MAKING TRAFFIC
ENTICING SETTLERS TO THE VIRGIN LANDS OF THE WEST--EMIGRATION
BUREAUS--RAILWAYS EXTENDED FOR THE BENEFIT OF EMIGRANTS--THE FIRST
CONTINUOUS RAILROAD ACROSS THE AMERICAN CONTINENT--CAMPAIGNS FOR
DEVELOPING SPARSELY SETTLED PLACES IN THE WEST--UNPROFITABLE BRANCH
RAILROADS IN THE EAST--DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC FARMING--IMPROVED
FARMS ARE TRAFFIC-MAKERS--NEW FACTORIES BEING OPENED--HOW RAILROAD
MANAGERS HAVE DEVELOPED ATLANTIC CITY.
Your railroad manager of other days was content with the traffic that was
offered him--if indeed he deigned to accept it all. For those were the
business methods that obtained everywhere in the other days. When
competition became the moving force in modern business, the railroad felt
it. The land had become gridironed with tracks; business did not offer
itself so freely as it had at the outset. When there came a division
between routes of a traffic that had formerly belonged to a single route,
earnings fell away and stockholders began to ask uncomfortable questions
of the men who operated their railroad properties. Then the fight for
business began--at first, as we have already seen, by a lively rivalry
which showed itself in a merciless slashing of rates. Such fighting
methods reacted on the railroads, and their rate-sheets became code and
law, only a little less holy than the Federal Constitution, long before
the Interstate Commerce Commission exerted its beneficent paternalism over
the railroads of the land. But with the rates equalized between the
railroads, the competition remained. The one obvious solution of the
situation which was left was put into effect. The railroads began to make
traffic.
The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed
branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized
business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads
had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the
Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along
those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an
unpopulated country would never be any great "shakes" of a railroad until
people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to
Chicago--afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern--the
Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration
bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities
of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition
that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even
those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these
same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they
accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those
days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war
the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who
had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them
with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and
struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and
so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes
again.
At the close of the war these tides rose to flood. The railroads no longer
struggled. There was a steady flow of traffic over their rails, and they
were able because of it to engage capital to stretch their rails a little
farther west. After they had moved another stretch, the tides of
emigration still flowed. That process might have gone ahead in orderly
fashion until the Pacific had been reached, if the scheme had not been
upset.
They built too many railroads, they overworked their idea. In the broad
reaches of the Middle West, lines of steel crumbled into rust, and
cross-roads dreamed vainly that they would become villages. Many a
struggling village failed to become the city that her enthusiastic
residents had fancied. They had the big boom in Kansas, and the bigger
collapse that followed. After that, folk stayed East for a while, and the
business of making traffic in that territory became an advanced science.
There was another factor in the situation. You will remember that the
Summer of '69 saw the first continuous railroad across the American
continent--the combination of Central Pacific and Union Pacific. The huge
success of that railroad was inspiration for others. In the generation of
men that followed the rails that reached from Atlantic to Pacific were
multiplied. After that there was a new problem for the owners of the
transcontinental railroads. Their statistical charts of originating
traffic showed great black masses at either end of the line--where
connections were made with the great traffic-bringers from the East, and
where the rails ran upon the docks of the Pacific shore. Between those two
points was a thin black line, like spider-thread. To make that line black
and firm at all points, to bring masses of new traffic at intermediate
points, was the demand that the railroad-owner made of his
traffic-manager.
It is being done to-day. It has taken time, money and almost incredible
patience; but it is being done. This is a broad land, and there is still
much to be done. In Montana, there is a single county with an area
exceeding that of Maryland and a population less than that of the smallest
ward of Baltimore; and near-by there is another county, as large as
Delaware and Connecticut combined, with mere handful of residents. These
are typical. There are great open stretches to the southwest; and the
Santa Fe, working hand in hand with the Harriman lines, is busy populating
and developing these. In the North Country, James J. Hill's railroads and
the new outstretched arm of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul are doing
much to exploit the unfarmed lands of Montana, and the intensive
possibilities of Washington for fruit-raising, market-gardening and the
like. Up and down the Pacific coast, the railroads are uniting in similar
campaigns of development.
