The big railroaders have not been quick to see the practical possibilities of the motor-truck. Gradually however these are being forced upon their attention. Take Cincinnati. Perhaps you are not a shipper and so are not familiar with the freight situation there. If so, let me tell you that in the days before Uncle Sam attempted consolidation of all his railroads and the old-time competing systems used points of individual attractiveness to gain traffic, the bright young men who sought out preference-freight for their individual lines used, as the strongest of their talking points, to promise the elimination of Cincinnati for any shipment bound north or south or east or west through its vicinage. The late J. J. Hill used to say that it took as long and cost as much for a box-car to go through the Chicago terminals--about twenty-two miles--as from Chicago to the Twin Cities--nearly five hundred miles. Applying a similar test to the Cincinnati terminals one might say that a journey on from the Queen City by the Ohio through to El Paso would be an equally fair comparison. For while Chicago lies upon a broad flat plain and presents no topographical problems whatsoever to the railroad engineer, Cincinnati, crouched under fearful hills there along the river, has always been his despair. When Collis P. Huntington first conceived the idea of a real transcontinental railroad system forty or more years ago and sought to bring his Chesapeake and Ohio, as an integral unit of that plan, into Cincinnati, he found the roads already there most hostile to his entrance. They held the town impregnable. Yet Huntington outwitted them by a superb coup d' etat of engineering in which he thrust a marvelous great bridge over the Ohio into the heart of the city and the upper levels of its Central Union Station.