THE REGIONAL RAILROAD OVERSEAS
The beginnings of the railroad across the Atlantic were so very slightly
in advance of our own that they may be regarded as contemporaneous. In
Great Britain, where the railroad as we know it to-day was born, the
conditions of its infancy were much the same as in the United States. In
Continental Europe they were considerably different. There military
necessity quite overbalanced immediate commercial needs. There the first
railroads were dictated by the international strategists. From that day to
this their expansion has been directed by the same necessity.
Yet granting at the outset that the needs and opportunities of the
European railways are in many ways different from those of ours, there
remains the fact that to-day there is much over there that our railroaders
of the United States might and should learn. There is also a good deal
that the European railroad men might and should learn from some of our big
operators and traffic experts--but that phase of the problem is not
germane to this book.
It was to study some of the features of European railway operation that
might be applicable directly to our railroads of the United States that I
journeyed not many months ago across the Atlantic and down the westerly
nations of Europe. Central and Eastern Europe still were in transport
chaos and so could be expected to give little or nothing to one who wished
to see their railways under anything even faintly approaching normal
conditions. But in Great Britain, in France, in Spain, and in Italy, the
railways were functioning well--extremely well, when one came to consider
the very great burden so recently put upon them. The last two of these
four nations may, however, be dismissed immediately from present
consideration. Neither the density of population nor the traffic
conditions of either Spain or Italy makes their transport problems of
great interest or value to the United States. But Great Britain or France
may hold the key to a real solution of our most vexing transportation
problem of the moment.
In area these two closely built and industrial nations are not far apart.
Ireland is not included in the comparison; in this chapter, however, we
are not going to give consideration to the Irish railways. They too are
not germane to the discussion, even if conditions in Ireland were even
approximately normal to-day, which decidedly they are not.
The area of France is roughly speaking about equal to that of our five
great industrial States reaching from New York to Chicago--New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This section of the United
States contains but about thirty-five millions of people, as compared with
forty millions of French, yet it has approximately twice the railway
mileage. The French have buttered their area pretty evenly with their
railway transport. We have not. In these five industrial States of ours
there is not only in many cases gross duplication and excess of plant--in
most cases due to the effects of overstimulated competition--but in other
cases considerable territories even to-day inadequately provided with
railroad facilities. Our bread is by no means buttered evenly.
Neither is Great Britain's. Like ourselves she built her transport plans
to meet the exigencies of actual conditions from year to year. Add to this
her very irregularity of conformation; her chief city, and forever her
traffic hub, situated nowhere near the center of the congested island, but
almost in an extreme southeastern corner of it; her other great cities,
seaport and inland industrial centers, scattered here and there and
everywhere as the chance fortune of long centuries dictated and separated
by high ridges of mountainous hills. Take conditions such as these and you
have the beginnings of a transport problem that even at the outset would
bewilder the wisest of traffic experts, given the rare opportunity of
devising an entire new railway system for the United Kingdom.
Of course, no such wise or scientific scheme of planning her railways was
ever possible. They grew, as I have just said, out of necessity. From the
crude beginnings of the Stockton and Darlington and the Liverpool and
Manchester, almost an even century ago, they advanced clumsily until
nearly twenty years ago, when the last of the trunk-lines forced its way
into London and the competitive development of the British railway system
was virtually ended. The strategy of thrusting a new line here, of
building a connection there, of piercing into this town or that so as to
get the business away from the other road, then became history. Thereafter
the chief problem of the British railway manager, like that of his fellow
executive in the United States, became that of supplying proper transport
to a nation that refused to "stay put," but insisted upon growing, even to
an unthinkable size. In the years of its railway development the
population of Great Britain has increased from fifteen or sixteen millions
to well over forty-two. In a single one of her cities more than seven
million people are now resident.
