The Railroad Problem

ad men frankly confess puzzles them the most. For it hits close to the source of their largest revenue-the earnings from the freight. It is a transport of things r

n territory in southeastern Pennsylvania and in adjacent New Jersey, but right up to the very doors of New York City, itself. Florists, whose greenhouses dot the Illinois prairies for fifty miles roundabout Chicago, today are using fleets of these vehicles to bring their wares at top speed either to suburban railroad stations or down into the heart of the city itself-although this last is somewhat unsatisfactory owing

er I

GHT IS ON

e great black-breasted yards of a

point. Executives, high and low, h

g to relieve the congestion. Thi

, opposite New York City, is

at for days and sometimes weeks at a time they were compelled to refuse to accept or deliver many classes of freight. They gave their first efforts to moving coal and milk and the other vital necessities for the towns which they served with the rigors of an unusually h

ons were unusual, to say the least. Bridgeport found herself transformed almost overnight from a brisk and average Connecticut manufacturing town into one of the world's greatest munition centers. Prosperity hit her between the eyes. For a time people

ecticut towns. They, too, were making munitions and were in turn congested. But by far the worst congestion of all was at Bridgeport. The railroad people wor

tself in everyday service that a group of Bridgeport manufacturers and merchants formed themselves into a transportation company and placed other trucks in daily service between their town and New York. And a little later when the New York terminals became glutted with freight and hedged about with embargoes, the manufacturers of Bridgeport began having freight billed to them at t

and the branches of his railroad-from all these, stretching, like a fine moss upon an old oak, the improved highroads. The mapmaker had done more. By use of colors he had shown the automobile stage routes upon these roads

inging much traffic to its cars. The motor truck running over a well-paved highway can easily reach a farm or factory situated far from the steel rails.[13] It may save the construction of expensive and eventually unprofitable branch-line railroads just as the passen

, entirely new. A good many men have been studying for a long time to develop a practical receptacle that will obviate the necessity of constantly handling and rehandling freight-always a great

ortably upon the chassis of a large truck-three or four, upon the frame of an electric car-for either city or interurban use. The regulation freight car of the steam railroad would then consist of trucks and frame-build

sfer or assorting points. This last method would be exactly similar to that employed by the post-office department or the express companies in handling their daily flood tides of small parcel traffic. The use of the universal container would be directed more particu

By use of small-wheeled trucks or overhead tractors it would be carried first to the waiting chassis of the motor truck-in case the manufacturer was not able to command railroad si

tor truck performing its part of the work again, if necessary, and the container going direct to the merchant or manufacturer with the least

money for the initial investment in containers. They would have to be built in large quantities, in order to justify the large immediate expense to adapt any number of freight cars

y themselves with the en

tral station and other monumental structures of its sort. But those were passenger terminals. And now

are the most important. Through them pour the foodstuffs-the meats, the fish, the vegetables, the fruits, the milk, the clothing, the fuel, the thousand a

opolitan city. Is there any reason why the freight gateways should not be the housing places of affiliated industries-industries, if you please, more or less dependent upon the rapid movement of either their raw material or their finished products? Suppose that the railroads were ever to seek out and solve that fascinating problem of the universal unit container. Wo

USH T

klyn, New

RMINAL WAREHOU

lo, Rochester, & P

of freight house an

ck of these piers and connected with them by means of an intricate, but extremely well-planned system of industrial railroad, rise many buildings of steel and stone and concrete, almost all of them built to a single type and differing only in the minor details of their construction. On the many

York, owing to the peculiar physical formation of the city and its segregation from the mainland by several great navigable rivers, the upper harbor, and the Sound, is most difficult of operation. All the railroads find it necessar

prima-donna-like temperament of the average truck-driver, showing itself in constant and protracted strikes, and you can see why the manufacturers have flocked not only to that great industrial city in South Brooklyn, but to others like it which have begun to spring up in and around metropolitan New York. Not only is the trucking expense entirely eliminated-the freight cars are wait

s sort, terminals which, like the Grand Central station, would bring direct revenue to the railroad which built them. In this hour when the cost of foodstuffs is occupying so large a portion of public attention, when a large part of the problem lies in the marketing and storage facilities, or the lack of them, it might be possible to develop the freight terminal as both a cold-sto

he state erect a public wholesale market house for the private sale or auctions of foodstuffs of every sort and in every quantity. This market would be open, on equal terms and without favor or prejud