Hill began the campaign in Montana. He is a dreamer and a far-seer. When
he began making presents of blooded bulls to the farmers out along the
Great Northern, folk laughed at him, some of his directors thought that he
had gone crazy. They thought differently when they knew the results, when
they got the traffic reports of the cattle business that was growing along
the line.
That thing was typical. The railroad--Hill's railroad and all the other
big transcontinentals--lent itself to the fine development of all the
traffic that might possibly be obtained within its territory. Heretofore
it had roughly combed traffic possibilities, now it began to screen them
with a fine mesh screen. The emigrant bureau did its part of the work; the
railroad went further and set itself to develop every inch of available
land along its lines. Attractive excursions brought settlers to the new
country, the railroad was of practical assistance in finding locations for
them. Everything is being brought toward the development of those great
new States of the West: cross-roads are beginning to become villages;
villages, cities. A little time before his death, Mr. Harriman announced
that there would be four great cities spread across the American
continent--New York, Chicago, Salt Lake, and San Francisco. He then took
it upon his own rather roomy shoulders to make Salt Lake City worthy of a
place in the file.
From this activity in the West, the Eastern railroads have stolen a
lesson. Originally built in many cases to serve the needs of the farmers
of some particular locality, they have become merged and welded in a way
that has caused them to serve the industrial interests of the country more
particularly than the agricultural. One of the valuable old properties of
the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey rejoices in the name of Freehold
and Jamesburg Agricultural Railroad.
When, after the serious slump in traffic that followed the panic in 1907,
the railroads of the East found themselves, for the first time in a
decade, with more facilities than freight, they began to cultivate more
carefully the traffic branch of transportation science. They took quite
readily to the lesson that the transcontinentals gave them. Then they
proceeded to put it into effect in practical fashion.
For some years past the problem of the unimportant branches has been a
serious one with the big Eastern systems. These branches, many of them
once profitable feeders, have been allowed to deteriorate and retrograde,
while main-line traffic developed and increased under active conditions of
competition. The little towns along the branches seemed to retrograde too;
while the busy cities of the country, strung along the main lines of the
railroad, absorbed new growth and new energy. Sometimes the branch lines
were paralleled by interurban electric railroads, which were able to
operate at far less cost than steam railroads, and consequently to charge
lower rates of fare; and their slight passenger traffic continued to grow
lighter. The freight traffic had long since dwindled to slim proportions;
the branch lines were almost entirely agricultural railroads; and the
farmers of the East were discouraged and disheartened.
The new movement began in Western New York, which is fairly gridironed
with a network of these unprofitable branch railroads. It was started even
before the panic of 1907. New York State, with its great resources and
its fat treasury, has long been engaged in the development of scientific
farming--which means farming for the largest profit that can be brought
from the soil. It has a great agricultural school as a part of Cornell
University, and an interesting experimental school along similar lines at
Geneva. These schools have done a great work. They have educated young men
to be modern farmers, in every sense of that phrase; and they have sent
leaflets to every corner of the Empire State. But even these methods were
not far-reaching enough. It is not every farmer's boy in these days who
can afford to go down to Ithaca for a college education in the tilling of
the soil; few of the older men care to mingle with the boys at such an
institution. Even the pamphlets sent out from Geneva were not sufficient.
So when the railroads, seeking to make traffic in a dull time and to
rehabilitate their branches in the farming districts, made alliance with
the agricultural schools, special trains were sent out into the farming
districts, and these trains carried a competent corps of instructors from
the schools. Day coaches made good school-rooms for the itinerant
institutions; and a baggage-car, filled with specimens of fruit and grains
grown under scientific methods, was generally attached. The Western roads
had used similar trains with success in building up their virgin
territories. The use of the scientific schools in connection was the
Eastern adaptation of the idea.
A train of this sort will "make" half a dozen towns in the course of a
day. The towns are not far apart, and the schedule generally permits a
stop of about an hour in each. The coming of the "farmers' special" has
been thoroughly announced by handbills, posters, and the local newspapers.
Whether the day be wet or fair, the appreciation of the enterprise that
started the special out is sure to be manifest in a crowd that packs the
day-coaches and not infrequently causes overflow meetings to be held
from the rear platform of the train.
