THE IRON HORSE AND THE GAS BUGGY
The other day the convention of an important Episcopalian diocese was held
in a large town in one of our eastern states. The general passenger agent
of a certain good-sized railroad which radiates from that town in every
direction saw a newspaper clipping in relation to the convention and
promptly dictated a letter to his assistant there asking about how many
passengers they had had as a result of the gathering. The reply was
prompt.
"None," it read.
The G.P.A. reached for his ready-packed grip and took the next train up
there. He wanted to find out the trouble. It was not hard to locate. It
was a pretty poor shepherd of a pretty poor flock who did not possess some
lamb who commanded a touring car of some sort. And it was a part of the
lamb's duty, nay, his privilege, to drive the rector to the convention.
They came from all that end of the state in automobiles. And what had in
past years been a source of decent revenue to the railroad which covered
that state ceased to be any revenue whatsoever.
This is only one of many such cases. Any county or state or interstate
gathering held in a part of the country where road conditions are even
ordinarily good may count on folk coming to it by automobile up to a
150-mile radius, ofttimes from much greater distances. It is not argued
that the trip is less expensive; the contrary is probably invariably true.
Only today folks have the cars, and a meeting in an adjoining county gives
a welcome excuse for a little trip. Need more be said?
Only this. Those same folk might otherwise have gone upon the cars. And
the railroad's assistant general passenger agent could have sat down
beside his typewriter and written a neat little letter to his chief
calling attention to the increased business resulting from the meeting of
the Grand Lodge of the X.Y.G.C. this year as compared with that of
last--the inference being nearly as clear to the chief as to the man who
had created the aforesaid increased business. Multiply these lodge
meetings, these conventions, these convocations; add to them high-school
excursions and picnics and fraternity field-days almost without number;
picture to yourself, if you will, the highways leading to these high spots
of American life crowded with private and public motor cars of all
descriptions and you can begin to realize a serious situation which
confronts the passenger traffic men of the big steam railroads. Upon the
eastern and western edges of the land, where highway conditions have
attained their highest development, the situation is all but critical; in
the central and southern portions of the country it is already serious.
Here is one of the big hard-coal roads up in the northeastern corner of
the U.S.A. Its president lays much stress upon the value to the property
of its anthracite holdings and carryings. Yet he is far too good a
railroader to ignore the value of its passenger traffic. Because of this
last his road has builded huge hotels and connecting steamboats. In past
years its passenger revenues have even rivaled the tremendous earnings of
its coal business. Because, however, of the competition of the automobile
these have slipped backward for the past few years. And the president of
the road has reasoned it out in an ingenious fashion.
"There are 4,339 motor cars licensed in Albany, Troy, and their
intermediate towns alone," he says. "If each of these carried three
passengers twenty-five miles a day for a year their passenger-miles would
equal those of our entire system for the same time."
A passenger-mile, as we know already, is one of the units in estimating
the traffic revenue of a railroad. It is passenger-miles, by the hundreds
and the thousands, that the railroads of New England are losing today.
When one stands beside one of the well-traveled pathways of the Ideal
Tour, the Real Tour, or the Mohawk Trail and sees touring cars loaded to
the gunwales with luggage go whizzing by him, ten, twenty to the hour, he
begins to realize this.[10] More than 50,000 visiting automobiles were
registered in Massachusetts this last summer. There were last year in the
United States, 2,445,664 automobiles. With a carrying capacity averaging
five persons to a car--12,000,000 persons all told--they can seat three
times as many persons as all our railroad cars in the country combined.
Not all of these folk would travel by train if there were no motor cars.
Some of them are riding for the pure joy of automobile touring. But many
of them would go to the mountains or the coast anyway and so make a large
addition to railroad passenger revenues. The vast increase in trunks
handled over reasonably long distances by the express companies in these
last few years is, in itself, something of an index of the volume of this
through business, which is today traveling by motor.
Now cross the country and take a quick glimpse at the situation in the
Northwest. The president of an important steam road at Portland--which in
turn controls both city and interurban lines extending out from Portland
and Spokane--is peculiarly qualified to speak of the situation there.
