It would be pathetic, nay tragic, to remove an American railroad name like the Pennsylvania or the Northwestern, to try to paint out the red cars of the one line and the yellow ones of the other. New York Central is too good a name to be scrapped. The same is true of Baltimore and Ohio. How can we prate of morale and then dare to take from under it the things that are its chief support? After all does sentiment count for nothing? And tradition? Have we not possibly become a little too materialistic a nation? On the other hand Southern Pacific means but little to-day as the name of a railroad which reaches as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as deeply into the heart of the country as Ogden. The Californian railroad has a sense of dignity that ought to appeal to every man of that great State. Such a sense too has the Puget Sound Lines. What's in a name? Everything. Sentiment. Tradition. Morale. Progress. Dollars and cents, if you will force me to be materialistic. * * * * * But the far greater thing to be gained is the intimacy of contact resulting by the location of a railroad president with large authority within but a few hours reach of the people that he is endeavoring to serve. Why should the man of Concord, New Hampshire, or he of Lewiston, Maine, have to go farther than Boston for the adjudication of even his most serious differences with the railroad? Or he of Madison or Racine further than Chicago? And when it comes to the contacts with his fellow-workers, how can a railroad president in our Federal capital city of Washington be expected to know of living conditions in Great Falls, Montana, or in Wichita Falls, Texas? Incidentally that is the chief issue upon which the Pennsylvania is to-day fighting the Railroad Labor Board in the courts. It wishes the right to meet its own workers, in its own way. This is real regional thought. The people in control of the Standard Oil and the Bell Telephone companies came long ago to bless the day when legislation embarrassing to them at the time, forced the regional system upon them. They now know its real advantages. The intimacy of labor control alone is worth all the trouble and all the expense. There is little or no dispute among those who really know the situation that nine tenths of the solution of the railroad labor problem as it exists in this country to-day rests in better contacts between the employers and the employed. A predicament such as we saw but a little time ago--the general manager of a great railroad unable to get his proposals to his shop-workers--would hardly be possible in a road whose limits were not too great. A certain high executive of my acquaintance is going to take extreme exception to my suggestion that the regional trunk-lines in the immediate district between New York and Chicago be broken at Buffalo, at Pittsburg, and the Ohio River.