Transport: Denver on the Map

Denver, Colo. has had notorious trouble with Indians, dueling, prostitution and the 16-1 ratio of silver and gold. More lasting than any of these has been Denver’s trouble with transport. Founded in 1858, this roaring frontier town presently grew into one of the West’s most important cities, with some 300,000 inhabitants. But not until 1934 did it succeed in getting on a transcontinental railroad. That year, with a wild barbecue and great civic jubilation, Denver finally holed through the Moffat Tunnel under the continental divide, got a direct train route to the East.* Meanwhile, all other major U. S. cities were taking places in the spreading network of U. S. airlines and Denver once more found itself shortchanged.

Though almost all its traffic and trade are eastwest, Denver has only a north-south airline. To get to either coast a Denverite has a choice of flying north for 97 mi. on Wyoming Air Service to Cheyenne and United Air Lines’ transcontinental route or south for 419 mi. on Wyoming Air Service and Varney Air Transport to catch TWA at Albuquerque. Though Denver and the airlines have long been aware that both could profit by altering this uneconomic situation, they have been prevented from doing so by an opposition as steep as the scarp of the Rockies which so long held back the railroads—the attitude of the U. S. Post Office Department. Last week Denver was again jubilant, for it finally succeeded in tunneling through this obstacle too.

Ever since the celebrated Farley-Roosevelt airmail cancellation, the Post Office has been as capricious with the airlines as a young girl is with her suitors. This airline application it grants; that one it turns down, often with no satisfactory explanation. One of its key policies has been to frown on any proposed extension of one airline or creation of a new one if it will compete with an established service (TIME, March 22). Since the Post Office controls the air mail subsidy, its word is tantamount to law and many a proposed extension has failed to materialize. Denver is such a case. Any new transcontinental line through Denver would compete with United and TWA. Any extension by United or TWA into Denver would compete with Wyoming Air or Varney, which now have all the traffic. Result: a stymie. United reluctantly began to dicker with Wyoming Air to buy its run between Cheyenne and Denver. Last week these negotiations had been dropped, for another solution presented itself.

Last month Northwest Airlines got permission from the Post Office to fly 60 mi. south of its run between Seattle and Spokane so it could serve Yakima, Wash., which had no airline at all. The Denver Chamber of Commerce immediately petitioned the Post Office to allow United to do the same for Denver. TWA and others protested violently, but Wyoming Air, the sole system which would be directly hurt, offered no objection because of an agreement with United. Last week, to everyone’s surprise, Post Office Solicitor Karl A. Crowley decided in favor of the petition, set up a new and important ruling— that an airway was not to be considered a geometric line like train tracks but a “zone of influence.” Therefore any airline should be allowed to serve communities within a reasonable distance of its regular route.

Starting May 10, United will fly one plane a day in each direction through Denver, diverging from its regular run at Rock Springs, Wyo. and North Platte, Neb. Fares will be the same as United fares out of Cheyenne. All flights will be by day, for the new route has no radio ranges or light beacons. At Denver the planes will use the magnificent municipal airport, which has four runways longer than 4,500 ft., will therefore qualify as a super-terminal when the Bureau of Air Commerce inaugurates the new airport regulations disclosed last fortnight.

-Through train traffic has boomed so heavily since then that the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy R. R., which operates the run into Denver from the East, last week announced that it will immediately spend $750,000 installing the world’s longest centralized traffic control system, with one dispatcher controlling the 112 miles from Denver to Akron, Colo.