Cleveland has just embarked upon an extravagant union station project which, after all is said and done, is not to be a union station. For some of the more sensible of the railroads who come to her have refused to be beguiled by so obvious a real-estate scheme and one involving huge expenditures at the very time when the average American railroad is pleading poverty and reducing its expenditures because of that plea. The huge capital expenditure of that proposed new Cleveland passenger-station might be saved in a large part, and still that enterprising city be given a fine passenger gateway that would express worthily her great pride and her great wealth. I have always had a feeling that with foresight--and _an abolition of foolish competitive pride_--the huge capital expenditure already made and yet to be made upon the new Union Station of Chicago could have been very largely saved by an enlargement and an adaptation of the existing passenger terminals of that city. The Northwestern for instance has a head-house out of all proportion to the train-house. A second train-house could easily have been built alongside of the present one without the real necessity of adding to the main frontage of the station upon Madison Street. Unquestionably new and much larger stations were and still are needed both at Dearborn Street and upon the lake-front. But these new stations will be needed even after the completion of the so-called Union Station, at an expense now estimated at well in excess of $50,000,000. These other stations could have been built to a larger size without the expenditure of the $50,000,000, and the Chicago Union Station permitted to become a matter of history. It is useless, it seems to me, to stress too heavily the wage of the American railroad employee when gross capital expenditures of this sort have been made and are continuing to be made; or the rate of the traffic return. Our railroads have been far too greatly burdened by these gewgaws. Once in a while, of course, a station comes along, like the new Grand Central Terminal in New York, which is the fruition of a positive genius. If all of our passenger terminals had the economic strength of the new Grand Central it would not have been necessary to write these paragraphs. And I do not think either that it would have been necessary to raise the passenger-fares far from their before-the-war levels. But when one balances one Grand Central against a baker's dozen of Washington Terminals (with that overhead and operating cost of thirty-four cents a passenger) he sees at once the genuine value of that one Grand Central.