I have broken my rule and delved into railroad history in this instance for a single purpose, to show how admirably a certain portion of this parallel and largely superfluous railroad construction could be brought to a rapid transit electric installation. For some years past there has been a plan to rid Baltimore of the pressure of through freight traffic through her heart by the construction of a freight cut-off just north of the city, to be used jointly by both the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio. Oddly enough the city itself has opposed this plan. Baltimore has a particularly delightful suburban section extending for many miles north of her actual civic limits. It would be quite impossible to build the proposed freight cut-off without intersecting this section. Baltimore is a conservative town. That a bit of her comfort or beauty should be sacrificed to commercial necessity is, in her eyes, unthinkable. Yet some day that cut-off will be built, if for no other reason than simply because it is a commercial necessity, and the traffic upon the twin sets of tunnels in her heart will be lessened very appreciably. Now consider those tunnels consolidated--conducted in cooperation and not in rivalry. If the Baltimore and Ohio can use the Pennsylvania passenger-station in New York there is no moral reason why it cannot use the Pennsylvania passenger-station in Baltimore and make a real operating saving. Baltimore, far more than New York, presents opportunities for the physical connection of the railroads at each side of the city. As a matter of fact there is a connection already at the eastern edge, and none is needed at the western edge. For the scheme that I contemplate would continue the Baltimore and Ohio's through trains over the Pennsylvania tracks to the Union Station in Washington, which already they use jointly. Now we have a first-class pair of rails left nearly free all the way from Mount Royal Station, Baltimore, to the Union Station, Washington, forty miles distant. The third-rail electric installation of this line which to-day extends for three or four miles of its length through Baltimore could easily be extended to Washington--not only into the Union Station but well beyond it. It would take a lower level of the station, on the side opposite from that occupied by the depressed tracks of the railroads that lead out from and under the station toward the south, and continue as a subway through the heart of Washington to Georgetown and Chevy Chase. Similarly in Baltimore it probably would continue north from Mount Royal, through to Roland Park or even beyond, while between the two cities there has been for many years upon the line of the Baltimore and Ohio an almost unbroken succession of villages, suburban and semi-suburban.