THE IRON HORSE AND THE GAS BUGGY

The other day the convention of an important Episcopalian diocese was held in a large town in one of our eastern states. The general passenger agent of a certain good-sized railroad which radiates from that town in every direction saw a newspaper clipping in relation to the convention and promptly dictated a letter to his assistant there asking about how many passengers they had had as a result of the gathering. The reply was prompt.

“None,” it read.

The G.P.A. reached for his ready-packed grip and took the next train up there. He wanted to find out the trouble. It was not hard to locate. It was a pretty poor shepherd of a pretty poor flock who did not possess some lamb who commanded a touring car of some sort. And it was a part of the lamb’s duty, nay, his privilege, to drive the rector to the convention. They came from all that end of the state in automobiles. And what had in past years been a source of decent revenue to the railroad which covered that state ceased to be any revenue whatsoever.

This is only one of many such cases. Any county or state or interstate gathering held in a part of the country where road conditions are even ordinarily good may count on folk coming to it by automobile up to a 150-mile radius, ofttimes from much greater distances. It is not argued that the trip is less expensive; the contrary is probably invariably true. Only today folks have the cars, and a meeting in an adjoining county gives a welcome excuse for a little trip. Need more be said?

Only this. Those same folk might otherwise have gone upon the cars. And the railroad’s assistant general passenger agent could have sat down beside his typewriter and written a neat little letter to his chief calling attention to the increased business resulting from the meeting of the Grand Lodge of the X.Y.G.C. this year as compared with that of last—the inference being nearly as clear to the chief as to the man who had created the aforesaid increased business. Multiply these lodge meetings, these conventions, these convocations; add to them high-school excursions and picnics and fraternity field-days almost without number; picture to yourself, if you will, the highways leading to these high spots of American life crowded with private and public motor cars of all descriptions and you can begin to realize a serious situation which confronts the passenger traffic men of the big steam railroads. Upon the eastern and western edges of the land, where highway conditions have attained their highest development, the situation is all but critical; in the central and southern portions of the country it is already serious.

Here is one of the big hard-coal roads up in the northeastern corner of the U.S.A. Its president lays much stress upon the value to the property of its anthracite holdings and carryings. Yet he is far too good a railroader to ignore the value of its passenger traffic. Because of this last his road has builded huge hotels and connecting steamboats. In past years its passenger revenues have even rivaled the tremendous earnings of its coal business. Because, however, of the competition of the automobile these have slipped backward for the past few years. And the president of the road has reasoned it out in an ingenious fashion.

“There are 4,339 motor cars licensed in Albany, Troy, and their intermediate towns alone,” he says. “If each of these carried three passengers twenty-five miles a day for a year their passenger-miles would equal those of our entire system for the same time.”

A passenger-mile, as we know already, is one of the units in estimating the traffic revenue of a railroad. It is passenger-miles, by the hundreds and the thousands, that the railroads of New England are losing today. When one stands beside one of the well-traveled pathways of the Ideal Tour, the Real Tour, or the Mohawk Trail and sees touring cars loaded to the gunwales with luggage go whizzing by him, ten, twenty to the hour, he begins to realize this.[10] More than 50,000 visiting automobiles were registered in Massachusetts this last summer. There were last year in the United States, 2,445,664 automobiles. With a carrying capacity averaging five persons to a car—12,000,000 persons all told—they can seat three times as many persons as all our railroad cars in the country combined. Not all of these folk would travel by train if there were no motor cars. Some of them are riding for the pure joy of automobile touring. But many of them would go to the mountains or the coast anyway and so make a large addition to railroad passenger revenues. The vast increase in trunks handled over reasonably long distances by the express companies in these last few years is, in itself, something of an index of the volume of this through business, which is today traveling by motor.

Now cross the country and take a quick glimpse at the situation in the Northwest. The president of an important steam road at Portland—which in turn controls both city and interurban lines extending out from Portland and Spokane—is peculiarly qualified to speak of the situation there.