Yet, as might have been expected the clumsy competitive system of building
railroads has not given her a really adequate rail transport plant. Her
bread also is extremely badly buttered. Great industrial sections as those
around London or Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester or Sheffield, her
coal districts, are ofttimes much more than adequately provided with
railways. And there still are sections of the small island--to traverse
its extreme length one goes a distance roughly equal to that from New York
to Buffalo--which are not even to-day properly provided with rail
transport. These are, it is true, rather thin pickings. The competitive
system has wotted not of them. It never spreads the butter evenly. The
butter goes where it is worth the most, and nowhere else. Too much butter
goes in certain localities. England has begun to learn that lesson.
In France the development of the railroad proceeded far more slowly. Such
ever was the way of the French. From the beginning their Government took a
firm hand in the matter. It saw that French railways were planned,
primarily from the military necessities of the country but also from its
many peaceful ones. If all of this at first had the effect of retarding
railroad construction it also has resulted in giving France the best
national plan of rail transport in the entire world. In 1842, sixteen
years after the beginnings of railway development in Great Britain, it was
still possible in France to determine in what definite direction her
principal lines should be put down. In that year a statute was passed
settling this vital question in so comprehensive and generally
satisfactory a fashion that the uneconomical duplication of the rail
systems of both the United States and Great Britain was almost entirely
avoided; while within the next three or four years definite beginnings
were made in the regional allotment of the land to the several railway
systems, or _reseaux_, which have continued with but one or two important
changes down to the present day.
In contrast to England and Scotland, France presents an almost ideal field
to the primary planner of railroad lines. If Paris, forever her chief
commercial and social hub, is not in the precise center of the republic,
it is at least near enough to permit the devising of a railway plan in
which most of the chief lines form roughly the spokes of a great wheel
radiating out from Paris as a hub. Five of the regional systems of France,
her _reseaux_--the Nord, the Est, the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean, the
Paris-Orleans, and the Etat--operate these great spokes. The Nord takes
the segment of the wheel which touches upon the English Channel, from Le
Treport-Mers all the way east to Dunkirk and the Belgian line. To the east
of it lies the Est, touching the Nord at Soissons and Laon and after also
touching the newly-acquired lines of Alsace-Lorraine reaching as far into
the southeast as Belfort.
The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean has but two spokes of the wheel into
the Paris hub but it is the largest of the privately owned French
railways, reaching from Belfort to Cette upon the Mediterranean shore and
serving between the Swiss and the Italian gateways to say nothing of the
Rhone valley and the Riviera. Immediately next to it in turn is the
Paris-Orleans, with Toulouse and Bordeaux as its chief southerly
terminals. At these cities it joins the southerly Midi system, which also
meets the P.-L.-M. at Cette.
The Etat or State railway with its lines from Paris to the west and the
southwest of France completes the great railway wheel. A little more than
a decade ago it absorbed the fairly important but always unprofitable
Ouest system. Up to that time the government railway had been the least
important of all the French properties. Its lines, reaching down chiefly
into the rather poor districts of the Vendee and the Charente, were
distinctly unprofitable. In 1908 a French gentleman by the name of Georges
Clemenceau succeeded in extending the beneficent influence of the state to
the almost equally unfortunate Ouest system. Since then the State railway
of France has become distinctly important, geographically and politically,
but not particularly so in any other way. Its annual deficit has never
been overcome. Matters have now come to a point where it is proposed that
system be leased to a private corporation for operation. The government
can no longer carry on with it. Its suburban service alone sustained a
deficit of 100,000,000 francs in 1921.
At the present moment, however, all the French railways are operating at a
loss variously figured at from a million francs a day upward. Since the
beginning of the World War, a total deficit of something considerably more
than a billion dollars has been achieved. Yet the roads themselves are
still paying their dividends--the privately owned and operated properties
of course. These are guaranteed by the Government under special
legislation that goes as far back as 1857. In the early days of the recent
war, when even the formerly profitable Nord, Est, and P.-L.-M. began to
run toward heavy deficits, special legislation was hurried through by the
Government to insure continued interest in the proper operation of the
essential lines of rail transport by the simple and entirely human process
of maintaining the dividends, even though the taxpayer paid the
difference. The difference steadily grew greater. Wages increased 327 per
cent. in six years, the staff--due chiefly to France's very literal
interpretation of her new eight-hour law--from 355,000 to nearly 500,000,
about 41 per cent. And despite an increase of 25 per cent. in freight and
passenger-rates--afterwards increased to a total of 70 or 80 per cent. for
passenger and 140 for freight--the operating ratio of her railways swung
from 57 per cent. in 1913 to the ridiculous and impossible figure of 125
per cent. in 1920.
