THE GASOLENE-MOTOR UNIT AND ITS POSSIBILITIES

In the twelve months of 1921 service was abandoned upon 1626 miles of standard steam railroad in the United States—much of it permanently abandoned. Of this, 217 miles, or very slightly less than that of 1920, was not only abandoned, but the track was taken up and the equipment sold. In addition to all of this the various regulatory commissions had authorized the abandonment of 191 more miles of line, and applications were pending for the scrapping of still another 575 miles. Once fairly important roads, such as the Colorado Midland and the Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek (one fourth of the abandoned mileage was within the State of Colorado) and the Missouri and North Arkansas, are included within these totals, while to them are added a host of small railroads, lines twenty-five to forty miles in length or less. Unimportant? Yes, to you and me, when we go hurrying across the country in the Limited, but not infrequently of very large importance to the communities that they aim to serve.

The position of the short-line railroad in our rail transport debacle is even worse than that of his bigger brothers. Even in the prosperous days before our entrance into the World War he was constantly involved in difficulties. Even then the motor-truck was beginning to make serious inroads into his earnings. So wonder not that he hailed the advent of McAdoo and government control as a possibility of real salvation. Yet how false a hope that was was quickly shown when the director-general of the United States Railroad Administration refused bluntly to bother with these roads—there are close to a thousand of them—in his unified rail transport structure. He said that they were not necessary to the successful prosecution of the war. And that settled it. Nor was this all. The last blow came when, with the reroutings of freight that came as an inevitable result of Federal control, the small railroads across the land began to lose the little hauls that frequently were given them by friendly freight traffic officers. At that many of them quit. More and more of them have been quitting ever since. In a few cases local pride has served to keep them alive; I can think of the Kanona and Prattsburg, a little eleven-mile line up in western New York which to-day is being operated by a group of farmers and village people who already are wondering if it would not be wiser to sell their locomotive and scrap the thin iron link that holds them to the outer world.

Where these little roads are alive they are breathing heavily. The little locomotive, purchased second-hand from the big railroad, which had used it almost up to the point of worthlessness, the battered cars, the bridges and trestles so long suffering from a lack of proper maintenance as to render it positively unsafe to run heavy cars over them, all are gasping for their very breath. In truth the short-line railroad is sinking into a state of coma.

And so is the rather typical branch line of its bigger brothers. In the abandoned mileage reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission for the last few years are included the feelers and the feeders of some pretty important railroad systems across this land. In these cases the track and the equipment have been maintained, to a fair degree of safety at least. And a fair degree of traffic also has been doled out to them. Yet they are as vulnerable to the short-haul competition of the motor-truck upon the highroad as the separate and highly individual short-line roads.

It is but fair to add that it probably is well that many of these short-line roads and little branches of the bigger roads should be abandoned. A considerable number of them never should have been built in the first place. But others that have gone and are going are essential to their communities. And these should be saved.

They can be saved. They can be made profitable, even against the inroads of the motor-truck.

There grew up in the later days of the World War—when, as we have seen, traffic congestion upon our railroads came close to the breaking point—a demand that the motor-truck, still an infant toy, come into the breach. It came and, I think, saved the day—gloriously, as the novelists always like to put it. We saw the day when the much-advertised Lincoln highway, not only from New York to Philadelphia but for several hundred miles further west, was crowded with emergency freight traffic, some of it fairly long-haul traffic. So were the other important highways not only of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but of New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts and a half-dozen other States as well—as the pleasure motorist of to-day, picking his way around and past the holes and ruts made by the war-time motor-traffic, very well knows. In the flush of that traffic problem many wondrous new motor-freight routes were established. Some of them were planned elaborately. A tire-maker in Akron, finding it next to impossible to get any prompt service to his branches and his patrons in New England, instituted a motor-truck service for the 900-odd miles over to Boston, laid down a schedule for the six-day trip, and then lived up to it, summer and winter, with a precision that few American freight or passenger-trains had made for many and many a month before. Some enthusiasts, with this practical example as a text, let their fancies fly to the fullest extent. They shouted for the long-distance hauls. In fact it was said not more than two or three years ago that four or five years would see regular motor-truck fast freights established from New York or Boston to points as far distant as Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City.

