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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40242 ***
+
+THE MODERN RAILROAD
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: READY FOR THE DAY'S RUN]
+
+
+
+
+ THE MODERN RAILROAD
+
+
+ BY EDWARD HUNGERFORD
+ AUTHOR OF "LITTLE CORKY," "THE MAN WHO STOLE A
+ RAILROAD," ETC.
+
+
+ WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
+ FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
+
+
+ CHICAGO
+ A. C. McCLURG & CO.
+ 1911
+
+
+
+
+ COPYRIGHT
+ A. C. McCLURG & CO.
+ 1911
+
+ Published November, 1911
+ Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England
+
+
+ PRESS OF THE VAIL COMPANY
+ COSHOCTON, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+ TO MY FATHER
+ IN RECOGNITION OF HIS
+ INTEREST AND APPRECIATION
+ THIS BOOK
+ IS DEDICATED
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+To bring to the great lay mind some slight idea of the intricacy and the
+involved detail of railroad operation is the purpose of this book. Of the
+intricacies and involved details of railroad finance and railroad
+politics; of the quarrels between the railroads, the organizations of
+their employees, the governmental commissions, or the shippers, it says
+little or nothing. These difficult and pertinent questions have been and
+still are being competently discussed by other writers.
+
+The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors and
+publishers of _Harper's Monthly_, _Harper's Weekly_, _The Saturday Evening
+Post_, and _Outing_ in permitting the introduction into this work of
+portions or entire articles which he has written for them in the past. He
+would also feel remiss if he did not publish his sincere acknowledgments
+to "The American Railway," a compilation from _Scribner's Magazine_,
+published in 1887, Mr. Logan G. McPherson's "The Workings of the
+Railroad," Mr. C. F. Carter's "When Railroads Were New," and Mr. Frank H.
+Spearman's "The Strategy of Great Railroads." Out of a sizable reference
+library of railroad works, these volumes were the most helpful to him in
+the preparation of certain chapters of this book.
+
+E. H.
+
+ BROOKLYN, NEW YORK,
+ _August 1, 1911_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ PAGE
+ CHAPTER I
+
+ THE RAILROADS AND THEIR BEGINNINGS 1
+
+ Two great groups of railroads; East to West, and North to
+ South--Some of the giant roads--Canals--Development of the
+ country's natural resources--Railroad projects--Locomotives
+ imported--First locomotive of American manufacture--Opposition
+ of canal-owners to railroads--Development of Pennsylvania's
+ anthracite mines--The merging of small lines into systems.
+
+ CHAPTER II
+
+ THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD 15
+
+ Alarm of canal-owners at the success of railroads--The making of
+ the Baltimore & Ohio--The "Tom Thumb" engine--Difficulties in
+ crossing the Appalachians--Extension to Pittsburgh--Troubles of
+ the Erie Railroad--This road the first to use the telegraph--The
+ prairies begin to be crossed by railways--Chicago's first
+ railroad, the Galena & Chicago Union--Illinois Central--Rock
+ Island, the first to span the Mississippi--Proposals to run
+ railroads to the Pacific--The Central Pacific organized--It and
+ the Union Pacific meet--Other Pacific roads.
+
+ CHAPTER III
+
+ THE BUILDING OF A RAILROAD 34
+
+ Cost of a single-track road--Financing--Securing a charter--
+ Survey-work and its dangers--Grades--Construction--Track-laying.
+
+ CHAPTER IV
+
+ TUNNELS 48
+
+ Their use in reducing grades--The Hoosac Tunnel--The use of
+ shafts--Tunnelling under water--The Detroit River tunnel.
+
+ CHAPTER V
+
+ BRIDGES 56
+
+ Bridges of timber, then stone, then steel--The Starucca
+ Viaduct--The first iron bridge in the United States--Steel
+ bridges--Engineering triumphs--Different types of railroad
+ bridge--The deck span and the truss span--Suspension
+ bridges--Cantilever bridges--Reaching the solid rock with
+ caissons--The work of "sand-hogs"--The cantilever over the Pend
+ Oreille River--Variety of problems in bridge-building--Points in
+ favor of the stone bridge--Bridges over the Keys of Florida.
+
+ CHAPTER VI
+
+ THE PASSENGER STATIONS 80
+
+ Early trains for suburbanites--Importance of the towerman--
+ Automatic switch systems--The interlocking machine--Capacities
+ of the largest passenger terminals--Room for locomotives,
+ car-storage, etc.--Storing and cleaning cars--The concourse--
+ Waiting-rooms--Baggage accommodations--Heating--Great
+ development of passenger stations--Some notable stations in
+ America.
+
+ CHAPTER VII
+
+ THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS 107
+
+ Convenience of having freight stations at several points in a
+ city--The Pennsylvania Railroad's scheme at New York as an
+ example--Coal handled apart from other freight--Assorting the
+ cars--The transfer house--Charges for the use of cars not
+ promptly returned to their home roads--The hard work of the
+ yardmaster.
+
+ CHAPTER VIII
+
+ THE LOCOMOTIVES AND THE CARS 119
+
+ Honor required in the building of a locomotive--Some of the
+ early locomotives--Some notable locomotive-builders--Increase
+ of the size of engines--Stephenson's air-brake--The workshops--
+ The various parts of the engine--Cars of the old-time--
+ Improvements by Winans and others--Steel cars for freight.
+
+ CHAPTER IX
+
+ REBUILDING A RAILROAD 138
+
+ Reconstruction necessary in many cases--Old grades too heavy--
+ Curves straightened--Tunnels avoided--These improvements
+ required especially by freight lines.
+
+ CHAPTER X
+
+ THE RAILROAD AND ITS PRESIDENT 152
+
+ Supervision of the classified activities--Engineering,
+ operating, maintenance of way, etc.--The divisional system as
+ followed in the Pennsylvania Road--The departmental plan as
+ followed in the New York Central--Need for vice-presidents--The
+ board of directors--Harriman a model president--How the
+ Pennsylvania forced itself into New York City--Action of a
+ president to save the life of a laborer's child--"Keep right on
+ obeying orders"--Some railroad presidents compared--High
+ salaries of presidents.
+
+ CHAPTER XI
+
+ THE LEGAL AND FINANCIAL DEPARTMENTS 170
+
+ Functions of general counsel, and those of general attorney--A
+ shrewd legal mind's worth to a railroad--The function of the
+ claim-agent--Men and women who feign injury--The secret service
+ as an aid to the claim-agent--Wages of employees the greatest of
+ a railroad's expenditures--The pay-car--The comptroller or
+ auditor--Division of the income from through tickets--Claims for
+ lost or damaged freight--Purchasing-agent and store-keeper.
+
+ CHAPTER XII
+
+ THE GENERAL MANAGER 187
+
+ His duty to keep employees in harmonious actions--"The
+ superintendent deals with men; the general manager with
+ superintendents"--"The general manager is really king"--Cases
+ in which his power is almost despotic--He must know men.
+
+ CHAPTER XIII
+
+ THE SUPERINTENDENT 202
+
+ His headship of the transportation organism--His manner of
+ dealing with an offended shipper--His manner with commuters--His
+ manner with a spiteful "kicker"--A dishonest conductor who had a
+ "pull"--A system of demerits for employees--Dealing with
+ drunkards--With selfish and covetous men.
+
+ CHAPTER XIV
+
+ OPERATING THE RAILROAD 220
+
+ Authority of the chief clerk and that of the assistant
+ superintendent--Responsibilities of engineers, firemen, master
+ mechanic, train-master, train-despatcher--Arranging the
+ time-table--Fundamental rules of operation--Signals--Selecting
+ engine and cars for a train--Clerical work of conductors--A trip
+ with the conductor--The despatcher's authority--Signals along
+ the line--Maintenance of way--Superintendent of bridges and
+ buildings--Road-master--Section boss.
+
+ CHAPTER XV
+
+ THE FELLOWS OUT UPON THE LINE 243
+
+ Men who run the trains must have brain as well as muscle--Their
+ training--From farmer's boy to engineer--The brakeman's
+ dangerous work--Baggagemen and mail clerks--Hand-switchmen--The
+ multifarious duties of country station-agents.
+
+ CHAPTER XVI
+
+ KEEPING THE LINE OPEN 256
+
+ The wrecking train and its supplies--Floods dammed by an
+ embankment--Right of way always given to the wrecking-train--
+ Expeditious work in repairing the track--Collapse of the roof of
+ a tunnel--Telegraph crippled by storms--Winter storms the
+ severest test--Trains in quick succession help to keep the line
+ open in snowstorms--The rotary plough.
+
+ CHAPTER XVII
+
+ THE G. P. A. AND HIS OFFICE 276
+
+ He has to keep the road advertised--Must be an after-dinner
+ orator, and many-sided--His geniality, urbanity, courtesy--
+ Excessive rivalry for passenger traffic--Increasing luxury in
+ Pullman cars--Many printed forms of tickets, etc.
+
+ CHAPTER XVIII
+
+ THE LUXURY OF MODERN RAILROAD TRAVEL 292
+
+ Special trains provided--Private cars--Specials for actors,
+ actresses, and musicians--Crude coaches on early railroads--
+ Luxurious old-time sleeping-cars--Pullman's sleepers made at
+ first from old coaches--His pioneer--The first dining-cars--The
+ present-day dining-cars--Dinners, _table d'hôte_ and _a la
+ carte_--_Café_-cars--Buffet-cars--Care for the comfort of women.
+
+ CHAPTER XIX
+
+ GETTING THE CITY OUT INTO THE COUNTRY 311
+
+ Commuters' trains in many towns--Rapid increase in the volume of
+ suburban travel--Electrification of the lines--Long Island
+ Railroad almost exclusively suburban--Varied distances of
+ suburban homes from the cities--Club-cars for commuters--
+ Staterooms in the suburban cars--Special transfer commuters.
+
+ CHAPTER XX
+
+ FREIGHT TRAFFIC 325
+
+ Income from freight traffic greater than from passenger--
+ Competition in freight rates--Afterwards a standard rate-sheet--
+ Rate-wars virtually ended by the Interstate Commerce Commission
+ classification of freight into groups--Differential freight
+ rates--Demurrage for delay in emptying cars--Coal traffic--
+ Modern methods of handling lard and other freight.
+
+ CHAPTER XXI
+
+ THE DRAMA OF THE FREIGHT 343
+
+ Fast trains for precious and perishable goods--Cars invented for
+ fruits and for fish--Milk trains--Systematic handling of the
+ cans--Auctioning garden-truck at midnight--A historic city
+ freight-house.
+
+ CHAPTER XXII
+
+ MAKING TRAFFIC 355
+
+ Enticing settlers to the virgin lands of the West--Emigration
+ bureaus--Railways extended for the benefit of emigrants--The
+ first continuous railroad across the American continent--
+ Campaigns for developing sparsely settled places in the West--
+ Unprofitable branch railroads in the East--Development of
+ scientific farming--Improved farms are traffic-makers--New
+ factories being opened--How railroad managers have developed
+ Atlantic City.
+
+ CHAPTER XXIII
+
+ THE EXPRESS SERVICE AND THE RAILROAD MAIL 369
+
+ Development of express business--Railroad conductors the first
+ mail and express messengers--William F. Harnden's express
+ service--Postage rates--Establishment and organization of great
+ express companies--Collection and distribution of express
+ matter--Relation between express companies and railroads--
+ Beginnings of post-office department--Statistics--Railroad mail
+ service--Newspaper delivery--Handling of mail matter--Growth of
+ the service.
+
+ CHAPTER XXIV
+
+ THE MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS 388
+
+ Care and repair of cars and engines--The locomotive cleaned and
+ inspected after each long journey--Frequent visits of engines to
+ the shops and foundries at Altoona--The table for testing the
+ power and speed of locomotives--The car shops--Steel cars
+ beginning to supersede wooden ones--Painting a freight car--Lack
+ of method in early repair shops--Search for flaws in wheels.
+
+ CHAPTER XXV
+
+ THE RAILROAD MARINE 404
+
+ Steamship lines under railroad control--Fleet of New York
+ Central--Tugs--Railroad connections at New York harbor--Handling
+ of freight--Ferry-boats--Tunnel under Detroit River--Car-ferries
+ and lake routes--Great Lakes steamship lines under railroad
+ control.
+
+ CHAPTER XXVI
+
+ KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH THE MEN 418
+
+ The first organized branch of the Railroad Y. M. C. A.--
+ Cornelius Vanderbilt's gift of a club-house--Growth of the
+ Railroad Y. M. C. A.--Plans by the railways to care for the sick
+ and the crippled--The pension system--Entertainments--Model
+ restaurants--Free legal advice--Employees' magazines--The Order
+ of the Red Spot.
+
+ CHAPTER XXVII
+
+ THE COMING OF ELECTRICITY 432
+
+ Electric street cars--Suburban cars--Electric third-rail from
+ Utica to Syracuse--Some railroads partially adopt electric
+ power--The benefit of electric power in tunnels--Also at
+ terminal stations--Conditions which make electric traction
+ practical and economical--Hopeful outlook for electric
+ traction--The monorail and the gyroscope car, invented by Louis
+ Brennan--A similar invention by August Scherl.
+
+ APPENDIX 449
+
+ Efficiency through Organization.
