The opportunities for such correlated services are just as great to-day in the United States as in Europe, if not greater. The railroads that serve the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White and the Green mountains, the Rockies, and the Sierras could well afford to develop motor-bus routes as auxiliaries to their routes that already reach into these charming fastnesses. The Santa Fé and the Southern Pacific complain of the competition of the motor-bus along their lines that parallel the Pacific coast, yet have done nothing to meet such competition or to correlate with it. To-day the Northwestern Pacific terminates in the small city of Eureka, in the beautiful Humboldt County section of California, two hundred miles north of San Francisco. By the creation of a motor-bus route almost due east to the line of the Southern Pacific near Dunsmuir, a circular trip of unusual variety and beauty could readily be established. The Southern Pacific has already made beginnings along this line by the establishment of a highly successful rail and automobile route through the Apache Cañon. The success of this route, even though its beginnings are none too conveniently located, ought to encourage the establishment of others. The opportunities are real--there and all the way east of there, right to the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the most pathetic features about our American railroad situation is the almost entire submersion of the traffic manager and the things for which he is supposed to stand. Upon most of our roads the selling of transportation rapidly is becoming a lost art. There are a few exceptions of course, roads which, like the Santa Fé, still show a genuine belief in passenger traffic and its possibilities by not only advanced advertising methods but by a careful attention to the infinite details of the service. But these roads are very greatly in the minority. The majority of the lines are seemingly quite content to sit supinely and indifferently take such traffic as may be forced upon them.
In a recent issue of the "Railway Age" a railroad officer comments quite sharply upon this fact. He shows some of the difficulties that the average passenger meets when he is forced to ride upon trains that may be designated as "fairly second-class" in their accommodations, calls attention to the apparent indifference of the employees, and then proceeds to comment as follows: