Even after the first steps in the inevitable consolidation of our various lines had begun, when for instance the six railroads in the three-hundred-mile stretch between Albany and Buffalo had been merged into the first New York Central, this intimate sense of personal relationship remained for a long time.
The statue of William Bliss, president of the Boston and Albany railroad, which stood for many years in the lobby of the old Kneeland Street Station in Boston, typified it. When the Boston and Albany was the Boston and Albany it was the pride not only of its employees but of all New England. But when, in accordance with the general railroad practice of the moment, the Vanderbilts took it over upon a long lease and painted out the old name, placing “New York Central” upon the cars and locomotives, New England rose in its anger, and it was not appeased until a shrewd executive, going to Boston from New York, reversed the new order of things and painted the beloved old name back again upon the equipment. After which serenity ruled once again along the lines of the “Albany,” as the Boston people to this day love to call it.
What’s in a name? More than you can imagine. I asked a shrewd brotherhood man once what the New York Central had sacrificed in operating efficiency when it had chosen to paint the names “Lake Shore,” “Michigan Central,” and “Big Four” from its western constituent lines, and he said that he guessed—it really is anybody’s guess—that 50 per cent. would be about right. The Pennsylvania system, with a great deal of real wisdom and long vision, not many months ago decided to divide itself into four large regional operating divisions, all to be known however under the general title of Pennsylvania System. Yet an old passenger conductor with whom I have ridden these great many years between New York and Philadelphia confessed to me his great personal regret at the passing of the fine old name, “Pennsylvania Railroad.”
“I feel as if I had buried an old friend,” said he. So felt others, and a little later the Pennsylvania dropped the “system” from its official name and came back as the good old Pennsylvania Railroad once again.
A few miles further south the people are still grieving over the loss of the “Cumberland Valley,” one of the earliest railroads of the land—incidentally a Pennsylvania constituency and one which until the recent change had held its name and its individuality. Across the land the thing repeats itself again and again. Away up in the northwestern corner you will find people to-day lamenting the renaming of their chief railroad system into the Union Pacific.
“We were proud of the name ‘Oregon-Washington Railway,’” said one of the really big men of that community not long ago. “It was a good railroad and we felt that in no small sense its goodness reflected that of this particular corner of the U. S. A.”
If this feeling comes to the patrons of these railroads how much more distinctly must it come to their workers? In subsequent chapters in a pleading for a division of our national railroad structure into shorter operating units, despite the ponderous suggestions of the Transportation Act, I am going to refer to the fact that in this country a half-dozen or so of the small railroads (“small” at least in a comparative sense) are the best operated and hence the most profitable lines in the land. And incidentally, despite the great tangle of red tape that the government system of railroad control has spun about them, they still enjoy comparatively friendly relations with their labor.
With the fundamental idea of railroad consolidation one can have no quarrel whatsoever. It was inevitable. It came logically and sequentially—in some ways before many folk were really aware of it. When a very few years after the close of the Civil War the merger of the Grand Trunk railroad was accomplished—a single system of nearly four thousand miles, stretching all the way from Portland, Maine, by way of Montreal and Toronto to Detroit (a little later, on to Chicago)—America stood aghast. And yet what were four thousand miles to be compared with a single system of twelve thousand miles of main-line track—nearly one-twentieth of the total mileage in the United States, upon which moves one-seventh of the traffic of the nation? And yet here is but one of three or four big twelve-thousand-mile systems that our land holds.
In our Yankee version of the English language we dearly love that word “big.” Yet is it not now a fair time to ask what that bigness has really cost us? Granted that with a certain amount of real aid from the state it has given us through rail and through car routes of an amazing multiplicity—even though one cannot cross the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a through car, unless it be a freight-car—that it has simplified vastly our tariffs, our ticketing and our way-bill systems, it certainly is failing to-day in many, many instances to give us the high degree of service which our railroads themselves have educated us to expect. As I said at the beginning our transport service to-day is appreciably poorer and the rates a great deal higher than they were a decade ago, while the personnel problem of our railroads, in their executive ranks as well as in the ranks of the great mass of their labor, has become a matter of real alarm.
In this book I am going to give scant attention, if any, either to the scandals or to the triumphs of railroad finance for a half-century past in this country. Neither am I going to hark back to the evils of multiple and ofttimes conflicting regulation of our carriers by the Federal and the forty-eight State governments. Both have been pretty thoroughly treated over and over again. And so we shall assume, first that the railroads must be properly financed in order to function at all, and second that the principle of regulation by the state is so thoroughly established by this time as to be removed from the field of controversial argument; while the perplexing factor of many and ofttimes annoying conflicts between the State regulatory bodies, or between them and the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission, is being solved automatically by the steadily increasing usurpation of the individual rights of the various States by the centralized government at Washington.
The problems upon which I shall prefer to linger in this book are those that concern the physical side of our national railroad structure, future as well as present, its operating problems as well as its purely human ones, in these last including not merely the very human problem of the men and women who work upon the railroad but those who ride upon it or otherwise become its patrons. Granting the great importance of its questions of finance and of state regulation, I still feel that these last are of still greater portent to its future. With these properly solved, finance and regulation, to a large extent at least, will solve themselves. A national railroad structure well operated, with efficiency, with economy, with vision, with a broad human relationship, will not have to worry very much about the sale of its securities or about interference from fussy regulatory bodies. I think that this may be fairly set down as a fundamental fact in our argument.
As to what constitutes good operation, efficiency, economy, vision, broad human relationship, there will of course come more than one opportunity for an honest difference of opinion. It is in the sincere effort to gain the real current of forward-looking opinion upon these great questions of our national transportation problem that the writer for the last sixteen years has traveled many thousands of miles across the United States and Canada and has interviewed hundreds of people in railroad circles and out. For more than a dozen years past he has foreseen the present crisis. The coming of the World War hastened it a bit perhaps but the crisis was inevitable. A drifting policy, which ofttimes was no policy at all, followed by both the railroad and the various groups of persons that assumed to control it, has brought us almost to the edge of supreme catastrophe.
Go back with me once again to the beginning. Remember if you will that the railroad in the United States to-day is a little more than ninety years old. For eighty of those years it was in a state of steady and healthy development and progress. For the last ten or twelve of them it has not only been in a state of arrested development but narrowly approaching entrance into a state of decadence.
For eighty years the American railroad grew, and grew heartily. It financed its own growth and, consisting