In this emergency the motor truck proved its worth. It so happens that there is a factory in Bridgeport which manufactures a very heavy type of motor truck. It put one of these in service between its plant and New York--fifty-six miles distant over the well-paved historic Boston Post Road. It brought emergency supplies of every sort to the factory doors. So efficient did it prove itself in everyday service that a group of Bridgeport manufacturers and merchants formed themselves into a transportation company and placed other trucks in daily service between their town and New York. And a little later when the New York terminals became glutted with freight and hedged about with embargoes, the manufacturers of Bridgeport began having freight billed to them at the local freight houses in Newark. They extended their motor-truck service to that busy Jersey town and so saved themselves many dollars. When, in the course of a few months, the congestion was removed and freight conditions at Bridgeport were normal once again, the motor-truck service along the Post Road disappeared. It could not compete with the freight rates of the railroad.[12] But its possibilities as a feeder are enormous. Only a few days ago I stood beside the desk of the traffic vice-president of a big trunk line and looked over his shoulder at a huge map spread there. It showed the main line and the branches of his railroad--from all these, stretching, like a fine moss upon an old oak, the improved highroads. The mapmaker had done more. By use of colors he had shown the automobile stage routes upon these roads--those that carried freight and those that combined two or three of these classes of traffic. The vice-president frankly confessed that he was studying to see what practical use he could make of these feeding motor routes. It was significant that the railroad should be making so careful a study of its new competitor, that it should be taking the first beginning steps to recognize it not as a competitor but rather as a friend and an ally, a feeder which eventually may be the means of bringing much traffic to its cars. The motor truck running over a well-paved highway can easily reach a farm or factory situated far from the steel rails.[13] It may save the construction of expensive and eventually unprofitable branch-line railroads just as the passenger automobile or motor bus has begun to save the building of unprofitable street-car lines. If the farm fails or the factory burns down, never to be rebuilt, the railroad does not find itself with an expensive and utterly useless branch line of track upon its hands.