* * * * * The entire field of British railway operation offers many valuable and suggestive hints, even to a nation as supposedly expert in railroad operation as this. It is not possible in the limits of a single chapter to go into all of these. Among them is the development of electrification upon the standard lines of Great Britain; despite a seemingly slow progress in this great work (but 365 miles out of 24,500 being operated by electricity at the moment) it is known that a group of distinguished American electrical engineers has been engaged for some time past in devising a scheme for the operation of every mile of British railway by electric power. Others are the exquisite simplification and economy of her terminal operation and the facility of her small goods-wagons for short-haul traffic. These are all interesting. Yet, the single phase of her regional development so far outranks even these as to demand an almost exclusive attention. France has led the way, has proved almost beyond doubt the value of the regional system; Great Britain now falls in line. The United States will be next in turn. Because the possibilities of the extension of this, the greatest of immediate railway economies, are so vast in this land of huge railroad development I shall leave their description until later. Then I shall endeavor to show how as a nation we can all benefit--railroad patron, railroad shareholder, railroad employee alike--by the extension to our national transport machine of a plan which is so ingenious, so genuinely economic, and yet withal so simple as to make it a bewildering wonder that our biggest railroaders did not come to it long ago. That they did not is rather a sad commentary upon their vision--or lack of it. CHAPTER XV THE REGIONAL RAILROAD AT HOME Nearly six years ago I began a careful study of the possibilities of a regional railroad development within the United States. At that time I had not visited Europe. Yet a fairly thorough knowledge of the general plan of her railway organization, acquired through a process of careful reading, had made me cognizant of the regional plan as it exists there; particularly of the French _reseaux_. It was then apparent--well before our entrance into the World War--that the scheme of organization upon which our roads had been upbuilt for eighty-five years was approaching the end of its usefulness. Over-consolidation, the decline of real competition between the separate carriers, the increasing unintelligent interference of government with the minor details of railroad operation, the decline of morale--each of these things separately, all of them together, bespoke the slowly approaching end of our old order of railroad things.