* * * * *
Important and vital as these things are, however, to the Frenchman, they
have no great concern with the phase of the international railroad
situation that is under our immediate scrutiny--competition, and with it
the inevitable and wasteful duplication of lines and other features of any
national transport plant. If the French railway system had been burdened
with these wastefulnesses, one shudders even to think of the consequences.
The French railways would not then be close to bankruptcy, they would be
entirely involved in it and so completely broken that all France would be
prostrated--the bitter tragedy of Russia repeated along the west coast of
Continental Europe.
In my opinion it is because of the simple and entirely economic placing of
her railways that they have been enabled to withstand at all the terrible
and multiplied burdens that have been placed upon them in the last seven
years. The judgment of the men who first planned their general locations
has been completely vindicated again and again in the really supurb way in
which they bore their all but overwhelming war burdens, and more latterly
in the way that they have handled the almost equally important and vexing
problems of the after-the-war period. Both speak volumes for the inherent
morale of the French railways, to say nothing of the grit and the
endurance of the Frenchman himself.
We started a moment ago to show how these regional and generally
non-competitive railways of France were laid down upon her map. We likened
the main lines of the Nord, the Est, the P.-L.-M., the Paris-Orleans, and
the Etat to the spokes of a great wheel with Paris as their hub. Outside
of these five greatest regions there lie the two others--the Midi and the
recently acquired lines in Alsace-Lorraine. The first of these, as we have
just seen, occupies important territory just north of the Pyrenees; the
second is indicated by its name. It has not yet been determined what shall
be the ultimate operating plan of the lines in Alsace and in Lorraine.
They may be parceled between the Est and the P.-L.-M., but it is more than
likely that they will continue to be operated as a separate system. France
long ago saw the viciousness of bringing too large a railway property
under a single operating direction.
The plan is almost perfectly regional. The only important exceptions are
where a long arm of the Paris-Orleans goes at right angles to the parent
stem and up into the heart of the Etat territory (to Nantes and to Brest),
and where the Etat in turn has a rather roundabout line from Paris to
Bordeaux, the chief external point of the Orleans system. (It is possible
that in the contemplated return of the Etat to private operation this line
may be handed over to the Paris-Orleans. It would be a logical step in the
French regional plan.) Still one almost always goes to Nantes upon the
P.-O. and rarely ever to Bordeaux upon the Etat, while to Marseilles or to
Lyons there is absolutely no alternative to the P.-L.-M. To go to Rheims
or to Strasbourg one must use the Est, to Boulogne or to Calais the Nord.
There is no choice other than the Etat for reaching Rouen or Le Havre from
Paris.
Here then is regional railway operation brought to almost perfect
operation, with competition all but eliminated. For remember, if you
please, that it never is completely eliminated. Even if one were to go to
the final degree of consolidation and centralization, competition would
not be entirely gone. In France, even if the Paris-Orleans no longer
reached Nantes or the Etat Bordeaux, even if every mile of rail were
brought under a single autocratic and absolute head, there would remain
the competition of her unified railway with those outside the republic,
and within it the natural competition, let us say, of towns north of Paris
with towns south for the traffic of that metropolis; east would forever be
pitted against west. You can no more entirely remove competition in
business than you can the risings and the settings of the great sun. But
you can remove the absurd phases, the obvious extravagances of
competition--particularly in transport. Remember always, if you will--I
purposely reiterate the point--that some fine day you can cease to regard
the motor-truck, the inland waterway barge, the interurban trolley, and
the steam railroad train as competitors, but rather in the proper sense,
each as agents of that great function of life, transportation, and so in
some time or place properly correlated. And you can begin by regarding the
railroads together as at least a single efficient one of these agents, and
not as a lot of quarreling small boys dissipating much of their energy
through their trivial disputes. This is the lesson that the railways of
France bring to the rest of the great world of transport.
