THE COUNTRY’S NEED OF GREATER RAILWAY
FACILITIES AND TERMINALS

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BY

MR. JAMES J. HILL

AT

The Annual Dinner of the Railway Business Association,
New York City

DECEMBER 19, 1912

THE COUNTRY’S NEED OF GREATER RAILWAY FACILITIES AND TERMINALS

ADDRESS DELIVERED BY

MR. JAMES J. HILL

AT

The Annual Dinner of the Railway Business Association,
New York City

DECEMBER 19, 1912

The subject of national transportation is many-sided. One aspect of it takes precedence in one community or in the opinion of one interest, while for others some different phase ranks all the rest. But every interest and every community should understand that the main need today of transportation and of the many activities connected with and dependent upon it is an increase of terminal facilities. It is no exaggeration to say that the commerce of the country, its manufacturing and agricultural industry, its prosperity as a whole and the welfare of every man in it who engages in any gainful occupation can escape threatened disaster only by such additions to and enlargements of existing terminals at our great central markets and our principal points of export as will relieve the congestion which now paralyzes traffic when any unusual demand is made upon them. Our natural material growth will make this their chronic condition in the near future unless quick action is taken.

If you increase the size of a bottle without enlarging the neck, more time and work are required to fill and empty it. That is what has happened to the transportation business. In 1907 traffic was blocked on nearly all the principal Eastern railway lines. It took months to convey an ordinary shipment of goods from one domestic market to another. The dead-lock was broken partly by a panic that lessened the volume of business and partly by the efforts of railway managements to add, by increased efficiency, to the moving power of facilities at command. We neither anticipate nor desire perpetual business depression. While the limits of efficiency have not been reached, we know that it cannot be made to cover the demands of our growth in population and production. The records of any large city will prove this. The tonnage of the Pittsburgh District, for example, by railroad alone, grew from 64,125,000 to 152,000,000 in the ten years between 1901 and 1911. It is both practical and patriotic to ask what is to be done.

First, let us examine the following table, compiled from the reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission, showing the recent growth of the transportation business in the United States:

Business is beginning to feel the swell of a revival. The freight ton mileage of the country was less by seventeen and a half billions in 1909 than in 1907, and very little more than in 1906. Contrast this with the growth of the single year between 1909 and 1910. The freight ton mileage grew in that year eleven times as fast as trackage, and five times as fast as equipment. This ratio will be subject to increase rather than decrease. It will be much greater in this year of large crops and added tonnage. If any manufacturer were confronted with such conditions, it would be clear to him that he must either refuse business or more than double his plant. The railroad cannot refuse business. If it could do so legally, that policy would still mean national panic and individual ruin. It must enlarge its plant. Just what this means in the expenditure of billions of dollars on new track and rolling stock I demonstrated more than five years ago, and the facts have now been accepted by all authorities. But even the existing plant cannot be worked to its capacity without larger terminals. Hence the supreme importance at the very outset of this factor of the transportation problem.

This matter is vital not only to the railroads, but to every business man. It is the immediate concern of every large city. Cities can grow, they can escape decline, only as the movement of business between and through them is kept free. When the people find that their business cannot be handled, they must either move away or cease producing and consuming. They will decentralize their traffic, so far as that can be done; and the inability of the railroads to prevent this, by reason of conditions imposed on them from without, will work injury to all the great markets which have arisen through