Personal discrimination may be as effective upon competition through denial of facilities to some shippers, as through conferring of special favors upon others. Practices of this sort have been quite common in the coal business, especially in the matter of furnishing or refusing to furnish an ample supply of cars or suitable spur tracks to mines. In the well known Red Rock Fuel Company case in 1905,[178] the railroad definitely announced its policy, "not to have a lot of little shippers on its line who would ship coal when prices were high and then shut up shop and go home and let the large shippers have the lean years." The development of over 4,000 acres of coal lands was thus denied in favor of the large companies, until the Interstate Commerce Commission took the matter up. A year later came the startling revelations upon the Pennsylvania Railroad as to the practice of discrimination in furnishing cars to coal mines.[179] A comprehensive investigation by the company itself resulted in the discharge of a number of high officials. It appeared, for example, that the assistant to President Cassatt had acquired $307,000 in stock of coal companies without cost; that a trainmaster for $500 had purchased coal mine stock which yielded an annual income of $30,000; and that one road foreman was given three hundred shares of the same company stock for nothing. In all these cases the object was to secure not only an ample supply of cars for the favored companies, but perhaps even the denial of suitable service to troublesome competitors. In this regard, the old practices of the Standard Oil Company in the eighties are recalled. Not only, as in the celebrated Rice case,[180] did it demand heavy refunds on its own shipments, but it also compelled the imposition of a surtax on its competitors' traffic which was to be added to its own special allowance.