The Birmingham age-herald., 1904-11-17

llOI OI the TH1lWdyS Ol lHS DHlltu oldlcSs
 It was in part as follows:
 At the request of the director of the census the Interstate Commerce Com mission has undertaken commercial valuation of the ranways of the United States, which is being conducted jointly under the auspices of the two offices. The results of this investigation will be pub lished in the census .olume on Wealth, Debt and Taxation The statiscian of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the director of the census took the initiative In this work during the early summer of the present year by assigning the study of railwa.' valuation in several of the states to a number of expert special agents.
 Subsequently an expert special agent, representing the interstate commerce commission and the census bureau. was paced in active charge of the work; and several additional expert special agents have since been appointed for the pur- pose of pursuing particular phases of the i investigation. During the latter part of September a meeting of the special arents, who had been a work chiefly in the field, was held for the purpose of comparing results and discussing general plans and methods. The reports of the field agents reveal many diversities in the methods of valuation pursuet. in the va rlous states. and on whole the opin- ion seemed to prevail that little direct aid could be derived from the states for the task of valuing the railways of the l United States although a description of the methods followed by the several states, 1t was thought, would in many in stances throw interesting side lights on the general problems of valuation.
 Quite Scientific Work.
 Only few states. a smaller number than can be counted on the fingers of one hand, have done thoroughly scientific work of railway valuation. If such work had been done throughout the country the present valuation would be a very much easier, if indeed, not a needless task. l What these few as well as many other i states have done will be briefly described in the final report on railway valuation. i The exact form and contents of the final report cannot at present be specified and whatever may be said in this paper upon that subject must be understood to be tentative only and subject to such modi- l fications as the nature of the material to be formulated and the methods to be adopted may demand.
 Irrespective of whatever else the valua- ton of the railways of the United States may include, it obviously embraces two i general problems: First valuation of the various systems as a whole, and sec ond, the distribution of these total values l of the different railway systems among l the several states In which the systems 1 lie. In the case of railways which lie 1 wholly within the bounds of a single state the second problem is not applica- | ble. A little progress in the preliminary study soon led to the belief that all the salient facts relating to the first prob- | lem, that of valuing the systems as d whole were available in existing and ac- cessble reports, but that the facts neces- sary for scientific distribution of total values of systems among the states were not available.
 Hence an effort was immediately made to determine the best method for the as- signment of values to the states. With a l view of combining the greatest possible number of judgments and of getting as many criticisms and suggestions as pos sible, accounting, and other railway of ficers, as well as persons in different pur- suits recognized as authorities on such subjects, were interviewed regarding the methods for distributing values among the states. Up to the present the opinions and judgements of officials and others represented, perhaps. three-fourths of the railway mileage of the country, nave peer secured and taken into consideration in the elaboration of working plans.
 Tn order to test the accuracy of traffic density and gross revenue statistics as bases for the assignment of values tC states. the officials of several important railway systems kindly furnished figures for their respective systems. The data thus obtained were formulated in per centaee tables and compared. The re- suits were most gratifying. Assuming a certain value, tx) millions of dollars for each of these systems. the total value was divided among the states in which