The Modern Railroad :: CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXII

MAKING TRAFFIC

Enticing Settlers to the Virgin Lands of the West—Emigration Bureaus—Railways Extended for the Benefit of Emigrants—The First Continuous Railroad across the American Continent—Campaigns for Developing Sparsely Settled Places in the West—Unprofitable Branch Railroads in the East—Development of Scientific Farming—Improved Farms are Traffic-makers—New Factories being Opened—How Railroad Managers have Developed Atlantic City.

Your railroad manager of other days was content with the traffic that was offered him—if indeed he deigned to accept it all. For those were the business methods that obtained everywhere in the other days. When competition became the moving force in modern business, the railroad felt it. The land had become gridironed with tracks; business did not offer itself so freely as it had at the outset. When there came a division between routes of a traffic that had formerly belonged to a single route, earnings fell away and stockholders began to ask uncomfortable questions of the men who operated their railroad properties. Then the fight for business began—at first, as we have already seen, by a lively rivalry which showed itself in a merciless slashing of rates. Such fighting methods reacted on the railroads, and their rate-sheets became code and law, only a little less holy than the Federal Constitution, long before the Interstate Commerce Commission exerted its beneficent paternalism over the railroads of the land. But with the rates equalized between the railroads, the competition remained. The one obvious solution of the situation which was left was put into effect. The railroads began to make traffic.The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an unpopulated country would never be any great “shakes” of a railroad until people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to Chicago—afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern—the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes again.

At the close of the war these tides rose to flood. The railroads no longer struggled. There was a steady flow of traffic over their rails, and they were able because of it to engage capital to stretch their rails a little farther west. After they had moved another stretch, the tides of emigration still flowed. That process might have gone ahead in orderly fashion until the Pacific had been reached, if the scheme had not been upset.

They built too many railroads, they overworked their idea. In the broad reaches of the Middle West, lines of steel crumbled into rust, and cross-roads dreamed vainly that they would become villages. Many a struggling village failed to become the city that her enthusiastic residents had fancied. They had the big boom in Kansas, and the bigger collapse that followed. After that, folk stayed East for a while, and the business of making traffic in that territory became an advanced science.

There was another factor in the situation. You will remember that the Summer of ’69 saw the first continuous railroad across the American continent—the combination of Central Pacific and Union Pacific. The huge success of that railroad was inspiration for others. In the generation of men that followed the rails that reached from Atlantic to Pacific were multiplied. After that there was a new problem for the owners of the transcontinental railroads. Their statistical charts of originating traffic showed great black masses at either end of the line—where connections were made with the great traffic-bringers from the East, and where the rails ran upon the docks of the Pacific shore. Between those two points was a thin black line, like spider-thread. To make that line black and firm at all points, to bring masses of new traffic at intermediate points, was the demand that the railroad-owner made of his traffic-manager.

It is being done to-day. It has taken time, money and almost incredible patience; but it is being done. This is a broad land, and there is still much to be done. In Montana, there is a single county with an area exceeding that of Maryland and a population less than that of the smallest ward of Baltimore; and near-by there is another county, as large as Delaware and Connecticut combined, with mere handful of residents. These are typical. There are great open stretches to the southwest; and the Santa Fe, working hand in hand with the Harriman lines, is busy populating and developing these. In the North Country, James J. Hill’s railroads and the new outstretched arm of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul are doing much to exploit the unfarmed lands of Montana, and the intensive possibilities of Washington for fruit-raising, market-gardening and the like. Up and down the Pacific coast, the railroads are uniting in similar campaigns of development.

Hill began the campaign in Montana. He is a dreamer and a far-seer. When he began making presents of blooded bulls to the farmers out along the Great Northern, folk laughed at him, some of his directors thought that he had gone crazy. They thought differently when they knew the results, when they got the traffic reports of the cattle business that was growing along the line.

