What was to replace it? Government ownership? Some of the people who in 1916 had a stray thought or two that the state ownership and operation of our railroads might not be such a bad thing after all, by the end of 1920 were pretty well disillusioned. At the beginning of this book I reviewed in some slight detail the achievements and the failures of the United States Railroad Administration. It proved that in the centralization of an entire railroad structure of this land certain great operating economies might be accomplished; it also proved quite as definitely the fact that our 265,000 miles of railroad consolidated into a single structure was far too clumsy and too unwieldy for any sort of efficient operation whatsoever. A paradoxical statement in sound, but one in fact quite accurate.
Three years ago I attempted the fabrication of alternative railroad centralization and decentralization schemes. In the one I bowed abjectly to our great American god of competition. To the limit of my ability and knowledge I recognized banking control, natural traffic routes and breaking points, and interlocking directorates and ownerships. On paper I laid down a number of “competitively consolidated” railroads—not more than twenty, or at the most twenty-five,—for the entire United States. I linked widely separated roads because they already had linked themselves by joint ownership; I split New England in twain, giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania and the rest of her railroads to the already overburdened and somewhat unwieldy New York Central. Such moves followed the logic of Wall Street. The comfort and convenience of Boston mattered not at all. Did she not have competition? What mattered it that under such a plan the Baltimore and Ohio, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, or the Canadian roads would have no entrance either to her or to the fine industrial territory about her, save over the rails of competitors? That was a mere detail!
And while Boston might have the competition of two roads, little of the rest of New England would. As I have already said in this book, railroad competition may be the industrial necessity, nay even the very breath of commercial life, to such fine manufacturing towns as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids, but how about such fine manufacturing towns as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence? Are they not also entitled to the breath of commercial life? Yet to give these four big typical New England towns railroad competition would mean the complete dismemberment of the compact New Haven system—an almost utter impossibility. Southern New England is already pretty tightly set as a simon-pure railroad region. It can be regarded as nothing else.
So I tore up my “competitive consolidation” plan and began work trying to place the entire country on the simon-pure regional idea, beginning with New England, which can easily be considered as a single region even though Boston shudders at the mere thought of such a thing. And in fact from the point of view of better operation New England would far better be divided into two regional railroads, each with its headquarters in Boston. One of these roads would embrace the Boston and Albany and the roads south of it, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford and its controlled properties, the Central New England, and the New York, Ontario, and Western. Incidentally this last road is something of a teaser in any regional planning. From Campbell Hall, New York, where it connects with the Central New England and the New Haven (by way of the Poughkeepsie Bridge) down to Scranton and the heart of the anthracite district, it is an essential part of New England’s railroad system. From Cadosia—where the Scranton branch diverges from the present main line—north to Oswego it decidedly is not New England. There its value is very questionable, even for local traffic. From Oxford to Oswego, in any new order of things, it might either be given to a combination of the Erie and Lackawanna or else to the New York Central—neither road probably would be bidding for the opportunity.
Return to New England. Just as the present Boston and Albany would make a good east and west main-stem from Boston through Massachusetts to Albany for our newly created Southern New England Lines so would the erstwhile Fitchburg perform a similar office for the Northern New England Lines, which would include the Boston and Maine, Maine Central, Rutland, Central Vermont—probably, as to-day, right through to New London—and the Bangor and Aroostook. There would be left when this was done but two separate or “foreign” roads in the New England territory. And these would be “foreign” in the fullest sense of the word—the Grand Trunk (just now being absorbed into the Canadian national railroad system) and the Canadian Pacific, which reach across Maine toward Canada’s winter ports upon the Atlantic; Portland, St. Johns, and Halifax. It is not conceivable that these lines would be disturbed, any more that we should wish Canada to disturb the important links of the Michigan Central and the Wabash across the southwest corner of the Province of Ontario.
A good many people attempting this very difficult problem of regionalizing the railroads of New England have attempted to leave the Boston and Albany out of their calculations, which not only spoils the picture but makes the entire regional plan almost utterly senseless. Others doing the same thing have attempted to balance matters by giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania, which is perhaps a little worse. That distinguished student of American railroads, Professor E. Z. Ripley of Harvard, who undertook recently a regionalization scheme at the behest of the Interstate Commerce Commission, fell into no such error. He gave New Haven to the Baltimore and Ohio, and I suspect did it knowing full well that the Pennsylvania, having been offered the New Haven long ago and having refused it, would probably not have a change of heart in the near future.
In its recent close new traffic alliance with the New Haven—an alliance whose outward expression consists very largely of some new through trains and sleeping-car services from New England by way of the Hell Gate Bridge and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City—the Pennsylvania undoubtedly has all of the New Haven that it can easily digest. Broad Street cannot be anxious to undertake the management of the Litchfield branch in Connecticut, or the Chatham one down Cape Cod way.
Yet I hear you asking Professor Ripley, if the Pennsylvania does not want to buy the New Haven, how much more so would the Baltimore and Ohio, whose terminals in New York are weak and whose finances generally are in a far more precarious condition, want to attempt the thing? Can the keen-minded Mr. Willard at Baltimore be more anxious than the keen-minded Mr. Rea at Philadelphia to undertake the management of jerk-water branches in Connecticut or in Rhode Island or down on Cape Cod? In answer to all of which a Harvard eye of deep wisdom would be winked. Mr. Ripley knows well that the New England railroad should be purely a regional railroad—or two regional railroads—and yet I think that he would be quite willing to embrace the suggestion of the Boston banker that its ownership—not an enviable honor to-day or apparently for many days to come—should be divided between the three or four or five trunk-lines that it serves.
This entire question of the probable ownership of the regional roads I have left until the succeeding and final chapter of this book. I do not agree in the opinion of many bankers that the regionalization of the roads should be attempted in a supine bowing to their financial results of recent years, and so should be based upon these showings. I believe that it should be based fundamentally upon the service needs of the communities that the regional roads of to-morrow will have to serve. The Southern Tier of the state of New York for too many years suffered set-backs from the fact that virtually its sole railroad servant was a historic line, which wholesale fraud had doomed to a lifetime of perpetual near-paralysis.