The railroads that run along the south shore of Lake Erie, ample as are their facilities, already had a full load of traffic from Chicago, the West, and the Northwest. So the traffic from St. Louis and the rich country back of it must needs cross the Chicago currents and go to the north of Lake Erie. The Wabash--one of the least understood and most abused railroads in America--in those days first began really to justify the fine strategy of its position. It became the main factor in bringing St. Louis freight up to Detroit, where it no longer crossed into Canada by ferry but through the great tunnel which the Michigan Central completed about twelve or fourteen years ago; and by sweeping easily along through the gradeless tangents of the Province of Ontario that freight re-entered the United States at the Niagara frontier, and so on to New York or Boston by any one of a half a dozen uncongested traffic routes.
These things apparently could not have been done under private management; at any rate they were not done under private management, although it is but fair to say that some of the far-sighted railroaders who sat at the table of the former Railroad War Board--which had attempted at the eleventh hour to consolidate the lines and so save the obvious perils of government operation, even as a temporary war measure--had the vision of these very consolidation economies. They had the vision but not the power. Too many powerful considerations bore in upon them and bore them down. Regulation, which was not fair regulation, the inability to finance the lines with rates fixed and expenses increasing by leaps and by bounds, competition refusing to bury itself even in emergency, even traditional jealousy--all these things prevented the Railroad War Board, constituted by the roads themselves to have a sort of supreme authority, from accomplishing its real purpose. These things were accomplished by the United States Railroad Administration and William G. McAdoo, as director-general of railroads, almost at the very beginning.
I have set down these operating details of the United States Railroad Administration under its first director-general at some length, not because of any desire to glorify Mr. McAdoo but because I may want to refer to them again in the final chapters of this book when I am endeavoring to show the folly and the waste of many of the phases of our competitive system of railroading in the United States. Failure as it was in many ways, the McAdoo episode was perhaps valuable after all as a laboratory experiment in rail transport. I am not sure but that as such it was worth every cent that it cost; and its cost was not small. For some years past, before the coming of the war, a certain proportion of our railroaders had been getting into something of a rut, to put it lightly. McAdoo came along and, if he did nothing else, succeeded in shaking them well out of that rut. Yet it is but fair to recall again that the Railroad War Board might have done the same thing had it possessed two great powers that the United States Railroad Administration possessed--absolute authority and virtually unlimited financial resources. McAdoo, on the one hand, might order new locomotives by the hundreds and box-cars by the thousands--no matter what the price, we were at war--and upon the other, he could--and did--raise the railroad tariffs, both freight and passenger, to a point hitherto deemed virtually prohibitive. He raised the rates all the way from 25 to 35 per cent., and the railroads but two or three years before had found the Interstate Commerce Commission deaf to their appeals for mere 5 and 10 per cent. advances.