THE POSSIBILITIES OF ELECTRIFICATION

The immediate needs of our railroads of the United States divide themselves into three great classes: human, physical, financial. I shall not assume to say which of these three classes is most vital or most important. In my own mind I frankly do not know. Already we have dipped into the human phases. Now for mere convenience in the telling, we shall give consideration to their physical needs.

Here again there is further division. A railroad in its physical aspect consists of the track that things run upon and the things that run upon the track. The track, in the broad sense in which we are now considering it, consists of far more than two steel rails set upon wooden ties or sleepers which, in turn, are set in a graded roadway. It means bridges, tunnels, switches, signals, terminal and intermediate stations, buildings, passenger and freight-houses, engine-houses, shops, and all the rest of it. And upon track, in this and every other sense the things that run, are to be translated as locomotives, of a variety of forms, and cars, of an infinite number.

And because cars are, as a rule, quite helpless without locomotives to push or to pull them here and there, let us begin with the locomotive. For the moment, we are going to pass by the steam locomotive, and the large possibilities of its development far beyond the present point, and come direct to the form of tractive power which has at least the most popular appeal to the modern imagination—electricity.

The use of electricity as a motive-power upon this country’s so-called standard railroads (the electrical engineers like to call these heavy traction railroads) is no novelty. It began nearly thirty years ago when the Baltimore and Ohio railroad completed the electrification of its then new tunnels under the City of Baltimore. The move was made primarily to remove offensive smoke conditions, particularly in the main tunnel connecting Mount Royal and Camden stations, nearly two miles apart. In fact to-day trains going from Mount Royal toward Camden, a steady down-grade, are operated without the trouble of attaching electric locomotives to them; it is an easy gravity run for the two miles. For the up-trip the electric locomotive is attached at Camden Station in front of the through steam locomotive of the train and finally detached about two miles east of Mount Royal, by the simple process of running ahead and upon a facing-point switch—an adaptation of the old-time “flying switch.”

The obvious success of this early installation slowly led to its imitation elsewhere among the railroads of the land—a third-rail suburban plan on the New Haven from Bristol through New Britain to Hartford, Connecticut, and a branch of the same system down to Nantasket Beach, Massachusetts. Yet the process was slow indeed. Your typical railroader is particularly averse to novelties. It was not until about fifteen years ago that electric installation of any considerable size came into being: the large suburban services that were created by the New York Central, the New Haven, and the Pennsylvania, coincident with the similar suburban services in Oakland, California, and in Portland, Oregon, and in some of the longer tunnels of the land; the Hoosac tunnel of the old Fitchburg, the tunnel of the Michigan Central under the Detroit River, and that of the Great Northern through the Cascades in Washington being notable instances of this last sort of installation. After these came the large installations of the Norfolk and Western through the Alleghanies and of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul—of which much more in a moment. And after this a great hiatus, the huge rise in material and construction costs of every sort, the war, and the present paralysis of our railroad development.Recently there has come a demand, from the laity of the railroad world at least, that there be a revival of progress in this extension of electrical power upon our standard railroads. McAdoo sensed this well before he left his high office and said that at least one-fifth of the railroad mileage should be operated electrically at the earliest possible opportunity. And more recently there has come a larger realization to the land of its wholesale waste in potential water-power, as well as a gradual closing and increasing expense of its coal-supply.

The big builders and designers of our steam locomotives have not been asleep to this movement. They have met it in very recent years by a real improvement in the quality of that machine. For many years the steam locomotive grew in quantity—in mere size and bulk, if you please—rather than in quality. Once again we were captivated by the use of the word “big.” When we read not many years ago of the coming of the first 200-ton locomotive we drew in our breath a little. Four hundred thousand pounds! And without its great load of coal and water at that. What a monster! Here, indeed, was Frankenstein. But what old Frank could do in smashing down bridges and rail levels we wotted not of. Yet what was the 200-ton locomotive compared with the 300-ton and the 400-ton monsters that the Santa FÉ and the Delaware and Hudson began installing about a dozen years ago? It seemed as if no limit could be reached.

Yet the fact that a size limit could be reached and apparently was reached, was still no sign that the limits of steam locomotive efficiency had even been approached. Because the methods by which these limits may be extended, apparently almost indefinitely, are so complex and withal so fascinating, I am taking them up in a separate chapter of this book. This chapter and the one that follows it are the record of the achievements and the possibilities of the electric locomotive, whether as a separate unit or merely as a compact bundle of energy stowed away in the trucks of a passenger or freight-car. That locomotive shall receive our first consideration.Now despite all the improvements that we shall see have been made upon him, the American steam locomotive of to-day seemingly remains a laggard. In the days when his fuel was both plentiful and comparatively cheap one might merely say that he was extravagant and let it go at that. But now when coal if not scarcer is far more expensive his extravagance has become totally unwarranted.