To-day we know that these were flights of fancy. Out of a dozen through motor-truck routes established for the ninety-mile run between New York and Philadelphia, only a very few have survived until to-day. The same proportion holds true elsewhere in the more congested sections of the land, particularly those sections subject to the ravages of a hard wintertime. Yet upon the other hand a very considerable portion of the business community still seems to be at the rather definite conclusion that the motor-truck is to replace the railroad for freight hauls up to a hundred miles or less, while old-time railroaders for years past have been frank in saying that a freight-car did not even begin to make money until it had hauled its goods at least forty miles, and to-day the modern generation of operators will put this figure at eighty miles. Up to a distance somewhere between these figures—and undoubtedly far nearer eighty than forty—the vast city terminal charges of the American railroad nullify the profit of the haul itself. In due time I shall come to a detailed consideration of these questions of freight terminals in our large cities. Consider now that the motor-truck, to a very large extent at least, is freed from this terminal problem. That is a long point in its favor.

At the present time approximately 2,000,000 ton-miles of freight are being transported in this country each year by motor-truck; and five years hence it is estimated that this figure will have risen to 60,000,000 ton-miles. It is understood, of course, that the arbitrary and comparative figure of the ton-mile is reached by multiplying the number of tons actually handled by the number of miles that each shipment actually goes.

These figures are taken from an admirable article in a recent issue of the “Atlantic Monthly,” by Philip Cabot of Boston. Referring to the overuse of the highways of New England by the motor-truck, Mr. Cabot says:

This same situation is being repeated to-day in the State of New York, where more than $100,000,000 already is being expended in the creation of some eight thousand miles of highway, which already is being ground to pieces under the heavy wheels of the motor-truck. Against this highway improvement are issued bonds with an average life of fifty years. The road, used as a freight line, goes to pieces in seven or eight years. The result is a financial impasse that even a schoolboy should be able to fathom.

What is true of Massachusetts and of New York is equally true of California or Ohio or Pennsylvania or New Jersey or any other State that has gone to great trouble and expense to upbuild an elaborate system of improved highroads for itself. And the roads are not alone too lightly built, but in a majority of cases they are entirely too narrow for heavy motor-truck traffic. To this last almost any motorist can testify. He can contribute almost numberless personal experiences of trying to pass these bulky box-cars of the highway-box—cars which, in about nine cases out of ten, really have no business there.

For do not forget that one of these biggest motor-trucks does not carry, or should not be permitted to carry, more than five tons of freight upon the public highroad, while a really good freight-train upon the railroad will carry all the way from three thousand tons upwards, and with a working crew of, at the most, six or seven men. To carry this minimum bulk of merchandise in five-ton trucks would entail the services of six hundred trucks and at least six hundred men. To this statement one of my friends, who is a real enthusiast in regard to motor-trucks, takes vigorous exception:

“That isn’t a fair comparison,” he sputters. “How about the other men who work the railroad—the despatchers, the shop-forces, the gangs of trackmen—all of them?”

To which I reply: “How about the gangs that keep up the highway?” The fact that the motor-truck operator does not directly pay the wages of these men does not mean that he, or some one else, does not pay them indirectly, through taxes. And garage and shop-costs are quite as much a part of the cost of upkeep of the motor-truck as of the locomotive.