+
+ INDEX 465
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+ PAGE
+
+ Ready for the day's run _Frontispiece_
+
+ An early locomotive built by William Norris for the
+ Philadelphia & Reading Railroad 18
+
+ The historic "John Bull" of the Camden & Amboy
+ Railroad--and its train 18
+
+ A heavy-grade type of locomotive built for the Baltimore
+ & Ohio Railroad in 1864. Its flaring stack was typical of
+ those years 19
+
+ Construction engineers blaze their way across the face of
+ new country 38
+
+ The making of an embankment by dump-train 39
+
+ "Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless
+ engines" 39
+
+ Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of the
+ high hills 44
+
+ A giant fill--in the making 44
+
+ The finishing touches to the track 45
+
+ This machine can lay a mile of track a day 45
+
+ "Sometimes the construction engineer ... brings his line
+ face to face with a mountain" 52
+
+ Finishing the lining of a tunnel 52
+
+ The busiest tunnel point in the world--at the west portals
+ of the Bergen tunnels, six Erie tracks below, four
+ Lackawanna above 53
+
+ The Hackensack portals of the Pennsylvania's great tunnels
+ under New York City 53
+
+ Concrete affords wonderful opportunities for the
+ bridge-builders 68
+
+ The Lackawanna is building the largest concrete bridge in
+ the world across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa. 68
+
+ The bridge-builder lays out an assembling-yard for
+ gathering together the different parts of his new
+ construction 69
+
+ The new Brandywine Viaduct of the Baltimore & Ohio, at
+ Wilmington, Del. 69
+
+ The Northwestern's monumental new terminal on the West
+ Side of Chicago 82
+
+ The Union Station at Washington 83
+
+ A model American railroad station--the Union Station of
+ the New York Central, Boston & Albany, Delaware & Hudson,
+ and West Shore railroads at Albany 102
+
+ The classic portal of the Pennsylvania's new station in
+ New York 102
+
+ The beautiful concourse of the new Pennsylvania Station,
+ in New York 103
+
+ "The waiting-room is the monumental and artistic
+ expression of the station"--the waiting-room of the Union
+ Depot at Troy, New York 103
+
+ Something over a million dollars' worth of passenger cars
+ are constantly stored in this yard 114
+
+ A scene in the great freight-yards that surround Chicago 114
+
+ The intricacy of tracks and the "throat" of a modern
+ terminal yard: South Station, Boston, and its approaches 115
+
+ One of the "diamond-stack" locomotives used on the
+ Pennsylvania Railroad in the early seventies 126
+
+ Prairie type passenger locomotive of the Lake Shore
+ Railroad 126
+
+ Pacific type passenger locomotive of the New York Central
+ lines 126
+
+ Atlantic type passenger locomotive, built by the
+ Pennsylvania Railroad at its Altoona shops 126
+
+ One of the great Mallet pushing engines of the Delaware &
+ Hudson Company 127
+
+ A ten-wheeled switching locomotive of the Lake Shore
+ Railroad 127
+
+ Suburban passenger locomotive of the New York Central
+ lines 127
+
+ Consolidation freight locomotive of the Pennsylvania
+ system 127
+
+ Where Harriman stretched the Southern Pacific in a
+ straight line across the Great Salt Lake 140
+
+ Line revision on the New York Central--tunnelling through
+ the bases of these jutting peaks along the Hudson River
+ does away with sharp and dangerous curves 140
+
+ Impressive grade revision on the Union Pacific in the
+ Black Hills of Wyoming. The discarded line may be seen at
+ the right 141
+
+ The old and the new on the Great Northern--the "William
+ Crooks," the first engine of the Hill system, and one of
+ the newest Mallets 154
+
+ The Southern Pacific finds direct entrance into San
+ Francisco for one of its branch lines by tunnels piercing
+ the heart of the suburbs 155
+
+ Portal of the abandoned tunnel of the Alleghany Portage
+ Railroad near Johnstown, Pa., the first railroad tunnel in
+ the United States 155
+
+ The freight department of the modern railroad requires a
+ veritable army of clerks 176
+
+ The farmer who sued the railroad for permanent injuries--
+ as the detectives with their cameras found him 177
+
+ Oil-burning locomotive on the Southern Pacific system 190
+
+ The steel passenger coach such as has become standard upon
+ the American railroad 190
+
+ Electric car, generating its own power by a gasoline
+ engine 190
+
+ Both locomotive and train--gasoline motor car designed for
+ branch line service 190
+
+ The biggest locomotive in the world: built by the Santa Fe
+ Railroad at its Topeka shops 191
+
+ The conductor is a high type of railroad employee 208
+
+ The engineer--oil-can in hand--is forever fussing at his
+ machine 208
+
+ Railroad responsibility does not end even with the track
+ walker 209
+
+ The fireman has a hard job and a steady one 209
+
+ How the real timetable of the division looks--the one used
+ in headquarters 222
+
+ The electro-pneumatic signal-box in the control tower of a
+ modern terminal 228
+
+ The responsible men who stand at the switch-tower of a
+ modern terminal: a large tower of the "manual" type 228
+
+ "When winter comes upon the lines the superintendent will
+ have full use for every one of his wits" 229
+
+ Watchful signals guarding the main line of a busy railroad 229
+
+ "When the train comes to a water station the fireman gets
+ out and fills the tank" 248
+
+ A freight-crew and its "hack" 248
+
+ A view through the span of a modern truss bridge gives an
+ idea of its strength and solidity 249
+
+ The New York Central is adopting the new form of "Upper
+ quadrant" signal 249
+
+ The wrecking train ready to start out from the yard 262
+
+ "Two of these great cranes can grab a wounded Mogul
+ locomotive and put her out of the way" 262
+
+ "The shop-men form no mean brigade in this industrial army
+ of America" 263
+
+ "Winter days when the wind-blown snow forms mountains upon
+ the tracks" 272
+
+ "The despatcher may have come from some lonely country
+ station" 273
+
+ "The superintendent is not above getting out and bossing
+ the wrecking-gang once in a great while" 273
+
+ The New York Central Railroad is building a new Grand
+ Central Station in New York City, for itself and its
+ tenant, the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad 284
+
+ The concourse of the new Grand Central Station, New York,
+ will be one of the largest rooms in the world 284
+
+ South Station, Boston, is the busiest railroad terminal in
+ the world 285
+
+ The train-shed and approach tracks of Broad Street
+ Station, Philadelphia, still one of the finest of American
+ railroad passenger terminals 285
+
+ Connecting drawing-room and stateroom 296
+
+ "A man may have as fine a bed in a sleeping-car as in the
+ best hotel in all the land" 296
+
+ "You may have the manicure upon the modern train" 297
+
+ "The dining-car is a sociable sort of place" 297
+
+ An interior view of one of the earliest Pullman
+ sleeping-cars 302
+
+ Interior of a standard sleeping-car of to-day 303
+
+ "Even in winter there is a homely, homey air about the
+ commuter's station" 314
+
+ Entrance to the great four-track open cut which the Erie
+ has built for the commuter's comfort at Jersey City 314
+
+ A model way-station on the lines of the Boston & Albany
+ Railroad 315
+
+ The yardmaster's office--in an abandoned switch-tower 315
+
+ "The inside of any freight-house is a busy place" 328
+
+ St. John's Park, the great freight-house of the New York
+ Central Railroad in down-town New York 328
+
+ The great ore-docks of the West Shore Railroad at Buffalo 329
+
+ The great bridge of the New York Central at Watkins Glen 340
+
+ Building the wonderful bridge of the Idaho & Washington
+ Northern over the Pend Oreille River, Washington 341
+
+ Inside the West Albany shops of the New York Central:
+ picking up a locomotive with the travelling crane 350
+
+ A locomotive upon the testing-table at the Altoona shops
+ of the Pennsylvania 350
+
+ "The roundhouse is a sprawling thing" 351
+
+ Denizens of the roundhouse 351
+
+ "In the Far West the farm-train has long since come into
+ its own" 360
+
+ "Even in New York State the interest in these itinerant
+ agricultural schools is keen, indeed" 361
+
+ Interior of the dairy demonstration car of an agricultural
+ train 361
+
+ The famous Thomas Viaduct, on the Baltimore & Ohio at
+ Relay, Md., built by B. H. Latrobe in 1835, and still in
+ use 366
+
+ The historic Starucca Viaduct upon the Erie 366
+
+ The cylinders of the Delaware & Hudson Mallet 367
+
+ The interior of this gasoline-motor-car on the Union
+ Pacific presents a most unusual effect, yet a maximum of
+ view of the outer world 367
+
+ A portion of the great double-track Susquehanna River
+ bridge of the Baltimore & Ohio--a giant among American
+ railroad bridges 372
+
+ "In summer the brakemen have pleasant enough times of
+ railroading" 373
+
+ A famous cantilever rapidly disappearing--the substitution
+ of a new Kentucky river bridge for the old, on the Queen &
+ Crescent system 373
+
+ Triple-phase, alternating current locomotive built by the
+ General Electric Co. for use in the Cascade Tunnel, of the
+ Great Northern Railway 390
+
+ Heavy service, alternating and direct current freight
+ locomotive built by the Westinghouse Company for the New
+ York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad 390
+
+ The monoroad in practical use for carrying passengers at
+ City Island, New York 391
+
+ The cigar-shaped car of the monoroad 391
+
+ A modern railroad freight and passenger terminal: the
+ terminal of the West Shore Railroad at Weehawken, opposite
+ New York City 406
+
+ High-speed, direct-current passenger locomotive built by
+ the General Electric Company for terminal service of the
+ New York Central at the Grand Central Station 407
+
+ This is what New York Central McCrea did for the men of
+ the Canadian Pacific up at Kenora 420
+
+ A clubhouse built by the Southern Pacific for its men at
+ Roseville, California 420
+
+ The B. & O. boys enjoying the Railroad Y. M. C. A.,
+ Chicago Junction 421
+
+ "The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company has organized a brass
+ band for its employees" 421
+
+ A high-speed electric locomotive on the Pennsylvania
+ bringing a through train out of the tunnel underneath the
+ Hudson River and into the New York City terminal 434
+
+ High-speed, direct-current locomotive built by the
+ Westinghouse Company for the terminal service of the
+ Pennsylvania Railroad, in New York 434
+
+ Two triple-phase locomotives of the Great Northern Railway
+ helping a double-header steam train up the grade into the
+ Cascade Tunnel 435
+
+ The outer shell of the New Haven's freight locomotive
+ removed, showing the working parts of the machine 435
+
+
+
+
+_The railroad is a monster. His feet are dipped into the navigable seas,
+and his many arms reach into the uplands. His fingers clutch the treasures
+of the hills--coal, iron, timber--all the wealth of Mother Earth. His busy
+hands touch the broad prairies of corn, wheat, fruits--the yearly produce
+of the land. With ceaseless activity he brings the raw material that it
+may be made into the finished. He centralizes industry. He fills the ships
+that sail the seas. He brings the remote town in quick touch with the busy
+city. He stimulates life. He makes life._
+
+_His arms stretch through the towns and over the land. His steel muscles
+reach across great rivers and deep valleys, his tireless hands have long
+since burrowed their way through God's eternal hills. He is here, there,
+everywhere. His great life is part and parcel of the great life of the
+nation._
+
+_He reaches an arm into an unknown country, and it is known! Great tracts
+of land that were untraversed become farms; hillsides yield up their
+mineral treasure; a busy town springs into life where there was no
+habitation of man a little time before, and the town becomes a city.
+Commerce is born. The railroad bids death and stagnation begone. It
+creates. It reaches forth with its life, and life is born._
+
+_The railroad is life itself!_
+
+
+
+
+THE MODERN RAILROAD
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE RAILROADS AND THEIR BEGINNINGS
+
+ TWO GREAT GROUPS OF RAILROADS; EAST TO WEST, AND NORTH TO SOUTH--SOME
+ OF THE GIANT ROADS--CANALS--DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY'S NATURAL
+ RESOURCES--RAILROAD PROJECTS--LOCOMOTIVES IMPORTED--FIRST LOCOMOTIVE
+ OF AMERICAN MANUFACTURE--OPPOSITION OF CANAL-OWNERS TO RAILROADS--
+ DEVELOPMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA'S ANTHRACITE MINES--THE MERGING OF SMALL
+ LINES INTO SYSTEMS.
+
+
+Fifteen or twenty great railroad systems are the overland carriers of the
+United States. Measured by corporations, known by a vast variety of
+differing names, there are many, many more than these. But this great
+number is reduced, through common ownership or through a common purpose in
+operation, to less than a score of transportation organisms, each with its
+own field, its own purposes, and its own ambitions.
+
+The greater number of these railroads reach from east to west, and so
+follow the natural lines of traffic within the country. Two or three
+systems--such as the Illinois Central and the Delaware & Hudson--run at
+variance with this natural trend, and may be classed as cross-country
+routes. A few properties have no long-reaching routes, but derive their
+incomes from the transportation business of a comparatively small
+exclusive territory, as the Boston & Maine in Northern New England, the
+New Haven in Southern New England, both of them recently brought under a
+more or less direct single control, and the Long Island. Still other
+properties find their greatest revenue in bringing anthracite coal from
+the Pennsylvania mountains to the seaboard, and among these are the
+Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the
+Philadelphia & Reading systems.
+
+The very great railroads of America are the east and west lines. These
+break themselves quite naturally into two divisions--one group east of the
+Mississippi River, the other west of that stream. The easterly group aim
+to find an eastern terminal in and about New York. Their western arms
+reach Chicago and St. Louis, where the other group of transcontinentals
+begin.
+
+Giants among these eastern roads are the Pennsylvania and the New York
+Central. Of lesser size, but still ranking as great railroads within this
+territory are the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Erie.
+Several of the anthracite roads enjoy through connections to Chicago and
+St. Louis, breaking at Buffalo as an interchange point, about half way
+between New York and Chicago. There are important roads in the South,
+reaching between Gulf points and New York and taking care of the traffic
+of the centres of the section, now rapidly increasing its industrial
+importance.
+
+The western group of transcontinental routes are the giants in point of
+mileage. The eastern roads, serving a closely-built country, carry an
+almost incredible tonnage; but the long, gaunt western lines are reaching
+into a country that has its to-morrow still ahead. Of these, the so-called
+Harriman lines--the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific--occupy the
+centre of the country, and reach from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The
+Santa Fe and the Gould roads share this territory.
+
+To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of
+railroads, the Burlington, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific,
+together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther
+north Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway,
+another approaching completion in the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The
+"Grangers" (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that
+occupy the eastern end of this western territory,--the St. Paul, the Gould
+lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island--are just now showing
+pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade
+in its infancy. The first two of these have already laid their rails over
+the great slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building of
+railroads in the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the
+present time.
+
+The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great
+systems, it may be well to go back into the past, to examine the eighty
+years that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are
+illuminating. They tell with precise accuracy the development of American
+transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only a few brief pages, our
+review of them must be cursory.
+
+When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America firmly
+established as a nation, the people began to give earnest attention to
+internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and
+unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for
+development; but with an independent nation all was very different. The
+United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to
+develop that wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the
+first that it must depend almost wholly on transportation facilities. To
+appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at
+the beginning of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars
+at Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that seaport from
+Wheeling; so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar
+a barrel for the Baltimore market. With a better form of transportation it
+would cost a dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to
+Baltimore, making the price of the commodity at the first of these points
+under transit facilities four dollars a barrel. It did not take much of
+that sort of reasoning to make the States appreciate from the very first
+that a great effort must be made toward development. That effort, having
+been made, brought its own reward.
+
+The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal
+works. Canals had already proved their success in England and within
+Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States
+established their value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these
+were built in New England before the Revolution. After the close of that
+conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the
+State of New York in planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it
+was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo--from Atlantic tidewater to
+the navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises
+along the entire seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles,
+and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the outset. Canals
+were also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the
+success of the earliest of these ditches was a great encouragement to
+other investments of the sort, even where there existed far less necessity
+for their construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a
+little time.
+
+The invention of the steamboat just a century ago was an incentive
+indirectly to canal growth but there were other things that halted the
+minds of farsighted and conservative men. Canals were fearfully expensive
+things; likewise, they were delicate works, in need of constant and
+expensive repairs to keep them in order. Moreover, there were many winter
+months in which they were frozen and useless. It was quite clear to these
+farsighted men from the outset that the canal was not the real solution of
+the transportation problem upon which rested the internal development of
+the United States.
+
+They turned their attention to roads. But, while roads were comparatively
+easy to maintain and were possible routes of communication the entire year
+round, they could not begin to compare with the canals in point of tonnage
+capacity, because of the limitations of the drawing power of animals. Some
+visionary souls experimented with sail wagons, but of course with no
+practical results.
+
+At this time there came distinct rumors from across the sea of a new
+transportation method in England--the railroad. The English railroads were
+crude affairs built to handle the products of the collieries in the
+northeast corner of the country, to bring the coal down to the docks. But
+there came more rumors--of a young engineer, one Stephenson, who had
+perfected some sort of a steam wagon that would run on rails--a locomotive
+he called it,--and there was to be one of these railroads built from
+Stockton to Darlington to carry passengers and also freight. These reports
+were of vast interest to the earnest men who were trying to solve this
+perplexing problem of internal transportation. Some of them, who owned
+collieries up in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania and who were
+concerned with the proposition of getting their product to tidewater, were
+particularly interested. These gentlemen were called the Delaware & Hudson
+Company, and they had already accomplished much in building a hundred
+miles of canal from Honesdale, an interior town, across a mountainous land
+to Kingston on the navigable Hudson River. But the canal, considered a
+monumental work in its day, solved only a part of the problem. There still
+remained the stiff ridge of the Moosic Mountain that no canal work might
+ever possibly climb.
+
+To the Delaware & Hudson Company, then, the railroad proposition was of
+absorbing interest, of sufficient interest to warrant it in sending
+Horatio Allen, one of the canal engineers, all the way to England for
+investigation and report. Allen was filled with the enthusiasm of youth.
+He went prepared to look into a new era in transportation.
+
+In the meantime other railroad projects were also under way in the
+country, short and crude affairs though they were. As early as 1807 Silas
+Whitney built a short line on Beacon Hill, Boston, which is accredited as
+being the first American railroad. It was a simple affair with an inclined
+plane which was used to handle brick; and it is said that it was preceded
+twelve years by an even more crude tramway, built for the same purpose.
+Another early short length of railroad was built by Thomas Leiper at his
+quarry in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It has its chief interest from
+the fact that it was designed by John Thomson, father of J. Edgar Thomson,
+who became at a much later day president of the Pennsylvania Railroad
+Company, and who is known as one of the master minds in American
+transportation progress. Similar records remain of the existence of a
+short line near Richmond, Va., built to carry supplies to a powder mill,
+and other lines at Bear Creek Furnace, Pennsylvania, and at Nashua, N. H.
+But the only one of these roads that seems to have attained a lasting
+distinction was one built by Gridley Bryant in 1826 to carry granite for
+the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries at Quincy, Mass., to the docks
+four miles distant. This road was built of heavy wooden rails attached in
+a substantial way to stone sleepers imbedded in the earth. It attained
+considerable distinction and became of such general interest that a public
+house was opened alongside its rails to accommodate sightseers from afar
+who came to see it. This railroad continued in service for more than a
+quarter of a century.
+
+But the motive power of all these railroads was the horse; and it was
+patent from the outset that the horse had neither the staying nor the
+hauling powers to make him a real factor in the railroad situation. So
+when Horatio Allen returned to New York from England in January, 1829,
+with glowing accounts of the success of the English railroads, he found
+the progressive men of the Delaware & Hudson anxiously awaiting an
+inspection of the _Stourbridge Lion_, the first of four locomotives
+purchased by Allen for importation into the United States. Three of these
+machines were from the works of Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge;
+the fourth was the creation of Stephenson's master hand. The _Lion_
+arrived in May of that year, and after having been set up on blocks and
+fired for the benefit of a group of scientific men in New York it was
+shipped by river and canal to Honesdale.
+
+Allen placed the _Stourbridge Lion_--which resembled a giant grasshopper
+with its mass of exterior valves, and joints--on the crude wooden track of
+the railroad, which extended over the mountain to Carbondale, seventeen
+miles distant. A few days later--the ninth of August, to be exact--he ran
+the _Lion_, the first turning of an engine wheel upon American soil.
+Details of that scene have come easily down to to-day. The track was built
+of heavy hemlock stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quarter inches
+wide and one-half an inch thick were spiked. The engine weighed seven
+tons, instead of three tons, as had been expected. It so happened that the
+rails had become slightly warped just above the terminal of the railroad,
+where the track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek on a bending trestle. Allen
+had been warned against this trestle and his only response was to call for
+passengers upon the initial ride. No one accepted. There was a precious
+Pennsylvania regard shown for the safety of one's neck. So, after running
+the engine up and down the coal dock for a few minutes, Allen waved
+good-bye to the crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed away from
+the village around the abrupt curve and over the trembling trestle at a
+rate of ten miles an hour. The crowd which had expected to see the engine
+derailed, broke into resounding cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive
+in the United States had served to prove its worth.
+
+The career of the _Stourbridge Lion_ was short lived. It hauled coal cars
+for a little time at Honesdale; but it was too big an engine for so slight
+a railroad, and it was soon dismantled. Its boiler continued to serve the
+Delaware & Hudson Company for many years at its shops on the hillside
+above Carbondale. The fate of the three other imported English locomotives
+remains a mystery. They were brought to New York and stored, eventually to
+find their way to the scrap heap in some unknown fashion.
+
+Mr. Allen held no short-lived career. His experiments with the locomotive
+ranked him as a railroad engineer of the highest class, and before the
+year 1829 closed he was made chief engineer of what was at first known as
+the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, and afterwards as the South Carolina
+Railroad. This was an ambitious project, designed to connect the old
+Carolina seaport with the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles
+distant. It achieved its greatest fame as the railroad which first
+operated a locomotive of American manufacture.
+
+This engine, called the _Best Friend of Charleston_, was built at the West
+Point Foundry in New York City and was shipped to Charleston in the Fall
+of 1830. It was a crude affair, and on its trial trip, on November 2, of
+that year, it sprung a wheel out of shape and became derailed. Still it
+was a beginning; and after the wheels had been put in good shape it
+entered into regular service, which was more than the _Stourbridge Lion_
+had ever done. It could haul four or five cars with forty or fifty
+passengers at a speed of from fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, so the
+Charleston & Hamburg became the first of our steam railroads with a
+regular passenger service. A little later, a bigger and better engine,
+also of American manufacture and called the _West Point_, was sent down
+from New York.
+
+Word of these early railroad experiments travelled across the country as
+if by some magic predecessor of the telegraph. Other railroad projects
+found themselves under way. Another colliery railroad, a marvellous thing
+of planes and gravity descents, was built at Mauch Chunk in the Lehigh
+Valley, and this stout old road is in use to-day as a passenger-carrier.
+
+But it was already seen that the future of the railroad was not to be
+limited to quarries or collieries. Up in New England the railroad fever
+had taken hold with force; and in 1831, construction was begun on the
+Boston & Lowell Railroad. This line was analogous to the Manchester &
+Liverpool, which proved itself from the beginning a tremendous
+money-earner. Boston, a seaport of sixty thousand inhabitants was to be
+linked with Lowell, then possessing but six thousand inhabitants. Still,
+even in those days, Lowell had developed to a point that saw fifteen
+thousand tons of freight and thirty-seven thousand passengers handled
+between the two cities over the Middlesex Canal in 1829.
