CHAPTER XX
FREIGHT TRAFFIC
Income from Freight Traffic Greater than from Passenger—Competition in Freight Rates—Afterwards a Standard Rate-sheet—Rate-wars Virtually Ended by the Interstate Commerce Commission Classification of Freight into Groups—Differential Freight Rates—Demurrage for Delay in Emptying Cars—Coal Traffic—Modern Methods of Handling Lard and Other Freight.
In England they speak of it as “goods” and regard it as almost a minor factor in the conduct of their railways. In the United States it is freight-traffic, and is the thing from which the railroads derive by far the greater part of their revenues. In England it is represented by delicious little trails of “goods-wagons,” four-wheelers of from five to eight or nine or ten tons’ capacity, the “goods” often left exposed to the rigors of winter, save for possibly a tarpaulin covering; in the United States, fast-freights and slow-freights crowd upon one another’s heels; the sixty-ton steel car has long since come into its own.
If you do not realize the importance of the freight traffic, you should talk to those shrewd old souls in Wall Street who measure a carrier, not by its ticket sales, but by that fascinating thing that they call “tonnage”; you should go out upon the line and ask any operating man how his territory is holding up in traffic. He will answer you in tons, in freight-cars moved within a single twenty-four hours. If you are still unconvinced, go to the passenger man you know best. He will tell you that while he is pleading vainly with the biggest boss of all for some new Limited, eight or ten passenger cars all told, some shouldering freight-hustler has been welcomed into the inner sanctum and comes out with an O. K. for 800 or 1,000 box-cars or gondolas in his fist, a dozen new freight-pulling locomotives in addition, for good measure. There is your answer.
The passenger terminals may have all the magnificence in which we have seen them, but the freight terminals are the real core of a railroad’s entrance into any town. For when you come to even the roughest figures, you find that in extreme cases—such as the New Haven’s, where there is a congested territory, closely filled with thickly populated cities and towns—the passenger receipts will hardly do more than approach a balance with those from freight. In some cases the passenger earnings are hardly 25 per cent of the railroad’s entire income; and cases like these are more common than the New Haven, holding New England as its own principality. Wonder not that Wall Street looks askance at any new line until it can prove itself able to develop “train-load”—freight traffic, measured in thousands of tons.
Your general freight agent, who is a sort of official cousin to the general passenger agent, is the man who studies tonnage. More likely in these days of the exaltation of titles, he is the freight traffic-manager, with a group of subordinates around him and a traffic-skirmishing corps out on his own road and the other connecting roads, who are making friends with shippers, just as the young travelling passenger agents round up the theatrical managers and the brethren from the lodges. The travelling freight agents hang around sidings and breathe affection for manufacturers and wholesalers; they welcome to their very arms the business traffic-managers, who are really glorified shipping clerks for great big concerns. And while they cultivate the road in detail, their big boss studies the territory in general. The trade papers and the market bulletins litter his desk; he can tell you strength or weakness in this thing or that—why cotton is off, and wheat rushing upwards. Moreover, the freight traffic-manager, himself, is not above friendships. He will pack his own evening suit into a bag and go 500 miles willingly to give shippers his own private explanation of the national rate complication.
Did we say rate complication? That seems almost too simple a name for the subtle and intricate structure which tells us how much we must pay the railroad for the transportation of our goods. When we were visiting the passenger office, we saw something of the work of the rate-clerks there. We learned that, in fact, the railroad creates various classes of rates in the first place; local or round-trip tickets, at, say, three cents a mile for occasional travellers; mileage books for more constant travellers, which bring a wholesale rate of two cents a mile; a third and lowest rate of something less than a cent for that urbane soul, the Commuter. For excursions, where many, many persons were to be moved at one time, perhaps upon a single train, other very low passenger rates were created. We also saw how the railroad, trying to base its passenger charges on the number of miles covered, is compelled to make delicate adjustments on through charges between competitive points.
We speak of these things now, because in a way the passenger tariff resembles the freight, and yet compares with it as a child’s primer with a Greek lexicon. In an earlier day the thing was very much worse. In fact, at the very beginning there was no real scientific way in which the railroad might regulate its charges, and on some of the very earliest of steel highways the rates were made just half what they had been on the toll-roads, and without regard to the cost of transportation. Thus the competitive feature had its way early in the formulation of a rate-sheet; and there is evidence to assert that in those early days when the railroad had an opportunity it made its tariff as high as it thought folk would stand without a riot, and thus the now historic phrase “what the traffic will bear” came into coinage. As a matter of fact, in those days when scientific bookkeeping was unknown the railroad had no way of accurately knowing just how much it cost to operate, and how that cost should be fairly apportioned between the different classes of its traffic.