Little Giant

The Delaware & Hudson, a railroad only 884 miles long, has been said to run from "nowhere to nowhere." This jibe does injustice to Wilkes-Barre and Montreal, but nevertheless it had point last week when D. & H.'s shaggy bearded chief, Leonor Fresnel Loree, popped out with a proposal that the D. & H. should be given practically all the railroads of New England and a long list of others, six of which are bigger and longer than the nowhere-to-nowhere D. & H.

Than Railroader Loree no living rail roader is more famed or more acute. He was not asking Santa Claus for these rail roads; he was asking the Interstate Com merce Commission. And even had he asked the I. C. C. for the New York Central, Pennsylvania, B. & 0. and other miscellaneous billion-dollar lines, his plea would have received earnest attention.

In the first place, Mr. Loree or any other reputable railroader is entirely in order when he devises a plan for railroad consolidation. Nothing in the fast-moving U. S. has so dawdled and daggled as rail road consolidation -except possibly Prohibition enforcement. The I. C. C. has moved with the sloth of an iceberg. It now promises to come out soon with the basis of a plan. For years the public has been bored with dozens of plans mostly quite unoriginal.

The Loree plan is original. Other plans have been based on the observed fact that, in the East, railroads run mostly East and West. Mr. Loree shaped a system of which New England is the head, the Appalachian Mountains are the backbone and Virginia the Southern extremity. Thus as he, in his dreams, stepped down the Atlantic Coast, he trod on every big Eastern Rail road toe. But the plan, however original, was regarded last week as a protest rather than as a proposal -a protest against the D. & H. being gobbled up by the giants.

Furthermore, out of his much juggling, Mr. Loree makes money for his D. & H.-the most notable instance being last year when, frustrated in his Mississippi-to-Atlantic "fifth trunk system," he suddenly and to the vexation of the New York Central, B. & 0. and Van Sweringen group sold the D. & H. interest in the Lehigh Valley and the Wabash to the Pennsylvania at a profit of some $20,000,000.