The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean has but two spokes of the wheel into the Paris hub but it is the largest of the privately owned French railways, reaching from Belfort to Cette upon the Mediterranean shore and serving between the Swiss and the Italian gateways to say nothing of the Rhone valley and the Riviera. Immediately next to it in turn is the Paris-Orleans, with Toulouse and Bordeaux as its chief southerly terminals. At these cities it joins the southerly Midi system, which also meets the P.-L.-M. at Cette.
The Etat or State railway with its lines from Paris to the west and the southwest of France completes the great railway wheel. A little more than a decade ago it absorbed the fairly important but always unprofitable Ouest system. Up to that time the government railway had been the least important of all the French properties. Its lines, reaching down chiefly into the rather poor districts of the Vendée and the Charente, were distinctly unprofitable. In 1908 a French gentleman by the name of Georges Clémenceau succeeded in extending the beneficent influence of the state to the almost equally unfortunate Ouest system. Since then the State railway of France has become distinctly important, geographically and politically, but not particularly so in any other way. Its annual deficit has never been overcome. Matters have now come to a point where it is proposed that system be leased to a private corporation for operation. The government can no longer carry on with it. Its suburban service alone sustained a deficit of 100,000,000 francs in 1921.
At the present moment, however, all the French railways are operating at a loss variously figured at from a million francs a day upward. Since the beginning of the World War, a total deficit of something considerably more than a billion dollars has been achieved. Yet the roads themselves are still paying their dividends--the privately owned and operated properties of course. These are guaranteed by the Government under special legislation that goes as far back as 1857. In the early days of the recent war, when even the formerly profitable Nord, Est, and P.-L.-M. began to run toward heavy deficits, special legislation was hurried through by the Government to insure continued interest in the proper operation of the essential lines of rail transport by the simple and entirely human process of maintaining the dividends, even though the taxpayer paid the difference. The difference steadily grew greater. Wages increased 327 per cent. in six years, the staff--due chiefly to France's very literal interpretation of her new eight-hour law--from 355,000 to nearly 500,000, about 41 per cent. And despite an increase of 25 per cent. in freight and passenger-rates--afterwards increased to a total of 70 or 80 per cent. for passenger and 140 for freight--the operating ratio of her railways swung from 57 per cent. in 1913 to the ridiculous and impossible figure of 125 per cent. in 1920.