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187 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. xv (1936)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0187 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD THE half-dozen years since 1929 have been momentous ones for railroads throughout the world, and particularly for the railroads of the United States. Confronted with declining freight and passenger traffic, with decreasing gross and net earnings, with increasingly severe competition of highway, waterway, airway, and pipe-line carriers, with the flight of capital, particularly institutional investors, from the railroad securities, with increasingly severe criticism-sometimes con- structive and well-informed and sometimes quite the reverse-of railroad services and practices, with comprehensive governmental regulation in the face of different and often less comprehensive regulation of competitors, the railroads have been struggling through the heavy seas and gales of adversity and depression. As an additional hazard, the railroads have been acutely conscious of what is to many the specter of government ownership and operation. Now that some light has broken through the storm clouds, and traffic and earn- ings are showing unmistakable signs of improvement, the fog of gloom and despair has been dispelled for many, and a lighter atmosphere of cautious optimism has taken its place. The railroads of the United States have won many sympathetic friends in the years since 1929, and many destructive critics have become more constructive in their attitude. Constructive criticism and an intelligent public interest in railroad services, rates, and governmental regulation both within and without the industry are conducive to healthy growth in all industries and par- ticularly in the public service industries of which the railroads are so important a part. Intelligent self-criticism and constructive criticism by those outside the railroad industry are indispensable to future progress in the public interest. A word of caution may not be amiss. Too often the railroad problem is dis- cussed as though it were a single problem and as though all railroads were affected in the same way and in the same degree. The point of view of the editor of this symposium is that there is no railroad problem, but a number of operating, traffic, financial, and public relations problems in varying stages of consideration and solution. These problems, as they are solved, tend to create other and new problems, as the heads of the mythological monster reappeared in increasing number as the sword of the hero smote the old heads from its body; so that the editor is not sanguine that all railroad problems can ever be solved so that in some remote period of innocuous desuetude the railroads of this or any other country may be operated without problems. Nor does it appear that the numerous problems apply to and affect the railroad system of the United States in the same way and in the same degree. There is not a railroad system of the United States, but a hundred and forty-four Class I, two hundred and six Class II, and two hundred and sixty-three Class III railroads, differing in size, amount and quality of equipment, traffic, territory served, financial structure, and earning capacity. Generalizations, either as to condition or as to remedial measures, are patently both dangerous and inaccurate. The purpose of this volume is to present for general consideration some of the most important and most controversial aspects of these problems. No attempt was made to consider all of the problems or to achieve a nice balance of discussion upon each of these questions from diametrically opposed points of view. Rather, xv

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