second, the requirement that the carrier shall furnish safe and adequate car service; third, the power lodged with the commission to require the carrier to equip itself with safe and adequate facilities for performing its car service; and, fourth, the power to establish reasonable rules, regulations and practices with respect to car service, including the compensation to be paid for car hire as between carriers. Specifically as to terminals, including main line track or tracks for a reasonable distance outside of the same, is a provision which authorizes the commission to require their joint use when in the public interest and practicable without substantially impairing the ability of the owning or enjoying carrier to handle its own business.

With joint or co-operative use of freight equipment and terminal facilities thus provided for, as occasion may require in emergencies or otherwise, consideration may be given to main line tracks generally and to passenger equipment. As to the latter the act is silent-presumably another tribute to adequate service in the past, and a recognition of the fact that co-operative use need not be required when individual use provides a sufficiency of service.

While the act seems not in any way directly to require the joint physical use of main tracks as such, it does contain provisions which seem calculated to secure to the public the supposed benefits of such use. Foremost of these are the provisions inviting the acquisition by one carrier of the control of another, and the consolidation provisions with their expressed aim ultimately to combine the railroad properties of our country into a limited number of competitive systems. While co-operative physical use of facilities is not required, as such, by these portions of the law, it is obvious that that is what in fact must result.

Then there are other sections which seem designed to secure the benefits of joint physical use of facilities, while not requiring such use. For instance, while the former prohibition against pooling of tonnage and division of revenues is continued, it is with the proviso that the commission, after hearing on application of any carrier or carriers interested in handling the tonnage, or even upon its own initiative, may authorize such pooling and division, if found to be in the interest of better service, or operat

ing economy, if it does not unduly restrain competition, and if assented to by all the carriers involved. Somewhat akin to the change in the attitude toward pooling of tonnage is paragraph 10 of section 15, under which the commission is empowered, whenever the public interest and a fair distribution of the traffic require, to re-route traffic not routed by the shipper.

Not only are these various features of our Interstate Commerce Act new departures in our regulatory scheme, but in some cases they represent an exact reversal of theories previously held since the very beginning of the federal regulation of interstate commerce in 1887. Thus, the authority to accord preference and priority in transportation in emergency periods necessarily involves departure from the cardinal principle that the carrier must not unduly discriminate. It may be argued that the emergency makes the discrimination a reasonable one, and from a common sense standpoint this is no doubt true-but the distinction was not recognized before. Then, take terminals. Around these, and around tracks, there was a sort of sacred halo cast by the proviso of the old third section, which limited the antidiscrimination provision with the statement that—

this shall not be construed as requiring any such common carrier to give the use of its tracks or terminal facilities to another carrier engaged in like business.

A third reversal is on the matter of pooling tonnage and revenue the flat prohibition effective for years is now limited by language which seemingly recognizes that the practice may have some virtue and should therefore be permitted under supervision. And so far as the consolidation sections are concerned, the fact that they fairly fly in the face of popular legislation of almost 30 years ago is recognized by the declaration that the carriers affected by any order made under those provisions of the law are thereby relieved from the operations of the anti-trust laws, whether state or federal.

Just as it has sometimes been said that the 1906 and 1910 amendments to the Act to Regulate Commerce marked the end of individuality and initiative in railroad traffic practices, so it is now heard that the Transportation Act, 1920, has doomed individuality and initiative in railroad operation. That this may possibly prove true would seem apparent from a consideration

of that entire act; whether it will prove true will depend largely upon the attitude of the regulatory bodies. Certainly in so far as the law authorizes and seeks co-operative use of the various carriers' facilities there should in every case be thorough consideration of all the possible results, detrimental as well as beneficial, before it is attempted.

One of the practical difficulties in this matter of co-operative use of carriers' facilities is that the benefits are too obvious, while the detrimental results are, on the other hand, so remote that they are often overlooked. Take for instance, freight cars. They have been much used for years and will continue to be more and more used interchangeably between railroads. Custom, if not law, has generally decreed that a road equip itself so as best to serve the tonnage it originates. So it is that some roads with a large ownership of closed cars will own comparatively a small number of open cars. To particularize further, the granger line will specialize in grain-tight box cars, while the ownership of what are sometimes called merchandise box cars will be found more with lines that do not originate much grain. Of the open top cars, a road that is primarily a bituminous coal producer will own cars of a cubical capacity designed for coal, and these again will be sub-classified as to the bottom dumps, reflecting somewhat in that respect the unloading facilities and methods of the usual trade tributary to the line. The road serving a territory of large production of iron and steel must make provision for that traffic, and further particularize its open cars so as to provide for the most economical handling of steel, as one extreme, and coke, as the other.

