The position of the short-line railroad in our rail transport debacle is even worse than that of his bigger brothers. Even in the prosperous days before our entrance into the World War he was constantly involved in difficulties. Even then the motor-truck was beginning to make serious inroads into his earnings. So wonder not that he hailed the advent of McAdoo and government control as a possibility of real salvation. Yet how false a hope that was was quickly shown when the director-general of the United States Railroad Administration refused bluntly to bother with these roads--there are close to a thousand of them--in his unified rail transport structure. He said that they were not necessary to the successful prosecution of the war. And that settled it. Nor was this all. The last blow came when, with the reroutings of freight that came as an inevitable result of Federal control, the small railroads across the land began to lose the little hauls that frequently were given them by friendly freight traffic officers. At that many of them quit. More and more of them have been quitting ever since. In a few cases local pride has served to keep them alive; I can think of the Kanona and Prattsburg, a little eleven-mile line up in western New York which to-day is being operated by a group of farmers and village people who already are wondering if it would not be wiser to sell their locomotive and scrap the thin iron link that holds them to the outer world.
Where these little roads are alive they are breathing heavily. The little locomotive, purchased second-hand from the big railroad, which had used it almost up to the point of worthlessness, the battered cars, the bridges and trestles so long suffering from a lack of proper maintenance as to render it positively unsafe to run heavy cars over them, all are gasping for their very breath. In truth the short-line railroad is sinking into a state of coma.
And so is the rather typical branch line of its bigger brothers. In the abandoned mileage reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission for the last few years are included the feelers and the feeders of some pretty important railroad systems across this land. In these cases the track and the equipment have been maintained, to a fair degree of safety at least. And a fair degree of traffic also has been doled out to them. Yet they are as vulnerable to the short-haul competition of the motor-truck upon the highroad as the separate and highly individual short-line roads.