But suppose the ticket-agent in that brisk manufacturing city of the North sold us Venice—a little side-trip off the main circular route, up the line from Padua and back again to Padua before we were ready to go on to Florence and to Rome. The inclusion of the side-trip added but 8.9 lire to our original pasteboard, or less than two dollars. Suppose that we wanted not only Venice but Naples—this last, considerably more of a side-trip. We could retain Venice and do Naples as a side-trip from Rome, and still have our first-class round-trip ticket, going one route to Rome and returning by another and entirely different one, at 187.9 lire, or about $37.50, as we were then wont to figure it; while the period of availability of the ticket was lengthened from thirty to forty-five days.
Here is another point, seemingly unimportant, but really filled with a good deal of importance, particularly when one comes to view it from the standard of transportation salesmanship. In the days before the war the various parlor-car services of our railroads, whether owned and operated by the Pullman Co. or by the railroads themselves, had a minimum seat-rate of twenty-five cents. War-time administration ended this and fixed the minimum at fifty cents, to which presently was added a 50 per cent. surcharge for the benefit of the railroads, with the result that if a passenger is to ride but a mere fifteen or twenty miles in a parlor-car he is charged the outrageous figure of seventy-five cents for the privilege.
These short-haul riders of other days came to a considerable total. They helped fill the parlor-cars and so not only to add an attractive revenue but to maintain a service which, in many portions of the country at least, is a necessity. Yet apparently no one either in the railroad field or in the Interstate Commerce Commission has enough vision or salesmanship to order the minimum rate reduced. It goes, like a good many other things in the railroad situation to-day, by default, and just so far lowers the service standard.
Our railroads in recent years have faced a new and formidable competitor in the rapid development in the United States of the automobile and, in consequence, of the improved highroad upon which it is wont to travel. I have called attention to this point before and wish again to emphasize it. Whether the privately owned and operated motor-car or the motor-bus operated for public patronage, it is a serious competitor to them. Yet how have they faced its competition, its steadily increased lowering of their passenger business? Have they met it with return competition? Alas, no. The railroads either have railed against the new-comer in their pastures or else have merely reduced their service, with the immediate result that still more traffic is diverted from their trains. In some parts of the country this loss of traffic has come to a serious pass. In certain portions of the State of New York the local service of the railroads is now reduced to a point lower than it has been for the last sixty years.
The British railways have also had to face the same sort of competition. It grew particularly acute in the three months of the great coal strike of 1921, when they were compelled to reduce their services of every sort to an absolute minimum, and the motor-bus or char-à-bancs burning an entirely different sort of fuel jumped into the breach in every corner of the United Kingdom and rapidly increased its services. But as soon as the strike was broken and the railways were enabled to return to their normal services they began to meet competition with competition. They underbid the char-à-bancs for traffic, in both rates offered and service rendered, and they have quite regained their own again.
Yet they did not wait for this crisis to calculate the passenger possibilities of the motor-car, particularly in regard to their own traffic. When the gasolene-propelled unit was still a strange new-comer upon the highways the English railways were beginning to adapt it to their uses and to correlate it with their services upon the steel highways, with the result that to-day in almost every corner of the British Isles gasolene motor-cars and char-à-bancs are being operated in connection with and as feeders to steam lines. In a similar way two great French railroads, the Paris-Orleans and the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, have long since correlated the motor omnibus with their steam lines—in the one case in the district of the Touraine and in the other in the Fontainbleau, the Alps, and the Riviera territories.
The opportunities for such correlated services are just as great to-day in the United States as in Europe, if not greater. The railroads that serve the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White and the Green mountains, the Rockies, and the Sierras could well afford to develop motor-bus routes as auxiliaries to their routes that already reach into these charming fastnesses. The Santa Fé and the Southern Pacific complain of the competition of the motor-bus along their lines that parallel the Pacific coast, yet have done nothing to meet such competition or to correlate with it. To-day the Northwestern Pacific terminates in the small city of Eureka, in the beautiful Humboldt County section of California, two hundred miles north of San Francisco. By the creation of a motor-bus route almost due east to the line of the Southern Pacific near Dunsmuir, a circular trip of unusual variety and beauty could readily be established. The Southern Pacific has already made beginnings along this line by the establishment of a highly successful rail and automobile route through the Apache Cañon. The success of this route, even though its beginnings are none too conveniently located, ought to encourage the establishment of others. The opportunities are real—there and all the way east of there, right to the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the most pathetic features about our American railroad situation is the almost entire submersion of the traffic manager and the things for which he is supposed to stand. Upon most of our roads the selling of transportation rapidly is becoming a lost art. There are a few exceptions of course, roads which, like the Santa Fé, still show a genuine belief in passenger traffic and its possibilities by not only advanced advertising methods but by a careful attention to the infinite details of the service. But these roads are very greatly in the minority. The majority of the lines are seemingly quite content to sit supinely and indifferently take such traffic as may be forced upon them.