The other day I sat in the Southern Pacific offices at Houston, Texas, and talked with a genius of a railroad operator in regard to this very thing. He was telling of the remarkable record made by his road in getting the troops across from Galveston to El Paso. I asked what was the best he could do in a real emergency--an emergency calling for perhaps the movement of 50,000 troops, instead of 5,000. "Under normal conditions we can put five trainloads a day of troops across Texas, in addition to our regular traffic and keep them moving at a rate of from seventeen to eighteen miles an hour, including stops. We could put on more trains, but this would not accomplish much except to tie up all of them. We have to figure the capacity of our main line very largely by the frequency of the passing sidings." "Suppose a crisis should arise--a crisis which demanded an even quicker movement of troops?" I asked. He did not hesitate in his reply. "In such a crisis we would pull all our other traffic off the line and move from ten to twelve trains a day." Which, translated, would mean at the most from five to six regiments of 2,000 men and their accouterments. And this on a railroad with a tremendously high reputation for efficient operation. Here is the case for single-track. Now consider double-track. The Union Pacific moves in summertime eight through passenger trains west-bound out of its ancient transfer station at Council Bluffs, an equal number east-bound. Frequently there are extra sections of these trains, to say nothing of a pretty steady schedule of freights. Yet even this by no means represents the capacity of its low grades and double-track to Ogden. The Pennsylvania Railroad in twenty-four hours has handled 121 trains bound in a single direction out of its great yards at Altoona, which means a train every eleven minutes and a half. While the main line of the Pennsylvania is four-tracked, that traffic was freight and handled almost entirely upon one of a pair of freight tracks. If such a performance was possible in the steep hills of the Keystone state, it would hardly be exaggeration to suggest that the Union Pacific could handle a military train bound west from the Missouri at least every thirty minutes. Taking 1,000 men to the train as a moderate estimate, this great road could dispatch nearly 50,000 men a day without in any degree congesting itself. And while its central connecting stem at Ogden--that portion of the Southern Pacific once known as the Central Pacific--is by no means completely double-tracked, in a military necessity it could be made so at once by the simple expedient of using for a one-way movement of the trains, the newly built Western Pacific which parallels it all the way from Ogden to San Francisco.