Railroads Anticipate the Future

Abstract

W HEN THE PIONEER RAILROAD BUILDERS undertook their great adventures in transportation, they could not foresee today's profusion of services, any more than we today can clearly envision what is to be the transportation picture of the future. But they did recognize, as do we, that the basic transportation service of this nation will continue to be performed in trains of cars on tracks. We note this in full recognition of the growth and importance of other means of transportation. Each of them has its special place and its own particular advantages but no one of them, nor all of them together, can take the place of the railroads in performing the high-volume, low-cost, continent-wide transportation service which the agriculture, the industry, the commerce, and the very daily life of this nation require. The railroad officials of today forecast a future of high development and great promise. It is a future beset by problems and difficulties-but problems and difficulties are nothing new in the experience of the railroads. A century ago the effort lay in getting railroads built, to extend the lines into the wilderness and across the continent. Before the end of that great saga the problem had begun to change from extending rail lines to that of intensive development of lines and equipment for improving service and reducing costs of operation. So far as we can tell, that is the direction of the future for the railroads-a steady movement toward sound and continuing improvement in facilities, capable of turning out ever better service, and doing so with ever greater economy. We have just seen what amounts virtually to a revolution in railroading in the change-over from steam power to diesel power, now about 90 per cent accomplished. For the most part, this change was accomplished during the past decade, along with less dramatic but almost equally significant changes in the newer types of cars which these locomotives haul, in the tracks over which they run, in the terminals in which they are classified and assembled, in roadway maintenance and shop practices, in signals and communications, in record keeping and processing, and indeed in virtually every phase of railroading.