For rate-making, it is evident that an appraisal based on earnings will utterly fail of its purpose if made during the lean years immediately following construction. If made some years later, when the property has begun to pay, the risk and necessary financial loss of the lean years should be remembered, as any one building a road in the future will necessarily have the same problems to meet, together with the expenses of interest, depreciation, loss from operation, etc., both during the construction and the lean years following, all of which must properly be considered a part of the real cost of constructing and developing a property. J. E. WILLOUGHBY, M. AM. SOC. C. E. (by letter).—The determination of the cost of reproducing the property of any steam railway involves, together with other items, an estimate of the present cost of: _First._—The acquirement of the right of way, to the extent, in the form, and on the location of that held in connection with the railway to be reproduced; _Second._—The construction thereon of the roadway, to the form and dimensions, and of the materials which the roadway to be reproduced exhibits; and _Third._—The seasoning and adaptation of the roadway to the state of perfection which the roadway to be reproduced exhibits at the time the estimate of cost of reproduction is made. The first conception, for fixing the cost of the several items, is to consider the railway to be reproduced as being non-existent at the time the estimate is made, but having the environment which then exists along the operated railway, although that environment may be largely of the railway's own creating. The cost of the right of way is to be fixed as ungraded and unimproved property attached and forming a part of the adjoining improved property, which adjoining property will be entitled to receive, in addition to the market value of the land taken, all consequential damages due to the taking off of the right of way in the form and location that the land has actually been taken, and for the purpose of railway construction and operation. This adjoining property is to give credit on the consequential damages for the incidental benefits which it derives, if any, from the construction and operation of the railway.