If you are a traveler at all familiar with the Middle West and the South; if you are traveling steadily and consistently these years over all of their rail routes, you must have been convinced of their appalling condition. Many of their main lines are deplorable; their branch lines are unspeakable. Branch-line service in every part of the land has been a neglected feature of railroad opportunity—as we shall see in due course. But in the Middle West and in the South they are at their worst. If they do not actually cry aloud from a physical standpoint for reconstruction, their service, or the lack of it, certainly does. Yet the people, the communities, and the industries which are situated upon them are entitled to a railroad service which shall enable them to compete upon an even basis with the communities and industries which are situated upon rich and efficiently managed railroads. I feel that this is an economic principle to which there can be no dissent. And I think also that there can be no dissent to the wretched plight of many of the roads of the Middle West and the South—more particularly the Southwest. In rough figures, the prosperous railroads of the land, representing some forty per cent of its mileage, are able to give service to their patrons; sixty per cent are unable to render a proper service.
But even in the prosperous sections of the West—of the larger proportion of the country—one who rides and sees and thinks cannot fail to be impressed with another great cost, yet to come. I am speaking of the removal of tens of thousands of highway grade crossings, in our towns and cities and in the open country. Already a good beginning has been made; but it is as nothing compared with the work which remains to be done. The coming of the automobile has hastened the necessity of the completion of this work. The railroads have contrived many ingenious and perfected methods of safeguarding their highway grade crossings. The best of them are most inadequate, however.
The fact remains—a fact that must be particularly patent to you when you ride across Michigan, or Indiana, or Illinois, or Iowa, or any of their sister states—that here is a great and vastly expensive work awaiting the railroads of this country. In the larger cities—New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, to name a few striking examples—many millions have been expended in this work within the past few decades. While the several communities—in some instances the state treasuries—have borne a portion of these expenditures, the burden has fallen invariably upon the backs of the railroads. Fortunately the railroads which have succeeded in absolutely eliminating many of their highway crossings—and, in so doing, reducing a large part of their accident claims—have been the wealthier roads. But that is little satisfaction to a community unfortunate enough to be situated on the lines of a bankrupt road. The chances are that its grade crossings, being more poorly protected, are more dangerous.
One thing more, while we are upon this subject and are speaking particularly of this lack of development of the railroads of the West and of the Southwest. It is an interesting fact that there are but three railroads—the Santa Fé, the Union Pacific, and the Southern Pacific—which have done any considerable amount of double-tracking west of the Missouri River. Yet, as we shall see when we come to the military necessity of our railroads, it is only a double-track railroad which is competent to handle any really considerable volume of traffic. And it is equally true that it is more than foolish to attempt to build or to develop any considerable mileage of branch lines until there are double-track main stems to serve it adequately. James J. Hill had all these things in mind when he made his definite statement as to the financial needs of the railroads of the United States during the present decade. And he did not need to give consideration to the abnormal traffic which the great war has given to our railroads. The normal development of the West, its gigantic possibilities, were sufficient to convince that man of great vision, to set his ready pencil at statistics.
As a matter of fact and in view of the record of these past half-dozen years, the average well-posted railroader of today will tell you that Hill was only conservative in his estimate. But, being even more conservative ourselves, let us allow that, if the railroads had been unhampered during the past decade, they would have expended as high as $1,000,000,000 a year in permanent improvements.[2] Ten billions instead of four! Ten billions of dollars makes dramatic comparison even with our great trade balance that has accumulated during the European war—the excess of exports over imports already amounting to only a little over $3,000,000,000. And as to what it would have meant to industrial America, poured out through many channels, raw materials, manufactured goods, labor—it takes no stimulated mind to imagine. The flush period into which the war has suddenly plunged us can give a fair indication.
Now consider for a moment not the possible expansion that the railroad might have made in the last decade and did not, and see how it has failed in the ordinary upkeep of its property. This last phase of its plight bears directly upon the great railroad financial problem as it exists in this year of grace, 1916—the epochal year in which the roads need to replenish their equipment; the year in which they find the doors of the money markets, open to almost all other forms of industrial investment, all but closed in their faces. By equipment, I now speak in the broad sense of the word not merely of cars and locomotives but tracks and bridges and terminals as well—the entire physical aspect of the properties. Yet take, if you will, the word “equipment” in its narrow and technical sense. The sense of railroad necessity is not lessened.
The other day the Massachusetts Public Service Commission complained that the largest of the railroads operating out of Boston was using in its suburban service some 700 wooden passenger coaches, varying in age from twenty-five to forty years. The railroad did not deny that allegation. It merely said that it had no money with which to buy modern coaches.
Its condition is typical. Week after week in the glorious autumn of the year of grace 1916, the news columns of the commercial pages of our morning newspapers were telling with unvarying monotony of the shortage of freight cars as bulletined by the American Railway Association—100,000 this week, 75,000 last, 150,000 next—who knows? The merchant and the manufacturer know. They know in shipments of every sort delayed; in the delays running into sizable money losses week upon week and month upon month.
It may not be able to convince them that at the close of the fiscal year 1914—the period upon which we are working—there were upon the roads of the United States 2,325,647 freight cars, a number which, although greatly added to since that date, has not yet been made adequate for the normal traffic demands of the country.[3] And a large proportion of these cars are both obsolete and inadequate. In 1914, out of the 2,325,647 freight cars some 347,000 were of a capacity of but 60,000 pounds or under—a type today considered obsolete by the most efficient operating man. A great majority of this latter number of cars was of all-wood construction. If the financial condition of the railroads had permitted, they doubtless would have been replaced long since with all-steel cars of far greater carrying capacity. This situation in the freight-car equipment is reflected in larger measure in the passenger-car and locomotive situation. There are railroads in the United States that today are compelled by the exigencies of a really serious situation to operate locomotives whose very condition is a menace not only to the men who must ride and operate them but also to the passengers in the trains they haul. The annual number of serious delays that may be charged to “engine failure” is appalling.[4]