Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 20

Progress already has been made too in drawing up plans for various types of standard locomotives. A study has also been made of standard designs for freight-cars of special types, such as tank-cars, steel-cars, and the like. Some very interesting tests have been made of refrigerator-cars for the movement of fish and of fruits. Incidentally it may be said that before the coming of the World War there was little or no refrigerator-car movement in France or anywhere else in Europe, and this despite the remarkable advances made in the United States in this form of traffic for at least twelve or fifteen years before. To move safely certain low-test materials for the manufacturer of explosives across tropical seas it was necessary for two French manufacturers to produce ships equipped with elaborate refrigerating devices. The technical knowledge which these men so gained in the manufacture of ice-making machinery they are now prepared to turn to good account in the production of refrigerator-cars, while the rapid development of France's wonderful new territory south of the Mediterranean promises a growing area sufficient to produce a plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables not only for her cities, but for those of a large part of the rest of western Europe as well.

Perhaps the most interesting work, however, done up to the present time by the central study office of the French railways has been upon the development of electricity as a practical working power for their lines.

(I made pa.s.sing reference to this in an earlier chapter.) As yet they have lagged in this work. The Etat operates a dozen miles of electric standard railway between Paris and Versailles. The comparatively new Paris terminal of the P.-O. has electric operation for perhaps another dozen miles outside of the Gare d'Orsay. There are a very few isolated electric high-speed lines here and there across the face of the land. In these things the French do move slowly. But they generally move pretty thoroughly, and to-day they have developed a very marvelous plan for the electrification of at least one third of their entire railway mileage.

As a beginning a bill was pa.s.sed in May, 1921, authorizing a company to develop the vast potentialities of the Rhone water-power--so vast as to be estimated to save France six millions of tons of coal a year, which is quite a factor in a country that does not in the average year consume more than sixty million tons.

This new scheme will mean the immediate construction of eighteen great power-houses along the upper reaches of the river, with a total development of 1,100,000 horse-power. The chief users of this huge supply of clean and inexhaustible power will be the City of Paris, and the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean railway. It is proposed that all the rail-lines in the huge quadrilateral between Bellegrade, Lyons, Ma.r.s.eilles, and Vintimille shall be completely electrified.

In the opinion of distinguished French engineers this single enterprise will be far the greatest, from an economic point of view, ever undertaken in France. Yet this is but the beginning. The Paris-Orleans has also ambitious plans under which it expects to bring electric energy, water-generated, to more than one-half of its 3250 miles of line. The Midi, running for miles along the base of the Pyrenees, has abundant opportunities for this cheap motive-power. Its management is unusually progressive and it may be expected to take advantage of these in the not distant future.

The net result of this great national economy will be the annual saving of many millions of tons of coal in a land which has no fuel to spare, which is indeed dependent upon coal importations for her very existence, let alone the development of her industries.

Yet great as this huge economic step will yet prove itself for France, it still will remain secondary to her wisdom of the long-ago in the simplification of her entire operating system by means of the sensible and logical regional railway plan, with its consequent huge basic economies.

France at the beginning started right. She is even to-day reaping the benefit of them. To-morrow when her other economic conditions shall have readjusted themselves she will reap a far greater benefit. The largest achievements of her regional plan are still in the future.

England has long since taken note of the situation in her neighbor just across the Channel. She has seen her own salvation in the French solution of the extravagant luxury of railway duplication. And even a traditional British prejudice against borrowing an idea from another nation has finally been broken down--in this particular instance very much broken down. Yet it is entirely probable that, had it not been for the coming of the World War, the Briton still would be enjoying the wasteful luxury of the excess service which his extravagant compet.i.tive system--very much like our own--had given him for many years. For it was extravagance, nothing more, nothing less, that led each of the three railways binding the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, about thirty miles apart, to run an hourly service between those cities. The trains might run two thirds or three quarters empty, and frequently did, but the pride of the London and Northwestern, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Cheshire lines was upheld. Compet.i.tion is a great upholder of pride.

Along came the World War, and England from the beginning very much in it.

The burden placed upon her railways was huge. To meet it they were placed under governmental control at the very outset and their services, aside from the military ones, bared to the bone. Such luxuries as three trains to the hour in each direction between Liverpool and Manchester were immediately abolished. Under a cooperative plan the trains between those two great English cities were, to use the phrase of the engineer, "staggered"--placed in a triple alternation, which gave virtually the same headway between them but with an operation of a little less than one third the former number of trains. The pa.s.senger was merely asked to show enough ordinary intelligence to study the time-tables and find from which of three pa.s.senger terminals his train of a given hour would start.