Then there is the element of carrying capacity. The 50-ton and the 70-ton coal car are physically interchangeable, but the carrier which has forehandedly equipped itself with the latter, and expected by the co-ordination of other facilities therewith to satisfactorily serve its patrons, might find its service sadly curtailed and its revenues adversely affected by the loss of its 70-ton cars to its connections, whose entire railroad plant was not at all co-ordinated to that particular type of car.

Considerations of this sort coupled with the undeniable fact that cars can best and most economically be maintained in operating condition while on home rails, would seem to constitute

sufficient justification for the underlying principle of the car service rules adopted by common carrier railroads to govern the interchange of freight cars. This is that cars shall be kept at home to the greatest extent commensurate with good service, and that cars away from home shall be promptly returned to the owners' rails loaded or empty. This fundamental principle, it should be noted, does not merely serve the selfish purpose of the individual carrier-it serves as well the transportation necessities of its patrons by keeping in their service cars primarily built to suit their needs.

Were the roads reasonably well supplied with the requisite units of equipment necessary to meet reasonably normal demands, and were these car service rules respected, there would be little demand for any co-operative use of freight cars, or as it is commonly called, pooling of freight cars. But the practical lack of increase in freight car ownership in several years past together with the abnormal demands for cars in war and boom periods has produced shortages in which the carriers as well as the shippers have seized upon freight cars as legal tender equipment. The result was an abandonment of the ownership basis of car service rules and formal pooling of a considerable portion of the freight cars of the country during federal control. Since then, and during the rush of business in 1920, the cars were in practice operated largely as though pooled, although the ownership basis of car service rules was in effect. The remote and detrimental results are apparent in the large number of bad order cars which have in the past six months worked home, many for the first time in several years.

It must not be thought that the freight car pool is without merit. When a serious shortage of cars obtains, the shippers' need is for a car, and not necessarily any particular car. The pool satisfies his need with the greatest promptness. Then, too, the pool undeniably avoids switching and this means much from the standpoint of both terminal cost and efficiency, and these are very important factors in modern railroading. Whether or not the pool reduces that bugbear of the operating manempty mileage is solely a matter of point of view. The pro-pool man will answer in the affirmative, the anti-pool man in the

negative, and usually each can present what he honestly believes is good supporting data.

The truth is that the two schemes of freight car use-individual and joint-have not been fairly tried out. Both have been utilized, to be sure, in the past five years, but under conditions so abnormal that sound conclusions are not possible. Pending further experience the policy adopted by the American Railway Association would seem something safe and sane. That is, to operate cars in interchange service under rules designed to protect the individual road in its ownership, but simultaneously, through the maintenance of a car service division at Washington with proper plenary power, to meet traffic conditions by such suspension of, and departures or exemptions from the rules as may be necessary to transfer cars from one railroad or territory to another. This should suffice, but there is always the legal authority in the Interstate Commerce Commission to accomplish the same results should voluntary effort fail.

Even the layman in motive power matters appreciates that there is more of specialization in locomotives than in freight cars. For that reason alone there should be even greater care and deliberation exercised in determining the pros and cons of any scheme that aims toward the co-operative utilization of freight locomotives. But another reason for that greater care exists in the fact that here the human equation comes in. The engine crew must be considered. It may not be generally known outside the railroad world, but the use during the war on our American railways of the so-called Bolshevik engines-built on Russian specifications for use in Russia, but which never left our shores resulted in the production of considerable prose and poetry which humorously set forth the trials and tribulations of American enginemen and firemen assigned to those engines. These literary efforts did more than demonstrate the existence of literary talent among our engine crews-they demonstrated also the impracticability of getting the best results from the combination of trained men working with strange tools.

It seems almost obvious that rather than any general plan of co-operative use of all motive power, whatever the occasion, reliance had better be had upon borrow and loan arrangements between the carriers concerned, and based upon the experience