Our Railroads To-Morrow. Edward Hungerford
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he found the American railroad still meeting its responsibilities bravely and with a real degree of efficiency. One crossed the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Maumee, and still found the railroad functioning—the stout, pliable rod of its energy bending but never breaking. He came further east still, crossed the Susquehanna and then the Delaware, and still the rail carrier functioned. He came to the Hudson and found the battered and overburdened railroad machine still meeting its obligations, after a fashion at least.
Our railroad machine did not break even in New England, where conditions are and for a long time past have been almost at their worst; where for nearly two decades a high-grade community has been forced to pay penalty, and pay generously, for a grave accumulation of railroad errors. It was in New England that American railroading really began, with the construction in 1808 of a crude wooden railed line at Quincy, Massachusetts, whose horse-drawn cars brought granite from the quarries down to the water’s edge, whence it might go by sloop to Charlestown, where the tall shaft of the Bunker Hill monument was beginning to arise. It was in New England too that the first real railroad enterprise and development were shown; by the middle of the forties a group of energetic and profitable small companies rapidly expanded and offered genuine transport to six of the busiest and most rapidly growing States of the Union.
It is in that same New England that when one comes to-day he finds the picture of our national railroad machine almost at its very darkest—the stations dirty, unpainted, neglected; the passenger-cars and the locomotives in similar or even worse condition; the morale of the rank and file of railroad labor low in many different ways. Remember that it is not like this everywhere else within the land. It is particularly different out in the West. Take California; out there the stations almost invariably are clean and brightly painted, the broad lawns that surround them are in the pink of perfection, while the trains that enter and leave the stations are in full keeping with them. Engines, and the passenger-cars behind, are alike clean, fresh-painted, efficient in every detail of their appearance. Paint certainly does wonders. The cherry-red electric trains of the Southern Pacific never seemed brighter or more immaculate. I rode a little more than a year ago on a huge steam locomotive of the El Paso and Southwestern railroad. The brightness of her appearance, the efficiency of her performance, seemed to belie the fact that it was eleven years since she had left the big shop in Philadelphia where she had been born.
Always it is as one comes further east that the American railroad machine grows more and more shabby, until in New England we see it at its worst. Our entire railroad structure, speaking nationally and subject only to a few exceptions, is worn down a bit. It is a shoe outgrown. It pinches. It pinches hard. Yet nowhere does it pinch harder than in New England. I hinted but a moment ago of the transportation machine there, twisted and bended and torn and all but completely broken. I spoke of the desolate appearance of many of the trains and of the stations. The Boston and Albany, it is true, has been something of an exception to this rule. The present condition of the Springfield station does not prove the exception however. Always a wealthy road, the B. & A. is compelled by its State charter to return to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all of its earnings in excess of an annual 8 per cent. It is hardly necessary to add that even in its most prosperous years the excess earnings went into the property. And in consequence the patrons of the road benefited. But that was yesterday.
It was yesterday too that Boston possessed a suburban service in which she could at least display some slight evidences of satisfaction. That yesterday is now quite gone. To-day the service is unquestionably the very worst in all this land. It is doubtful if any other large American city would tolerate for a month the sort of suburban service which to-day is doled out to the Boston metropolitan district. Ancient and dilapidated cars, pulled by equally ancient and dilapidated locomotives, are the sad lot of the Boston commuter. The records of the railroad companies themselves show that some of these ancient coaches date from as far back as the early eighties; many of them go back into the nineties. Nightly the trains are crowded, not only to the extent of their seating capacities, but well beyond them. Nightly the abominable overcrowdings of the New York subways are repeated throughout the Boston suburban zone, and with far less excuse.
In its appropriate time I shall discuss the large possibilities of electrification as it applies in particular to the Boston suburban zone. For the moment consider this New England corner as the darkest corner of a transportation picture which to-day has but few patches of brilliancy. As one goes from east to west however the picture brightens perceptibly. Do not forget that it is at its very worst in New England and perhaps at its best in California.
For the moment the freight service, nationally speaking at least, is not subject to the same criticisms as the passenger. (To the depleted passenger service we shall come in good time.) This for the simple reason that the traffic is not being produced across the land. A sadly depleted transportation structure easily can take good care of a sadly lessened freight traffic. But let our wheels of industry begin really to hum again and contemplating the present condition of our carriers, I shall fear a reversion to the conditions of the winter months of the early part of 1920, when one box-car took forty days to go from Boston to Chicago, a trip that easily should have been made in a fortnight, while another car but a few days later took fifty days for the same journey!
Yet, to be entirely fair, these runs were made in a winter which, by the official records of the weather bureau, was the worst that the country had known in thirty-six years.
All right. Let us be fair. We shall go back three years to 1917 before government control and the really big labor problems had been wished upon the railroads. The New England roads even then were already having a fearful time of it. The Boston Chamber of Commerce sent out questionnaires to the big shippers of the district asking for specific reports on all of the car-load shipments that they were making. When the questionnaires came back to it, all filled in neatly on the dotted lines and in the blank spaces, they showed the definite record of 2625 cars, quite enough to be fully representative of the entire situation. One New England land shipper reported that the fifty-nine cars which he had had in Chicago movement had ranged from thirteen to eighty-seven days in transit. (Remember, if you will, that a fair average for that journey is fourteen days.) One hundred and sixty cars bound to his siding from various Western points had together consumed 6709 days in transit. A reasonable time for their journeys would have totaled 2550 days. Detentions due solely to railroad delays had in his one case come to the considerable figure of 4159 days.
For the entire 2625 cars—in almost every case from the primary grain-markets of the West—the total transit time came to 109,569 car-days. Again the law of fair average time comes into play. Let me explain briefly how it is made. To the shortest time in transit between two given points an arbitrary of 50 per cent. is added. This makes the fair average. In practice it results that the average time to Boston from points east of a line drawn through Buffalo and Pittsburg is fixed at seven days. Two weeks are allowed from points west of that line and east of the Mississippi, three weeks from those east of the Missouri and thirty days from places as far distant as Montana. With this rule as a measure and taking the individual routings of each of these 2625 box-cars, the fair average time of all of them came to a total of 40,753 car-days. Subtracting this time from the total transit time as you have just had it, we get in a few months at the beginning of 1917 a railroad detention of 68,996 car-days, or an average waste of 26.2 days for each car. If this waste could have been avoided there would have been an additional use of 9856 cars for one week each, or 3285 cars for a three weeks’ period. The hard-headed railroad executives who continue to argue against a too elaborate car-building program must understand these figures and their full import. Nor can their brethren in the field be entirely blind to the success of the Car Service Commission of the American Railway Association in making an extensive and vastly bettered use of the freight equipment immediately at hand at that time and available all the way across the country. It takes a lot of time and money to build any considerable quantity of new freight-cars. It does not take much of either to make a better use of the cars already in operation. And this is the very thing that had been done to a certain extent, up to the beginning of the present business slump.
It would not be just or fair to assert or even to imply that all of the car delays which we have just seen occurred within the boundaries of New England. It is just as fair to assume that many of them came to pass in Montreal, or in Toronto, or