Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

In a recent issue of the “Railway Age” a railroad officer comments quite sharply upon this fact. He shows some of the difficulties that the average passenger meets when he is forced to ride upon trains that may be designated as “fairly second-class” in their accommodations, calls attention to the apparent indifference of the employees, and then proceeds to comment as follows:

As a matter of choice, or because their work requires it, general officers, and even the more important division and subordinate officers on some roads, travel in business-cars isolated from contact with their roads’ patrons, unable to learn, or indifferent to the opinion of the service their roads are rendering to the very people who furnish the revenue that makes the roads’ operation possible.

It should not be lost sight of that while the public judges the roads through its most intimate contact with them (as passengers), it is this same public that in the final analysis will determine whether the roads are to continue under the present form of management and control or whether some other method of operation shall be experimented with. It is also this same public which, as individuals, pays the country’s freight bills as shippers, consignees, or consumers.

Assuming that it is a fact that almost all competitive tonnage is secured through “good-will,” is there any better way in which to impress a prospective shipper with the road’s efficiency than when he is a passenger? The things that were observed on this 8,000-mile trip seem to indicate that at least some managers do not appreciate the value of comfortable, courteous passenger service as a feeder of freight tonnage, or that they are unfamiliar with the manner in which their passenger service is being handled.

This extremely fair-minded critic of the railroads then goes on to call attention to the utter absurdity of the roads’ attempting to operate on trains made up of perhaps but two Pullman standard sleepers and the rest very largely tourist-cars, day-coaches, and dining-cars that are attempting in their service and prices to rival the best hotels across the land. There is indeed much meat in what he says. The dining-car service is in a great many cases absurd.

It is apt in many cases to convey an impression of innate snobbishness, certainly not one of economy. It takes from ten to eleven men to operate an American dining-car of equal or less seating capacity than its fellow of Continental Europe, which rarely has more than four or five servants. The prices, to the average man traveling across the land and accustomed to stay in hotels of even a fair grade are not unreasonable. They merely are unflexible to the man or woman of limited means who is forced to ride long distances upon the cars and who is given little or no opportunity to alight at refreshment stations upon the way for the purchase of inexpensive foodstuffs. The table d’hôte, which is used so successfully and so economically (both from the point of view of the railroad as well as of its patrons) on the railways of France and other European countries, has been given few fair trials in the United States. The New Haven once had a famous “fixed price” dinner; so did, and I think still has, the Milwaukee. The Baltimore and Ohio to-day offers what it calls a “commercial traveler’s club luncheon” for seventy-five cents, which I honestly think is the best meal in the country for that price. But these are the exceptions. The rule is a cumbersome dining-car arrangement, with the itinerant eating-place attempting to rival a city restaurant in the variety of its offerings, at a vast cost and annoyance to most of its patrons as well as to itself.

I should be inclined to agree with the gentleman writing in the “Railway Age” as to the complete neglect of the executive officers of our railroads of a proper supervision of their train service had there not come to my eyes recently a confidential report made to the president of a large road from one of his secret agents. This secret agent was much different from the average one—hired usually to assist in the detection of some employee or employees suspected of pilfering or other malfeasance. She was a woman of good station in life, a fairly experienced traveler, and by temperament inclined to be both generous as well as honest. For weeks she rode up and down the lines of that railroad and its competitors—not upon a pass, oh, no—but with nothing whatsoever to distinguish her from other travelers. Her comments upon the service, shrewdly feminine, went to her employer in the form of the confidential report which was brought to my attention. The mashed potatoes in Dining-Car 4809 were weak and watery. “... The chef should have known enough to have prepared them in milk or cream, not in water,” her woman’s judgment added. The head porter in the big new hyphenated hotel in P. advised her to go to a competing point by the X. line and not by the road that was employing her. There was a discourteous ticket-agent in the office at G. And so it went.

Here was a railroad taking a primary but a genuine step toward selling its transportation to its patrons. It is not enough that the railroads are making better “on time” records with their trains—their press-agents are putting out reams of propaganda these days to that effect: there is something more to real service than this. Return once again to our friend of the “Railway Age.” He says:

Do railroad managers expect their ticket-sellers to be salesmen in the generally accepted meaning of the term or do they reserve this function for passenger agents? A man who found that he must make a hurried trip to a destination several thousand miles distant called at a consolidated ticket-office to purchase his ticket. The purpose of his trip required that he visit certain cities en route but he found that the ticket seller was unable to tell him how to arrange his trip so as to include these cities. He consulted other ticket-sellers with no better success and then informed the writer of his predicament. The writer telephoned to the passenger agent of a road over which a portion of the trip must be made and a traveling agent was immediately despatched to the prospective passenger’s office who furnished him with all the information he required.

This prospective passenger was a man who had held important positions in the engineering department of railroads for years, but he did not know that railroads provided this service for prospective passengers. Subsequent investigation disclosed the fact that travelers are entirely ignorant of the services that city, district, and traveling passenger agents are prepared to render them.