Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Much of the heavy freight of the country,—coal, iron, grain and lumber,—should be carried in this way, in order to reduce freight rates and so, indirectly, the cost to the people, and further to relieve the burden on the railways.

The railways, it might be added, would still have a large and increasing package-freight business, besides the handling of heavy freight in parts of the country where there are no navigable rivers.

For these reasons it would seem clearly the only wise policy to adopt a general plan for waterway improvement and carry it into effect at once. But there are many things to be considered.

Millions of dollars (in all about five hundred and fifty-two millions) have been spent for the improvement of waterways. Some of it has resulted in great gain, but a large part of it has been wasted through lack of an organized plan. Work has been begun and not enough money appropriated to finish it. In the course of a few years much of the value of the work is destroyed by the action of the current or by shifting sands, or if a stretch of river is finished in the most approved manner, often it is not used much, in some cases actually less after than before the work was begun, and these things have created a prejudice against waterway improvements.

The other reason is that in spite of the overcrowding of the railroads, the traffic on many of our large rivers is steadily growing less. The Inland Waterways Commission finds as a reason for the decrease, the relations existing between the railways and the waterways. A railway, they consider, has two classes of advantages. First, those that come from natural conditions. A railroad line can be built in any direction to any part of the country except the extremely mountainous parts, while a river runs only in a single direction.

If a new region distant from a large water course is opened up, as is being done rapidly in the West through irrigation and dry farming, the people are entirely dependent on the railways to develop it, to bring them all the conveniences of the outside world, and to carry the products of their land to the market.

Branch lines and switches can be built to factories and warehouses, while boats can reach only those situated along the water-front.

Another advantage of the railroads is that they bill freight all the way through, and that freight is much more easily transferred from one road to another. It is much more difficult and expensive to load and reload freight from boats and barges on account of the high and low water stages of the river. This difference amounts to as much as sixty feet in the Ohio River at Cincinnati. Railways make faster time, and the distance between two points is usually shorter, though sometimes during the busy season of the railways the river freight reaches its destination much sooner.

The other class of reasons relates to the railways themselves, which have always been in open competition with the waterways, and to gain traffic for themselves, usually charge lower rates to those points to which boats also carry freight. In many cases they have bought the steamboat lines so that rates might be kept up, and then, unable to operate the two lines as cheaply as one, have abandoned the steamboat lines.

Another method by which the railroads have driven out the water traffic, is by charging extremely heavy rates for freight hauled a short distance to or from boats, making it quite as cheap as well as more convenient to send freight all the way by rail.