Their division into seven great operating units--but always carefully
correlated units--is only for the purposes of proper supervision. We have
seen in a previous chapter how easily the efficiency of a single railroad
may be thwarted by permitting it to grow to an untoward size. And before I
am entirely done I shall hope to show you that even in a regional railway
scheme, which applied to the United States might contemplate as many as
forty different railroads--different in name and in operating
organization--there must be a distinct effort toward a strong
centralization of certain functions; notably financing, traffic
solicitation and control, and the staff study of advanced operating
methods of every sort. Along the first two of these lines the _reseaux_
of France have as yet accomplished but little. There has been up to the
present time but little centralization of their control, although steps
now are being taken toward that end. In the opinion of some of the wisest
of Frenchmen to-day, such steps are not only the next in their railway
development but certain to come to a successful head. Only the confusing
problem of a single state-owned and operated system has prevented their
being accomplished this long while.
But in the standardization of operating methods and practices much already
has been done in France. Four companies, the Etat, the Midi, the Paris,
Lyons, and Mediterranean, and the Alsace-Lorraine have formed an
organization with the rather formidable title of _L'Office Central
d'Etudes du Materiel de Chemins de Fer_ for this purpose. This extremely
active organization is divided into four departments, one in charge of
tests, one for locomotive design, a third for car design, and the fourth
to handle railway electrification.
Progress already has been made too in drawing up plans for various types
of standard locomotives. A study has also been made of standard designs
for freight-cars of special types, such as tank-cars, steel-cars, and the
like. Some very interesting tests have been made of refrigerator-cars for
the movement of fish and of fruits. Incidentally it may be said that
before the coming of the World War there was little or no refrigerator-car
movement in France or anywhere else in Europe, and this despite the
remarkable advances made in the United States in this form of traffic for
at least twelve or fifteen years before. To move safely certain low-test
materials for the manufacturer of explosives across tropical seas it was
necessary for two French manufacturers to produce ships equipped with
elaborate refrigerating devices. The technical knowledge which these men
so gained in the manufacture of ice-making machinery they are now prepared
to turn to good account in the production of refrigerator-cars, while the
rapid development of France's wonderful new territory south of the
Mediterranean promises a growing area sufficient to produce a plenty of
fresh fruit and vegetables not only for her cities, but for those of a
large part of the rest of western Europe as well.
Perhaps the most interesting work, however, done up to the present time by
the central study office of the French railways has been upon the
development of electricity as a practical working power for their lines.
(I made passing reference to this in an earlier chapter.) As yet they have
lagged in this work. The Etat operates a dozen miles of electric standard
railway between Paris and Versailles. The comparatively new Paris terminal
of the P.-O. has electric operation for perhaps another dozen miles
outside of the Gare d'Orsay. There are a very few isolated electric
high-speed lines here and there across the face of the land. In these
things the French do move slowly. But they generally move pretty
thoroughly, and to-day they have developed a very marvelous plan for the
electrification of at least one third of their entire railway mileage.
As a beginning a bill was passed in May, 1921, authorizing a company to
develop the vast potentialities of the Rhone water-power--so vast as to be
estimated to save France six millions of tons of coal a year, which is
quite a factor in a country that does not in the average year consume more
than sixty million tons.
This new scheme will mean the immediate construction of eighteen great
power-houses along the upper reaches of the river, with a total
development of 1,100,000 horse-power. The chief users of this huge supply
of clean and inexhaustible power will be the City of Paris, and the Paris,
Lyons, and Mediterranean railway. It is proposed that all the rail-lines
in the huge quadrilateral between Bellegrade, Lyons, Marseilles, and
Vintimille shall be completely electrified.
