At present six great systems, not including Canadian lines which compete with them even for a substantial volume of traffic having both its origin and destination in the United States, connect the north Atlantic seaboard with Lake Erie, four of them reaching onward to Chicago and three of these operating to the eastern bank of the Mississippi over their own rails. In a railway sense, New England re mains an independent province, but its rail ways connect with the trunk lines and serve as collecting and distributing systems for inter changed traffic. Two railways, terminating upon Chesapeake Bay, at Norfolk and at New independent line now in alliance with one of the northern transcontinental systems. One of these °grangerp railways has been extended to Puget Sound and four have built or acquired lines into Kansas City. Seven lines connect the Gulf of Mexico with Saint Louis or Chicago, while seven °transcontinental° systems link the Pacific Coast with the Mississippi Valley. Seven railways serve the anthracite region of Pennsylvania and, in the East, five are especially characterized by heavy traffic in bituminous coal. Within this system certain railways have been developed along narrower lines and performing functions still more closely specialized, like the Virginian Railway, which is distinctively a carrier of soft coal; the Florida East Coast Railway, which handles the winter resort traffic of Florida; the Pere Marquette Railway, which is largely occupied in the service of the special agricultural pro duction of the lower peninsula of Michigan and the Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad, which holds distinctive relations with the traffic in ore and coal between the Great Lakes and the Pittsburgh district. In addition there are many systems of minor extent which have industrial relations of less general significance but having relatively no smaller share in the economic existence of the nation.
There have been great changes in the geo graphical distribution of railway mileage. In 1860 the whole region west of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River contained but 2,745 miles of line or 9 per cent of the country's mileage; in 1917 this region contained 128,733 miles or nearly 52 per cent of the total. The following table shows the changes in distribution in greater detail: port News, compete for traffic between the north Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi Valley, their services being supplemented by those of coastwise steamships with which they have traffic arrangements enabling the accept ance of freight at through rates named for the combined water and rail service. Three systems connect the eastern cotton States with the Potomac River or the Chesapeake. The spring wheat States and those of the corn belt, west and northwest of Chicago, are served by six independent systems, and by a formerly The relations of this railway skeleton to the economic resources of the country and their organization are apparent. The north Atlantic ports are the centres of export and import trade and, with the adjacent territory, are fields of great manufacturing activity. The lines which radiate from these ports distribute manu factured and imported goods and bring to them raw materials and products for export. Chicago
and the Mississippi and Missouri river cities are gathering centres for the food products of an area which now comprises nearly all of the valley of the Mississippi and Missouri and stretches from the Canadian boundary to the Gulf of Mexico. Forest products for merly moved from the West eastward but are now brought mainly from the South or the Southwest or from the Pacific Coast. The distinctive products of the Pacific Coast and trade to and from the Orient and Alaska seek the transcontinental lines in order to gain access to the centres of population in the East or Middle West.
The important place of the railways as a part of the economic organism of the United States may be statistically indicated. The fol lowing table compares the number of employees with the total population, showing the steady increase in the proportion of the available labor of the country engaged in railway transporta tion: Railway employees farms increased less than 5 per cent, from 838, 591,774 acres to 878,798,325 acres. The average value per acre indicated by these figures for 1900 is $15.57 and for 1910 $32.40, an increase of 108.1 per cent. There was no marking up of railway assets. The marking up of farm lands was made possible by the fact, among others, that while in 1900 there were 14.72 miles of ex cellent and highly efficient railway per 100 square miles of farm lands there were in 1910 17.51 miles of better and more efficient railway for each equal farm area.
The utilization of railway service has in creased much more rapidly than population. The following table compares the total trans portation of passengers, measured in passenger miles, with the population at successive periods.
• Not including employees of switching and terminal com• fFor 458 companies operating =029 miles of line.
The foregoing data make no allowance for the large numbers employed in industries, such as locomotive and car-building and coal pro duction, which serve the railway industry.
All measures of national wealth are subject to wide margins of error and in a smaller de gree the same is true of the effort to assign money values to the properties that constitute railway capital, but the following comparisons at least indicate approximate relations at suc cessive periods: Since 1893 there has been a heavy marking up of certain elements of national wealth, particularly real estate. For example, between 1900 and 1910 the reported value of farm lands increased from $13,058,007,995 to $28,475,674,169, or 118.1 per cent, although the total area in Although, as appears from the foregoing, the increase in railway passenger travel has been more than three times as rapid as that in population, the railway movement of freight has increased even more rapidly. This will ap pear from the following: Thus in 37 years during which population doubled, the movement of railway freight in creased 12-fold; in the last 17 years, while population increased 36.03 per cent, freight movement increased 178.28 per cent.