Our railroad machine did not break even in New England, where conditions are and for a long time past have been almost at their worst; where for nearly two decades a high-grade community has been forced to pay penalty, and pay generously, for a grave accumulation of railroad errors. It was in New England that American railroading really began, with the construction in 1808 of a crude wooden railed line at Quincy, Massachusetts, whose horse-drawn cars brought granite from the quarries down to the water's edge, whence it might go by sloop to Charlestown, where the tall shaft of the Bunker Hill monument was beginning to arise. It was in New England too that the first real railroad enterprise and development were shown; by the middle of the forties a group of energetic and profitable small companies rapidly expanded and offered genuine transport to six of the busiest and most rapidly growing States of the Union. It is in that same New England that when one comes to-day he finds the picture of our national railroad machine almost at its very darkest--the stations dirty, unpainted, neglected; the passenger-cars and the locomotives in similar or even worse condition; the morale of the rank and file of railroad labor low in many different ways. Remember that it is not like this everywhere else within the land. It is particularly different out in the West. Take California; out there the stations almost invariably are clean and brightly painted, the broad lawns that surround them are in the pink of perfection, while the trains that enter and leave the stations are in full keeping with them. Engines, and the passenger-cars behind, are alike clean, fresh-painted, efficient in every detail of their appearance. Paint certainly does wonders. The cherry-red electric trains of the Southern Pacific never seemed brighter or more immaculate. I rode a little more than a year ago on a huge steam locomotive of the El Paso and Southwestern railroad. The brightness of her appearance, the efficiency of her performance, seemed to belie the fact that it was eleven years since she had left the big shop in Philadelphia where she had been born.