"Just to teach you folks politeness and a little common decency," was the reply. And the lesson must have taken hold--for the steam railroad paid the price. The result was that it again held the territory and could regulate the transportation tolls, but what a price had been paid! Two railroads occupied the territory that was a good living for but one. The trolley line, now that it has begun to depreciate and to require constant maintenance repairs, vies with the desolate branch of the steam road, which runs but two half-filled passenger trains a day upon its rails. A tax is laid upon the steam-road property--a greater tax upon the residents of the valley--for operating man after operating man is going to "skin" the service in a desperate attempt to make an extravagant excess of facilities pay its way. The trolley line has already raised many of its five-cent fares to an inconvenient six cents--the steam branch is held fast by the provisions of its charter and the watchfulness of a state regulating commission. And in the beginning the entire situation could have been solved easily and efficiently by the comparatively modest expenditures required to electrify the steam railroad's branch. A good many railroads have taken forethought. The New York Central found some of its profitable lines in western New York undergoing just such electric interurban competition and a few years ago it installed the electric third rail on its West Shore property from Utica to Syracuse, forty-four miles. The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading. Built in the early eighties from Weehawken, opposite the city of New York, to Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely the New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of the fine business it had held for many years. After a bitter rate war the New York Central, with all the resources and the abilities of the Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively and bought its new rival for a song; but a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been practically useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a relief line for the overflow of through freight.