+
+Then there developed the first of a new sort of antagonism that the
+railroad was to face. The owners of the canals were keen-sighted enough to
+discover a dangerous new antagonist in the railroads. They protested to
+the Legislature that their charter gave them a monopoly of the carrying
+privileges between Boston and Lowell, and for two years they were able to
+strangle the ambitions of the proposed railroad. This fight was a type of
+other battles that were to follow between the canals and the railroads.
+The various lines that reached across New York State from Albany to
+Buffalo, paralleling the Erie Canal, were once prohibited from carrying
+freight, for fear that the canal's supremacy as a carrier might be
+disturbed. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, struggling to blaze a path
+toward the West, was for a long time halted by the Chesapeake & Ohio
+Canal, which proposed to hold to its monopoly of the valley of the
+Potomac.
+
+The Boston & Lowell, however, conquered its obstacles and was finally
+opened to traffic, June 26, 1835. Within a few months similar lines
+reaching from Boston to Worcester on the west, and Providence on the south
+had also been opened. By 1839 Boston & Worcester had been extended through
+to Springfield on the Connecticut River, where it connected with the
+Western Railroad, extending over the Berkshires to Greenbush, opposite
+Albany. The Providence Road was rapidly extended through to Stonington,
+Connecticut. From that point fast steamboats were operated through to New
+York, and a quick line of communication was established between Boston and
+New York. Before that time the fastest route between these two cities had
+been by steamboat to Norwich, then by coach over the post-road up to
+Boston. Norwich saw the railroad take away its supremacy in the through
+traffic. Finally it awoke to its necessity, and arranged to build a
+railroad to reach the existing line at Providence.
+
+Between New York and Philadelphia railroad communication came quickly into
+being, the first route opened being the Camden & Amboy, which terminated
+at the end of a long ferry ride from New York. Even after more direct
+routes had been established and the Delaware crossed at Trenton, it was
+many years before the trains ran direct from Jersey City into the heart of
+the Quaker City. The cars from New York used to stop at Tacony,
+considerably above the city and there was still a steamboat ride down the
+river.
+
+The railroad route to Baltimore was only a partial one. A steamboat took
+the traveller to New Castle, Delaware, where a short pioneer railroad
+crossed to French Town, Maryland. After that there was another long
+steamboat ride down the flat reaches of the Chesapeake Bay before
+Baltimore was finally reached. A little later there developed an all-rail
+route between Philadelphia and Baltimore although not upon the line of the
+present most direct route.
+
+From Philadelphia an early double-track railroad extended west to
+Columbia, upon the Susquehanna River. An early route extended due north
+from Baltimore to York, and then to Harrisburg; the parent stem of what
+afterwards became the Northern Central. A branch from this line was
+extended through to Columbia, and the New Castle and French Town route
+lost popularity.
+
+But the Columbia and Philadelphia route was destined to more important
+things than merely affording an all-rail route to Baltimore. At Columbia
+it connected with the important Pennsylvania State system of internal
+canals and railroads, affording a direct line of communication with
+Pittsburgh and the headwaters of the Ohio River.
+
+This was accomplished by use of a canal through to Hollidaysburgh upon the
+east slope of the Alleghanies, and the well-famed Alleghany Portage
+Railroad over the summit of those mountains to Johnstown, where another
+canal reached down into Pittsburgh and enjoyed unexampled prosperity from
+1834 to 1854. The Alleghany Portage railroad was a solidly constructed
+affair and its rails after the fashion of almost all railroads of that day
+were laid upon stone sleepers, rows of which may still be seen where the
+long-since abandoned railroad found its path across the mountains. The
+Portage Railroad was operated by the most elaborate system of inclined
+planes ever put to service within the United States; one has only to turn
+to the pages of Dickens's "American Notes" to read:
+
+ "We left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived at the
+ foot of the mountain, which is crossed by railroad. There are ten
+ inclined planes, five ascending and five descending; the carriages are
+ dragged up the former and slowly let down the latter by means of
+ stationary engines, the comparatively level spaces between being
+ traversed sometimes by horse and sometimes by engine power, as the
+ case demands.... The journey is very carefully made, however, only two
+ carriages travelling together; and while proper precaution is taken,
+ is not to be dreaded for its dangers."
+
+The Portage Railroad was the first to surmount the Alleghanies although in
+course of time its elaborate system of planes disappeared, as they
+disappeared elsewhere, under the development of the locomotive.
+
+An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route
+of communication across the Keystone State, which was afterwards to
+develop into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of
+the enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was
+supposedly free to use its rails for the hauling of his produce in his own
+cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that
+of an improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in
+1834, the horse-teams of private freight haulers alternated upon the
+tracks between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses
+hauling a four-wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently
+did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive fretting along for
+hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the
+Philadelphia & Columbia--the name of the road had been reversed--and in
+1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly organized Pennsylvania
+Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route
+from Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful Horse
+Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel, through to Pittsburgh; it had created
+its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany Portage
+Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies had
+been organized to control freight-carrying upon the tracks of the
+Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People's line, the
+other the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines,
+which in recent years have become so vexed a problem to the Interstate
+Commerce Commission.
+
+There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built
+to bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down
+to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads,
+which were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America's
+mightiest systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be
+built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany,
+by means of a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in
+turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a
+connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed
+the new railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great
+time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just
+so much as a passenger carrier.
+
+Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk
+& Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the
+American built locomotive _DeWitt Clinton_, when the railroad fever took
+hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but
+a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some of them
+were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through
+from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a
+monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop
+railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from
+Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still
+another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led
+to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the
+panic of '37 was a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was
+six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was
+a reality.
+
+Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large
+towns across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was
+jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a
+committee of eminent draymen, 'bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down
+to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections
+within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein
+both passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the
+city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led
+towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city has
+always stimulated local pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a
+bitter war to prevent the Lake Shore Railroad from making its gauge
+uniform through that city and abandoning a time-honored transfer of
+passengers and freight there.
+
+But there seems to be no stopping of the hand of ultimate destiny in
+railroading. The little weak roads across the Empire State were first
+gathered into the powerful New York Central, and after a time they were
+permitted to carry freight, the privilege denied them a long time because
+of the power of the Erie Canal. After a little longer time there was a
+great bridge built across the Hudson River at Albany, and soon after the
+close of the Civil War shrewd old Commodore Vanderbilt brought the
+railroad that had been built up the east shore of the Hudson, his pet New
+York & Harlem, and the merged chain of railroads across the State, into
+the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, his great lifework. That
+system spread itself steadily. It built a new short line from Syracuse to
+Rochester, another from Batavia to Buffalo. It absorbed and it
+consolidated; gradually it sent its tentacles over the entire imperial
+strength of New York State.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD
+
+ ALARM OF CANAL-OWNERS AT THE SUCCESS OF RAILROADS--THE MAKING OF THE
+ BALTIMORE & OHIO--THE "TOM THUMB" ENGINE--DIFFICULTIES IN CROSSING THE
+ APPALACHIANS--EXTENSION TO PITTSBURGH--TROUBLES OF THE ERIE
+ RAILROAD--THIS ROAD THE FIRST TO USE THE TELEGRAPH--THE PRAIRIES BEGIN
+ TO BE CROSSED BY RAILWAYS--CHICAGO'S FIRST RAILROAD, THE GALENA &
+ CHICAGO UNION--ILLINOIS CENTRAL--ROCK ISLAND, THE FIRST TO SPAN THE
+ MISSISSIPPI--PROPOSALS TO RUN RAILROADS TO THE PACIFIC--THE CENTRAL
+ PACIFIC ORGANIZED--IT AND THE UNION PACIFIC MEET--OTHER PACIFIC ROADS.
+
+
+All the railroad projects already related were timid projects in the
+beginning, with hardly a thought of ultimate greatness. Yet there were
+men, even in the earliest days of railroading, whose minds winged to great
+enterprises, whose dreams were empire-wide. Of such men was the Baltimore
+& Ohio born.
+
+Baltimore, like Philadelphia, had greedily watched the success of the Erie
+Canal upon its completion, and noted with alarm its possible effects upon
+its own wharves. Philadelphia, with the wealth of the great State of
+Pennsylvania behind, had sought to protect herself by the construction of
+the long links of canal and railroad to Pittsburgh, of which you have
+already read. But Baltimore had no great State to call to her support. She
+must look to herself for strength. Out of her eminent necessity for
+self-preservation came men of the strength and the fibre to meet the
+emergency. Baltimore might have retreated from the situation, as some of
+the New England towns had retreated from it, and become a somnolent
+reminiscence of a prosperous Colonial seaport. She did nothing of the
+sort. Instead she made herself the terminal and inspiration of a great
+railroad, laid the foundations of a great and lasting growth.
+
+The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was born February 12, 1827. On the evening
+of that day, a little group of citizens of the sturdy old Southern
+metropolis gathered at the house of George Brown. Mr. Brown together with
+Philip E. Thomas, a distinguished merchant and philanthropist of
+Baltimore, had been making investigation into the possibilities of
+railroads. The fact that the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was already
+well advanced in construction, would have its eastern terminus at the
+Potomac River, near Washington, brought no comfort to the merchants of
+Baltimore. Wonder not then, that the stern old traders of that city
+assembled to consider "the best means of restoring to the city of
+Baltimore that portion of the western trade which has lately been diverted
+from it by the introduction of steam navigation and other causes." From
+that February day to this the corporate title of the Baltimore & Ohio has
+been unchanged, despite the career of the most extreme vicissitudes--long
+years of shadows that were almost complete despair, other years that were
+brilliant with success.
+
+It was decided at the outset that the commercial supremacy of Baltimore
+rested on her conquest of the Appalachian Mountains, of her reaching by an
+easy artificial highway the almost limitless waterways of the West that
+linked themselves with the navigable Ohio. But for the beginning it was
+agreed that Cumberland, long an important point on the well-famed National
+Highway, and even then a centre in the coal traffic, was a far enough
+distant goal to be worthy of the most ambitious enterprise. Indeed a long
+cutting through a hill in the first section of the road proved a serious
+financial obstacle to the directors of the struggling railroad. But these
+last were men who persevered. They started to lay their track for the
+thirteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills on July 4, 1828. That
+occasion was honored by an old-time celebration in which the chief figure
+was Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, who laid the first stone of the new
+line. After his services were finished he said to a friend:
+
+"I consider this among the most important things of my life, second only
+to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to
+that." Of that act President Hadley, of Yale, has written: "One man's life
+formed the connecting link between the political revolution of the one
+century and the industrial revolution of the other."
+
+No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the
+directors found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise
+was then so unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark.
+Even the construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first
+planned to use wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted
+upon stone sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track
+was obviously wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the
+traffic was at all sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden
+sleepers.
+
+But the track was the least of the company's problems. It had gone ahead
+to build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent
+motive-power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the
+question for hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance.
+The Baltimore & Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car
+which was carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.
+
+Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power
+problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the
+outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore
+partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent
+that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him
+that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the
+struggling little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from
+Baltimore. He came to the aid of its directors in their problem of
+motive-power.
+
+That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a
+locomotive around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York,
+bought an engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car--not larger
+than a hand-car, geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief
+problem of the B. & O. His little engine--the _Tom Thumb_--was a primitive
+enough affair, but it pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who
+were pinning their entire faith to their railroad project.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Two years after the beginning of the work, "brigades" of horse-cars were
+in regular service to Ellicott's Mills; by the first of December, 1831,
+trains--steam-drawn--ran through to Frederick, Md.; five months later, to
+a day, they had reached Point of Rocks on the Potomac, seventy miles from
+Baltimore. At Point of Rocks the road was halted for a long time. The
+power of the powerful Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which had been great enough
+to keep State or national grants from struggling railroads, was raised to
+defend its claim to a monopoly of the Potomac Valley, by right of
+priority. This right was sustained in the courts, and the railroad held
+back two years, until it could buy a compromise.
+
+In 1835, a highly profitable branch was opened to Washington, while early
+in the following year, trains were running through to Harpers Ferry, at
+the mouth of the Shenandoah.
+
+During that same Summer of 1835, definite steps were taken toward the
+extension of the railroad to Pittsburgh, as well as Wheeling. But it was
+three years later before the struggling company was ready to make a
+surveying reconnaissance of these extensions of the road. All through that
+time actual construction work was slowly but quite surely progressing
+westward from Harpers Ferry, and on November 5, 1842, trains entered
+Cumberland, the one-time objective point of the enterprise.
+
+[Illustration: AN EARLY LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY WILLIAM NORRIS FOR THE
+PHILADELPHIA & READING RAILROAD]
+
+[Illustration: THE HISTORIC "JOHN BULL" OF THE CAMDEN & AMBOY
+RAILROAD--AND ITS TRAIN]
+
+[Illustration: A HEAVY-GRADE TYPE OF LOCOMOTIVE BUILT FOR THE BALTIMORE &
+OHIO RAILROAD IN 1864. ITS FLARING STACK WAS TYPICAL OF THOSE YEARS]
+
+But beyond Cumberland the road gradually left the comfortable valley of
+the Potomac, and these early railroad builders found themselves confronted
+with new difficulties. To build a railroad across the range of the
+Appalachians, with the primitive methods and machinery of those days was
+no simple task. For nine years the construction work dragged. In 1851 the
+line had only been finished to Piedmont, twenty-nine miles west of
+Cumberland, and its builders were well-nigh discouraged. Let us quote from
+the ancient history of the B. & O., from which we derive these facts, in
+an exact paragraph:
+
+ "In the Fall of 1851, the Board found themselves, almost without
+ warning, in the midst of a financial crisis, with a family of more
+ than 5,000 laborers and 1,200 horses to be provided for, while their
+ treasury was rapidly growing weaker. The commercial existence of the
+ city of Baltimore depended on the prompt and successful prosecution of
+ the unfinished road."
+
+In October, 1852, it was found that there had been expended for
+construction west of Cumberland, $7,217,732.51. But the road was going
+ahead once more. Its Board had dug deep into their pockets and the
+commercial crisis that hovered over Baltimore was passed. Two years later
+the road entered Wheeling, and its corporate title was no longer a
+misnomer.
+
+A little later, a more direct line was built to Parkersburg, West
+Virginia, and direct connection entered with the Ohio & Mississippi
+Railroad, which reached St. Louis. The railroad was beginning to feel its
+way out across the land.
+
+War between North and South had been declared before the long delayed
+extension to Pittsburgh was finished. In that time a real master-hand had
+come to the Baltimore & Ohio. In its early days the names of Philip E.
+Thomas, Peter Cooper, Ross Winans, and B. H. Latrobe were indissolubly
+linked with this pioneer railroad; in its second era John W. Garrett gave
+brilliancy to its administration. Even before, as well as throughout the
+four trying years of the war, when the road's tracks were being repeatedly
+torn up and its bridges burned, Mr. Garrett was laying down his masterly
+policy of expansion. It was a discouraging beginning that confronted him.
+The two expensive extensions to the Ohio River had been a severe drain on
+the company's treasury, traffic was at low ebb, the great financial panic
+of 1857 had been hard to surmount.
+
+But Mr. Garrett was one of the first of American railroaders to see that a
+trunk-line should start at the seaboard and end at Chicago or the
+Mississippi. He pushed his line to Pittsburgh, to Cleveland, to Sandusky,
+to Chicago. It began to reach new and growing traffic centres. The
+Baltimore & Ohio entered upon an era of magnificent prosperity.
+
+The first cloud upon that era came in the early seventies, when its
+powerful rival, the Pennsylvania, secured control of the Philadelphia,
+Wilmington & Baltimore, the B. & O.'s connecting link on its immensely
+profitable through route from New York to Washington. Pennsylvania
+interests tunnelled for long miles through the rocky foundations of
+Baltimore, purchased an independent line to Washington--the Baltimore &
+Potomac--and the B. & O. found itself deprived of its best congested
+traffic district. For eleven years it was unable to retaliate, though not
+a soul believed the Baltimore & Ohio to be other than a splendid,
+conservative property. It owned its own sleeping-car company, its own
+express company, its own telegraph company. The name of Garrett was behind
+it. Logan G. McPherson says:
+
+ "When it was desired to obtain additional funds, bonds were always
+ issued instead of the capital stock being increased. Interest on bonds
+ has always to be met, whereas dividends on stocks can be passed. It
+ was announced, however, that the retention of the stock
+ capitalization at less than fifteen millions of dollars was an
+ evidence of conservatism, as the continuance of semi-annual dividends
+ of five per cent was thereby permitted."
+
+John W. Garrett died in 1884, and was succeeded in the presidency by his
+son Robert Garrett, who announced himself ready to continue a policy of
+expansion. The younger Garrett sought to regain an entrance for his
+traffic to New York. To that end he built a line into Philadelphia and
+prepared to strike across the State of New Jersey. He failed in that end
+by the failure of one of his confidential aides; the line that he had
+counted on for entrance into the American metropolis was snapped up by his
+greatest rival just as his own fingers were almost upon it. Later the B. &
+O. was permitted a trackage entrance into Jersey City, but the terms of
+that entrance were so stringent as to mean a practical surrender upon its
+part.
+
+If Baltimore & Ohio had won that battle, a different story might have been
+chronicled. As it was, it stood a loser in a fearfully expensive fight;
+the English investors in the property became investigators--of a sudden
+the bottom dropped out of things. The stock went slipping down as only a
+mob-chased stock in Wall Street can drop; the road that had been the pride
+of Baltimore became, for the moment, her shame. It was shown, upon
+investigation, that the road had long gone upon a slender standing:
+millions of dollars that should actually have been charged to loss had
+been charged against its capital and included in the surplus. Ten years
+after Mr. Garrett's death the road found itself in even more bitter
+straits. It was a laughing stock and a reproach among railroad men. Its
+profitable side-properties--the sleeping-car company, the express company,
+the telegraph company,--the first two of which should never be permitted
+to go outside of the control of any really great railroad company--had
+been sold, one after another, in attempts to save the day of reckoning.
+Just before the Chicago Fair the road reached low-water mark. Its
+passenger cars were weather-beaten and ravaged almost beyond hope of
+paint-shops; it was sometimes necessary to hold outgoing trains in the
+famous old Camden station at Baltimore, until the lamps and drinking
+glasses could be secured from some incoming train. In that day of
+low-water mark it was actually and seriously proposed to abandon the
+passenger service of the road!
