But what was the New Haven doing to gain new business? Was it advertising? Was it improving the intensive details of its service? Was it trying to induce people to go in odd hours upon its trains? Not a bit of any of these. It was reducing trains. It controls the night boats upon the Sound--and operates these upon the same schedules upon which they were operated more than fifty years ago, save as they gradually are being permitted to die of dry-rot and so are eliminated. For at least a quarter of a century not one improvement has been made in the operation of the Fall River Line. And even when the press of midsummer traffic forces a double service in each direction each night no one in the management has the initiative to suggest "staggering" the schedules so as to give any diversity of service whatsoever. I should be the last to suggest that the New Haven make a low rate from New York or Boston for the Yale-Harvard or the Yale-Princeton games. It would be the height of absurdity to lower the rates when the traffic at full standard rates rises to a tidal wave which demands the full operating resources of the property for its handling; and that it always is well handled does credit to the New Haven's potential powers of operation. Yet there are times when it might well afford to make an attractive excursion-rate between New York and Boston. Some of its existing trains between these two cities move at awkward hours and with an incredible slowness. They naturally are not crowded trains. An occasional attractive rate upon these trains alone might, and probably would, result in filling them to their capacity, while the people that traveled upon them would not in any large measure be those that ordinarily travel at the regular rates. The success for many years past of the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio in operating week-end excursions between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington ought to have been of some educational value to the New Haven, but apparently it was not. I have no grudge against the New Haven. On the contrary, I have naught but sympathy for a railroad which earns upwards of $60,000,000 a year from its passenger traffic alone and yet shows so little knowledge of fundamental merchandising principles. Yet it is all too typical of many of its fellows. In my boyhood days in northern New York the annual event of the autumn was the big excursion to New York City. It ran at half-price and in crowded passenger-cars--parlor-cars, sleeping-cars, and coaches by the dozens. It attracted people who never went to the big city on the regular trains and at regular prices.