It seems to me, however, that we are beginning to miss the real point and pith of the thing. Let us grant the motor-truck some of the obvious things that are in its favor: the vastly increased proportionate energy of the internal combustion engine over that of the steam locomotive, no matter what may be its fuel; the flexibility and economy of the unit over that of the electric motor in districts and upon lines of comparatively light volume of traffic. These advantages the motor-truck has already shown where it is given the opportunity of a well-paved highroad. Upon a bad road there is little economy in its use. It thrives best upon the roads which were built, primarily at least, for the comfort of the passenger automobile.But suppose we improve upon that well-paved highroad. There is not a concrete nor an asphalt highway in the world that is comparable with the polished surface of the smooth steel rail. The tractive power of any unit increases vastly when it is used—often as high as twenty-five times.

In other words, and to drop simile, we take off the expensive rubber tires of the motor-truck and substitute for them the steel, flanged wheels of the railroad-car or locomotive. Presto! We have a completely self-contained locomotive far lighter than the lightest practicable steam locomotive and running at about a 35 per cent. power economy, while with that locomotive we combine the freight-car or the passenger-car, or both.

“If it were not for the gasolene-motor unit I should not be able to operate this little road to-day,” says the general manager, superintendent, and all-around Pooh-Bah of a short-line up in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania.

I know precisely what he means. His oil comes from near-by wells. He buys it at a great economy. His good-sized truck—it will carry seven or eight tons of freight or passengers—is enabled to make six round-trips a day over twelve miles of line at far less cost than a small locomotive and train would involve for but two round-trips a day. In other words he has tripled his service, with inevitable beneficial results to the passenger-traffic of the little road, and has made real savings in his operating costs. A road which otherwise would have been added to that appalling total of abandoned railroad mileage for 1921 has been saved, to the great benefit of the communities that it serves.

Not long ago I rode from Kane to Mount Jewett, twelve miles across the hills of that same northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. I wanted to catch the northbound flyer of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg railroad out of the latter town. Between Kane and Mount Jewett there stretches a rather remote branch of one of America’s largest and best operated railroads. It was in the dead of winter and I should have preferred to ride upon a railroad train. But one train a day and missing the important connections gave me no opportunity whatsoever. I was forced to ride in a motor-bus upon a slippery ice-coated highway. Twenty-three other persons, the most of them also trying to catch the northbound flyer of the B. R. & P., were doing the same thing. The bus made four trips a day in each direction and the driver said that it was not only good business but steady. He charged seventy-five cents for the ride in each direction, which was something more than six cents a mile. A good many people complain at paying more than 3.6 cents a mile upon the rail, but they are not usually short-haul riders.

Here was a steam railroad losing its traffic by default. Obviously it might not be able to put a steam train on that little run—in all probability a worn-out engine with two worn-out and dirty cars—and make a successful opposition to the motor-bus, but I think that with its own well-planned motor-unit operated on frequent headway and in connection with the trains at its terminals it would regain for the railroad a large portion of the lost traffic. Unfortunately, as I have said, this was a remote branch line. Yet the president of the railroad of which it is a branch has much pride in the thought that he loses nothing in the efficiency of the operation of his property because it is merely widespread. He honestly and sincerely is trying to build up its service, to repair the inroads made into it during the period of Federal administration. He has done wonders in a few short months. But, largely because he is but a man and not a super-man, he cannot know everything about his remote branches of this sort. He cannot even build up an organization that will know it. No president of a 4,000-mile railroad ever can. Which is one of the large evils to be charged forever against the absentee landlordism method of operating our railroads.In a certain Eastern State there is a small railroad of about 130 miles in length which narrowly escapes being known as a real short-line railroad. The fact that the road’s annual earnings barely exceed a million dollars just bring it within the Interstate Commerce Commission’s classification of Class I railroads. It traverses a rough mountain region. Its business is largely seasonal. In the summer it hardly can secure enough passenger-cars and locomotives to handle its tourist business. In the winter it can hardly find enough passengers to justify the operation of two small trains over the line, while at all times its freight traffic is inconsequential.