+
+Out of that chaos came the B. & O. of to-day, a substantial and
+well-managed railroad property. Mr. Garrett was the first of the
+railroaders to construct a single property from the Atlantic seaboard to
+the Mississippi; John F. Cowan, L. F. Loree, Oscar G. Murray, and Daniel
+Willard have been his successors in the revamping of the B. & O.,
+eliminating its costly grades, enlarging yard and terminal facilities, and
+making the historic road a carrier of the first class.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The history of the Erie Railroad is hardly less dramatic than that of the
+Baltimore & Ohio; its financial disasters were not owing to the errors
+that come of crass stupidity. For the Erie did its good part in the making
+of railroad law. Built and operated in the earliest railroad days as a
+single enterprise through the southern tier of counties of New York State
+from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, while the roads to the north that were
+eventually to be welded by Commodore Vanderbilt into the great New York
+Central were still quarrelling among themselves, it was wrecked time and
+time again by unscrupulous schemes of high finance. It was made to wear
+mill-stones in the shape of outrageous bonded indebtednesses that acted as
+a fearful handicap for many years and prevented a remarkably well located
+property from standing to-day as the peer of the Pennsylvania or of the
+New York Central. The story of these outrages has been told and
+retold--they are integral parts of the financial history of the country.
+Suffice it to say here and now that the Erie has been operated with more
+or less success by no less than four struggling corporations; that it has
+never come closer to achieving success than under its present president,
+F. D. Underwood; and that no one save those who have stood close to
+Underwood has known or appreciated the heritage of handicap that was given
+to him to shoulder. For it has been part of our railroad principle in this
+country--a mighty sad part, too--that no matter how villainously stocks
+and bonds may have been issued at any time--only to bring failure swiftly
+and inevitably,--such bogus paper has always been protected in
+reorganization. A railroad which becomes bankrupt cannot be abandoned.
+That has been done only in rare cases. Even the Baltimore & Ohio, at the
+end of its rope less than twenty years ago, was not permitted to abandon
+its passenger service. It must pull itself up out of the difficulties,
+and--in America at least--it must pull its trashy paper up too, in order
+that no holder of such paper may be unprotected. The paper can no more be
+abandoned than the right-of-way. The result is seen in railroads
+staggering under vast and questionable capitalization (there is no
+cleaning of the slate); but the sins of those that have gone before are
+truly visited upon the third and the fourth generation, as well as upon
+the poor humans who, under such burdens, are trying to operate a railroad
+property.
+
+From the beginning the story of Erie has been a story of difficulties. The
+original scheme of building a New York railroad from Piermont-on-Hudson to
+Dunkirk on Lake Erie--some 450 miles--seems in the face of the resources
+of the State at that time and the engineering difficulties to be solved,
+almost quixotic. But the road was built step by step, section by section,
+until in May, 1851, a triumphal first train was operated over its entire
+length. President Fillmore was the guest of honor on the train, but shared
+attention with Daniel Webster on the trip. Webster, in order that he might
+see the country, insisted on making the entire tedious journey in a
+rocking-chair, which was lashed upon a flat-car. Another flat-car was
+occupied by a railroad officer who was designated to receive the flags. C.
+F. Carter, in his interesting sketch on the early days of the Erie,
+writes:
+
+ "By a singular coincidence, the ladies at every one of the more than
+ sixty stations between Piermont and Dunkirk had conceived the idea
+ that it would be as original as it was appropriate to present a flag
+ wrought by their own fair hands to the railroad company when the first
+ train passed through to Lake Erie. As it would have consumed
+ altogether too much time to make a stop for each of these flag
+ presentations, the engineer merely slowed down at three-fourths of the
+ stations long enough to permit the man on the flat-car to scoop up the
+ banners in his arms, much like the hands on the old-fashioned Marsh
+ harvesters gathered up armfuls of grain for binding. At the end of the
+ journey the Erie Railroad had a collection of flags that would have
+ done credit to a victorious army."
+
+Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph
+came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line,
+built for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of
+the road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days.
+It was only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his
+message like a letter, beginning with "Dear sir" and ending with "Yours
+truly." The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast
+train rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the
+right-of-way over those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on
+single-track lines were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a
+train was waiting for another coming in an opposite direction, and the
+train came not after an hour, the first train proceeded forward "under
+flag." That meant that a man, walking with a flag in his hand preceded the
+train to protect it. The locomotive and its train of cars necessarily
+proceeded at snail's pace.
+
+It was not so very long after that observation-car trip that Daniel
+Webster took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie's
+superintendent, Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of
+the road. The train on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound
+express at Turner's. After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing
+the opposing train, Minot was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed
+up the line fourteen miles to Goshen to hold that west-bound train until
+he should arrive there. He then ordered his train-crew to proceed. They
+rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had too much regard for his own precious
+neck to break the time-card rules, even under the superintendent's orders.
+So finally Minot took charge of the engine himself, while Lewis cautiously
+seated himself in the last seat of the last car and awaited the worst.
+
+It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had received
+the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it had not
+arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to reach
+Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By the
+use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in
+running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains
+by telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early
+railroads.
+
+At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief
+that the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, "some two hundred
+thousand dollars in a year," and his neighbors laughed at him for his
+extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months' operation of the road
+the receipts--mostly from freight--were $1,755,285.
+
+To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not
+yet been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of
+scheming; the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the
+monumental tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property--a
+property with possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The
+present management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen
+the future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its
+lines for the full development of the property as a carrier of goods,
+rather than of through passengers.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the
+beginning, the different roads--such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore &
+Ohio, and New York Central--were being pushed west over the Alleghany
+Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era
+where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era
+which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange
+stock-watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and
+Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The
+first railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built
+in 1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State
+capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the _Sandusky_, was the first
+locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.
+
+The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad--now a
+part of the Wabash--extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to
+Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a
+locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N.
+J.,--the founders of a famous locomotive works--was landed from a
+packet-steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard
+upon the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:
+
+ "The little locomotive had no whistle, no spark-arrester, no
+ cow-catcher, and the cab was open to the sky. Its speed was about six
+ miles an hour, and where the railroad and the highway lay parallel to
+ each other there was frequently a trial of speed between the
+ locomotive with its 'pleasure cars' and the stage-coaches. Sometimes
+ the stage-coaches came in ahead. Six inches of snow were sufficient to
+ blockade the trains drawn by this American engine."
+
+In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from
+Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the
+east shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago
+with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its
+chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,--afterwards a part
+of the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the
+extended New York Central system--was also pushing toward Chicago as a
+goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow
+work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the
+railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful
+financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted
+beside the "fly-by-night" schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the
+single trunk-line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to
+Cleveland that was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the
+trunk-line connection east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing
+completion.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Chicago's first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the
+cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the
+really great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was
+incorporated in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in
+laying tracks, for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des
+Plaines; and its first locomotive, the _Pioneer_, had been bought
+second-hand from the Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York
+State. The rails were second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the
+Western railroads were already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it
+was a railroad, and it was with a deal of pride that John B. Turner, its
+president, used to ascend to an observatory on the second floor of the old
+Halsted Street depot to sight with a telescope the smoke of his morning
+train coming across the prairie. The Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was
+organized in 1859. For a time it was so desperately poor that it could not
+pay the interest on its bonds, and there was a time when its officers had
+to meet the pay-roll out of their own pockets; but it succeeded in
+absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at the beginning. In another
+decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting the Far West with the
+populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed. The Chicago and
+Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between the Lakes and the
+eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs. The business that
+came to it because of that linking was the first strong impulse that led
+to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.
+
+The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois
+Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later
+when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears,
+construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to
+Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking
+race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main
+line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready
+for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly
+showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to
+effect their escape to the North.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the
+Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a
+bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should
+seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while
+there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States,
+that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to
+the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six
+years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque,
+Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and
+his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New
+York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific
+railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was
+a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the
+propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge
+Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had
+died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came
+Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the
+fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to
+Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay
+diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk
+into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich
+man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in
+its propagation. He organized the People's Pacific Railroad,--and a part
+of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like
+the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan.
+There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to
+the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the
+Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real
+transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas
+City by 1856. That particular railroad--the Missouri Pacific--through its
+western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the
+coast within the past year.
+
+When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the seemingly hopeless task of
+trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm
+of Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer.
+The thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham,
+who had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought
+that august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war,
+into making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of
+ten men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with
+enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the
+location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to
+Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad
+had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with
+interest, but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into
+the high passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would
+certainly have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he
+believed so earnestly. He found it--making a route that would save 148
+miles and $13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities.
+When he went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends,
+Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that
+pass in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark
+Hopkins has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they
+were sending for the three other capitalists of Sacramento--the Crocker
+brothers, who had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford,
+a wholesale grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central
+Pacific Railroad was organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on
+the new line at Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California
+shook with laughter at the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers
+building a railroad across the crest of the Sierras.
+
+How they built their railroad successfully and amassed six really great
+American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a
+deaf ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that
+bankers dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring
+their credit), found their route through the mountains just as Judah had
+promised, brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand
+Chinese laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the
+pines by a single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to
+the mountains, and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys.
+"Two thousand feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where
+eagles were at home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could
+neither be surmounted nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a
+bank swallow's hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended
+in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight
+half the battles of the Revolution."
+
+While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union
+Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A
+Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental
+track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial
+blot upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the
+Spring of 1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of
+subsidy getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles
+away from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began
+that has never been approached in the history of railroad building.
+Twenty-five thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of
+locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten
+miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of
+such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford,
+who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific at
+Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment
+the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.
+
+After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific,
+and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single
+railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into
+its own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the
+Northern Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake
+country straight to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike
+was driven in the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and
+so far the only railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the
+Pacific. Within a year the Western Pacific--the westernmost of the chain
+of Gould roads--has begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As
+this volume goes to press finishing touches are being placed upon the
+Puget Sound extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the
+last transcontinental to be stretched across these United States for a
+number of years to come. Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is
+finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a
+great city--Prince Rupert--at its western terminal. It should be ready for
+its through traffic within the next three years.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading--an
+eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through
+many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused
+to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. It has been
+assailed by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of
+the so-called "pooling agreements," and it has cut its own strong arms by
+building foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while
+the highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud canals have
+fallen into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful
+existence. Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the
+business; and for the first time the country sees practically every line,
+large or small, honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all
+but passed into history.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE BUILDING OF A RAILROAD
+
+ COST OF A SINGLE-TRACK ROAD--FINANCING--SECURING A CHARTER--SURVEY-WORK
+ AND ITS DANGERS--GRADES--CONSTRUCTION--TRACK-LAYING.
+
+
+The railroad has its beginning in the inspiration and in the imagination
+of men. Perchance a great tract of country, rich in possibilities, stands
+undeveloped for lack of transportation facilities. The living arm of the
+railroad will bring to it both strength and growth. It will bring to it
+the materials, the men, and the machinery needed for its development. It
+will take from it its products seeking markets in communities already
+established.
+
+In that way the first railroads began, reaching their arms carefully in
+from the Atlantic and the navigable rivers and bays that emptied into it.
+In the beginning there was hardly any inland country. All the important
+towns were spread along the sea-coast or along those same navigable
+tributaries, and it was sorry shrift for any community that did not
+possess a wharf to which vessels of considerable tonnage might attain.
+Where such communities did not possess natural water-ways, they sought to
+obtain artificial ones; and the result was the extraordinary impetus that
+was given to the building of canals during the first half of the
+nineteenth century--a page of American industrial history that has been
+told in another chapter.
+
+It was found quite impossible to handle bulky freight economically by
+wagon, no matter how romantic the turnpike might be for passenger traffic
+in the old-time coaches. The canal was so much better as a carrier that it
+was hailed with acclaim, and waxed powerful. In the height of its power
+it laughed at the puny efforts of the railroad, and then, as you have
+seen, sought by every possible means to throttle the growth of the steel
+highway. Within eighty years it was powerless, and the railroad was
+conqueror. There were hundreds of miles of abandoned canal within the
+country, many of them being converted into roadbeds of railroads; and the
+water-highway, with its slow transit and its utter helplessness during the
+frozen months of the year, was not able to exist except where quantities
+of the coarsest sort of freight were to be moved.
+
+Without railroads, the United States to-day would, in all probability, not
+be radically different from the United States of a hundred years ago. All
+the large towns and cities would still be clustered upon the coast and
+waterways, and back of them would still rest many, many square miles of
+undeveloped country; the nation would have remained a sprawling, helpless
+thing, weakened by its very size, and subject both to internal conflict
+and to attacks of foreign invaders. It has been repeatedly said that if
+there had been a through railroad development in the South during the
+fifties, there would have been no Civil War. France for five hundred years
+before the signing of our Declaration, was a civilized and progressive
+nation. Yet century after century passed without her inland towns showing
+material change; and her seaports, lacking the impetus of interior growth,
+remained quiescent. Such a metropolis as Marseilles is to-day, became
+possible only when the railroad made this seaport the south gate of a
+mightily developing nation.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Let us assume that we are about to build a railroad. If we are going to
+strike our road in from some existing line or some accessible port into
+virgin country, we may hope for land or money grants from the State,
+county, town, or city Government. That is a faint hope, however, in these
+piping days of the twentieth century. So much scandal once attached itself
+to these grants that they have become all but obsolete. We shall have to
+fall back upon the individual enterprise and help of the persons who are
+to benefit by the coming of the railroad. They may be folk who simply
+regard our project as a good investment, and place their money in it with
+hopes of a fair return.
+
+Even if we are not going into virgin territory to give whole townships and
+counties their first sight of the locomotive, but are going to strike into
+a community already provided with railroad facilities but seemingly
+offering fair opportunity for profit in a competitive traffic, we shall
+find capital ready to stand back of us. A railroad will cost much money,
+the mere cost of single-track construction generally running far in excess
+of $35,000 a mile; and it should have resources, particularly in a highly
+competitive territory, to enable it to carry on a losing fight at the
+first.
+
+For the money it receives it will issue securities, upon incorporation and
+legal organization, almost invariably in the form of capital stock and of
+mortgage-bonds. The stock will probably be held by the men who wish to
+control the construction and the operation of the line; the bonds will be
+issued to those persons who invest their money in it, either for profit or
+as an aid to the community it seeks to enter. The bonds are, in almost all
+cases, the preferable security. They pay a guaranteed interest at a
+certain rate, and at the end of a designated term of years they are
+redeemable at face value, in cash or in the capital stock of the company.
+There are other forms of loan obligations which the railroad
+issues--debenture bonds, second-mortgage bonds, short-term notes, and the
+like. To enter upon a description of these would mean a detour into the
+devious highways and byways of railroad finance--an excursion which we
+have no desire to make in this book.
+
+In building our line we will issue as few bonds in proportion to our stock
+as will make our company fairly stable in organization, and its
+proposition attractive to investors. For we shall have to pay our
+interest coupons upon the bonds from the beginning. We can begin even
+moderate dividends upon our stock after our enterprise has entered upon
+fair sailing. The all-important initial problem of financing having been
+at least partly settled, we will go before the Legislature and secure a
+charter for our road. In these modern days we shall probably have also to
+make application to some State railroad or public utility commission. It
+will consider our case with great care, granting hearings so that we may
+state our plans, and that folk living in the territory which we are about
+to tap may urge the necessity of our coming, and that rival railroads or
+other opponents may state their objections. After the entire evidence has
+been sifted down and weighed in truly judicial fashion, we may hope for
+word to "go ahead," from the official commission, which, though it assumes
+none of our risk of loss in projecting the line, will gratuitously assume
+many of the details of its management.
+
+Perhaps the politicians will poke their noses into our plan; they
+sometimes do. If we have plenty of capital behind us; if it becomes
+rumored that the P---- or the N---- or the X----, one of the big existing
+properties, is back of us, or some "big Wall Street fellow" is guiding our
+bonds, we can almost confidently expect their interference. After that it
+becomes a matter of diplomacy--and may the best man win!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Let us assume that some of these big obstacles have already been passed,
+that the politicians have been placed at arm's length, that the money
+needed is in sight--we are ready to begin the construction of our line.
+The location is the thing that next vexes us. A few errors in the placing
+of our line may spell failure for the whole enterprise. Obviously, these
+errors will be of the sort that admit of no easy correction.
+
+If our line is to link two important traffic centres and is to make a
+specialty of through traffic it will have to be very much of a town that
+will bend the straightness of our route. If, on the other hand, the line
+is to pick up its traffic from the territory it traverses we can afford to
+neglect no place of possibilities. We must make concessions, even if we
+make many twists and turns and climb steep grades; we cannot afford to
+pass business by. Perhaps we may even have to worm our way into the hearts
+of towns already grown and closely built, and this will be expensive work.
+But it will be worth every cent of that expense to go after competitive
+business.
+
+We roughly outline our route, and the engineers get their camping duds
+ready, particularly in these days when new railroads almost invariably go
+into a new country. Their first trip over the route will be known as the
+reconnaissance. On it they will make rough plotting of the territory
+through which the new line is to place its rails. Our engineers are
+experienced. They survey the country with practised eyes. The line must go
+on this side of that ridge, because of the prevailing winds and their
+influence upon snowdrifts (it costs a mint of money to run ploughs through
+a long winter), and on the other side of the next ridge, because the other
+side has easily worked loam, and this side heavy rock. There must be
+passes through hills and through mountains to be selected now and then,
+and all the while the engineer must bear in mind that the amount of his
+excavation should very nearly balance the amount of embankment-fill.
+Bridges are to be avoided and tunnels must come only in case of absolute
+necessity.
+
+There will be several of these reconnaissances and from them the engineers
+who are to build the line, and the men who are to own and operate it, will
+finally pick a route close to what will be the permanent way.
+
+[Illustration: CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERS BLAZE THEIR WAY ACROSS THE FACE OF
+NEW COUNTRY]
+
+[Illustration: THE MAKING OF AN EMBANKMENT BY DUMP-TRAIN]
+
+[Illustration: "SMALL TEMPORARY RAILROADS PEOPLED WITH HORDES OF RESTLESS
+ENGINES"]
+
+Then the real survey-work begins. The engineers divide the line, if it is
+of any great length, and the several divisions prosecute their work
+simultaneously. Each surveying party consists of a front flag-man, who
+is a captain and commands a brigade of axe-men in their work of cutting
+away trees and bushes; the transit-man, who makes his record of distances
+and angles and commands his brigade of chain-men and flag-men; and the
+leveller, who studies contour all the while, and supervisors, rod-men and
+more axe-men. Topographers are carried, their big drawing boards being
+strapped with the camp equipment; and a good cook is a big detail not
+likely to be overlooked.
