Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

The Railroad War Board came into being committed to the idea of a single continental railroad in the United States as a war-time measure; please mark this fact for future reference. Indeed that efficient and economical idea had been in the heads of some of our practical railroaders for a good many years before the coming of the World War. But any steps that they might take toward it then seemed to bring them afoul of the Federal statutes—particularly the so-called Sherman Law—and in imminent danger of the penitentiary. Now, however, there seemed to be the faint ghost of an opportunity to gain some of the obvious practical advantages that naturally would inure from a centralized control of our national railroad structure.

Three great things, however, the War Board lacked. The first was the financial backing of the Government. No matter what broad plans for efficiency it might and did adopt—and that they were effective plans the statistics of their results most clearly show—the railroads lacked the financial resources to go into a market where rising labor and raw material costs were being reflected directly in tremendously increased prices for locomotives and cars and rails and every other what-not that goes to the making and maintaining of a railroad. On the contrary they watched the value of their securities drop as they listened to the demands of their employees for higher wages.

Beyond the War Board’s local authority, it had no real centralized control, no genuine supreme power. After all, it was but a group of men—big men, powerful individualists, each of them. They had been reared in powerful roads, roads of great traditions. They had been competitors, powerful competitors. Coöperation, at the best, was no easy pathway for them.

Remember always that the Railroad War Board lacked authority. It could not even compel its own member roads to fall in line and stay in line toward the formation of the single national railroad system. And as for the shipper, it could only go to him on bended knee and beg his coöperation. And of all the shippers the Government was perhaps the worst of all. It is our own beloved Uncle Samuel who is a most obdurate and unreasonable old fellow when he takes it into his head to become a patron of the railroad. If he is a passenger and in gold lace and khaki he may come into the train and demand that it be stopped and started to suit his own convenience. That frequently is done. And as a shipper he was forever letting his boys—Food and Fuel and Ships and a lot of others too—place priority orders upon their shipments, to the immense complication of the entire railroad situation.

The Railroad War Board began slipping in November, 1917. The hard early winter of that year finished the job. The inspectors of the Interstate Commerce Commission at various terminals and division points (themselves none too friendly to the War Board) began filing by telegraph their reports of delayed cars and trains, and the members of that commission, at the suggestion of the President, began framing a bill supplementing the measure of August, 1916, which had permitted him to take over the lines in case of a national emergency, and outlining the plans for the step as well as for the protection of the security-holders of the properties. The plan was in Mr. Wilson’s hands early in December and he decided that McAdoo—who seemed to stand in an impartial and aloof position from all the properties and who had not only a rapid transit electric railroad experience at least, but remarkable acumen in financial matters—ought to have the job. McAdoo sought to decline it. I honestly believe that he never wanted it. The President insisted. The weather grew more inclement, the railroad rod bent further than ever before. Then on the eve of Christmas something happened. A great American railroad stood in the shadow of bankruptcy. Other receiverships were to follow upon its heels. Such a calamity was unthinkable. The die was cast. The White House moved, and moved quickly. McAdoo accepted his new responsibility and on December 28, 1917, became director-general of more miles of railroad than any one man—even the late E. H. Harriman—had ever even dreamed of controlling.

William Gibbs McAdoo took hold of his new job with a pretty firm grasp. He said that he was going to “do things” and apparently he meant to keep his word. With one stroke of the pen he abolished the abominable priority orders and with another he doubled the demurrage charges upon freight-cars—two vastly important executive steps toward a bettering of the entire railroad situation. The rapidly retiring Railroad War Board, confronted by the increasing conditions of congestion upon the roads, at the eleventh hour sent an urgent request to the various lines that they at once reduce their passenger services at least (it had been suggested that their entire public service be suspended for several days)—suggestion which in some cases was acted upon with more enthusiasm than judgment. There was many a division superintendent who saw a chance to take a death-crack at that unprofitable, unhealthy, money-eating 11:08—or was it the 5:15? In other days a stern State commission probably had stood to forbid him, in the public interest, removing a train which might have had an average of seventeen passengers a day. Now the authority of the State commissions, even to a large extent of the all-powerful Interstate Commerce Commission, had largely been superseded.

The Pennsylvania, which for many years past has had the major share of traffic between New York and Washington, had asked a little time before to have its fastest express between the two cities, the almost internationally famous Congressional Limited, made an excess-fare train, like the Merchants’ Limited from New York to Boston or the Twentieth Century from New York to Chicago. The commission, on the very eve of McAdoo’s accession, refused. The road withdrew the world-famous train despite the fact that it was running to capacity and announced that thereafter all trains between New York and Washington would carry but one parlor-car each.

Now it happens that this route was and still is of tremendous commercial importance, not alone for the movement of freight but for the movement of men, big and little, in government service as well as in essential private business, back and forth between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and the great territory that lies behind all of these cities. McAdoo’s quick judgment saw the need of clean, comfortable, quick transit for these men and ordered the famous train back again, even though it did not then regain its historic name nor quite all of its parlor-cars, nor run at quite as brisk a pace as heretofore.

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 coöperate well he showed himself possessed of a genius for organization as well as for coördination. 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 substitute 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.