Each evening at a quarter after seven a fast-freight train of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad leaves the Mott Haven terminal of that system, in the upper section of New York, for Boston. With selected equipment, it makes good time on the 229-mile run to Boston and pulls in there shortly before six o'clock in the morning. A hard-headed and long-visioned motor-truck concern in New York fills three to a dozen box-cars in that train each night. Into that Mott Haven terminal it operates its own fleet of motor-trucks, not only from all freight-giving points in the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queensborough, and Bronx districts of greater New York, but from the many industrial towns in the vicinage roundabout, up to a radius of from thirty to forty miles. Out of the Boston terminal of the New Haven it operates a similar fleet, and so makes the journey of a package of hides from Passaic to Lynn but a single rail-haul, in addition to the pick-up and the delivery motor-run. Simplicity and efficiency. And efficiency and economy. In theory there would seemingly be nothing to prevent the single big express company (into which all of the old-time companies were combined, as a war-time measure) from doing this same thing. In practice, however, their contracts with the railroads forbid this very simple and efficient method of working. Those contracts compel the express company to load its freight into railroad baggage-cars, for no matter how short the haul. If the American Railway Express takes two rolls of carpet from Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, New York, to Yonkers, on the very edge of the big town and hardly a dozen miles distant from the carpet-store, it must lug them to its big terminal on the west side of Manhattan Island and there put them in a baggage-car of the New York Central for the haul to its station in Yonkers, from which, of course, there is the second delivery run. There is nothing in the theory--or in its simple practice--to keep the express company's truck which picked up the rolls of carpets at the Fifth Avenue shop continuing north to the very door of the house in Park Hill or any other section of Yonkers to which they are consigned. In a similar way express freight that is destined from Manhattan Island to a point as near as Newark--seven or eight miles of rail-haul--must all go by baggage-car, which, in its way, is quite as absurd as sending stuff all the way from New York to Chicago by motor-truck. * * * * *