THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION
Long before the clear Washington morning had broken which succeeded that
stormy April evening of 1917 when the United States first entered the
World War, the railroad executives themselves had been feeling that there
would need to be correlated and cooperative effort to make the rail
transport system of the country adequate to meet the new and added burden
to be laid upon its already sadly bended back. Not many weeks after that
terrible August, 1914, the United States was feeling the reflection of the
world disturbance, although feeling it in some unexpected ways. In August,
1914, few people in this country if any dreamed of the tidal wave of
industrial production that was soon to all but overwhelm us, when
Bridgeport turned (almost overnight, it seemed) from a sleepy Connecticut
manufacturing town into an overcrowded metropolis wherein people by the
hundreds slept nightly in the railroad station, and the new county
almshouse was transformed into an overflow hotel; when Akron, Ohio, ran
wild with prosperity, growth, and overcrowding; when drowsy old Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, became a bedlam of industry and Chester, Pennsylvania, the
same; when Detroit, well used to rapid growth, now leaped ahead toward the
million mark; and when so also in a large degree did Wilmington, Delaware,
and Youngstown, Ohio, and Trenton, New Jersey, and Rochester and
Schenectady, New York--dozens of other communities like them.
Manufacturing plants worked night and day and doubled and trebled and
quadrupled themselves in a matter of mere months; half-abandoned
shipyards sprang into life and extension; mines were dug with a furious
speed into the rich subsurfaces of mother earth--production everywhere.
And everywhere the chief burden of all this was coming upon the back of
the American railroad, and coming at a time when it could ill afford any
overload.
As even a casual student of the situation easily understands, for the six
or eight years before the advent of 1914 most if not all of the railroads
of the United States had been in a period of serious retrenchment. Soon
afterwards the beginning of the present and national increases in the cost
of living had become an appreciable burden to them, not so much (as we
shall see before we are done with this book) in their wages as in their
cost of coal and other materials. They had endeavored to meet this
increase in one expense in the conduct of their business by cutting down
in other expenses. "Economy" and "efficiency" had become real catchwords
to them. In both of these they accomplished much. At least so it seemed in
1914. Their economies up to that time, compared with the ones that have
been achieved since then, were almost as nothing.
So the railroads were none too well equipped to meet the strain of greatly
increased business that the war overseas thrust upon them. Their supply of
locomotives and cars was inadequate. The track equipment upon which they
ran their terminals and yards and their shop facilities were, if in good
repair, at any rate in most cases no longer generous. And that prized
possession of the American railroad of yesterday, the morale of its men,
the thing that I shall call "the fine tradition of our American
railroading" again and again and again before I am done with this book,
was already on the wane.
So to an economic agent already sadly overburdened if not actually
crippled was to be given also the serious and the urgent business of
transporting soldiers and sailors and their munitions, a United States
army of a size never before conceived, supplies in a vastness heretofore
deemed incredible. Long before Woodrow Wilson's signature was dry upon the
dreaded declaration of war the War Department experts were making detailed
plans for the enlistment, the training, the supply, and the transport of
the new army that was to go overseas. They involved many things, most
important among them the creation of thirty or forty great concentration
and training camps and huge ports of embarkation.
To meet these needs the already swollen manufacturing industry of the land
was spurred into fresh efforts of production. More factory buildings went
up, more shipyards were established--we were talking about the "bridge of
ships across the Atlantic" those days--more abandoned mines were put into
activity once again.
All these things were a fearful burden upon a national railroad structure
that was from the beginning inadequately equipped for a proper handling of
them. Yet how did the national railroad structure meet this added burden
set upon its badly bended shoulders? The answer is--like a good American
citizen. Up to that April night, without a really efficient or concrete
central body, it already had sought to create one. It took the ancient and
somewhat archaic American Railway Association, shook new life into it, and
on April 11, 1917--six days after the war declaration--established at
Washington what was known as the Railroad War Board. For the personnel of
this board the national railroad structure sought out some of the very
best of its executives: Fairfax Harrison of the Southern railway, Hale
Holden of the Burlington, Julius Kruttschnitt of the Southern Pacific,
Howard Elliott of the Northern Pacific, Samuel Rea of the Pennsylvania,
and Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio. The first five of these men
were made into the active war board and immediately moved themselves to
Washington where they set up a permanent headquarters. Mr. Willard already
was prominently identified with the business of the organization of this
country's part in the World War as chairman of the Council of National
Defense, which was then doing a very great work of hurried preparation for
the conflict, but which President Wilson afterward saw fit to relieve of
most of its power and responsibility.
