The morning journal-courier., 1908-02-20
"Meddler" Criticises President
 Mellen and Offers Practical .% Suggestions.
GOOD WILL OVERLOOKED
The Point of View of the Merchant ... Who Loses Money to Please
 - Patrons.
To the Editor Journal-Courier:


 I see in the news of the day that the conductors on the railroad have been given new orders in regard to reporting passengers and fares, with the intention of removing trains which do not pay.
 We who are not public service cor porations and who have really to serve the public in order to do business, read such paragraphs as these, with a growing sense of envy. What luxury it is to manage a public service cor poration. If a train does not pay, cut it out; if it costs good money to in stall a system of signals or lenders to safeguard the public, don't do it; if 1t is going to make hard feelings to discharge a favored division superin tendent who does not know any more about short haul passenger traffic than a trolley superintendent knows about long haul freight traffic, let your short haul passenger traffic go to the devil and cut out the trains as fast as it appears that the public cant accommodate them selves to the schedule he finds most easy to operate. I suppose that no railroad officials wife ever goes down to one of the business corporations in New Haven and asks to have a purchase which amounts to less than twenty-five cents, delivered at her home. She always carries such small purchases home does she not? What would she think of the stores in New Haven if they should all agree not to deliver purchases amounting to less than twenty-five cents, even if the customer at other times made large purchases, and in fact ordinarily made such large purchases She would think it pretty and niggardly policy and would condemn the managers of the stores to all her friends, and she would say to her acquaintances In New York and elsewhere that New Haven was the most provincial city she had ever heard of. And she would be right! The dry goods dealer, the grocer. the butcher or the public ser vice corporation which is too niggard- ly to give some service which does not pay, in order to build up a good will which will pay in increased traffic in the long run, is too short sighted to succeed in any field where competi- ton is practicable. Even though it has a monopoly at the time, as Mir. Mellens railroad has, it loses money almost as fast as it loses good will, by such stupidly bad management.
 As an instance of this, 1 know of an early morning train which for rprny years had been running into Zoe of the cities of this State at an hour suitable for joiners, mechanics and clerks to get to their work. With out warning this train was taken off in order to "economize" and the pas sengers were expected to take train which arrived only a trife more than an hour later. The idea was that pas sengers could be handled like freight, left to accumulate until you got a train load and then handled in bulk at less cost than carrying the smaller quantity in each of several loads.
 The theory was excellent had it been founded on knowledge of the subject matter As it was founded Oil iSlVi pl tiit oh'JtAl hiub- ter the result was just what any ob- servant passenger could have pre- dicted The public could not adapt its business to the train service, and family after family gave up suburban homes and moved to the city in order to enable the wage earner to continue his work An average of something like fifteen to twenty passengers to the mile for a distance of say twenty miles from that city, left the country and quit committing
 Their supplies. which the railroad had been carrying, dropped off the freight traffic, their wives had often gone into the city on other trains than the one dropped out and had paid full fare This dropped off the passenger traffic on other trains. A rough calculation shows that the road lost at least fifteen hundred dollars a year, net, by removing this one train. and 1t will take many years for it to over come the i'll will and the lack of con- fidence in its management that one piece of thoughtlessness has occasion- ed. The train was restored a few weeks later, and while it checked fur ther migration to the city, none of