Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

The expert traffic executives of this super-railroad would settle these rate questions, and be subject only to revisions, in the strict legal points involved, by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which then would become almost exclusively a high court of railroad law, in turn subject only to revision in its decisions by the United States Supreme Court itself. The traffic experts of the United States Railroad would control absolutely the routings of through business where it passed over the lines of two or more of the regional carriers. But as an immediate beginning the best construction step that they possibly could make would be the creation of a real scientific freight-rate structure for this country.

Up to the present time this has been deemed an impossibility, by traffic experts outside of the ranks of the railroads as well as those within them. But it has only been an impossibility because of the lack of proper central organization or authority among our railroads as they exist to-day. Such a plan in the main—called the block-and-zone system—has now been in successful operation for a number of years in both our parcel-post and express services. I was in the express business myself when it first came into being there. Up to the very hour of its arrival the tariff-sheets of the express companies were veritable Chinese puzzles; they were nearly as complicated and as obsolete as the freight tariff-sheets of our American railroads of to-day.

The extremely gifted and far-seeing mind of the late Franklin K. Lane devised the block-and-zone tariff system for the express. Some of the older men of the express companies then felt that the blackest day in their history had come to hand. Within a twelvemonth the most reactionary of these had been converted to the new scheme. They saw its simplicity, its fairness, its utility, its economy.

What was done for the express nearly half a dozen years ago should be done for the railroad freight situation here immediately. At the time of his retirement from office Director-General McAdoo already had begun to plan a national freight-rate structure. He had engaged to perfect its details Edward Chambers, vice-president of the Santa Fé, and one of the ablest traffic men that this country has ever known. The Chambers plan was worked out quite fully but was never made public. It is known, however, that it follows very closely the general scheme of both the parcel-post and the express block-and-zone tariffs varying from them only in its intricacies of detail due to the vast range of commodities that a railroad finds itself obliged to carry upon its cars.

For a centralized traffic bureau of our railroads there is also a huge international opportunity. The representation of our American roads overseas is to-day a woeful thing indeed. The Southern Pacific has an office of its own in Paris. Perhaps there are others. If so I have never seen them. But in my long months of residence in that old city the railways from all quarters of the world save the United States have called to me appealingly from their shop-windows along the boulevards. So it is in London; so in other great capitals of Europe. It is only America—only that lovely great quarter of North America that we call the United States—that is deaf and blind alike to the possibilities of the traveler and the freight from overseas. In April, 1921, I picked up the time-table of a prominent American railroad in the chief hotel in Madrid; in its familiar colorings it seemed like an old friend, indeed. It was an old friend. It was dated December, 1916—and so were all of its fellows from the U. S. A. in the time-table rack of the man from Cook’s.

The United States Railroad would represent adequately every mile of railroad in the United States in every great city of the world. Its offices would be the outposts of American commercial enterprise. They would be filled with adequate and up-to-date information for the tourist and shipper alike. It might be that they would sell through tickets and through bills of lading to the most humble and sequestered of American communities, while to-day the scarcity of information that the European may readily acquire upon even important towns of our U. S. A. is appalling. Contrast such service, or lack of it, with that rendered, let us say, by the Swiss Federal Railroads in the City of New York, where one may go and find the fullest and the most accurate information in regard to the smallest of Swiss villages.

Already I have hinted upon the valuable work that this United States Railroad might do in the technique of the business, both in studying of constant new inventions as well as in working out better operating methods from the tools already at hand. This last certainly would include the constant study of a far better correlation between our steam railroads, our highways, and our inland waterways. It probably would result in not only the complete study of the most efficient and economical container but the actual ownership of several millions of them. It might be well for the title of all our freight-cars as well as our present Pullman sleepers to be vested in it. The advantages of a pooled ownership of these fleets of wheeled carriers, so extremely valuable in inter-railroad communication, have long been realized by our hard-headed railroad executives. The United States Railroad could accomplish such point ownership, and with a minimum of fuss and feathers. In the long run it might even accomplish the tremendous feat of establishing a through fast passenger-train between New York and Seattle. Who knows?

In other words the work of this centralized railroad organization would not only be analagous to the staff of any army but something considerably beyond. Expert railroaders, removed for a season, short or long, from the details and the vexations of everyday problems and working with skilled technical experts and even recognized theorists, ought to and would accomplish wonders. I have hinted also at the possibility of a strong central organization in training and recruiting future executive personnel. Those possibilities might be carried much further, in the super-relationship between the American railroad and the rank and file of its employees. With a proper scheme of representation upon our United States Railroad—of which more in a moment—it might even be possible to have it supersede the present rather hapless Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago and so accomplish a real governmental economy.

Yet remember that the actual hiring and the immediate relationship and authority between the railroad and its employee—no matter what his rank—should always remain with the regional organization. For remember also that it is largely for this purpose that we brought it into being—to better the human relationship between the human officer of the railroad and its human patron and its human employees. Contact alone does this. For this we have gone through to decentralization. We have tried to keep authority in these human relationships active and alert and acute upon the immediate ground. If we can accomplish that one great thing, if we can make our railroad of the United States as a huge mechanism of organization quickly responsive to the human being and his rights, it will be well worth the huge expense and trouble of decentralization. Remember all the while, if you will, that the one very great sore spot of our railroad problem is that we have thought too much of it always in terms of dollars and not enough of it in terms of men.

I bear no particular grief for the organized bodies of shippers or for those of the employees. They are all entitled to fair treatment—and nothing more. The one group may easily become a pest, the other an autocrat. Yet a just consideration for the patron and for the employee is a rock upon which our railroads may stand secure, the lack of it a rock upon which they may inevitably crash. This may be poor epigram, but it is a solid fact.