“You see how complicated it all is,” the traffic manager tells the young Secretary, “and how we must use judgment all the while. We’ve got to figure individual cost for certain distances and localities and directions of traffic, figure in the varying cost of handling different sorts of freight, and then put in a percentage of the general cost of the business, just as the restaurant-keeper makes each patron pay proportionately for the cost of bread and butter, heat, light, service and rent, no matter how large or how small his check may be on any one occasion.
“We must use judgment, and we must make rates to keep the goods moving all the while. Suppose that both nails and crowbars are made in Pittsburgh and only nails are made at Williamsport. Suppose then that the rate from Pittsburgh to New York for both crowbars and nails is fifty cents a hundred, but that the rate from Williamsport to New York was but 38 cents. What chance would the nail manufacturer in Pittsburgh have against his competitor in Williamsport, when both men are making annually nails in tens of thousands of tons? It is to help the Pittsburgh man that we make a special 38-cent rate on nails from his town to New York; and when we keep filing these commodity rates at Washington, your shippers ask why we can’t have a standard rate-sheet, or the Australian system. The next time some one of them finds that he cannot sell plough shares in Texas because a man down in Fort Wayne has him beaten on standard rates, you watch him hurry here and ask for a special one.
“It is out of this clamor and contention of almost myriad interests, the ambitions of just such thriving little cities as your own, out of the skilled arguments of brainy men that the rate-sheet is born and kept living in a state of perpetual healthy change.”
We are tired of rates and the factors that go to make them, and inquire what is the A, B, C of a freight transaction between the railroad and a shipper. The traffic-man makes it quite clear to us.
“When one of our agents receives a consignment of freight,” he says, “he immediately issues a bill of lading to the shipper, or consignor, as a receipt and as a contract for the shipment. From his duplicate of this bill of lading he makes out a way-bill, or manifest, which will accompany the car until the freight reaches its destination. This way-bill describes the shipment and the car into which it has been loaded, specifies the shipping point and the destination, the consignor and the consignee, the rate and whether or not the charges have been paid in advance or are to be collected at destination. A copy of this way-bill is given to the freight-conductor, who gives the station agent a receipt for the consignment. At that place of destination a freight-bill, containing a description of the shipment similar to that of the way-bill, and showing in addition the total charge collected or to be paid, is rendered to the consignee, and his receipt is taken for the shipment when it is delivered.”
“It seems quite simple,” you breathe softly.
“It is not,” is his reply, “for it has its complications. I’ll show you one of them.”
We step through swinging doors of green baize and for a moment from a traffic into an operating department, but an operating department that for the telling in a work of this sort is best allied with the story of the freight traffic. The traffic-manager points to a man sitting at a square and littered desk, his thoughts with sturdy intent upon the mass of correspondence which he is quickly sifting.
“He is the best car-service man in the country,” says our guide; and you recall when you were in the auditor’s office, that an accounting was being kept between the lines for the use of one another’s cars that went on through runs off upon strange or “foreign” lines. The traffic-man continues: “Ours is not a big road, as some roads go. Yet we receive about 40,000 cars a month and, of course, deliver something like the same number in the same thirty days. Yet there is not an hour of any day of the month that this man cannot tell where any one of these cars is, just how long it has been upon our tracks, just how much free time the consignee has for unloading it, or just how much he will have to pay the railroad for his delay in emptying it, so it can get back into service once again.”
That waiting charge, the traffic-man explains, is known in the parlance of his business as “demurrage”; and it is another keen example of the constant use to which a railroad puts its equipment, of the tremendous economy that is beginning to be practised in the modern science of railroading. You are introduced to the car-service man, bend low over his desk as he explains a bit of his work to you. Here, for example, is a car filled with automobiles bound from Detroit to a dealer in Worcester, Mass. This car, in a train of some 60 others, leaves Detroit east-bound over the Michigan Central Railroad. At Buffalo it is switched to the tracks of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. On the evening of the second day it arrives at Rensselaer, across the Hudson River from Albany, and is given over to the Boston & Albany Railroad. To make a concrete instance, let us see how the B. & A. handles the thing through its car-service department.