“Our road has suffered severely from this new form of automobile competition,” he says. “We lost last summer quite a proportion of our passenger business moving from Portland to the beaches because of the completion of a hard-surface wagon road between it and them. We were compelled to withdraw several local trains, to lay off a number of trainmen because of this new competitor. With us the question is vital. It is still more vital with our electric interurban properties. Throughout California, Oregon, and Washington this class of railroad has suffered most severely from motor competition, and with the decreased cost and increased effectiveness of the automobile I expect such losses to increase rather than to diminish. In all these states there have been large expenditures for improved highroads during the past five years; many times under the guise of providing easy and inexpensive transportation for farm products to markets. But these highroads instead of being built from the transportation centers out into the producing region, so as to serve the farms, have almost invariably paralleled steam and electric lines. As a result the transportation companies have been heavily taxed to construct and maintain highways for the benefit of competitors who are carrying both passengers and freight in direct competition with them.”

The Southern Pacific, whose lines cover California like a fine mesh, has been hard hit by this new form of competition. The fine new highways and the even climate of the Golden State, which brought the jitney to its highest strength there, are giving stimulus to its bigger brother—the long-distance motor bus. These have multiplied in every direction until today there are central stations in the larger cities, providing waiting, smoking, and reading rooms in charge of a joint employee, who usually acts as starter and information clerk and is liberally supplied with large printed schedules advertising automobile service to various points. From these stations the routes radiate in almost every direction; one may ride from San Francisco to Stockton, 80 miles; or to Fresno, 200 miles; connecting there with a public automobile for Los Angeles, some 250 miles farther. From Los Angeles there are still more routes: to Bakersfield, 124 miles over the new Tejon Pass route; to Santa Barbara, about 100 miles; to San Diego, about 125 miles, and from San Diego on to El Centro in the Imperial Valley, another 116 miles.

These routes are generally covered with touring cars—generally second-hand but tried and capable of efficient and reliable service. But there is a tendency toward larger cars, where the volume of travel warrants; several companies operating large busses, seating from twenty to twenty-five persons each. A very good example of this is the Peninsular Rapid Transit Company, which operates between San Francisco and San Mateo and between San Mateo and Palo Alto.

Fares by automobile in California are generally somewhat lower than the railroad fares. There are instances, however, where the fares are equal and yet the motor cars enjoy the bulk of the business, perhaps from their ability to pick up or discharge passengers anywhere along the route—in town or in country, perhaps from their frequency and flexibility of service. Several attempts made by the railroads to regain their traffic by reducing rates have shown these things to be real factors in the situation.As far as the Southern Pacific is concerned, it finds today that the automobile has taken the bulk of its one-way and round-trip short-haul business, leaving it the long-haul and commutation traffic. In some instances the gasoline buggy has helped itself to long-haul traffic as well; as between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, where the distance by motor car over the wonderful new Tejon Pass highroad—to which the Southern Pacific, as chief taxpayer in California, has contributed most generously—is but 124 miles, against 170 miles, the shortest rail distance. The gasoline buggy can climb grades and round curves that the iron horse may not even attempt.

There is genuine feeling among many of the railroad companies of the land that the new competition is unjust. They make a good case for themselves. Complaints are coming in from the rail carriers all the way across the land. New York has appropriated and expended nearly $100,000,000 in building a system of improved highways over the entire state. Like the highways of California, they, too, are superb roads. Not only do they link all the big cities and the big towns but they sometimes stretch for many miles through the fastnesses of the forest—you may drive for twenty miles through the Adirondacks on as perfect a bit of pavement as any city park may boast and yet not pass more than one or two human habitations in all that distance. All of which is glorious for the motorist and his friends, to say nothing of the hotel keepers and the garage owners on the route. But how about the New York Central Railroad, which covers the greater part of New York State like a web and which, because of the fact that it is its chief taxpayer, becomes automatically the heaviest contributor to these highways? It knows that every mile of improved road that is completed is going to mean a lessening of its revenues from local passenger traffic. And it can have, from that point of view, small comfort from seeing the increasing list of motor-car owners in the New York State towns.

For the moment leave the purely pleasure uses of the motor car. Consider a commercial possibility that is increasing almost overnight. The auditing departments of concerns that have from 50 to 500 salesmen out in the field are beginning to acquaint themselves with gasoline and tire performances. They soon will have need of such special knowledge. A single case will illustrate:

Two drummers working out of Syracuse—the one for a typewriter concern and the other for a wholesale grocery—decided to cooperate. Together and out of their own funds they purchased an inexpensive car—had its body so adjusted that back of the driving seat there was a compartment large enough for a goodly quantity of samples and the valises that held their personal effects. They had figured that upon many of the local lines of railroad, operating but two or three trains a day in each direction at the most, they could not under the most favorable conditions “make” more than four towns a day. From twenty to thirty per cent of their time was spent in the lobbies of hotels or country stations waiting for the up local or the down. With their automobile they now can get out of a town as soon as their business is done there. And during the past three months they have averaged six towns a day.

