The Heart of the Railroad Problem Author:Frank Parsons Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. PASSENGER REBATES AND OTHER FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION IN PASSENGER TRAFFIC. In addition to the passengers who travel free on passes, there are m... more »any who have free transportation in other forms. One method of favoritism is the payment of rebates, which are in use in the passenger departments as well as in the freight departments of our railroads. Passenger rebates are repayments of a part or the whole of the amounts paid by favored parties for tickets or mileage. For example, large concerns that employ travelling men buy ordinary passenger mileage books, and when the mileage is used the cover of the book is returned to the railroad and a refund is made.1 In the investigation of the Wisconsin railroads, instituted by Governor La Follette in 1903, it was found that every railroad of importance in the State had been paying passenger rebates in large amounts every year for the whole six years that were covered by the search. From 1897 to the end of 1903 the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul refunded $170,968 in passenger rebates, the Chicago and Northwestern refunded $614,361; adding the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha, the Wisconsin Central, and the "Soo Line," the total passenger rebates paid by the five roads named in the said time was over $972,000. In the case of some favored shippers in Wisconsin it was found that the railroads secretly refunded the entire 1 See McClure's Magazine, December, 1905, whore Ray Stannard Baker has stated the leading facts. chapter{Section 4original cost of the mileage books bought by the said shippers for themselves or their agents, or $60 per book. So that these favored houses "were able to send out their entire force of travelling men without paying one cent of railroad fare, while their competitors paid full fares." ...« less