able more and more to overcome the long established compet.i.tive feeling between the railroad executives--to no small extent, perfectly natural and human personal jealousies--the more he was able to effect and extend these economies. The Railroad War Board which the railways had appointed early in 1917 and which was in many ways an antic.i.p.ation of the coming of Federal control, despite its good intents and honest endeavors and real results, was constantly hampered by this compet.i.tive feeling even between its members. Yet as we have seen it lacked the autocratic power of the government director-general, and so it failed and had to be replaced. And the obvious war-time economies--the direct routing of traffic, the pooling and interchange of equipment, the joint representations and the like--came into being.

To accomplish these things nationally and permanently, to lessen compet.i.tion rather than to increase it (no sane man imagines that we are ever to succeed entirely in removing the compet.i.tive element), may yet mean the complete reorganization of our national railroad system. Yet even so radical a step need not be regarded as either fatal or impossible. It is entirely within the possibilities to-day that our privately owned and operated railroads, at least as they are at present const.i.tuted, may fall.

There is but little in the present situation to make one optimistic as to their future success, along the present lines at least.

The sole alternatives to private ownership and operation are government ownership and operation. To the majority of Americans the very idea of a further governmental control is extremely distasteful, to put the matter mildly. To them railroad nationalization is a very real menace. Yet the menace cannot be avoided by merely singing a song of hate about it. It can be overcome and finally prevented by some definite national plan or policy in regard to our roads--a simple thing in which for a number of years past we have been sadly lacking. If such a plan means their radical reorganization we must begin. And the sooner the better.

CHAPTER XIV

THE REGIONAL RAILROAD OVERSEAS

The beginnings of the railroad across the Atlantic were so very slightly in advance of our own that they may be regarded as contemporaneous. In Great Britain, where the railroad as we know it to-day was born, the conditions of its infancy were much the same as in the United States. In Continental Europe they were considerably different. There military necessity quite overbalanced immediate commercial needs. There the first railroads were dictated by the international strategists. From that day to this their expansion has been directed by the same necessity.

Yet granting at the outset that the needs and opportunities of the European railways are in many ways different from those of ours, there remains the fact that to-day there is much over there that our railroaders of the United States might and should learn. There is also a good deal that the European railroad men might and should learn from some of our big operators and traffic experts--but that phase of the problem is not germane to this book.

It was to study some of the features of European railway operation that might be applicable directly to our railroads of the United States that I journeyed not many months ago across the Atlantic and down the westerly nations of Europe. Central and Eastern Europe still were in transport chaos and so could be expected to give little or nothing to one who wished to see their railways under anything even faintly approaching normal conditions. But in Great Britain, in France, in Spain, and in Italy, the railways were functioning well--extremely well, when one came to consider the very great burden so recently put upon them. The last two of these four nations may, however, be dismissed immediately from present consideration. Neither the density of population nor the traffic conditions of either Spain or Italy makes their transport problems of great interest or value to the United States. But Great Britain or France may hold the key to a real solution of our most vexing transportation problem of the moment.

In area these two closely built and industrial nations are not far apart.

Ireland is not included in the comparison; in this chapter, however, we are not going to give consideration to the Irish railways. They too are not germane to the discussion, even if conditions in Ireland were even approximately normal to-day, which decidedly they are not.

The area of France is roughly speaking about equal to that of our five great industrial States reaching from New York to Chicago--New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This section of the United States contains but about thirty-five millions of people, as compared with forty millions of French, yet it has approximately twice the railway mileage. The French have b.u.t.tered their area pretty evenly with their railway transport. We have not. In these five industrial States of ours there is not only in many cases gross duplication and excess of plant--in most cases due to the effects of overstimulated compet.i.tion--but in other cases considerable territories even to-day inadequately provided with railroad facilities. Our bread is by no means b.u.t.tered evenly.

Neither is Great Britain's. Like ourselves she built her transport plans to meet the exigencies of actual conditions from year to year. Add to this her very irregularity of conformation; her chief city, and forever her traffic hub, situated nowhere near the center of the congested island, but almost in an extreme southeastern corner of it; her other great cities, seaport and inland industrial centers, scattered here and there and everywhere as the chance fortune of long centuries dictated and separated by high ridges of mountainous hills. Take conditions such as these and you have the beginnings of a transport problem that even at the outset would bewilder the wisest of traffic experts, given the rare opportunity of devising an entire new railway system for the United Kingdom.

Of course, no such wise or scientific scheme of planning her railways was ever possible. They grew, as I have just said, out of necessity. From the crude beginnings of the Stockton and Darlington and the Liverpool and Manchester, almost an even century ago, they advanced clumsily until nearly twenty years ago, when the last of the trunk-lines forced its way into London and the compet.i.tive development of the British railway system was virtually ended. The strategy of thrusting a new line here, of building a connection there, of piercing into this town or that so as to get the business away from the other road, then became history. Thereafter the chief problem of the British railway manager, like that of his fellow executive in the United States, became that of supplying proper transport to a nation that refused to "stay put," but insisted upon growing, even to an unthinkable size. In the years of its railway development the population of Great Britain has increased from fifteen or sixteen millions to well over forty-two. In a single one of her cities more than seven million people are now resident.

