It is but fair to add that it probably is well that many of these short-line roads and little branches of the bigger roads should be abandoned. A considerable number of them never should have been built in the first place. But others that have gone and are going are essential to their communities. And these should be saved.
They can be saved. They can be made profitable, even against the inroads of the motor-truck.
There grew up in the later days of the World War--when, as we have seen, traffic congestion upon our railroads came close to the breaking point--a demand that the motor-truck, still an infant toy, come into the breach. It came and, I think, saved the day--gloriously, as the novelists always like to put it. We saw the day when the much-advertised Lincoln highway, not only from New York to Philadelphia but for several hundred miles further west, was crowded with emergency freight traffic, some of it fairly long-haul traffic. So were the other important highways not only of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but of New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts and a half-dozen other States as well--as the pleasure motorist of to-day, picking his way around and past the holes and ruts made by the war-time motor-traffic, very well knows. In the flush of that traffic problem many wondrous new motor-freight routes were established. Some of them were planned elaborately. A tire-maker in Akron, finding it next to impossible to get any prompt service to his branches and his patrons in New England, instituted a motor-truck service for the 900-odd miles over to Boston, laid down a schedule for the six-day trip, and then lived up to it, summer and winter, with a precision that few American freight or passenger-trains had made for many and many a month before. Some enthusiasts, with this practical example as a text, let their fancies fly to the fullest extent. They shouted for the long-distance hauls. In fact it was said not more than two or three years ago that four or five years would see regular motor-truck fast freights established from New York or Boston to points as far distant as Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City.
To-day we know that these were flights of fancy. Out of a dozen through motor-truck routes established for the ninety-mile run between New York and Philadelphia, only a very few have survived until to-day. The same proportion holds true elsewhere in the more congested sections of the land, particularly those sections subject to the ravages of a hard wintertime. Yet upon the other hand a very considerable portion of the business community still seems to be at the rather definite conclusion that the motor-truck is to replace the railroad for freight hauls up to a hundred miles or less, while old-time railroaders for years past have been frank in saying that a freight-car did not even begin to make money until it had hauled its goods at least forty miles, and to-day the modern generation of operators will put this figure at eighty miles. Up to a distance somewhere between these figures--and undoubtedly far nearer eighty than forty--the vast city terminal charges of the American railroad nullify the profit of the haul itself. In due time I shall come to a detailed consideration of these questions of freight terminals in our large cities. Consider now that the motor-truck, to a very large extent at least, is freed from this terminal problem. That is a long point in its favor.