At the request of the American Railway Association Mr. Willard became an
ex officio member of the Railroad War Board and was in constant
consultation with it. So did Edgar E. Clark, a valued member of the
all-powerful Interstate Commerce Commission at that time and a veteran
railroader of wide experience, having risen to the rank of conductor and
in time become the head of the great brotherhood of that branch of
railroading.
The Railroad War Board came into being committed to the idea of a single
continental railroad in the United States as a war-time measure; please
mark this fact for future reference. Indeed that efficient and economical
idea had been in the heads of some of our practical railroaders for a good
many years before the coming of the World War. But any steps that they
might take toward it then seemed to bring them afoul of the Federal
statutes--particularly the so-called Sherman Law--and in imminent danger
of the penitentiary. Now, however, there seemed to be the faint ghost of
an opportunity to gain some of the obvious practical advantages that
naturally would inure from a centralized control of our national railroad
structure.
Three great things, however, the War Board lacked. The first was the
financial backing of the Government. No matter what broad plans for
efficiency it might and did adopt--and that they were effective plans the
statistics of their results most clearly show--the railroads lacked the
financial resources to go into a market where rising labor and raw
material costs were being reflected directly in tremendously increased
prices for locomotives and cars and rails and every other what-not that
goes to the making and maintaining of a railroad. On the contrary they
watched the value of their securities drop as they listened to the demands
of their employees for higher wages.
Beyond the War Board's local authority, it had no real centralized
control, no genuine supreme power. After all, it was but a group of
men--big men, powerful individualists, each of them. They had been reared
in powerful roads, roads of great traditions. They had been competitors,
powerful competitors. Cooeperation, at the best, was no easy pathway for
them.
Remember always that the Railroad War Board lacked authority. It could not
even compel its own member roads to fall in line and stay in line toward
the formation of the single national railroad system. And as for the
shipper, it could only go to him on bended knee and beg his cooperation.
And of all the shippers the Government was perhaps the worst of all. It is
our own beloved Uncle Samuel who is a most obdurate and unreasonable old
fellow when he takes it into his head to become a patron of the railroad.
If he is a passenger and in gold lace and khaki he may come into the train
and demand that it be stopped and started to suit his own convenience.
That frequently is done. And as a shipper he was forever letting his
boys--Food and Fuel and Ships and a lot of others too--place priority
orders upon their shipments, to the immense complication of the entire
railroad situation.
The Railroad War Board began slipping in November, 1917. The hard early
winter of that year finished the job. The inspectors of the Interstate
Commerce Commission at various terminals and division points (themselves
none too friendly to the War Board) began filing by telegraph their
reports of delayed cars and trains, and the members of that commission, at
the suggestion of the President, began framing a bill supplementing the
measure of August, 1916, which had permitted him to take over the lines in
case of a national emergency, and outlining the plans for the step as well
as for the protection of the security-holders of the properties. The plan
was in Mr. Wilson's hands early in December and he decided that
McAdoo--who seemed to stand in an impartial and aloof position from all
the properties and who had not only a rapid transit electric railroad
experience at least, but remarkable acumen in financial matters--ought to
have the job. McAdoo sought to decline it. I honestly believe that he
never wanted it. The President insisted. The weather grew more inclement,
the railroad rod bent further than ever before. Then on the eve of
Christmas something happened. A great American railroad stood in the
shadow of bankruptcy. Other receiverships were to follow upon its heels.
Such a calamity was unthinkable. The die was cast. The White House moved,
and moved quickly. McAdoo accepted his new responsibility and on December
28, 1917, became director-general of more miles of railroad than any one
man--even the late E. H. Harriman--had ever even dreamed of controlling.
William Gibbs McAdoo took hold of his new job with a pretty firm grasp. He
said that he was going to "do things" and apparently he meant to keep his
word. With one stroke of the pen he abolished the abominable priority
orders and with another he doubled the demurrage charges upon
freight-cars--two vastly important executive steps toward a bettering of
the entire railroad situation. The rapidly retiring Railroad War Board,
confronted by the increasing conditions of congestion upon the roads, at
the eleventh hour sent an urgent request to the various lines that they at
once reduce their passenger services at least (it had been suggested that
their entire public service be suspended for several days)--suggestion
which in some cases was acted upon with more enthusiasm than judgment.