In 1918, the most recent year for which the figures are available, our steam locomotive consumed 163,000,000 tons of coal in addition to 45,700,000 barrels of oil. Reducing these last to their coal equivalent, we have a total fuel consumption expressed in terms of coal of 176,000,000. And when we measure that consumption alongside the freight carried—1918 was one of the record years of our American railroads—it will be seen that for every thousand tons of freight that they moved one mile they burned 290 pounds of coal. Through any modern steam-generating electric station—the figures taken from the modern power-houses of the few steam railroads that already have been progressive enough to install electric motive-power—an even hundred pounds of coal may easily move more than 1600 tons of freight one mile—in the accurate phrasing of the railroaders themselves, 1600 ton-miles.

In other words the same freight traffic moved by electricity through steam power houses would have required but a little over fifty million tons of coal. From 120,000,000 to 130,000,000 tons of coal would have been saved—a saving roughly expressed in money at between three-quarters of a billion and a billion dollars, which of itself would be a 4 or 5 per cent. dividend upon the total capitalization of our American railroads.

In the saving that we have just shown we have presupposed an absolutely universal substitution of electric for steam power all the way across the land. This however is not practical to-day; nor is it likely to be practical in any day to come, for every mile of our 275,000 miles of American railroad system. On the other hand this huge estimate of national saving is based entirely upon the coal-consumption basis. The most impressive savings that you shall see before you are finished with this chapter are those accomplished by our lines which have bended water-power, hitherto wasted, to the movement of their trains. I have stood upon the brink of Niagara Falls and there seen train after train arrive and depart, each hauled by a steam locomotive. And all the while I knew that the force and power of that mighty cataract was lighting the homes and driving the street-cars of Toronto and of Syracuse—by land, respectively one hundred and 150 miles distant. What a travesty upon efficiency!

For the moment however we are seeing the question, not in fine, but in large. It is terribly large, terribly wasteful, if you please. For not only is our steam locomotive a laggard in his over-greed for food but he is lazy into the bargain. A fearful proportion of his time he spends in resting or in being refitted for his work. For each hour that he spends out upon the line he spends another hour in the roundhouse—and this of course quite outside of the yearly visit to the shops for complete overhauling and repair. The traffic of Fifth Avenue, New York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, would never move if motor-cars were permitted to park alongside their busy curbs. One reason why the traffic upon our railroads has not moved better in times of stress is because there has been too much parking both of locomotives and of cars, particularly of the first.

An Eastern trunk-line railroad which a dozen years ago was having a fearful time moving its freight brought in a consulting engineer for an opinion as to the increase of its facilities. Like most engineers the outside expert saw the problem as a field-day possibility for contracting concerns—and engineers. A new classification-yard here, great additions and rearrangements to others there, at other places a long stretch of additional main-line trackage—the trick might be done anywhere from sixty to one hundred millions of dollars there in yester-year.These figures staggered the president of the road. He was not satisfied and so turned again for outside consultation, this time with the hard-headed general manager of a Western line.

“Tell me what you can make of it?” he asked.

The Westerner took a hurried trip over the line and had his report ready within sixty minutes thereafter; it was short, concise, verbal.

“Give me a couple of million dollars’ worth of more locomotives and in a week I’ll have your problem solved. You don’t want more yards, to be clogged up in turn. You want yard shortage—and line movement. If you have a sufficiency of motive-power you won’t need many yards, not as many as you have to-day. Your stuff will keep moving, not hanging around on side-tracks.”

The problem of that Eastern road of a dozen years ago is to-day that of virtually every trunk-line of the Northeast. Remember, if you will, that for more than a decade there has been no main line trackage laid down east of Pittsburg or Cleveland. Previous to that time a considerable amount of relief work had been done by a half-dozen or so of the larger roads in that territory. But the relief that these changes gave has long since been swallowed up until to-day it is hardly apparent. And the steadily growing traffic demands fresh relief.

How it can be given is not as easy a problem to the big engineers. The Pennsylvania can and has planned still more low-grade relief-lines across and through the Alleghany Mountains, but Pittsburg still remains its bottle-neck—in there between the high hills and all but defying the railroad engineers. The New York Central needs more main-line trackage, but far more does it need relief of its own bottle-necks—at Albany and again at Buffalo. It is the problem of the cities that counts—not merely Albany or Buffalo or Pittsburg, but New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Cleveland and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Chicago. There is no use in laying down additional main tracks when the terminals in the hearts of these great cities are so sadly congested as to take a freight-car as long to move through a single one of them as from three hundred to five hundred miles on open line.

