The idea is simplicity itself, nor is it a particularly new one. For many years past the express companies have used it for the transport of their comparatively small and valuable packages, placing these in large iron-bound wooden trunks for safety in carriage. It is more than a dozen years ago that a professor in one of the New England colleges--Amherst, I think--wrote an article in which he advocated the scheme for all package-freight and sent the article to a technical publication, which promptly refused it, saying that it was entirely too visionary an idea. Yet here we are, fairly come to it in these days. The Erie plan in its last refinements proposes to unload the package-freight for New York at its yards at Croxton, New Jersey, just west of the Bergen tunnels, and then after reassortment to reload it into steel container-boxes, seventeen and one-half feet by eight and one-half, and with a working capacity of five tons. Two of these containers will fill the platform of an average flat-car. The reassortment or transfer work at Croxton will be not only into containers for the Erie's various sole and joint freight-stations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queensborough, but also to individual business houses, where the volume of the freight justifies such a step. Great retail stores, such as Macy's or Wanamaker's or Altman's, easily would receive one or more of these containers each day. So would the important wholesalers, and all other considerable distributing concerns of the City of New York. The containers placed upon the flat-cars at Croxton will quickly traverse the three or four brief miles to the water-side of Weehawken, just across from West Fortieth Street, Manhattan. Here they will go upon the huge floats originally built for the terminal movement of loaded box-cars but each easily adapted for the carrying of sixty of the five-ton containers. All the elaborate plans that have been made for the extension and development of the port of New York predicate the scrapping of this great harbor fleet of car-floats--some eight million dollars' worth all told. In this book I am aiming to show possible railroad economies, not expenditures. It is easy enough to depict elaborate plans which involve vast capital expenditure. We have had rather too many of these in this country in recent years. It seems to me that by far the best plans are those that give large operating economies with a minimum of actual expense. These are the sort that I am trying to show within these pages.