There was many a division superintendent who saw a chance to take a
death-crack at that unprofitable, unhealthy, money-eating 11:08--or was it
the 5:15? In other days a stern State commission probably had stood to
forbid him, in the public interest, removing a train which might have had
an average of seventeen passengers a day. Now the authority of the State
commissions, even to a large extent of the all-powerful Interstate
Commerce Commission, had largely been superseded.
The Pennsylvania, which for many years past has had the major share of
traffic between New York and Washington, had asked a little time before to
have its fastest express between the two cities, the almost
internationally famous Congressional Limited, made an excess-fare train,
like the Merchants' Limited from New York to Boston or the Twentieth
Century from New York to Chicago. The commission, on the very eve of
McAdoo's accession, refused. The road withdrew the world-famous train
despite the fact that it was running to capacity and announced that
thereafter all trains between New York and Washington would carry but one
parlor-car each.
Now it happens that this route was and still is of tremendous commercial
importance, not alone for the movement of freight but for the movement of
men, big and little, in government service as well as in essential private
business, back and forth between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and
New York, and the great territory that lies behind all of these cities.
McAdoo's quick judgment saw the need of clean, comfortable, quick transit
for these men and ordered the famous train back again, even though it did
not then regain its historic name nor quite all of its parlor-cars, nor
run at quite as brisk a pace as heretofore.
McAdoo is no fool. Even his bitterest enemies--and he has plenty of
them--will admit that. His moves from the very beginning of his
overlordship of the railroads were generally marked with extreme
shrewdness. And although he does not cooperate well he showed himself
possessed of a genius for organization as well as for coordination. Yet
almost as soon as he stepped into the office on the ninth floor of the new
Interstate Commerce Commission building that had been hurriedly set aside
for the use of the director-general of the railroads, he impressed into
service the various working subcommittees of the Railroad War Board, but
courteously and promptly dismissed that Board itself.
With the Railroad War Board out of the way the director-general moved
quickly toward finding a substitute for it. At the beginning he said that
he was going to try to surround himself with the ablest and most
experienced railroaders in the land--an advisory board, which would be in
effect a railroad cabinet, divided so as to include a man from each of the
great interests already concerned in national rail transport, one
representing operation, another maintenance and equipment, another
finance, another traffic, another public service and accounts, another
law, still another labor.
Yes, labor. Labor at last was to sit in the high council of railroad
transportation. That had a new sound in the game. Yet McAdoo was quick to
include it in his plans. And at that time he added:
"I am putting in men of no partisan views--partisan neither to capital nor
to labor. In every case I have tried to select men who will inspire
confidence. I want men of broad vision."
The man who dug the great tunnels under the Hudson River when every one
else had pronounced the project as chimerical could hardly stand accused
himself of any lack of vision. Moreover McAdoo's selections in nearly
every case justified his words. He began by choosing as his right-hand
assistant and general adviser Walker D. Hines, an extremely able New York
lawyer, who in the forty-seventh year of his life was chairman of the
board of the Santa Fe. On the average road the chairmanship of the board
of directors is likely to be a sort of sanitarium for retired executives.
Not so with the Santa Fe. Its late president, E. P. Ripley, the man who
was instrumental in bringing it out of bankruptcy and up to its place as
one of the greatest single systems in the United States, ten or twelve
years ago was seeking a young man who could represent the road in New
York, and represent it with the proper authority. He found such a man in
Hines, then barely turned forty, and he never regretted his choice.
Moreover Hines, in a brilliant legal connection with the Louisville and
Nashville before going to the Santa Fe, had begun to acquire his
remarkable knowledge of railroad conditions in virtually every section of
the land.
The Santa Fe has always had much good motive-power, human and mechanical.
McAdoo chose two of this first class, Hines and Edward Chambers, its
former vice-president in charge of traffic. These men formed the beginning
of his advisory cabinet. To them he added gradually several others--Henry
Walters of Baltimore, chairman of the board of the extremely sound and
conservative Atlantic Coast Line; John Skelton Williams, controller of the
currency, who had been not only the president but really the creator of
the Seaboard Air Line; Carl R. Gray, at that time president of the Western
Maryland railroad and now occupying a similar post upon the Union Pacific;
and Judge John Barton Payne, who also had served as chairman of the
Shipping Board and as secretary of the interior.
