Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 2

here to stay. If in the process of transportation evolution we have reached the normal use of the highway, together with the waterway and the railway, then you are doing a constructive work for your country. But if that work is not normal, if you are trying to impose upon the body politic something strange and artificial, then your work will, and ought to, fail.
The transportation system of the United States is not a unity. It can not be run on what we may call unitarian lines. It is a trinity, and has to be run on trinitarian lines. You must link up railways and waterways and highways to get a perfect transportation system for this country. If there were no railroads we would have little transportation. If there were no waterways there would be insufficient transportation. If we had an abundance of railways and waterways and lacked the use of highways, we should have imperfect transportation. We should fail to bring it to every man's door, and it must be brought to every man's door to be perfect.
The early transportation in the Hudson River Valley was by sloop. The history of the river is full of the traditions from the old sloop days, when it was sometimes five and sometimes nine days from New York to Albany by water. The river was just as navigable then as it is now; the difference lies in the tool that was used. Now in that use of the fit tool for the route lies the whole truth in transportation, and yet so far as I know the full bearing of the application of the tool to the job is almost new to our discussions of the several phases of transportation. In due time comes Robert Fulton and the Clermont begins to flap flap her weary 36 hours from New York to Albany. A new tool but the same route. In time she passed into a more modern type. The steamboat developed, and came the canal with its mule power. How strange it seems in these days to think of mule power ever having been considered. Yet I have in my possession a letter to the constructing engineer of the Erie Railroad urging that it should be operated by horses between New York and Buffalo and giving 10 very excellent reasons why horses were far better than steam locomotives could be. It took a lot of argument to keep the horses off the Erie Railroad.
Came the steam locomotive. Now the rail was not new any more than the river was new. The railroad or tramway in England is far back, earlier than the railroad in America. There were tracks laid many years before anybody thought of a locomotive engine. The invention lies not in the railway but in the tool put upon it. Again the principle of the tool to the job. Also a new principle that the way, whether it was waterway or railway or highway must adapt itself also to the most effective kind of tool that could be put upon it. You could apply it but partially to the river. When canals came along later, it became apparent that you must not only have the best tool for your waterway, but must suit the latter also to the tool. We understand this about railways; we have not been so clear about it as to waterways and highways.
It is within two years that the governor of a great State has suggested to me that the use of large motor trucks be forbidden because they destroyed highways. I ask you if you will warrant the removal of locomotive engines because they are made 100 tons heavier and would break the light rail made 40 years ago? The problem is a duplex one. The best tool must be had for the job and the opportunity must be provided for the tool to do its work.
So the railway came along and since the mechanical engine fitted so perfectly into the American temperament and the national needs, the railway and the tool for the railway developed together side by side. Still with the coming of the railroad we thought of transportation as a unity. Highways did not amount to very much. Men went by horseback often, because they had to, not always because they wanted to. And after the railroad came, the waterway was all but destroyed, because we thought of transportation as a unity of railroads. Up to a very few years ago all of us who are not far-seeing would have thought of public transportation as meaning essentially the railroads. Yet so rapidly in the last five years has the law of transportation been developed that it is a little bit difficult for us to keep up with the rush of this movement.
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