Already the residents of these communities are taking definite steps toward relief. In the city of New York, Commissioner John J. Dillon of the state Department of Food and Markets has proposed that the state erect a public wholesale market house for the private sale or auctions of foodstuffs of every sort and in every quantity. This market would be open, on equal terms and without favor or prejudice to buyers of every sort. It is believed that it would, in every way, tend to simplify the terminal handling of foodstuffs and in just such measure help to reduce food costs to the ultimate consumer.
Commissioner Dillon estimates the cost of such a market house at from $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. Owing to a recent wave of stringent economy, upon certain lines, at Albany, this suggestion of his has not been looked upon with great favor by the executive branch of the state government. Yet it is probable that in the long run a state which has not turned a hair at a recently voted appropriation of $10,000,000 for a necessary addition to its park lands will halt at a necessary appropriation of $4,000,000 to reduce food costs in its largest city, even more to provide similar food stations in its other large communities. We soon shall see how it has voted $150,000,000 for a canal of little or no practical value. The suggested expenditure for market houses is as nothing compared with that.
But before such market houses can be planned and erected comes the opportunity of the railroads whose lines reach New York. If they can build such terminals, or even adapt, temporarily at least, their present plants to meet such a public and general need they will be proving themselves, in truth, public servants.
If I may be permitted here and now to enter a sotto-voce remark, it would be that an absence of some such definite, modern, constructive methods as these—not alone in regard to food transportation, terminal handling, storage, and marketing, but as to speculation itself—is going to bring the United States closer to a practical and nation-wide experiment in socialism than the disturbed railroad situation has ever brought it. It seems as if the Railroad’s older brother, the steward and purveyor of our great estate, was about to fall ill. I think that I can see that tremulous, but stern nurse, Regulation, turning her attention toward him. And I am quite sure that if he does break down at this time he is going to know Regulation as the Railroad never has known her.
All these things are more or less intimately related to the question of terminals—more rather than less. And they are all most intimately related to the question of the freight-traffic development of the railroad.
“Get the terminals,” were James J. Hill’s repeated orders to his lieutenants in the creative period of his railroads. Hill knew the value of terminals, freight terminals in particular; he knew that it took a freight car bound from east to west or west to east as long to go through the city of Chicago as from Chicago to St. Paul—400 miles—and that is why he set out to get his terminals in growing cities while the land was cheap and the getting was good. Hill had vision. He was also tremendously practical. It was the combination of these qualities that made him the master railroader of his generation.
There is another form of transportation whose development always has been and always will be directly connected with the development of the railroads. I am referring to the use of the inland waterways of the country—not merely the Great Lakes which today bear the most highly developed commerce of any fresh-waterways in the world, but our rivers and our canals. With the notable exception of the Great Lakes, which we have just cited, we are decades behind Europe in the use of these waterways. And to make a bad matter worse Federal legislation has sought to penalize the enterprise of the railroads in any attempts to develop the use of the waterways in their own interest. Just how this came about is a matter of plainly recorded history; a story of the attempts of certain ill-advised carriers to purchase and to strangle water lines, because of the competition which they offered. But the railroads which operated the huge grain and coal fleets on the Great Lakes were not throttling—they were developing. And the success of their example was slowly but surely having its effect on their fellows elsewhere across the land.
Fortunately the same hands that make a law may repeal it. And the odious anti-railroad provisions of the navigation law that accompanied the opening of the Panama Canal should be revoked at once. The railroads should be aided and encouraged in the development, through their capital and the use of their connecting land lines as well as their advantageous waterfront terminals in almost all our cities, in developing a waterborne traffic. Such a traffic, devoting itself chiefly, if not exclusively, to the lower, coarser, and slower moving grades of freight would be a tremendous relief to their rails; in the long run probably saving them huge capital expenditures for the construction of third and fourth tracks to relieve their overburdened double-tracks. Congestion on our railroads is not always a question of overcrowded terminals.
Take that great, elaborate, and all but economically useless ditch which the state of New York is just completing from the Hudson River at Troy to the foot of Lake Erie at Buffalo—the outgrowth of the once-famous Erie Canal. As a piece of engineering the new Barge Canal is a marvel. Its locks are comparatively few, roomy, marvels of operating mechanism, its fairway is generous—together these give a water pathway large enough for a barge of 2,000 tons burden. Two thousand tons is roughly equal to forty modern freight cars—a fair length train. Two of these barges would have the tonnage equivalent of a full-length modern freight train. Fifty of them would be a genuine relief to the crowded rails of the New York Central’s six tracks from Albany to Buffalo.