Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 2

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

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

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

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

The man who dug the great tunnels under the Hudson River when every one else had p.r.o.nounced the project as chimerical could hardly stand accused himself of any lack of vision. Moreover McAdoo's selections in nearly every case justified his words. He began by choosing as his right-hand a.s.sistant and general adviser Walker D. Hines, an extremely able New York lawyer, who in the forty-seventh year of his life was chairman of the board of the Santa Fe. On the average road the chairmanship of the board of directors is likely to be a sort of sanitarium for retired executives.

Not so with the Santa Fe. Its late president, E. P. Ripley, the man who was instrumental in bringing it out of bankruptcy and up to its place as one of the greatest single systems in the United States, ten or twelve years ago was seeking a young man who could represent the road in New York, and represent it with the proper authority. He found such a man in Hines, then barely turned forty, and he never regretted his choice.

Moreover Hines, in a brilliant legal connection with the Louisville and Nashville before going to the Santa Fe, had begun to acquire his remarkable knowledge of railroad conditions in virtually every section of the land.

The Santa Fe has always had much good motive-power, human and mechanical.

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

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

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

They were referring of course to the brilliant young president of the Southern railway, who was the chairman of the Railroad War Board, const.i.tuted, you will remember, as a war measure by the railroads themselves. In that job, and against no small odds, Harrison had won a fair measure of success. He felt keenly the slap at him in the McAdoo selections; he felt another when he was virtually deposed from the control of the railroad which had been his great pride and ambition, and young Mr.

Markham brought down from Chicago to be the McAdoo generalissimo of all the roads in the southeastern corner of the land at Atlanta. Yet that last thrust was hardly greater than the first, when the ranking heads of the two railroads which had been the hottest enemies of the Southern in that which it regarded peculiarly as its own territory were lifted to eminence, while the president of the Southern was permitted to retire to Richmond as merely its corporate head, without one atom of authority over the operation of his road.

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

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

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

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

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

Officially that policy was thus stated in his own words:

Inasmuch as "no man can serve two masters," and the efficient operation of the railroads for winning the war and the service to the public is the purpose of Federal control, it was manifestly wise to release the presidents and other officers of the railroad companies, with whose corporate interest they are properly concerned, from all responsibility for the operation of their properties.... All ambiguity of obligation is thus avoided. Officers of the corporation are left free to protect the interests of their owners, stockholders, and creditors, and the regional and operating managers have a direct and undivided responsibility and allegiance to the United States Railroad Administration.

He then went ahead in accordance with this announced policy and appointed Federal managers for the larger roads, incorporating into their direction smaller lines, closely affiliated or connected with them. But in almost every case the president of the railroad became its Federal manager, invariably at a lower salary than the private corporations had paid. Mr.

Harrison, Mr. Willard, Mr. Rea, Mr. Kruttschnitt, and Mr. Underwood (of the Erie) were extremely conspicuous exceptions to this rule.

I am setting down these intensely personal episodes in the conduct of the Railroad Administration under its first director-general solely for one purpose--they have had a very large bearing on the present-day plight of our railroads of the United States. The bitternesses that were then engendered have not ceased. I do not feel that Mr. Harrison or Mr. Willard or Mr. Rea, to-day restored to their old positions and influence, now harbors a single grievance against Mr. McAdoo because of them. The damage that he did has all been done, in the thrust against the morale of the rank and file of our American railroad organization. McAdoo talking to the men from the rear end of his own private-car at Pueblo and at El Paso and telling them that at last they were come into their own rights did not begin to do the damage that the whispered rumors, running here and there and everywhere, of what the director-general was doing to the former big bosses of great railways did to our old-time traditions of railroad respect and discipline.

In giving labor a seat in his cabinet McAdoo did a big thing. In making speeches such as those at Pueblo and at El Paso he did a far smaller thing, to put the matter very lightly indeed. In the innuendo of his att.i.tude toward a group of important railroad presidents a very great wrong was done unquestionably.

The functions of the director-general's cabinet were national. In addition to its members the steersman of the craft chose regional directors, at first (and with but a few changes thereafter) as follows: for the extremely congested lines north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, A. H. Smith, president of the New York Central; for the lines of the Southeast, as we have just seen, C. H. Markham, president of the Illinois Central; and for those of the rest of the country, R. H. Aishton, president of the Chicago and Northwestern. Later Mr. Aishton's huge territory was subdivided and three sub-regions made of it. In a similar fashion New England also was made a sub-region, and James H. Hustis, the very popular president of the Boston and Maine, placed in charge of it, after him came Percy R. Todd of the Bangor and Aroostook, an executive equally experienced in New England railroading.

Mr. Smith was the very first of these men to be chosen. He received a telephone request to come to Washington one day late in December, 1917.