That thing was typical. The railroad—Hill’s railroad and all the other big transcontinentals—lent itself to the fine development of all the traffic that might possibly be obtained within its territory. Heretofore it had roughly combed traffic possibilities, now it began to screen them with a fine mesh screen. The emigrant bureau did its part of the work; the railroad went further and set itself to develop every inch of available land along its lines. Attractive excursions brought settlers to the new country, the railroad was of practical assistance in finding locations for them. Everything is being brought toward the development of those great new States of the West: cross-roads are beginning to become villages; villages, cities. A little time before his death, Mr. Harriman announced that there would be four great cities spread across the American continent—New York, Chicago, Salt Lake, and San Francisco. He then took it upon his own rather roomy shoulders to make Salt Lake City worthy of a place in the file.From this activity in the West, the Eastern railroads have stolen a lesson. Originally built in many cases to serve the needs of the farmers of some particular locality, they have become merged and welded in a way that has caused them to serve the industrial interests of the country more particularly than the agricultural. One of the valuable old properties of the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey rejoices in the name of Freehold and Jamesburg Agricultural Railroad.

When, after the serious slump in traffic that followed the panic in 1907, the railroads of the East found themselves, for the first time in a decade, with more facilities than freight, they began to cultivate more carefully the traffic branch of transportation science. They took quite readily to the lesson that the transcontinentals gave them. Then they proceeded to put it into effect in practical fashion.

For some years past the problem of the unimportant branches has been a serious one with the big Eastern systems. These branches, many of them once profitable feeders, have been allowed to deteriorate and retrograde, while main-line traffic developed and increased under active conditions of competition. The little towns along the branches seemed to retrograde too; while the busy cities of the country, strung along the main lines of the railroad, absorbed new growth and new energy. Sometimes the branch lines were paralleled by interurban electric railroads, which were able to operate at far less cost than steam railroads, and consequently to charge lower rates of fare; and their slight passenger traffic continued to grow lighter. The freight traffic had long since dwindled to slim proportions; the branch lines were almost entirely agricultural railroads; and the farmers of the East were discouraged and disheartened.

The new movement began in Western New York, which is fairly gridironed with a network of these unprofitable branch railroads. It was started even before the panic of 1907. New York State, with its great resources and its fat treasury, has long been engaged in the development of scientific farming—which means farming for the largest profit that can be brought from the soil. It has a great agricultural school as a part of Cornell University, and an interesting experimental school along similar lines at Geneva. These schools have done a great work. They have educated young men to be modern farmers, in every sense of that phrase; and they have sent leaflets to every corner of the Empire State. But even these methods were not far-reaching enough. It is not every farmer’s boy in these days who can afford to go down to Ithaca for a college education in the tilling of the soil; few of the older men care to mingle with the boys at such an institution. Even the pamphlets sent out from Geneva were not sufficient.

So when the railroads, seeking to make traffic in a dull time and to rehabilitate their branches in the farming districts, made alliance with the agricultural schools, special trains were sent out into the farming districts, and these trains carried a competent corps of instructors from the schools. Day coaches made good school-rooms for the itinerant institutions; and a baggage-car, filled with specimens of fruit and grains grown under scientific methods, was generally attached. The Western roads had used similar trains with success in building up their virgin territories. The use of the scientific schools in connection was the Eastern adaptation of the idea.

A train of this sort will “make” half a dozen towns in the course of a day. The towns are not far apart, and the schedule generally permits a stop of about an hour in each. The coming of the “farmers’ special” has been thoroughly announced by handbills, posters, and the local newspapers. Whether the day be wet or fair, the appreciation of the enterprise that started the special out is sure to be manifest in a crowd that packs the day-coaches and not infrequently causes overflow meetings to be held from the rear platform of the train.

