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Show STARVING THE RAILROADS The following editorial published in the Orange Judd Farmer, (Illinois), and touching upon the "junking of railroads" is worthy of careful reading and we pass it along to our readers that they be mindful of the damage that will surely result if passenger, freight and express business of the railroads are turned over to auto transportation trans-portation companies which are seeking privileges through the state utilities commissions: "Just now a few of the strongest railroads are earning a moderate moder-ate return upon the money actually invested in transportation service. Not all railroads by any means are in this fortunate class. The great majority, at a time when the freight movement is record breaking, break-ing, are earning a very small per cent, not upon capitalization but upon money actually engaged in furnishing transportation. And some are failing to earn operating expenses and fixed charges even in these times of heavy travel and record freight shipments. For the last decade or more our governmental attitude toward railroads has been formulated by politicians who have sought popularity popu-larity among unthinking voters by restrictive legislation, all calculated calculat-ed to prevent the investment of needed capital in railway extension. In effect the policy has been to increase operating costs without permitting per-mitting income to proportionally increase. This has meant slow starvation for the less favorably gituated roads. In three years six steam or electric railroads in Illinois have succumbed to this starvation process and gone out of business, junked their property and left towns, villages and farming country without transportation service upon which mode of life, character of business and property values have been adjusted. This hard-boiled hard-boiled fact means more to the people of Illinois than can be made good by all the buncombe of all the politicians of the country. Railroad Rail-road regulation and repression carried to the point where transportation transpor-tation service is destroyed because it is made unremunerative to the capital employed, means something more than merely robbing those whose money is invested in the business. It means decreased value per acre of farm land, decreased value of business enterprises, and confiscation of general property values. A policy toward railroads that makes it almost impossible to induce capital to engage in new railroad enterprises, or to finance upon a reasonable return extensions and equipment of existing transportation service is a stupid self-injury. More than a half million mil-lion people in Illinois have come to realize this through the abandonment abandon-ment of six railway lines upon which they have depended for transportation trans-portation service. They have learned that a policy which starves the railroads, in the end destroys values in the country served. Equally stupid is the theory that all railroads alike, big and small, strong and weak, can be subjected to the same restrictive legislative legislation and equally survive. There are thousands of farmers along these abandoned lines who will feelingly testify that Illinois can better spare all the political demagogues who preach hostility and starvation for railroads than he can spare a single mile I of needed service." |