hn! In other words, while a car is
making one trip to St. John and back with wheat, it could make four
trips to Vancouver.

One year the crop so far exceeded the rolling stock of all the
railroads in America that millions of dollars were lost in depreciation
and waste waiting for shipment. This state of affairs does not apply
to wheat alone nor to Canada alone. It was the condition with every
crop in every section of America. I saw twenty-nine miles of cotton
standing along the tracks of a southern port exposed to wet weather
because the southern railroads had neither steamers nor cars to rush
shipments forward for Liverpool. In New York State and the belt of
middle west states thousands of barrels of fruit lay and rotted on the
ground because the railroads could not handle it. In an orchard near
my own I saw two thousand barrels lie and go to waste because there
were no shipping facilities cheap enough to make it worth while to send
the apples to market. Hill has said that if all the fruit orchards set
out in western states come to maturity, it will require twenty times
the rolling stock that exists today to ship the fruit out in time to
reach the market in a salable condition. The same of wheat, especially
in the West, where wheat is raised in quantities too great for any
individual granary. A few years ago, when the northwestern states had
their banner crop, piles of wheat the size of a miniature town lay
exposed to weather for weeks on Washington and Idaho and Montana
railroads because the railroads had not sufficient cars to haul it away.

The same thing almost happened in Canada one fall, though conditions
were aggravated by the coal strike.

Now, then, where does Panama come into this story? What if the
railroads did not carry the crop two thousand four hundred miles to
seaboard in order to ship forward to Liverpool? What if they carried
some of the big crops only six hundred miles west to sea-board on the
Pacific? They would have four times as many cars available to handle
the crop, or they could make just four times as many trips to Vancouver
with the same cars as to the Atlantic seaboard after the close of
navigation in the East. It is apparent now why the Pacific ports have
gone mad over the possibilities from Panama and are preparing for
enormous traffic. Of course there are features of this diversion of
traffic to new channels which the lay mind will miss and only the
traffic specialist app