The refusal to furnish cars in fair proportion is a familiar form of discrimination all through this period, usually in combination with other forms of preference. In Kansas, on the line of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway, were two coal companies whose plants were of about equal capacity, and several individual shippers. The railway and its officials became interested in one of the coal companies, and by rebate and other process it was given rates which averaged only forty percent of the rates charged other shippers. The result was that all the other shippers were driven out of business, part of them being hopelessly ruined before giving up the struggle. In addition to rate discrimination the railway practised gross favoritism in the distribution of cars. For example, during one period of 564 days, as was proven in court, the road delivered to the Pittsburg Coal Company 2,371 empty cars to be loaded with coal, although such company had sale for, and capacity to produce and load, during the same period, more than 15,000 cars. During the same time this railway company delivered to the Rogers Coal Company, in which the railway company and C. W. Rogers, its vice-president and general manager, were interested, no less than 15,483 coal cars, while 466 were delivered to individual shippers. In other words, the coal company owned in large part by the railway and its officials, was given 82 percent of all the facilities to get coal to market, although the other shippers had much greater combined capacity than the Rogers Coal Company. During the last four months of the period named, and when the Pittsburg Coal Company had the plant, force, and capacity to load thirty cars per day, they received an average of one and one-fourth cars per day, resulting as was intended, in the utter ruin of a prosperous business and the involuntary sale of the property, while the railway coal company, the railway officials, and the accommodating friends who operated the Rogers Coal Company, made vast sums of money; and when all other shippers had thus been driven off the line the price of coal was advanced to the consumer. Another railway interested in a coal mine furnished cars in abundance to that mine and to others that would sell their product to the mining company in which the railway was interested, but systematically failed to furnish cars to other operators.[84] One operator, after being forced for years in this way to sell his product to the railway mining company at a very low price, was obliged to build a railway of his own in order to reach other lines of railroad and so have a fighting chance for cars. In Arkansas a coal mine owned by the Gould interests was able to ship its product to market at very low rates, while the owners of an adjoining mine were forced to haul their coal to the same market in wagons because the rates charged them from the coal railway were so high as to absorb the whole value of the coal at destination.