Why was this simple step not taken? Why not the large capital outlay saved? Competition. The Atlantic Coast Line felt that it could not have its trains entering and leaving the same station as its competitor in Richmond, even though it is doing that selfsame thing in Charleston, in Savannah, and in Jacksonville. Competition; competition and a little foolish pride.
"Pride; but not foolish," says the big railroad executive, who stands at my elbow and whose eyes fall upon these paragraphs. "It is this sort of pride, the pride built up from competition, that long ago brought our American railroads to their high standards of service perfection."
A pretty theory that, but will it last? What is the actual competition to-day between, let us say, New York and Chicago? They are two first-grade railroads of the highest type connecting these two chief cities of the United States and four more, of a second grade, yet in themselves quite excellent railroads. On each of the two first-grade roads there are five or six fine express-trains in each direction each day. Long ago we have seen in the pages of this book how each has one train making the journey in precisely twenty hours, to the exact minute, and how formerly these trains did the trip in eighteen hours, also to the precise minute. After the wise step of the lengthening of the schedules, these two American "super-trains"--I think that I may safely call them such--remained exactly the same on the two supposedly competing roads, despite the fact that the distance between New York and Chicago on the one is 911 miles and on the other 979. Why does not the Pennsylvania with its shorter route beat the New York Central on its schedules all the while? Is it because its mountain ranges take so much longer to traverse than the much advertised "water-level route" of the Vanderbilt system? Possibly, but I doubt it.
The real reason is that the schedules of all these so-called competing trains are regulated by agreement between the so-called competing roads. There is a multiplicity of these agreements. The Pennsylvania has its own rails between New York and Buffalo, the two chief terminals of the original New York Central road, but it may not advertise to carry through passengers between these two cities, in exchange for which the New York Central will not advertise to carry through passengers on its own rails between New York and Pittsburg, the two chief terminals of the original Pennsylvania.
