Some 8,000 articles, ranging from arsenic to step-ladders and from Christmas trees to locomotives, are grouped into these classes. Into them has gone about everything that the railroad will handle, save coal and a few other specialties which are rated as specific commodities and have special published rates. So a man shipping feather dusters from South Brooklyn to Ogdensburg, N. Y., would find that they came under Class 1, and that he would have to pay 44 cents a hundred pounds for the haul. If he was shipping steel beams between the same points he would find them under Class 4 and he would find the tariff at 23 cents a hundred. These six classes have been made standard throughout the country by all the railroads in coöperation. The roads north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi use the so-called Official Classification; south of the Ohio and still east of the Mississippi, the Southern Classification; while all those west of the Mississippi use the Western Classification. So the shipper is no longer in much doubt in these matters, particularly in view of the fact that the three classifications are very much the same in all save minor details.
So much for the classification at this moment. It is quite simple when you come to place it beside the tariff sheets themselves, the printed form of an intricate structure, so great as to be almost shadowy in its workings. You ask a freight traffic-manager about rates. He is a skilled man, a man skilled in the economics of common carriers, and he tries his best to explain simply to you the basing charges for the transportation of commodities.
“Our rates,” he says, “are formed by many things. In a general way, by the competitive territory into which we go, and in specific cases by the volume of business that comes or goes from a single point. The direction of the movement, including whether cars must return empty or loaded, is another factor. Then, of course, there is the great factor to which both passenger and freight rates must comply—the necessity for the railroad earning more than it pays out. Acworth, the English economist, says that a railroad must pay for three things, the expense of maintaining the organization, that of maintaining the plant, and that of doing the work. Our revenues, from one source or another, must meet that triple expense.”
Ask this big freight-man about charging “what the traffic will bear” and he looks grieved. He turns about sharply and asks you:
“The earning-sheets of every railroad are public and they will show you that they are but making expenses, in a few cases paying about half the dividends that a healthy national bank or trust company or manufacturing enterprise might be expected to return to its investors. That makes it look as if we had begun to get some sort of scientific adjustment between expense and revenue, does it not?”
You dodge the point. You have no desire to quarrel or to delve into high railroad finance, and so you say you simply want to know about rates.
“It’s a little simpler than Sanscrit,” says the freight-man. “We begin to figure on common or basing points—”
You interrupt and inquire as to what a “common point” really is. Then the traffic expert gets down to primer talk and begins to explain the thing to your real understanding. It seems that some years ago, when the railroads first “pooled” they had to find an equitable method of making a rate-sheet. Everybody made suggestions, and a Pennsylvania freight-clerk, named James McGraham, made the right one. It was adopted and became the standard of to-day—which goes to show that good can sometimes come out of iniquity.
In this arrangement, the rate for each of the six different classes and all the special commodities, between New York and Chicago was made 100 per cent. Other towns, both further and less distant from New York than Chicago were given proportionate percentages, St. Louis being fixed at 117, Pittsburg 60, Cleveland 71, Detroit 78, Indianapolis 93, Peoria 110, and Grand Rapids at 100—the same as Chicago. At the eastern end of this particular bit of territory—the Official Classification—a reduction of two or three cents a hundred was made from the New York rates in favor of Baltimore and Philadelphia, a corresponding addition of two or three cents to meet the increased haul to Boston. No matter how you ship freight, these rates now hold standard, as long as the railroads remain faithful to their traffic associations. You may ship from Indianapolis to New York by way of Cleveland and Albany, by Marion and Salamanca, by Columbus and Pittsburgh, or by Cincinnati and Parkersburg, and although there is quite a wide variance in mileage between these routes, the rate is the same on all the different roads that go to form them.
This standard, simple as things go in freight-rates, was not adopted in a moment. Bitter contentions on the part of cities and of shippers had to be settled before it ruled. After it ruled, it was easy for each road to build its own tariff upon it. Together these form a vast structure, one that is constantly changing, as one road or another changes its tariff under the pressure of shippers or of civic bodies, or possibly a desire to establish more equitable schedules; and the work these changes make can be imagined when it is stated that a single one of them in the Official Classification territory causes more than eight thousand changes in the rate-sheets of the railroads.