Offhand these looked like good appointments; in reality too they _were_
good appointments--able men in every instance; men of the broadest
experience. But the men on the inside--those who have a thorough
understanding of the wheels within wheels in the working of the big
national railroad machine--saw more in these appointments than a mere
search for transport ability.
"Walters and Williams," they said, "Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air
Line. It's a hard dig at Fairfax Harrison."
They were referring of course to the brilliant young president of the
Southern railway, who was the chairman of the Railroad War Board,
constituted, you will remember, as a war measure by the railroads
themselves. In that job, and against no small odds, Harrison had won a
fair measure of success. He felt keenly the slap at him in the McAdoo
selections; he felt another when he was virtually deposed from the control
of the railroad which had been his great pride and ambition, and young Mr.
Markham brought down from Chicago to be the McAdoo generalissimo of all
the roads in the southeastern corner of the land at Atlanta. Yet that last
thrust was hardly greater than the first, when the ranking heads of the
two railroads which had been the hottest enemies of the Southern in that
which it regarded peculiarly as its own territory were lifted to eminence,
while the president of the Southern was permitted to retire to Richmond as
merely its corporate head, without one atom of authority over the
operation of his road.
Those who know Fairfax Harrison know how these two blows must have cut. He
is a man of intense pride as well as patriotism, a railroader who almost
plays the lone hand but plays it very well indeed. A gentleman to the
core, born of the gentlest of Virginia blood and lineage--his father
private secretary to Jefferson Davis, his mother a gifted American
novelist, his brother one-time governor-general of the Philippines--his
pride in his family has for years past been exceeded by his pride in the
railroad which, as a logical successor to the late Samuel Spencer, he had
been upbuilding. Fairfax Harrison himself is a _literateur_ of no small
merit. He has made translations of the classics, while to him has long
been ascribed the composition of an essay in Latin on the proper carving
of Virginia ham. Yet I dare say that in none of his literary excursions
has he ever reached greater charm than in the booklet which he wrote eight
or nine years ago on the tragic sacrifices made by the men of the Southern
who strove to keep their road open and in operation during the terrific
floods of 1913.
Yet Harrison was not the only man to be reduced menially as well as
physically by the director-general of railroads. Carl R. Gray, himself one
of the most lovable men in the business, was then president of the Western
Maryland. He came to it from a high office with the 'Frisco. That
railroad, originally a small local affair largely financed by the city of
Baltimore and for many years terminating at Hagerstown in the Cumberland
valley, had been built, largely by Rockefeller capital, through to
Cumberland and Connellsville (by connection to Pittsburg), paralleling the
main stem of the Baltimore and Ohio for virtually the entire distance. It
was a real thorn in the side of the B. & O. Mr Gray was quickly elevated
to a high post in the Railroad Administration. This was a distinct thrust
at Daniel Willard.
It will be recalled that the distinguished figure of Daniel Willard,
president of the Baltimore and Ohio, loomed large in the Railroad War
Board. Mr. Willard was doomed to feel the displeasure of official
Washington. Just why, I never have been able to understand. He went to the
service at the very outbreak of the war and gave himself unreservedly to
Mr. Wilson and his associates. And at the very hour of the Armistice he
was in army khaki, prepared to sail overseas to undertake the operation of
the entire system of French railways, which were beginning to go down
under their terrific burden of more than four years.
Yet Mr. Willard's reward for all of this was removal from the actual
operation of his road. Samuel Rea, the president of the Pennsylvania,
suffered a similar fate. Yet this was not all. An official order was sent
out from Washington to the effect that these presidents were to be
deprived of the use of their official cars--the phrase "private-car" long
since has come into disrepute; it smacks too much of junketing. A fairly
circumlocutious method was offered by which these gentlemen could
occasionally avail themselves of their cars. They declined to avail
themselves of so patronizing an offer. Mr. Rea's car finally was assigned
to an operating officer of the Railroad Administration; Mr. Willard's
gathered dust for two long years in a corner of the train-shed of Camden
Station, Baltimore.
Mr. McAdoo's answer to the quiet but strenuous protests that went to the
supreme authority at Washington against his treatment of Mr. Willard and
Mr. Rea was extremely disingenuous. He disclaimed personal feeling and
said that his act was the following out of an established policy.
