I could take the atlas maps of western New York and show you many, many more miles of railroad which could be abandoned profitably to-day, not to the hindrance but to the positive benefit of the communities which they are supposed to serve yet no longer serve, efficiently at least. But let us turn our attention from trackage to terminals and for the moment consider the chief city of western New York--the chief in size at any rate, Buffalo. Twelve steam railroads to-day enter Buffalo and share four main passenger-stations there. The Lackawanna has a handsome new terminal at the harbor-front, into which enter not only its trains but those of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg and the Nickel Plate lines. The Lehigh Valley has an almost equally new and handsome station, which it shares with the Grand Trunk. The Erie plays the lone hand in a very ancient building, while the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Michigan Central, and one or two other roads are housed in the Exchange Street Station, which is fairly antediluvian in its antiquity and its inefficiency. For some years Buffalo dreamed her dreams of a real union station, which would rise majestically from the lake-front in the neighborhood of the historic court-house and jail where Czolgosz, the assassin of William McKinley, met his trial and his just fate. Travelers who have had to pass through Buffalo and who have been compelled to change from one railroad to another there shared these dreams of a station into which all the trains should pass. But the city authorities and those of the railroads came to an absolute _impasse_ in the matter. The New York Central, for instance, did not want to continue backing its through New York-Chicago passenger trains into the Buffalo station. It proposed as a compromise a union station somewhere east of Clinton Street. But "somewhere east of Clinton Street" is _declasse_ to Buffalo, and the big lake-front town would have nothing of that. So while mayors and general managers and high-priced engineers and all the other bigwigs stormed and argued the Lackawanna people and the Lehigh Valley people went right ahead and built their own passenger stations. It is not conceivable that these large handsome stations would now be abandoned. In the creation of the regional plan it is not necessary. It becomes obvious from the beginning that the many trains of the Erie-Lackawanna would easily fill the Lackawanna Station to repletion and permit of the final abandonment of the ancient Erie passenger-house with one of its most exasperating rail grade-crossing problems in the land as a perplexity always attendant upon its operation.