[Illustration: IN THE FAR WEST THE FARM-TRAIN HAS LONG SINCE COME INTO ITS
OWN]
[Illustration: "EVEN IN NEW YORK STATE THE INTEREST IN THESE ITINERANT
AGRICULTURAL SCHOOLS IS KEEN, INDEED"]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE DAIRY DEMONSTRATION CAR OF AN AGRICULTURAL
TRAIN]
There is no cause for disheartenment in the soul of the farmer after he
has been down to the train. He learns the things that his land is capable
of and yet has never reared for him. Take the perennial and hardy alfalfa,
for instance. Crowd into the car, where a hundred earnest men from the
country-side are gathered and listening to the man from the State
Agricultural College, who talks on it.
"An acre of good alfalfa," he is saying, "produces twice as much
digestible nutriment as an acre of good clover. It is therefore profitable
to our farmers to make every effort to establish alfalfa fields. Your
climate is favorable to alfalfa, which can be grown on a variety of soils.
The most favorable is a gravelly loam with a porous sub-soil. There must
be drainage, fertility, lime, and inoculation. Alfalfa is a lime-loving
plant, and if you haven't a limy soil, apply lime at the rate of one to
two thousand pounds per acre. These figures will be given you in a
pamphlet as you leave the car."
And so it goes. If the train is in one of the great fruit-growing
districts of western New York, fruit is the theme of the lecturers. There
is no product that the soil may give, directly or indirectly, that is too
humble for the attention of the farmers' special. All the roads in Western
New York have taken part in the campaign--the New York Central, the Erie,
the Lehigh Valley, and the smaller roads have sent out the train over the
lines, each in due turn.
The idea has gone into the Middle West and back to Pennsylvania. The
Pennsylvania Railroad, which creates traffic from every conceivable
source, has operated since November, 1908, four agricultural specials and
two fruit-tree and shrubbery specials. The agricultural schools of the
great territory it traverses have furnished the lecturers and the
material. Now it is preparing to establish down in the Eastern Shore
country between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, a development
farm, in which it will show the farmers of that agricultural district the
greatest use that they can make of their land, the greatest results that
it can be brought to yield. It has gone down into the sandy southern part
of New Jersey and made the potato crop for New York and for Philadelphia
into a vast yield,--a profit both for the farmer and for the railroad
which has created the traffic.
* * * * *
The first of these development farms in the East was that established by
H. B. Fullerton, under the auspices of the Long Island Railroad, at Wading
River, N. Y. The Long Island possesses a territory that particularly needs
development of that sort. It has a good suburban territory adjacent to New
York City, but after that there is not a town of importance the entire
length of its lines. There is no manufacturing of consequence out upon its
line and it has been driven to the necessity of making traffic.
Fullerton's Farm is another traffic-maker by educational process. He has
taken the worst of the sandy soil that makes thousands of acres at the
east end of the Island, and he has created from it a model farm. The farm
has had to pay its way. It has not been nurtured under any extensive
appropriations from the railroad, but it has had to win its success under
the same conditions that would confront the farmer who measured his
capital in hundreds, rather than in thousands of dollars. It is teaching
the lesson that it has sought to teach. Arid soil, on the very hearthstone
of a metropolitan city, is being given over to profitable truck-farming;
and the Long Island Railroad for its modest farm investment is beginning
to harvest appreciable traffic returns.
The New York Central, under the guidance of its president, W. C. Brown,
who is keenly interested in the revival of farming in the East, and who
personally directed the operation of the "farm specials" over its lines,
has purchased two demonstration farms--one in Central, the other in
Western New York. It has hired a competent farmer to have charge of
them--T. E. Martin, of West Rush, who made a famous record for himself in
growing 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre on land that had never before
grown more than sixty. They will also serve as object lessons, and when
they have been developed to their capacity, they will be sold at a far
higher price than the song for which they were purchased in rundown
condition. The proceeds will be turned over to the purchase and
development of neglected acres in other sections along the lines of that
system.
The New York Central is also making its own special development of the
"farm special" idea, by taking two coaches and making them into
"agricultural cars" at its West Albany shops. These cars will not run
sporadically on special trains but will be in use the entire year round,
being dropped at one little town after another for a day or two days or
three days, in order that the farmers from the surrounding district may
drop in to receive a little practical information.
