4.—The writer fully realizes the magnitude of the task before the appraiser who is asked to determine first cost plus improvements or betterments.
Hardly a trunk line road exists to-day that has not grown up from a small beginning, changed its line, reduced its grades, added safety devices, changed the type of its bridges and buildings, increased the weight of its rails, put in service much heavier equipment, in fact, completely changed everything, except, perhaps, the original right of way.
The task of securing from old accounting department records an accurate statement of cost is—and the writer says it with the confidence born of experience—an impossibility. It is a job of such magnitude as to be practically prohibitive. The different systems of accounting, the different policies of the management, as to charging betterments to capital or operating expense, to say nothing of the countless errors that creep into the distribution of accounts, place such an undertaking among the labors of a modern Hercules, and, to one who has been engaged even in the task of trying to ascertain what one year's accounting on a large road may do in concealing betterments under the guise of operating expense, it would appear that a result that could be sworn to as correct was impossible of attainment along the lines suggested in this report.
The general question of the propriety of the use of mortality tables is discussed elsewhere in this paper.
This document, as an addition to the literature of the subject of valuation of properties, is disappointing, for if there were original and valuable methods they are not explicitly described.
The cost of making the appraisal was about $13 per mile of line.
[11]. Engineering-Contracting.
The Valuation of Traction Properties in Chicago.
During 1906 a complete valuation of the property and franchises of the surface roads of Chicago was made under the direction of a Commission consisting of Bion J. Arnold, M. Am. Soc. C. E., and Messrs. Mortimer E. Cooley, and A. B. du Pont. The report of this valuation was published in the form of a pamphlet which is now practically out of print, as all extra copies were long ago exhausted.