Boarding a midnight train, he was in McAdoo's office the next day. The director-general of the railroads notified him that he had been drafted to work out the fearfully congested situation in the Northeast. Without a word of comment Smith turned on his heel, walked to a desk in the corner of the room, and, picking up a block of paper, began inditing detailed telegraphic instructions to the presidents of the roads in his new jurisdiction as to their part in the great drama of national control whose opening scene was so close at hand. A little later he returned to New York. And at noon on December 28, 1917, the exact time set by President Wilson for the curtain to rise on government operation of the continental railroad system, Mr. Smith stood in his window on an upper floor of the Grand Central Terminal, and, looking down at the maze of tracks below him, trains coming, trains going, began the dictation of a short statement as to the history, the size, and the strength of the property he headed.

"I want it to go into the record," said Smith. "The opportunity might not come again."

He turned immediately to the work in hand. There was plenty of it to be done. The great city around about the terminal was on the edge of panic.

There was a fuel famine and no promise of relief. New York at last was paying the penalty of her medieval, not to say archaic, system of distribution. At last the war was very real and very close at hand. They were saying that many of the schools would have to close, that there was a possibility the theaters would have to shut down each Monday night. Poor New York! She did not then know that the worst was yet to come!

All this occurred with 300,000 tons of coal upon the Jersey side of the Hudson River opposite the city, while in the midst of a winter of almost unprecedented bitterness an ancient lighterage system struggled with ice hardly less thick than that which once sufficed for a footpath for Henry Ward Beecher from New York to Brooklyn, and could bring less than 30,000 tons of coal a day across the river. Nor was this all--no, not even a reference now to the freight upon the Jersey meadows. Know now that the greater part of that acc.u.mulated 300,000 tons of coal was in cars and that production at the mines actually was being slowed down by the delay in the return of these cars.

"Open the Pennsylvania tubes to the coal trains!" shrieked the radicals of Manhattan. "Give us fuel trains and food trains instead of Florida Limiteds! Put them through at the rate of fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty a day, if needful!"

Some of these lost their heads. Smith did not lose his. Neither did he impose any more humiliation upon the head of his great compet.i.tor. He does not do business that way. Instead he gave careful heed to the terminal possibilities of the Pennsylvania, the traditional and very real rival of the road he himself headed.

"We may possibly make a freight use of the tubes," he said quietly, "but it will be a moderate use. I shall limit the length of the trains to thirty-six or thirty-seven cars, which really is no train at all. For I do not want to see one of those fifty-ton battle-ship coal gondolas jumping the track in a tube which was not designed for it, and so completely blocking the line. I am going to be in a position to hand the terminal back to the Pennsylvania in quite as good condition as I found it."

Then he made further explanations. After all the Pennsylvania tubes, thrusting themselves across the island of Manhattan, are even in an emergency of little or no freight use to it. They are too deep to be of freight service to the heart of metropolitan New York. To Brooklyn, with a population almost equal to that of Manhattan, to Queens, and to the Bronx they eventually were made of some slight service.

This was not the big part of Smith's job, however. He made a quick survey of the entire situation in his big district; trains and cars cluttered here and there and everywhere. For the final thirty days of private operation the situation steadily had been growing worse. In the districts roundabout Pittsburg and Philadelphia and New York it had become intolerable. Take, if you will, the industries in those vast manufacturing districts and consider them multiplied tenfold, their influx of fuel and of raw material increased in like proportion, and so with their output.

Add these industries one to another and see them in units of tens of dozens of trains, of hundreds and thousands of coal-cars and flat-cars and box-cars. And on the other hand, see all of these poured upon railroads that had been steadily growing weaker for eight or ten years--more rapidly weakened, however, in the last four months than in the entire three years that preceded them. Bear in mind their tremendous loss of man-power through the draft, consider the gradual wearing down of engines and cars and tracks and terminals toward the breaking point, and wonder not then that we had congestion and much worse east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio.

Throughout that autumn of 1917 we watched the bending of the rod of the railroad just as we had watched it bend and then recover again through the two hard winter seasons that have preceded this one. It bent further this winter than ever before--the traffic was so much greater, and the facilities with which to meet it so much weaker. No wonder that freight moved slowly, more slowly, most slowly, and in many cases finally ceased to move at all; that upon the Jersey meadows outside of New York were 30,000 car-loads of merchandise that could not be moved up to that port and to the ships waiting to carry it overseas. At one time 150 ships stood waiting for coal alone in New York Harbor. And overseas was a great war in its critical stages. No wonder, though, that coal began coming in dribblings to hearthstones that were whining for tons of it, that finally it ceased coming at all for whole days, while great and ordinarily comfortable American cities shivered and watched their death rates mount higher than they had mounted in many a year.

