For it need not be supposed that the bill was adopted without contentions. These were many and some of them were bitter. The Scottish question was but one of several vexing sub-problems. A good many of the British railway men looked upon the rate return to come from the proper fixing of the tariff charges in each of the groupings as quite too low. The fact that it was the equal of 1913 has meant little or nothing to them. That year returned but 3.64 per cent. to the average British railway share, and some large holders of these securities felt that they should have a much bigger return upon their investments.
Yet to go further into this vexing point would involve an intricate study of British railway capitalization. It is enough for our point now to say that it is large, extremely large, per mile as compared with our American capitalization. Those people who have made it their particular business to shout upon watered stock and bonds of our roads will have interesting food for thought if they will study the capitalization of railways overseas; particularly so if they will consider that the preliminary valuation reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission show many of our carriers as possessing an actual property value well in excess of the combined securities issued against it.
The entire field of British railway operation offers many valuable and suggestive hints, even to a nation as supposedly expert in railroad operation as this. It is not possible in the limits of a single chapter to go into all of these. Among them is the development of electrification upon the standard lines of Great Britain; despite a seemingly slow progress in this great work (but 365 miles out of 24,500 being operated by electricity at the moment) it is known that a group of distinguished American electrical engineers has been engaged for some time past in devising a scheme for the operation of every mile of British railway by electric power. Others are the exquisite simplification and economy of her terminal operation and the facility of her small goods-wagons for short-haul traffic. These are all interesting. Yet, the single phase of her regional development so far outranks even these as to demand an almost exclusive attention.
France has led the way, has proved almost beyond doubt the value of the regional system; Great Britain now falls in line. The United States will be next in turn. Because the possibilities of the extension of this, the greatest of immediate railway economies, are so vast in this land of huge railroad development I shall leave their description until later. Then I shall endeavor to show how as a nation we can all benefit—railroad patron, railroad shareholder, railroad employee alike—by the extension to our national transport machine of a plan which is so ingenious, so genuinely economic, and yet withal so simple as to make it a bewildering wonder that our biggest railroaders did not come to it long ago. That they did not is rather a sad commentary upon their vision—or lack of it.
CHAPTER XV
THE REGIONAL RAILROAD AT HOME
Nearly six years ago I began a careful study of the possibilities of a regional railroad development within the United States. At that time I had not visited Europe. Yet a fairly thorough knowledge of the general plan of her railway organization, acquired through a process of careful reading, had made me cognizant of the regional plan as it exists there; particularly of the French réseaux. It was then apparent—well before our entrance into the World War—that the scheme of organization upon which our roads had been upbuilt for eighty-five years was approaching the end of its usefulness. Over-consolidation, the decline of real competition between the separate carriers, the increasing unintelligent interference of government with the minor details of railroad operation, the decline of morale—each of these things separately, all of them together, bespoke the slowly approaching end of our old order of railroad things.