The astonishing feature of the entire thing was the lack of complaint from the traveling public which followed this wholesale reduction of train service. Everywhere throughout Great Britain it was the same. Competing trains between many of her busiest centers, arriving and departing at virtually the same hours but traversing separate routes, were consolidated, due regard being given to the necessities of intermediate towns which might happen to be served by but a single one of the road; and a war-time service was given for five years that was astonishingly good.

Not perfect, of course. The Englishman traveling was forced to sit a little closer in his seat, sometimes compelled to wait in queues at the wickets to buy his ticket, occasionally, in the absence of porters, to handle at least some of his own luggage at the terminals. But there was very little hardship about all of this, and a tremendous resultant economy.

Great Britain will never go back to her old extravagances of the days of unbridled transport compet.i.tion. True it is that since the signing of the Armistice her railway service, both pa.s.senger and freight, has been radically increased, but to nowhere near the point that it had reached in 1913. Fine frills, like the running of fast non-stop expresses between London and the ocean landing at Fishguard, in South Wales, to cite a single instance out of many, have been abandoned; never to be taken up again in your day or mine. The harsh necessities of vast economies born of a great war, the huge increases in labor and fuel and raw material costs that followed in its wake, do not encourage frills. Out of them came the demand for permanent sweeping economies that resulted in the pa.s.sage of the important Railways Bill by Parliament in August, 1921, after many hard weeks of exhaustive study.

To bring fifty-four almost entirely compet.i.tive railways into four almost non-compet.i.tive ones and insure a governmental control of rates and other charges sufficient to bring the const.i.tuent roads a rate of return equal to that which they were receiving in 1913--here in brief is the chief purpose of the extremely lengthy Railways Act, supplanting all transport legislation that had gone before. It is the most drastic business move that England has accomplished in many and many a day. Upon it are pinned the hopes of a thinking people. And because, following in the steps of the long-established regional systems of France it has become a high hope for our extremely muddled rail transport situation in the United States, it is well worth at least a little detailed study.

The south coast of England runs at a distance from London of from sixty miles upward, as it extends both east and west of Brighton, the nearest point to that great city. Three separate systems connect it with London: to the extreme east the affiliated Southern and Chatham railways, made familiar to thousands of Americans who have used them as an essential link between Victoria Station and the beginning of the Channel crossing at Dover; the London, Brighton, and South Coast; and the London and Southwestern, this last line reaching as far west as Plymouth, down in Cornwall. In a sense it may be said that these three railways are regional railways within a region. Each has fairly definite and non-compet.i.tive territory. Each serves its own princ.i.p.ality, and serves it admirably. To make a region out of these three railways is no problem at all. It is solved, almost before it is begun.

Nor is the east coast of England to the north of London and right up to and beyond the old Scottish border difficult to bring into a single region. Three more or less parallel railways--the Great Central, the Great Northern, and the Great Eastern--occupy the eastern counties all the way up to York, 188 miles north of London, where the Northeastern has its real beginning and occupies the extreme northeastern corner of England as an absolute monopoly. This last line reaches within fifty-eight miles of Edinburgh. As a matter of operating convenience, however, its locomotives run all the way through to that ancient Scottish capital, traversing the final fifty-eight miles upon the rails of the North British company.

Perhaps no better instance may be shown of the absurdly small typical English railway of to-day than to realize that within the 392 miles that lie between London and Edinburgh--no distance at all upon our American railroad map--the through fast expresses run upon three separate railways.

The only condition we have that parallels and exceeds this is the operation of the Baltimore and Ohio's through trains from New York to Philadelphia, which traverse the rails of three roads--the Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, and the Philadelphia and Reading--in the short ninety miles that intervene between Manhattan Island and the entrance to the B. & O.'s own rails.

The British railroaders have long recognized the absurdity of the railway that is too short just as they are able to point the finger of fine scorn at our many railroads that are entirely too long. More than a decade ago these four roads of the eastern counties of England sought to antic.i.p.ate the present grouping principle of the Railways Act by an amalgamation of their properties into a single, succinct regional railway property. The proposal was bitterly fought in Parliament and then defeated. Great Britain had not then become convinced of the extravagance of the compet.i.tion principle in transportation. It was necessary to have a war to teach her that important economic lesson.