When first I came to know this property a dozen years or more ago it operated three passenger-trains a day the year round over the entire system—the main line and two branches. But that was before the day of the competitive motor-buses and the improved highways that now parallel almost every mile of its trackage and for which, as a heavy taxpayer, it has contributed rather liberally. Its local fare at that time was fixed at three cents a mile, although a State law compelled it to sell mileage books at the rate of two cents a mile.

Both the competitive motor-buses and the competitive privately owned and operated automobile have gradually decreased its passenger earnings, although the resort locality that it serves has grown steadily in prestige and patronage during this last dozen years. It met the competition of the gasolene locomotive upon the highroad, how? By cutting its all-the-year train service to two trains a day and gradually raising its fare to five cents a mile. People who have to go from one end of its main line to the other, about 110 miles, are still likely to patronize it. The motor-bus is hardly more effective in the long haul than is the motor-truck. And in the really bleak days of winter its snug little passenger-cars, well lighted and warmed, have more appeal than the poorly lighted and heated motor-buses that traverse the State highway.

Yet that is about all. At all other times it is the motor-bus that has the prestige and the popularity. It reaches into the heart of the towns it serves; the little railroad’s passenger-stations are not well located—not in every instance, at any rate. It stops to receive or discharge its passengers at virtually any point along its route. It is clean. And in summer it is not only cleaner but cooler than the steam train.

But suppose that this little railroad should devise or find a good gasolene-unit passenger-bus and, fitting it with flanged wheels, operate it five or six times a day, over its main line at least. It might be compelled to retain one steam train a day in each direction because of the milk, the mail, and the express business along the route. The other four trips could easily be made with the gasolene-motor units.

At the outset there would be real frequency of service, a very great point in attracting any volume of passenger business. A commercial traveler who goes up its main line to-day and who sought to do any business even in the fairly large towns along the route could hardly make the trip in one direction in less than a week. The result is that most of the drummers to-day have their own automobiles and make the round-trip in three or four days. With the two-trains-a-day service they frequently found that they could complete their business in a village within the hour, after which they would have to wait perhaps five or six hours before the train came along which would carry them to the next town. Now they can clean up their business in a village, whether it takes fifteen minutes or an hour and fifteen, and be off to the next town as soon as they are done with all of it, while a real volume of traffic is lost to the railroad.

A service of five or six trains a day, such as I have just suggested, would bring a great part of it back. The inconvenient location of this small railroad’s passenger-station in its chief town easily could be overcome by having its gasolene-unit train stop at the principal street crossings through the community and a real flexibility of service rendered. The fact that the railroad’s gasolene-car was a little heavier, a little warmer, a little better lighted than its competitor of the paved highway would be a talking point in its favor. Added to that the facts that the gasolene motor-car of the steel highway is protected at all times by the flange of the rail—skidding is not an infrequent accident upon the paved road—and by the telegraphic order—collisions are not unheard-of things upon the State highways—and operated by a skilled and trained employee are other talking points that would have quick appeal to any man of advertising sense. We shall talk of these last possibilities again when we come to discuss those of selling transportation. In the meantime bear them in mind as strong arguments in favor of the possibilities of the individual small railroad or small branch of the big railroad. If these feelers wither and die to-day, it can only be the fault, in most instances, of the men who control them—at least of their lack of far-sighted vision.

It could be put down fairly as a lack of far-sighted vision of our steam railroaders, who at last are beginning to see the economic possibilities of the gasolene-unit passenger-car these days, if only to supplement the present extravagant steam trains upon their local lines and turn no point nor part of their economy toward the benefit of their patrons. In other words the point that I have just made of the mountain railroad, which could bring back its traffic by using its gasolene-units to make six trips a day instead of the present widely-spaced two trips of the steam trains, applies with equal force elsewhere across the well-built portions of the country. Such a method at first sight will not appeal to the average steam-railroad operating man, schooled as he is to bow deep before those twin gods of the train-mile and the car-mile. Increased train-miles? Impossible. Not impossible. I will go further and say that it will be quite impossible for the average steam road to make any headway whatsoever against motor-bus competition until it increases its train-miles, at least, radically. Frequency of trains is, as we have seen, the real test of passenger service. The gasolene-unit has made it possible to meet this test and still achieve real operating economies. It will be a vast pity if it is not installed generally, with this high service purpose in view.

