Why was not this done, you ask? The answer is easy. Competition.
But Vancouver is in Canada, you insist. Very well; we shall hark to the vagaries of the Canadian railway situation at another time. For this come back across the international boundary. Spokane is not in Canada. It is a handsome, well-built city across whose civic heart there lies the disagreeable barrier of three trunk-line railroads; parallel and from one to two blocks apart. The right-of-way and station of any one of them could easily have handled the business of the other two. And not only would a large capital outlay have been saved, but Spokane would have been spared the existence of two Chinese-wall embankments through her business center.
Competition—a great god, indeed! It is competition that keeps alive the farce of separate passenger terminals upon the harbor “moles” of Oakland, despite the fact that the trans-harbor ferry-boats that serve them use the same common terminal at the foot of Market Street, San Francisco. Competition makes two elaborate passenger terminals in Seattle do the work of one; keeps three stations alive and eating up overhead and operation in Los Angeles; runs to its nth degree of extravagance in the small city of Tucson, Arizona, where a magnificent edifice in a park—at first glance you would be sure to call it the town’s Carnegie Library—serves as a competing passenger terminal for a railroad which runs but two passenger-trains a day in and out of it.
West, you say? All right, come East. Within the last two years there has been opened in the outskirts of the city of Richmond, Virginia, a very expensive and elaborate passenger-station development for which there was no call whatsoever. It is the so-called Union Station of the Atlantic Coast Line and the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac railroads and replaces the badly located and inadequate Byrd Street Station which they had used almost since the days of the Civil War. That Byrd Street Station deserved to be abandoned does not come into the question. The point is that there was no need whatsoever to build the elaborate new station away out in the outskirts of the Virginia city. For Richmond also had upon her Main Street a comparatively modern station already used by the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Southern railroads which, with a slight adaptation and enlargement, could easily have been brought to meet the needs of the two other roads entering the town.
Why was this simple step not taken? Why not the large capital outlay saved? Competition. The Atlantic Coast Line felt that it could not have its trains entering and leaving the same station as its competitor in Richmond, even though it is doing that selfsame thing in Charleston, in Savannah, and in Jacksonville. Competition; competition and a little foolish pride.
“Pride; but not foolish,” says the big railroad executive, who stands at my elbow and whose eyes fall upon these paragraphs. “It is this sort of pride, the pride built up from competition, that long ago brought our American railroads to their high standards of service perfection.”
A pretty theory that, but will it last? What is the actual competition to-day between, let us say, New York and Chicago? They are two first-grade railroads of the highest type connecting these two chief cities of the United States and four more, of a second grade, yet in themselves quite excellent railroads. On each of the two first-grade roads there are five or six fine express-trains in each direction each day. Long ago we have seen in the pages of this book how each has one train making the journey in precisely twenty hours, to the exact minute, and how formerly these trains did the trip in eighteen hours, also to the precise minute. After the wise step of the lengthening of the schedules, these two American “super-trains”—I think that I may safely call them such—remained exactly the same on the two supposedly competing roads, despite the fact that the distance between New York and Chicago on the one is 911 miles and on the other 979. Why does not the Pennsylvania with its shorter route beat the New York Central on its schedules all the while? Is it because its mountain ranges take so much longer to traverse than the much advertised “water-level route” of the Vanderbilt system? Possibly, but I doubt it.
The real reason is that the schedules of all these so-called competing trains are regulated by agreement between the so-called competing roads. There is a multiplicity of these agreements. The Pennsylvania has its own rails between New York and Buffalo, the two chief terminals of the original New York Central road, but it may not advertise to carry through passengers between these two cities, in exchange for which the New York Central will not advertise to carry through passengers on its own rails between New York and Pittsburg, the two chief terminals of the original Pennsylvania.
Competition? It is a neat phrase.
Similar minimum passenger-schedule agreements rule the service between Chicago and the Twin Cities (St. Paul Minneapolis), Chicago and St. Louis, Chicago and Kansas City, St. Louis and Kansas City, Chicago and the Pacific coast points—elsewhere across the land. When a few years ago the Post-Office Department sought to establish a really fast mail-train service between Chicago and St. Louis—a train that would make the 283 miles in six hours—it found no enthusiasm whatsoever for the project in the four so-called competing railroads that connect those cities and who long before had fixed their minimum running time between them at a rather leisurely eight hours in order to suit the necessities of the slowest and the most roundabout of the four. Eventually the Post-Office Department carried its point and the Chicago and Alton to-day carries a through mail train from Chicago to St. Louis in six hours and ten minutes. But the regular passenger-trains still remain at the old slow running-time.