Almost as the northeastern corner of England is the undisputed princ.i.p.ality of a single system so does a single railway, the Great Western, stretch alone directly west from London and almost completely dominates its territory. To bring it into regional grouping with any of the other important British railway systems has been well-nigh impossible.

After a number of futile attempts the professional and amateur railroaders who have been attempting the solution of the regional plan for Great Britain have given up the idea. They have found that they could only combine the Great Western with the Cambrian and some other less important Welsh roads, and now they have let it go at that--a single well-developed region of some 3650 miles, well contained and, with the exception of a single long arm thrust up into Liverpool, fairly compact.

In the center of England rested the difficult part of the entire problem of working out a rational and economic regional plan. In the succeeding and final chapters of this book I shall show how in the two inner industrial centers of America, the one just east and the other just west of the Mississippi River, we shall come to two territories where the working out of a pure regional plan is virtually impossible. So it is in central England. Two great railways, possibly the two greatest in all Britain, the London and Northwestern and the Midland--occupy that industrial area with a perfect interlacing of lines, and at every corner of it fight energetically for its traffic. Other railways enter slightly upon it; as we have just seen, the Great Western with its line through Birmingham up to Liverpool, the Great Central and, in its northerly reaches, the cross-country Lancashire and Yorkshire. This last line has however recently been absorbed by the London and Northwestern. It too antic.i.p.ated the decisions of the Railways Act and comes into any grouping the largest single system in Great Britain, with considerably more than four thousand miles of line, a system roughly comparable in size and volume of traffic with our own Baltimore and Ohio, although in its history, as well as in the traditions of its personnel, more closely a.n.a.logous to the Pennsylvania railroad.

To have attempted to separate the important London and Northwestern and Midland systems would have been to break down completely the whole spirit and plan of the British regional system. Therefore they have been brought into a single grouping, and with them the Lancashire and Yorkshire of course, the North Staffordshire, the Furness, the Caledonian, the Glasgow and Southwestern, and the Highland companies--the last of these, as their names indicate, Scottish lines.

Here then are four railways created out of fifty-four--some 24,500 miles of line as compared with the 27,000 miles of French railway. The groupings have followed the lines that I have just shown and take the names of the Southern; the Northeastern, the Eastern, and the East Scottish; the Western; and the Northwestern, Midland, and West Scottish groups respectively. The smaller and comparatively unimportant lines of the United Kingdom fall easily into some one of these four great regions. For a time Scotland itself represented a rather perplexing problem. The energetic young British minister of transport, Sir Eric Geddes, stood stoutly for the retention of all the Scottish railways in a separate, distinct, and strongly unified group. In this he was opposed. The old-time compet.i.tive idea that there should be at least two separate and rival routes from London up into Scotland--the one on the east coast and the other on the west coast of Britain--would not down. Geddes gave up. Then for a time he proposed a generous compromise in the form of two separate Scotch groups, one upon each side of the island and connecting with the Eastern (English) and the Northwestern and Midland groups at York and Carlisle respectively. But even in this he was beaten. Scotland lost her railway autonomy. Her lines will be merged and as ent.i.ties forever lost in the sweep of the two larger groups of the entire kingdom.

Geddes has stood in his position in regard to the Scottish railways for the regional plan in its purest form. His theory was excellent. But it had to give way to hard-headed practice. It often so happens. Remember always, if you will, that railroad compet.i.tion has been a great G.o.d in Britain as well as in the United States. Yet compet.i.tion is not to be too hardly judged, even by the loftiest of idealists. It has its good points, and they are many. Most of the fine excellences of our railroad service in this country were built up in its hottest compet.i.tive period. That is irrefutable. It is entirely probable that if we had not had that compet.i.tive period we should not have had a service even comparable with the high standard of excellence that we reached a decade ago. The point is that within the last generation genuine compet.i.tion has ceased to exist between our railroads; the sham of it that remains is a fearful drag upon any really economical operation of them to-day.