It was a man-sized job that confronted A. H. Smith. Like a real railroad man he handled it. He went in at once upon it. He began to do things. He issued immediate embargoes against shipment into the New York district of anything save food, news-print paper, live stock, perishable freight, and freight consigned to the Government. He did more. With a great map of metropolitan New York and its railroad terminals spread before him he began ordering freight concentrated west of Buffalo and Pittsburg and south of Washington into the trunk-lines which variously best serve the great group of cities that const.i.tute the metropolitan district of New York. The Baltimore and Ohio for instance has exclusive terminal facilities upon Staten Island, which with its many shipyards and wharves is an important freight consignment point. In ordinary times, when the situation was dominated by compet.i.tive conditions, a car-load of freight offered the New York Central at Toledo or Detroit would be carried on its lines to New York and then floated to Staten Island by car-ferry. In this non-compet.i.tive war situation, in this hour when the temporary continental railroad system of the United States was being born, such a car would be taken by the New York Central from Toledo or Detroit to the Baltimore and Ohio at some point west of Pittsburg, and then over it to Staten Island by the shortest possible route.

What Smith was doing in New York his fellow regional directors in Atlanta and in Chicago also were doing. Order was being worked out of chaos. The great railroads of the United States, even temporarily and very hastily welded into a single national system, showed good results of efficiency and economy, just as some of their far-sighted private operators had predicted more than two decades ago. Released from the shackles of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law--Congress had refused such a release to the Railroad War Board but quickly granted it to McAdoo--and from the conflicting regulatory commissions all the way across the land, they were able to simplify and unify their facilities--even though many times at public cost and inconvenience--in a way that enabled them not only to handle the pressure of war traffic and in an admirable fashion but also to show great economies upon their cost-sheets.

To come to actual cases: It was good railroading when the centralized Washington administration began a.s.sembling various sections of various lines so as to gain not only more direct routes between important traffic centers but lines of lowest possible gradients as well. In the West particularly, great progress was made in this direction. For instance in the old days of compet.i.tive railroading the Southern Pacific quite naturally operated its through route from Dallas or Fort Worth to Los Angeles and San Francisco over its own tracks through San Antonio or El Paso. Of course the old-time and somewhat unfortunate Texas and Pacific had a far shorter route from Dallas and Fort Worth direct to El Paso, but the compet.i.tive situation, the fact that it was the Texas and Pacific and not the Southern Pacific, prevented it from getting much volume of traffic for its short line. Under government unification the T. & P. line came into its own, with the result that 500 miles were taken off the through route between the important North Texas cities and southern California--with great resultant time and operating economies.

Similarly, there arose a war-time a.s.sembled through line from the oil-fields at Casper, Wyoming, to Montana and Puget Sound points, 880 miles shorter than the route which the compet.i.tive situation formerly forced. Freight from southern California to Ogden was hauled 201 miles less than by the pathway formerly used; while the Railroad Administration route between Chicago and Sioux City was 110 miles shorter than the old, and 289 miles were saved in the through traffic between Kansas City and Galveston and Houston. Multiply these examples and it is easy to see how in a period of sixty days in the summer of 1918 nine thousand freight-cars were so rerouted as to effect a saving in mileage traveled by each car of about 195 miles, or a total saving of about 1,754,805 car-miles.

To be ranked with this sort of operating economy was the work undertaken by Regional Director R. H. Aishton at Chicago when early in the spring of 1918 he began consolidating train movements so that instead of the several competing trunk-lines coming down from out of the Northwest, each operating competing through freight-trains each day into the great terminal and interchange yards at St. Paul, and there shifting and resorting their cars incredibly for distribution between the six trunk-lines leading for another five hundred miles down into Chicago, through trains were operated solidly from the Puget Sound points through to Lake Michigan. For through freight the great railroad yards upon the line between St. Paul and Minneapolis represented no more of a stop than was necessary for changing engines, cabooses, and crews. Moreover these through trains were distributed in alternation between the Northern Pacific and Great Northern lines from the Pacific coast down to the Twin Cities, but because of its superior mileage and gradient conditions they were handled on to Chicago almost exclusively by the Northwestern.

Nor was Chicago--with almost inevitable traffic congestion, despite the fact that it now bears upon its western rim the largest interchange and clearing-house yard for freight-cars in the entire world--a railroad point big enough to break this simple scheme of through service. Take the export corn specials out of the Missouri valley. One of these trains, let us say, consisted of thirty-one cars from Omaha and five cars from Sioux City, all moving under special government permits, and was routed intact from Omaha to Philadelphia. It came east over the Northwestern to a point well outside of the Chicago congested district. There it was turned to the tracks of the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern, one of the outermost of the belt-line railroads which encircle Chicago. The Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern in turn delivered the train--intact and unchanged, you will remember--to the Nickel Plate, which at Buffalo handed it to the Lackawanna, which in turn carried it as far as Scranton, giving it there to the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the connecting Philadelphia and Reading for prompt handling through to tide-water and a waiting ship at Philadelphia.

