the New York School of Philanthropy, and other social workers and investigators. However, it is not content simply with those who seek its help but, like a business house, endeavors to create demands for its services from new sources.

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Among many other movements in which the Foundation has taken an indirect part that is, wholly or in part outside of its own departments- may be mentioned campaigns for the study and prevention of tuberculosis, of blindness, and of infant mortality, and movements for child welfare, better schools, prevention of child labor, "placing out" dependent children in homes, better organization of juvenile court work, higher standards of probation, children's school gardens, open-air schools, better housing, town and city planning, more efficient hospitals, better facilities

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Through these movements, through the development of the exhibit idea as a means of reaching the people, through publicity bureaus and newspapers, through The Survey magazine, through its own publications, and in a hundred other ways, the Foundation has for six years been bringing social facts to the attention of the people of the whole country, awakening intelligent interest and enlightened opinion, and leading to serious study, discussion, and effort toward national improvement.

dollars a day to the railroads of the United States, and is saving it every day.

When Mr. James J. Hill was an active railroad man, he used to carry around in his pocket a little note-book full of figures. The principal use of that note-book was to demonstrate to anybody that came along that on the Hill roads they practised "efficiency." Mr. Hill seldom used that word, but he would talk by the hour about the way they had cut down the ton-mile costs on the Great Northern and the Burlington. "Ton-mile cost" means the actual number of mills that it costs to move a ton of freight one mile by rail. Every railroad man, when he is talking about his own operations, has in mind the average ton of freight on his own system.

Therein, of course, lies a pitfall. The average ton of freight on a road like the Lackawanna, for instance, whose lines are

rather than any other of half a dozen is that its figures happened to come in a convenient form just as this article was written.

The Burlington is a good old railroad serving a good old country, and it has always been run by a good strong staff in both its traffic and operating departments. It is both a trunk line and granger road. A little more than half its mileage consists of branches that produce less than ten per cent. of its traffic. This traffic is very miscellaneous, consisting of almost everything that is handled on the railroads of this country. Yet about thirtytwo per cent. of all its traffic is soft coal. It carries more live stock than any other railroad. These facts, the nature of the mileage, and the nature of the traffic, are well to keep in mind when you are studying railroad efficiency.

In 1901, the year in which Mr. Morgan

always busy hauling anthracite coal downhill, is a very different thing from the average ton of freight on, say, the Bangor & Aroostook, which does fairly well with potatoes and things like that, but probably never hauled a full trainload of anthracite in its long and uneventful history. Therefore, when one comes to talk about efficiency which is merely another name for ton-mile cost — it is well not to make invidious comparisons between one railroad and another; for almost everybody that ever did it found himself finally talking pure nonsense.

One good railroad will serve as an illustration as well as another. In the present case, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy will do very well to show some of the important phases of modern railroad efficiency; and the writer is willing to confess that the main reason that it is chosen

and Mr. Hill captured the Burlington after a picturesque battle with Mr. Harriman, the statistics show that the freight trains on the Burlington traveled 18,397,000 miles in all, carrying freight. In 1912, the freight trains traveled only 16,688,000 miles. The system in the meantime had grown from about 7,700 miles to about 9,000. However, the freight trains in 1912 carried 7,676,000,000 tons of freight one mile, whereas in 1901 the larger number of freight trains carried only 3,871,000,000 tons one mile.

That is "efficiency" in a nutshell. The movement of a ton of freight one mile is the standard unit of freight traffic. The Burlington carried twice as many units in 1912 as it did in 1901 with a considerably smaller number of trains running on the lines. When we have found out how they did it, we will have a fairly

definite view of the methods used to secure real money-saving efficiency on the American railroads.

In a recent issue of the Railway Age Gazette a good illustration was cited of one of the more important methods that help toward this result. The Burlington had a line to Centralia, Ill. It wanted to extend this line down to a little town called Herrin in the soft coal field of Illinois. The line from Centralia north, however, was not much of a line for heavy traffic, because it had grades running up as high as sixty feet to the mile. The Burlington cut down the grade all the way from Centralia to Savanna, up in the north end of the state, so that in no place in the approximately 330 miles was there a grade greater than fifteen feet to a mile. By that piece of work they made

standard engine had a "tractive" power of 20,000 pounds. Nowadays, the standard locomotives of a main line have a tractive power of 60,000 pounds. Of course, most of the old engines are still working on the branch lines; but the average power of every locomotive on the road is about forty per cent. higher than the maximum of 1901. This is probably the second element in efficiency as it is practised on the Burlington.

Of course, cars also have increased in size and capacity. They used to have an average load of 12 tons in every Burlington car. Now they have 181. This is what they call carload, and if you happen to get hold of a crank on this subject he will write you a book about the methods that are used by all the railroads of the country to make this carload item broad.

a continuous line from Herrin to St. Paul, 625 miles, without a grade on it greater than fifteen feet to a mile.

The result, when you get the story down in black and white, is obvious enough. The trainload gets heavier. The same engine can do a great deal more work on the same amount of fuel. The same train crew which carried a train forty or fifty miles up the old hill would carry it one hundred miles or more over the reconstructed line. There is a saving all around. That means a reduction in ton-mile cost. It may be taken for granted or if any one wants to prove it he can do so that at the same time that the Burlington was reconstructing this division it was doing the same kind of work all over the system. This is a prime element in railroad efficiency. Of course, it is not the only one. When Mr. Hill got the Burlington its heavy

There are men on every one of the big systems whose life business it is to see that the loading is better every year on the railroad.

It may be significant, however, that on the Burlington the increase has not been great between 1907 and 1912. There are a good many railroad men who think that the limit in size of freight cars and in carload lots has been pretty nearly reached.

