Project this to the entire main line of that railroad, 999 miles from New York to Chicago; remember that we have been considering but one 140-mile division of that main line, and savings begin to multiply. If the proportion of savings could be maintained the Erie would have been $630,000 ahead on its main line alone; if it could be carried to its branch lines too, the figure would run into a million dollars or more a year. Yet the Erie is less than a hundredth part of the route mileage of the railroads of the United States, of which a comparatively small part is yet equipped with automatic block-signals. To say that our carriers might save a hundred million dollars a year by the use of modern and scientific signaling alone would probably be a conservative guess. A million dollars a day, Mr. Justice Brandeis! It begins to look as if you had understated, not overstated the savings to be accomplished by our national transport.
We have by no means reached our limits in operating economies. That our practical railroaders, under the fearful spur of a terrific demand for great retrenchments, have done much is not to be denied. In some things, notably the creation of the big car, the big locomotive, and the big train, they not only have accomplished marvels but to-day they have probably approached the extreme limits of efficiency, if indeed they have not already actually passed them. Recently they have increased the loading of the average freight-car and have speeded up its movement. On March 1, 1920, when the private operators took their roads back from the Government, they announced that they were going to try to make a "thirty-thirty" record--an average daily mileage of thirty miles (instead of the 22.3 which the United States Railroad Administration was then accomplishing) and an average loading of thirty tons (instead of the 28.3 tons which the Railroad Administration by almost superhuman efforts, including appeals to the patriotism of the shippers, had finally succeeded in reaching). Despite most unpropitious circumstances the railroad executives had virtually reached the mark that they had fixed for themselves when the industrial slump set in upon the land. And in a total movement of a million car-loads of freight a week (a fair standard for good business across the land) savings such as these are the equivalent of many new cars, particularly so at the times when our railroads find themselves short of freight rolling-stock. In an earlier chapter I showed how rapidly our total freight-car equipment has declined--in three years more than 125,000 cars. Yet the saving of but a mile a day in the operation of each car of our existing equipment is equivalent to the addition of 100,000 cars to it.