Through the schools of a number of corn-growing States, into which this
work has spread, boys and girls are being stimulated by prizes to plant
little patches of corn. Out of each community where such an exhibit is
held, ten prize-winning ears are sent to the country fair. From this the
best ten ears are sent to the State fair, and interstate competition is
already being developed.
There is another side to this. The railroads are making more than a new
traffic for themselves, they are making a new wealth for the communities
through which their rails are stretched. It has been estimated by a
Pennsylvania agronomist that the value of the staple farm crops in the
Keystone State in a single year exceeds $170,000,000; and that some
224,000 farmers entered into this production. If by training and
education each of these farmers can increase his yield of corn one bushel
to the acre, the additional corn revenue from that one State would be
$1,044,000. Further than that, he says that $780,000 would roll into the
pockets of these farmers if they would choose their seed corn carefully
and thus add ten kernels to each ear of corn grown by them in the course
of a twelvemonth. That sort of thing looks like a cooperative benefit from
almost any angle from which you may view it.
The Rock Island Railroad has begun to preach dry farming down through the
Southwest. Wheat six feet in length is exhibited by that railroad in its
offices throughout the East as sample of what the farmers in its territory
do, under its help and supervision. That sort of thing silently makes
traffic every day in the year. It is worth a dozen times what it costs the
railroad.
But the railroad is not confining its efforts at making traffic to the
products of the soil. What is good method with the farmer is similarly
good method with the manufacturer. So you now see the railroads, east and
west, working with the aid of industrial commissioners. The industrial
commissioner is like a High Minister of Commerce.
Take, for instance, a typical railroad running from New York to Chicago.
It has ample docks upon the sea board, extensive ramifications within the
coal-mining districts; in the West it taps both the Great Lakes and the
transcontinentals, which reach across the land to the Pacific. In all this
district it is under hard competition, gaining its traffic--every ton of
it--by the sweat of the general traffic-manager's brow. That railroad has
its Industrial Commissioner, and if you are a prospective manufacturer
looking for a site for a new plant, you are sure to come to him. You tell
him that you want to build a factory. He tilts back his chair and looks at
you easily.
"What kind of a factory?" he asks. "We've room for 10,000 more along our
rails. If it's a silk mill I can suggest Paterson, where the help is
trained, and the dyes and raw materials handy. If you are going to turn
out a steel product somewhere in the Pittsburgh district, Youngstown,
Ohio, is the most economical point in the United States to-day for the
turning out of finished steel. Perhaps yours is a canning factory," he
laughs. "If you want to can fruit we can fix you out up in Western New
York among the orchards; if you want to can tomatoes, well, sir, there is
nothing like Indiana for tomatoes."
You specify your new business and its requirements in some detail. The eye
of this practical Minister of Commerce illumines.
"I have the very thing you want," he says, without hesitation. "Over at
W----, just half a mile above the city limits along the river. It has
siding facilities." (You may be fairly certain that the siding facilities
give chief access to the railroad that employs this particular
Commissioner.) "And you say you want fresh water. Well, there's five
thousand gallons a day of the purest soft water in the East for you."
His eyes shine with enthusiasm. He reaches for his paper block and the
next instant he is sketching the plot for you with remarkable accuracy,
and with a similitude of scale. Here is the river and there is where you
can build your dam. Over there is the main line of the best railroad in
America (he leaves no doubt in your mind as to that); and your siding can
go in there with less than a quarter of one per cent grade. The highroad
is there, and close by it the trolley leading into town.
"They've a surplus of help of the kind you want in W----," he adds.
"You'll never run short of hands there."
It sounds good, and within a week you are bound to W---- with him to meet
the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. If things are as he has
represented them to you, and your mind is unbiased, you build your
factory, and the railroad picks up 200 tons a day off your siding. That
single transaction has been worth the Commissioner's salary for a year to
it. There is a variety of method in making traffic.
* * * * *
The general passenger agent has to keep his end up. Any G. P. A. of to-day
found entertaining the old-fashioned idea that the traffic that flows of
its own volition up to the ticket-wickets is going to be sufficient to
satisfy his employers is out of present-day development. The general
passenger agent who gets patted on the back nowadays is the man who goes
to the president in a dull season with a sheet showing gains over a
preceding busy season. He may have to bring water from stones to increase
that tide of traffic, but it must be increased. There are no two ways
about what is expected of him.
