The Railroad Problem

by Edward Hungerford

But the New York Central is not permitted to operate barges through the new Erie Canal from Troy to Buffalo. Oh, no! and for that matter, not from New York up the waters of the Hudson to Troy. The Federal regulation takes care of the waters of the Hudson—and keeps them freight-desolate—the sovereign state of New York prevents their passing through the sacred portals of its new $150,000,000 canal. For, truth to tell, the new canal was designed for but two or three real purposes; to keep the port of Buffalo from falling into decay, to find jobs for numerous deserving feeders at the public trough and keep down the local freight rates of the New York Central, which it parallels for its entire length. If it succeeds in these things—and it probably will—the men who control the present destinies of the state government will probably lose no time in worrying over the fact that the canal is practically completed, yet no boats of the modern type for which it was builded have been launched—or even planned. For a traffic not one one-thousandth of that at Panama, a canal of half the size and half the cost has been constructed.

Seneca Falls has been made a port, and so has Rome and so has Holley—and if the citizens of these sleepy towns doubt this they may go down and see the wharves and warehouses, the docks and levees which a benevolent state has wished upon them. And even if there are no boats to patronize these wonderful establishments they are kept atrim, and throughout all the watches of the night brilliantly alight. Perhaps the argosy is yet to plow the waters of the Erie! One thing I know. I traveled on a night train on the Delaware and Hudson not so long ago and chanced to see the great locks of the Champlain Canal—twin sister to the new Erie—all the distance ablaze with clusters of arc lamps. Traffic? Not a bit of it. There is no traffic upon the Champlain Canal. And the gods in the high heavens must laugh aloud as they read of “America Efficient” and night after night gaze down upon the brilliancy of those glaring lights upon the unused lengths of the canals of the state of New York.

“One hundred and fifty millions of dollars,” groans the practical engineer, “and the state of New York might have had instead of 350 miles of canals, 1,000 miles of railroads, every mile of the needed improved highways she has been building, many more beside. The overhead that the freight will have to pay going through the expensive and extravagant new canal is far greater than that of the best of railroads.”

All of which is perfectly true. But, in the words of an economist of another generation, it is a condition and not a theory which confronts us. The canals have been built—but no vessels have been builded for them. The waterways cannot remain unused. The state has two ways by which it may force their use. It may build, equip, and operate its own barges and so bring at once a widespread experiment in government transportation that seems almost foredoomed to complete failure, or it may take steps to induce, not only the New York Central, but the other railroads which link New York and Buffalo, to build and operate barges upon the canals. Remember that these railroads are more than merely links; local freight-carriers between New York and Buffalo. And Buffalo, as you probably know, is one of the larger of the terminals at the base of the Great Lakes.

Each year millions of bushels of grain—other coarse freight as well—find their way to its docks for rail transshipment to New York or Boston, where in turn they may go into the holds of vessels for transportation overseas. The Erie Canal is as much a link as any of these railroads. And, despite the fact that the state of New York has been foolish enough to build and maintain it exclusively from its own treasury, the fact remains that it is a water avenue of national communication. A glance at your atlas will satisfy you as to that.

Of one thing the state of New York may be certain. Private capital is not going to build traffic upon the Erie and the Champlain canals—particularly in view of the legislation which tends to discourage, if not actually to prevent, a company of any real size or influence operating upon the canal. The tendency of today is entirely toward centralization and consolidation. And the small independent transportation company, deprived of feeding traffic and adequate joint or independent terminals has a hard shift for existence.

I have dilated upon the New York canals because they are typical of the river opportunities that await the railroad throughout the rest of the country. You think of the old-time river boat—you still can see a few of them rubbing their blunt noses against the levees at New Orleans or Memphis or St. Louis or Pittsburgh—and you laugh at me. I might reply by calling your attention to the fact that the tonnage of the port of Pittsburgh, which moves entirely on the muddy rivers that serve it, is in excess of the tonnage of many of the greatest and most famous seaports in the world—Liverpool to make a shining comparison. And as for the river steamboat—it is capable of infinite development, of transformation from the gaudy and inefficient carrier of ante-bellum days into a mighty freight-hauler of today. The Great Lakes have witnessed a complete transformation of the type of freight vessel upon their waters. The genius that effected the revolution of their naval architecture is available for the development of the river craft of the United States.

Need more be said? The opportunity awaits. Preceded by the necessary repeal legislation, to which I have already referred, it is, at the least, among the very largest of the opportunities that today await the sick man of American business.

Perhaps by this time you are beginning to be genuinely interested in the opportunity for the development of the freight traffic of the railroad. It is not entirely an opportunity of the operating or the engineering departments. Indeed, at the present time the greatest activities of the traffic-soliciting forces of the railroad are given to its larger customers—patrons whose shipments run in carload, if not in trainload lots. The undeveloped field of freight opportunity for the railroad is the smaller patron—the man who ships “less than carload,” but whose traffic fostered and increased would mean trainloads by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands. The railroads, through their industrial departments already have begun to accomplish much along these lines. One big road—the Baltimore and Ohio—has begun, on a very large scale, to make an intensive study of the resources of the territory which it occupies. It sends a corps of its investigators—college-trained men, all of them, into a single small city and keeps them there for one or two or three weeks. When they are done with both this field work and the review of it back at headquarters, the road has in its archives at Baltimore a book of 100 pages or more which is a complete record of that city, not alone industrially, but socially and historically as well. And if the town is clamorous for a new depot—most towns are—a study of this book will do much toward giving the answer. It may show that it finally is entitled to a new passenger gateway; and it may show also that it is careless about its pavements and its lawns, about the upkeep of the public buildings which it already has—in which case the railroad has a fairly good reason for refusing a new station.

Other railroads are following these methods—most of our roads are quickly imitative at least, even when they are unwilling to break precedent and take a definite lead. Yet, in my own humble opinion, they have not begun to even scratch the surface possibilities of traffic development.