Nor is it always necessary to buy locomotives at the rate of four or even five for a million dollars, with interest rates at 8 per cent. or thereabouts, when a railroad can borrow at all. There is many and many a short cut toward electrification. Take New England, for instance.
Up in that extreme northeastern corner of this land, as we have seen already at some length, the railroad shoe already has begun to pinch very hard indeed. With a few exceptions the railroads there are bankrupt, or virtually so. And yet their economic need and opportunity in electrical installation was never greater than it is at this very moment. If you don't believe this bald statement, imagine yourself the president of that formerly prosperous little railroad down in Maine and your purchasing-agent coming in and telling you that he just paid twenty-seven dollars a ton for tender coal for your locomotives--with Maine richer in undeveloped water-power than almost any other State in the Union!
New England needs electrification of her steam railroads, and needs it at once. It is no new story to her. She began her experimentation with this sort of development more than two decades ago, when the New Haven laid that third rail alongside its busy Bristol-New Britain-Hartford line and installed a frequent electric suburban service. It was a beginning; a beginning that led slowly but surely to overhead wire installations upon several other branch lines of the New Haven system and eventually to the elaborate work in connection with the New York Central's electrification of the Grand Central Station in New York. This last embraced the entire main line from Forty-second Street through to New Haven. It now ends there. And when you talk electrification to one of the high officers of the road he will point to this particularly elaborate installation and say:
"Not on your life. We had your vision fifteen years ago, and we put in this pretty job. Where did it get us? Into debt. It is one of the finest installations in the world, and one of the most expensive. While the increased capacity of the Grand Central Station from the operation of a two-level plan--a scheme utterly impossible under the use of steam as a motive-power--undoubtedly justified the expenditure, the fact remains that, considered independently, our electric zone to-day does not return interest on its investment. Of two locomotives of equal capacity, the steam one will cost $45,000, the electric $150,000. In addition to all of this investment in overhead there is also the cost of its maintenance, and that is not small. Wire-trains for immediate repairs as well as for maintenance must be in readiness day and night with a variety of expert, and expensive, workers. It all costs."