The smooth and shiny steel rails that slip through each of these congested traffic-hubs are their Fifth Avenues and their Michigan Avenues too. We do not permit the gasolene locomotive to park and obstruct these highways of asphaltum. But the laggard steam locomotive is permitted to loaf in great roundhouses along the steel highway. He is to-day not merely a laggard but an actual obstructionist. I hinted but a moment ago at the time he must spend between runs resting and being more or less overhauled—fires cleaned, machinery overhauled, flues calked and the like, twelve hours out of each twenty-four. Moreover he requires water each seventy-five miles and a fresh supply of coal each 150.

On the other hand, take the electric locomotive. Not only does he save weight by carrying no coal or water and so put that weight into motive machinery—his strength to-day is 7000 horse-power as against but about 3000 of our largest steam locomotives—but he actually goes 5000 miles without having to receive the inspection attention that his old-fashioned steam brother apparently has to have at the end of 150. Which means that for days at a time—and even a week or a fortnight, if the necessity arises—he can remain in steady service, going from one train to another, and only changing crews. The locomotive is always ready.

And what is true in this comparison of the “front shop” light repairs and overhauling, which the steam locomotive must undergo at the end of each division, is still more true of that fortnight in the “back shop”—the heavier repairs and more thorough overhauling that it must have each twelvemonth, if it is to be kept in anything like a decent condition of efficiency. The steam locomotive must go to the “back shop” at the end of 75,000 miles. Barring accidents the electric locomotive need never go there. Its only ordinary repairs are the removing of worn bearings or the occasional rewinding of an armature, which can be easily accomplished in any small shop of a division-point. The elaborate plants of roundhouses, coal and water stations, turntables, cinder-pits, and sizable shops required every hundred or hundred and fifty miles along the lines of a steam railroad disappear, while with the facility of the electric locomotive for long-continued running the division-points themselves may well disappear.

The New York Central railroad in its 440 miles between New York and Buffalo, using steam locomotives for 410 miles of this distance, for many years made three engine-changes upon the one-way run; recently it has done somewhat better than this. The Erie and the Lackawanna between these same cities make the same number of engine-changes. So do the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania between New York and Pittsburg, only a slightly longer distance. This is standard steam railroad practice. It is only recently being changed. If these lines used electric locomotives the engines could easily make this entire stretch—with a possible change or two of engine-crews but not of locomotives—and at a vast saving of time, trouble, and money.

These statements are not made idly. This particular one is made upon the authority of the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul railway, which has successfully undertaken the longest and most scientific electrification yet introduced in the United States. His name is H. E. Byram, and the main line of his road is to-day completely equipped for electric operation for 649 miles—from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, 438 miles (or about the same mileage as the New York Central’s between New York and Buffalo or the Pennsylvania’s between New York and Pittsburg) and again from Othello to Tacoma, Washington, 211 miles.

“We regularly run our electric locomotive the entire 438 miles between Harlowton and Avery on the same passenger-train,” says Mr. Byram, “and if the track were electrified for that distance could just as well run it four thousand miles. In fact, counting in attendance, wear and tear, shop capacity, and the like, we figure that one of our electric locomotives is equal to three of the heaviest steam type.”

The forty-five electric locomotives now in service on the Harlowton-Avery section—the first to be installed—actually have replaced the 120 steam locomotives that formerly were needed for it. The power for this section, crossing the high ranges of the Rockies, as well as for the newer section further to the west, which crosses the Cascades, is supplied entirely by water. The fuel saving in 650 miles of just an ordinary busy single-tracked main-line railroad in a twelvemonth—259,000 tons of coal and 31,700,000 gallons of fuel-oil, according to its careful estimates for a single typical year—is considerable. When you come to project these to the busy double-tracked and triple-tracked and four-tracked railroads of our Eastern territory you begin to have the great savings which I outlined toward the beginning of this chapter. And these were only predicated upon the use of coal in the power-houses which becomes quite naturally part and parcel of any scheme of electrification.

Consider the Milwaukee’s important experiment in somewhat greater detail. It has been loath to give out exact figures as to its savings in dollars and cents by its electric installation until a number of years of operation should determine these beyond a point of quibbling or of argument. Some of its economies are quite obvious however. I am not going into the remarkable system of “regenerative braking” under which in the course of a year some 60 per cent. of the current taken from the overhead trolley-wire by the road’s electric locomotives is returned to that thread of copper by the seemingly simple expedient of turning the locomotive’s motor into a dynamo momentarily and so utilizing the ancient force of gravity upon a descending mountain grade as to actually turn out electric current and return it to the unseen treasury through that connecting medium of a copper wire. It is enough to say that a 60 per cent. return of current is an appreciable amount. If you do not believe this, ask the next trolleyman that you meet what it would mean to his road if 60 per cent. of the coal which his power-houses have reduced to ashes could be returned to good coal again—and an infinite saving made upon brake-shoes into the bargain.