+
+In soft and rolling country this is a form of camp life that turns back
+the scoffer: busy summer days and indolent summer nights around the
+camp-fire, pipes drawing well and plans being set for the morrow's work.
+Another summer all this will be changed. The resistless path of the
+railroad will be stepped through here, the group of nodding pines will be
+gone, for a culvert will span the creek at this very point.
+
+Sometimes the work of these parties becomes intense and dramatic. The
+chief, lowered into a deep and rocky river cañon, is making rough notes
+and sketches, following the character of the rock formation, and dreaming
+the great dreams that all great engineers, great architects, great
+creators must dream perforce. He is dreaming of the day when, a year or
+two hence, the railroad's path shall have crowded itself into this
+_impasse_, and when the folk who dine luxuriously in the showy cars will
+fret because of the curve that spills their soup, and who never know of
+the man who was slipped down over a six-hundred-foot cliff in order that
+the railroad might find its way.
+
+It is then that the surveying party begins to have its thrills. Perhaps to
+put that line through the cañon the party will have to descend the river
+in canoes. If the river be too rough, then there is the alternative of
+being lowered over the cliffsides. Talk of your dangers of Alpine
+climbing! The engineers who plan and build railroads through any
+mountainous country miss not a single one of them. Everywhere the lines
+must find a foothold. This is the proposition that admits of but one
+answer--solution. Sometimes the men who follow the chief in the deep river
+cañons, the men with heavy instruments to carry and to operate--transits,
+levels, and the like--must have lines of logs strung together for their
+precarious foothold as they work. Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope
+that lowers the engineer down over the cliffside snaps, and the folk in
+the cheerful dining-room do not know of the graves that are dug beside the
+railroad's resistless path.
+
+It is all new and wonderful, blazing this path for civilization; sometimes
+it is even accidental. An engineer, baffled to find a crossing over the
+Rockies for a transcontinental route saw an eagle disappear through a
+cleft in the hills that his eye had not before detected. He followed the
+course of the eagle; to-day the rails of the transcontinental reach
+through that cleft, and the time-table shows it as Eagle Pass.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Possibly there are still alternative routes when the surveyers return in
+the fall and begin to make their finished drawings. Final choices must now
+be made, and land-maps that show the property that the railroad will have
+to acquire, prepared. The details, of infinite number, are being worked
+out with infinite care.
+
+The great problem of all is the problem of grades; in a mountainous
+stretch of line this is almost the entire problem. Obviously a perfect
+stretch of railroad would be straight and without grades. The railroad
+that comes nearest that practically impossible standard comes nearest to
+perfection. But as it comes near this perfection, the cost of construction
+multiplies many times. Most new lines must feel their way carefully at the
+outset. Moreover it is not an impossible thing to reconstruct it after
+years of affluence--of which more in another chapter.
+
+A three-per-cent grade is almost the extreme limit for anything like a
+profitable operation; even a two-per-cent grade is one in which the
+operating people look forward to reconstruction and elimination. Yet there
+are short lengths of line up in the mining camps of Colorado, where grades
+of more than four per cent are operated; and it is a matter of railroad
+history that away back in 1852, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was
+being pushed through toward Parkersburg, and the great Kingwood tunnel was
+being dug, B. H. Latrobe, the chief engineer of the company, built and
+successfully operated a temporary line over the divide at a grade of ten
+per cent--528 feet to the mile. A locomotive which weighed 28 tons on its
+driving-wheels carried a single passenger car, weighing 15 tons, in safety
+and in regular operation over this stupendous grade for more than six
+months. The ascent was made by means of zigzag tracks on the so-called
+switchback principle. That scheme succeeded earlier planes operated by
+endless chains; an instance of which is the quite famous road of Mauch
+Chunk, originally operated for coal, and now a side scenic trip for
+passengers. Other planes of this sort, you will remember, were in
+operation at Albany and Schenectady on the old Mohawk & Hudson route, now
+a part of the New York Central lines; but all of them involved a change of
+passengers and freight to and from their cars, and the zigzag switchback
+was considered quite an advance in its day. Two of these ancient
+switchbacks are still in regular use for passengers and freight--one at
+Honesdale, Pa., and the other at Ithaca, N. Y.
+
+The matter of grades being settled, and with it as a corrollary the
+question of minor curves, minor details next claim attention. Perhaps the
+water supply along the new line is defective. Then arrangements must be
+made for impounding, and perhaps suitable dams and waterworks will be
+built for this purpose. The water must be soft, to protect the locomotive
+boilers; if hard, an apparatus is erected for the softening process.
+Grade crossings are to be avoided, highway crossings being built, wherever
+possible, over or under the railroad.
+
+A railroad crossing another railroad at grade is an abomination not to be
+permitted nowadays. The universal use of the air-brake has permitted a
+reduction of the "head-room,"--the necessary clearance between the rail
+and overhead obstruction--from 20 feet to 14 feet. The old "head-room" was
+necessary to protect the brakeman who worked atop of the box-cars. This
+reduction of six feet in clearance was a matter of infinite relief to
+engineers, particularly in the bridging of one railroad over another.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The entire problem of bridges is so intricate a phase of American railroad
+construction as to demand attention in a subsequent chapter. In actual
+railroad practice it is apt to demand a separate branch of engineering
+skill, both in construction and in maintenance. We turn our attention back
+to the main problem of the building of our railroad.
+
+When all plans are finished, contracts remain to be divided and
+sub-divided; for it would be a brave contractor, indeed, who in these days
+would consent to essay himself, any considerable length of railroad line.
+In fact, in recent work of heavy nature, the price is almost invariably
+placed at an indefinite figure, a certain definite percentage of profit
+being allowed the contractor on each cubic yard of rock or soil. In such a
+case the contractor's business becomes far less a game of chance; he is,
+in effect, the railroad's agent supervising its construction at a certain
+set stipend.
+
+Let us say that the construction on our railroad begins in the early
+spring. As a matter of real fact it would not be halted long because of
+adverse weather conditions. Even up in the frozen and uninhabitable wilds
+of the Canadian Northwest, work has been prosecuted on the new Grand Trunk
+Pacific throughout the entire twelve months. But in summer the
+construction gangs rejoice. The great proposition of bringing mile after
+mile of future railroad to sub-grade--the level upon which the cross-ties
+are to be set--fairly sweeps forward under the genial warmth of the sun.
+The construction is under the supervision of competent engineers, who are,
+of course, under the direct supervision of the railroad's own
+organization. Every six to twelve or fifteen miles of new line is divided
+into sections, better known as residencies, for each is under the eye of
+its own resident engineer. He reports to the construction engineer, who in
+turn reports to the chief engineer of the railroad, an officer who reports
+to no less person than the president of the company.
+
+This great force--for each engineer has gathered about him a competent
+staff of young men as expert with compass, with level, and with transit as
+were the men who first projected the line--is in the field as quickly as
+the contractor. They are to see him bring the line to sub-grade; to see
+him place bridges and culverts, bisect high hills with cuttings, bore
+tunnels through even higher hills and mountains, span deep valleys with
+great embankments. To facilitate quick construction the residencies are
+made numerous; work begins at as many initial points as possible. These
+points, of course, are situated, where possible, close to water
+communication or existing railroad lines, in order that material may be
+brought with the least possible delay and expense.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Of course, if the country has a sharp contour, the ordinary difficulties
+of line-construction multiply very rapidly. The great cuttings through the
+hills may have to be carved out of resisting rock, a work that is carried
+on through many levels, known to the engineers as ledges or as benches. If
+there are high hills to be notched there will probably be great hollows
+where the circumstances do not justify carrying the line on bridge or
+trestle. In these cases come the fills, or embankments. We have already
+shown how the locating engineer in the first instance has tried to plan
+his line so that the earth or rock from his cutting will be as nearly as
+possible sufficient to form the near-by embankments. Sometimes it is not,
+and then the resident engineers must locate borrow-pits, where the hungry
+demand of the railroad for dirt will cause a great hollow to show itself
+on the face of the earth. The borrow-pit must be carefully
+located--convenient of access, far enough from the track not to be a
+danger spot to it. This is one of the infinity of problems that come to
+the construction engineer.
+
+For these big jobs laborers' camps will be established close to them; and
+small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless dummy-engines
+and forcing their narrow-gauged rails here and there and everywhere, will
+be busy for long weeks and months. There will not be much hand-cutting in
+the ledges. Steam shovels, mounted like locomotives upon the rails, and
+pushing forward all the while, will fairly eat out the hillside. One of
+these will catch up in a single dip of his giant arm more than a wagon
+load of soft earth or of rock that has been blasted apart for his coming.
+
+To make the fills the engineers must often build rough wooden trestles out
+of the permanent level of the line. The dummy-engines, with their trails
+of dump-cars, coming from the back of the steam shovels in the cutting, or
+from the nearest borrow-pit, will hardly seem in a single day to make an
+appreciable effect upon the fill. But the days and weeks together count,
+and the dumping multiplies until the rough trestle has completely
+disappeared, and the railroad has a firm and permanent path across the
+edge of the dizzy embankment. And these embankments can be made truly
+dizzy. The passenger going west from Omaha on the new Lane cut-off of the
+Union Pacific finds his path for almost twenty miles through deep cuttings
+of the crests of the rolling Nebraska hills, across the edge of the long
+fills over wide valleys. The Lackawanna railroad building a great
+cut-off on its main line where it passes through New Jersey has just
+finished the largest railroad embankment ever built--an earthen structure
+for two tracks, three miles long and seventy-five to one hundred and ten
+feet in height.
+
+[Illustration: CUTTING A PATH FOR THE RAILROAD THROUGH THE CREST OF THE
+HIGH HILLS]
+
+[Illustration: A GIANT FILL--IN THE MAKING]
+
+[Illustration: THE FINISHING TOUCHES TO THE TRACK]
+
+[Illustration: THIS MACHINE CAN LAY A MILE OF TRACK A DAY]
+
+As the line goes forward, the track follows. The new railroad has probably
+popularized itself from the outset by hiring the near-by farmers and their
+teams to grade the line through their localities, particularly where an
+almost level country makes the grading a slight matter. Sometimes in level
+country, grading machines, drawn by horses, or by traction engines, have
+been used to advantage. These machines are equipped with ploughs which
+loosen the soil and place it on conveyor belts. Material can be deposited
+twenty-two feet away from the line, and a four-foot excavation can be made
+by these machines with ease.
+
+But the laying of the track--the line having been finished at sub-grade
+with a top width of from 14 to 20 feet for each standard gauge track to be
+laid--the line begins to assume the appearance of a real railroad. Upon
+the first stretches of completed track, locomotives and cars employed in
+construction service begin to operate. As the track grows, their field of
+operation increases. Then comes the day when the track sections begin to
+be joined; the railroad is beginning to be a real pathway of steel.
+
+To build this pathway is comparatively a simple matter, once the sub-grade
+is finished. A mile a day is not too much for any confident contractor to
+expect of his construction gangs. There was that time, back in '69, when a
+world's record of ten miles of track laid in a single day was established
+on the Central Pacific. For that mile of standard track the contractor
+will need 3,168 ties--eight carloads; 352 rails--five carloads; and a
+carload of angle irons, bolts, and spikes, as fasteners.
+
+The track-layers are as proud of their profession as any man might be of
+his. Their skill is a wondrous thing. Two men who follow the wake of a
+wagon roughly place the ties as fast as they are dropped upon the
+right-of-way. Another man aligns them with a line that has been strung by
+one of the young engineers, a fourth with a notched board, marks the
+location of one rail. That rail--the line side--follows close to the
+location marks. It is roughly banded and lightly fastened in place. The
+other rail--the gauge side--quickly follows. The wonderfully accurate
+gauge representing the 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches that is almost the standard of
+the work, and which is tested every morning by the engineers, is in
+constant use. The railroad track must be true; there is not room for even
+the variation of a fraction of an inch in the gauge of the two rails.
+
+In fastening the two long lines of rails, the profession of track-laying
+rises to almost supreme heights. The men who fasten the rail with angle
+iron and a single roughly-adjusted bolt in each rail-end are
+head-strappers and past masters in their art. After them in due season
+come the back-strappers, finishing that fine work of solidly bolting the
+rail against the vast strain of a thousand-ton train being shot over it at
+lightning speed. And after the back-strappers and the men who have spiked
+the rail to the ties, comes the locomotive itself, bringing more ties,
+more rails, more angle-bars and bolts, and more spikes to the front. Then
+sometime later the road-bed is ballasted and the line made ready for heavy
+operation.
+
+But track-laying is frequently machine systematized these days; and in
+this, as in so many smaller things, the mechanical device has supplanted
+the man. A real giant is the track-laying machine. It is mounted upon
+railroad tracks and is a form of overhead carrier with a tremendous
+overhang. The carrier is fed with the cross-ties from supply cars just
+back of the machine and the ties are dropped, each close to its appointed
+place, as a locomotive slowly pushes the entire apparatus forward. In a
+smaller way the heavy steel rails are delivered from under the overhang
+of the carrier. A gang of men make short work of the fastening of the rail
+to the cross-ties and the machine moves steadily forward. It has been
+known to make two miles a day at this work.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the
+bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their
+kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the
+new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities
+produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon
+the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation,
+the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the
+locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded.
+
+Life is awakened. The railroad, which is life, has reached forth a new
+arm, and creation is begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+TUNNELS
+
+ THEIR USE IN REDUCING GRADES--THE HOOSAC TUNNEL--THE USE OF SHAFTS--
+ TUNNELLING UNDER WATER--THE DETROIT RIVER TUNNEL.
+
+
+Sometimes the construction engineer of the railroad brings his new line
+face to face with a mountain too steep to be easily mounted. Then he may
+prepare to pierce it. Tunnels are not pleasant things through which to
+ride. They are, moreover, expensive to construct, and when once
+constructed are an unending care, necessitating expensive and constant
+inspection. But--and that "but" in this case is a very large one--they
+reduce grades and distances in a wholesale fashion; and when you reduce
+grades you are pretty sure to be reducing operating expenses. A railroad
+man will think twice in his opposition to a smoky bore of a tunnel that
+will cost some three to five million dollars, when his expert advisers
+tell him that that same smoky bore will save him a hundred thousand tons
+of coal in the course of a year.
+
+From almost its very beginnings the American railroad has been dependent
+upon tunnels, and thus has closely followed European precedent. The
+Alleghany Portage Railroad, to which reference has already been made,
+passed through what is said to have been the first railroad tunnel in the
+United States. It pierced a spur in the Alleghany Mountains, and it was
+901 feet in length, 20 feet wide, and 19 feet high within the arch, 150
+feet at each end being arched with cut stone. The old tunnel, built in
+1832, which has not echoed with the panting of the locomotive for more
+than half a century, is still to be found not far from Johnstown, Pa. It
+simply serves the purpose to-day of calling attention to the durable
+fashion in which the earliest of our railroad-builders worked.
+
+Of the building of the Baltimore & Ohio, tunnel-construction formed an
+early part, several paths being found across the steep profiles of the
+Alleghanies. The Kingwood Tunnel, which B. H. Latrobe drove, was nearly a
+mile long and the chief of these bores. But when the Hoosac Tunnel was
+first proposed--piercing the rocky heart of one of the greatest of the
+Berkshires--the country stood aghast. Four miles and a half of tunnel!
+That seemed ridiculous away back in 1854, when the plan was first broached
+and folk were not slow to say what they thought of such an absurd plan.
+For twenty years it looked as though these scoffers were in the right--the
+work of digging that monumental tunnel was a fearful drain on the treasury
+of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was lending its aid to the
+project. But the tunnel-diggers finally conquered--they almost always
+do--and the Hoosac remains to-day the greatest of all mountain tunnels in
+America. The system of continuous tunnels, by which the Pennsylvania
+Railroad recently reached its terminal in New York, stretches from Bergen
+Hill in New Jersey to Sunnyside, Long Island, a distance of some ten
+miles. In fact the largest feature of recent tunnel-work in this country
+has been in connection with terminal and rapid-transit development in the
+larger cities. For a good many years New York and Baltimore, in
+particular, have been pierced with these sub-surface railroads; it is a
+construction feature that increases as our great cities themselves
+increase. No river is to-day too formidable to be conquered by these
+underground traffic routes. A river such as the Hudson or the Detroit may
+sometimes halt the bridge-builders; it has but slight terror for the
+tunnel engineers.
+
+The tunnel-work is apt to be a separate part of the work of building a
+railroad. It calls for its own talent, and that of an exceedingly expert
+sort. If the tunnel is more than a half or three-quarters of a mile long
+it will probably be dug from a shaft or shafts as well as from its
+portals. In this way the work will not only be greatly hastened but the
+shafts will continue in use after the work is completed as vents for the
+discharge of engine smoke and gases from the tube. The work must be under
+the constant and close supervision of resident engineers. The survey lines
+must be corrected daily, for the tunnel must not go astray. It must drive
+a true course from heading to heading. In the shafts plumb lines, with
+heavy bobs, to lessen vibration, will be hung. Sometimes these bobs are
+immersed in water or in molasses.
+
+From the portals and from the bottoms of the shafts the headings are
+driven. If the tunnel is to accommodate no more than a single track it
+will be built from 15 to 16-1/2 feet wide, and from 21 to 22 feet high,
+inside of its lining; so the general method is first to drive a top
+heading of about 10 feet in height up under the roof of the bore. The rest
+of the material is taken out in its own good season on two following
+benches or levels.
+
+Piercing a granite mountain is no rapid work. When the Pennsylvania
+Railroad built its second Gallitzin Tunnel in 1903, 13 men, working 4
+drills in the top heading, were able to drill 16 holes, each 10 feet deep,
+in a single day. The engineers there figured that each blast removed
+twenty-three cubic yards of the rock. At night, when the "hard-rock men"
+were sleeping and their drills silent, a gang of fourteen "muckers"
+removed the loosened material.