For the moment we have been concerning ourselves with the passenger opportunities of the motor-truck mounted upon the steel rail. Its freight opportunities are not less impressive. When with the inevitable correlation of the container (the huge steel packing-box for the prompt handling of package and other freight) the flange-wheeled motor-truck upon the branch-line is made a perfect supplement to the box-car upon the main line, we shall have something that begins to approach really efficient modern transport upon our American railroad.

Mr. Cabot in his “Atlantic” article upon the New England situation, from which I have already quoted, draws attention to the obvious and striking analogy between New England and Old England, both in the congestion of population and in the character of industry and of traffic, and then asks why it is that New England should not be served with the same form of railroad transportation with which Old England has been served these many years, and with great success. He draws attention to the futility of using huge box-cars, such as those that are used in the long-haul business of the central and western parts of the country, and criticizes sharply the employment of Western railroad executives in the New England territory—men who have been schooled particularly in the movement of long-distance freight.

Certain it is that Old England—every part of Great Britain—knows well the efficient handling of short-haul freight-traffic. The ten-ton goods-wagon (at the most, fifteen) of the British railway is a small unit, easily handled, if necessity arises, by a horse or two at a country station. It is an inexpensive unit too; and being inexpensive England is able to have over a million freight-cars for her 25,000 miles of line as against but a little more than two million for 265,000 miles of railroad in the United States, which makes much for the flexibility of her railway freight service.

Moreover the freight-traffic of Great Britain is virtually an overnight service. Ordinary package-freight over there moves with much of the celerity and ease of the express in this country. Goods despatched from London terminals in the late afternoon are at Bristol or Manchester or Liverpool or even Glasgow and Edinburgh the next morning. While it is obvious that if the high-speed gasolene passenger-unit is introduced to any large extent in this country, we also shall have to speed up the freights that are interlarded between them, which will naturally mean the larger use of a high-speed and improved steam locomotive of comparatively moderate weight, and the use of comparatively small swift freight-trains, we shall have to abandon, for this sort of service at least, our American fetish of the excessively long and the excessively heavy freight-train.

For the moment we have permitted ourselves to drift away from the gasolene-motor unit upon the railroad track. Up to this point I have stressed the stripping of the rubber-tired wheels of the ordinary heavy motor-truck and the substitution of flanged steel wheels in their place. There is a compromise to this plan which is at least worth a passing paragraph of attention.

Down in the Imperial valley of southern California there was built a dozen years or more ago a small steam railroad, eleven miles in length, connecting the somewhat isolated village of Holtville with the Southern Pacific at El Centro. It eked out a fair sort of existence until the coming of the automobile truck and the improved highway began to cut sadly into its earnings. Its little passenger-train then found that it could not compete with the motor-bus. Its earnings fell to nothing. The situation was most discouraging. It looked as if the little railroad, into which a considerable amount of capital had been poured, would have to be abandoned.

It was not abandoned. Some inventive genius over in Los Angeles devised a motor-truck with a different sort of wheel than had ever been seen before. Inside there were the flanged wheels for the contact upon the steel rail, and, just outside of these, heavy rubber-tired wheels for use upon the highway. The problem of that little road, both for freight and passenger traffic was solved. No longer must it await the passengers and goods who found their way to its station at thriving and growing El Centro. Its combination trucks took the city streets very easily; they could go to any hotel or merchant’s door, receive passengers or freight, and then, making their way to the railroad terminal, by a simple mechanical device mount the rail and go hurrying off to Holtville, with the tractive advantage of the steel rails over even the well-paved dirt road that already I have shown you. Moreover it became no longer necessary for the road to go to the expense of train-despatching. If two of its “trains” met midway on the line, by the use of this same ingenious mechanical device, one of them could remain on the rails and the other go to the earth surface alongside of it. This then became the ordinary operation of the line, that trains going east upon the track had the right to the rails, while those going west would take to the dirt. What could be simpler?