the state government. Yet it is probable that in the long run a state which has not turned a hair at a recently voted appropriation of $10,000,000 for a necessary addition to its park lands will halt at a necessary appropriation of $4,000,000 to reduce food costs

nes reach New York. If they can build such terminals, or even adapt, temporarily at least, their present

lation itself-is going to bring the United States closer to a practical and nation-wide experiment in socialism than the disturbed railroad situation has ever brought it. It seems as if the Railroad's older brother, the steward and purveyor of our great es

terminals-more rather than less. And they are all most intimately rela

ook a freight car bound from east to west or west to east as long to go through the city of Chicago as from Chicago to St. Paul-400 miles-and that is why he set out to get his terminals in growing citie

ble exception of the Great Lakes, which we have just cited, we are decades behind Europe in the use of these waterways. And to make a bad matter worse Federal legislation has sought to penalize the enterprise of the railroads in any attempts to develop the use of the waterways in their own interest. Just how this came about is a matter of plainly recorded history; a story o

tal and the use of their connecting land lines as well as their advantageous waterfront terminals in almost all our cities, in developing a waterborne traffic. Such a traffic, devoting itself chiefly, if not exclusively, to the lower, coarser, and slower moving grades of freight

new Barge Canal is a marvel. Its locks are comparatively few, roomy, marvels of operating mechanism, its fairway is generous-together these give a water pathway large enough for a barge of 2,000 tons burden. Two thousand tons is roughly equal to forty m

ew $150,000,000 canal. For, truth to tell, the new canal was designed for but two or three real purposes; to keep the port of Buffalo from falling into decay, to find jobs for numerous deserving feeders at the public trough and keep down the local freight rates of the New York Central, which it parallels for its entire length. If it succeeds in these things-and it probably w

ept atrim, and throughout all the watches of the night brilliantly alight. Perhaps the argosy is yet to plow the waters of the Erie! One thing I know. I traveled on a night train on the Delaware and Hudson not so long ago and chanced to see the great locks of the Champlain Canal-twin sister to the new Erie-all the distance abl

s of canals, 1,000 miles of railroads, every mile of the needed improved highways she has been building, many more beside. The overhead t

ay force their use. It may build, equip, and operate its own barges and so bring at once a widespread experiment in government transportation that seems almost foredoomed to complete failure, or it may take steps to induce, not only the New York Central, but the other railroads which l

lds of vessels for transportation overseas. The Erie Canal is as much a link as any of these railroads. And, despite the fact that the state of New York has been foolish enough to

which tends to discourage, if not actually to prevent, a company of any real size or influence operating upon the canal. The tendency of today is entirely toward centralizati

ly by calling your attention to the fact that the tonnage of the port of Pittsburgh, which moves entirely on the muddy rivers that serve it, is in excess of the tonnage of many of the greatest and most famous seaports in the world-Liverpool to make a shining comparison. And as for the river steamboat-it is capable of infinite development, of transfo

islation, to which I have already referred, it is, at the least, among the very

nd increased would mean trainloads by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands. The railroads, through their industrial departments already have begun to accomplish much along these lines. One big road-the Baltimore and Ohio-has begun, on a very large scale, to make an intensive study of the resources of the territory which it occupies. It sends a corps of its investigators-college-trained men, all of them, into a single small city and keeps them there for one or two or three weeks. When they are done with both this field work and the review of it back at headquarters,

even when they are unwilling to break precedent and take a definite lead. Yet, in my own humbl

they began to look about to find where they might develop a tonnage with which to fill their cars and wagons. At that moment the cost of living was making one of its periodic ascents. The express companies took advantag

t spell the very salvation of the railroad. Two things are necessary, how

we have not yet raised master railroaders to take the places of James J. Hill or E. H. Harriman. Yet it is by no means certain that such master railroaders may not be in the making today on our great overland carriers. Take such men as Daniel Willard, the hard-headed, far-seeing president of the Baltimore and Ohio, Hale Holden, the diplomatic and

with which we already are familiar, but also to make it possible for him to take advantage of the great opportunities which await him. The average railroader-feeling that the cards were all against him, that his credit at the bank was nearly nil, and that he must spend the greater part of his time on the defens

e can begin important creative work. He knows that the lines along which he has been working for a long time have been cramped and restricted-conservative, to pu

me to them we shall come to a consideration of a railroad problem of recent compelling attention