Workingmen's Homes Author:Edward Everett Hale 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: CHEAP TRAINS ON RAILROADS. All the combinations of settlers thus far described, and all the arrangements of savings-banks and other capitalists, are fruitless... more », unless the proprietors of railroads will loyally combine with capitalists and settlers. I copy here, therefore, the report of the Massachusetts Eailroad Commissioners, of the triumphant success of the Eastern Eailroad's cheap trains for laboring men, resulting from the law which Mr. Quincy has alluded to, which the Legislature of Massachusetts passed at his earnest instigation. CHEAP TRAINS. In the last annual report of the Board a detailed statement was given of the origin and early progress of the experiment of cheap workingmen's trains initiated on the Eastern Eailroad in November, 1872. (Fourth Annual Eeport, pp. 37 - 49.) It will be remembered that this experiment was based upon an attempted adoption upon railroads running in and out of Boston of the one-price street-railway system. Special trains, at a low rate of speed and making frequent stops at local stations, were to come to the city in the morning and leave it in the evening. Tickets, good upon these trains only, were sold by the corporation in slips of twenty (20) for one dollar, and these tickets were available for the entire trip or for any part of it; but no fares were collected on the cars and no single tickets were sold at the offices of the company, though any one might retail them. These trains began to run over the Eastern Kailroad on the 4th of November, 1872. When the last report of this Board was prepared they had been running but a single month, and no opinion could be formed as to the ultimate success or failure of the experiment. In regard to it the Commissioners then remarked (p. 49), " A year hence some reliable conclusions may be...« less