I began this chapter with the motor-truck. With the motor-truck I shall close it. It is the object of great dreams of transport. Yet these are not, after all, mere dreams. They are, as we have seen just now, the carefully developed plans of engineers long since become expert in transportation. I could have carried you much further into these plans--into their application for the relief of Philadelphia, whose great water-front along the Delaware is only reached by the box-car after miles of tedious switching through congested trackage, and where the motor-truck offers an almost immediate and a comparatively inexpensive solution of the freight terminal problem; into Chicago where the situation is nearly as bad; and into Boston, where it is considerably worse, and where again the motor-truck plus the container in terminal service is a veritable key to the problem. Further still could I have carried you in this discursion--to Baltimore, to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, to Detroit, elsewhere still. I have hesitated to weary you with too much detail. You have had enough to prove my points, while only space prevents the discussion of the financial phases of this service, sometimes known as store-door delivery. I shall admit that store-door delivery has no attractive sound to the practical operating railroad executive. He is gun-shy, tremendously gun-shy of it. And yet I do not wonder at that. Your railroader feels that sooner or later--and probably much sooner than later--the charges for this service would be tacked upon his shoulders flatly included within his transportation rate. Aside from that I think that he would welcome it distinctly. It would greatly simplify the traffic problems in and around his freight-terminals to say nothing of making vast savings in the use of his equipment. Moreover the day is coming when he will be compelled to welcome it willy-nilly. For, in my opinion, the motor-truck will occupy a place in the railroads' necessities to-morrow only second to that of the locomotive itself. It represents the railroad's newest field of development, by far its largest field of possibilities. Remember that the pictures which you have just seen in some detail of the Cincinnati and the New York terminal situations are but two out of many of these possibilities. The others are so vast and so many as to be termed limitless. They represent progress--progress in the field of American transport as definite and as distinct as that which marked the coming of the locomotive. The years pass by. In them we do move. We do progress. And transport enterprise consists in translating vision to practical operation, along lines such as we just have seen. So shall our railroad of to-morrow be upbuilt. CHAPTER XIII THE TWILIGHT OF COMPETITION