: The Railroad Problem by Hungerford Edward - Railroads United States; Railroads United States Employees

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l consists of commuters, commercial travelers, men on business trips, and persons traveling for pleasure; in proportion about in the order I have given them. If these figures show anything, they show that the great bulk of our passenger mileage is used by a class which we may call constant travelers. I believe that it is a reasonably safe assumption that at least four-fifths of the 35,000,000,000 passenger-miles made last year were used by this class of travel, probably representing less than 10,000,000 of the population of the country. This same 35,000,000,000 of passenger-miles distributed equally among our entire population produces 357 passenger-miles per individual.

"I myself have always maintained that the passenger revenues of our railroads do not render their proportion of the cost of operation. The Interstate Commerce Commission has upheld the same contention, as anyone can see by its recent decision granting increases in passenger rates proportionately much higher than the increases in freight rates. These figures of mine show how a privileged class, representing ten per cent, or, at the widest calculation, not more than twenty per cent of the population, have been receiving transportation at far less than the actual cost; while the remaining ninety per cent of the citizens of the United States have paid the freight--literally."

The railroader's figures are interesting--to say the least. And we must assume that he has not forgotten the fact that there is one great economic difference between the freight and the passenger traffic. The one must move, and, save in the few cases where waterborne traffic competes, move by rail; a large part of the other is shy and must be induced. If this were not true the big railroads would be advertising for freight business as steadily and as strongly as they advertise for passengers. Of course a large proportion of folk travel because necessity so compels, yet there is a goodly proportion, a proportion to be translated into many thousands of dollars, who travel upon the railroad because the price is low enough to appeal to their bargain-sense. In this great class must always be included the excursionists of every class. These folk must be lured by attractive rates. And as a class they are particularly susceptible just now to the charms of the railroad's great new competitor--the automobile.

It was only two or three years ago that the round-trip ticket at considerably less than the cost of two single-trip tickets and the twenty-dollar mileage book, entitling the bearer to 1,000 miles of transportation, prevailed in the eastern and more closely populated portion of the United States. The price of the mileage book was raised to .50. Within a short time it is likely to go to . And there are shrewd traffic men among the railroad executives of the country who today say that within twenty years it will cost five cents a mile to ride upon the railroad--as against an average fare of two and a half cents today. And I do not think that, in view of the advances in cost--as well as that great necessity in making good that loss in both physical and human equipment, to which I have already referred--the public will make any large protest. The average man does not wish to ride upon a railroad that is neglecting either its property or its employees. He is willing to pay a larger price for his transportation if only he is assured that this larger price is going to make his travel more safe and more comfortable in every way.

Therefore I do not think that it is going to be very hard for the railroads to gain necessary advances in fares--particularly if they will not forget one big thing. The success of the Twentieth Century Limited and the other trains of its class ought not to be lost upon the railroader. With service he can trade for increased rates. There are many large opportunities for the railroad along these lines, in both freight and passenger service. A progressive desire to enter into these opportunities will probably bring the railroad many of the advances that it so sorely needs. And I am not sure but that such a spirit would also do much toward securing for it the very necessary unification of regulation--not alone of its income but also of its outgo--that it so earnestly seeks at the present time.

REGULATION

At the time that these lines are being written the railroads of the United States are entering a veritable no man's land. The ponderous Newlands committee of Congress has begun its hearing and accomplished little; so little that it has asked and received an extension of time of nearly eleven months in which to go into the entire question more thoroughly. We all hope it does. The Adamson bill, establishing the so-called eight-hour day for certain favored classes of railroad employees, is statute, but its constitutionality is yet to be established. And the railroads are preparing to fight it, in its present form, and to the bitter end. General sympathy seems to be with them; it is quite probable that even the four brotherhoods that fought for the measure--unlike the Pears Soap boy--are not quite happy now that they have received it.

In the midst of all this confusion President Wilson, assured of a second term of office and so of a reasonable opportunity to try to put a concrete plan into effect, has emerged with his definite program, not radically different from that which he evolved last August at the time of the biggest of all crises between the railroads and their labor, but which was warped and disfigured until its own father might not know it. His plan, as now is generally known, provides not alone for the eight-hour day for all classes of railroad employees, but includes the most important feature of compulsory arbitration referred to in an earlier chapter.

It now looks as if the United States was upon the threshold of the eight-hour day--in many, many forms of its industrial life. I believe that, in his heart, the average railroader--executive or employee--favors it, fairly and honestly and efficiently applied. It has been charged as the first large step forward toward the government operation of our railroads, yet I cannot see it as nearly as large a step as the extension of the maximum weight of packages entrusted to the parcel post, a system which if further extended--and apparently both legally and logically extended--might enable a man to go up to Scranton and place enough postage stamps upon the sides of a carload of coal to send it to his factory siding at tidewater. Compared with this the eight-hour day is as nothing as a step toward government operation or ownership. A genuine eight-hour day is, of course, a long step toward the nationalization of our railroads--quite a different matter, if you please.

President Wilson's entire plan, as it has already been briefly outlined, forms a very definite step toward such nationalization. It at once supersedes the indefinite quality of the Newlands committee hearings--no more indefinite at that than the average hearing of a legislative committee. When the Wilson plan has been adopted, fully and squarely and honestly, either by this Congress or by the next, it will then be the order of the day to take up some of the next steps, not so much, perhaps, toward the nationalization of our railroads as toward the further bettering of their efficiency and their broadening to take advantage of some of their great latent opportunities as carriers of men and of goods.

The men who control our railroads today look forward to such a definite program with hope, but not without some misgivings. For, after all, we are by no means nationally efficient, and there seems to be a wide gulf between the making of our economic plans and their execution. No wonder, then, that the railroads are dubious. They are uncertain. They have been advised and threatened and legislated and regulated until they are in a sea of confusion, with apparently no port ahead. The extent of the confusion is indicated not alone by their failure to handle the traffic that has come pouring in upon them in the last days of the most active industrial period that America ever has known, but by the failure of their securities to appeal to the average investor--a statement which is easily corroborated by a study of recent Wall Street reports. And what would be a bad enough situation at the best has been, of course, vastly complicated by the labor situation.

We already have reviewed some of the salient features of that situation; we have seen, of organized labor, the engineer and the conductor at work; and of unorganized labor, the section-boss and the station agent. We have seen the equality of their work and the inequality of their wage. It is futile now to attempt to discuss what might have happened if the pay envelopes of all these four typical classes of railroad employees had been kept nearer parity. As a matter of fact the disagreeable and threatening situation between the railroads and the employees of their four brotherhoods is largely of their own making. If, in the past, the railroads had done either one of two things there probably would be no strike threats today, no Adamson legislation, no president of the United States placed even temporarily in an embarrassing and somewhat humiliating position. The railroads, in the succession of "crises," as we have already studied them, must have foreseen the inevitable coming of the present situation. They could have fought a strike--and perhaps won it--at any time better in the past than at the present. The brotherhoods have gained strength and the efficiency of unison more rapidly than the railroads. And even if the railroads at some time in the past had fought the issue and lost it, they at least would have had the satisfaction of having fought a good fight and an honest one. Institutions are builded quite as frequently on defeats as upon successes.

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