Which in his case means a combination of more freight-cars—or better loading of the existing equipment—and more second or double tracks across the long reaches of the West. Yet when I suggest electrification as a method for the removal of pipe friction, he shakes his head sadly.
“My old chief,” he begins, his loyalty showing in his very phrasing, “once thought as you now think. He was anxious to install electric motive-power upon the stiff grades of our mountain division. He had reports made upon the possibility of the thing from three separate sources, the two big electrical equipment companies and our own fairly expert corp of engineers. There was little variance between the reports of these different interests. Almost uniformly they figured the cost of the job at a little more than ten million dollars, or at that time about $550,000 annual interest. A fuel bill on the volume of traffic that we then had of about $300,000 would be saved. That sort of saving did not appeal to me. I told the chief so.”
I asked this big railroader how about that mountain division of his to-day, with its traffic greatly increased and its fuel bill more than doubled. He replied by saying that not only had the cost of electrical equipment—locomotives, dynamos, copper wire, all the rest of it—doubled or more than doubled, but the interest cost of getting money has increased all the way from 25 to 33 per cent. And so the wide margin of more than a decade ago has not narrowed perceptibly.
I have introduced this point here because it is most fair and most germane. Unquestionably that paper saving of all the way from a billion and a half to two billion dollars a year that we have just seen would be greatly cut down by the increase in the cost of electrical equipment and of the interest on the money that would go to buy it, but to-day the margin upon the electrification side of the argument is growing wider day by day, while as we go east and the congestion problem upon our railroads increases the margin in favor of electrical operation also increases. Granted that the costs of electrification are indeed vast, with dynamo units running all the way from one million to five million dollars, with locomotives at $175,000 and upwards apiece, all the other accessories in proportion, the game is indeed worth the candle.
Nor is it always necessary to buy locomotives at the rate of four or even five for a million dollars, with interest rates at 8 per cent. or thereabouts, when a railroad can borrow at all. There is many and many a short cut toward electrification. Take New England, for instance.
Up in that extreme northeastern corner of this land, as we have seen already at some length, the railroad shoe already has begun to pinch very hard indeed. With a few exceptions the railroads there are bankrupt, or virtually so. And yet their economic need and opportunity in electrical installation was never greater than it is at this very moment. If you don’t believe this bald statement, imagine yourself the president of that formerly prosperous little railroad down in Maine and your purchasing-agent coming in and telling you that he just paid twenty-seven dollars a ton for tender coal for your locomotives—with Maine richer in undeveloped water-power than almost any other State in the Union!
New England needs electrification of her steam railroads, and needs it at once. It is no new story to her. She began her experimentation with this sort of development more than two decades ago, when the New Haven laid that third rail alongside its busy Bristol-New Britain-Hartford line and installed a frequent electric suburban service. It was a beginning; a beginning that led slowly but surely to overhead wire installations upon several other branch lines of the New Haven system and eventually to the elaborate work in connection with the New York Central’s electrification of the Grand Central Station in New York. This last embraced the entire main line from Forty-second Street through to New Haven. It now ends there. And when you talk electrification to one of the high officers of the road he will point to this particularly elaborate installation and say:
“Not on your life. We had your vision fifteen years ago, and we put in this pretty job. Where did it get us? Into debt. It is one of the finest installations in the world, and one of the most expensive. While the increased capacity of the Grand Central Station from the operation of a two-level plan—a scheme utterly impossible under the use of steam as a motive-power—undoubtedly justified the expenditure, the fact remains that, considered independently, our electric zone to-day does not return interest on its investment. Of two locomotives of equal capacity, the steam one will cost $45,000, the electric $150,000. In addition to all of this investment in overhead there is also the cost of its maintenance, and that is not small. Wire-trains for immediate repairs as well as for maintenance must be in readiness day and night with a variety of expert, and expensive, workers. It all costs.”
I know that it costs, Mr. New Haven. But I also know that it takes but one half the amount of coal to pull a train with an electric locomotive as compared with a steam locomotive of the same capacity. Remember that the steam locomotive’s voracious appetite for coal apparently is unceasing. He may stand idle and upon sidings for half or a third of a working day, yet the fireman’s task at the fire-box door is steady. While if that fireman be lacking in every-day efficiency, the coal waste is increased, not lessened. The president of a large Eastern railroad has estimated that even a little better handling of the coal-shovels by his firemen would save the road 500,000 tons of coal annually. For even if coal must drive a railroad, if that railroad is driven from a central power-station there is almost no inefficiency in firing there; the central station operates on hourly coal-record sheets and waste is quickly detected.
I have not had in mind, however, for immediate use in New England the sort of elaborate installation which the New Haven has upon the western end of its main stem. What I meant for that road, as well as for sections of other lines up there, was the same sort of comparatively simple electric construction that the New Haven itself has operated for years on some of its isolated suburban lines in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I mean, instead of heavy steel passenger-coaches of main-line standards of size and weight and propelled by expensive electric locomotives, electric motor-cars of comparatively small size and weight, self-propelled and self-contained and operated in trains of from one to twelve cars in accordance with the immediate necessities of the traffic at hand. The New Haven’s field south of Boston, where its suburban service is at its very worst to-day, is particularly ripe for installation of that sort. There the once competitive interurban tradition has come to its final slough of despond.