To assume infallibility or even great accuracy in sketching a regional railroad plan for the United States would be of course ridiculous. We have just had the mere suggestion of twenty-five or twenty-six railroads, some of them non-competitive monopolies and others quite completely competitive, in form at least, which is about all that our so-called competitive railroads are to-day. Still the great transport god of our transport world apparently must continue to be appeased. Form seems to please him. We shall grant him that. But in a national transportation plan which begins to assume any real form of high organization we shall not permit the component parts of it to indulge in internecine struggle. It is too expensive business. So probably we shall begin the operation of our regional plan, which you already have seen outlined geographically, by first taking our thousand or more separate railroads--nearly 265,000 miles of line--and thrusting them together into a great single organization. This we might easily call the United States Railroad, even though it is to be in one sense not a railroad, from an operating point of view at any rate. For once we have centralized our great rail transport plant, we shall at once begin to decentralize it. We shall make many railroads of it. We shall follow in the main the scheme used by those vastly successful private organizations, Standard Oil and the Bell Telephone, and the equally successful government institution, the Federal Reserve Bank, and set up regional and highly autonomous separate organizations. I began my planning of the regional railroad for this country with the number of separate units fixed at about the same as of these three organisms that I have just mentioned--approximately an even dozen. Gradually I found, however, that in as intricate or as extensive a business as railroading in the United States twelve or fourteen or even sixteen regional companies would not be enough. Perhaps twenty-six is not even enough. After all, that is but a detail. What we really are seeking now is the proper method of organization.