The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-10-18
GIGANTIC TASK
 ID RUN RAILROADS Employ Over 1,5oO,OOO Men
 At Present Time THE LUxURlES OF TRAVEL England Holds the Record for the Fastest 1oo-MIe Trip-Rock Island Frisco System Has Greatest
 Mileage of All.
THE lUXURlES OF TRAVEL
BY FREDERIC ]. HAsklN.

The railroads of the country give em ployment to million and a half people, the force having doubled in five years. If the freight engines and cars were put into one big train 1t would be about 900O lsiles long, carrying one-half of the freight of the entire world,S and the passenger equipment would add another 300 miles to it's length. There were nearly 5O,00oOoO carloads of stuff hauled last year, or some IS tons for every person in the country. It is estimated that ho- boes cost the railroad $25,O00000 a year. The roads are adopting vigorous meas ures to get rid of them. They are beg ging the cities and towns along their lines not to continue to give the hoboes the "get-out-of-town or go-to-j jail' notice any more, but to throw them behind the bars on sight. The roads are asking their cooperation in an effort to put down the tramp nuisance. Not all of the hoboes are patrons of the "side door Pull mans" Many of them prefer the blind baggage or the brake rods of the pas- senger trains. More tramps than pas sengers are annually killed by the rail- roads.
 The housekeeping expenses of big road are something enormous. In one year the Santa Fe, for instance, uses three tons of pins, 50 barrels of ink, and 1500 miles of lead pencils, and sells over 100000 bottes of soft drinks a year on it's lines. The Pennsylvania railroad an- nually pays out some s15,0e0 for the chew in in 70 in it's stations. And though this road spends $250,0 ,000 without kissing it goodbye, it yet saves the waste pins, waste pens, waste papers, old mops, old rags and old bottles with a care that would be called miserly in the average man. It re- alizes nearly $o0O0 a year out of its waste paper alone.
 Another heavy item of expense is the printing of time tables Four million of these were given away in New York City alone in 1905 There are associa- tions which do nothing but look after the distribution of time tables Every hotel and other public place where trav elers congregate are kept supplied. A few years ago two men were discussing the Siberian railroad in Russia at dinner in New York hotel. The one bet the other the price of the dinner that there was not a time table of that road to be found in the hotel. A boy was sent to see and in a few minutes came back with the pamphlet The first regular time table ever issued was by the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac railroad, in 1S36 Copies of this time table are now in the Field Museum at Chicago
 An analysis of the last report of the interstate commace commission shows that freight rates are 10 per cent lower in the south than they are in the north. Taking the railroads of those states north of the Ohio and the Potomac and east of the western boundary of the state of Indiana as one group, and those south of these two rivers and west of the Mis- sssippi as another, it is found that the rate per ton per mile in the south is only 90 per cent of the rate in the north. The roads of the south get only SS per cent as much for operating a passenger train one mile as the northern roads, and only S2 per cent as much for oper- ating their freight trains per mile. These figures apply to a period just antedating the reduction of rates that has been made by state legislation.
 e In the northern group 27 per cent of the capital stock paid no dividends, while fl