Officially that policy was thus stated in his own words:
Inasmuch as "no man can serve two masters," and the efficient
operation of the railroads for winning the war and the service to the
public is the purpose of Federal control, it was manifestly wise to
release the presidents and other officers of the railroad companies,
with whose corporate interest they are properly concerned, from all
responsibility for the operation of their properties.... All ambiguity
of obligation is thus avoided. Officers of the corporation are left
free to protect the interests of their owners, stockholders, and
creditors, and the regional and operating managers have a direct and
undivided responsibility and allegiance to the United States Railroad
Administration.
He then went ahead in accordance with this announced policy and appointed
Federal managers for the larger roads, incorporating into their direction
smaller lines, closely affiliated or connected with them. But in almost
every case the president of the railroad became its Federal manager,
invariably at a lower salary than the private corporations had paid. Mr.
Harrison, Mr. Willard, Mr. Rea, Mr. Kruttschnitt, and Mr. Underwood (of
the Erie) were extremely conspicuous exceptions to this rule.
* * * * *
I am setting down these intensely personal episodes in the conduct of the
Railroad Administration under its first director-general solely for one
purpose--they have had a very large bearing on the present-day plight of
our railroads of the United States. The bitternesses that were then
engendered have not ceased. I do not feel that Mr. Harrison or Mr. Willard
or Mr. Rea, to-day restored to their old positions and influence, now
harbors a single grievance against Mr. McAdoo because of them. The damage
that he did has all been done, in the thrust against the morale of the
rank and file of our American railroad organization. McAdoo talking to the
men from the rear end of his own private-car at Pueblo and at El Paso and
telling them that at last they were come into their own rights did not
begin to do the damage that the whispered rumors, running here and there
and everywhere, of what the director-general was doing to the former big
bosses of great railways did to our old-time traditions of railroad
respect and discipline.
In giving labor a seat in his cabinet McAdoo did a big thing. In making
speeches such as those at Pueblo and at El Paso he did a far smaller
thing, to put the matter very lightly indeed. In the innuendo of his
attitude toward a group of important railroad presidents a very great
wrong was done unquestionably.
The functions of the director-general's cabinet were national. In addition
to its members the steersman of the craft chose regional directors, at
first (and with but a few changes thereafter) as follows: for the
extremely congested lines north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi,
A. H. Smith, president of the New York Central; for the lines of the
Southeast, as we have just seen, C. H. Markham, president of the Illinois
Central; and for those of the rest of the country, R. H. Aishton,
president of the Chicago and Northwestern. Later Mr. Aishton's huge
territory was subdivided and three sub-regions made of it. In a similar
fashion New England also was made a sub-region, and James H. Hustis, the
very popular president of the Boston and Maine, placed in charge of it,
after him came Percy R. Todd of the Bangor and Aroostook, an executive
equally experienced in New England railroading.
Mr. Smith was the very first of these men to be chosen. He received a
telephone request to come to Washington one day late in December, 1917.
Boarding a midnight train, he was in McAdoo's office the next day. The
director-general of the railroads notified him that he had been drafted to
work out the fearfully congested situation in the Northeast. Without a
word of comment Smith turned on his heel, walked to a desk in the corner
of the room, and, picking up a block of paper, began inditing detailed
telegraphic instructions to the presidents of the roads in his new
jurisdiction as to their part in the great drama of national control whose
opening scene was so close at hand. A little later he returned to New
York. And at noon on December 28, 1917, the exact time set by President
Wilson for the curtain to rise on government operation of the continental
railroad system, Mr. Smith stood in his window on an upper floor of the
Grand Central Terminal, and, looking down at the maze of tracks below him,
trains coming, trains going, began the dictation of a short statement as
to the history, the size, and the strength of the property he headed.
"I want it to go into the record," said Smith. "The opportunity might not
come again."
He turned immediately to the work in hand. There was plenty of it to be
done. The great city around about the terminal was on the edge of panic.
There was a fuel famine and no promise of relief. New York at last was
paying the penalty of her medieval, not to say archaic, system of
distribution. At last the war was very real and very close at hand. They
were saying that many of the schools would have to close, that there was a
possibility the theaters would have to shut down each Monday night. Poor
New York! She did not then know that the worst was yet to come!