Here is a possibility of the automobile that the railroad can hardly afford to ignore. One big New England road noted in a recent month that its sale of mileage books—a form of railroad ticket designed particularly for the use of commercial travelers—had declined nearly twenty-nine per cent since the high-water mark three years before. Investigation on its part showed that the drummers all through its territory were beginning to get automobiles. The houses that employed them were encouraging them, either helping in the part purchase of the cars or, in some cases, buying them entirely. They, too, had discovered that their salesmen, no longer dependent on the infrequent train service of branch lines, could “make” more towns in a day.

Here is our ubiquitous branch line bobbing up once again. It is a problem which seemingly will not down. For branch-line passenger service is closely related to this last phase of automobile competition. It is the opinion of a good many shrewd railroaders—as well as our own—that the big roads have not always given proper attention to the full development of this phase of their traffic. Some of the big roads—some of the smaller ones too—have given this traffic, oftentimes valuable in itself and never to be ignored as feeding possibility of main-line and competitive traffic, little or no attention. Other roads ignore it.“It is unprofitable,” they tell you, with exceeding frankness. “If there is any money at all in the passenger end of the railroad it is in the long haul. We have our branch lines and of course we shall have to continue to operate them, as best we can. But they are the lean of our business. And we have to get a lot of fat on the long-haul traffic to even up with this discouraging lean.”

It is because of this theory—very popular in some transportation circles—that so many branch-line railroads have today no more, in many instances even less, trains than they had twenty or thirty or forty years ago. The constant tendency has been to cut down service upon the branches. Such cuts generally come in the recurrent seasons of railroad retrenchment. But the trains cut off are rarely restored. For one thing, the branch-line railroad does not often run in a genuinely competitive territory. For another, there is apt to be less protest from a string of small towns and large villages than from one or two large cities with boards of trade, whose secretaries are eternally nagging the railroads.

Yet these small towns and villages—ofttimes the nucleus and the birthplace of our best Americanism—and even the isolated crossroads have some rights.[11] One of the largest of these is the right of communication. Some of them, under the shrinkage of the train service of the single branch-line railroad that has served them, have found themselves in turn shrinking and hardening. The popular-priced automobile may yet prove the salvation of these towns. The tavern at the crossroads has been repainted and is serving “chicken and waffle” dinners, the general store thrives anew on its sale of gasoline and oil. But best of all, the folks in adjoining villages visit back and forth. They mix and broaden. The intercourse that they were denied by the railroad has been given them through the agency of the automobile.

Come now to the public use of the automobile. And, although many railroaders profess to scout at the automobile carrying passengers for pay and state their belief that the increasing number of privately owned and operated cars represents their real problem, yet the motor bus operating ’cross country begins to bear, in its relation to the steam railroad, a strong resemblance to the effect of the jitney upon the traction road. In this last case the opposition quickly reached a high and dangerous volume and then subsided. The reasons why the jitney, after being hailed with high acclaim all the way across the land, has disappeared from the streets of more than half our American cities and towns, are not to be told here. It is sufficient here and now to say that, save in the South and the extreme West, it has ceased to be a formidable competitor of the trolley. But as the jitney of the city has diminished, its brother of the country roads has grown. And the various regulating boards, city and county, while generally looking upon the city boy with a forbidding look, have given nothing but encouraging glances to his country brother.

On a certain day last summer, I rode with Henry Sewall from Frederick, Maryland, to Baltimore. Henry is a coffee-colored Negro of unusually prepossessing dress and manner. He owns a seven-passenger motor car of 1916 model and a fairly popular-priced make. He keeps his car tuned up and clean.

I found the two of them in the main street of Frederick—just in front of one of the town’s most popular hostelries. The car bore a placard stating that it would leave for Baltimore, forty-six miles distant, at five o’clock and that the one-way fare for the journey would be $1.50. I asked Henry Sewall the time that I might reasonably expect to be at my hotel in Baltimore. He showed his even white teeth as he replied:

“’Fore seven ’clock, suh. Ah’ve been known to do it in less.”