In the opinion of distinguished French engineers this single enterprise
will be far the greatest, from an economic point of view, ever undertaken
in France. Yet this is but the beginning. The Paris-Orleans has also
ambitious plans under which it expects to bring electric energy,
water-generated, to more than one-half of its 3250 miles of line. The
Midi, running for miles along the base of the Pyrenees, has abundant
opportunities for this cheap motive-power. Its management is unusually
progressive and it may be expected to take advantage of these in the not
distant future.
The net result of this great national economy will be the annual saving of
many millions of tons of coal in a land which has no fuel to spare, which
is indeed dependent upon coal importations for her very existence, let
alone the development of her industries.
Yet great as this huge economic step will yet prove itself for France, it
still will remain secondary to her wisdom of the long-ago in the
simplification of her entire operating system by means of the sensible and
logical regional railway plan, with its consequent huge basic economies.
France at the beginning started right. She is even to-day reaping the
benefit of them. To-morrow when her other economic conditions shall have
readjusted themselves she will reap a far greater benefit. The largest
achievements of her regional plan are still in the future.
* * * * *
England has long since taken note of the situation in her neighbor just
across the Channel. She has seen her own salvation in the French solution
of the extravagant luxury of railway duplication. And even a traditional
British prejudice against borrowing an idea from another nation has
finally been broken down--in this particular instance very much broken
down. Yet it is entirely probable that, had it not been for the coming of
the World War, the Briton still would be enjoying the wasteful luxury of
the excess service which his extravagant competitive system--very much
like our own--had given him for many years. For it was extravagance,
nothing more, nothing less, that led each of the three railways binding
the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, about thirty miles apart, to run
an hourly service between those cities. The trains might run two thirds
or three quarters empty, and frequently did, but the pride of the London
and Northwestern, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Cheshire lines was
upheld. Competition is a great upholder of pride.
Along came the World War, and England from the beginning very much in it.
The burden placed upon her railways was huge. To meet it they were placed
under governmental control at the very outset and their services, aside
from the military ones, bared to the bone. Such luxuries as three trains
to the hour in each direction between Liverpool and Manchester were
immediately abolished. Under a cooperative plan the trains between those
two great English cities were, to use the phrase of the engineer,
"staggered"--placed in a triple alternation, which gave virtually the same
headway between them but with an operation of a little less than one third
the former number of trains. The passenger was merely asked to show enough
ordinary intelligence to study the time-tables and find from which of
three passenger terminals his train of a given hour would start.
The astonishing feature of the entire thing was the lack of complaint from
the traveling public which followed this wholesale reduction of train
service. Everywhere throughout Great Britain it was the same. Competing
trains between many of her busiest centers, arriving and departing at
virtually the same hours but traversing separate routes, were
consolidated, due regard being given to the necessities of intermediate
towns which might happen to be served by but a single one of the road; and
a war-time service was given for five years that was astonishingly good.
Not perfect, of course. The Englishman traveling was forced to sit a
little closer in his seat, sometimes compelled to wait in queues at the
wickets to buy his ticket, occasionally, in the absence of porters, to
handle at least some of his own luggage at the terminals. But there was
very little hardship about all of this, and a tremendous resultant
economy.
Great Britain will never go back to her old extravagances of the days of
unbridled transport competition. True it is that since the signing of the
Armistice her railway service, both passenger and freight, has been
radically increased, but to nowhere near the point that it had reached in
1913. Fine frills, like the running of fast non-stop expresses between
London and the ocean landing at Fishguard, in South Wales, to cite a
single instance out of many, have been abandoned; never to be taken up
again in your day or mine. The harsh necessities of vast economies born of
a great war, the huge increases in labor and fuel and raw material costs
that followed in its wake, do not encourage frills. Out of them came the
demand for permanent sweeping economies that resulted in the passage of
the important Railways Bill by Parliament in August, 1921, after many hard
weeks of exhaustive study.
To bring fifty-four almost entirely competitive railways into four almost
non-competitive ones and insure a governmental control of rates and other
charges sufficient to bring the constituent roads a rate of return equal
to that which they were receiving in 1913--here in brief is the chief
purpose of the extremely lengthy Railways Act, supplanting all transport
legislation that had gone before. It is the most drastic business move
that England has accomplished in many and many a day. Upon it are pinned
the hopes of a thinking people. And because, following in the steps of the
long-established regional systems of France it has become a high hope for
our extremely muddled rail transport situation in the United States, it is
well worth at least a little detailed study.