"Our road has suffered severely from this new form of automobile
competition," he says. "We lost last summer quite a proportion of our
passenger business moving from Portland to the beaches because of the
completion of a hard-surface wagon road between it and them. We were
compelled to withdraw several local trains, to lay off a number of
trainmen because of this new competitor. With us the question is vital. It
is still more vital with our electric interurban properties. Throughout
California, Oregon, and Washington this class of railroad has suffered
most severely from motor competition, and with the decreased cost and
increased effectiveness of the automobile I expect such losses to increase
rather than to diminish. In all these states there have been large
expenditures for improved highroads during the past five years; many times
under the guise of providing easy and inexpensive transportation for farm
products to markets. But these highroads instead of being built from the
transportation centers out into the producing region, so as to serve the
farms, have almost invariably paralleled steam and electric lines. As a
result the transportation companies have been heavily taxed to construct
and maintain highways for the benefit of competitors who are carrying both
passengers and freight in direct competition with them."
The Southern Pacific, whose lines cover California like a fine mesh, has
been hard hit by this new form of competition. The fine new highways and
the even climate of the Golden State, which brought the jitney to its
highest strength there, are giving stimulus to its bigger brother--the
long-distance motor bus. These have multiplied in every direction until
today there are central stations in the larger cities, providing waiting,
smoking, and reading rooms in charge of a joint employee, who usually
acts as starter and information clerk and is liberally supplied with large
printed schedules advertising automobile service to various points. From
these stations the routes radiate in almost every direction; one may ride
from San Francisco to Stockton, 80 miles; or to Fresno, 200 miles;
connecting there with a public automobile for Los Angeles, some 250 miles
farther. From Los Angeles there are still more routes: to Bakersfield, 124
miles over the new Tejon Pass route; to Santa Barbara, about 100 miles; to
San Diego, about 125 miles, and from San Diego on to El Centro in the
Imperial Valley, another 116 miles.
These routes are generally covered with touring cars--generally
second-hand but tried and capable of efficient and reliable service. But
there is a tendency toward larger cars, where the volume of travel
warrants; several companies operating large busses, seating from twenty to
twenty-five persons each. A very good example of this is the Peninsular
Rapid Transit Company, which operates between San Francisco and San Mateo
and between San Mateo and Palo Alto.
Fares by automobile in California are generally somewhat lower than the
railroad fares. There are instances, however, where the fares are equal
and yet the motor cars enjoy the bulk of the business, perhaps from their
ability to pick up or discharge passengers anywhere along the route--in
town or in country, perhaps from their frequency and flexibility of
service. Several attempts made by the railroads to regain their traffic by
reducing rates have shown these things to be real factors in the
situation.
As far as the Southern Pacific is concerned, it finds today that the
automobile has taken the bulk of its one-way and round-trip short-haul
business, leaving it the long-haul and commutation traffic. In some
instances the gasoline buggy has helped itself to long-haul traffic as
well; as between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, where the distance by motor
car over the wonderful new Tejon Pass highroad--to which the Southern
Pacific, as chief taxpayer in California, has contributed most
generously--is but 124 miles, against 170 miles, the shortest rail
distance. The gasoline buggy can climb grades and round curves that the
iron horse may not even attempt.
There is genuine feeling among many of the railroad companies of the land
that the new competition is unjust. They make a good case for themselves.
Complaints are coming in from the rail carriers all the way across the
land. New York has appropriated and expended nearly $100,000,000 in
building a system of improved highways over the entire state. Like the
highways of California, they, too, are superb roads. Not only do they link
all the big cities and the big towns but they sometimes stretch for many
miles through the fastnesses of the forest--you may drive for twenty miles
through the Adirondacks on as perfect a bit of pavement as any city park
may boast and yet not pass more than one or two human habitations in all
that distance. All of which is glorious for the motorist and his friends,
to say nothing of the hotel keepers and the garage owners on the route.
But how about the New York Central Railroad, which covers the greater
part of New York State like a web and which, because of the fact that it
is its chief taxpayer, becomes automatically the heaviest contributor to
these highways? It knows that every mile of improved road that is
completed is going to mean a lessening of its revenues from local
passenger traffic. And it can have, from that point of view, small comfort
from seeing the increasing list of motor-car owners in the New York State
towns.