These things have been told. But there has not been told publicly before this time a comparison of operating costs between the Missoula division—half of the Harlowton-Avery electrified section of the Milwaukee—and an adjacent mountain division which in 1918 and 1919 was not electrified, and which moreover is not subjected to the extremely hard winters of the Missoula range. The cost of locomotive repairs for 1918 and 1919 on this steam division was two and one-third times as great as upon the electric, owing in no small degree to the fact that the electric locomotive handles heavier trains and at higher speed than the steam, yet, notwithstanding this increased capacity, has a much lower maintenance cost per mile run. The cost of train crews was nearly two and one-half times greater on the steam division than upon the electric—this also because of the greater train tonnage and speed under electric operation. The expense for enginemen for similar reasons was 55 to 60 per cent. greater on the steam operation.

It is easy enough to talk in generalities, much harder sometimes to come to the brass tacks of a situation. It is a sort of brass tack, isn’t it, when on this steam division of the Milwaukee, the engine-house expense was two and one-half times greater than upon the electric—and for reasons that we have already seen? We do not need the exact dollars and cents of saving, when these comparisons are placed before us.

Neither do we need exact dollars and cents when we come east to the important electrification of the coal-carrying Norfolk and Western through the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia—a tremendously busy thirty-mile stretch of line over which there constantly moves a vast tonnage of bituminous coal. Conditions here are considerably different from those upon the Milwaukee yet the results that are being attained are largely the same. Upon the N. & W. huge trains of one-hundred-ton steel cars (3250 tons to the train), which formerly required three big steam Mallets, are now being hauled by two articulated electric locomotives, and at twice the speed. Focus your attention upon this last statement and then remember what we were saying about the necessity of keeping the motor-cars moving constantly and uniformly through the busiest streets of our metropolitan cities. It is not any more necessary to the understanding of the real economics of railroad electrification to know that the Norfolk and Western has made twelve double electric locomotives do the work of thirty-three steam Mallets than it is to know that those great mountain-climbing trains are moving at the rate of fourteen miles an hour instead of but seven as formerly. Here is speed; but speed expressed in a double dimension—speed compounded if you choose to put it that way.

While there also arises the interesting further proposition that in any railroad of high traffic density it is intensely important that its trains be kept moving at a uniform speed. In other days the freight movement at seven miles an hour through the thirty-mile heavy grade mountain section of the Norfolk and Western tended to “drag the line” and hold back the trains behind it, despite the fact that upon these more level sections their steam power could easily draw them at fourteen miles an hour. But never without a free clearance. That thirty-mile summit section was indeed a clog to the efficient operation of the line. Electricity removed the clog. And, quite incidentally, the soft-coal smoke in a very dirty tunnel through the crest of the Blue Ridge.

Take such speed, such even traffic flow, and apply it to our overburdened trunk-lines of the Northeast; to make the most definite instance and the greatest necessity. Suppose that no more main-line tracks need be laid upon the railroads east from Chicago and St. Louis, north from Washington and Cincinnati, no more expensive notchings in the mountains that hem in Pittsburg or fresh expenditures in Buffalo, if but a far quickened movement of freight can be obtained over existing rails. Here then is a double economy effected not alone in the use of fuel (still leaving the water-power solution in abeyance) but in a greatly bettered use of existing terminals and trackage. If our railroads can save three quarters of a billion dollars a year by burning their coal and oil in central power-stations instead of in locomotive fire-boxes, it may be fair to say that the terminal economies that might be effected by increasing the existing facilities from 40 to 50 per cent. without physical enlargement would equal the first saving. When the shoe begins to pinch there is many and many a way of relieving the foot.

There are railroaders, and shrewd railroaders too, who will not chime in rapidly. Here is one of them—in the Far West, a mighty operating executive schooled years ago by one of the half-dozen of the real captains of the industry. He feels the need of great relief to the traffic pressure upon his own great system—the greater need of a smoother movement of the traffic upon its rails.

“The game,” he says, “is simplicity itself. It is to take the friction out of the pipe and at the same time increase the pressure.”

Which in his case means a combination of more freight-cars—or better loading of the existing equipment—and more second or double tracks across the long reaches of the West. Yet when I suggest electrification as a method for the removal of pipe friction, he shakes his head sadly.