There was no switching and but little delay en route, and the train generally went through from the Missouri to the Delaware in considerably less than a week. Such a prompt through movement, with its saving of time and money, was quite unheard of in the days of compet.i.tive railroad management.

All the reroutings and consolidations of this sort by no means had been confined to the western portions of the land. In the East many others were made, particularly in the congested sections of war-munitions manufacture, where, in addition to great numbers of war brides and shipyards and camps and cantonments, requiring not merely outbound shipping facilities but large quant.i.ties of raw materials and fuel, there had been a vast movement of coal for both domestic use and export. In the handling of this coal ingenious savings were made, both in the routings and in the details of train operation. Roads and portions of roads, formerly in bitter compet.i.tion, were joined together in a way only possible under absolutely unified and autocratic control. And in some cases the routings were so made as to divert the great streams of through freight traffic, in order to avoid areas already badly congested. Thus Atlantic-bound freight coming up into St. Louis from the Southwest was sent far to the north and even through Canada before it reached the seaboard. A glance at the map and a fair understanding of the present traffic situation will show the necessity of this. The lines that reach into the coal-fields of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia and western Pennsylvania were much burdened these months. It hardly was fair to ask them to carry much through freight upon their already heavily laden shoulders. And the Pittsburg district, with its various narrow _impa.s.ses_ made by broad rivers and sharp-sided mountains, is a railroad abomination--a fearfully congested traffic gateway which, by reason of those selfsame rivers and mountains, is hardly capable of radical enlargement, even at great cost.

The railroads that run along the south sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie, ample as are their facilities, already had a full load of traffic from Chicago, the West, and the Northwest. So the traffic from St. Louis and the rich country back of it must needs cross the Chicago currents and go to the north of Lake Erie. The Wabash--one of the least understood and most abused railroads in America--in those days first began really to justify the fine strategy of its position. It became the main factor in bringing St. Louis freight up to Detroit, where it no longer crossed into Canada by ferry but through the great tunnel which the Michigan Central completed about twelve or fourteen years ago; and by sweeping easily along through the gradeless tangents of the Province of Ontario that freight re-entered the United States at the Niagara frontier, and so on to New York or Boston by any one of a half a dozen uncongested traffic routes.

These things apparently could not have been done under private management; at any rate they were not done under private management, although it is but fair to say that some of the far-sighted railroaders who sat at the table of the former Railroad War Board--which had attempted at the eleventh hour to consolidate the lines and so save the obvious perils of government operation, even as a temporary war measure--had the vision of these very consolidation economies. They had the vision but not the power.

Too many powerful considerations bore in upon them and bore them down.

Regulation, which was not fair regulation, the inability to finance the lines with rates fixed and expenses increasing by leaps and by bounds, compet.i.tion refusing to bury itself even in emergency, even traditional jealousy--all these things prevented the Railroad War Board, const.i.tuted by the roads themselves to have a sort of supreme authority, from accomplishing its real purpose. These things were accomplished by the United States Railroad Administration and William G. McAdoo, as director-general of railroads, almost at the very beginning.

I have set down these operating details of the United States Railroad Administration under its first director-general at some length, not because of any desire to glorify Mr. McAdoo but because I may want to refer to them again in the final chapters of this book when I am endeavoring to show the folly and the waste of many of the phases of our compet.i.tive system of railroading in the United States. Failure as it was in many ways, the McAdoo episode was perhaps valuable after all as a laboratory experiment in rail transport. I am not sure but that as such it was worth every cent that it cost; and its cost was not small. For some years past, before the coming of the war, a certain proportion of our railroaders had been getting into something of a rut, to put it lightly.

McAdoo came along and, if he did nothing else, succeeded in shaking them well out of that rut. Yet it is but fair to recall again that the Railroad War Board might have done the same thing had it possessed two great powers that the United States Railroad Administration possessed--absolute authority and virtually unlimited financial resources. McAdoo, on the one hand, might order new locomotives by the hundreds and box-cars by the thousands--no matter what the price, we were at war--and upon the other, he could--and did--raise the railroad tariffs, both freight and pa.s.senger, to a point hitherto deemed virtually prohibitive. He raised the rates all the way from 25 to 35 per cent., and the railroads but two or three years before had found the Interstate Commerce Commission deaf to their appeals for mere 5 and 10 per cent. advances.

CHAPTER III