Only a few years ago Lord Monkswell, the distinguished British student of railway problems, said:

"At sight it would appear that it [compet.i.tion] has possessed certain advantages. It is found that in Great Britain, the only European country where different routes between the same important centers exist to any great extent under separate management, the train service is more complete than anywhere else _except France_ [the italics are my own] and the pa.s.senger-fares are by no means particularly high. But when we remember that Great Britain was the first country to develop railways and so got a long start of the rest of the world, and that the population of Great Britain for each unit of area is much greater than that of any other big country--more than twice as great as that of France, and half as great again as that of Germany--we see that there are other causes to which these effects may be ascribed.

"No conditions of this kind, however, tend in any way to show that compet.i.tion, if attainable, is incapable of producing good results on railways at the present time. Far from it; railways present so many possibilities of improvement that if any really effective means could be discovered of inducing their managers to make bold experiments, it is more than likely that the best results would ensue. As has just been remarked the facilities offered to pa.s.sengers are certainly on the whole greater in Great Britain than elsewhere, and in conjunction with--probably in consequence of--this, it is found that the pa.s.senger receipts per head of the population are approximately twice as large as they are in France or Germany.

"On the face of it then there is a very good reason for supposing that the receipts increase with the facilities offered. Now the two things above all others that pa.s.sengers may be expected to care for are reduced third-cla.s.s fares and increased speeds. If railway managers, animated by some real spirit of compet.i.tion, were to offer these advantages, it is possible and even probable that travel would increase so much that the railways, besides conferring a great boon on their customers, would themselves secure large benefits.

"As regards the goods traffic, the definite elimination of all compet.i.tion would be likely to have the result of doing away with several unsatisfactory features of this traffic. Even though there is ostensibly no compet.i.tion in rates between the different companies serving the same points, there can be no doubt that the fear of losing traffic has frequently induced railways to make concessions of various kinds to traders, the results of which have been to give more or less secret rebates to the traders in whose favor the concessions were made."

I have quoted Lord Monkswell in some detail because his remarks, made upon the British railway situation eight years ago, are so pertinent and applicable to our American railroad situation of this moment. He has seen the rise and the decline of compet.i.tion upon his home island. And we too have seen its rise and its decline, upon the North American continent.

Return for a final moment to the British regional grouping plan as it has finally been effected by Parliament; some of the many details are vital to us because they are details that before long we shall be compelled to face in the remaking of our own national railroad structure. The Railways Act over there, after outlining rather precisely the geography of the regional grouping, sets up an Amalgamation Tribunal, consisting of three commissioners, who will approve and confirm the amalgamation schemes submitted to them. This tribunal is to be a court of record and is to have an official seal. Its decisions are subject to a review by the Court of Appeal, whose decision is to be final, unless it gives leave to carry it up to the House of Lords itself.

It is expected that the work of this tribunal will be finished early in 1923, so that the new groups may begin active operations upon July 1 of that year. At one time it was suggested that the entire scheme be made operative upon July 1, 1921; the whole thing was suggested by the minister of transport as early as June, 1920. But that was obviously far too short a time. The railway companies would have none of it. They wanted it to begin not before January 1, 1924, and have nearly had their own way in the matter.

For it need not be supposed that the bill was adopted without contentions.

These were many and some of them were bitter. The Scottish question was but one of several vexing sub-problems. A good many of the British railway men looked upon the rate return to come from the proper fixing of the tariff charges in each of the groupings as quite too low. The fact that it was the equal of 1913 has meant little or nothing to them. That year returned but 3.64 per cent. to the average British railway share, and some large holders of these securities felt that they should have a much bigger return upon their investments.

Yet to go further into this vexing point would involve an intricate study of British railway capitalization. It is enough for our point now to say that it is large, extremely large, per mile as compared with our American capitalization. Those people who have made it their particular business to shout upon watered stock and bonds of our roads will have interesting food for thought if they will study the capitalization of railways overseas; particularly so if they will consider that the preliminary valuation reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission show many of our carriers as possessing an actual property value well in excess of the combined securities issued against it.

The entire field of British railway operation offers many valuable and suggestive hints, even to a nation as supposedly expert in railroad operation as this. It is not possible in the limits of a single chapter to go into all of these. Among them is the development of electrification upon the standard lines of Great Britain; despite a seemingly slow progress in this great work (but 365 miles out of 24,500 being operated by electricity at the moment) it is known that a group of distinguished American electrical engineers has been engaged for some time past in devising a scheme for the operation of every mile of British railway by electric power. Others are the exquisite simplification and economy of her terminal operation and the facility of her small goods-wagons for short-haul traffic. These are all interesting. Yet, the single phase of her regional development so far outranks even these as to demand an almost exclusive attention.

