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me to afford the only adequate and permanent means of relief. In 

 arranging these rates on California commodities with our Eastern con- 

 nections we have been forced in our various negotiations to divide the 

 total earnings with them on practically a mileage basis. We have been 

 obliged to do this though our operating expenses and difficulties are far 

 greater than are those of any of the Eastern railroads. Wages, as you 

 all know r , are higher here. Supplies of all kinds cost more. Fuel is 

 greatly more expensive. The average cost of fuel to run a locomotive 

 any given distance on the Southern Pacific lines is over three times as 

 great as the average on Mississippi Valley roads; and many of the latter 

 roads show a total cost per mile for fuel, engineers, firemen, oil, general 

 supplies, of less than the Southern Pacific's cost for fuel alone. Many 

 physical obstacles exist on the Southern Pacific which are unknown to 

 the most of our Eastern roads. One great expense connected with main- 

 tenance of snowsheds, for example, is something they know little about. 

 The cost of building and maintaining the snowsheds and providing snow 

 service for the railroads of this State would be sufficient to construct 

 and maintain at least a hundred miles of railroad in the Mississippi Val- 

 ley. If the roads in the Mississippi Valley were obliged to pay California 

 prices for fuel and California rates for labor, few if any of them could, even 

 with their current rates and traffic, pay their bare expenses of operation, 

 while their prices for fuel and their rates of labor applied to the South- 

 ern Pacific line west of El Paso and Ogden would effect a reduction of over 

 $5,000,000 per year in the operation of the Pacific system of the South- 

 ern Pacific Company. Every railroad running out of California traverses 

 high mountain ranges, with roadbeds costly to construct and maintain, 

 with steep grades, expensive to operate. For example, freight East- 

 bound from Sacramento is lifted 7,000 feet vertically in the first 105 

 miles of its movement. The expenditure of power requisite to make this 

 lift would move the same weight 450 miles along a level road. As Mr. 

 Smurr has told you, the Interstate Commerce Commission, who are very 

 conservative, very impartial, very thorough in their collection of statis- 

 tics, and very rigid in their requirements upon the railroads to furnish 

 them information, compute the cost to the Southern Pacific Company for 

 moving freight at from nine tenths of one cent to one and two hundredths 

 cents per ton per mile. Now the average rate upon California orchard 

 products does not exceed nine tenths of a cent per ton per mile, without 

 taking into account the great dead weight of the refrigerator cars. I 

 will not go into the refrigerator car question, as it has been fully presented 

 to you already. 



A Member: I notice that refrigerator cars, although they are so heavy 

 and cost so much more to move than the other cars, have been sent 

 East loaded with dried fruit. Why is that? 



Mr. Curtis: It is because those cars are sent out here from the East 

 empty for green fruit. They have not been used in that business, and 

 they are being ordered East empty in order that they may engage in 

 the Florida orange traffic, and we are putting this dried fruit in them 

 instead of again hauling them empty over the long overland line. 



A Member: I notice that refrigerator cars are frequently used in 

 local traffic in the San Joaquin Valley. 



Mr. Curtis: There must have been some good reason for it, such as 

 loading to go in the direction such cars would move empty. We do not 



