Speaking of a credit business, one thing is certain, somebody has got to do a tick trade when railroads keep their employes behind months. There is the Lackawanna & Pittsburgh, which has not given its workman a dollar in over five months. How can they pay in advance? But such treatment on the part of a railroad, is simply shameful. It compels their employes to pay twenty to forty per cent more for what they eat and wear, than it they had the cash to buy with -the cash which they earn by hard work. Some seem to think it doubtful if this road ever pays. It is mortgaged from top to bottom; doesn’t own a dollar’s worth of rolling stock, and has a mighty thin business. Quite a change from, say ’81 when Barse and Morris, and Cary, and Kelsey and a number of other Olean capitalists started to build the little road (then called the Allegany Central) from Olean to Bolivar. They were glad to get their money back out of their enterprise, and the bonanza which they found in the Olean, Bradford and Warren road never materialized, in the Allegany oil region narrow gauge. They were fortunate in getting out even. Mills Barse still owns an engine which daily runs on the Lackawanna & Pittsburgh as a result of his early investment in that enterprise.
But the narrow gauges of oildom, have just about played out. They are still convenient, but their twenty per cent monthly dividends are things past and gone never to return again. It’s a bad year for railroads generally – broad gauges as well as narrow. Most of them have been run too expensively – too many useless officers with high salaries. I read that the new president of the Erie road has already succeeded in reducing the expenses of that great thoroughfare at the rate of some $600,000 a year. Just think of it! It’s safe to say that he will lop off over a million dollars of useless annual expense before he gets through using his pruning shears!
Source: The Olean Herald. Olean, NY. January 3, 1885.