“My old chief,” he begins, his loyalty showing in his very phrasing, “once thought as you now think. He was anxious to install electric motive-power upon the stiff grades of our mountain division. He had reports made upon the possibility of the thing from three separate sources, the two big electrical equipment companies and our own fairly expert corp of engineers. There was little variance between the reports of these different interests. Almost uniformly they figured the cost of the job at a little more than ten million dollars, or at that time about $550,000 annual interest. A fuel bill on the volume of traffic that we then had of about $300,000 would be saved. That sort of saving did not appeal to me. I told the chief so.”

I asked this big railroader how about that mountain division of his to-day, with its traffic greatly increased and its fuel bill more than doubled. He replied by saying that not only had the cost of electrical equipment—locomotives, dynamos, copper wire, all the rest of it—doubled or more than doubled, but the interest cost of getting money has increased all the way from 25 to 33 per cent. And so the wide margin of more than a decade ago has not narrowed perceptibly.

I have introduced this point here because it is most fair and most germane. Unquestionably that paper saving of all the way from a billion and a half to two billion dollars a year that we have just seen would be greatly cut down by the increase in the cost of electrical equipment and of the interest on the money that would go to buy it, but to-day the margin upon the electrification side of the argument is growing wider day by day, while as we go east and the congestion problem upon our railroads increases the margin in favor of electrical operation also increases. Granted that the costs of electrification are indeed vast, with dynamo units running all the way from one million to five million dollars, with locomotives at $175,000 and upwards apiece, all the other accessories in proportion, the game is indeed worth the candle.

Nor is it always necessary to buy locomotives at the rate of four or even five for a million dollars, with interest rates at 8 per cent. or thereabouts, when a railroad can borrow at all. There is many and many a short cut toward electrification. Take New England, for instance.

Up in that extreme northeastern corner of this land, as we have seen already at some length, the railroad shoe already has begun to pinch very hard indeed. With a few exceptions the railroads there are bankrupt, or virtually so. And yet their economic need and opportunity in electrical installation was never greater than it is at this very moment. If you don’t believe this bald statement, imagine yourself the president of that formerly prosperous little railroad down in Maine and your purchasing-agent coming in and telling you that he just paid twenty-seven dollars a ton for tender coal for your locomotives—with Maine richer in undeveloped water-power than almost any other State in the Union!

New England needs electrification of her steam railroads, and needs it at once. It is no new story to her. She began her experimentation with this sort of development more than two decades ago, when the New Haven laid that third rail alongside its busy Bristol-New Britain-Hartford line and installed a frequent electric suburban service. It was a beginning; a beginning that led slowly but surely to overhead wire installations upon several other branch lines of the New Haven system and eventually to the elaborate work in connection with the New York Central’s electrification of the Grand Central Station in New York. This last embraced the entire main line from Forty-second Street through to New Haven. It now ends there. And when you talk electrification to one of the high officers of the road he will point to this particularly elaborate installation and say:

“Not on your life. We had your vision fifteen years ago, and we put in this pretty job. Where did it get us? Into debt. It is one of the finest installations in the world, and one of the most expensive. While the increased capacity of the Grand Central Station from the operation of a two-level plan—a scheme utterly impossible under the use of steam as a motive-power—undoubtedly justified the expenditure, the fact remains that, considered independently, our electric zone to-day does not return interest on its investment. Of two locomotives of equal capacity, the steam one will cost $45,000, the electric $150,000. In addition to all of this investment in overhead there is also the cost of its maintenance, and that is not small. Wire-trains for immediate repairs as well as for maintenance must be in readiness day and night with a variety of expert, and expensive, workers. It all costs.”

I know that it costs, Mr. New Haven. But I also know that it takes but one half the amount of coal to pull a train with an electric locomotive as compared with a steam locomotive of the same capacity. Remember that the steam locomotive’s voracious appetite for coal apparently is unceasing. He may stand idle and upon sidings for half or a third of a working day, yet the fireman’s task at the fire-box door is steady. While if that fireman be lacking in every-day efficiency, the coal waste is increased, not lessened. The president of a large Eastern railroad has estimated that even a little better handling of the coal-shovels by his firemen would save the road 500,000 tons of coal annually. For even if coal must drive a railroad, if that railroad is driven from a central power-station there is almost no inefficiency in firing there; the central station operates on hourly coal-record sheets and waste is quickly detected.

