For passenger traffic roads these baby railroads would be as nothing. But for the handling of goods, particularly of farm produce, they would offer a rare opportunity. It is not every farmer that can afford to own a motor-truck; in fact if he were to do really sharp bookkeeping in regard to such a mechanism he would find that it is only the large farmer who really can afford its use, not alone from the point of view of the cost of its upkeep but also because of its “overhead.” Understand that for such farmers a small narrow-gage railroad as this—the feeder to a branch or main line of some standard steam railroad, running all the way from ten to twenty miles in length, inexpensively laid down alongside the highway and equipped with a single small locomotive (with perhaps one held in reserve against emergencies) and from one hundred to two hundred small four-wheeled flat-cars—would be a boon, and the capital outlay would be comparatively slight. It ought to be built and operated by the farmers that it would serve. With never more than a single train upon the line at one time, there would be no danger of collision, no necessity of a despatching system, while the method of operation would be simplicity itself.
The train—the small locomotive and from ten to fifteen of the little cars—would start down the line from the main terminal, where it connected with the standard steam railroad. At each farm-house there would be a simple switch or siding. At each of these, one at least of the little cars would be set. Such would be the early morning process of operation. Toward night the train would come back, in as many trips as were found necessary, and gather up the little cars, now filled with the farmer’s produce. They would be taken to the steam railroad and there unloaded into the railroad’s big box-cars for shipment down into the cities.
It would, of course, be possible to vary this plan by making the little railroad double-track, at a considerably increased expense—and using upon it gasolene motor-trucks, whose flanged wheels for track service could quickly be slipped into place. This strikes me, however, as being unnecessary costliness. Under such a plan, for fifteen car-loads of merchandise there would be in reality fifteen locomotives, each requiring a separate engineer. How much better to have one locomotive with one engineer—and possibly a fireman, too—haul these fifteen car-loads of merchandise! The locomotive easily might be a gasolene or kerosene internal-combustion unit or it might be a steam locomotive burning either coal or oil. That is a matter for experimentation and careful decision. And that is not the point.
The point is that the average little farmer cannot well afford to tie up money in a motor-truck which probably will stand idle all too many hours out of the twenty-four, or else tear itself to pieces upon the rough roads of his fields. Even the tractor used in slow hauls to town and back is a doubtful economic benefit. But the type of car such as is suggested could have its flange wheels exchanged for regular iron-tired wheels in five minutes—probably the smart farmer’s son could do the job in three—while either the tractor or the team of horses or mules could draw it down into the fields where it would receive its produce.
Such a railroad—how I should like to hear it called the Bates County Farmers’ Railroad or something of that sort!—would carry coal and merchandise out from the standard railroad to the farm-houses. Its chief utility, however, would be the inward movement of produce. The relief to the highroad, in case the highroad happens to be the typical narrow, light pavement so often used in this country, would be obvious, while in the cases of the all but unspeakable dirt and sand roads the relief to the farmer’s horses or trucks, to say nothing of his nerves, would be vast indeed.
Sometimes when I contemplate the vastness of the possibilities of rail transport in these United States I am staggered with their enormity. We sometimes say that we now have developed a complete railroad system in this country. Such a statement is a joke. We have not even scotched the surface of transport possibilities here. We have tackled the obvious and neglected the possibilities not so obvious. But they do exist nevertheless and await the coming of the right intelligence and imagination to make the proper use of them. This brings us at once to the possibilities of the freight-container for the American railroad—not only for the railroad but for all those other forms of transport which we have said should be allied with it and which eventually, I believe, will be correlated and allied with it—the motor-truck, the canal-barge, the outbound steamship. For all of these forms of transportation the container is the veritable keystone of the arch. It is more. It links them together. It is not merely the keystone but the binding mortar itself of the transport arch.
I spoke but a moment ago of the transfer of freight from this imaginary farmers’ railroad—based upon the French models—to the steam railroad at the point of connection between the two. Transfer, at the best, is expensive. At the worst, it is both cumbersome and filled with delay. The container reduces freight transfer to an absolute minimum.
Yet because it has so many varied and fascinating phases I shall not enter upon its discussion within the pages of this chapter but shall give it a chapter of its own. It really deserves a book.