For the moment leave the purely pleasure uses of the motor car. Consider a
commercial possibility that is increasing almost overnight. The auditing
departments of concerns that have from 50 to 500 salesmen out in the field
are beginning to acquaint themselves with gasoline and tire performances.
They soon will have need of such special knowledge. A single case will
illustrate:
Two drummers working out of Syracuse--the one for a typewriter concern and
the other for a wholesale grocery--decided to cooperate. Together and out
of their own funds they purchased an inexpensive car--had its body so
adjusted that back of the driving seat there was a compartment large
enough for a goodly quantity of samples and the valises that held their
personal effects. They had figured that upon many of the local lines of
railroad, operating but two or three trains a day in each direction at the
most, they could not under the most favorable conditions "make" more than
four towns a day. From twenty to thirty per cent of their time was spent
in the lobbies of hotels or country stations waiting for the up local or
the down. With their automobile they now can get out of a town as soon as
their business is done there. And during the past three months they have
averaged six towns a day.
Here is a possibility of the automobile that the railroad can hardly
afford to ignore. One big New England road noted in a recent month that
its sale of mileage books--a form of railroad ticket designed particularly
for the use of commercial travelers--had declined nearly twenty-nine per
cent since the high-water mark three years before. Investigation on its
part showed that the drummers all through its territory were beginning to
get automobiles. The houses that employed them were encouraging them,
either helping in the part purchase of the cars or, in some cases, buying
them entirely. They, too, had discovered that their salesmen, no longer
dependent on the infrequent train service of branch lines, could "make"
more towns in a day.
Here is our ubiquitous branch line bobbing up once again. It is a problem
which seemingly will not down. For branch-line passenger service is
closely related to this last phase of automobile competition. It is the
opinion of a good many shrewd railroaders--as well as our own--that the
big roads have not always given proper attention to the full development
of this phase of their traffic. Some of the big roads--some of the smaller
ones too--have given this traffic, oftentimes valuable in itself and never
to be ignored as feeding possibility of main-line and competitive traffic,
little or no attention. Other roads ignore it.
"It is unprofitable," they tell you, with exceeding frankness. "If there
is any money at all in the passenger end of the railroad it is in the long
haul. We have our branch lines and of course we shall have to continue to
operate them, as best we can. But they are the lean of our business. And
we have to get a lot of fat on the long-haul traffic to even up with this
discouraging lean."
It is because of this theory--very popular in some transportation
circles--that so many branch-line railroads have today no more, in many
instances even less, trains than they had twenty or thirty or forty years
ago. The constant tendency has been to cut down service upon the branches.
Such cuts generally come in the recurrent seasons of railroad
retrenchment. But the trains cut off are rarely restored. For one thing,
the branch-line railroad does not often run in a genuinely competitive
territory. For another, there is apt to be less protest from a string of
small towns and large villages than from one or two large cities with
boards of trade, whose secretaries are eternally nagging the railroads.
Yet these small towns and villages--ofttimes the nucleus and the
birthplace of our best Americanism--and even the isolated crossroads have
some rights.[11] One of the largest of these is the right of
communication. Some of them, under the shrinkage of the train service of
the single branch-line railroad that has served them, have found
themselves in turn shrinking and hardening. The popular-priced automobile
may yet prove the salvation of these towns. The tavern at the crossroads
has been repainted and is serving "chicken and waffle" dinners, the
general store thrives anew on its sale of gasoline and oil. But best of
all, the folks in adjoining villages visit back and forth. They mix and
broaden. The intercourse that they were denied by the railroad has been
given them through the agency of the automobile.
Come now to the public use of the automobile. And, although many
railroaders profess to scout at the automobile carrying passengers for pay
and state their belief that the increasing number of privately owned and
operated cars represents their real problem, yet the motor bus operating
'cross country begins to bear, in its relation to the steam railroad, a
strong resemblance to the effect of the jitney upon the traction road. In
this last case the opposition quickly reached a high and dangerous volume
and then subsided. The reasons why the jitney, after being hailed with
high acclaim all the way across the land, has disappeared from the streets
of more than half our American cities and towns, are not to be told here.