I have not had in mind, however, for immediate use in New England the sort of elaborate installation which the New Haven has upon the western end of its main stem. What I meant for that road, as well as for sections of other lines up there, was the same sort of comparatively simple electric construction that the New Haven itself has operated for years on some of its isolated suburban lines in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I mean, instead of heavy steel passenger-coaches of main-line standards of size and weight and propelled by expensive electric locomotives, electric motor-cars of comparatively small size and weight, self-propelled and self-contained and operated in trains of from one to twelve cars in accordance with the immediate necessities of the traffic at hand. The New Haven’s field south of Boston, where its suburban service is at its very worst to-day, is particularly ripe for installation of that sort. There the once competitive interurban tradition has come to its final slough of despond.The traction systems throughout all New England have not been immune from the difficulties that have beset their brethren in other sections of the land. In fact I should not hesitate to say that their troubles have been greater rather than less than their brethren’s. More traction mileage has probably been abandoned in New England than in any other distinctive single locality. From Plymouth to Sagamore, Massachusetts, there stretch twenty miles of track and trolley-wire which, like the Hampden railroad (once built by one Charles S. Mellen for a dozen miles east of Springfield), never has been used and probably never will be. Two years ago the Bay State’s lines in and around Gloucester and the Cape Ann district were all abandoned, while the Connecticut Co. (a New Haven property) constantly threatened to do the same thing in some of its larger cities if jitney competition were not withdrawn. A prompt compliance by the local authorities with this mandate saved these towns their trolley service, temporarily at least. It is a grave question whether fifteen years hence we shall have any trolley service in most of our American towns of less than 100,000 population. But the most important abandonment of long-distance trolley service which has come to my attention has been that of the Shore Line Electric, along the north shore of Long Island Sound, for sixty miles between New Haven and New London.

There have been serious deletions in the passenger transportation machine of New England. The causes that have led to them are many and too involved to be discussed here. The main fact is that virtually none of this trolley mileage, outside of the city systems, is ever likely to come back into use again. A good deal of it should not have been built but, having been built, has become both a convenience and a necessity to the territory which it served and its abandonment a distinct social and commercial blow to that territory.

It so happens too that there is a vast amount of surplus mileage in the form of branch lines and even of some of the secondary main lines upon the steam railroads of New England. And some of this in turn became unprofitable only when it was paralleled by a trolley-line, which quickly changed the situation from one wherein a territory sustained a single thriftily operated line to one where two hotly competing lines could hardly fail both to lose. Now the opportunity is beginning to show itself for a change toward old conditions.

It ought to be and is possible for the New Haven, the Boston and Maine, and some of the other railroads of New England to transform some of their secondary lines into inexpensive combined freight and passenger roads, using steam, if need be, for their freight service and electricity for their passenger.

What I meant for the New Haven, as well as the other New England roads, was the same sort of simple installation that was operated for many years, and apparently operated successfully, on some of the suburban lines east of Hartford, between Middletown and Berlin Junction, Connecticut, between Providence, Warren, and Fall River, and in the summer months out to Nantasket Beach beyond Boston. I meant cars of comparatively small size and weight and self-propelled, depending upon no locomotive whatever. This field south of Boston, where the New Haven’s suburban service is at its very worst, is ripe for installation of that sort, through as far as Plymouth at least, and possibly to New Bedford, Newport, and Providence as well.

To the Boston and Maine the zone of suburban lines of the one-time Eastern railroad from North Station out to Salem, Gloucester, and up to Newburyport and Portsmouth offers similar immediate opportunity. Here are lines on which a minimum of through traffic is being routed to-day and most of that could, if necessary, be taken off and placed on the more direct main lines of the original Boston and Maine, just to the west, and leading direct through to Portland and the north. They thread the territory where the interurban lines are dying most rapidly and being totally abandoned, and where a great public inconvenience is arising as a result.A further result, and one not to be underestimated, would be the vast saving in the capacity of the North Station, just as the New Haven and the Boston and Albany can make a similar vast saving in South Station. A regular interval service, increased during rush-hours, of multiple-unit cars means no switching service whatsoever. An incoming train discharges its passengers upon one side and receives others for the outgoing run on the other side, while it stands upon a single pair of rails and without an unnecessary movement of any sort, which means, in effect, the virtual doubling of a station’s capacity.

The New England lines are this very day short—wofully short—of steam locomotives. Yet the immediate installation of electric overhead wires upon some of their congested branches would within a short space of time release dozens of locomotives which, if not efficient for the movement of long or heavy freights, could move shorter ones; after which could come the heavier installations.

“All right say for Berkshire County, Massachusetts,” you interrupt, “but how about the southeastern corner of New England? Haven’t the rivers down there in Rhode Island all the load they can carry?”

