For the moment the freight service, nationally speaking at least, is not subject to the same criticisms as the passenger. (To the depleted passenger service we shall come in good time.) This for the simple reason that the traffic is not being produced across the land. A sadly depleted transportation structure easily can take good care of a sadly lessened freight traffic. But let our wheels of industry begin really to hum again and contemplating the present condition of our carriers, I shall fear a reversion to the conditions of the winter months of the early part of 1920, when one box-car took forty days to go from Boston to Chicago, a trip that easily should have been made in a fortnight, while another car but a few days later took fifty days for the same journey! Yet, to be entirely fair, these runs were made in a winter which, by the official records of the weather bureau, was the worst that the country had known in thirty-six years. All right. Let us be fair. We shall go back three years to 1917 before government control and the really big labor problems had been wished upon the railroads. The New England roads even then were already having a fearful time of it. The Boston Chamber of Commerce sent out questionnaires to the big shippers of the district asking for specific reports on _all_ of the car-load shipments that they were making. When the questionnaires came back to it, all filled in neatly on the dotted lines and in the blank spaces, they showed the definite record of 2625 cars, quite enough to be fully representative of the entire situation. One New England land shipper reported that the fifty-nine cars which he had had in Chicago movement had ranged from thirteen to eighty-seven days in transit. (Remember, if you will, that a fair average for that journey is fourteen days.) One hundred and sixty cars bound to his siding from various Western points had together consumed 6709 days in transit. A reasonable time for their journeys would have totaled 2550 days. Detentions due solely to railroad delays had in his one case come to the considerable figure of 4159 days.