We have slackened our running time appreciably in the United States these days; very wisely, I think, in the case of the twenty-hour trains between New York and Chicago. As a matter of fact the Twentieth Century Limited, doing the 979 miles of the longer high-speed route between those two cities, from 2:45 o'clock one afternoon (Eastern time) to 9:45 o'clock the next morning (Central time), still makes a remarkable train performance. The Pennsylvania still has two or three of the mile-a-minute flyers in service between Camden and Atlantic City--59.7 miles in fifty-seven or fifty-eight minutes. The Reading has one or two of its flyers left, not only between those points, but between Philadelphia and Jersey City. Yet this is about all of the mile-a-minute work. From here the slackening in time is appreciable until we come to the comparatively slow performances of the high-grades between Chicago and the cities that lie back of it. The New Haven no longer talks about a four-hour train from New York to Boston; it has lengthened its schedule between those cities. There also has been a slight lengthening of the one-time high-speed schedules between New York and Washington. There has been a let-down. The once proud Empire State Express now takes nine hours instead of eight to go from New York to Buffalo, while out upon the Pacific coast the tremendously high-speed expresses of the Santa Fe between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Saint and the Angel, which we saw but a little time ago being summarily dropped by the McAdoo administration, have never been restored. They are not likely to be restored. The Southern Pacific takes thirteen hours and one-half for its best express between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a run of 475 miles. But a moment ago we saw the West Coast system of England doing 540 miles in eight hours and thirty-two minutes, and keeping it up month in and month out. Similarly the S. P. takes twenty-nine hours and ten minutes for its best train between Portland and San Francisco, a distance of 773 miles. It is 517 miles from Paris to Marseilles; the best regular express train between those two cities makes the run in twelve hours and thirty-three minutes. It is 652 miles from Paris to Nice; a regularly scheduled passenger train does it to-day in seventeen hours. And yet the French railway executives promise that they will do much better.