Granted. I indulge in no such wild day-dreams as that of all the railroad trackage of southern New England being operated by water-generated electric power. There is a better plan in view. Before me lies the rough prospectus of the super-power plan of the Northeast Atlantic seaboard, for the surveys of which Congress has already made generous appropriations. In a word this plan provides that in a great congested industrial area consisting of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, southeastern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and portions of New Jersey and of Maryland a present consumption of 17,000,000 horse-power—divided into 10,000,000 for industrial purposes and 7,000,000 for railroad—shall be fully met by the consolidation and connection, through high-voltage transmission lines, of existing steam-electric stations as well as by the establishment of central power-plants at the mine-heads of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, these last with a capacity of but 5,500,000 horse-power and yet helping to meet the present need for 17,000,000.

These are but the coal sources of electrical energy; and I have just stressed the importance of the steadily decreasing coal supply and a consequent steady increase in the price of coal itself. Even the vast and sweeping economies to be gained by the consolidation of steam power-stations as well as by the burning of coal at the mine-head are almost as nothing compared with those to be gained by a scientific grouping and use of the available and little used water-powers of the territory. It is upon this very phase of the situation that the super-power plan gains its greatest value. Do you recall how but a moment ago we saw that the operating economies of the Milwaukee out in the Rocky Mountains were based largely upon the use of water-power rather than upon the consumption of coal in its electric power-houses?

The hydro-electric resources of the super-power territory that have not been developed to their full capacity, if at all, comprise power-sites in the Adirondacks; along the Hudson, the Raquette, and the Black rivers; along the upper reaches of the Delaware and the lower ones of the Susquehanna and last—and greatest—that of the St. Lawrence River itself, taken just below Ogdensburg, New York. This last part of the project ties up very closely with the St. Lawrence Ship Canal project, an international scheme in which the United States and Canada shall share the cost and the benefits, both in power and in enlarged water traffic possibilities. It is estimated that more than 1,400,000 horse-power can be generated in this plan, of which one-half would be available for the use of this country. At present the whole St. Lawrence River canal scheme is under bitter political attack, which renders it unlikely that it will come quickly into effect. That it will not come eventually is hard to believe.When all is said and done, however, this super-power plan, so sweeping as to be all but staggering to the imagination, and yet sponsored by the shrewdest and most far-seeing of American engineers, is based primarily upon the consumption of coal at the mines rather than in distant factory engine-rooms, central power-stations, or locomotive boilers. It is estimated that it can be operated at a saving of at least 30,000,000 tons of coal each year to the industries and railroads of the district which it embraces, or, at a modest average of eight dollars a ton of coal, $240,000,000 a year to commercial America. Shimmery copper wires will carry silently and continuously what will amount to at least one half of the coal tonnage not carried by the railroads for power and lighting purposes. A copper wire knows neither snow, blockade, nor traffic congestion. And railroad experts estimate the super-power plan as a saving of another $150,000,000 annually in coal freights. A total of more than a million dollars a day saved in just one corner of American industry is not to be sneezed at, even in these days when we talk so easily and carelessly in billions.

In this great single super-economy the railroads of eastern New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, southern New England, and northern New Jersey may easily share. In fact it is definitely planned that they shall share in it. The list of feasible users of this concentrated power includes the Fitchburg division of the Boston and Maine, all the way from Boston to Rotterdam Junction, New York (oddly enough the western half of this division, from Greenfield to Rotterdam, through the Hoosac tunnel, 104 miles, has for some time since been marked for electrification by the road’s own engineers); the connecting Delaware and Hudson from Mechanicsville, New York, to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; the New York, New Haven, and Hartford from the present terminal of the electric zone at New Haven through to Boston, both by the Shore line and the Springfield line (this predicates of course the electrical operation of the Boston and Albany all the way east of Springfield—and why not west of that point also is not easily discovered); the main line of the Erie, from Jersey City to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania; the Lackawanna, from Hoboken to Elmira; the Lehigh Valley from New York to Wilkes-Barre; the Central Railroad of New Jersey-Reading-Baltimore and Ohio group to Washington, to Hagerstown, Maryland, and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; the Pennsylvania, from New York to a point just beyond Harrisburg—all of these main lines and a host of their branches. Such is the railroad portion of this embracing scheme. The only important road in its territory that is omitted from the electric program is the New York Central, which has such low grades and hence such economical use of power that the economy of electricity is least necessary to it. If ever it should desire to coÖperate in the plan, it probably can gain the power for its main line—west of Albany, at least—from Niagara Falls, and for its network of busy lines in northern New York from the abundant water-powers of the Adirondack preserve or the huge St. Lawrence River international power project.