The flexibility of the gasolene-motor unit is indeed astounding. It is not inconceivable that a device such as I have indicated should be so extended as to permit a motor-truck or passenger-car unit to go far beyond the limits of the rail terminals. In other words, why should Holtville be the terminal of the Holtville interurban? If there is a load of freight eight miles to the east of it, why not send the “train” on the highway for that eight miles to let it pick up the freight.The correlation of the highway with the steam railroad is a topic of almost unending fascinations. By it the branch lines of our big roads and the main stems of our small ones may be continued almost indefinitely. There undoubtedly are many cases where it would be both more practical and more profitable for the railroad to abandon the branch line entirely and use in its stead the nearest parallel highway. Into this possibility there enters, of course, the question of the congestion of that parallel highway. One of the arguments that I have just used for the placing of the motor-truck upon the railroad track is to give a much needed relief to the highroad. Yet here, as in so many other places, one cuts the cloth to meet the situation. In one instance it might be most advisable to use the highroad as a supplement to the railroad track; in another it would be a great mistake.

This entire prospect has vast ramifications. In Great Britain the railways already are moving toward a use of the highroads in direct competition with the trucks and steam lorries of the independent traders. Their moves are not being made without opposition. At this moment it is difficult to tell whether or not they are to be given permission to go to the highroads themselves and there fight it out with their newest competitors. But whether they gain this point or lose it, the fact will remain that they show a real vision in the very suggestion. To an impartial observer it seems as if a railroad which almost always, if not absolutely always, is the largest taxpayer in any community would have certain inherent rights in the public highway which it is taxed so heavily to support.

But whether or not ideas such as these are practical things or merely the fancies of a dreamer, the fact remains that our American railroads, obsessed by the possibilities of through or long-haul freight traffic, have as a rule ignored the vast extensive possibilities of the short-haul, which may be set down as one of the damnable heritages of our competitive railroad system. They do this intensive cultivation of traffic far better in France, which long ago discarded the competitive principle as both foolish and extravagant. Let me illustrate.

Not many months ago I found myself in the little, obsolete Atlantic fishing-port of Les Sables d’Olonne, in the VendÉe country almost half-way between St. Nazaire and La Rochelle. Up to the stout stone quays of that picturesque enclosed harbor there ran three types of railway, each of them rather typically French. The first was the standard-gage (four feet, eight and one half inches) branch of the State Railway system which connected Les Sables d’Olonne with a main line, and so, with all the rail lines of the rest of France and of Europe. There was a sixty-centimeter (twenty-four inches) narrow-gage also at the railway terminal and the quays; as well as a third at the harbor-side of but forty-centimeter gage. This last interested me tremendously. Its tiny rails, spaced a bare eighteen inches apart, seemed so inefficient; and yet they told me that it had been in successful existence for many years past.

“It is the poisson line,” they explained.

“The what?” I asked.

“The road that reaches out along the beaches and brings the fish into the big ten-ton cars that await it here at the railway terminal,” was the further explanation. I understood. That was correlated rail transport—the tiny engine (it was hardly larger than those that are operated for the delectation of children at country fairs) and its little cars were an active and efficient feeder for the big main railroad system of the republic. Intensified transport, in its largest sense.

Later that day, as we drove from Les Sables d’Olonne, we rode for a long distance alongside the sixty-centimeter line. Its rails were placed inconspicuously in the greensward beside the national highway. It followed that highway for many miles, dipped and rose when the highroad dipped and rose, and when the highway came to a culvert or a narrow bridge the little railroad, without hesitation, curved its way and shared the narrow bridge. At one town we met the train—there was only one upon the line, going up in the morning and back again at night—but it had a stout and immaculate twenty-five-ton locomotive which hauled three or four light passenger-cars and six or seven cars filled with local freight.

