Important and vital as these things are, however, to the Frenchman, they have no great concern with the phase of the international railroad situation that is under our immediate scrutiny—competition, and with it the inevitable and wasteful duplication of lines and other features of any national transport plant. If the French railway system had been burdened with these wastefulnesses, one shudders even to think of the consequences. The French railways would not then be close to bankruptcy, they would be entirely involved in it and so completely broken that all France would be prostrated—the bitter tragedy of Russia repeated along the west coast of Continental Europe.
In my opinion it is because of the simple and entirely economic placing of her railways that they have been enabled to withstand at all the terrible and multiplied burdens that have been placed upon them in the last seven years. The judgment of the men who first planned their general locations has been completely vindicated again and again in the really supurb way in which they bore their all but overwhelming war burdens, and more latterly in the way that they have handled the almost equally important and vexing problems of the after-the-war period. Both speak volumes for the inherent morale of the French railways, to say nothing of the grit and the endurance of the Frenchman himself.
We started a moment ago to show how these regional and generally non-competitive railways of France were laid down upon her map. We likened the main lines of the Nord, the Est, the P.-L.-M., the Paris-Orleans, and the Etat to the spokes of a great wheel with Paris as their hub. Outside of these five greatest regions there lie the two others—the Midi and the recently acquired lines in Alsace-Lorraine. The first of these, as we have just seen, occupies important territory just north of the Pyrenees; the second is indicated by its name. It has not yet been determined what shall be the ultimate operating plan of the lines in Alsace and in Lorraine. They may be parceled between the Est and the P.-L.-M., but it is more than likely that they will continue to be operated as a separate system. France long ago saw the viciousness of bringing too large a railway property under a single operating direction.
The plan is almost perfectly regional. The only important exceptions are where a long arm of the Paris-Orleans goes at right angles to the parent stem and up into the heart of the Etat territory (to Nantes and to Brest), and where the Etat in turn has a rather roundabout line from Paris to Bordeaux, the chief external point of the Orleans system. (It is possible that in the contemplated return of the Etat to private operation this line may be handed over to the Paris-Orleans. It would be a logical step in the French regional plan.) Still one almost always goes to Nantes upon the P.-O. and rarely ever to Bordeaux upon the Etat, while to Marseilles or to Lyons there is absolutely no alternative to the P.-L.-M. To go to Rheims or to Strasbourg one must use the Est, to Boulogne or to Calais the Nord. There is no choice other than the Etat for reaching Rouen or Le Havre from Paris.
Here then is regional railway operation brought to almost perfect operation, with competition all but eliminated. For remember, if you please, that it never is completely eliminated. Even if one were to go to the final degree of consolidation and centralization, competition would not be entirely gone. In France, even if the Paris-Orleans no longer reached Nantes or the Etat Bordeaux, even if every mile of rail were brought under a single autocratic and absolute head, there would remain the competition of her unified railway with those outside the republic, and within it the natural competition, let us say, of towns north of Paris with towns south for the traffic of that metropolis; east would forever be pitted against west. You can no more entirely remove competition in business than you can the risings and the settings of the great sun. But you can remove the absurd phases, the obvious extravagances of competition—particularly in transport. Remember always, if you will—I purposely reiterate the point—that some fine day you can cease to regard the motor-truck, the inland waterway barge, the interurban trolley, and the steam railroad train as competitors, but rather in the proper sense, each as agents of that great function of life, transportation, and so in some time or place properly correlated. And you can begin by regarding the railroads together as at least a single efficient one of these agents, and not as a lot of quarreling small boys dissipating much of their energy through their trivial disputes. This is the lesson that the railways of France bring to the rest of the great world of transport.
Their division into seven great operating units—but always carefully correlated units—is only for the purposes of proper supervision. We have seen in a previous chapter how easily the efficiency of a single railroad may be thwarted by permitting it to grow to an untoward size. And before I am entirely done I shall hope to show you that even in a regional railway scheme, which applied to the United States might contemplate as many as forty different railroads—different in name and in operating organization—there must be a distinct effort toward a strong centralization of certain functions; notably financing, traffic solicitation and control, and the staff study of advanced operating methods of every sort. Along the first two of these lines the réseaux of France have as yet accomplished but little. There has been up to the present time but little centralization of their control, although steps now are being taken toward that end. In the opinion of some of the wisest of Frenchmen to-day, such steps are not only the next in their railway development but certain to come to a successful head. Only the confusing problem of a single state-owned and operated system has prevented their being accomplished this long while.
But in the standardization of operating methods and practices much already has been done in France. Four companies, the Etat, the Midi, the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, and the Alsace-Lorraine have formed an organization with the rather formidable title of L’Office Central d’Etudes du Matériel de Chemins de Fer for this purpose. This extremely active organization is divided into four departments, one in charge of tests, one for locomotive design, a third for car design, and the fourth to handle railway electrification.
Progress already has been made too in drawing up plans for various types of standard locomotives. A study has also been made of standard designs for freight-cars of special types, such as tank-cars, steel-cars, and the like. Some very interesting tests have been made of refrigerator-cars for the movement of fish and of fruits. Incidentally it may be said that before the coming of the World War there was little or no refrigerator-car movement in France or anywhere else in Europe, and this despite the remarkable advances made in the United States in this form of traffic for at least twelve or fifteen years before. To move safely certain low-test materials for the manufacturer of explosives across tropical seas it was necessary for two French manufacturers to produce ships equipped with elaborate refrigerating devices. The technical knowledge which these men so gained in the manufacture of ice-making machinery they are now prepared to turn to good account in the production of refrigerator-cars, while the rapid development of France’s wonderful new territory south of the Mediterranean promises a growing area sufficient to produce a plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables not only for her cities, but for those of a large part of the rest of western Europe as well.
Perhaps the most interesting work, however, done up to the present time by the central study office of the French railways has been upon the development of electricity as a practical working power for their lines. (I made passing reference to this in an earlier chapter.) As yet they have lagged in this work. The Etat operates a dozen miles of electric standard railway between Paris and Versailles. The comparatively new Paris terminal of the P.-O. has electric operation for perhaps another dozen miles outside of the Gare d’Orsay. There are a very few isolated electric high-speed lines here and there across the face of the land. In these things the French do move slowly. But they generally move pretty thoroughly, and to-day they have developed a very marvelous plan for the electrification of at least one third of their entire railway mileage.