This all seems most logical. In the case of New England it so happens that the super-power plan—which is now seemingly certain of eventual execution—embraces just that section of the territory where there is the least surplus of water-power. The rough, wild rivers of the north of Maine, of New Hampshire, and of Vermont can and yet will operate almost all of the mileage of the railroads of those States; the distant mines in the Pennsylvania and the West Virginia hills will run the lines in the rest of New England. Power—power to move railroads—will cease to move across the most congested strip of North Atlantic seaboard in noisy and overcrowded and inefficient car-loads of coal. Power will come on the copper wire and will move the silent trains around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and many of them—some of them with big and efficient locomotives and others by sturdy small individual motors set within the car-trucks. The steam locomotive in this northeastern territory is nearly doomed. I think that eventually it will be doomed everywhere within the United States (our disappearing coal supply will be the chief factor in this), but first and foremost of all in the great congested areas which, having no coal of their own, live in constant and deadly fear that an overworked and overgrown railroad structure may yet fail to bring to them all that they need for their imminent necessities.

That such a step will bring eventual economies, vast economies, one can have no doubt. The New Haven for the nonce may be failing to make a profit on its elaborately electrified main line between New York and New Haven, to the power-station of which it must haul coal a long way and over congested rail routes. But with that unseen power stretched further and further upon its lines I have no doubt that adequate transportation service, freight and passenger, can again be given to the communities which it serves. What is true of the New Haven is equally true of the Albany, the Boston and Maine, and the other railroads of the New England area—after all, railroads of real inherent strength despite the great abuses which they have suffered. And what is true of all these railroads of New England is of course true of the railroads elsewhere within the nation, and true even if the economy be but the one of coal or oil consumption in a central power-station; far more true of course if water-developed electricity be found available. For notwithstanding the great developments of our water-powers that have been made in the last fifteen or twenty years, the experts of the geological survey down at Washington say that the undeveloped water-power of the United States is still approximately 54,000,000 horse-power. Much of this is of course in the West and the Far West where there is as yet but little traffic congestion upon the railroads. In such cases the gasolene-unit cars are ofttimes the best solution of the problem of the local passenger service.There are instances too in the Northeast where single units are still the best solution of this most perplexing transport problem. And in the Northeast there is a considerable proportion of undeveloped water-power still remaining. But whether this be drawn upon chiefly, or the coal at the mine-head, the engineers of the super-power zone plan eventually will decide; the fact remains that here in a strip beginning at Washington and ending at Portland, Maine, and stretching from one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles inland, is the scene of our greatest railroad congestion, and the scene where in any traffic crisis the possibility of breakdown becomes most imminent. Yet across this strip and through it the laggard steam locomotive still continues to draw long trains of coal—with 20 per cent. of it destined for his fire-box and the fire-boxes of his fellows. And this in an era which we have been pleased to call the age of electricity!

No matter from what angle one may view them, the possibilities of a far wider extension of electric motive-power on our railroads are fascinating indeed. Nor are they in this day and age to be regarded as particularly radical or revolutionary, or new and untried. Remember all the while, if you will, that the first important electrification of a section of standard steam railroad in this country—the Mount Royal tunnel section of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad through the heart of Baltimore—was nearly thirty years ago. Since that day a good many other like experiments, large and small, have followed in its wake. Other lands have both followed and preceded us. These other lands are not asleep to-day. Despite the terribly crippled condition of Europe to-day, elaborate plans are being made over there—particularly in France, in Switzerland, and in Great Britain, and even in Spain and in Italy. The British plans are still quite vague. The French are more definite. It is now planned to electrify at least 6000 miles of the 26,500 miles of French railway; a single system, the Paris-Orleans, has made definite preparations for bringing this power, the most of it water-generated, to more than half of its mileage, about 3250 miles all-told. In Switzerland work is already rapidly under way for transforming the entire Federal system of railways, approximately 1900 miles, from steam to electric power. It is to be a huge job, the cost of which is roughly estimated at $200,000,000. Little Switzerland shows great pluck in even tackling it. But when you ask the managers of their railways why they are undertaking it they shrug their shoulders and smile and reply:

“Think of the economies that it will bring us.”

Think of the economies it will bring us, us Americans. If a thing is good for a little republic overseas with but 3300 miles of rail trackage all told, how much better must it be for the big republic with 265,000 miles of line? Have the French or the Swiss railroaders more vision than we Americans have? I should hate to say that, particularly in the face of such a development as that of the Milwaukee, to say nothing of our great terminals in New York, in Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Have they more funds with which to tinker and to experiment? Of course not.

We have the vision. We have the money. We simply need the correlating force that shall join the two in the immediate relief of our sadly wobbling railroad situation. Such a force would be big business in the truest and the finest sense of the word. It would be something more; it would be statesmanship, railroad statesmanship if you please, railroad statesmanship of the sort that we stand so sorely in need of to-day.