The people in its territory do not particularly like the motor-bus. They use it chiefly because of its frequency of service and the fact that it makes frequent intermediate stops along the line. Both of these factors are possible to that railroad with the installation of a light unit, traveling at frequent intervals. From one end to the other of this sixty-mile line there is abundant water-power. A good engineer of my acquaintance tells me that the whole route could easily be operated on 5,000 horse-power. Ergo, once again. The big and generally well-operated railroad system that owns and operates that little half-hidden branch is missing a good bet--for one reason for being so far removed in real headquarters from the line itself, of which much more in good time. The point is, here and now, the bet is being missed and a fair income opportunity lost. An aggregate of these small fair income opportunities would make a considerable dividend upon the stock even of a 12,000-mile railroad.
Across the land there are hundreds of lines such as this, hundreds of such fair income opportunities. We are coming presently to the possibilities of the gasolene motor-car unit in regard to them; yet here and now may I not suggest that if ever we as a nation should come to a serious shortage of our crude-oil supply, upon which such super-demands are being made these days, we shall retain our water-power? This is a point in favor of the electric unit, as opposed to the gasolene or kerosene one, that we hardly can afford to overlook.
But a moment ago we were calling the steam locomotive upon the American railroad a "laggard." Yet we were reserving a rebuttal to place his case upon the minutes of this record. In all this wild to-do about the possibilities of electricity in heavy rail transport he is forgotten. Such ever must be the fate of a laggard. Yet truth to tell, the steam locomotive does have a case. He can make a real rebuttal. He may be a laggard to-day; but to-morrow--Did you ever chance to know of a boy or a girl in school who was a laggard, and a brilliant success in after life? I myself have known of several.
Moreover it is hardly conceivable even now that all of the mileage of all our railroads ever will be run by electricity. Even the remarkable vision of McAdoo, which viewed the thing with marked friendliness, only predicated its use upon about one fifth of the railroad mileage in the United States. The great inland sections of the country, the plains and the prairies and the broad valleys of the Mississippi and the Missouri and the most of their tributaries, are comparatively limited in available water-power facilities. And this despite such great works as the Keokuk dam and others of the same sort, while the huge distances there militate against the economies of central steam-power stations for the generation of electric current.