Do not laugh. I know myself what this idea would be in the United States—a copper wire above the center of the track, separate bridges at the little creeks and rivulets, rock-ballast perhaps, standard-gage, even private right-of-way and big trolley cars—how we Yanks do love the sound of that word “big”!—running every hour up and down the line. Economy? Nonsense. Why speak of the thing? We are rather proud of our interurban trolleys in many parts of this land. But the average interurban stockholder is not very proud of his holdings in them. We have seen the disaster that has come to some of them in New England. Few of them to-day are earning any money; in fact the greater part of them to-day are fighting bankruptcy, despite heavily increased rates and forced operating economies of a sizable nature. Many of these roads should never have been built, particularly where they paralleled existing steam railroads. That was a grave economic mistake for which we are now paying. The lines that led out from the steam roads should have been correlated years ago. That they were not was due generally to a very stupid pride that veiled itself as conservatism.

Yet these little French narrow-gage lines, if they have not made “big” money, certainly have not lost. In the years before the coming of the World War they would generally average about 2 per cent. annually upon the investment. But this was not the point. Locally owned and managed they were not built primarily for profit but as a convenience to the communities that they served. Please remember this. In Paris I once found a man who had built many miles of these small railroads.

“Cheap?” said he, in reply to one of my questions. “Of course they are cheap. That is the point of it. They rise and fall with the contour of the highroad because that saves expensive grading work. But you will notice that the highroads that they follow almost invariably are in the fairly level portions of France, and so the grades are not such that a well-designed locomotive, even if a fairly small one, cannot traverse them without difficulty. The lines curve sharply to make the highway bridges—but separate bridges would cost money and our narrow-gages primarily are cheap railroads. And our little locomotives are not bothered with the curves. They are extremely well-designed for their own purposes, and so when our line makes a right angle from one highroad to another, because a long easy curve would mean a separate right-of-way, possibly tearing down houses into the bargain, our well-designed locomotive brings ten or twelve or even thirteen loaded cars around that sharp turn in the highroad with little or no difficulty.”

The Frenchman rose and came around his office table, pointing his finger in my face.

“Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?” he went on. “We have saved that immensely costly thing that you Americans call ‘overhead.’ The owners of one of these little roads of ours have not tied up a small fortune for every mile of them in grading and bridge-work and copper wire and power-houses. Our locomotives are small—always well-designed, mind you, and so not so very expensive, yet only one or two or three are required for the entire service of our average narrow-gage. The best of these cost far less than the smallest dynamos, to say nothing of car-motors, while the poorest of them will haul our little cars.”

There is a big lesson for America in these little roads. All of our highways are not improved highways; only a very small proportion of them are, in fact. It will be many, many years before any large proportion of them are completed. One shrinks at the very contemplation of so vast a task, while, as I have said, there is a growing disinclination against the use of our new paved roads as railroad tracks, particularly for heavy freight service. The most of them are too narrow; and even the wider roads are gradually pounded to pieces by the all-year use of ponderous motor-trucks. Remember that the average life of the best of the highways in the State of New York, where the manufacture of these roads has reached a high degree of perfection, is but seven or eight years at the most.

Suppose that we were to begin the business of laying down light narrow-gage lines along many of the important highroads of the United States—not parallel to our standard railroads but in every case feeding in or out of them. They would not have to be more than twenty-four or thirty inches in gage and they could be built in the same efficient and economical way as those in France.

