The Railroad Problem

by Edward Hungerford

Here is a possibility of the automobile that the railroad can hardly afford to ignore. One big New England road noted in a recent month that its sale of mileage books—a form of railroad ticket designed particularly for the use of commercial travelers—had declined nearly twenty-nine per cent since the high-water mark three years before. Investigation on its part showed that the drummers all through its territory were beginning to get automobiles. The houses that employed them were encouraging them, either helping in the part purchase of the cars or, in some cases, buying them entirely. They, too, had discovered that their salesmen, no longer dependent on the infrequent train service of branch lines, could “make” more towns in a day.

Here is our ubiquitous branch line bobbing up once again. It is a problem which seemingly will not down. For branch-line passenger service is closely related to this last phase of automobile competition. It is the opinion of a good many shrewd railroaders—as well as our own—that the big roads have not always given proper attention to the full development of this phase of their traffic. Some of the big roads—some of the smaller ones too—have given this traffic, oftentimes valuable in itself and never to be ignored as feeding possibility of main-line and competitive traffic, little or no attention. Other roads ignore it.

“It is unprofitable,” they tell you, with exceeding frankness. “If there is any money at all in the passenger end of the railroad it is in the long haul. We have our branch lines and of course we shall have to continue to operate them, as best we can. But they are the lean of our business. And we have to get a lot of fat on the long-haul traffic to even up with this discouraging lean.”

It is because of this theory—very popular in some transportation circles—that so many branch-line railroads have today no more, in many instances even less, trains than they had twenty or thirty or forty years ago. The constant tendency has been to cut down service upon the branches. Such cuts generally come in the recurrent seasons of railroad retrenchment. But the trains cut off are rarely restored. For one thing, the branch-line railroad does not often run in a genuinely competitive territory. For another, there is apt to be less protest from a string of small towns and large villages than from one or two large cities with boards of trade, whose secretaries are eternally nagging the railroads.

Yet these small towns and villages—ofttimes the nucleus and the birthplace of our best Americanism—and even the isolated crossroads have some rights.[11] One of the largest of these is the right of communication. Some of them, under the shrinkage of the train service of the single branch-line railroad that has served them, have found themselves in turn shrinking and hardening. The popular-priced automobile may yet prove the salvation of these towns. The tavern at the crossroads has been repainted and is serving “chicken and waffle” dinners, the general store thrives anew on its sale of gasoline and oil. But best of all, the folks in adjoining villages visit back and forth. They mix and broaden. The intercourse that they were denied by the railroad has been given them through the agency of the automobile.

Come now to the public use of the automobile. And, although many railroaders profess to scout at the automobile carrying passengers for pay and state their belief that the increasing number of privately owned and operated cars represents their real problem, yet the motor bus operating ’cross country begins to bear, in its relation to the steam railroad, a strong resemblance to the effect of the jitney upon the traction road. In this last case the opposition quickly reached a high and dangerous volume and then subsided. The reasons why the jitney, after being hailed with high acclaim all the way across the land, has disappeared from the streets of more than half our American cities and towns, are not to be told here. It is sufficient here and now to say that, save in the South and the extreme West, it has ceased to be a formidable competitor of the trolley. But as the jitney of the city has diminished, its brother of the country roads has grown. And the various regulating boards, city and county, while generally looking upon the city boy with a forbidding look, have given nothing but encouraging glances to his country brother.

On a certain day last summer, I rode with Henry Sewall from Frederick, Maryland, to Baltimore. Henry is a coffee-colored Negro of unusually prepossessing dress and manner. He owns a seven-passenger motor car of 1916 model and a fairly popular-priced make. He keeps his car tuned up and clean.

I found the two of them in the main street of Frederick—just in front of one of the town’s most popular hostelries. The car bore a placard stating that it would leave for Baltimore, forty-six miles distant, at five o’clock and that the one-way fare for the journey would be $1.50. I asked Henry Sewall the time that I might reasonably expect to be at my hotel in Baltimore. He showed his even white teeth as he replied:

“’Fore seven ’clock, suh. Ah’ve been known to do it in less.”

I glanced at the time card of the railroad that connects Frederick with Baltimore. It is a particularly good railroad, yet the afternoon train that it runs over the “old main line,” as it calls that branch, left Frederick at 4:50 P.M. and did not arrive at a station, some ten “squares”—one never says “blocks” in Baltimore—from my hotel, until 7:30. Mileage and fare were practically the same as Henry Sewall’s, but the train made numerous intermediate stops. And Henry announced, with the Negro’s love of pomp and regulation, that the laws of the state of Maryland would not permit him to stop and pick up passengers between Frederick and Baltimore—his license with the imposing state seal in its corner especially forbade that.