The south coast of England runs at a distance from London of from sixty
miles upward, as it extends both east and west of Brighton, the nearest
point to that great city. Three separate systems connect it with London:
to the extreme east the affiliated Southern and Chatham railways, made
familiar to thousands of Americans who have used them as an essential link
between Victoria Station and the beginning of the Channel crossing at
Dover; the London, Brighton, and South Coast; and the London and
Southwestern, this last line reaching as far west as Plymouth, down in
Cornwall. In a sense it may be said that these three railways are
regional railways within a region. Each has fairly definite and
non-competitive territory. Each serves its own principality, and serves it
admirably. To make a region out of these three railways is no problem at
all. It is solved, almost before it is begun.
Nor is the east coast of England to the north of London and right up to
and beyond the old Scottish border difficult to bring into a single
region. Three more or less parallel railways--the Great Central, the Great
Northern, and the Great Eastern--occupy the eastern counties all the way
up to York, 188 miles north of London, where the Northeastern has its real
beginning and occupies the extreme northeastern corner of England as an
absolute monopoly. This last line reaches within fifty-eight miles of
Edinburgh. As a matter of operating convenience, however, its locomotives
run all the way through to that ancient Scottish capital, traversing the
final fifty-eight miles upon the rails of the North British company.
Perhaps no better instance may be shown of the absurdly small typical
English railway of to-day than to realize that within the 392 miles that
lie between London and Edinburgh--no distance at all upon our American
railroad map--the through fast expresses run upon three separate railways.
The only condition we have that parallels and exceeds this is the
operation of the Baltimore and Ohio's through trains from New York to
Philadelphia, which traverse the rails of three roads--the Pennsylvania,
the Lehigh Valley, and the Philadelphia and Reading--in the short ninety
miles that intervene between Manhattan Island and the entrance to the B. &
O.'s own rails.
The British railroaders have long recognized the absurdity of the railway
that is too short just as they are able to point the finger of fine scorn
at our many railroads that are entirely too long. More than a decade ago
these four roads of the eastern counties of England sought to anticipate
the present grouping principle of the Railways Act by an amalgamation of
their properties into a single, succinct regional railway property. The
proposal was bitterly fought in Parliament and then defeated. Great
Britain had not then become convinced of the extravagance of the
competition principle in transportation. It was necessary to have a war to
teach her that important economic lesson.
* * * * *
Almost as the northeastern corner of England is the undisputed
principality of a single system so does a single railway, the Great
Western, stretch alone directly west from London and almost completely
dominates its territory. To bring it into regional grouping with any of
the other important British railway systems has been well-nigh impossible.
After a number of futile attempts the professional and amateur railroaders
who have been attempting the solution of the regional plan for Great
Britain have given up the idea. They have found that they could only
combine the Great Western with the Cambrian and some other less important
Welsh roads, and now they have let it go at that--a single well-developed
region of some 3650 miles, well contained and, with the exception of a
single long arm thrust up into Liverpool, fairly compact.
* * * * *
In the center of England rested the difficult part of the entire problem
of working out a rational and economic regional plan. In the succeeding
and final chapters of this book I shall show how in the two inner
industrial centers of America, the one just east and the other just west
of the Mississippi River, we shall come to two territories where the
working out of a pure regional plan is virtually impossible. So it is in
central England. Two great railways, possibly the two greatest in all
Britain, the London and Northwestern and the Midland--occupy that
industrial area with a perfect interlacing of lines, and at every corner
of it fight energetically for its traffic. Other railways enter slightly
upon it; as we have just seen, the Great Western with its line through
Birmingham up to Liverpool, the Great Central and, in its northerly
reaches, the cross-country Lancashire and Yorkshire. This last line has
however recently been absorbed by the London and Northwestern. It too
anticipated the decisions of the Railways Act and comes into any grouping
the largest single system in Great Britain, with considerably more than
four thousand miles of line, a system roughly comparable in size and
volume of traffic with our own Baltimore and Ohio, although in its
history, as well as in the traditions of its personnel, more closely
analogous to the Pennsylvania railroad.
