In front of me lies the hand-book of the Italian state railways in those blessed days of before-the-war. From it I find that I could have started from the Milan Union Station and made a circular trip through Bologna, Florence, Rome, Pisa, Genoa, and Turin back to Milan again for 157.5 lire, first-class or, at the then rate of exchange, a little more than thirty-two dollars. As a matter of fact the ticket sold at exactly the same rate from any other point upon this designated belt and from it was good in exactly the same way. We are using Milan here merely as a convenient point from which to study the system.
But suppose the ticket-agent in that brisk manufacturing city of the North sold us Venice--a little side-trip off the main circular route, up the line from Padua and back again to Padua before we were ready to go on to Florence and to Rome. The inclusion of the side-trip added but 8.9 lire to our original pasteboard, or less than two dollars. Suppose that we wanted not only Venice but Naples--this last, considerably more of a side-trip. We could retain Venice and do Naples as a side-trip from Rome, and still have our first-class round-trip ticket, going one route to Rome and returning by another and entirely different one, at 187.9 lire, or about $37.50, as we were then wont to figure it; while the period of availability of the ticket was lengthened from thirty to forty-five days.
Here is another point, seemingly unimportant, but really filled with a good deal of importance, particularly when one comes to view it from the standard of transportation salesmanship. In the days before the war the various parlor-car services of our railroads, whether owned and operated by the Pullman Co. or by the railroads themselves, had a minimum seat-rate of twenty-five cents. War-time administration ended this and fixed the minimum at fifty cents, to which presently was added a 50 per cent. surcharge for the benefit of the railroads, with the result that if a passenger is to ride but a mere fifteen or twenty miles in a parlor-car he is charged the outrageous figure of seventy-five cents for the privilege.
These short-haul riders of other days came to a considerable total. They helped fill the parlor-cars and so not only to add an attractive revenue but to maintain a service which, in many portions of the country at least, is a necessity. Yet apparently no one either in the railroad field or in the Interstate Commerce Commission has enough vision or salesmanship to order the minimum rate reduced. It goes, like a good many other things in the railroad situation to-day, by default, and just so far lowers the service standard.