I know that it costs, Mr. New Haven. But I also know that it takes but one half the amount of coal to pull a train with an electric locomotive as compared with a steam locomotive of the same capacity. Remember that the steam locomotive's voracious appetite for coal apparently is unceasing. He may stand idle and upon sidings for half or a third of a working day, yet the fireman's task at the fire-box door is steady. While if that fireman be lacking in every-day efficiency, the coal waste is increased, not lessened. The president of a large Eastern railroad has estimated that even a little better handling of the coal-shovels by his firemen would save the road 500,000 tons of coal annually. For even if coal must drive a railroad, if that railroad is driven from a central power-station there is almost no inefficiency in firing there; the central station operates on hourly coal-record sheets and waste is quickly detected.
I have not had in mind, however, for immediate use in New England the sort of elaborate installation which the New Haven has upon the western end of its main stem. What I meant for that road, as well as for sections of other lines up there, was the same sort of comparatively simple electric construction that the New Haven itself has operated for years on some of its isolated suburban lines in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I mean, instead of heavy steel passenger-coaches of main-line standards of size and weight and propelled by expensive electric locomotives, electric motor-cars of comparatively small size and weight, self-propelled and self-contained and operated in trains of from one to twelve cars in accordance with the immediate necessities of the traffic at hand. The New Haven's field south of Boston, where its suburban service is at its very worst to-day, is particularly ripe for installation of that sort. There the once competitive interurban tradition has come to its final slough of despond.
The traction systems throughout all New England have not been immune from the difficulties that have beset their brethren in other sections of the land. In fact I should not hesitate to say that their troubles have been greater rather than less than their brethren's. More traction mileage has probably been abandoned in New England than in any other distinctive single locality. From Plymouth to Sagamore, Massachusetts, there stretch twenty miles of track and trolley-wire which, like the Hampden railroad (once built by one Charles S. Mellen for a dozen miles east of Springfield), never has been used and probably never will be. Two years ago the Bay State's lines in and around Gloucester and the Cape Ann district were all abandoned, while the Connecticut Co. (a New Haven property) constantly threatened to do the same thing in some of its larger cities if jitney competition were not withdrawn. A prompt compliance by the local authorities with this mandate saved these towns their trolley service, temporarily at least. It is a grave question whether fifteen years hence we shall have any trolley service in most of our American towns of less than 100,000 population. But the most important abandonment of long-distance trolley service which has come to my attention has been that of the Shore Line Electric, along the north shore of Long Island Sound, for sixty miles between New Haven and New London.