So he gets out, like the traffic people from the freight end of the
railroad, and he keeps in constant touch with his territory, with the
towns along the line and the agents who are working under him. If he is
instrumental in locating a big convention at some point where his line
will receive the lion's share of the business, that is a good trick and
worth while. A lively convention will do a lot toward bracing up a weak
passenger sheet in some dull month.
One railroad reaching out of New York into the mountains at the
northeastern corner of that State and losing itself at some obscure town,
a railroad without valuable connections and ramifications, has made its
passenger business a little gold-mine by scientific nurturing. It sent its
passenger representatives up into the country towns, and they sought to
improve conditions of every sort there. They started agitation for better
roads from the railroad into the uplands where city folk were prone to
wander; they helped the boarding-house landlord and the country
hotel-keeper to bring their facilities up to attractive standards. In some
cases they induced capital to come in and build new hotels. In every case
they offered free space in the railroad's summer resort literature.
Under a single general passenger agent pursuing such a campaign
unflaggingly the passenger receipts of that small railroad increased 125
per cent in eight years!
[Illustration: THE FAMOUS THOMAS VIADUCT, ON THE BALTIMORE & OHIO AT
RELAY, MD., BUILT BY B. H. LATROBE IN 1835, AND STILL IN USE]
[Illustration: THE HISTORIC STARUCCA VIADUCT UPON THE ERIE]
[Illustration: THE CYLINDERS OF THE DELAWARE & HUDSON MALLET]
[Illustration: THE INTERIOR OF THIS GASOLINE-MOTOR-CAR ON THE UNION
PACIFIC PRESENTS A MOST UNUSUAL EFFECT, YET A MAXIMUM OF VIEW OF THE OUTER
WORLD]
Take the case of Atlantic City. That town used to be a collection of
wooden hotels, set along a sandy, pleasant beach, which were content with
six or eight weeks of good business in midsummer. The railroads that
stretched their rails down to it registered good earnings during that hot
season, and they had to put in extensive plants to handle that six or
eight weeks of heavy traffic. The extensive--and expensive--plants were
idle a great part of the year, and there was a lot of capital wasted. The
managers of the railroads told the summer hotel proprietors that, and
asked why beach property should be a losing investment ten months out of
the year. That was a new sort of proposition for a summer resort hotel
proprietor but it seemed sound argument and the hotels extended their
seasons at either end. They combined with the railroads in making
attractive special rates for these duller parts of the season, and before
long the spring was well nigh as popular and as profitable as midsummer.
Folk came over from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and up from Baltimore and
Washington, to spend their summers at Atlantic City, and the scientific
business-making there created a fashionable season for Northerners from
Easter forward. The building of wooden hotels ceased, and fireproof
structures of brick and stone, steel and concrete, began to rise along the
beach. Capital ceased to lie idle at Atlantic City. The hotels began to
keep open the year around, and the scientific method of the biggest of the
railroads had been so effectual that it built a million-dollar bridge
across the Delaware at Philadelphia to handle through traffic down to
Atlantic City.
Still the railroads worked in harmony with the hotels, and the fashionable
season began at Christmas instead of Easter. Before long they will make
the fall fashionable, and then the hotels will be crowded all the year
round. When there is a lull in the season they bring on half a dozen
conventions and fill the trains and the hotels with the delegates. That
Atlantic City plant does not lie idle much of the time. There are nearly
800 hotels there to-day--more than fifty of them huge structures--and on a
busy day 300,000 people are along the famous boardwalk above the beach. In
dull days the big hotels are comfortably filled. The hotel men have made
fortunes, the railroads have added millions of dollars to their passenger
earnings because of Atlantic City.
There you have the best example of this new creed of the practical
railroader--making traffic. It is not a lost example. Across the land
every city and town, every resort, from the haughty spa with a cluster of
brilliant hotels down to the humblest inn that ever cuddled by the shore
of a silvery lake, is taking notice of the creed. The farmer is bending
himself to increase the yield of his land, while the railroad reaps a
benefit. The marketman from town is reaching out for better sources for
his needs; the railroad helps him and reaps a benefit. The resort hotel
arranges a joint rate and ticket with the railroad, which covers both
transportation and board for a "week-end" in the dull season, and the
passenger receipts are swelled in some degree.
That is what the railroader calls making traffic.