All this occurred with 300,000 tons of coal upon the Jersey side of the
Hudson River opposite the city, while in the midst of a winter of almost
unprecedented bitterness an ancient lighterage system struggled with ice
hardly less thick than that which once sufficed for a footpath for Henry
Ward Beecher from New York to Brooklyn, and could bring less than 30,000
tons of coal a day across the river. Nor was this all--no, not even a
reference now to the freight upon the Jersey meadows. Know now that the
greater part of that accumulated 300,000 tons of coal was in cars and that
production at the mines actually was being slowed down by the delay in the
return of these cars.
"Open the Pennsylvania tubes to the coal trains!" shrieked the radicals of
Manhattan. "Give us fuel trains and food trains instead of Florida
Limiteds! Put them through at the rate of fifty, one hundred, one hundred
and fifty a day, if needful!"
Some of these lost their heads. Smith did not lose his. Neither did he
impose any more humiliation upon the head of his great competitor. He
does not do business that way. Instead he gave careful heed to the
terminal possibilities of the Pennsylvania, the traditional and very real
rival of the road he himself headed.
"We may possibly make a freight use of the tubes," he said quietly, "but
it will be a moderate use. I shall limit the length of the trains to
thirty-six or thirty-seven cars, which really is no train at all. For I do
not want to see one of those fifty-ton battle-ship coal gondolas jumping
the track in a tube which was not designed for it, and so completely
blocking the line. I am going to be in a position to hand the terminal
back to the Pennsylvania in quite as good condition as I found it."
Then he made further explanations. After all the Pennsylvania tubes,
thrusting themselves across the island of Manhattan, are even in an
emergency of little or no freight use to it. They are too deep to be of
freight service to the heart of metropolitan New York. To Brooklyn, with a
population almost equal to that of Manhattan, to Queens, and to the Bronx
they eventually were made of some slight service.
This was not the big part of Smith's job, however. He made a quick survey
of the entire situation in his big district; trains and cars cluttered
here and there and everywhere. For the final thirty days of private
operation the situation steadily had been growing worse. In the districts
roundabout Pittsburg and Philadelphia and New York it had become
intolerable. Take, if you will, the industries in those vast manufacturing
districts and consider them multiplied tenfold, their influx of fuel and
of raw material increased in like proportion, and so with their output.
Add these industries one to another and see them in units of tens of
dozens of trains, of hundreds and thousands of coal-cars and flat-cars and
box-cars. And on the other hand, see all of these poured upon railroads
that had been steadily growing weaker for eight or ten years--more rapidly
weakened, however, in the last four months than in the entire three years
that preceded them. Bear in mind their tremendous loss of man-power
through the draft, consider the gradual wearing down of engines and cars
and tracks and terminals toward the breaking point, and wonder not then
that we had congestion and much worse east of the Mississippi and north of
the Ohio.
Throughout that autumn of 1917 we watched the bending of the rod of the
railroad just as we had watched it bend and then recover again through the
two hard winter seasons that have preceded this one. It bent further this
winter than ever before--the traffic was so much greater, and the
facilities with which to meet it so much weaker. No wonder that freight
moved slowly, more slowly, most slowly, and in many cases finally ceased
to move at all; that upon the Jersey meadows outside of New York were
30,000 car-loads of merchandise that could not be moved up to that port
and to the ships waiting to carry it overseas. At one time 150 ships stood
waiting for coal alone in New York Harbor. And overseas was a great war in
its critical stages. No wonder, though, that coal began coming in
dribblings to hearthstones that were whining for tons of it, that finally
it ceased coming at all for whole days, while great and ordinarily
comfortable American cities shivered and watched their death rates mount
higher than they had mounted in many a year.
It was a man-sized job that confronted A. H. Smith. Like a real railroad
man he handled it. He went in at once upon it. He began to do things. He
issued immediate embargoes against shipment into the New York district of
anything save food, news-print paper, live stock, perishable freight, and
freight consigned to the Government. He did more. With a great map of
metropolitan New York and its railroad terminals spread before him he
began ordering freight concentrated west of Buffalo and Pittsburg and
south of Washington into the trunk-lines which variously best serve the
great group of cities that constitute the metropolitan district of New
York. The Baltimore and Ohio for instance has exclusive terminal
facilities upon Staten Island, which with its many shipyards and wharves
is an important freight consignment point. In ordinary times, when the
situation was dominated by competitive conditions, a car-load of freight
offered the New York Central at Toledo or Detroit would be carried on its
lines to New York and then floated to Staten Island by car-ferry. In this
non-competitive war situation, in this hour when the temporary continental
railroad system of the United States was being born, such a car would be
taken by the New York Central from Toledo or Detroit to the Baltimore and
Ohio at some point west of Pittsburg, and then over it to Staten Island by
the shortest possible route.