In the Far West the farm-train has long since come into its own

“Even in New York State the interest in these
itinerant agricultural schools is keen, indeed”

Interior of the dairy demonstration car of an agricultural train

There is no cause for disheartenment in the soul of the farmer after he has been down to the train. He learns the things that his land is capable of and yet has never reared for him. Take the perennial and hardy alfalfa, for instance. Crowd into the car, where a hundred earnest men from the country-side are gathered and listening to the man from the State Agricultural College, who talks on it.

“An acre of good alfalfa,” he is saying, “produces twice as much digestible nutriment as an acre of good clover. It is therefore profitable to our farmers to make every effort to establish alfalfa fields. Your climate is favorable to alfalfa, which can be grown on a variety of soils. The most favorable is a gravelly loam with a porous sub-soil. There must be drainage, fertility, lime, and inoculation. Alfalfa is a lime-loving plant, and if you haven’t a limy soil, apply lime at the rate of one to two thousand pounds per acre. These figures will be given you in a pamphlet as you leave the car.”

And so it goes. If the train is in one of the great fruit-growing districts of western New York, fruit is the theme of the lecturers. There is no product that the soil may give, directly or indirectly, that is too humble for the attention of the farmers’ special. All the roads in Western New York have taken part in the campaign—the New York Central, the Erie, the Lehigh Valley, and the smaller roads have sent out the train over the lines, each in due turn.

The idea has gone into the Middle West and back to Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which creates traffic from every conceivable source, has operated since November, 1908, four agricultural specials and two fruit-tree and shrubbery specials. The agricultural schools of the great territory it traverses have furnished the lecturers and the material. Now it is preparing to establish down in the Eastern Shore country between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, a development farm, in which it will show the farmers of that agricultural district the greatest use that they can make of their land, the greatest results that it can be brought to yield. It has gone down into the sandy southern part of New Jersey and made the potato crop for New York and for Philadelphia into a vast yield,—a profit both for the farmer and for the railroad which has created the traffic.

The first of these development farms in the East was that established by H. B. Fullerton, under the auspices of the Long Island Railroad, at Wading River, N. Y. The Long Island possesses a territory that particularly needs development of that sort. It has a good suburban territory adjacent to New York City, but after that there is not a town of importance the entire length of its lines. There is no manufacturing of consequence out upon its line and it has been driven to the necessity of making traffic.

Fullerton’s Farm is another traffic-maker by educational process. He has taken the worst of the sandy soil that makes thousands of acres at the east end of the Island, and he has created from it a model farm. The farm has had to pay its way. It has not been nurtured under any extensive appropriations from the railroad, but it has had to win its success under the same conditions that would confront the farmer who measured his capital in hundreds, rather than in thousands of dollars. It is teaching the lesson that it has sought to teach. Arid soil, on the very hearthstone of a metropolitan city, is being given over to profitable truck-farming; and the Long Island Railroad for its modest farm investment is beginning to harvest appreciable traffic returns.

The New York Central, under the guidance of its president, W. C. Brown, who is keenly interested in the revival of farming in the East, and who personally directed the operation of the “farm specials” over its lines, has purchased two demonstration farms—one in Central, the other in Western New York. It has hired a competent farmer to have charge of them—T. E. Martin, of West Rush, who made a famous record for himself in growing 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre on land that had never before grown more than sixty. They will also serve as object lessons, and when they have been developed to their capacity, they will be sold at a far higher price than the song for which they were purchased in rundown condition. The proceeds will be turned over to the purchase and development of neglected acres in other sections along the lines of that system.

The New York Central is also making its own special development of the “farm special” idea, by taking two coaches and making them into “agricultural cars” at its West Albany shops. These cars will not run sporadically on special trains but will be in use the entire year round, being dropped at one little town after another for a day or two days or three days, in order that the farmers from the surrounding district may drop in to receive a little practical information.

Through the schools of a number of corn-growing States, into which this work has spread, boys and girls are being stimulated by prizes to plant little patches of corn. Out of each community where such an exhibit is held, ten prize-winning ears are sent to the country fair. From this the best ten ears are sent to the State fair, and interstate competition is already being developed.

