traffic is very light. Electrification has not yet been seriously proposed for any applications outside of suburban traffic or special cases such as the Pennsylvania and New York Central terminal projects, where the use of steam locomotives is out of the question. The conditions of density and traffic distribution which are favorable for electric traction are at present confined to this suburban business. Rail motor cars, on the other hand, are being experimented with on branch lines and certain portions of main lines where the local traffic is light but where the demand for transportation is frequent, or where parallel trolley lines, by reason of lower fares and better service, create sharp competition. It is obvious that between these two extremes there is a vast field, embracing most of the existing mileage in the United States, where steam locomotives are, and will apparently continue to be, the most economical motive power for many years to come.
The electrification of an existing steam road involves many problems entirely outside of the engineering difficulties, and the cost of the electric power-house, transmission line and rolling stock equipment is only a small part of the expense which must be incurred. At the meeting referred to, Mr. W. J. Wilgus estimated it at about a quarter of the total. Assuming that the traffic is dense enough to justify the change from steam to electricity, then if the electric zone be of large enough radius to require through express service from outlying points, a separation of express and local trains on different tracks is absolutely necessary. Grade crossings cannot be allowed to exist, and greater care must be taken along the entire right-of-way to protect the line from trespassers, where an exposed third-rail is used. The interest on the cost of making these changes in the permanent way, when added to the cost of electrical equipment, is a large additional burden, to be offset partly by an increase in net earnings per passenger, due to more efficient operation, and partly by an increase in the number of passengers carried. The electric interurban roads have shown how a frequent and convenient service can create new business.
Rail motor cars, on the other hand, are a far less costly experiment. Practically no changes in the permanent way or terminal and station facilities are necessary, and the cost of three motor cars is but little more than that of an engine and three coaches. One man in the train crew is done away with (if the labor unions can be placated), and there are no men in the power-house or sub-station to compensate for this reduction in the working force. For such lines as rail motor cars are best adapted, no separation of traffic is necessary, and a single track can be operated almost as well as two tracks. On a line, say, 25 miles long, three motor cars can give an hourly service in both directions, whereas a steam train of equivalent seating capacity could give a service of only one train in three hours, and with the frequent stops could make little or no better time than the motor cars. In this country, a very useful field for the rail motor car, apart from branch line working, would be on sections of the trunk lines where important towns are from 25 to 50 miles apart and where the intermediate towns now have a local service of only one or two trains a day each way. The combined through and local passenger and freight traffic does not, and will not for many years to come, justify the electrification of such lines, but a good local train service between the small towns and the important cities should bring about a profitable development of the intervening country.
There are many indications that the time is surely coming when the uses of electrification, especially for passenger service, will be very greatly extended. For the present. it is only being called upon to increase the profits from passenger working where there is great congestion of short haul traffic. The courageous work now being done by the New York Central and the Long Island looks far ahead to the years when greater gross earnings and more efficient working together will be able to take care of the first cost, but there can be scarcely a doubt that that time will come bringing with it great rewards.
“Let Justice Be Done”
It is more than a decade since a great and wise railroad president, now deceased, appealed to the public, in a paper bearing the above title, to deal fairly and justly with the railroad industry. He urged that if there is no alternative save oppressive legislation on the one hand and government ownership upon the other, simple justice to the investors in railroad property demands that these properties be taken over by the government at a fair valuation. Long ago the advocates of drastic anti-railroad laws, adopting an argument similar to that by which reluctant children are urged to swallow nauseous medicines, which may or may not have been wisely prescribed, began to use the bugaboo of government ownership to frighten conservative citizens into acceptance of their legislative nostrums. Thus Prof. Henry C. Adams, statistician to the Interstate Commerce Commission, writing in 1896, said:
There are two possible lines of development, both of which call for an extension of governmental authority. The one is to increase the powers conferred upon commissions, so that they may become in fact, as they now are in theory, a positive influence in the conduct of railroad affairs; the other is to adopt the policy of government ownership and government management.
It is gratifying to note that although the President regards “increased supervision” as the “only alternative to an increase of the present evils on the one hand or a still more radical policy on the other,” his experienced Secretary of the Navy, fresh from daily and practical contact with the business of transportation and the patrons of a great railroad system, sees at least two other possibilities, both of which lie in the direction of greater rather than less freedom on the part of the individuals and corporations engaged in this great industry. But if it is to be a choice between the evils of government control without ownership and government ownership and control, which should railroad investors choose? It is not particularly pleasant to discuss this or any other American problem from the point of view of class interest, but when a threat is hurled at one industry such discussion may be justified. And the railroad class is a large one. Primarily, it consists of one and one-half millions of workers whose names are borne upon railroad pay-rolls and of other millions who build cars, make rails, mine locomotive fuel, raise grain to feed railroad labor and follow the thousand and one vocations which contribute to the sustenance of this great industry. Then there are the millions of depositors in savings banks that own railroad securities, the policy holders of insurance companies whose capital and reserve funds are similarly invested, the students and other beneficiaries of universities and other institutions whose endowments and trust funds rest upon railroad stocks and bonds. To this great and worthy class the enactment of the Quarles-Cooper bill, or the Hearst bill, or the Townsend bill, or the Hepburn Dill, or the Davey bill, or any other rate-making measure means that the industry upon which its members depend shall be confined in legislative swaddling-clothes. When any of these measures has become a law, elasticity of railroad rates will have become a thing of the past. Facility in adopting rates to the changing demands of an intensely dynamic industrial organization will be no more, although such facility is precisely the means by which American industry and American railroads have grown great together. The rates and the revenues of every railroad system will be hopelessly at the mercy of a Federal board, whose members are selected as partisans and may be chosen for political reasons. It will no longer be safe to make empirical concessions in the hope of augmenting traffic at particular points or of particular kinds, for every reduction will be a club by which the ultimate authority, that is, the Interstate Commerce Commission or whatever board may take its place, could and probably would compel other and undesirable reductions. The effect upon the railroads would be no worse than that upon all other industries, but we are now considering the subject solely from a railroad point of view. Government rate-making, whether under government ownership or under control not based upon ownership would stretch all American industry, including the railroad industry, upon a procrustean bed and could cause nothing but numbness, stagnation and deformity.
Does not this make the sensible choice of the railroad class perfectly clear? Under government rate-making and private ownership they would bear the first consequences of the blow. With this alternative, railroad labor and railroad capital would suffer first and most acutely. Government ownership would enable the present railroad class either entirely to “stand from under” or at the worst but to bear their proportionate share of the aggregate evil inflicted upon the community. The worst evil of government ownership would in fact be precisely that now sought to be imposed, viz., government rate-making. If the railroads were owned by the government, railroad employees could hope to maintain, for a time at least, their present high relative standard of earnings, by means of united political action. Ultimate reduction would probably be necessary in consequence of reduced efficiency in management, but this would probably be long postponed. The savings banks, insurance companies, colleges, missionary societies, etc., as well as the private owners of railroad securities would fare still better.
But when government ownership is brought about, if it ever is, it will not be, for it cannot be, by the confiscation of property. If railroad property is taken for pub-
