THE IRON HORSE DIES
Mayer, Milton
The Iron Horse Dies by MILTON MAYER It is," said Hinky Dink Kenna, "the end of an erea." The end of an erea, indeed. I hopped the rattler in S— the other evening and blew into B—, where a free...
...If the next war is an old-fashioned one— which it won't be—we'll need the trains again...
...Happy Sun Valley farmer...
...Expensive campaigns to advertise their unjust taxation fell on the world's deafest ears...
...Public ownership is the only natural way to operate a natural monopoly...
...You could have come in on it...
...They have got to be closed and, since they can't be used for anything else, sold for the high value of the land...
...He had...
...The trains would run forever...
...I love the railroads...
...A few months ago, in good weather, I was three hours late on the Texas Eagle from St...
...Who was at my friends' house but—of all people—my old friend Joe...
...Railway transportation was a natural monopoly...
...Louis to Austin...
...It warped us, body and, I dare say, soul...
...it bores everybody...
...maintenance of monster equipment...
...Last year the Pennsy's return on investment—freight and passenger service combined—was down to \y% per cent—IV2 per cent away from Bolshevism...
...Its smell was enough to dishearten a goat...
...The railroad offered the ramshackle farmer $10,000 for the spring...
...Nothing—least of all raising fares and cutting schedules—would save it...
...There was no platform vending of good, cheap food (as there was everywhere in Europe except, of course, England) and the station lunchrooms (where there was no time to eat, anyway) were, with the distinguished exception of Fred Harvey's on the Santa Fe, the most unappetizing grease joints at home or abroad...
...First, there are the passenger stations...
...but that's because I live with my memories, and my fondest memory is that of the sun-pictures we used to make on Chicago's Calumet Avenue, with a square of print-paper and a glass negative, and the Empire State Express was the best picture of them all...
...all he had to do for his heavy sugar was impanel six Skid Row stiffs for a coroner's jury, give them $5 apiece, and tell them to find that the deceased had drunk a half-gallon of whiskey before he was hit by the train...
...I hopped the rattler in S— the other evening and blew into B—, where a free flop with friends awaited me...
...to come home on the train...
...the Pullmans behind rolled richly along with their cargo of ruddy red life, dimes thrown around like bottle-caps...
...the extra-fare Twentieth Century grossed $200,000,000 in its half-century of existence...
...The 1957 taxes on Grand Central and Penn Station and their approaches used exclusively for passenger service were $13,000,000...
...and from 1 to 5 a.m...
...the conductor, whose father had beaten him as a child, burst outraged into the car every ten minutes to accuse its groaning populace, in the voice of Stentor, of harboring among their wretched number a culprit who wanted to get off at the next station, which was Wichita Falls...
...I'm not...
...Then there's roadbed maintenance...
...The railroads owned the country and the government, state and federal...
...The Iron Horse was on its last legs...
...Pullman rates were (and are) extortionate—up to five times the cost of comparable accommodations in Europe...
...Empty, empty station, where lovers licit and illicit once met and parted...
...Freight is more tractable even than passengers, and a new freight car costs $10,000 against $80,000 for a new passenger car—in case they ever get around to building one...
...After the war the railroads made a belated effort to pull themselves out...
...Decent accommodations were confined to the very rich and the business-man on an expense account...
...Beginning in 1946 they showed a nation-wide deficit in passenger service, rising from $139,746,000 in that year, if you want to know, to $6,315,093,000 ten years later...
...The mutability of1 human affairs...
...It would save the passengers quite a hike...
...Otherwise nobody cares...
...nobody cared...
...Under Hiram Johnson what was left of the State of California was recovered from the Southern Pacific...
...They imported coolies—-Irish and Chinese —and worked them as chain-gangs...
...Even then, the freight competition of the trucks and the state barge lines (and even the air lines) will probably do them in in another few years...
...Better than life insurance...
...even to wave at the train, as it breasts the world with its face and head sunk into its indomitable shoulders...
...And my grandfather hated them...
...On the whole, and with legendary and lovable exceptions, both clerical and operating personnel (especially the latter, with their elite job security) treated the passengers like cattle...
...immense crews feather-bedding their vengeance on the descendants of the Goulds and the Hills and the Huntingtons who exploited their predecessors...
...in 1929, before the crash, it was operating in seven sections...
...So the passengers have got to go...
...The railroads were saddled with gargantuan mausoleums, called stations, and the taxes were killing them...
...Well," I said, "why don't you...
...To ride a train in the night—even the day coach—and hear the whistle and see the lights in the windows and grab a whiff of air at the whistle stops...
...it meant two or three hundred grand to them...
...Aren't you glad...
...the railway unions were the first fighting labor organization, and their hatred of the railroads is unabated...
...Hapless widow...
...There was nothing to be done about it all, short of public ownership...
...A personal injury claim against a railroad was better than money in the bank...
...And service the cars (however so little...
...I am the last survivor of the Age of the Iron Horse...