Yet, as might have been expected the clumsy compet.i.tive system of building railroads has not given her a really adequate rail transport plant. Her bread also is extremely badly b.u.t.tered. Great industrial sections as those around London or Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester or Sheffield, her coal districts, are ofttimes much more than adequately provided with railways. And there still are sections of the small island--to traverse its extreme length one goes a distance roughly equal to that from New York to Buffalo--which are not even to-day properly provided with rail transport. These are, it is true, rather thin pickings. The compet.i.tive system has wotted not of them. It never spreads the b.u.t.ter evenly. The b.u.t.ter goes where it is worth the most, and nowhere else. Too much b.u.t.ter goes in certain localities. England has begun to learn that lesson.

In France the development of the railroad proceeded far more slowly. Such ever was the way of the French. From the beginning their Government took a firm hand in the matter. It saw that French railways were planned, primarily from the military necessities of the country but also from its many peaceful ones. If all of this at first had the effect of r.e.t.a.r.ding railroad construction it also has resulted in giving France the best national plan of rail transport in the entire world. In 1842, sixteen years after the beginnings of railway development in Great Britain, it was still possible in France to determine in what definite direction her princ.i.p.al lines should be put down. In that year a statute was pa.s.sed settling this vital question in so comprehensive and generally satisfactory a fashion that the uneconomical duplication of the rail systems of both the United States and Great Britain was almost entirely avoided; while within the next three or four years definite beginnings were made in the regional allotment of the land to the several railway systems, or _reseaux_, which have continued with but one or two important changes down to the present day.

In contrast to England and Scotland, France presents an almost ideal field to the primary planner of railroad lines. If Paris, forever her chief commercial and social hub, is not in the precise center of the republic, it is at least near enough to permit the devising of a railway plan in which most of the chief lines form roughly the spokes of a great wheel radiating out from Paris as a hub. Five of the regional systems of France, her _reseaux_--the Nord, the Est, the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, the Paris-Orleans, and the Etat--operate these great spokes. The Nord takes the segment of the wheel which touches upon the English Channel, from Le Treport-Mers all the way east to Dunkirk and the Belgian line. To the east of it lies the Est, touching the Nord at Soissons and Laon and after also touching the newly-acquired lines of Alsace-Lorraine reaching as far into the southeast as Belfort.

The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean has but two spokes of the wheel into the Paris hub but it is the largest of the privately owned French railways, reaching from Belfort to Cette upon the Mediterranean sh.o.r.e and serving between the Swiss and the Italian gateways to say nothing of the Rhone valley and the Riviera. Immediately next to it in turn is the Paris-Orleans, with Toulouse and Bordeaux as its chief southerly terminals. At these cities it joins the southerly Midi system, which also meets the P.-L.-M. at Cette.

The Etat or State railway with its lines from Paris to the west and the southwest of France completes the great railway wheel. A little more than a decade ago it absorbed the fairly important but always unprofitable Ouest system. Up to that time the government railway had been the least important of all the French properties. Its lines, reaching down chiefly into the rather poor districts of the Vendee and the Charente, were distinctly unprofitable. In 1908 a French gentleman by the name of Georges Clemenceau succeeded in extending the beneficent influence of the state to the almost equally unfortunate Ouest system. Since then the State railway of France has become distinctly important, geographically and politically, but not particularly so in any other way. Its annual deficit has never been overcome. Matters have now come to a point where it is proposed that system be leased to a private corporation for operation. The government can no longer carry on with it. Its suburban service alone sustained a deficit of 100,000,000 francs in 1921.

At the present moment, however, all the French railways are operating at a loss variously figured at from a million francs a day upward. Since the beginning of the World War, a total deficit of something considerably more than a billion dollars has been achieved. Yet the roads themselves are still paying their dividends--the privately owned and operated properties of course. These are guaranteed by the Government under special legislation that goes as far back as 1857. In the early days of the recent war, when even the formerly profitable Nord, Est, and P.-L.-M. began to run toward heavy deficits, special legislation was hurried through by the Government to insure continued interest in the proper operation of the essential lines of rail transport by the simple and entirely human process of maintaining the dividends, even though the taxpayer paid the difference. The difference steadily grew greater. Wages increased 327 per cent. in six years, the staff--due chiefly to France's very literal interpretation of her new eight-hour law--from 355,000 to nearly 500,000, about 41 per cent. And despite an increase of 25 per cent. in freight and pa.s.senger-rates--afterwards increased to a total of 70 or 80 per cent. for pa.s.senger and 140 for freight--the operating ratio of her railways swung from 57 per cent. in 1913 to the ridiculous and impossible figure of 125 per cent. in 1920.