There is another side to this. The railroads are making more than a new traffic for themselves, they are making a new wealth for the communities through which their rails are stretched. It has been estimated by a Pennsylvania agronomist that the value of the staple farm crops in the Keystone State in a single year exceeds $170,000,000; and that some 224,000 farmers entered into this production. If by training and education each of these farmers can increase his yield of corn one bushel to the acre, the additional corn revenue from that one State would be $1,044,000. Further than that, he says that $780,000 would roll into the pockets of these farmers if they would choose their seed corn carefully and thus add ten kernels to each ear of corn grown by them in the course of a twelvemonth. That sort of thing looks like a cooperative benefit from almost any angle from which you may view it.

The Rock Island Railroad has begun to preach dry farming down through the Southwest. Wheat six feet in length is exhibited by that railroad in its offices throughout the East as sample of what the farmers in its territory do, under its help and supervision. That sort of thing silently makes traffic every day in the year. It is worth a dozen times what it costs the railroad.

But the railroad is not confining its efforts at making traffic to the products of the soil. What is good method with the farmer is similarly good method with the manufacturer. So you now see the railroads, east and west, working with the aid of industrial commissioners. The industrial commissioner is like a High Minister of Commerce.

Take, for instance, a typical railroad running from New York to Chicago. It has ample docks upon the sea board, extensive ramifications within the coal-mining districts; in the West it taps both the Great Lakes and the transcontinentals, which reach across the land to the Pacific. In all this district it is under hard competition, gaining its traffic—every ton of it—by the sweat of the general traffic-manager’s brow. That railroad has its Industrial Commissioner, and if you are a prospective manufacturer looking for a site for a new plant, you are sure to come to him. You tell him that you want to build a factory. He tilts back his chair and looks at you easily.

“What kind of a factory?” he asks. “We’ve room for 10,000 more along our rails. If it’s a silk mill I can suggest Paterson, where the help is trained, and the dyes and raw materials handy. If you are going to turn out a steel product somewhere in the Pittsburgh district, Youngstown, Ohio, is the most economical point in the United States to-day for the turning out of finished steel. Perhaps yours is a canning factory,” he laughs. “If you want to can fruit we can fix you out up in Western New York among the orchards; if you want to can tomatoes, well, sir, there is nothing like Indiana for tomatoes.”

You specify your new business and its requirements in some detail. The eye of this practical Minister of Commerce illumines.

“I have the very thing you want,” he says, without hesitation. “Over at W——, just half a mile above the city limits along the river. It has siding facilities.” (You may be fairly certain that the siding facilities give chief access to the railroad that employs this particular Commissioner.) “And you say you want fresh water. Well, there’s five thousand gallons a day of the purest soft water in the East for you.”

His eyes shine with enthusiasm. He reaches for his paper block and the next instant he is sketching the plot for you with remarkable accuracy, and with a similitude of scale. Here is the river and there is where you can build your dam. Over there is the main line of the best railroad in America (he leaves no doubt in your mind as to that); and your siding can go in there with less than a quarter of one per cent grade. The highroad is there, and close by it the trolley leading into town.

“They’ve a surplus of help of the kind you want in W——,” he adds. “You’ll never run short of hands there.”

It sounds good, and within a week you are bound to W—— with him to meet the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. If things are as he has represented them to you, and your mind is unbiased, you build your factory, and the railroad picks up 200 tons a day off your siding. That single transaction has been worth the Commissioner’s salary for a year to it. There is a variety of method in making traffic.

The general passenger agent has to keep his end up. Any G. P. A. of to-day found entertaining the old-fashioned idea that the traffic that flows of its own volition up to the ticket-wickets is going to be sufficient to satisfy his employers is out of present-day development. The general passenger agent who gets patted on the back nowadays is the man who goes to the president in a dull season with a sheet showing gains over a preceding busy season. He may have to bring water from stones to increase that tide of traffic, but it must be increased. There are no two ways about what is expected of him.