...the $2 hamburger on the Pennsy is worth 50 cents of anyone's money, and, while the $3.50 to $5.50 dinner on most lines is edible, the Missouri Pacific's is the only first-class food I've had on an American railroad, and the Santa Fe's the only good second-class...
...Equipment, apart from extra-fare trains, was uniformly bad...
...They spaced it out with the train butcher's cesspool coffee (with canned milk in it...
...The Surface Transportation Subcommittee of the Senate, taking testimony a few months ago, was told about one run which averages four passengers a trip and is served by two crews of five men each...
...In between the ten-minute approaches to stations he would tiptoe down the aisle and shine his flashlight into the face of anyone who even looked sleepy, and ask if he had seen their tickets...
...but there was atmosphere, in whose thickness the ceiling lights, too dim to read by, too bright to sleep by, glowed ghostly at night...
...In Europe and Japan, where people have to ride the railroad, the trains are good, dependable, and cheap...
...Nope," he said, "the price ain't right...
...And there was no way, short of public ownership, to regulate the monopolists into providing good service...
...The government owns and operates them at a no greater loss (in some cases much smaller) than the American systems now pleading for private operation at public expense...
...The other reasons for getting rid of the passengers—and, says Joe, every line in the East wants to, and the Western roads are heading for it— are more obvious...
...Or on the bus, or the plane, or by private car...
...That's the way father and grandfather felt about the railroads...
...But my father didn't...
...As usual, they did it wrong...
...Nobody but me...
...I lived in those iron jungles, my friends, and so, in her truncated youth, did my little woman and, in their infancy stunted by the experience, my children...
...May I, as an old friend, count on you as a permanently dissatisfied customer and urge you to spread the word against us...
...But the passengers are instant death...
...As long as there are any passengers, the State Public Service Commission will not permit the road to discontinue the service...
...taxes...
...They finally asked the farmer what price would be right...
...We could," said Joe...
...The American railroads, with the highest fares in the world and the poorest service (poorer even than Spain's, in terms of frequency), are going broke...
...It is possible, but just barely, to exaggerate the sins of the railroads...
...After crying over-regulation for almost fifty years, they proposed two dreamworld alternatives to the Senate subcommittee—either complete freedom from all regulation or complete regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the second, or Bolshevik, solution to include, of course, a "fair return" subsidy...
...Since the train makes up in S— and terminates unbroken here in B—, couldn't you just as easily put those eleven baggage cars on at the hind end...
...A few weeks ago they played their last card...
...as long as they carry passengers, they have to do a little something (not much) about it...
...Better than government bonds...
...The railroads' number was up before World War II...
...between them was the day coach, the traveling tenement that carried those who were not fortunate enough to be wholly alive or wholly dead...
...But they still made monopoly money...
...Family men with brains left home with a two-day lunch packed up by their mothers or wives...
...We could, indeed...
...Hapless orphans...
...The war kept the railroads going— with gasoline rationed—but every war has to end sometime, and when that one ended the railroads were finished...
...Happy haters of railroads...
...The Empire State Express...
...They handed out bribes in broad daylight and got free land, which, in the case of some of the Western lines, now constitutes their most valuable asset, chock full of oil and minerals...
...The railroads' comeuppance had come up at last, juries of railroad-hating Americans awarded damages of $100,000 and $500,000 in personal injury suits involving a fingernail broken in the process of scratching a flea bite on a day coach...
...But, like the Bourbons, they couldn't believe it...
...The railroads' only hope of survival now is to get rid of the passenger business altogether...
...The Iron Horse bites the dust unmournedl The high and mighty brought low...
...Now he's the head man of one of the biggest railroads in the country, the very railroad I had just blown in from S— on...
...Our minimum is 3.921 cents...
...and the story of the Pennsy's successful campaigns to keep the B & O out of New York and run it around Chicago is one for, and in, the books...
...The taxpayers built tax-free airports for the air lines...
...The baggage car ahead carried the crated remains of the dead...
...Of course the family man with brains—I don't know about you...
...People were going by plane...
...Trying—stupidly— to compete with air travel, they cut running time on their fastest trains...
...the road's lawyers (including legislators and Congressmen on $50,000 retainers) always advised a settlement at any price rather than let the case get to a jury...
...The road doubled the ante, tripled it, quadrupled it, and the farmer shook his head...
...the railroads believed that enough people would always be afraid to go by plane to keep them in business...
...Everybody hated the railroads, and for a hundred years everybody was helpless...
...It's true...
...The last time I saw Joe, ten years ago, he was lawyering...
...The railroads' atrocities led, eventually, to government regulation...
...But public ownership is Bolshevism...
...You couldn't lose an election if you ran against the railroads, and you couldn't win otherwise...
...People were going by car...
...The heat could not be turned off in the summer, or on in the winter...
...My friend Joe, the new head man of one of the biggest roads in the country, explained, while he urged me to be a permanently dissatisfied customer, that the settlement of injury suits alone is bankrupting the railroads...
...When you got off the Super Chief or The City of San Francisco, you quivered for a week...