+
+Slow work that. The Northern Pacific finding its way through the crest of
+the Cascade Mountains by means of the great Stampede Tunnel, nearly two
+miles in length, demanded that the contractor work under pressure and make
+13-1/2 feet of tunnel a day. The contractor, working under the bonus plan,
+did better. With his army of 350 "hard-rock men," "muckers," and their
+helpers, and his tireless battery of 36 drills he sometimes made as high
+as eighteen feet a day from the two headings. On a three-year job he beat
+his contract time by seven days. The Northern Pacific paid the price, $118
+for each lineal foot of tunnel. That was a high price, occasioned largely
+by the fact that the work was carried forward in what was then an almost
+unbroken wilderness. The Wabash finding its way through the great and
+forbidding hills of Western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh a dozen years later
+was able to dig its succession of tunnels at an average cost of $4,509 for
+100 feet. Of that amount $2,527 went for labor; and $260 was the price of
+a ton of dynamite.
+
+When the tunnel engineer finds that his bore is not to pierce hard-rock,
+of whose solidity he is more than reasonably assured, he prepares to use
+cutting-shields. These shields, proceeding simultaneously from the portals
+and from the footings of the shafts, are steel rings of a circumference
+only slightly greater than that of the finished tunnel. With pick and with
+drill and dynamite, they constantly clear a path for it, whereupon it is
+pressed forward in that path. Dummy tracks follow the cutting-shield; and
+dummy locomotives--more likely electric than steam in these days--are used
+in removing the material. Electricity has been a boon to latter-day
+tunnel-workers. Its use for light and power keeps the tunnel quite clear
+of all gases during the work of boring.
+
+In rare cases, the rock through which the shield has been forced is strong
+enough to support itself; in most works the engineers prefer to line the
+bore, with brick and concrete, as a rule. This lining is set in the path
+of the cutting-shield before its protection is entirely withdrawn; and so
+the heavy roof-timbering which was formerly a trade-mark of the successful
+tunnel engineer is no longer used.
+
+Tunnel-boring becomes doubly difficult when the railroad is to be carried
+under a river or some broad arm of the sea. Men work in an unnatural
+environment when they work below the surface of great waters, and the
+record of such work is a record of many tragedies. At any instant firm
+rock may cease, silt or sand or an underground stream may make its
+appearance and the helpless workmen find a ready grave. In work where
+there is even the slightest expectation of such a contingency the
+air-lock, with its artificial pressure to hold back the soft earth and
+moisture is brought into use. In another chapter we shall see how the
+caisson is operated. Suffice it to say now that the necessity of "working
+under the air," brings no comfort to any one. It vastly hinders and
+complicates the work of construction, and adds greatly to the expense.
+Moreover, it has its own record of tragedies. Still it remains, to the
+infinite credit of a national persistence, that there is no record in the
+annals of American engineering where the workers have finally given up a
+tunnel job. Lives have been sacrificed, good-sized fortunes swept away,
+but in the end the resistless railroad has always found its underground
+path.
+
+The tunnel-workers can tell you of the accident when the subway was being
+driven under the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn, three years ago.
+The cutting-shield, which was advancing from the Brooklyn side, suddenly
+slipped out from the rock into the unprotected soft mud of the river
+bottom. The heavily compressed air shot a geyser straight up to the
+surface of the river some fifty feet above. A workman shot through the
+geyser, pirouetted gayly for a fraction of a second above the river, then
+dropped, to be picked up by the crew of a passing ferryboat. In a week he
+was back at work again inside the cutting-shield. His fortune was the
+opposite of that which generally awaits a man caught in a tunnel accident.
+
+"It ain't as bad as it used to be," one of them informs you. "When I first
+got into this profession, they didn't have the electricity for lights or
+moving the cars or nothing. We used to try and get along with safety
+lamps an' near choke to death. It was more like hell then than it is now."
+
+[Illustration: "SOMETIMES THE CONSTRUCTION ENGINEER ... BRINGS HIS LINE
+FACE TO FACE WITH A MOUNTAIN"]
+
+[Illustration: FINISHING THE LINING OF A TUNNEL]
+
+[Illustration: THE BUSIEST TUNNEL POINT IN THE WORLD--AT THE WEST PORTALS
+OF THE BERGEN TUNNELS, SIX ERIE TRACKS BELOW, FOUR LACKAWANNA ABOVE]
+
+[Illustration: THE HACKENSACK PORTALS OF THE PENNSYLVANIA'S GREAT TUNNELS
+UNDER NEW YORK CITY]
+
+But your interest in the man who was blown from the tunnel to the surface
+of the river and escaped with his life is not entirely satiated, and you
+ask more questions. What do they do when they strike soft mud like that?
+
+"We get down and pray," he of the experience in this weird form of
+construction engineering tells you. "We try to get the boys safely back
+through the air-lock, and then we quit boring till we can fix things up
+from outside. If it's a real bad case we've got to make land to bore
+through. It's generally done by dumping rock and bags of sand from floats
+just over where she blows out. It's a pretty rough way of doctoring her
+up, but it has to go, and generally it does. All we want is to get it to
+hold until we can set the rings of the tunnel.
+
+"That ain't always the worst. I've been driving a bore under water this
+way, when we struck stiff rock overhead and soft mud underneath the edge.
+That's something that makes the engineers hump. You can't rest a cast-iron
+tunnel like this on mud and you get a wondering if you've got to quit
+after all this work under the durned old river, and let the boss lose his
+money.
+
+"The last time we struck a snag of that sort, the boss didn't give up. He
+wasn't that kind. He had a chief engineer that was brass tacks from
+beginning to end. What do you suppose that fellow did? He bored holes in
+the bottom of the lining and drove steel legs right down to the next ledge
+of solid rock below. There's that tunnel to-day, carrying 32,000 people
+between five and six o'clock every night perched down there seventy feet
+underground like a big caterpillar sprawled under the wickedest ledge o'
+rock you ever see."
+
+It takes a real genius of an engineer for this sort of work. He who drives
+his bore into the unknown must be on guard for the unexpected. Emergencies
+arise upon the minute, and the tunnel engineer must be ready with his
+wits and ingenuity to meet them. Finally the day does come when the bores
+from either shore are hard upon one another. If there has been blasting
+under the bed of the river it is reduced to a minimum. The drills work at
+half-speed, the fever of expectancy hangs over the men. Those who are
+close at the heading catch faint sounds of the workmen on the other side
+of the thin barrier--the last barrier of the river that was supposed to
+acknowledge no conqueror.
+
+The first tiny aperture between the two bores is greeted with wild cheers.
+On the surface far above, the whistles of the shaft-houses carry forth the
+news to the outer world; it is echoed and reëchoed by the noisy river
+craft. The aperture grows larger. It is large enough to permit the passage
+of a man's body; and a man, enjoying fame for this one moment in his life,
+crawls through it. The men knock off work and have a rough spread in the
+tunnel. At night the engineers and contractors banquet in a hotel. "Not so
+bad," the chief engineer says quietly. "We were 3/8 of an inch out, in
+8,000 feet." It was not so bad. It spoke wonders for his profession. To
+carry forth two giant bores from the opposite sides of a broad river, and
+have them meet within 3/8 of an inch of perfect alignment, was an
+achievement well worth attention.
+
+After that, the last traces of the rough rock and silt are removed, the
+iron rings of the tunnel made fast together, the air pressure released,
+the cutting-shields, that formed so essential a feature of the
+construction, removed. Then there remains only the work of installing
+conduits and wiring and laying the tracks before the tunnel is ready for
+the traffic of the railroad.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The Michigan Central has recently finished a tunnel under the busy Detroit
+River, at Detroit, which eliminates the use of a car-ferry at that point.
+The tunnel was built in a manner entirely new to engineers. The river at
+Detroit is about three-quarters of a mile wide, and its bed is of soft
+blue clay, making it difficult to bore a tunnel safely and economically.
+To meet this obstacle a new fashion of tunnel-building was created.
+
+The tunnel itself consists of two tubes, each made from steel 3/8 of an
+inch in thickness and reinforced every twelve feet by outer "fins." The
+channel was dredged and a foundation bed of concrete laid. The sections of
+the tunnel, each 250 feet long, were then put in position one at a time.
+The section-ends were closed at a shore plant with water-tight wooden
+bulkheads. They were then lashed to four floating cylinders of compressed
+air and towed out to position. After that it was merely a matter of detail
+to drop the sections into place, pour in more concrete and make the new
+section fast. The wooden bulkheads next the completed tube were then
+removed and the structure was ready for the track-layers. The sub-aqueous
+portion of the new Detroit Tunnel is 2,600 feet long; it joins on the
+Detroit side with a land tunnel 2,100 feet long, and on the Canadian side
+with a land tunnel of 3,192 feet.
+
+It takes more than a river, carrying through its narrow throat the vast
+and growing traffic of the Great Lakes--a traffic that is comparable with
+that of the Atlantic itself--to halt the progress of the railroad.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BRIDGES
+
+ BRIDGES OF TIMBER, THEN STONE, THEN STEEL--THE STARUCCA VIADUCT--THE
+ FIRST IRON BRIDGE IN THE U. S.--STEEL BRIDGES--ENGINEERING
+ TRIUMPHS--DIFFERENT TYPES OF RAILROAD BRIDGE--THE DECK SPAN AND THE
+ TRUSS SPAN--SUSPENSION BRIDGES--CANTILEVER BRIDGES--REACHING THE SOLID
+ ROCK WITH CAISSONS--THE WORK OF "SAND-HOGS"--THE CANTILEVER OVER THE
+ PEND OREILLE RIVER--VARIETY OF PROBLEMS IN BRIDGE-BUILDING--POINTS IN
+ FAVOR OF THE STONE BRIDGE--BRIDGES OVER THE KEYS OF FLORIDA.
+
+
+When the habitations of man first began to multiply upon the banks of the
+water courses, the profession of the bridge-builder was born. The first
+bridge was probably a felled tree spanning some modest brook. But from
+that first bridge came a magnificent development. Bridge-building became
+an art and a science. Men wrought gigantic structures in stone,
+long-arched viaducts, with which they defied time. Then for two thousand
+years the profession of the bridge-builder stood absolutely still.
+
+With the coming of the iron and steel age it moved forward again. The
+development of a fibre of great strength and without the dead weight of
+granite gave engineers new possibilities. They began in simple fashion,
+and then they developed once again, with marvellous strides. Steel, the
+dead thing with a living muscle, could span waterways from which stone
+shrank. Steel redrew the maps of nations. Proud rivers at which the paths
+of man had halted, were conquered for the first time. Routes of traffic of
+every sort were simplified; the railroad made new progress; and economic
+saving of millions of dollars was made to this gray old world.
+
+The earliest of the very distinguished list of American bridge-builders
+erected great timber structures for the highroads and the post-roads. Some
+of them went back many centuries and came to the stone bridge, in many
+ways the most wonderful of all the artifices by which man conquers the
+obstructive power of a running stream. But the building of stone bridges
+took time and money, and time and money were little known factors in a new
+land that had begun to expand rapidly.
+
+So at first the railroad followed the course of the highroad and the
+post-road, and took the timber bridge unto itself. In some cases it
+actually fastened itself upon the highroad bridge, as at Trenton, N. J.,
+where a faithful wooden structure built by Theodore Burr in 1803 was
+strengthened and widened in 1848 to take the first through railroad route
+from New York. It continued its heavy dual work until 1875 when it was
+superseded by a steel bridge. A dozen years ago the railroad tracks were
+moved from that structure to a magnificent and permanent stone-arch built
+near-by. Thus the railroad crossing the Delaware at Trenton has, in this
+way, typified step by step every stage of the development of American
+bridge-building.
+
+The timber bridges developed the steel truss bridge, the typically
+American construction, of to-day. In an earlier day the timber bridges
+were the glory of the engineer. Sometimes you see one of these old fellows
+remaining, like the long structure that Mr. Walcott built across the
+Connecticut River at Springfield, Mass., in 1805, and which still does
+good service; but the most of them have passed away. Fire has been their
+most persistent enemy. Within the past two years fire destroyed the
+staunch toll-bridge at Waterford on the Hudson, just above Troy. The
+bridge was a faithful carrier for one hundred and four years. In many ways
+it was typical of those first constructions. It consisted of four clear
+arch spans--one 154 feet, another 161 feet, the third 176 feet, and the
+fourth 180 feet in length. It was built of yellow pine, wonderfully hewn
+and fitted, hung upon solid pegs; and save for the renewal of some of the
+arch footings, the roof, and the side coverings, it was unchanged through
+all the years--even though the heavy trolley-cars of a through interurban
+line were finally turned upon it.
+
+About the same time, the once-famed Permanent Bridge across the Schuylkill
+River at Philadelphia was built. It had two arches of 150 feet each and
+one of 195 feet. In its day it was regarded as nothing less than a
+triumph. A very old publication says:
+
+ "The plan was furnished by Mr. Timothy Palmer, of Newburyport, Mass.,
+ a self-taught architect. He brought with him five workmen from New
+ England. They at once evinced superior intelligence and adroitness in
+ a business which was found to be a peculiar art, acquired by habits
+ not promptly gained by even good workmen in other branches of framing
+ in wood.... The frame is a masterly piece of workmanship, combining in
+ its principles that of king-post and braces or trusses with those of a
+ stone arch."
+
+In after years, the Permanent Bridge was also entrusted with the carrying
+of a railroad. It has, however, disappeared these many years.
+
+The early railroad builders did not neglect the possibilities of the stone
+bridge. Two notable early examples of this form of construction still
+remain--the Starrucca Viaduct upon the Erie Railroad, near Susquehanna,
+Pa., and an even earlier structure, the stone-arch bridge across the
+Patapsco River at Relay, Md., which B. H. Latrobe, the most distinguished
+of all American railroad engineers, built for the Baltimore & Ohio
+Railroad, in 1833-35. The Thomas Viaduct, as it has been known for
+three-quarters of a century, was the first stone-arch bridge ever built to
+carry railroad traffic. It was erected in a day when the railroad was just
+graduating from the use of teams of horses as motive-power. In this day,
+when locomotives have begun to reach practical limits of size and weight,
+that viaduct is still in use as an integral part of the main line of the
+Baltimore & Ohio. It is built on a curve, and consists of 8 spans of stone
+arches, 67 feet 6 inches, centre to centre of piers, which, together with
+the abutments at each end, make the total length of the structure 612
+feet. It is in as good condition to-day as upon the day it was built.
+
+When the Erie Railroad was being constructed across the Southern Tier
+counties of New York in 1848, its course was halted near the point where
+the rails first reached the beautiful valley of the Susquehanna. A
+side-valley, a quarter of a mile in width, stretched itself squarely
+across the railroad's path. There was no way it could be avoided, and it
+could be crossed only at a high level. For a time the projectors of the
+Erie considered making a solid fill, but the tremendous cost of such an
+embankment was prohibitive. While they were at their wits' ends, James P.
+Kirkwood, a shrewd Scotchman, who had been working as a civil engineer
+upon the Boston & Albany, appeared. Kirkwood spanned the valley with the
+Starucca Viaduct, one of the most beautiful bridges ever built in America.
+He opened quarries close at hand and by indefatigable energy built his
+stone bridge in a single summer. It has been in use ever since. The
+increasing weight of its burdens has never been of consequence to it, and
+to-day it remains an important link in a busy trunk-line railroad. It is
+1,200 feet in length and consists of 18 arches of 50 feet clear span
+apiece.
+
+But stone bridges even then cost money, and so the timber structure still
+remained the most available. Many men can still remember the tunnels, into
+whose darkness the railroad cars plunged every time they crossed a stream
+of any importance whatsoever. They have nearly all gone. The wooden bridge
+was ill suited to the ravages of weather and of fire--ravages that were
+quickened by the railroad, rather than hindered. A substitute material
+was demanded. It was found--in iron.
+
+The first iron bridge in the United States is believed to be the one
+erected by Trumbull in 1840 over the Erie Canal at Frankfort, N. Y. Record
+is also held of one of these bridges being built for the North Adams
+branch of the Boston & Albany Railroad, in 1846. About a year later,
+Nathaniel Rider began to build iron bridges for the New York & Harlem, the
+Erie, and some others of the early railroads. His bridges--of the truss
+type, of course, that type having been worked out in the timber bridges of
+the land--were each composed of cast-iron top-chords and post, the
+remaining part of the structure being fabricated of wrought-iron. The
+members were bolted together. Still, the failure of a Rider bridge upon
+the Erie in 1850, followed closely by the failure of a similar structure
+over the River Dee, in England, influenced officials of that railroad to a
+conclusion that iron bridges were unpractical, and to order them to be
+removed and replaced by wooden structures. For a time it looked as if the
+iron bridge were doomed. That was a dark day for the bridge engineers. A
+contemporary account says:
+
+ "The first impulse to the general adoption of iron for railroad
+ bridges was given by Benjamin H. Latrobe, chief engineer of the
+ Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. When the extension of this road from
+ Cumberland to Wheeling was begun, he decided to use this material in
+ all the new bridges. Mr. Latrobe had previously much experience in the
+ construction of wooden bridges in which iron was extensively used; he
+ had also designed and used the fish-bellied girder constructed of cast
+ and wrought-iron."
+
+Under the influence of the really great Latrobe, an iron span of 124 feet
+was built in 1852 at Harpers Ferry. In that same year, the B. & O. built
+its Monongahela River Bridge, a really pretentious structure of 3 spans of
+205 feet each, and the first really great iron railroad bridge in all the
+land. The path was set. The conquest of iron over wood as a bridge
+material was merely a problem of good engineering. The iron bridge quickly
+came into its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad began building cast-iron
+bridges of from 65 to 110 feet span at its Altoona shops for the many
+creeks and runs along the western end of its line. The other railroads
+were following in rapid order. Squire Whipple, Bollman, Pratt--all the
+others who could design and build iron bridges--were kept more than busy
+by the work that poured in upon them.
+
+And in the day when the iron bridge was coming into its own, Sir Henry
+Bessemer, over in England, was bringing the steel age into existence,
+first making toy cannon models for the lasting joy of Napoleon III, and
+then making a whole world see that steel--that dead thing with the living
+muscle--was no longer to be limited for use in tools and cutting surface.
+Steel was to become the very right-hand of man. And so steel came to the
+bridge-builders, at first only in the most important wearing points such
+as pins and rivets, finally to be the whole fabric of the modern bridge.
+The transition was gradual. The early engineers began using less and less
+of cast-iron and more and more of wrought, until they had practically
+eliminated cast-iron as a bridge material. Then there came a quick change;
+there was another dark day for the railroad bridge engineers of America.
+In 1876--that very year when the land was so joyously celebrating its
+Centennial--a passenger train went crashing through a defective bridge at
+Ashtabula, Ohio. There was a great property loss--thousands and thousands
+of dollars, and a loss of lives that could never be expressed in dollars.
