But the railroad is not confining its efforts at making traffic to the products of the soil. What is good method with the farmer is similarly good method with the manufacturer. So you now see the railroads, east and west, working with the aid of industrial commissioners. The industrial commissioner is like a High Minister of Commerce.
Take, for instance, a typical railroad running from New York to Chicago. It has ample docks upon the sea board, extensive ramifications within the coal-mining districts; in the West it taps both the Great Lakes and the transcontinentals, which reach across the land to the Pacific. In all this district it is under hard competition, gaining its traffic—every ton of it—by the sweat of the general traffic-manager’s brow. That railroad has its Industrial Commissioner, and if you are a prospective manufacturer looking for a site for a new plant, you are sure to come to him. You tell him that you want to build a factory. He tilts back his chair and looks at you easily.
“What kind of a factory?” he asks. “We’ve room for 10,000 more along our rails. If it’s a silk mill I can suggest Paterson, where the help is trained, and the dyes and raw materials handy. If you are going to turn out a steel product somewhere in the Pittsburgh district, Youngstown, Ohio, is the most economical point in the United States to-day for the turning out of finished steel. Perhaps yours is a canning factory,” he laughs. “If you want to can fruit we can fix you out up in Western New York among the orchards; if you want to can tomatoes, well, sir, there is nothing like Indiana for tomatoes.”
You specify your new business and its requirements in some detail. The eye of this practical Minister of Commerce illumines.
“I have the very thing you want,” he says, without hesitation. “Over at W——, just half a mile above the city limits along the river. It has siding facilities.” (You may be fairly certain that the siding facilities give chief access to the railroad that employs this particular Commissioner.) “And you say you want fresh water. Well, there’s five thousand gallons a day of the purest soft water in the East for you.”
His eyes shine with enthusiasm. He reaches for his paper block and the next instant he is sketching the plot for you with remarkable accuracy, and with a similitude of scale. Here is the river and there is where you can build your dam. Over there is the main line of the best railroad in America (he leaves no doubt in your mind as to that); and your siding can go in there with less than a quarter of one per cent grade. The highroad is there, and close by it the trolley leading into town.
“They’ve a surplus of help of the kind you want in W——,” he adds. “You’ll never run short of hands there.”
It sounds good, and within a week you are bound to W—— with him to meet the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. If things are as he has represented them to you, and your mind is unbiased, you build your factory, and the railroad picks up 200 tons a day off your siding. That single transaction has been worth the Commissioner’s salary for a year to it. There is a variety of method in making traffic.
The general passenger agent has to keep his end up. Any G. P. A. of to-day found entertaining the old-fashioned idea that the traffic that flows of its own volition up to the ticket-wickets is going to be sufficient to satisfy his employers is out of present-day development. The general passenger agent who gets patted on the back nowadays is the man who goes to the president in a dull season with a sheet showing gains over a preceding busy season. He may have to bring water from stones to increase that tide of traffic, but it must be increased. There are no two ways about what is expected of him.