Here is a possibility of the automobile that the railroad can hardly afford to ignore. One big New England road noted in a recent month that its sale of mileage books--a form of railroad ticket designed particularly for the use of commercial travelers--had declined nearly twenty-nine per cent since the high-water mark three years before. Investigation on its part showed that the drummers all through its territory were beginning to get automobiles. The houses that employed them were encouraging them, either helping in the part purchase of the cars or, in some cases, buying them entirely. They, too, had discovered that their salesmen, no longer dependent on the infrequent train service of branch lines, could "make" more towns in a day. Here is our ubiquitous branch line bobbing up once again. It is a problem which seemingly will not down. For branch-line passenger service is closely related to this last phase of automobile competition. It is the opinion of a good many shrewd railroaders--as well as our own--that the big roads have not always given proper attention to the full development of this phase of their traffic. Some of the big roads--some of the smaller ones too--have given this traffic, oftentimes valuable in itself and never to be ignored as feeding possibility of main-line and competitive traffic, little or no attention. Other roads ignore it. "It is unprofitable," they tell you, with exceeding frankness. "If there is any money at all in the passenger end of the railroad it is in the long haul. We have our branch lines and of course we shall have to continue to operate them, as best we can. But they are the lean of our business. And we have to get a lot of fat on the long-haul traffic to even up with this discouraging lean." It is because of this theory--very popular in some transportation circles--that so many branch-line railroads have today no more, in many instances even less, trains than they had twenty or thirty or forty years ago. The constant tendency has been to cut down service upon the branches. Such cuts generally come in the recurrent seasons of railroad retrenchment. But the trains cut off are rarely restored. For one thing, the branch-line railroad does not often run in a genuinely competitive territory. For another, there is apt to be less protest from a string of small towns and large villages than from one or two large cities with boards of trade, whose secretaries are eternally nagging the railroads.