Mr. Robinson. Any of the trunk lines—the Illinois Central, the Louisville or the Southern Railway lines. The roads in Mississippi south of the river are not parties to this arrangement, you understand. In fact, as fast as they find it out they break it up, or try to. They do not want their traffic diverted.
Senator Kean. Does it not come down to this, that some road is trying to cheat another on the use of its cars?
Mr. Robinson. Not only that, but it is trying to get traffic that does not belong to it.[286]
Wherever a large volume of traffic is moving by an unnatural route, the first explanation which arises therefore is that rebates or rate-cutting are taking place.[287]
A third cause of diversion of traffic is akin to the second; and concerns the practices in pro-rating. Much circuitous transportation is due to the existence of independent transverse lines of railway which may participate in the traffic only on condition that it move by an indirect route. This situation is best described by reference to the following diagram. Let us suppose traffic to be moving by two routes passing through points B and C, and converging on A, which last-named point might be Chicago, St. Louis, New York or any other railroad centre. Cutting these two converging lines of railway, we will suppose a tranverse line passing through B and C. Obviously the proper function of this railway is as a feeder for the through lines, each being entitled to traffic up to the half-way point, D. But over and above serving as a mere branch, this road, desirous of extending its business, has a powerful incentive to extend operations. The longer the tranverse haul, the greater becomes its pro-rating division of the through rate with the main line. Traffic from C is of no profit to the tranverse road so long as it is hauled directly to A. But if hauled from C to the same destination by way of B, the profit may be enhanced in two ways. In the first place the pro-rating distance is greater; and secondly, such traffic from C not being naturally tributary to the main line B A but merely a surplus freight to be added to that already in hand, the main line A B is open to temptation to shrink its usual proportion of the through rate in order to secure the extra business. This same motive may on proper solicitation induce the other main line C A to accept traffic from B and its vicinity. The result is a greatly enhanced profit to the cross line and circuitous carriage of the goods in both directions around two sides of a triangle. Only recently in a case in Texas the Interstate Commerce Commission found that two roads thus converging on a common point were each losing to the other traffic which rightfully was tributary to its own line. In a recent case, ninety-nine per cent. of the business from Chatham to New York was moving over a route 249 miles long, when it might have gone directly only 144 miles, by pro-rating with another road.[288] Our illustrative examples are not fanciful in any degree.[289]
This roundabout carriage becomes of course increasingly wasteful in proportion to the width of angle between the main lines converging on the common point. And several cases indicate that in extreme instances the two main lines may converge on a common point from exactly opposite directions, while the transverse or secondary road or series of roads forms a wide and roundabout detour. The well known Pittsburg-Youngstown case, cited in the original Louisville & Nashville decision in 1887, serves as illustration. The Pennsylvania was competing from Pittsburg directly eastbound to New York with certain feeders of the New York Central lines which took out traffic bound for the same destination but leaving Pittsburg westbound.[290] Other instances of the same phenomenon occur at Chattanooga, where freight for New York may leave either northward or southward, at Kansas City and in fact at almost any important inland centre.
Another extreme form may arise even in the competition between two parallel trunk lines cut transversely by two independent cross roads. One of these latter may induce traffic to desert the direct route, to cut across to the other trunk line, to move over that some distance and then to be hauled back again to a point on the first main line where it may find a "cut" rate to destination. Grain sometimes used literally to meander to the seaboard in the days of active competition between the trunk lines. Wheat from Iowa and northern Illinois finally reached Portland, Maine, by way of Cincinnati in this manner, with a superfluous carriage of from 250 to 350 miles:
"Starting within 90 miles of Chicago, though billed due northeast to Portland, wheat has travelled first 97 miles due southwest to avail of the connection of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for Cincinnati, and thence north to Detroit Junction, a total of 716 miles to reach the latter point and save 5 cents in freight. The direct haul through Chicago would have been 340 miles less, or a total of 376 miles only."[291]
Another witness describes the route as follows: