All the connecting and following roads are on record as having protested against the measures in which they followed the lead of the initial lines.[255] The freight agent of the West Shore Railroad declared that the prohibition of through shipments to the towns of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine "occurred simply through mistake;" but the mistake, he acknowledged, had never been corrected.[256] This "mistake" and that of September, which preceded it, put an end to a large business, amounting in 1888 to 900,000 barrels. The men, whom the railroads began to massacre after having pledged them full protection, saved a fraction of their trade in New England, as we have seen, only by taking refuge with a foreign railroad. The railroads against their will, as they swore, lost business as well as honor, but the mistake was not corrected. It would tax the imagination of a Cervantes to dream out a more fantastic tangle of sense and nonsense in quixotic combat than that which these highwaymen spun out of the principles of "scientific railroading." All that highway control could do to destroy the barrel shippers for the benefit of the tank shippers was done; and yet the barrel method is the safer and more profitable for the railroads.[257] The cars that carry oil in barrels can return loaded; the railroads have to haul the tank-cars back empty and pay mileage on them.[258] For a series of years on the Pennsylvania Railroad the damage from carrying oil in barrels was less than half the damage from the carrying of oil in tanks.[259] The general freight agent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company tells the Interstate Commerce Commission that the carriage of oil in tank-cars "is the most undesirable business we do." He described a smash-up at New Brunswick where there was a collision with a line of tank-cars. The oil got on fire; it ran two squares, got into a sewer, overflowed the canal, which was then frozen over, and followed the ice a square or two beyond. Besides having to pay nearly five hundred thousand dollars damages for the destruction done, the railroad lost its bridge, which cost two or three hundred thousand dollars. It lost more money than it could make carrying oil for ten years. "I regard it," he said, "as worse than powder to carry; I would rather carry anything else than oil in tanks."[260] Barrel shipments being the best for the railroads, these princes of topsy-turvydom move heaven and earth to destroy them.[261]