For a centralized traffic bureau of our railroads there is also a huge international opportunity. The representation of our American roads overseas is to-day a woeful thing indeed. The Southern Pacific has an office of its own in Paris. Perhaps there are others. If so I have never seen them. But in my long months of residence in that old city the railways from all quarters of the world save the United States have called to me appealingly from their shop-windows along the boulevards. So it is in London; so in other great capitals of Europe. It is only America--only that lovely great quarter of North America that we call the United States--that is deaf and blind alike to the possibilities of the traveler and the freight from overseas. In April, 1921, I picked up the time-table of a prominent American railroad in the chief hotel in Madrid; in its familiar colorings it seemed like an old friend, indeed. It was an _old_ friend. It was dated December, 1916--and so were all of its fellows from the U. S. A. in the time-table rack of the man from Cook's. The United States Railroad would represent adequately every mile of railroad in the United States in every great city of the world. Its offices would be the outposts of American commercial enterprise. They would be filled with adequate and up-to-date information for the tourist and shipper alike. It might be that they would sell through tickets and through bills of lading to the most humble and sequestered of American communities, while to-day the scarcity of information that the European may readily acquire upon even important towns of our U. S. A. is appalling. Contrast such service, or lack of it, with that rendered, let us say, by the Swiss Federal Railroads in the City of New York, where one may go and find the fullest and the most accurate information in regard to the smallest of Swiss villages. Already I have hinted upon the valuable work that this United States Railroad might do in the technique of the business, both in studying of constant new inventions as well as in working out better operating methods from the tools already at hand. This last certainly would include the constant study of a far better correlation between our steam railroads, our highways, and our inland waterways. It probably would result in not only the complete study of the most efficient and economical container but the actual ownership of several millions of them. It might be well for the title of all our freight-cars as well as our present Pullman sleepers to be vested in it. The advantages of a pooled ownership of these fleets of wheeled carriers, so extremely valuable in inter-railroad communication, have long been realized by our hard-headed railroad executives. The United States Railroad could accomplish such point ownership, and with a minimum of fuss and feathers. In the long run it might even accomplish the tremendous feat of establishing a through fast passenger-train between New York and Seattle. Who knows?