In the East, the Boston and Maine, the Maine Central, and the Central Vermont railroads are confronted with dozens of such possibilities of developing through supplemental motor routes in the White Mountains and the Green Mountains; the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the Alleghenies should be filled with opportunities for the Delaware and Hudson, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Chesapeake and Ohio railroads. To establish such routes only needs a few things--the detailed and detached attention of an alert young traffic man, with his nose well above conventions and precedents, working with a man schooled in the operation of motor vehicles upon a large scale. To this partnership add a competent advertising man, give a little money at the outset--and the trick will be turned. And I am confident that if it be well turned, the railroad will never wish to turn back again. CHAPTER X MORE RAILROAD OPPORTUNITY Let us now bring the motor truck into consideration. So far we have not taken it into our plans. And yet it is the phase of automobile competition that some railroad men frankly confess puzzles them the most. For it hits close to the source of their largest revenue--the earnings from the freight. It is a transport of things rather than of men. But that is no fundamental reason why it should not become as much an ally and a feeder of the railroad--as the passenger automobile, for instance. The possibilities of the motor truck, under the development of good roads, which already has grid-ironed the two coastal fronts of the United States with improved highways and placed them here and there and everywhere throughout the interior, are large. A wholesale meat vendor in Philadelphia has used motor trucks with specially designed refrigerator bodies to distribute his wares not only through the immediate suburban territory in southeastern Pennsylvania and in adjacent New Jersey, but right up to the very doors of New York City, itself. Florists, whose greenhouses dot the Illinois prairies for fifty miles roundabout Chicago, today are using fleets of these vehicles to bring their wares at top speed either to suburban railroad stations or down into the heart of the city itself--although this last is somewhat unsatisfactory owing to the crowded streets of downtown Chicago. The motor truck is coming into increasing use in Oregon and in Washington and in California. It is proving a disturbing competitor to the small railroads upon the larger islands of the Hawaiian group. And a company has just been formed to introduce a motor-truck freight service to certain railroadless parts of China--which are supplied with ancient but very passable highroads. [Illustration: WHEN FREIGHT IS ON THE MOVE