For passenger traffic roads these baby railroads would be as nothing. But for the handling of goods, particularly of farm produce, they would offer a rare opportunity. It is not every farmer that can afford to own a motor-truck; in fact if he were to do really sharp bookkeeping in regard to such a mechanism he would find that it is only the large farmer who really can afford its use, not alone from the point of view of the cost of its upkeep but also because of its “overhead.” Understand that for such farmers a small narrow-gage railroad as this—the feeder to a branch or main line of some standard steam railroad, running all the way from ten to twenty miles in length, inexpensively laid down alongside the highway and equipped with a single small locomotive (with perhaps one held in reserve against emergencies) and from one hundred to two hundred small four-wheeled flat-cars—would be a boon, and the capital outlay would be comparatively slight. It ought to be built and operated by the farmers that it would serve. With never more than a single train upon the line at one time, there would be no danger of collision, no necessity of a despatching system, while the method of operation would be simplicity itself.

The train—the small locomotive and from ten to fifteen of the little cars—would start down the line from the main terminal, where it connected with the standard steam railroad. At each farm-house there would be a simple switch or siding. At each of these, one at least of the little cars would be set. Such would be the early morning process of operation. Toward night the train would come back, in as many trips as were found necessary, and gather up the little cars, now filled with the farmer’s produce. They would be taken to the steam railroad and there unloaded into the railroad’s big box-cars for shipment down into the cities.

It would, of course, be possible to vary this plan by making the little railroad double-track, at a considerably increased expense—and using upon it gasolene motor-trucks, whose flanged wheels for track service could quickly be slipped into place. This strikes me, however, as being unnecessary costliness. Under such a plan, for fifteen car-loads of merchandise there would be in reality fifteen locomotives, each requiring a separate engineer. How much better to have one locomotive with one engineer—and possibly a fireman, too—haul these fifteen car-loads of merchandise! The locomotive easily might be a gasolene or kerosene internal-combustion unit or it might be a steam locomotive burning either coal or oil. That is a matter for experimentation and careful decision. And that is not the point.

The point is that the average little farmer cannot well afford to tie up money in a motor-truck which probably will stand idle all too many hours out of the twenty-four, or else tear itself to pieces upon the rough roads of his fields. Even the tractor used in slow hauls to town and back is a doubtful economic benefit. But the type of car such as is suggested could have its flange wheels exchanged for regular iron-tired wheels in five minutes—probably the smart farmer’s son could do the job in three—while either the tractor or the team of horses or mules could draw it down into the fields where it would receive its produce.

Such a railroad—how I should like to hear it called the Bates County Farmers’ Railroad or something of that sort!—would carry coal and merchandise out from the standard railroad to the farm-houses. Its chief utility, however, would be the inward movement of produce. The relief to the highroad, in case the highroad happens to be the typical narrow, light pavement so often used in this country, would be obvious, while in the cases of the all but unspeakable dirt and sand roads the relief to the farmer’s horses or trucks, to say nothing of his nerves, would be vast indeed.

Sometimes when I contemplate the vastness of the possibilities of rail transport in these United States I am staggered with their enormity. We sometimes say that we now have developed a complete railroad system in this country. Such a statement is a joke. We have not even scotched the surface of transport possibilities here. We have tackled the obvious and neglected the possibilities not so obvious. But they do exist nevertheless and await the coming of the right intelligence and imagination to make the proper use of them. This brings us at once to the possibilities of the freight-container for the American railroad—not only for the railroad but for all those other forms of transport which we have said should be allied with it and which eventually, I believe, will be correlated and allied with it—the motor-truck, the canal-barge, the outbound steamship. For all of these forms of transportation the container is the veritable keystone of the arch. It is more. It links them together. It is not merely the keystone but the binding mortar itself of the transport arch.

I spoke but a moment ago of the transfer of freight from this imaginary farmers’ railroad—based upon the French models—to the steam railroad at the point of connection between the two. Transfer, at the best, is expensive. At the worst, it is both cumbersome and filled with delay. The container reduces freight transfer to an absolute minimum.

Yet because it has so many varied and fascinating phases I shall not enter upon its discussion within the pages of this chapter but shall give it a chapter of its own. It really deserves a book.