What Smith was doing in New York his fellow regional directors in Atlanta
and in Chicago also were doing. Order was being worked out of chaos. The
great railroads of the United States, even temporarily and very hastily
welded into a single national system, showed good results of efficiency
and economy, just as some of their far-sighted private operators had
predicted more than two decades ago. Released from the shackles of the
Sherman Anti-Trust Law--Congress had refused such a release to the
Railroad War Board but quickly granted it to McAdoo--and from the
conflicting regulatory commissions all the way across the land, they were
able to simplify and unify their facilities--even though many times at
public cost and inconvenience--in a way that enabled them not only to
handle the pressure of war traffic and in an admirable fashion but also to
show great economies upon their cost-sheets.
To come to actual cases: It was good railroading when the centralized
Washington administration began assembling various sections of various
lines so as to gain not only more direct routes between important traffic
centers but lines of lowest possible gradients as well. In the West
particularly, great progress was made in this direction. For instance in
the old days of competitive railroading the Southern Pacific quite
naturally operated its through route from Dallas or Fort Worth to Los
Angeles and San Francisco over its own tracks through San Antonio or El
Paso. Of course the old-time and somewhat unfortunate Texas and Pacific
had a far shorter route from Dallas and Fort Worth direct to El Paso, but
the competitive situation, the fact that it was the Texas and Pacific and
not the Southern Pacific, prevented it from getting much volume of traffic
for its short line. Under government unification the T. & P. line came
into its own, with the result that 500 miles were taken off the through
route between the important North Texas cities and southern
California--with great resultant time and operating economies.
Similarly, there arose a war-time assembled through line from the
oil-fields at Casper, Wyoming, to Montana and Puget Sound points, 880
miles shorter than the route which the competitive situation formerly
forced. Freight from southern California to Ogden was hauled 201 miles
less than by the pathway formerly used; while the Railroad Administration
route between Chicago and Sioux City was 110 miles shorter than the old,
and 289 miles were saved in the through traffic between Kansas City and
Galveston and Houston. Multiply these examples and it is easy to see how
in a period of sixty days in the summer of 1918 nine thousand freight-cars
were so rerouted as to effect a saving in mileage traveled by each car of
about 195 miles, or a total saving of about 1,754,805 car-miles.
To be ranked with this sort of operating economy was the work undertaken
by Regional Director R. H. Aishton at Chicago when early in the spring of
1918 he began consolidating train movements so that instead of the several
competing trunk-lines coming down from out of the Northwest, each
operating competing through freight-trains each day into the great
terminal and interchange yards at St. Paul, and there shifting and
resorting their cars incredibly for distribution between the six
trunk-lines leading for another five hundred miles down into Chicago,
through trains were operated solidly from the Puget Sound points through
to Lake Michigan. For through freight the great railroad yards upon the
line between St. Paul and Minneapolis represented no more of a stop than
was necessary for changing engines, cabooses, and crews. Moreover these
through trains were distributed in alternation between the Northern
Pacific and Great Northern lines from the Pacific coast down to the Twin
Cities, but because of its superior mileage and gradient conditions they
were handled on to Chicago almost exclusively by the Northwestern.
Nor was Chicago--with almost inevitable traffic congestion, despite the
fact that it now bears upon its western rim the largest interchange and
clearing-house yard for freight-cars in the entire world--a railroad point
big enough to break this simple scheme of through service. Take the export
corn specials out of the Missouri valley. One of these trains, let us say,
consisted of thirty-one cars from Omaha and five cars from Sioux City, all
moving under special government permits, and was routed intact from Omaha
to Philadelphia. It came east over the Northwestern to a point well
outside of the Chicago congested district. There it was turned to the
tracks of the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern, one of the outermost of the
belt-line railroads which encircle Chicago. The Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern
in turn delivered the train--intact and unchanged, you will remember--to
the Nickel Plate, which at Buffalo handed it to the Lackawanna, which in
turn carried it as far as Scranton, giving it there to the Central
Railroad of New Jersey and the connecting Philadelphia and Reading for
prompt handling through to tide-water and a waiting ship at Philadelphia.
