“You don’t mean to say,” they gasped, “that you are going to guarantee to cut twenty-five hours off the running time between Chicago and the Pacific coast?”
“We are going to run the new train through in five hours less time than our fastest train today.”
“Five dollars an hour! That’s going some!” whistled railroad Chicago.
“Five dollars an hour—nothing!” replied the Santa Fé. “We are going to charge for luxury—not for speed. We are going to charge folks eighty-five dollars for the ride between Chicago and San Francisco instead of the standard price of sixty dollars; and we are going to have them standing in line for the privilege of doing it! They will come home and boast of having ridden on that train just as folks come home from across the Atlantic and boast of the great hotels that have housed them in Europe. You never hear a man brag of having ridden in a tourist-sleeper.”
The Santa Fé was right. It gauged human nature successfully. Its de luxe train at twenty-five dollars excess fare has become a weekly feature between Chicago and the Pacific coast the entire winter long. Its chief rival has also installed an excess-fare train—in connection with its feeding lines, the North Western and the Southern Pacific. This train runs daily the year round and so charges but ten dollars excess fare between Chicago and San Francisco. But in the case of neither of these trains do they refund fare-excess in case of delay. They feel that the two big passenger roads of the East made a distinct mistake when they established that basic principle.
Truth to tell, America these days is bathed in luxury. America stands ready to pay the price; but America demands the service.[16] And the lesson of the excess-fare trains is one that the railroader who thinks as he reads may well take to heart. Some of them are giving it consideration already. One big road has had for some time past under advisement a scheme by which it would make a ticket charge of one-half cent a mile extra for those of its passengers who chose to ride in sleeping or parlor cars. In this way it would compensate itself for the lack of any portion of the Pullman Company’s direct revenue.
A certain big railroader out in the Middle West has very determined opinions in regard to the possibility of the passenger end of the railroad receipts being increased. Like many of the big operating men he affects a small regard for the passenger service. And this despite the fact that if you touch the average railroader, big or little, upon his tenderest spot, his pride in his property, he will talk to you in glowing terms of the “Limited,” the road’s biggest and fastest show train—showy from the barber shop and the bath in her buffet car, to the big brass-railed observation platform at the rear. He will not talk to you at length of his freight trains, but he will prate unceasingly of Nineteen’s “record”—how she ran ninety-eight per cent on time last month, a good showing for a train scheduled to make her thousand miles or so well inside of twenty-four hours.
This big railroader of the Middle West does not, however, take your time in mere boasting of his operating record. He comes to cases, and comes quickly—to the question of increased passenger rates when our present flood tide of traffic has descended to the normal.
“See here,” he tells you when you are seated in his big, comfortable office, “here are the figures. They speak for themselves. Take New York, for instance. There were 120,750 commuters entering and leaving that big town each business day last year. With an average ride of fourteen miles for each commuter, we have a total passenger mileage of 1,014,300,000 miles in that metropolitan district. The passenger traffic from New York westward to Chicago and beyond in the same time was 234,482 passengers. Multiply these by the average rail distance between the two cities, 960 miles, and you have another 225,083,520 passenger-miles. Now to this add 163,620 commercial travelers, each riding an estimated average of fifty miles a day—2,454,300,000 miles for these—and you have a total of 3,693,683,520 miles—or approximately ten and a half per cent of the passenger miles on our steam railroads last year. This ten and a half per cent of the passenger travel was participated in by 518,832 persons—a little bit more than one-half of one per cent of the total population of the country. If this rule holds good it follows that five and three-tenths per cent of the population of the United States, or 5,194,000, received in an average year all the benefits of the passenger-carrying establishment of the railroads.