So he gets out, like the traffic people from the freight end of the railroad, and he keeps in constant touch with his territory, with the towns along the line and the agents who are working under him. If he is instrumental in locating a big convention at some point where his line will receive the lion’s share of the business, that is a good trick and worth while. A lively convention will do a lot toward bracing up a weak passenger sheet in some dull month.

One railroad reaching out of New York into the mountains at the northeastern corner of that State and losing itself at some obscure town, a railroad without valuable connections and ramifications, has made its passenger business a little gold-mine by scientific nurturing. It sent its passenger representatives up into the country towns, and they sought to improve conditions of every sort there. They started agitation for better roads from the railroad into the uplands where city folk were prone to wander; they helped the boarding-house landlord and the country hotel-keeper to bring their facilities up to attractive standards. In some cases they induced capital to come in and build new hotels. In every case they offered free space in the railroad’s summer resort literature. Under a single general passenger agent pursuing such a campaign unflaggingly the passenger receipts of that small railroad increased 125 per cent in eight years!

The famous Thomas Viaduct, on the Baltimore & Ohio at Relay, Md.,
built by B. H. Latrobe in 1835, and still in use

The historic Starucca Viaduct upon the Erie

The cylinders of the Delaware & Hudson Mallet

The interior of this gasoline-motor-car on the Union Pacific presents
a most unusual effect, yet a maximum of view of the outer world

Take the case of Atlantic City. That town used to be a collection of wooden hotels, set along a sandy, pleasant beach, which were content with six or eight weeks of good business in midsummer. The railroads that stretched their rails down to it registered good earnings during that hot season, and they had to put in extensive plants to handle that six or eight weeks of heavy traffic. The extensive—and expensive—plants were idle a great part of the year, and there was a lot of capital wasted. The managers of the railroads told the summer hotel proprietors that, and asked why beach property should be a losing investment ten months out of the year. That was a new sort of proposition for a summer resort hotel proprietor but it seemed sound argument and the hotels extended their seasons at either end. They combined with the railroads in making attractive special rates for these duller parts of the season, and before long the spring was well nigh as popular and as profitable as midsummer.

Folk came over from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and up from Baltimore and Washington, to spend their summers at Atlantic City, and the scientific business-making there created a fashionable season for Northerners from Easter forward. The building of wooden hotels ceased, and fireproof structures of brick and stone, steel and concrete, began to rise along the beach. Capital ceased to lie idle at Atlantic City. The hotels began to keep open the year around, and the scientific method of the biggest of the railroads had been so effectual that it built a million-dollar bridge across the Delaware at Philadelphia to handle through traffic down to Atlantic City.

Still the railroads worked in harmony with the hotels, and the fashionable season began at Christmas instead of Easter. Before long they will make the fall fashionable, and then the hotels will be crowded all the year round. When there is a lull in the season they bring on half a dozen conventions and fill the trains and the hotels with the delegates. That Atlantic City plant does not lie idle much of the time. There are nearly 800 hotels there to-day—more than fifty of them huge structures—and on a busy day 300,000 people are along the famous boardwalk above the beach. In dull days the big hotels are comfortably filled. The hotel men have made fortunes, the railroads have added millions of dollars to their passenger earnings because of Atlantic City.

There you have the best example of this new creed of the practical railroader—making traffic. It is not a lost example. Across the land every city and town, every resort, from the haughty spa with a cluster of brilliant hotels down to the humblest inn that ever cuddled by the shore of a silvery lake, is taking notice of the creed. The farmer is bending himself to increase the yield of his land, while the railroad reaps a benefit. The marketman from town is reaching out for better sources for his needs; the railroad helps him and reaps a benefit. The resort hotel arranges a joint rate and ticket with the railroad, which covers both transportation and board for a “week-end” in the dull season, and the passenger receipts are swelled in some degree.

That is what the railroader calls making traffic.

Clyx.com