I glanced at the time card of the railroad that connects Frederick with Baltimore. It is a particularly good railroad, yet the afternoon train that it runs over the “old main line,” as it calls that branch, left Frederick at 4:50 P.M. and did not arrive at a station, some ten “squares”—one never says “blocks” in Baltimore—from my hotel, until 7:30. Mileage and fare were practically the same as Henry Sewall’s, but the train made numerous intermediate stops. And Henry announced, with the Negro’s love of pomp and regulation, that the laws of the state of Maryland would not permit him to stop and pick up passengers between Frederick and Baltimore—his license with the imposing state seal in its corner especially forbade that.

I rode with Henry. The softness and the sunshine of a perfect day in early summer, the knowledge that the old National Pike over which we were to travel was in the pink of condition, that we were to pass across the Stone Jug bridge and through the fascinating towns of Newmarket and Ellicott City was too much to be forsworn. And we had a glorious ride—the car filled and but one stop of ten minutes at the delightful Ellicott City, where Henry changed tires. But even with this detention I was at my hotel promptly at seven o’clock.

Henry makes the round trip from Baltimore to Frederick each day of the week, excepting Sundays, when his car is for general charter. Even on rainy days Henry’s car is almost invariably filled—he manages to carry eight passengers besides himself. With a maximum earning capacity of twenty-four dollars a day and an average of only a very little less, Henry is earning a very good living for himself, even when he figures on the cost, the wear and tear, and the depreciation of an automobile which is being driven about 100 miles a day.

There are many Henry Sewalls in and around Baltimore. Maryland today claims to have the finest highroads of any state in the Union. The cross-country jitney busses have not been slow to take advantage of this. They start at regularly appointed hours from a popular-priced hotel in the heart of the city and the hours of their arrival and departure are as carefully advertised and as carefully followed as those of a steam railroad. When they are all starting out in the morning, the scene is as brisk and gay as it must have been at Barnum’s Hotel in the Baltimore of nearly a century ago, when, with much ado and gay confusion, the coaches set out upon the post roads—for Frederick, for York, for Harrisburg, for Philadelphia, and for Washington.

Yet the railroads that radiate from Baltimore have not seen fit to fight these newcomers for the traffic of from ten to fifty miles outside the city. They have made particularly serious inroads upon the earnings of one of the smaller of these steam lines, which ordinarily derives a very good share of its earnings from its suburban traffic. There are good and sufficient reasons for the big railroads to hold their peace. Take Henry Sewall’s opposition. The direct rail route to Frederick from Baltimore is a line exempted from through passenger trains and very largely given over to a vast tonnage of through freight. The officers of the road have from time to time given thought to the possibilities of increasing the local passenger service on that very line. To do so, however, on the generous plans that they had outlined among themselves would have meant either one of two things—either they would seriously have incommoded the movement of the through freight—which is a railroad’s largest source of profit—or else they would have been compelled to add a third track to that particular line. The income from the increased local passenger service would not justify the expense in either of these cases. Therefore this railroad can afford to be indifferent to Henry Sewall and his gasoline coach.

Yet there is a broader way of looking at it. Out from my old home town in northern New York there radiates today nearly as complete a system of motor-bus routes as that from Baltimore. We have almost 300 miles of superb new state highways in Jefferson County. And Watertown—our county seat—is a hub of no small traffic wheel. These busses, despite the arduous winters of the North Country—Watertown is reputed to have but three seasons: winter and July and August—keep going nearly the entire year round. They are of course patronized all that time. And the railroad which serves almost the entire North Country loses much local passenger traffic as a result of them. It is the same system that I have just quoted as being the largest taxpayer in the state of New York—the chief contributor to its $100,000,000 system of highways. Yet it, too, is not fighting these jitney busses. On the contrary, one of its high traffic officers said to me just the other day:

“We realize that the automobile is hardly apt to be a permanent competitive factor in any long distance passenger traffic—and that is the only passenger traffic in which we see any real profit. And there is a still bigger way of looking at it. Every automobile that goes into the sections of New York which we serve means a movement of high-grade freight—the tires, the gasoline, the oils, the innumerable accessories that it constantly demands, mean more freight. Besides this, if the automobile is developing the man on the farm or in the little village we shall, in the long run, profit. The development of the entire state of New York means the development of our railroad.”