There was no switching and but little delay en route, and the train
generally went through from the Missouri to the Delaware in considerably
less than a week. Such a prompt through movement, with its saving of time
and money, was quite unheard of in the days of competitive railroad
management.
All the reroutings and consolidations of this sort by no means had been
confined to the western portions of the land. In the East many others were
made, particularly in the congested sections of war-munitions manufacture,
where, in addition to great numbers of war brides and shipyards and camps
and cantonments, requiring not merely outbound shipping facilities but
large quantities of raw materials and fuel, there had been a vast movement
of coal for both domestic use and export. In the handling of this coal
ingenious savings were made, both in the routings and in the details of
train operation. Roads and portions of roads, formerly in bitter
competition, were joined together in a way only possible under absolutely
unified and autocratic control. And in some cases the routings were so
made as to divert the great streams of through freight traffic, in order
to avoid areas already badly congested. Thus Atlantic-bound freight coming
up into St. Louis from the Southwest was sent far to the north and even
through Canada before it reached the seaboard. A glance at the map and a
fair understanding of the present traffic situation will show the
necessity of this. The lines that reach into the coal-fields of eastern
Kentucky and West Virginia and western Pennsylvania were much burdened
these months. It hardly was fair to ask them to carry much through freight
upon their already heavily laden shoulders. And the Pittsburg district,
with its various narrow _impasses_ made by broad rivers and sharp-sided
mountains, is a railroad abomination--a fearfully congested traffic
gateway which, by reason of those selfsame rivers and mountains, is hardly
capable of radical enlargement, even at great cost.
The railroads that run along the south shore of Lake Erie, ample as are
their facilities, already had a full load of traffic from Chicago, the
West, and the Northwest. So the traffic from St. Louis and the rich
country back of it must needs cross the Chicago currents and go to the
north of Lake Erie. The Wabash--one of the least understood and most
abused railroads in America--in those days first began really to justify
the fine strategy of its position. It became the main factor in bringing
St. Louis freight up to Detroit, where it no longer crossed into Canada by
ferry but through the great tunnel which the Michigan Central completed
about twelve or fourteen years ago; and by sweeping easily along through
the gradeless tangents of the Province of Ontario that freight re-entered
the United States at the Niagara frontier, and so on to New York or Boston
by any one of a half a dozen uncongested traffic routes.
These things apparently could not have been done under private management;
at any rate they were not done under private management, although it is
but fair to say that some of the far-sighted railroaders who sat at the
table of the former Railroad War Board--which had attempted at the
eleventh hour to consolidate the lines and so save the obvious perils of
government operation, even as a temporary war measure--had the vision of
these very consolidation economies. They had the vision but not the power.
Too many powerful considerations bore in upon them and bore them down.
Regulation, which was not fair regulation, the inability to finance the
lines with rates fixed and expenses increasing by leaps and by bounds,
competition refusing to bury itself even in emergency, even traditional
jealousy--all these things prevented the Railroad War Board, constituted
by the roads themselves to have a sort of supreme authority, from
accomplishing its real purpose. These things were accomplished by the
United States Railroad Administration and William G. McAdoo, as
director-general of railroads, almost at the very beginning.
* * * * *
I have set down these operating details of the United States Railroad
Administration under its first director-general at some length, not
because of any desire to glorify Mr. McAdoo but because I may want to
refer to them again in the final chapters of this book when I am
endeavoring to show the folly and the waste of many of the phases of our
competitive system of railroading in the United States. Failure as it was
in many ways, the McAdoo episode was perhaps valuable after all as a
laboratory experiment in rail transport. I am not sure but that as such it
was worth every cent that it cost; and its cost was not small. For some
years past, before the coming of the war, a certain proportion of our
railroaders had been getting into something of a rut, to put it lightly.
McAdoo came along and, if he did nothing else, succeeded in shaking them
well out of that rut. Yet it is but fair to recall again that the Railroad
War Board might have done the same thing had it possessed two great powers
that the United States Railroad Administration possessed--absolute
authority and virtually unlimited financial resources. McAdoo, on the one
hand, might order new locomotives by the hundreds and box-cars by the
thousands--no matter what the price, we were at war--and upon the other,
he could--and did--raise the railroad tariffs, both freight and passenger,
to a point hitherto deemed virtually prohibitive. He raised the rates all
the way from 25 to 35 per cent., and the railroads but two or three years
before had found the Interstate Commerce Commission deaf to their appeals
for mere 5 and 10 per cent. advances.