...It's just as the French say—the more things stay the same, the more they change...
...Nobody cares...
...The J & D, for instance, a fine railroad, makes the same run...
...payment on preferred stock and bonds...
...The best "paper" on earth—except, of course, for a personal injury claim against the same railroads...
...They provided better equipment no better serviced, and the new day coaches on the Eastern lines ineluctably took on the basement police station atmosphere of the old...
...Sun Valley had to have a warm-water swimming pool, up there in the snow, and there was a hot spring on a neighboring farm...
...The single, intelligent exception was the new California Zephyr, a pleasant fifty-hour train between Chicago and San Francisco run jointly by the Burlington, Rio Grande, and Western Pacific...
...Before the Twentieth Century Limited was merged—that is, discontinued—last month, it was losing $1.50 on every $5 it collected in fares, even though the cheapest accommodation on the train had risen since 1929 from $49.50 to $80.76...
...The Iron Horse falls to its knees unpitied...
...It isn't even impossible that an imaginative railroad head, like my friend Joe, will one of these days come out in the open and say so in print...
...to go away on the train...
...No price," said the farmer...
...twenty years after the European railroads had syncopated couplings, the American passenger had to flex his neck when the train came to a stop or have it broken...
...The average passenger on the run pays 23 cents fare...
...The day coach was a rolling hell, furnished in the bleakest, itchiest, and most absorptive of all fabrics—green plush...
...Except for showcase runs (and sometimes then), late arrival was routine, and still is...
...then, of course, being no more moral than the railroads, they raised them...
...There was no air, and no way for air to leave or enter...
...Gilt-edged, blue-chip, copper-sheathed, rock-ribbed...
...Short of that, the New York Central, for instance, whose passenger train-miles have fallen 41 per cent since 1948, might quietly install bumps on the Water-Level Route...
...And so did yours...
...A transportation monopoly in a country too big to cross otherwise, the railroads did not bother to compete on rates or service even where they ran parallel lines...
...I had taken the train, instead of flying, because I had to be sure of being on time...
...The robber barons— known to themselves as the widows and orphans—were tied in knots...
...Night and day, and day after day, it accumulated the essence of peanuts and oranges (consumed alternatively to raise and slake the thirst of the traveling poor), of diapers and gently swinging doors to completely unequipped lavatories, of bodies unbathed in anticipation of a boiling-out at the end of the journey, of soot built into the car (the windows had all been nailed shut in 1904), and of layers of dust and ladies' face powder...
...But their case was hopeless anyway...
...And, to top it all, increase of flying safety to the point where, if the pilot can dodge the Air Corps jets, the passenger's chances of getting there, and even of getting there on time, are excellent...
...In America, where people don't have to ride the trains any more, nobody cares...
...I once knew a coroner's physician in Chicago who, on a $2,000 salary, was rolling in riches...
...Because," said Joe, "we are trying to get the passengers so sore at us that they will transfer their patronage to one of our many competitors...
...Everyone flew, everyone drove or rode cut-rate buses, and the trucks went to town—with the freight...
...the railroads believed that the Americans could not learn from Hitler how to build superhighways...
...The road was hot for that hot spring...
...Nobody cared...
...just to look down the two rails with the moonlight on them, until they merge in the on and on and on—that's for me, friends...
...The taxpayers maintained the highways for themselves and the tax-free buses and trucks...
...Too late, too late...
...I travel by plane, but it bores me...
...I remember—with considerable inaccuracy, I'm sure—the story a Union Pacific man told me when UP built Sun Valley...
...station and right-of-way maintenance...
...the air lines paid not a cent in taxes on the LaGuardia and Idlewild Airports, whose taxes, on the basis of their assessed valuation, would be $4,400,000 a year...
...Vis a vis all competing forms of transportation they were crushed by fixed charges—accrued indebtedness (periodically wiped out by "reorganization" and periodically accrued again...
...prosperous proof that a train could compete, not on its competitors' terms, but by offering a clean, comfortable, leisurely trip...
...every railroad system in the world, except Canada's, Brazil's, and ours, is operated Bol-shevistically...
...Schedules continued to be based on a passenger-be-damned doctrine, and they still are...
...I am speaking of myself—traveled in the day coach...
...Or as Hinky Dink Kenna says...
...Joe," I said, "I know the railroads don't care what they do to the passenger, but when I got off yours tonight I had to walk past eleven baggage cars at the front end of the train, carrying my luggage...
...Meanwhile, the air lines can-nily kept their coach fares low until, a year ago, they decided the railroads were licked...
...Fifty years ago—twenty-five —the conservative man of property left his widow and orphans stock in the Class-A railroads...
...it costs the railroad $30 to carry him...
...I'd sooner give it to the hyenas than sell it to the railroads...
...Just as easily...
...The Swiss Bolshevik railroads even make money, on an average passenger rate of 2 cents a mile...
...Dining cars were (and are) likewise the province of the rich...
Vol. 22 • August 1958 • No. 8
