Our Railroads To-Morrow. Edward Hungerford
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or Altoona, or Brunswick, as in West Springfield, or Cedar Hill, or Mechanicville. But when this point has been stated the fact still remains that the New England roads to-day are and have been for a number of years past fairly typical—certainly not exceptional—of the condition that prevails in certain other sections of the land, particularly upon the so-called “weaker lines.” The great trouble is that in New England there are virtually no strong roads. They are all down in the doldrums. Even the last series of rate advances by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which gradually are proving very profitable to many of the already strong railroads in the southwestern corner of the United States, have failed to bring relief to the already weakened properties in its northeastern corner.
In the course of this book I shall refer more than once to the deplorable New England situation. I have referred just now to the fearful delays to freight originating there in the last fairly normal period of private operation, giving full heed to the fact that many if not most of these delays occurred outside of the actual New England territory, in order to emphasize the absolute unpreparedness to-day of our national railroad structure should great freight traffic demands be made upon it once again. In a merely introductory chapter I cannot expatiate at length upon the reasons that have led to this bad condition nor attempt to give the methods by which it may possibly be corrected. I merely am trying to paint in brief a picture that has all too few high lights. In the course of this book I shall attempt gradually to fill in some of the details.
All these things, and many others too, are upon the face of our present railroad situation in this country. When one goes beneath the surface matters are even worse. If one is a security-holder in rails he does not have to study Wall Street reports to see the saddening decline in dividend payments—either average or cumulative. It is he who long ago began to smell the rat. And the news that in the railroad the employer and the employee have been slipping further and further apart until a seemingly unbridgeable gulf has come to exist between them, that the executive personnel of our railroads of to-day is growing on in years with little or none to replace it, that no steps whatsoever are being taken to bring our railroad structure up to the necessities of to-day—to say nothing of to-morrow—is not news to him.
Perhaps the most pathetic of all these declines is that of the fine tradition of American railroading—the thing which in war days we learned to call morale. It was that tradition that used to make the farmer’s boy, as he stood in the field and watched the express sweep by, yearn to become a railroad president. In a less romantic and far more concrete form it enabled the old-time railroaders to fight against fearful conditions at times—against the blizzards of midwinter in the north, the blazing midsummer of southern deserts, flood, pestilence—come what might, that old-time railroader was ready for it.
It was the survival of that tradition, the fine fiber of its long-created morale, that enabled our railroads to make such a fine war-time performance. And it is its lessening, the gradual passing of the old-time railroader with none of his caliber to replace him, that is one of the tragedies of our railroad situation of to-day.
To Americans these things still will come as more or less of a surprise. They may have felt themselves fairly remote from actual railroad responsibility. They may have been depositors in the saving-banks downtown or holders of policies in the insurance companies, and yet have quite forgotten the millions of dollars of railroad securities in the strong-boxes of these great fiscal institutions. The financial ramifications of the railroad as well as its social and commercial ones are far-reaching indeed.
Once again, it is because of this intertwining of the railroad with the every-day life of the American community in its every phase and relation that the growing seriousness of its present predicament becomes a matter of so large national import. Our transport problem is no academic matter. It is very real, very human, very close to every one of us. I did not overstate when I said that the railroad to-day was life itself to us. And because it is life, our life if you please, its present serious problem is very much our business.
If we should go back and begin at the beginning we should find our American railroads in their beginnings small individual units, in many cases personal properties, like a store or a bank or a factory, and seldom correlated. Even the gages of our pioneer roads did not always agree, and in at least one case purposely so. The early builders of the Erie felt that by laying down a six-foot gage for their enterprise they would succeed in keeping their freight-cars and other equipment on their own property and under their own eyes. In this purpose they succeeded admirably. They also succeeded in keeping the freight-cars of other railroads, bringing valuable interchange merchandise, off their rails, with the eventual result that that railroad, twenty years after it was first laid down, was forced at great trouble and expense to bring its track to the standard width.
There was much that was crude and experimental about those early roads—a condition that was of course bound to exist. The traveler who went abroad upon them quickly became aware of all this. In the beginning he would change cars four or five times between Albany and Buffalo; and when fifteen or sixteen years later the railroad had extended itself all the way out to Chicago there were three or four more changes to be made. To-day a solid train from New York or Boston to Chicago or St. Louis is so much a part of our regular order of things as to cause no comment whatever. Yet even to-day one cannot ride across the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific without a change of cars—that is, not in the United States. In Canada he can do it quickly, easily, comfortably. Of which much more in good time.
The lack of convenience in the handling of freight was equal to if not greater than that in the handling of passengers. Of through routes there were none. Freight bound from five hundred to a thousand miles or more was repeatedly transferred and retransferred. The fact that until the late seventies two such important links of the important New York-Chicago routes as the former Lake Shore and the New York Central and Hudson River railroads had gages varying a little more than an inch, and so necessitating an elaborate mechanism at Buffalo for the transfer of the trucks beneath the freight-car bodies, shows the fearful lack of rail correlation everywhere across the land. Indeed it was hardly a decade before, that a state of near civil war had been precipitated at Erie, Pennsylvania, by the efforts of the Lake Shore railroad to standardize its gage through that town. The townsfolk, urged and led forward by local hotel-keepers and bus-drivers, had stoutly resisted the change.
In railroad rate-making and accounting of every sort conditions were even more chaotic. There were no standards. You could hardly expect a group of several hundred widely separated and highly individualistic railroads to have uniform bookkeeping practices when in many instances there were not enough standards in the building of their cars to enable them to be coupled together into a single train.
And yet with all of this wretched system, or lack of any system whatsoever, those little railroads of yesterday had many, many things in their favor. Their very individuality was an asset. The fact that they were owned and operated by men who lived upon their lines or very close to them was a still greater asset. The railroad executive of those days understood from first-hand knowledge and intimate personal contact the problems as well as the opportunities of the communities that he was trying to serve. And a third and still greater asset was the close personal relationship that he might enjoy with his employees. On a railroad owning from twelve to twenty locomotives he might know, and almost invariably did know, not only each of those engines individually but the men who ran them. In fact in those days it was customary for a locomotive to be named and to be assigned to a permanent crew of engineer and fireman, who immediately began to take a surpassing pride in the upkeep of their craft—in keeping her boiler black and shiny and her brasses and her nickel-work gleaming like new.
In these days the brass and the nickel and all the rest of the former gay trimmings have departed from the locomotive. Its boiler is no longer shiny. On the average American railroad, locomotive upkeep has become an all but forgotten art. The names and the individuality have gone from its engines. They are assigned to crews out of the roundhouses in a very systematic and utterly unsentimental way. Yet something very definite has been lost.
You could scarce expect a modern railroad president whose system may own three or four thousand locomotives to know any considerable number of the men who operate them. Yet here is the loss. On that little road of yester-year