To have attempted to separate the important London and Northwestern and
Midland systems would have been to break down completely the whole spirit
and plan of the British regional system. Therefore they have been brought
into a single grouping, and with them the Lancashire and Yorkshire of
course, the North Staffordshire, the Furness, the Caledonian, the Glasgow
and Southwestern, and the Highland companies--the last of these, as their
names indicate, Scottish lines.
Here then are four railways created out of fifty-four--some 24,500 miles
of line as compared with the 27,000 miles of French railway. The groupings
have followed the lines that I have just shown and take the names of the
Southern; the Northeastern, the Eastern, and the East Scottish; the
Western; and the Northwestern, Midland, and West Scottish groups
respectively. The smaller and comparatively unimportant lines of the
United Kingdom fall easily into some one of these four great regions. For
a time Scotland itself represented a rather perplexing problem. The
energetic young British minister of transport, Sir Eric Geddes, stood
stoutly for the retention of all the Scottish railways in a separate,
distinct, and strongly unified group. In this he was opposed. The old-time
competitive idea that there should be at least two separate and rival
routes from London up into Scotland--the one on the east coast and the
other on the west coast of Britain--would not down. Geddes gave up. Then
for a time he proposed a generous compromise in the form of two separate
Scotch groups, one upon each side of the island and connecting with the
Eastern (English) and the Northwestern and Midland groups at York and
Carlisle respectively. But even in this he was beaten. Scotland lost her
railway autonomy. Her lines will be merged and as entities forever lost in
the sweep of the two larger groups of the entire kingdom.
Geddes has stood in his position in regard to the Scottish railways for
the regional plan in its purest form. His theory was excellent. But it had
to give way to hard-headed practice. It often so happens. Remember always,
if you will, that railroad competition has been a great god in Britain as
well as in the United States. Yet competition is not to be too hardly
judged, even by the loftiest of idealists. It has its good points, and
they are many. Most of the fine excellences of our railroad service in
this country were built up in its hottest competitive period. That is
irrefutable. It is entirely probable that if we had not had that
competitive period we should not have had a service even comparable with
the high standard of excellence that we reached a decade ago. The point is
that within the last generation genuine competition has ceased to exist
between our railroads; the sham of it that remains is a fearful drag upon
any really economical operation of them to-day.
Only a few years ago Lord Monkswell, the distinguished British student of
railway problems, said:
"At sight it would appear that it [competition] has possessed certain
advantages. It is found that in Great Britain, the only European
country where different routes between the same important centers
exist to any great extent under separate management, the train service
is more complete than anywhere else _except France_ [the italics are
my own] and the passenger-fares are by no means particularly high. But
when we remember that Great Britain was the first country to develop
railways and so got a long start of the rest of the world, and that
the population of Great Britain for each unit of area is much greater
than that of any other big country--more than twice as great as that
of France, and half as great again as that of Germany--we see that
there are other causes to which these effects may be ascribed.
"No conditions of this kind, however, tend in any way to show that
competition, if attainable, is incapable of producing good results on
railways at the present time. Far from it; railways present so many
possibilities of improvement that if any really effective means could
be discovered of inducing their managers to make bold experiments, it
is more than likely that the best results would ensue. As has just
been remarked the facilities offered to passengers are certainly on
the whole greater in Great Britain than elsewhere, and in conjunction
with--probably in consequence of--this, it is found that the passenger
receipts per head of the population are approximately twice as large
as they are in France or Germany.
"On the face of it then there is a very good reason for supposing that
the receipts increase with the facilities offered. Now the two things
above all others that passengers may be expected to care for are
reduced third-class fares and increased speeds. If railway managers,
animated by some real spirit of competition, were to offer these
advantages, it is possible and even probable that travel would
increase so much that the railways, besides conferring a great boon on
their customers, would themselves secure large benefits.