It is sufficient here and now to say that, save in the South and the
extreme West, it has ceased to be a formidable competitor of the trolley.
But as the jitney of the city has diminished, its brother of the country
roads has grown. And the various regulating boards, city and county, while
generally looking upon the city boy with a forbidding look, have given
nothing but encouraging glances to his country brother.
On a certain day last summer, I rode with Henry Sewall from Frederick,
Maryland, to Baltimore. Henry is a coffee-colored Negro of unusually
prepossessing dress and manner. He owns a seven-passenger motor car of
1916 model and a fairly popular-priced make. He keeps his car tuned up and
clean.
I found the two of them in the main street of Frederick--just in front of
one of the town's most popular hostelries. The car bore a placard stating
that it would leave for Baltimore, forty-six miles distant, at five
o'clock and that the one-way fare for the journey would be $1.50. I asked
Henry Sewall the time that I might reasonably expect to be at my hotel in
Baltimore. He showed his even white teeth as he replied:
"'Fore seven 'clock, suh. Ah've been known to do it in less."
I glanced at the time card of the railroad that connects Frederick with
Baltimore. It is a particularly good railroad, yet the afternoon train
that it runs over the "old main line," as it calls that branch, left
Frederick at 4:50 P.M. and did not arrive at a station, some ten
"squares"--one never says "blocks" in Baltimore--from my hotel, until
7:30. Mileage and fare were practically the same as Henry Sewall's, but
the train made numerous intermediate stops. And Henry announced, with the
Negro's love of pomp and regulation, that the laws of the state of
Maryland would not permit him to stop and pick up passengers between
Frederick and Baltimore--his license with the imposing state seal in its
corner especially forbade that.
I rode with Henry. The softness and the sunshine of a perfect day in early
summer, the knowledge that the old National Pike over which we were to
travel was in the pink of condition, that we were to pass across the Stone
Jug bridge and through the fascinating towns of Newmarket and Ellicott
City was too much to be forsworn. And we had a glorious ride--the car
filled and but one stop of ten minutes at the delightful Ellicott City,
where Henry changed tires. But even with this detention I was at my hotel
promptly at seven o'clock.
Henry makes the round trip from Baltimore to Frederick each day of the
week, excepting Sundays, when his car is for general charter. Even on
rainy days Henry's car is almost invariably filled--he manages to carry
eight passengers besides himself. With a maximum earning capacity of
twenty-four dollars a day and an average of only a very little less, Henry
is earning a very good living for himself, even when he figures on the
cost, the wear and tear, and the depreciation of an automobile which is
being driven about 100 miles a day.
There are many Henry Sewalls in and around Baltimore. Maryland today
claims to have the finest highroads of any state in the Union. The
cross-country jitney busses have not been slow to take advantage of this.
They start at regularly appointed hours from a popular-priced hotel in the
heart of the city and the hours of their arrival and departure are as
carefully advertised and as carefully followed as those of a steam
railroad. When they are all starting out in the morning, the scene is as
brisk and gay as it must have been at Barnum's Hotel in the Baltimore of
nearly a century ago, when, with much ado and gay confusion, the coaches
set out upon the post roads--for Frederick, for York, for Harrisburg, for
Philadelphia, and for Washington.
Yet the railroads that radiate from Baltimore have not seen fit to fight
these newcomers for the traffic of from ten to fifty miles outside the
city. They have made particularly serious inroads upon the earnings of one
of the smaller of these steam lines, which ordinarily derives a very good
share of its earnings from its suburban traffic. There are good and
sufficient reasons for the big railroads to hold their peace. Take Henry
Sewall's opposition. The direct rail route to Frederick from Baltimore is
a line exempted from through passenger trains and very largely given over
to a vast tonnage of through freight. The officers of the road have from
time to time given thought to the possibilities of increasing the local
passenger service on that very line. To do so, however, on the generous
plans that they had outlined among themselves would have meant either one
of two things--either they would seriously have incommoded the movement of
the through freight--which is a railroad's largest source of profit--or
else they would have been compelled to add a third track to that
particular line. The income from the increased local passenger service
would not justify the expense in either of these cases. Therefore this
railroad can afford to be indifferent to Henry Sewall and his gasoline
coach.
