Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

Moreover the freight-traffic of Great Britain is virtually an overnight service. Ordinary package-freight over there moves with much of the celerity and ease of the express in this country. Goods despatched from London terminals in the late afternoon are at Bristol or Manchester or Liverpool or even Glasgow and Edinburgh the next morning. While it is obvious that if the high-speed gasolene passenger-unit is introduced to any large extent in this country, we also shall have to speed up the freights that are interlarded between them, which will naturally mean the larger use of a high-speed and improved steam locomotive of comparatively moderate weight, and the use of comparatively small swift freight-trains, we shall have to abandon, for this sort of service at least, our American fetish of the excessively long and the excessively heavy freight-train.

For the moment we have permitted ourselves to drift away from the gasolene-motor unit upon the railroad track. Up to this point I have stressed the stripping of the rubber-tired wheels of the ordinary heavy motor-truck and the substitution of flanged steel wheels in their place. There is a compromise to this plan which is at least worth a passing paragraph of attention.

Down in the Imperial valley of southern California there was built a dozen years or more ago a small steam railroad, eleven miles in length, connecting the somewhat isolated village of Holtville with the Southern Pacific at El Centro. It eked out a fair sort of existence until the coming of the automobile truck and the improved highway began to cut sadly into its earnings. Its little passenger-train then found that it could not compete with the motor-bus. Its earnings fell to nothing. The situation was most discouraging. It looked as if the little railroad, into which a considerable amount of capital had been poured, would have to be abandoned.

It was not abandoned. Some inventive genius over in Los Angeles devised a motor-truck with a different sort of wheel than had ever been seen before. Inside there were the flanged wheels for the contact upon the steel rail, and, just outside of these, heavy rubber-tired wheels for use upon the highway. The problem of that little road, both for freight and passenger traffic was solved. No longer must it await the passengers and goods who found their way to its station at thriving and growing El Centro. Its combination trucks took the city streets very easily; they could go to any hotel or merchant’s door, receive passengers or freight, and then, making their way to the railroad terminal, by a simple mechanical device mount the rail and go hurrying off to Holtville, with the tractive advantage of the steel rails over even the well-paved dirt road that already I have shown you. Moreover it became no longer necessary for the road to go to the expense of train-despatching. If two of its “trains” met midway on the line, by the use of this same ingenious mechanical device, one of them could remain on the rails and the other go to the earth surface alongside of it. This then became the ordinary operation of the line, that trains going east upon the track had the right to the rails, while those going west would take to the dirt. What could be simpler?

The flexibility of the gasolene-motor unit is indeed astounding. It is not inconceivable that a device such as I have indicated should be so extended as to permit a motor-truck or passenger-car unit to go far beyond the limits of the rail terminals. In other words, why should Holtville be the terminal of the Holtville interurban? If there is a load of freight eight miles to the east of it, why not send the “train” on the highway for that eight miles to let it pick up the freight.

The correlation of the highway with the steam railroad is a topic of almost unending fascinations. By it the branch lines of our big roads and the main stems of our small ones may be continued almost indefinitely. There undoubtedly are many cases where it would be both more practical and more profitable for the railroad to abandon the branch line entirely and use in its stead the nearest parallel highway. Into this possibility there enters, of course, the question of the congestion of that parallel highway. One of the arguments that I have just used for the placing of the motor-truck upon the railroad track is to give a much needed relief to the highroad. Yet here, as in so many other places, one cuts the cloth to meet the situation. In one instance it might be most advisable to use the highroad as a supplement to the railroad track; in another it would be a great mistake.

This entire prospect has vast ramifications. In Great Britain the railways already are moving toward a use of the highroads in direct competition with the trucks and steam lorries of the independent traders. Their moves are not being made without opposition. At this moment it is difficult to tell whether or not they are to be given permission to go to the highroads themselves and there fight it out with their newest competitors. But whether they gain this point or lose it, the fact will remain that they show a real vision in the very suggestion. To an impartial observer it seems as if a railroad which almost always, if not absolutely always, is the largest taxpayer in any community would have certain inherent rights in the public highway which it is taxed so heavily to support.

But whether or not ideas such as these are practical things or merely the fancies of a dreamer, the fact remains that our American railroads, obsessed by the possibilities of through or long-haul freight traffic, have as a rule ignored the vast extensive possibilities of the short-haul, which may be set down as one of the damnable heritages of our competitive railroad system. They do this intensive cultivation of traffic far better in France, which long ago discarded the competitive principle as both foolish and extravagant. Let me illustrate.

Not many months ago I found myself in the little, obsolete Atlantic fishing-port of Les Sables d’Olonne, in the Vendée country almost half-way between St. Nazaire and La Rochelle. Up to the stout stone quays of that picturesque enclosed harbor there ran three types of railway, each of them rather typically French. The first was the standard-gage (four feet, eight and one half inches) branch of the State Railway system which connected Les Sables d’Olonne with a main line, and so, with all the rail lines of the rest of France and of Europe. There was a sixty-centimeter (twenty-four inches) narrow-gage also at the railway terminal and the quays; as well as a third at the harbor-side of but forty-centimeter gage. This last interested me tremendously. Its tiny rails, spaced a bare eighteen inches apart, seemed so inefficient; and yet they told me that it had been in successful existence for many years past.

“It is the poisson line,” they explained.