"As regards the goods traffic, the definite elimination of all
competition would be likely to have the result of doing away with
several unsatisfactory features of this traffic. Even though there is
ostensibly no competition in rates between the different companies
serving the same points, there can be no doubt that the fear of losing
traffic has frequently induced railways to make concessions of various
kinds to traders, the results of which have been to give more or less
secret rebates to the traders in whose favor the concessions were
made."
I have quoted Lord Monkswell in some detail because his remarks, made upon
the British railway situation eight years ago, are so pertinent and
applicable to our American railroad situation of this moment. He has seen
the rise and the decline of competition upon his home island. And we too
have seen its rise and its decline, upon the North American continent.
* * * * *
Return for a final moment to the British regional grouping plan as it has
finally been effected by Parliament; some of the many details are vital to
us because they are details that before long we shall be compelled to face
in the remaking of our own national railroad structure. The Railways Act
over there, after outlining rather precisely the geography of the regional
grouping, sets up an Amalgamation Tribunal, consisting of three
commissioners, who will approve and confirm the amalgamation schemes
submitted to them. This tribunal is to be a court of record and is to have
an official seal. Its decisions are subject to a review by the Court of
Appeal, whose decision is to be final, unless it gives leave to carry it
up to the House of Lords itself.
It is expected that the work of this tribunal will be finished early in
1923, so that the new groups may begin active operations upon July 1 of
that year. At one time it was suggested that the entire scheme be made
operative upon July 1, 1921; the whole thing was suggested by the minister
of transport as early as June, 1920. But that was obviously far too short
a time. The railway companies would have none of it. They wanted it to
begin not before January 1, 1924, and have nearly had their own way in the
matter.
For it need not be supposed that the bill was adopted without contentions.
These were many and some of them were bitter. The Scottish question was
but one of several vexing sub-problems. A good many of the British railway
men looked upon the rate return to come from the proper fixing of the
tariff charges in each of the groupings as quite too low. The fact that it
was the equal of 1913 has meant little or nothing to them. That year
returned but 3.64 per cent. to the average British railway share, and some
large holders of these securities felt that they should have a much
bigger return upon their investments.
Yet to go further into this vexing point would involve an intricate study
of British railway capitalization. It is enough for our point now to say
that it is large, extremely large, per mile as compared with our American
capitalization. Those people who have made it their particular business to
shout upon watered stock and bonds of our roads will have interesting food
for thought if they will study the capitalization of railways overseas;
particularly so if they will consider that the preliminary valuation
reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission show many of our carriers as
possessing an actual property value well in excess of the combined
securities issued against it.
* * * * *
The entire field of British railway operation offers many valuable and
suggestive hints, even to a nation as supposedly expert in railroad
operation as this. It is not possible in the limits of a single chapter to
go into all of these. Among them is the development of electrification
upon the standard lines of Great Britain; despite a seemingly slow
progress in this great work (but 365 miles out of 24,500 being operated by
electricity at the moment) it is known that a group of distinguished
American electrical engineers has been engaged for some time past in
devising a scheme for the operation of every mile of British railway by
electric power. Others are the exquisite simplification and economy of her
terminal operation and the facility of her small goods-wagons for
short-haul traffic. These are all interesting. Yet, the single phase of
her regional development so far outranks even these as to demand an almost
exclusive attention.
France has led the way, has proved almost beyond doubt the value of the
regional system; Great Britain now falls in line. The United States will
be next in turn. Because the possibilities of the extension of this, the
greatest of immediate railway economies, are so vast in this land of huge
railroad development I shall leave their description until later. Then I
shall endeavor to show how as a nation we can all benefit--railroad
patron, railroad shareholder, railroad employee alike--by the extension to
our national transport machine of a plan which is so ingenious, so
genuinely economic, and yet withal so simple as to make it a bewildering
wonder that our biggest railroaders did not come to it long ago. That they
did not is rather a sad commentary upon their vision--or lack of it.