And that is a platform on which no business—no matter how large or how small it is—can ever lose.

But is there not a possibility that the railroad can regain some of the traffic that it has lost, temporarily at least, to the motor car? Is it not possible that the derided branch line may not be changed from a withered arm into a growing one? Amputation has sometimes proved effective. There is many and many a branch-line railroad, which probably should never have been built in the first place, whose owners have been wise enough to abandon it and to pull up the rails. Old iron has a genuine market value. Go back with me once again to the time when the trolley began to be a long-distance affair. We have seen already how a good many steam railroad men looked with apprehension upon their branch lines—and with good cause.

For a time it did look as if the electric railroad might become a genuine competitor of the steam railroad. A good many interesting fantasies of that sort got into print. An enterprising interurban trolley company over in Illinois put on trolley-sleeping cars between St. Louis and Springfield and St. Louis and Peoria. It was said that the day was coming when a man would ride in a trolley limited all the way from Chicago to New York—a real train, with sleeping cars and dining cars and Negro porters and manicures and an observation platform. The Utica (New York) Chamber of Commerce got tremendously excited over the matter and went all the way out to St. Louis and back in a chartered car taken right out of the press of traffic in Genesee Street.

But the trolley, as we have seen, has not proved a competitor of the steam railroad. It has become in almost every instance a feeder and as such is a valuable economic factor in the transportation situation. There have been no more sleeping cars placed on trolley routes, but a little time ago I found a Canadian Pacific box car on the shores of Keuka Lake, more than ten miles distant from the nearest steam railroad. A trolley road had placed it there, on a farmer’s private siding. And he was packing it full of grapes—grapes to go overseas from some big Canadian port upon the Atlantic.

Such possibilities of the trolley line to the steam railroad point to similar feeding possibilities of the automobile—but of these very much more in their proper time and places. Let us still continue to study the possibilities of the branch line.

The other day I chanced to travel upon a certain small brisk railroad that runs across a middle western state. In my lap was a time card of that line and I was idly following it as we went upon our way. Halfway down the long column of town-names, I saw a change. In other days a passenger for the enterprising county shiretown of Caliph had been compelled to alight at the small junction point known as East Caliph and there take a very small and very dirty little train for three miles, which finally left him at a clump of willows by a brookside—a full dozen hot and dusty blocks from the courthouse square which marks the geographical and commercial center of Caliph.

That branch-line train has disappeared. In its place a line on a time card reads “automobile service to Caliph,” and at the junction I saw a seven-passenger touring car with the initials of the railroad upon its tonneau doors. The motor bus takes you to the door of Caliph’s chief hotel, which faces that same courthouse square. The branch is unused, except for occasional switching. There is no expense of keeping it up to the requirements of passenger traffic, nor of maintaining a passenger station. The hotel serves as this last and at far less expense. And the cost of running the automobile over three miles of excellent highway is far cheaper than that of running a railroad train. The chauffeur is an entirely competent conductor and ticket-taker. And between passenger runs he can be used to carry the express and baggage on a motor truck. His own opportunities for development are fairly generous.

Recently the automobile has been placed upon the railroad rails—with astonishing results as to both efficiency and economy. I saw one of these, not long ago, working on a small railroad running from the Columbia River up to the base of Mount Hood. The superintendent of that railroad—he likewise was its agent, conductor, dispatcher, engineering expert, and chief traffic solicitor—had purchased a large “rubberneck” automobile, had substituted railroad flange wheels for the rubber-tired highway wheels, and was not only saving money for his property but also giving much pleasure to his patrons. A ride in a dirty, antiquated, second-hand coach behind a smoky, cindery locomotive is hardly to be compared with one in a clean, swift automobile, riding in the smooth ease of steel rails. So successful had the experiment proven that he was having a closed automobile made for winter service upon his railroad—with a tiny compartment for the baggage, the mail, and the express.

A series of interesting experiments conducted by the army along the Mexican border recently showed another way in which the motor truck could well be made an active ally and agent of the railroad. Special T-rail wheel flanges were designed to fit outside of the heavy rubber tires that carry the cars over highways. It is the work of a very few minutes to slip these steel flanges on or off the wheels. Which means that the motor truck may follow the lines of the railroad as far as it leads, giving many more miles of performance for each gallon of gasoline consumed; and then, when the rails end in the sand and sagebrush, may strike off for itself across the country in any direction.