And that is a platform on which no business--no matter how large or how small it is--can ever lose. * * * * * But is there not a possibility that the railroad can regain some of the traffic that it has lost, temporarily at least, to the motor car? Is it not possible that the derided branch line may not be changed from a withered arm into a growing one? Amputation has sometimes proved effective. There is many and many a branch-line railroad, which probably should never have been built in the first place, whose owners have been wise enough to abandon it and to pull up the rails. Old iron has a genuine market value. Go back with me once again to the time when the trolley began to be a long-distance affair. We have seen already how a good many steam railroad men looked with apprehension upon their branch lines--and with good cause. For a time it did look as if the electric railroad might become a genuine competitor of the steam railroad. A good many interesting fantasies of that sort got into print. An enterprising interurban trolley company over in Illinois put on trolley-sleeping cars between St. Louis and Springfield and St. Louis and Peoria. It was said that the day was coming when a man would ride in a trolley limited all the way from Chicago to New York--a real train, with sleeping cars and dining cars and Negro porters and manicures and an observation platform. The Utica (New York) Chamber of Commerce got tremendously excited over the matter and went all the way out to St. Louis and back in a chartered car taken right out of the press of traffic in Genesee Street. But the trolley, as we have seen, has not proved a competitor of the steam railroad. It has become in almost every instance a feeder and as such is a valuable economic factor in the transportation situation. There have been no more sleeping cars placed on trolley routes, but a little time ago I found a Canadian Pacific box car on the shores of Keuka Lake, more than ten miles distant from the nearest steam railroad. A trolley road had placed it there, on a farmer's private siding. And he was packing it full of grapes--grapes to go overseas from some big Canadian port upon the Atlantic. Such possibilities of the trolley line to the steam railroad point to similar feeding possibilities of the automobile--but of these very much more in their proper time and places. Let us still continue to study the possibilities of the branch line.