Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 May 1905 — Fixing Railroad Rates. [ARTICLE]

Fixing Railroad Rates.

Making railroad rates is like playing a game of checkers or chess. Communities to be benefited, producers, manufacturers or shippers to be aided, represent the pie.ces used. Every possible move is studied for its effect on the general result by skilled traffic managers. A false move in the making of freight rates may mean the ruin of a city, of a great manufacturing interest, of an agricultural community. Railroads strive to build up all these so that each may have an equal chance in the sharp competition of business. So senstitlve to this rivalry are the railroads that in order to build up business along their lines they frequently allow the shipper to practically dictate rates. Rate-making has been a matter of development; of mutual concessions for mutual benefit. That is why the railroads of the United States have voluntarily made freight rates so much lower in this country than they are on the govern-ment-owned and operated railways of Europe and Australia that they are now the lowest transportation rates In the world.