France has led the way, has proved almost beyond doubt the value of the regional system; Great Britain now falls in line. The United States will be next in turn. Because the possibilities of the extension of this, the greatest of immediate railway economies, are so vast in this land of huge railroad development I shall leave their description until later. Then I shall endeavor to show how as a nation we can all benefit--railroad patron, railroad shareholder, railroad employee alike--by the extension to our national transport machine of a plan which is so ingenious, so genuinely economic, and yet withal so simple as to make it a bewildering wonder that our biggest railroaders did not come to it long ago. That they did not is rather a sad commentary upon their vision--or lack of it.

CHAPTER XV

THE REGIONAL RAILROAD AT HOME

Nearly six years ago I began a careful study of the possibilities of a regional railroad development within the United States. At that time I had not visited Europe. Yet a fairly thorough knowledge of the general plan of her railway organization, acquired through a process of careful reading, had made me cognizant of the regional plan as it exists there; particularly of the French _reseaux_. It was then apparent--well before our entrance into the World War--that the scheme of organization upon which our roads had been upbuilt for eighty-five years was approaching the end of its usefulness. Over-consolidation, the decline of real compet.i.tion between the separate carriers, the increasing unintelligent interference of government with the minor details of railroad operation, the decline of morale--each of these things separately, all of them together, bespoke the slowly approaching end of our old order of railroad things.

What was to replace it? Government ownership? Some of the people who in 1916 had a stray thought or two that the state ownership and operation of our railroads might not be such a bad thing after all, by the end of 1920 were pretty well disillusioned. At the beginning of this book I reviewed in some slight detail the achievements and the failures of the United States Railroad Administration. It proved that in the centralization of an entire railroad structure of this land certain great operating economies might be accomplished; it also proved quite as definitely the fact that our 265,000 miles of railroad consolidated into a single structure was far too clumsy and too unwieldy for any sort of efficient operation whatsoever. A paradoxical statement in sound, but one in fact quite accurate.

Three years ago I attempted the fabrication of alternative railroad centralization and decentralization schemes. In the one I bowed abjectly to our great American G.o.d of compet.i.tion. To the limit of my ability and knowledge I recognized banking control, natural traffic routes and breaking points, and interlocking directorates and ownerships. On paper I laid down a number of "compet.i.tively consolidated" railroads--not more than twenty, or at the most twenty-five,--for the entire United States. I linked widely separated roads because they already had linked themselves by joint ownership; I split New England in twain, giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania and the rest of her railroads to the already overburdened and somewhat unwieldy New York Central. Such moves followed the logic of Wall Street. The comfort and convenience of Boston mattered not at all.

Did she not have compet.i.tion? What mattered it that under such a plan the Baltimore and Ohio, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, or the Canadian roads would have no entrance either to her or to the fine industrial territory about her, save over the rails of compet.i.tors? That was a mere detail!

And while Boston might have the compet.i.tion of two roads, little of the rest of New England would. As I have already said in this book, railroad compet.i.tion may be the industrial necessity, nay even the very breath of commercial life, to such fine manufacturing towns as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids, but how about such fine manufacturing towns as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence? Are they not also ent.i.tled to the breath of commercial life? Yet to give these four big typical New England towns railroad compet.i.tion would mean the complete dismemberment of the compact New Haven system--an almost utter impossibility. Southern New England is already pretty tightly set as a simon-pure railroad region. It can be regarded as nothing else.

So I tore up my "compet.i.tive consolidation" plan and began work trying to place the entire country on the simon-pure regional idea, beginning with New England, which can easily be considered as a single region even though Boston shudders at the mere thought of such a thing. And in fact from the point of view of better operation New England would far better be divided into two regional railroads, each with its headquarters in Boston. One of these roads would embrace the Boston and Albany and the roads south of it, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford and its controlled properties, the Central New England, and the New York, Ontario, and Western. Incidentally this last road is something of a teaser in any regional planning. From Campbell Hall, New York, where it connects with the Central New England and the New Haven (by way of the Poughkeepsie Bridge) down to Scranton and the heart of the anthracite district, it is an essential part of New England's railroad system. From Cadosia--where the Scranton branch diverges from the present main line--north to Oswego it decidedly is _not_ New England. There its value is very questionable, even for local traffic.