The weight classification killed Knapp’s business, but a few small independents lived in spite of it. So another move was made on the railroad chess-board. Three great railroads tap the Kansas oil fields: the Santa Fe, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, and the Missouri Pacific. In August, 1904, just as the Standard finished its pipe line to Kansas City, the rates on crude oil and its products were raised by all the railroads on the field. The rate to Kansas City went up from 10 cents to 17 cents a hundred; and the rate to St. Louis rose from 15 cents to 22 cents. On a carload of fifty-five thousand lbs. the increase in the freight to Kansas City was $38.50, or $93.50 total, and $121 to St. Louis. This was prohibitive. In their testimony given in March last (1905), shippers, even those who were using their own tank cars, declared that the change in rates compelled them to stop business at once and shut down their wells. The advance in freight was not a part of a general readjustment of rates. It was made alone. And it made oil rates out of all proportion to other rates. The freight from Chanute to Kansas City was $50 for a car of wheat, $40 for corn, $66 for machinery, $28 for cattle, and $30 for a car of fruit, against $93.50 for oil, the least valuable of all, and formerly carried for $50 or $55 a car. The examiner at the recent Kansas investigation presented the following letter in explanation of the railroads: “The reason the Santa Fe and the ‘Katy’ railroads raised rates on oil after the pipe line was completed was because the Standard’s companies arranged with them to do so, by agreeing to give them a percentage upon every barrel of oil that was run through their pipe lines on condition the railroads would increase the freight rate on oil to a prohibitive rate, so that all the oil would be forced through the pipe line. Now the railroads have no oil, but get about ten cents per barrel for all oil going through the pipe lines.” This is similar to an arrangement that existed for several years from 1884 on between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Oil Combine by which the railroad was to have a fixed sum per barrel on 26 percent of all the oil going eastward from the Pennsylvania oil fields, whether the oil went by rail or pipe line,[300] in consideration of which the railroad was to put up the rates on oil.