There is moreover an economy argument in the consolidated office that is not without its appeal to the railroad executive. The only question in the mind of his traffic expert is whether the economy argument is not completely overcome by the additional business to be gained by a red-hot competitive little separate office. Of course if all the lines coming into any large city should maintain red-hot competitive little separate offices the gain would be theoretical rather than real. There might be some passenger traffic actually created by the brave showing of the separate offices, but I think that it would be negligible.
The convenient universally interchangeable mileage-book that McAdoo installed (with his name printed upon each third tiny coupon) has been retained with all of its universal privileges, up to the present time at least. But no longer with the name of McAdoo brightly displayed. It still represents no saving to the purchaser over the price of individual separate tickets, though offering a certain convenience in the checking of through baggage, in making Pullman reservations and the like. Yet the putting through of the Senate bill authorizing the Interstate Commerce Commission to reduce its price bids fair at last to lead toward a correction of this precise phase of the situation. Gradually a pretty well-defined feeling is being developed that railroad passenger-fares in the United States to-day are entirely too high. “Not more fares but more riders” is a slogan which a young man who is developing traffic for street railways is using, with telling results. His slogan is quite as applicable to the steam railroads. They apparently have brought their passenger-rates to a point where the riding, always a variable and uncertain quantity, no longer is attracted to their trains. And this is an hour when the motor-car is steadily gaining strength as a competitor of the railroad.
The flat abolition of the stop-over privilege which some enthusiastic railroad traffic expert urged upon McAdoo is now being slowly worn down again, at least to the point where most of the stop-over privileges that were in existence in pre-war days have now been restored. The traffic departments of our various railroads all the way across the land at last are beginning to unbend. The traveler is beginning to regain his old-time privileges.
We do progress.
CHAPTER V
THE PRESENT-DAY SITUATION
Yet our progress is by no means rapid; it easily may be described in the one word “halting.”
In the opening chapter of this book I directed attention to the ravages in the service of our national railroad structure that any man can readily find for himself. To discover, specifically, how the passenger train service across much of the land has been depleted he has but to turn over the pages of that ponderous tome, the “Official Guide of the Railways of the United States.” The many, many trains of yesterday that are missing to-day even after the partial reparations to this important branch of the railroad’s social obligation to the nation that the Railroad Administration made after the war crisis show the deletions that have been made. There too he might find how the speed of most of the trains that remain is slackened.