446 IOWA , DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



Friday. My shipping point is out here at Waukee, on the M. & 

 St. L. and Milwaukee railroads. We have the hardest time getting 

 cars. They say: We have instructions for only so many cars, 

 and there are six or seven fellows ahead of you ; and so we go on 

 a week or two weeks. But the local buyers for Indianapolis, 

 Pittsburgh and Des Moines can get cars, and if we take off 25 

 cents to $1.25 we can sell our stock. Now that is not fair. We 

 want the benefit of this $17.50 market in Chicago. There is no 

 competition, and the railroad agent does not care a tinker's damn 

 whether you ship over the road or not. 



We are entitled to some consideration. We put up with all of 

 these things during the war, and we would even walk the track all 

 night at 20 below zero — anything to win the war. Now that we 

 have gotten thru, we are entitled to good service. We want cars. 

 W^e do not want to sell to the local buyer and lose from 25 cents 

 to $1.25. We plead with you, when you get back to Washington, 

 that you shall give the live stock men some consideration, es- 

 pecially out here a long way from the market, and further than 

 that we expect our old stock train, the pick-up train — and then do 

 not add a lot of dead freight to it. I have run a thousand trains 

 between Rock Island and Chicago just as fast as any local pas- 

 senger train. If we did that twenty-five or thirty years ago, why 

 can't you do it now? Our engines then were nothing but tea- 

 kettles compared with what you have today. You are making 

 us pay more freight now than ever before, and we are willing to 

 pay the freight — but give us service, that is what we want. 



Mr. White : We have had a great deal of trouble at Williams- 

 burg. The railroad company does not seem to know anything of 

 what they have on their line at all. If you want a stock car, you 

 never know until it is set out at the chute. A man may come and 

 ask for a car, and the agent will tell him he doesn't know when he 

 can get it. The man may not have reached his home yet until he 

 will be called up and told that there are ten cars at the chute. 



So far as the zone system is concerned, it seems to me it could 

 be worked out all right. In regard to passes, if they would only 

 provide room it wouldn't be so bad. I remember one time going 

 to Chicago there were twenty-three men in the caboose, and seats 

 for sixteen. 



Mr. Robinson. I live 110 miles east of Council Bluff's, on the 

 C. & N. W. I went to Omaha to buy cattle, and there was a rule 