Important and vital as these things are, however, to the Frenchman, they have no great concern with the phase of the international railroad situation that is under our immediate scrutiny--compet.i.tion, and with it the inevitable and wasteful duplication of lines and other features of any national transport plant. If the French railway system had been burdened with these wastefulnesses, one shudders even to think of the consequences.

The French railways would not then be close to bankruptcy, they would be entirely involved in it and so completely broken that all France would be prostrated--the bitter tragedy of Russia repeated along the west coast of Continental Europe.

In my opinion it is because of the simple and entirely economic placing of her railways that they have been enabled to withstand at all the terrible and multiplied burdens that have been placed upon them in the last seven years. The judgment of the men who first planned their general locations has been completely vindicated again and again in the really supurb way in which they bore their all but overwhelming war burdens, and more latterly in the way that they have handled the almost equally important and vexing problems of the after-the-war period. Both speak volumes for the inherent morale of the French railways, to say nothing of the grit and the endurance of the Frenchman himself.

We started a moment ago to show how these regional and generally non-compet.i.tive railways of France were laid down upon her map. We likened the main lines of the Nord, the Est, the P.-L.-M., the Paris-Orleans, and the Etat to the spokes of a great wheel with Paris as their hub. Outside of these five greatest regions there lie the two others--the Midi and the recently acquired lines in Alsace-Lorraine. The first of these, as we have just seen, occupies important territory just north of the Pyrenees; the second is indicated by its name. It has not yet been determined what shall be the ultimate operating plan of the lines in Alsace and in Lorraine.

They may be parceled between the Est and the P.-L.-M., but it is more than likely that they will continue to be operated as a separate system. France long ago saw the viciousness of bringing too large a railway property under a single operating direction.

The plan is almost perfectly regional. The only important exceptions are where a long arm of the Paris-Orleans goes at right angles to the parent stem and up into the heart of the Etat territory (to Nantes and to Brest), and where the Etat in turn has a rather roundabout line from Paris to Bordeaux, the chief external point of the Orleans system. (It is possible that in the contemplated return of the Etat to private operation this line may be handed over to the Paris-Orleans. It would be a logical step in the French regional plan.) Still one almost always goes to Nantes upon the P.-O. and rarely ever to Bordeaux upon the Etat, while to Ma.r.s.eilles or to Lyons there is absolutely no alternative to the P.-L.-M. To go to Rheims or to Strasbourg one must use the Est, to Boulogne or to Calais the Nord.

There is no choice other than the Etat for reaching Rouen or Le Havre from Paris.

Here then is regional railway operation brought to almost perfect operation, with compet.i.tion all but eliminated. For remember, if you please, that it never is completely eliminated. Even if one were to go to the final degree of consolidation and centralization, compet.i.tion would not be entirely gone. In France, even if the Paris-Orleans no longer reached Nantes or the Etat Bordeaux, even if every mile of rail were brought under a single autocratic and absolute head, there would remain the compet.i.tion of her unified railway with those outside the republic, and within it the natural compet.i.tion, let us say, of towns north of Paris with towns south for the traffic of that metropolis; east would forever be pitted against west. You can no more entirely remove compet.i.tion in business than you can the risings and the settings of the great sun. But you can remove the absurd phases, the obvious extravagances of compet.i.tion--particularly in transport. Remember always, if you will--I purposely reiterate the point--that some fine day you can cease to regard the motor-truck, the inland waterway barge, the interurban trolley, and the steam railroad train as compet.i.tors, but rather in the proper sense, each as agents of that great function of life, transportation, and so in some time or place properly correlated. And you can begin by regarding the railroads together as at least a single efficient one of these agents, and not as a lot of quarreling small boys dissipating much of their energy through their trivial disputes. This is the lesson that the railways of France bring to the rest of the great world of transport.

Their division into seven great operating units--but always carefully correlated units--is only for the purposes of proper supervision. We have seen in a previous chapter how easily the efficiency of a single railroad may be thwarted by permitting it to grow to an untoward size. And before I am entirely done I shall hope to show you that even in a regional railway scheme, which applied to the United States might contemplate as many as forty different railroads--different in name and in operating organization--there must be a distinct effort toward a strong centralization of certain functions; notably financing, traffic solicitation and control, and the staff study of advanced operating methods of every sort. Along the first two of these lines the _reseaux_ of France have as yet accomplished but little. There has been up to the present time but little centralization of their control, although steps now are being taken toward that end. In the opinion of some of the wisest of Frenchmen to-day, such steps are not only the next in their railway development but certain to come to a successful head. Only the confusing problem of a single state-owned and operated system has prevented their being accomplished this long while.

But in the standardization of operating methods and practices much already has been done in France. Four companies, the Etat, the Midi, the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, and the Alsace-Lorraine have formed an organization with the rather formidable t.i.tle of _L'Office Central d'Etudes du Materiel de Chemins de Fer_ for this purpose. This extremely active organization is divided into four departments, one in charge of tests, one for locomotive design, a third for car design, and the fourth to handle railway electrification.