Yet there is a broader way of looking at it. Out from my old home town in
northern New York there radiates today nearly as complete a system of
motor-bus routes as that from Baltimore. We have almost 300 miles of
superb new state highways in Jefferson County. And Watertown--our county
seat--is a hub of no small traffic wheel. These busses, despite the
arduous winters of the North Country--Watertown is reputed to have but
three seasons: winter and July and August--keep going nearly the entire
year round. They are of course patronized all that time. And the railroad
which serves almost the entire North Country loses much local passenger
traffic as a result of them. It is the same system that I have just quoted
as being the largest taxpayer in the state of New York--the chief
contributor to its $100,000,000 system of highways. Yet it, too, is not
fighting these jitney busses. On the contrary, one of its high traffic
officers said to me just the other day:
"We realize that the automobile is hardly apt to be a permanent
competitive factor in any long distance passenger traffic--and that is the
only passenger traffic in which we see any real profit. And there is a
still bigger way of looking at it. Every automobile that goes into the
sections of New York which we serve means a movement of high-grade
freight--the tires, the gasoline, the oils, the innumerable accessories
that it constantly demands, mean more freight. Besides this, if the
automobile is developing the man on the farm or in the little village we
shall, in the long run, profit. The development of the entire state of New
York means the development of our railroad."
And that is a platform on which no business--no matter how large or how
small it is--can ever lose.
* * * * *
But is there not a possibility that the railroad can regain some of the
traffic that it has lost, temporarily at least, to the motor car? Is it
not possible that the derided branch line may not be changed from a
withered arm into a growing one? Amputation has sometimes proved
effective. There is many and many a branch-line railroad, which probably
should never have been built in the first place, whose owners have been
wise enough to abandon it and to pull up the rails. Old iron has a genuine
market value. Go back with me once again to the time when the trolley
began to be a long-distance affair. We have seen already how a good many
steam railroad men looked with apprehension upon their branch lines--and
with good cause.
For a time it did look as if the electric railroad might become a genuine
competitor of the steam railroad. A good many interesting fantasies of
that sort got into print. An enterprising interurban trolley company over
in Illinois put on trolley-sleeping cars between St. Louis and Springfield
and St. Louis and Peoria. It was said that the day was coming when a man
would ride in a trolley limited all the way from Chicago to New York--a
real train, with sleeping cars and dining cars and Negro porters and
manicures and an observation platform. The Utica (New York) Chamber of
Commerce got tremendously excited over the matter and went all the way out
to St. Louis and back in a chartered car taken right out of the press of
traffic in Genesee Street.
But the trolley, as we have seen, has not proved a competitor of the steam
railroad. It has become in almost every instance a feeder and as such is a
valuable economic factor in the transportation situation. There have been
no more sleeping cars placed on trolley routes, but a little time ago I
found a Canadian Pacific box car on the shores of Keuka Lake, more than
ten miles distant from the nearest steam railroad. A trolley road had
placed it there, on a farmer's private siding. And he was packing it full
of grapes--grapes to go overseas from some big Canadian port upon the
Atlantic.
Such possibilities of the trolley line to the steam railroad point to
similar feeding possibilities of the automobile--but of these very much
more in their proper time and places. Let us still continue to study the
possibilities of the branch line.
The other day I chanced to travel upon a certain small brisk railroad that
runs across a middle western state. In my lap was a time card of that line
and I was idly following it as we went upon our way. Halfway down the long
column of town-names, I saw a change. In other days a passenger for the
enterprising county shiretown of Caliph had been compelled to alight at
the small junction point known as East Caliph and there take a very small
and very dirty little train for three miles, which finally left him at a
clump of willows by a brookside--a full dozen hot and dusty blocks from
the courthouse square which marks the geographical and commercial center
of Caliph.
