The Railroad Builders: A Chronicle of the Welding of the States. John Moody

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СКАЧАТЬ had thus greatly curtailed the consolidation of competing lines which had gone on so rapidly during the decades following the Civil War. Railroad managers and financiers therefore began to face a very serious problem. Competition of a more or less serious nature was still rampant, rates were cut, and traffic was pretty freely diverted by dubious means. Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business.

      Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history. Edward H. Harriman had risen in ten years from comparative obscurity and was now the president of the Union Pacific Railroad, which he had, in conjunction with the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, reorganized and taken out of bankruptcy. Harriman was one of the originators of the "community of interest" idea, a device for the partial control of one railroad system by another. For instance, although the law forbade any railroad system from acquiring a complete control of a competing line by purchasing a majority of its capital stock or by leasing it, nothing was said about one railroad having a minority investment interest in another. A minority investment, even though it be as low as ten or twenty per cent, usually constitutes a dominating influence if held by a single interest, for in most cases the majority of the shares will be owned in small blocks by thousands of investors who never combine for a definite, practical purpose. Thus the interest which has the one large block of stock usually controls the voting power, and runs little risk of losing it unless a contest develops with other powerful interests—and this is a contingency which it almost never has to meet.

      Carrying out this policy of promoting harmony among competing lines, the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad early in 1900 acquired a working control of the Reading Company, which in turn controlled the New Jersey Central and dominated the anthracite coal traffic. Later the Baltimore and Ohio shared this Reading interest with the Lake Shore of the New York Central system. The New York Central and the Pennsylvania acquired a working control of the same kind in the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which was an important element in the soft coal fields and was reaching out to grasp soft coal properties in Ohio and Indiana.

      These and other purchases, and the consequent voice acquired in the management, established comparative harmony among Eastern railroads for a long time; they stabilized rates and enabled formerly competing roads to parcel out territory equitably among the different interests. Later, Harriman, and to some extent Morgan, carried the community of interest idea some steps further. Morgan caused the New York Central to acquire stock interests in certain "feeder" lines such as the New York, New Haven and Hartford and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, as well as in competing lines; and Harriman caused the Union Pacific not only to dominate the Southern Pacific Company by minority control but also to acquire interests in the Illinois Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, the New York Central, and other eastern properties. The fact was that Harriman had plans in view for acquiring actual control of the New York Central for the Union Pacific and thus, with the Illinois Central, of creating a continuous transcontinental line from ocean to ocean.

      In the past decade few unusual or startling events have marked the history of the Vanderbilt lines. The Vanderbilt family no longer possesses a majority interest in the stock, or anything which approaches it, and the New York Central system and its subsidiaries have come to be known more and more as Morgan properties. The system has grown up with the country. Many of its former controlled roads have now been merged into the main corporation and many new lines have been added to it. Hundreds of millions of dollars of new capital have been spent on the main lines and terminals since 1900. In 1919 the entire property, including controlled lines, embraced more than 13,000 miles of main track, besides about 5000 miles of extra tracks; over 200,000 freight cars are in use on the system, and every year upwards of 200,000,000 tons of freight are transported. The gross annual revenues of the entire system now aggregate more than $400,000,000, while the total capitalization in stocks and bonds exceeds a billion dollars. It is indeed a far cry from that day in August, 1831, when the De Witt Clinton locomotive made its trial trip over the primitive rails of the seventeen-mile Mohawk and Hudson road—a far cry even from that other day, thirty-eight years later, when the sagacious Commodore startled the financial world by his New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, with a capital of ninety million dollars.

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