+An outraged land asked the bridge-builders if they really knew their
+business.
+
+Out of that Ashtabula wreck came the scientific testing of bridges and
+bridge materials, and the abolition of the rule-of-thumb in the cheaper
+sorts of construction. Out of that miserable wreckage came also the use of
+steel in the railroad bridge. Steel had found itself; and how the steel
+bridges began to spring up across the land! They spanned the Ohio, and
+they spanned the Mississippi, and they spanned the Missouri; a great
+structure threw itself over the deep gorge of the Kentucky River. When the
+day came that fire destroyed the famous wooden viaduct of the Erie over
+the Genesee River at Portage, N. Y. (you must remember the pictures of
+that tremendous structure in the early geographies), steel took its place.
+
+All this while the bridge engineer attempted more and more. He built over
+the deep gorge of the Niagara. He conquered the St. Lawrence in and about
+Montreal. He laughed at the mighty Hudson and flung a dizzy steel trestle
+over its bosom at Poughkeepsie. He built at Cairo, at Thebes, and at
+Memphis, on the Mississippi, and again and again and still again at St.
+Louis. The East River no longer halted him or compelled him to resort to
+the alternative of the very expensive types of suspension bridge. He has
+finally thrown a great cantilever over it, from Manhattan to Long Island.
+The steel bridge has come into its own.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Let us study for a moment the construction of the different types of
+railroad bridge. For the tiny creeks--the little things that are mad
+torrents in spring, and run stark-dry in midsummer--where they cannot be
+poured through a pipe or a concrete moulded culvert, the simplest of
+bridge forms will suffice. And the simplest of bridge forms consists of
+two wooden beams laid from abutment to abutment and holding the ties and
+rails of the track-structure. As the first development of that simplest
+idea comes the substitution of steel for wood, giving, as we have already
+seen, protection against fire and a far greater strength. The steel beam
+has greater strength than a wooden beam of the same outside dimension and
+yet in its design it effects for itself a great saving of material, by
+cutting out superfluous parts and becoming the structural standard of
+to-day, the I beam. When the I beam becomes too large to be made in a
+single pouring or a single rolling, it may be constructed of steel plates
+and angles firmly riveted together, and thus still remains the possibility
+of the simplest form of bridge. That single span may be further increased,
+or the bridge developed into a succession of increased spans by the
+substitution of the lattice-work girder, effecting further saving in
+weight without material loss of strength for the solid-plate girder. The
+track may be laid atop of such girders or--to save clearance in overhead
+crossing--swung between them at their bases.
+
+The limit in this form of bridge is generally in a 65-foot or a 100-foot
+span. It is not practical to build the girders up outside of a shop; and
+the 65-foot length represents the two flat-cars that must be used to
+transport any one of them to the bridge location. Some railroads have used
+three cars for the hauling of a single girder, and so increased these
+spans to 100 feet; but as a rule, over 65 feet, and the truss, the most
+common form of railroad bridge in this country, comes into use.
+
+The truss is a distinct evolution from those old timber bridges of which
+we have already spoken. Burr and Latrobe and Bollman and Howe and Squire
+Whipple--those distinguished engineers of other days--have evolved it,
+step by step. It is, in one sense, no more than an enlarged form of
+lattice girder, the work of the different designers having been to
+accomplish at all times, a maximum of strength with a minimum of weight.
+It is built of members that stand pulling-strain, and those that stand
+pressure-strain; and these are respectively known as tension and as
+compression members. In them rests the real strength of the truss. But in
+addition to the structure are the bracing-rods, generally placed as
+diagonals and built to sustain the structure against both lateral and
+wind-strains. The members that form the trusses are stoutly riveted
+together; the rapid rat-a-tap-tap of the riveter is no longer a novelty in
+any corner of the land. Sometimes certain of the important bearing-points
+are connected by steel pins instead of rivets--another survival of the old
+days of the timber bridge.
+
+As a rule, the railroad is carried through the truss--and this is known as
+the through span. Sometimes it is carried upon the top of the structure,
+and then the truss becomes known as a deck span. A long bridge may
+effectively combine both of these types of span. The splendid new
+double-track truss bridge recently built by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
+over the Susquehanna River between Havre-de-Grace and Aiken, Md., to
+replace a single-track bridge in the same location, is a splendid example
+of the best type of such structures. At the point of crossing, the river
+is divided into channels by Watson Island; the width of the west channel
+being approximately 2,600 feet and that of the east channel being
+approximately 1,400 feet. The distance across the low-lying island is
+2,000 feet--making the length of the entire bridge about 6,000 feet. The
+bridge, as originally constructed when the line from Baltimore to
+Philadelphia was built, in 1886, had a steel trestle over Watson Island.
+In building the new structure, this viaduct was eliminated in favor of a
+bridge structure of 90-foot girder spans, placed upon concrete piers.
+Additional piers were placed in the west channel, shortening the deck
+spans from 480 to 240 feet; the through span over the main channel was
+kept at the original length--520 feet. In the east channel, the span
+lengths remained unchanged, with a single slight exception. The changes in
+the span lengths involved new masonry, and all piers were sunk to solid
+rock, those in the west channel being carried by caissons to a depth of
+more than seventy feet beneath low-water. The total amount of new masonry
+and concrete approximated 62,000 cubic yards. The long span-lengths of the
+deck span over the east channel and the through span over the navigable
+portion of the west channel--each 520 feet in length--occasioned heavy
+construction. The deck span, for instance, weighed 12,000 pounds to each
+foot of bridge. The total weight of this very long bridge reaches the
+enormous figure of 32,000,000 pounds. And yet, even the untechnical
+observe the extreme simplicity of its lines of construction, and feel that
+the engineer, A. W. Thompson, has done his work well. The construction of
+the giant took two years and a half. During that time, the trains of the
+B. & O. were diverted to the closely adjacent Pennsylvania, so that the
+bridge-builders might continue with a minimum of delay.
+
+The truss span reaches its limitations at a little over 500 feet in
+length--we have just seen how the Susquehanna structure had its spans cut
+in halves in the non-navigable portions of the river. The spans of two
+great railroad bridges over the Ohio at Cincinnati reached 519 and 550
+feet, but they were built in a day when the weights of locomotives and of
+train-loads had not yet begun to rise. Nowadays the shorter span is the
+safer and by far the best. The engineer builds plenty of midstream piers,
+looking out only for a decent width for any navigable channels.
+
+And when because of peculiarities of location he cannot place his pier
+midstream, then it is time for him to get out his pencils and begin his
+drawings all over again. He can perhaps build a suspension bridge--a clear
+span of 1,500 feet will be as nothing to it,--but suspension bridges take
+a long time to build and are fearfully expensive in the building. It is
+more than likely, then, that he will turn to the cantilever. In the
+cantilever, two giant trusses are cunningly balanced upon string
+supporting towers. They are constructed by being built out from the
+towers, evenly, so that the balance of weight may never be lost for a
+single hour. The two projecting arms are finally caught together in
+mid-air and over the very centre of the span--caught and made fast by the
+riveters. The result is a bridge of surpassing strength and fairly low
+cost, a real triumph for the bridge engineer.
+
+The first of these cantilever bridges built in the United States was of
+iron. It was designed and constructed by C. Shaler Smith across the deep
+gorge of the Kentucky River in 1876-77. Mr. Smith also built the second
+cantilever, the Minnehaha, across the Mississippi, at St. Paul, Minn., in
+1879-80. The third and fourth were the Niagara and the Frazer River
+bridges built in the early eighties. In their trail came many others--one
+of the most notable among them being the great Poughkeepsie Bridge.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We are going to see something of the construction of one of these great
+railroad bridges. Let us begin at the beginning, and see the men, as they
+work upon the foundations of abutments and of piers--many times hundreds
+of feet under the waters of the very stream that they will eventually
+conquer. For months this important work of getting a good foothold for the
+monster will go forth almost unseen by the workaday world--by the aid of
+the great timber footings, which the engineer calls his caissons. These
+caissons (they are really nothing more or less than great wooden boxes),
+are slowly sunk into the sand or soft rock under the tremendous weight of
+the many courses of masonry. They sink to solid rock--or something that
+closely approximates solid rock.
+
+We are going down into one of the caissons that form the foothold of a
+single great pier of a modern railroad bridge; we are going to stand for a
+very few minutes under air-pressure with the "sand-hogs"--men whom we
+first came to know when we studied the boring of a tunnel. Air pressure
+spells danger. It takes a good nerve to work high up on the exposed steel
+frame of some growing bridge, but the bridge-builders have air and
+sunlight in which to pursue their hazardous work. The sand-hog has
+neither. He toils in a box down in the depths of the unknown, working with
+pick and shovel under artificial light and under a pressure that becomes
+all but intolerable. The knowledge that the most precious and vital of all
+man's needs--fresh air--is controlled by another, and through delicate and
+intricate mechanism, cannot add to his peace of mind.
+
+No wonder, then, that it is the highest paid of all merely manual work.
+The sand-hog working 50 feet below datum is paid $3.50 for an eight-hour
+day. But 50 feet is but the beginning to these human worms, who burrow
+deep into the earth. Below it they first begin to divide their day into
+two working periods. The air begins to count, and men with steel muscled
+arms must rest. As they approach 80 feet below datum--the engineers'
+phrase for sea level,--they are working two periods each day of one hour
+and a half apiece, while their daily pay has risen to $4. There is your
+rough arithmetical law of sand-hogs. As your caisson goes down so does the
+length of your working-day decrease; inversely, their air pressures and
+the pay of the men increase. The cost? The cost leaps forward in
+geometrical progression. It is the owner's turn to groan this time.
+
+One hundred feet is the limit. At 100 feet the air pressure is more than
+50 pounds to the square inch--three additional atmospheres--and the limit
+of human endurance is reached. The men work two shifts of forty minutes
+each as a daily portion and the law steps in to say that they must rest
+four hours between the shifts. They are paid $4.50 for that day's
+work--which means something more than $4 an hour for the time that they
+are actually at work in the caisson.
+
+You have expressed your interest in the sand-hog, given vent to a desire
+to go down into their underworld. You wonder what three pressures is going
+to feel like. Permission is given and a physician begins examining you.
+You cannot go into the caisson unless you are sound of heart and stout of
+body. This is no joking matter. The sand-hogs' rules read like the
+training instructions for a college football team. No drink, regular
+hours, simple diet, the donning of heavy clothes after they leave the
+pressure, constant reëxamination--these rules are inflexible when the
+caissons go to far depths. By their observance the difficult foundation
+construction of this new bridge has been kept free from accident--there
+have been few cases of the "bends" brought to the specially constructed
+hospital in the bottom of the cavity.
+
+The "bends" sounds complicated, and is, in reality, almost the simplest of
+human ailments in its diagnosis. A "bubble" of high pressure air works its
+way into the human structure while a man is in the caisson. When he comes
+out into the normal atmosphere the bubble is caught and remains. If it is
+caught near any vital organ that bubble is apt to spell death. Generally
+the bubbles are caught in the joints--frequently the elbow or the
+knee--where they cause excruciating pain. Then the specially constructed
+hospital crowded on the narrow platform formed by the top of the pier,
+comes into full play. Its sick room is incased in an air-tight cylinder.
+The man suffering from the "bends," together with physicians and nurses,
+is put under a pressure that gradually increases until it reaches that of
+the caisson. After that it is a comparatively simple matter to relieve the
+bubble and bring the air in the hospital back to a normal pressure.
+
+The path is clear for us to go down into the caisson. A party of
+sand-hogs, hot and exhausted after forty minutes of work within, come out
+of the little manhole at the top of the air-lock. We step through the
+little manhole and into a tiny steel bucket that rests within the air-lock
+there at the top of the shaft. A word of command--farewell to the bright
+blue sky overhead--the black manhole cover is replaced. It is suddenly
+very dark. A single faint incandescent gives a dim glow in the tiny
+place.
+
+[Illustration: CONCRETE AFFORDS WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE
+BRIDGE-BUILDERS]
+
+[Illustration: THE LACKAWANNA IS BUILDING THE LARGEST CONCRETE BRIDGE IN
+THE WORLD ACROSS THE DELAWARE RIVER AT SLATEFORD, PA.]
+
+[Illustration: THE BRIDGE-BUILDER LAYS OUT AN ASSEMBLYING-YARD FOR
+GATHERING TOGETHER THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF HIS NEW CONSTRUCTION]
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW BRANDYWINE VIADUCT OF THE BALTIMORE & OHIO, AT
+WILMINGTON, DEL.]
+
+You are not thinking of that. They are putting the pressure on. You can
+feel it. Your eardrums feel as if they would break; they vibrate. You must
+show your distress.
+
+"Pinch your nose and swallow hard," says the man who stands beside you in
+the bucket.
+
+He stands so close to you that you can fairly feel the pulsation of his
+heart, but his voice sounds miles away. You swallow hard, the hardest you
+have ever swallowed, and you pinch your nose. You feel better. The
+far-away voice speaks again in your ear. "Three atmospheres," is all it
+says. The caisson shaft is no place for extended conversation. You descend
+in an express elevator car; in that bucket you just drop. You have all the
+eerie sensations that a Coney Island "novelty ride" might give you. There
+is a row of dim incandescents all the way down the smooth side of the
+shaft, and when you look you forget that this is vertical traction and
+think of an uptown subway tube as you see it recede from the rear of an
+express. A final manhole, the gate at the foot of the shaft and you stop
+abruptly. It seems as if you had almost bumped against the under side of
+China.
+
+"This is it," says the far-away voice.
+
+A timbered room, not larger than a parlor in a city flat and not near so
+high. A close and murky place, filled with a little company of
+men--shadowy humans of a real underworld there under the dull electric
+glow.
+
+"They're finding the footing for the shaft," says the voice. "We're on
+rock at last at 94 feet."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When the footings are finished and the caisson's edges have ceased to cut
+its path straight downward, that timbered construction will rest here far
+below the city for long ages. The sand-hogs will come out of their working
+chamber for the last time--it will be poured full of concrete, more solid
+than rock itself. The air pressure will be withdrawn--there is no longer
+mud or shifting sand for it to withhold. Then, section by section, the
+steel lining of the caisson shaft will be withdrawn, while concrete,
+tramped into place, makes the shaft a hidden monolith 100 feet or so in
+length. Upon the tops of all these monoliths a close grillage of steel
+beams will be laid; upon that grillage will be riveted the steel plates
+and columns of the bridge tower. The great structure is to have sure
+footing; these giant feet bind and clasp themselves throughout the years
+against the mighty river that has been conquered and humbled by the work
+of man.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"You should have been down in one of the boxes when they had to burn
+torches, before they got the electric light," says one of the bridge
+engineers. "I worked in one of those that we left under a stone tower of
+the Brooklyn Bridge. Now we're almost in clover. They even cool and dry
+the compressed air before we breathe it."
+
+An order goes aloft over an electric wire, the engineer who sits smoking
+his pipe on the sun-baked platform of the traveller derrick pulls a lever,
+and we go slipping up the shaft toward fresh air and freedom only a little
+less rapidly than we descended it. We do not reach it too quickly. There
+is a long wait in the air-lock after the lower manhole has closed, while
+the pressure is being reduced. You begin to worry and you ask your guide
+as to the delay. Nothing wrong?
+
+He smiles at your timorous question and explains. It would be dangerous to
+come out from the caisson pressure quickly. He does not want to have to
+send you to that air-tight hospital with a bad case of the "bends."
+
+"How long in the air-lock?" you ask.
+
+"Fifty minutes," he answers.
+
+Then he explains in more detail. You have been under a pressure of 50
+pounds to the square inch--that's your three atmospheres, and under the
+rules you must spend fifty minutes in the tiny air-lock. Up to a pressure
+of 36 pounds you must spend two minutes there for every three pounds of
+pressure. When you get above that "law of 36" it is a minute to the pound.
+
+When that manhole cover overhead finally slides open you feel blinded by
+the light, even though the sun is hidden behind a passing cloud. The
+air-lock tender reaches down with his arms and gives you a lift up onto
+his narrow perch.
+
+"Want to be a sand-hog?" he smiles.
+
+"Not yet a while," you answer, in all truth. "Not until every other job is
+gone."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+You are standing aloft, balancing yourself upon tiny planks at the
+steadily advancing end of the bridge, as it forces itself over a stream of
+formidable width. Overhead, a gigantic, ungainly traveller, equipped with
+steel derricks at every corner, is advancing foot by foot as the bridge
+advances foot by foot. Underneath, through the thin network of planks, of
+girder and of supporting false work, you can see the surface of the river
+a full hundred feet below. A steamboat is passing directly beneath you.
+From your perch she looks like a great yellow bird. Those fine black
+specks upon her back are the humans who are gathered upon her upper deck.
+
+Whistles call and the derricks groan as they swing the thousands of
+bridge-members, that are flying together at the beck of the engineer, into
+their final resting-places. There is the deafening racket of the riveters,
+here and there and everywhere. There are crude railroad tracks upon the
+temporary flooring of the bridge deck, and the calls of the dummy
+locomotives add to the racket. The railroad tracks lead to the shore, to
+temporary yards where the bridge materials are assembled as fast as they
+come from the shops in a city three hundred miles distant.
+
+For, remember that while the sand-hogs were burrowing under the surface of
+the river to find footholds for this monster, other men were burrowing
+into the hillsides to find the precious ore for the welding of his
+muscles. A hundred thousand picks must have fought in his behalf, furnaces
+blazed for miles before the crude ore became the finished, perfect steel.
+Of the forging and the rolling of the steel a whole book might be written.
+It is enough now to say that of the 50,000,000 pounds of steel, every
+pound was made on honor. The railroad had its inspectors everywhere, but
+the rolling-mill men held to their formulas for perfect steel, and perfect
+steel was the result. A slight flaw in the metal, and possibly at some
+unexpected day, a great catastrophe. The safety of human life was upon the
+men who forged the steel, and they forged honor into every great girder,
+into every rod and bolt and plate. This conqueror of the river was a
+warrior built in honor.
+
+The safety of human life depends upon the men who build this bridge. Study
+carefully the face of this man who stands beside you, the man who evolved
+this bridge as a season's work of his restless mind. His face is the face
+of a man who has high regard for human safety; that factor creeps to the
+fore as he talks to you. He is telling of the method of constructing the
+upper works of a bridge of this size.