That branch-line train has disappeared. In its place a line on a time card
reads "automobile service to Caliph," and at the junction I saw a
seven-passenger touring car with the initials of the railroad upon its
tonneau doors. The motor bus takes you to the door of Caliph's chief
hotel, which faces that same courthouse square. The branch is unused,
except for occasional switching. There is no expense of keeping it up to
the requirements of passenger traffic, nor of maintaining a passenger
station. The hotel serves as this last and at far less expense. And the
cost of running the automobile over three miles of excellent highway is
far cheaper than that of running a railroad train. The chauffeur is an
entirely competent conductor and ticket-taker. And between passenger runs
he can be used to carry the express and baggage on a motor truck. His own
opportunities for development are fairly generous.
* * * * *
Recently the automobile has been placed upon the railroad rails--with
astonishing results as to both efficiency and economy. I saw one of these,
not long ago, working on a small railroad running from the Columbia River
up to the base of Mount Hood. The superintendent of that railroad--he
likewise was its agent, conductor, dispatcher, engineering expert, and
chief traffic solicitor--had purchased a large "rubberneck" automobile,
had substituted railroad flange wheels for the rubber-tired highway
wheels, and was not only saving money for his property but also giving
much pleasure to his patrons. A ride in a dirty, antiquated, second-hand
coach behind a smoky, cindery locomotive is hardly to be compared with one
in a clean, swift automobile, riding in the smooth ease of steel rails. So
successful had the experiment proven that he was having a closed
automobile made for winter service upon his railroad--with a tiny
compartment for the baggage, the mail, and the express.
A series of interesting experiments conducted by the army along the
Mexican border recently showed another way in which the motor truck could
well be made an active ally and agent of the railroad. Special T-rail
wheel flanges were designed to fit outside of the heavy rubber tires that
carry the cars over highways. It is the work of a very few minutes to slip
these steel flanges on or off the wheels. Which means that the motor truck
may follow the lines of the railroad as far as it leads, giving many more
miles of performance for each gallon of gasoline consumed; and then, when
the rails end in the sand and sagebrush, may strike off for itself across
the country in any direction.
[Illustration: THE MOTOR-CAR UPON THE STEEL HIGHWAY
How much better this than the smoky, dirty cars of yester-year!]
[Illustration: THE ADAPTABLE MOTOR-TRACTOR
Equipped with flange wheels and hitched to a flat-car train on a logging
railroad, it makes a bully motor-truck of real hauling capacity.]
These ideas may seem visionary--advanced, perhaps. They are nothing of the
kind. They are new, but they do represent the practical working of the
great opportunity in branch-line railroading. And the gasoline-propelled
unit railroad coach is no longer visionary, no longer even to be
classed as a mere novelty. This adaptation of the automobile idea in the
form of a single gasoline-propelled car, which combines baggage and
express and smoking and day-coach compartments in an efficient
compactness, has been a tremendous help to many railroads on their
branch-line problems. These cars require a crew of but three men against a
minimum crew of five men on the old-style steam train for branch-line
service. They are clean and they are fast. And they have aided many
railroads to increase their branch-line operation without increasing their
operating cost--in many cases making actual savings. It is well for the
big men who own and operate the steam railroad to remember that no matter
how rapid may be the spread of the automobile or how permanent its
extensive use, there will always be a large class of travel-hungry folk
who must ride upon some form of railroad. There are people who, if
financially capable of owning a car, are incapable of running it, and
cannot afford a chauffeur. And the difficulties of owning an automobile
increase greatly when one comes to live in the larger cities. The local
line situation is not nearly as bad as it looks at first glimpse. There is
a business for it if the railroader will devote himself carefully to its
cultivation. Remember that in many cases he has sought so long for the
larger profits of long-distance business between the big cities that he
has rather overlooked the smaller, sure profits of the local lines. And it
is interesting to know that the railroad of the Middle West which
concededly maintains the finest local service is the one road that made no
active appearance in a recent hearing in which the roads of its territory
sought increased passenger rates. Despite the fact that many of its
competitors have said that its local service is expensive and generous to
an unwarranted degree, it found that its net profits on its passenger
earnings were proportionately higher than those on its freight!
