Norwich bulletin., 1914-05-16


 railroad to haul that car from the point where it received the goods to my station. It has repeatedly deliv- cred goods in that time betA>een the stations involved
 They grow tremendous quantities of fine onions in Orange county, N. Y. Practically all of them are shipped to the big city for consumption. It is less than seventy miles from the Bat tery to the farthest extreme tip of Orange county. Yet it regularly takes from eight to fourteen days to get a carload of onions from any point in Orange county to New York city.
 Every month, in connection with the business of the little cooperative club of which I am a member, I go to a city. twenty-five miles away, to buy our monthly bill of goods.
 It regularly takes from four to five days for the railroad to get them to my station, though the shipping point and the receiving point are both on lines managed by the same company. In this case as in that of the lime, the railroad makes a detour, but it's total haul is less than forty miles, at that.
 More than eighty hours to get ton or two of groceries forty miles! Great is steam, now isn't it?
 Why, in the old backward days of our grand dads, yoke of farm raised distance in less hours. and spent half the time eating and restingi
 As a matter of simple family his tory, my grandfather, who used to sell same city and buy ali his supplies there, in the days when there wasn't a railroad on earth, used to make the . round trip with a two-horse wagon, loaded both ways, in thirty six hours. am 15O miles from New York city. Sometimes,-as a punishment for my many sins,-I am compelled to buy in that city. l have never yet received shipment of freight from there in less than ten days. and have some times had to wait twenty eight. which is not turned over to the mail clerks till a. m. reaches me a 10 a. m. of the same day, delivered at my door, five miles from the post-offlce.
 Of course. one doesn't expect freight to be hauled as fast as mail. But the difference between eight hours for the one and twenty eight days for the other is absurd.
 Speaking of similar delays reported to it by an indignant subscriber, a western paper remarks that this con-
 
 country"
 do not know how much of it is due to the railroad management, and how much to the duress in which the roads are held by the various unions which now control their operating functions But no one can fail for a minute to see that somewhere there is incompetence and inefhciency.
 The farmer who complains to "Suc- cessful Farming notes another evil dence of this incompetence. Every thing that is not nailed down or steel hooped is smashed or pilfered', he writes. Certainly it is. if 1t is eatable or smashable.
 Once. in that city. to which I have referred, I made what seemed like a very good "buy'' of peaches. They were in fine shape. securely crated, and cheap-less than half the price charged for similar fruit in my home town. They were forwarded by freight When they arrived most of the crates had been broken open: about a third of the peaches were gone; the re- maining two-thirds had been slammed about till they were bruised in9 hope lessness. I managed to save barely g third of the bushels I had bought, and even these were so badly damaged as to be scarcely usable.
 Of course. put in a claim for damages, and finally got a rebate. But that took time and an absolutely intol- erable amount Of correspondence.
 Two or three years ago I was over charged just double on a ton of freight which I had ordered. I put in my claim for a return of the over charge In about a month I got a polite note regretting the mistake and saying that new and correct bill had been made out. Soon after I received it: a new bill calling on me to pay the correct freight over again. after I had al- ready, enforced by the railroads rules, paid twice the proper sum! It took me five months more to get this strengthened out and my money back.