From a purely mechanical standpoint. these three elements better tracks, stronger engines, and bigger cars — are the main elements in the saving of a million a day in transportation expenses. So far as the main railroads of the country are concerned, they are almost universal. Practically all our great railroads in the past twelve years have spent many mil lions of dollars to make their lines more efficient, have put in service very heavy modern locomotives, and have increased

the size of their cars. By these methods they have brought about sweeping reductions in the cost of transportation per ton per mile, and there is little doubt that these methods alone have made possible the large profits that have been earned despite a steady rise in the cost of labor and a decreasing average rate earned by carrying freight.

There are, however, many other elements. On some of the railroads where efficiency of this brand has been almost a fad, tremendous efforts on the part of men and officers have supplemented the purely mechanical addition to the plant, with the result that on these railroads efficiency has reached perhaps a higher point than the average throughout the country. Such supervision is common on

Therefore, on the Burlington, the freight car in service covers about thirty-two miles a day, on an average. On all the railroads of the country the general average is about twenty-four miles. Considering the diversity of the tonnage moved, and the general character of the traffic on the Burlington, it is probably safe to say that at least half of its advantage over the average of the country in freight movement is due to the careful human supervision over the manner in which they make the cars move.

The object of all this supervision and analysis is to make the freight cars move a little faster on the lines this year than they did last year. At first sight that might not seem to be a very important matter; for freight cars, in the mind of the average

all the Hill roads the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and the Burlington

The system of supervision is very elaborate and wonderful. Every day, big sheets that show how tonnage moves on every division come to headquarters. The study of these sheets is the business of all the officers. They do not let cars "loaf" on the Burlington. There is a daily telegraphic report of every car that has been in the yard longer than twentyfour hours, and reasons for the delay are required at headquarters. If there is a carload of freight that is supposed to run on schedule anywhere on the road, it is reported by telegraph every day, so that freight headquarters know exactly where it is, what has happened to it, how far behind its schedule it may be, or how far ahead. They follow every car of time-freight over every mile of the road.

man who travels on express trains, are pretty slow anyway, and a few miles more or less would not make much difference. Yet it is one of the most important things in modern life.

In the year 1909, the average freight car moved 313.58 tons of freight one mile every day. In 1912, the work of a freight car was to move 359.83 tons one mile every day. In 1912 there were 2,192,987 freight cars working on the railroads. When you apply the increased day's work to that number of cars, you find that the greater efficiency of the freight car amounted to the same thing as if the railroads had bought and placed in commission about 314,000 new freight cars. If you figure them at an average of $1,000 apiece it means that this increase in efficiency took the place of buying $314,000,000 worth of new cars. You

may also find that the actual earnings of the freight service were increased approximately $600,000 a day as a result of this increased efficiency.

Of course, to accomplish this result all elements have contributed. It has been shown that grades have been reduced and tracks made more efficient; that engines are more powerful and better adapted for the particular work they have to do; that cars are larger and loaded much better than they were; and that methods of supervision are much stricter and more. thorough than they were a few years ago. It is quite evident that the rebuilding of the road, the purchase of larger engines and cars, and the organization of forces for supervision cost a great deal of money. It is quite impossible even for a railroad statistician to estimate, with any degree of accuracy, just what the net profit is from all this efficiency, but all critics are agreed that the net saving is enormous.

This great gain has been accomplished since the day when Mr. Brandeis startled the business world by his claim that the railroads were wasting a million dollars a day, but there has been an even greater saving over a longer period; for this struggle to reduce ton-mile cost is no new thing. Twenty years ago the American freight car was a very much neglected commercial element. It seemed to wander around the country aimlessly and with little indication of commercial common sense. If a manufacturer wanted six cars he always ordered a dozen. If he wanted his cars on the last of the month, he always asked for them about the first. When he got them they were just as likely as not to stand idle on his siding for weeks at a time. Similarly, when freight came in to the warehouse in carload lots, the shipper let the cars full of freight stand idly on the siding acting as warehouses. Nobody was in a hurry to load or unload.

It is a different story to-day. If you get freight in carload lots you get it out of the cars within twenty-four hours after it arrives in the yard, or you pay a high price for the use of the car. If you ask for half a dozen cars to ship some of your products, when they come in on your siding you know well that they will go out

again within about forty-eight hours whether they are loaded or not. The agent in your town may be a pretty good friend of yours, but he knows that some place up above him a busy official has a record that these cars were delivered to you at a certain time. He also knows that these cars have got to move within a certain length of time or some awkward questions will be put to him to answer.

Right along the same line is the effort of the railroad men to equalize their traffic in both directions on the line. If. for example, a railroad has a heavy westward tonnage and very little freight moving eastward, that railroad starts to develop some kind of tonnage that can be loaded into its cars when they are coming back over the lines. Of course, sometimes it cannot be done. You cannot haul trainloads of fertilizer down to the eastern end of Long Island and load oysters, fish, and

cabbages into those same cars. however, load lumber into box cars. same car that takes a miscellaneous load of package freight from Chicago to Spokane can run on the siding at a big Washington mill and pick up enough lumber for the Eastern markets to make the trip worth while. In the old days, se simple an expedient as that one followed, of course; but it was not developed into a science. Nowadays it is That is the difference between American railroad methods of twenty years ago and of to-day.

It is the habit of railroad writers are critics, if they are not quite sure wh started a certain radical change in railroad methods, to ascribe it to Mr. James ! Hill, and let it go at that. Very likely nine tenths of the great departures which Mr. Hill brought to perfection on th Great Northern were practised, more o