This road runs parlor cars upon almost all of its local trains, sleeping
cars where there is even a possibility of their getting traffic. A big
eastern road has just begun to follow this parlor-car practice. It builds
and maintains its own cars. There are no expensive patent rights to be
secured in the making of a parlor car. A double row of comfortable wicker
or upholstered chairs, a carpet, lavatory facilities, and a good-humored
porter will do the trick. And the train and the road upon which such a
simple, cleanly car travels at once gains a new prestige. In an age when
travel demands a private bath with every hotel room, a manicure with the
haircut, and a taxicab to and from the station, a parlor car is more of a
necessity than a luxury. And it is surprising to notice its earning
possibilities upon even the simplest of branch lines or on one local
train.
* * * * *
One thing more--a rather intimately related thing, if you please. We have
spoken of the railroad automobile which runs up the public highway from
East Caliph to Caliph and return. Let us consider that particular form of
transportation service of the automobile in still another light. A man who
went up into one of the great national parks on the very backbone of the
United States this last summer was tremendously impressed with both the
beauty and the accessibility of the place. The one thing was supplemental
to the other. This man was impressed by still another thing, however.
The railroad which had brought him to a certain fine and growing city at
the base of the mountains--a most excellent and well-operated railroad it
chanced to be--had a branch line which ran much closer to the national
park, upon which it was spending many thousands of dollars in advertising,
both generously and intelligently. In other days park visitors took this
branch--four-in-hands or carriages from its terminal for the thirty-mile
run up through the canyon and into the heart of the park. With the coming
of the automobile all this was changed. The motor car quickly supplanted
the old-time carriages, even the four-in-hands themselves. In a short time
it was running from the big city below the base of the mountains and the
railroad was taking off one of its two daily trains upon the branch in
each direction. Then, after only a little longer time, it was making a
truce with its new competitor--so that its through tickets might be used,
in one direction at least, upon the motor cars.
An excellent idea, you say. Perhaps. But I know a better one.
This same man rode last summer upon one of those motor vehicles all the
way from the big city up into the heart of the park--some seventy miles
all told. He is a man who owns an excellent touring car at his home--back
East. Perhaps that is the reason why he did not enjoy this run out in the
West. For the car on which he rode was a truck-chassis upon which had
been builded a cross-seat body, with accommodations for some fifteen or
sixteen passengers. It was the only practical way in which a motor vehicle
could be built in order to compete with the railroad at its established
rates of fare. Yet he did not enjoy the run, at least not until they were
across the long forty-mile stretch of plains and up into the foothills of
the Rockies. And then he and his were a little too tired by the slow, if
steady, progress of the low-geared truck-chassis, to really have the
keenest enjoyment of the glorious park entrance.
The point of all this is that the railroad which owns and operates that
branch line ought also to own those excellently managed motor routes that
radiate from its terminals through one of the loveliest and most rapidly
growing playgrounds in all western America--perhaps own and operate a
chain of its own hotels as well. It would gain not only prestige by so
doing, but traffic as well. For back of its own advertising of the charms
of that superior place it would set the guaranty of its name, of its
long-established reputation for handling passengers well.
There are plenty of places in the United States where this may be
done--and done today. The Southern Pacific is widely advertising a motor
route through the Apache country and the Salt River valley of Arizona and
in connection with its southern main stem between El Paso and Los Angeles.
The success of its radical traffic step on its part may yet lead it to a
correlation with its service of many wonderful motor runs over those
superb roads of California, as well. Similar opportunities are open to the
Burlington, the Milwaukee, the Union Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande,
the Great Northern--all of them railroads not ordinarily blind to traffic
opportunities of any sort whatsoever.
In the East, the Boston and Maine, the Maine Central, and the Central
Vermont railroads are confronted with dozens of such possibilities of
developing through supplemental motor routes in the White Mountains and
the Green Mountains; the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the Alleghenies
should be filled with opportunities for the Delaware and Hudson, the New
York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Chesapeake
and Ohio railroads. To establish such routes only needs a few things--the
detailed and detached attention of an alert young traffic man, with his
nose well above conventions and precedents, working with a man schooled in
the operation of motor vehicles upon a large scale. To this partnership
add a competent advertising man, give a little money at the outset--and
the trick will be turned. And I am confident that if it be well turned,
the railroad will never wish to turn back again.