The Pennsylvania, which for many years past has had the major share of
traffic between New York and Washington, had asked a little time before to
have its fastest express between the two cities, the almost
internationally famous Congressional Limited, made an excess-fare train,
like the Merchants' Limited from New York to Boston or the Twentieth
Century from New York to Chicago. The commission, on the very eve of
McAdoo's accession, refused. The road withdrew the world-famous train
despite the fact that it was running to capacity and announced that
thereafter all trains between New York and Washington would carry but one
parlor-car each.
Now it happens that this route was and still is of tremendous commercial
importance, not alone for the movement of freight but for the movement of
men, big and little, in government service as well as in essential private
business, back and forth between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and
New York, and the great territory that lies behind all of these cities.
McAdoo's quick judgment saw the need of clean, comfortable, quick transit
for these men and ordered the famous train back again, even though it did
not then regain its historic name nor quite all of its parlor-cars, nor
run at quite as brisk a pace as heretofore.
McAdoo is no fool. Even his bitterest enemies--and he has plenty of
them--will admit that. His moves from the very beginning of his
overlordship of the railroads were generally marked with extreme
shrewdness. And although he does not cooperate well he showed himself
possessed of a genius for organization as well as for coordination. Yet
almost as soon as he stepped into the office on the ninth floor of the new
Interstate Commerce Commission building that had been hurriedly set aside
for the use of the director-general of the railroads, he impressed into
service the various working subcommittees of the Railroad War Board, but
courteously and promptly dismissed that Board itself.
With the Railroad War Board out of the way the director-general moved
quickly toward finding a substitute for it. At the beginning he said that
he was going to try to surround himself with the ablest and most
experienced railroaders in the land--an advisory board, which would be in
effect a railroad cabinet, divided so as to include a man from each of the
great interests already concerned in national rail transport, one
representing operation, another maintenance and equipment, another
finance, another traffic, another public service and accounts, another
law, still another labor.
Yes, labor. Labor at last was to sit in the high council of railroad
transportation. That had a new sound in the game. Yet McAdoo was quick to
include it in his plans. And at that time he added:
"I am putting in men of no partisan views--partisan neither to capital nor
to labor. In every case I have tried to select men who will inspire
confidence. I want men of broad vision."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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