+
+"We're getting ahead all the time," he laughs, "and we're moving rather
+forward in our construction methods. In an older day we did this work with
+derricks of a rather simple sort, operated them by small portable steam
+engines. You can't handle bridge-members--units that are only held down by
+the clearances of tunnels and the transporting powers of the
+railroads--that way to-day. We've nearly half a million dollars tied up
+here in constructing-appliances. These steel-boom derricks, travellers,
+and steel-wire hoists, the compressing engines for handling the riveters,
+cost big money.
+
+"Our method? That's a simple enough affair as a rule. We set up this
+spindly tower on rails, that we call the 'traveller' and it moves
+backwards and forwards over the trusses and the timber falsework that we
+build before the steel really begins to be set up. When the steel--the
+trusses--is up and riveted, then away with the falsework. Our bridge
+stands by itself. You can put up a 500-foot span in no time at all by
+using the falsework."
+
+You make bold to ask what the engineer does when the river is too deep to
+admit of falsework. He is quick to answer.
+
+"We generally fall back on a cantilever," he says, without hesitation.
+Then he begins to tell you about one of the latest of American
+problems--the new bridge of the Idaho & Washington Northern Railroad, just
+now being built over the Pend Oreille River, Washington. They could span
+that narrow cleft only on the cantilever principle, and when they began to
+balance their cantilever, there was not enough room for the back arm. But
+the engineers only chewed off fresh cigars and began forcing their great
+span out mid-air. They made the balance by placing 600 tons of steel rails
+on the back-arm. For every foot the span reached out anew over a so-called
+"bottomless" they added a few more rails. You can generally trust an
+engineer in such a time as that.
+
+Look closely now upon the workmen who are fabricating this giant bridge.
+Look closely upon them. They are different from those whom we saw toiling
+in the caissons below. Scandinavians may and do toil as sand-hogs at the
+bottom of the stream; Lithuanians may mine the ore, and Hungarians roll it
+into steel; Americans build upon their toil and erect this bridge. These
+builders speak no unfamiliar tongue. They are the product of Ohio, the
+Middle West, the South, the Pacific Coast, New England; they rise
+immeasurably superior to every other class of labor employed upon the
+work. Some of them have been sailors, and their talk has the savor of the
+sea. All of them are men, clear-headed, cool-headed, true-headed men.
+
+If you come upon them at the noon-hour, sprawled along the narrow ledge of
+a single plank you may be impressed by two things--their Americanism and
+their cosmopolitanism. The first of these is writ upon each man as you
+look at him; the second is evident in talk with him. This big fellow must
+have been a sheriff out in Montana, and he must have been a sheriff for
+bad men to dodge; his neighbor is talking about his last job, a sky-high
+cantilever down in Peru. The two side-partners over by the tool-box are
+just back from India. American bridge-building talent encircles the world.
+Here is a boss who got his first training down on the Nile; his assistant
+has done some mighty big work on the Trans-Siberian.
+
+These are the men who are building the bridge. In a little time there will
+be no advancing ends, finding their path from pier-top to pier-top. There
+will be, instead, a long and slender path for the railroad; the bridgemen
+will have done their work well; a great river will have once again been
+conquered.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The bridge problem is always different, it constantly has the fascination
+of variety. That variety will come into play at unexpected turns. Once,
+down in a deep Colorado cañon, whose walls rose precipitously for a
+thousand-odd feet, and which was all but filled by a deep and rapid river,
+the engineers of the Rio Grande & Western found absolutely no ledge
+whatsoever upon which they might rest their rails. They puzzled upon the
+problem for a little while, and then they swung a girder bridge parallel
+with the river. The bridge was supported by braced girders, that fastened
+their feet in the walls of the cañon, hardly wider there than a narrow
+city house. The railroad has been running over that construction for more
+than thirty years; it is one of the scenic wonders of the land, and a
+triumph for the engineer that built it. In constructing the expensive West
+Shore Railroad up the Hudson River, similar difficulties were experienced
+south of West Point, and truss bridges were built parallel with the steep
+river banks to carry the tracks from ledge to ledge. It is not an unusual
+matter for the construction engineer to spend a quarter of a million
+dollars to span some deep, waterless gully in the mountains, which could
+not be filled for more than twice that sum.
+
+Many times, in these days of increasing weight of equipment, it becomes
+necessary to replace a bridge, without interrupting the traffic. The
+construction engineer never fails to meet the problem. Years ago, he took
+Roebling's famous suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, removed the stone
+towers and replaced them with towers of steel, without delaying a single
+train; and a little later he took that bridge itself, and substituted a
+heavy cantilever for it, while all the time a heavy traffic poured itself
+over the structure. The rebuilder of bridges works like the original
+builder--with plentiful falsework. He timbers in and around his structure,
+and then step by step and with exceeding caution removes the old and
+substitutes the new. An old girder is taken out between trains; before
+another train of cars shall roll over the structure a new one is ready,
+temporarily bolted until the riveters can make it fast. It sounds
+complicated, but it is remarkably simple, under the careful plans of a
+patient engineer, who has that infinite thing that we call genius.
+
+Sometimes a bold engineer strikes out into a new method, quicker and less
+expensive than these piecemeal efforts. Of such was the job at
+Steubenville, O., where a 205-foot double-track span was erected on heavy
+falsework alongside the old bridge. In a carefully chosen interval between
+a service of frequent trains, both the old and the new spans--together
+weighing 1,300 tons--were fastened together and drawn sideways a distance
+of twenty-five feet in one minute and forty seconds. The new span was then
+in place, and the old one--ready to be dismantled--stood on falsework at
+the side. The entire job had been accomplished in an interval of seventeen
+minutes between trains.
+
+That is not unusual. The floating method is sometimes adopted with
+remarkable success--especially in the case of draw-bridge spans. There the
+problem complicates itself exceedingly, for both the water and the land
+highways must be kept open for traffic; yet it is a matter of record that
+the Pennsylvania Railroad, operating a fearfully heavy suburban service in
+and out of Jersey City, recently substituted one draw for another on its
+Hackensack River Bridge without delaying a single train.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+But even in this high noon of the day of steel, the stone bridge holds its
+own. The big chiefs of railroad construction look upon it with favor.
+Higher priced than a steel bridge of equal capacity it requires initial
+outlay. But forever after, it represents a saving--a saving chiefly in
+that very important figure, maintenance. A steel bridge requires constant
+attention and constant expense. A stone bridge requires little of either;
+and therein lies its strength in its old age. Engineers point to such
+structures as the Thomas Viaduct down at Relay, or to the wonderful stone
+bridges that have stood through the centuries in older lands; they bear in
+mind the constant battle that a steel bridge must make against the ravages
+of weather and against the sinister thefts of corrosion, and ofttimes they
+rule in favor of the oldest type of sizable bridge.
+
+Two things are all-important in the choice between the steel bridge and
+the arch bridge of stone or concrete. The first is the accessibility of
+the quarries. If they are not very near the solid bridge will cost four
+times that of one of steel and the average American railroad is not able
+to spend money in that fashion, even in the hopes of future economies in
+maintenance. If the quarries are close at hand, as they were years ago
+when Kirkwood built the Starucca Viaduct for the Erie, the cost of a
+masonry bridge will hardly exceed that of steel trusses, and the concrete
+structure may cost a little less. Then there comes into play the second
+consideration. The stone or concrete bridge has tremendous weight, no
+ordinary foundation work will serve it. If the river bed and banks be of
+sand or poor earth, the engineer had best give up his hopes of the Roman
+form of structure. He can build steel towers and trusses on piles of
+caissons--hardly solid stone piers and abutments and aides.
+
+All these things considered, the stone bridge is still more than holding
+its own in modern railroad construction. The Boston & Albany Railroad
+began building these splendidly permanent structures along its lines
+through the Berkshires more than twenty years ago. More recently both the
+Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio have been looking with favor upon
+this type of bridge. The Baltimore & Ohio has just finished building its
+massive Brandywine Viaduct, near Wilmington, a splendid double-track
+structure, 764 feet in length, and composed of two 80-foot, two 90-foot,
+and three 100-foot arches.
+
+The three great stone bridges that the Pennsylvania has built upon its
+main line are all four-tracked. Two splendid examples of these span the
+Raritan River at New Brunswick, and the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey.
+The third, spanning the Susquehanna at Rockville, Pa., just north of
+Harrisburg, is the largest stone bridge in the world. It is over a mile in
+length, and is composed of 48 arches; 220,000 tons of masonry was employed
+in its construction.
+
+Concrete viaducts were first employed in interurban electric railroad
+construction, and latterly they have been brought more to the service of
+the steam railroad. A splendid example of this very new form of
+construction exists in the extension of the Florida East Coast Railroad
+over the keys and shallow waters of Southern Florida, for seventy-five
+miles between Homestead and Key West. A considerable portion of the line
+is over the sea.
+
+The Florida keys are like a series of stepping-stones, leading into the
+ocean from the tip of the peninsula to Key West. They lie in the form of a
+curve, the channels separating the islands varying from a few hundred feet
+to several miles in width. Nearly thirty of these islands were used in the
+construction of the new railroad. More than fifty miles of rock and
+earthen embankment have been built where the intervening waters are
+shallow, but where the water is deeper and the openings are exposed to
+storms by breaks in the outer reef, concrete arch viaducts have been used.
+These viaducts consist of 50-foot reinforced concrete arch spans and
+piers, with here and there a 60-foot span.
+
+There are four of these arch viaducts aggregating 5.78 miles in length.
+The longest is between Long Key and Grassy Key, 2.7 miles, and is called
+the Long Key Viaduct; across Knight's Key Channel, 7,300 feet; across
+Moser's Channel, 7,800 feet, and across Bahia Honda Channel, 4,950 feet.
+The material of these islands is coralline limestone. In many places the
+embankment for the roadway is 8 or 9 feet in height, and the roadbed is
+ballasted with the same material. The result is one of the finest and
+safest railway roadbeds in the world.
+
+Across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa., the Delaware, Lackawanna &
+Western Railroad is building the largest concrete bridge in the world, a
+few feet longer than the great structure by which the Illinois Central
+crosses the Big Muddy River and just 100 feet longer than the Connecticut
+Avenue Bridge, at Washington, D. C. The Lackawanna's bridge is 1,450 feet
+long, with five arches of 150-foot span, and a number of shorter arches.
+The track is carried at an elevation of 75 feet above highwater; and to
+find living-rock as a solid foundation for a structure of so great a
+weight, the abutments and piers were carried about 61 feet below the
+surface of the ground.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+With the bridge-builder at his elbow, the railroad constructing engineer
+hesitates at no river, no arm of the sea, no deep valley, no wild ravine,
+no cleft in the mountain-side. He calls to his aid the magic of the men
+who have made this branch of American practical science famous: a feathery
+trestle appears, as if by magic. Across its narrow edge the steel rails
+follow their resistless path.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PASSENGER STATIONS
+
+ EARLY TRAINS FOR SUBURBANITES--IMPORTANCE OF THE TOWERMAN--AUTOMATIC
+ SWITCH SYSTEMS--THE INTERLOCKING MACHINE--CAPACITIES OF THE LARGEST
+ PASSENGER TERMINALS--ROOM FOR LOCOMOTIVES, CAR-STORAGE, ETC.--STORING
+ AND CLEANING CARS--THE CONCOURSE--WAITING-ROOMS--BAGGAGE
+ ACCOMMODATIONS--HEATING--GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF PASSENGER STATIONS--SOME
+ NOTABLE STATIONS IN AMERICA.
+
+
+The railroad terminal is the city gate. Without, it rises in the superior
+arrogance of white granite, as an architectural something. It has broad
+portals, and through these portals a host of folk both come and go.
+Within, this city gate is a thing of stupendous apartments and monumental
+dimensions, a thing not to be grasped in a moment. In a single great
+apartment--a vaulted room so great as to have its dimensions run into
+distant vistas--are the steam caravans that come and go. It is a busy
+place, a place of an infinite variety of business.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In the early morning the train-shed gives the first sign of the new-born
+day. Before the dawn is well upon the city, the great arcs that run into
+those distant vistas in wonderful symmetry are hissing and alight, and the
+first of 500 incoming trains is finding its way into the gloom of the
+shed. Some few trains have started out with the early mails and the
+morning papers. The great rush into town is yet to begin.
+
+Even before dawn, a thousand little homes without the city have been awake
+and fretful. The gray fogs of the night lie low, and lights begin to
+twinkle, lines of shuffling figures to find their way to the nearest
+suburban station. It is very early morning when these begin to pass
+through the city gate. The earliest suburban trains slip in from the yards
+and come to a slow, grinding stop beneath the shed. Before the wheels have
+ceased turning, the first of the workers is off the cars and running down
+the platform. In fifteen seconds, the platform is black with men.
+
+There are many more of these trains, a great multiplication of men within
+a little time. Before seven o'clock, the trains begin to increase; to
+follow more and more closely upon one another's heels. After seven, they
+come still oftener; two or three of them may stop simultaneously on
+different tracks under the great vault of the shed; they are heavy with
+people. There is a constant clatter of engines, stamping and puffing,
+dragging their heavily laden trains and snapping them quickly out of the
+way of others to follow. The electric lights under the shed go out with a
+protesting sputter, and you realize that the day is at hand. This mighty
+army of those who live without the city walls is flocking in, in an
+unceasing current now. There is an endless procession from the track
+platforms; a stream of humans finding its way to the day's work.
+
+Do you want figures so that you may see the might of this army?
+Binghamton, N. Y., is a city; a little less than fifty thousand persons
+live there. If the whole population of Binghamton--every man, woman, and
+child--were poured through the portals of this terminal on any one of six
+mornings of the week, it would be about equal to this suburban traffic. In
+a single hour--from seven to eight--45 trains have arrived under the roof
+of this shed and discharged their human freight; in the following hour, 64
+trains empty another great brigade of the army from without the city
+walls.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The city gate is indeed a busy place. Its concourse or head platform
+echoes all day long with the unending tread of shuffling feet; beyond the
+fence, with its bulletins and ticket-examiners, is the vault of the
+train-shed, a thing of great shadows, even in midday. Its echoes are also
+unending. There seems to be no end of pushing and shoving and hauling
+among the engines; there must be an infinite stock of trains somewhere
+without. The human stream flows all the while.
+
+The marvel of all this is that the terminal, which seems so intricate, so
+baffling, is under the control of one man--a man to whom it is as simple
+as the ten fingers of his hands. This man is keeper of the city gate. His
+watch-house is situated just without the big and squatty train-shed. It is
+long and narrow, glass-lined and sun-filled. Through its windows he keeps
+track of those who come and go.
+
+"There's Second Seventeen, with them school teachers coming back from the
+convention out at Kansas City. Put her in on Twenty-one so's to give the
+baggage folks a chance. Them women travel with lots of duds."
+
+These are orders to his assistants and orders in that watch tower are
+rarely repeated. The assistants are in shirt-sleeves like their chief, for
+the sun-filled tower is broiling hot. They nod to one another, click small
+levers, and Second Seventeen--a long train of sleeping-cars coming into
+the city in the hot moisture of the early June morning--is sent easily and
+carefully in upon track Twenty-one in the train-shed of the terminal.
+There you have the explanation of that order that was meaningless to you
+but a moment ago. Track Twenty-one is nearest the in-baggage room of the
+station. With two cars, piled roof-high with heavy trunks, the
+thoughtfulness of the towerman in sending the special upon track
+Twenty-one will be appreciated by the baggage handlers. A vast amount of
+manual labor will be saved; and that counts, even upon a cool day.
+
+[Illustration: THE NORTHWESTERN'S MONUMENTAL NEW TERMINAL ON THE WEST SIDE
+OF CHICAGO]
+
+[Illustration: THE UNION STATION AT WASHINGTON]
+
+This keeper of the city gate represents the survival of the fittest, the
+very cream of his profession. The chances are that he began his
+railroading off in some lonely way station on a branch line, developed
+qualities that brought him to the quick and favorable attention of his
+chiefs, then advanced steadily along the rapid lines of promotion that
+railroading holds for some men. He is one of three men, who, for certain
+hours, hold the keeping of the complicated city gate within their own
+well-drilled minds. The tower is the mind, the brain centre, the ganglion,
+of that city gate; but the tower is only wondrously mechanical, after all;
+the mind of the careful towerman is the mind that controls all the
+mechanism.
+
+To the average traveller, the city gate is a thing that impresses itself
+upon his mind by its exterior and interior beauty, or its convenience of
+arrangement. He notes the broad concourses, the ample entrances and exits,
+the compelling magnificence of the public rooms, the great sweep of the
+train-shed roof, but beyond that train-shed roof is a tangle of tracks and
+signals about which he does not worry his busy head. Those tracks and
+signals represent more truly the station than the mere architectural
+magnificence of its outer shell. They are a tangle and a maze, apparently,
+but a tangle and maze that must represent skill and ease in their
+tremendous operation. They are neither tangle nor maze to the
+shirt-sleeved men in the tower. They must know each track, each
+switch-point, each signal as intimately and familiarly as they know the
+fingers of their hands.
+
+Every mechanical device is employed to simplify the tangle for the comfort
+of the busy minds that must constantly employ themselves in solving it. In
+the big watch-tower--the "control" of the terminal--there is a map that is
+more than map. It depicts in miniature all the tracks and switches and
+signals that lie without and roundabout the tower; but this map shows
+switches and signals changing as the switches and signals of the
+train-yard change. It brings the distant corners of the terminal in closer
+touch with the towermen. In fog or blinding storm, this track model is
+invaluable--a veritable compass set within the brain of the terminal.
+
+This illuminated map sets upon the best piece of mechanism that has yet
+been devised for the operation of the terminal yard. It is a long boxed
+affair, not entirely unlike the box of the old-fashioned square piano, but
+in this case (the terminal we are watching being of unusual capacity) more
+than thirty feet in length. This box is the very brains of the terminal.
+It represents the acme of mechanical condensation. Reduced to its earliest
+and simplest equivalent--the separate hand operation of a gigantic cluster
+of switches in a great terminal yard--it would cover a vast area and
+result in the employment of an army of switchmen. Carelessness on the part
+of any one member of this army might cause a serious accident. The margin
+of safety would be very low in such a case.
+
+The first schemes of automatic switch systems eliminated the necessity of
+employing an army of switchmen. A cluster of levers, in a tower of
+commanding location, was connected by steel rods with the switches and the
+signals which protected them. A man in the tower operated this group of
+levers. In this way, the control of the yard was simplified, and
+responsibility was placed upon a better paid and better trained man than
+the average hand switchman. The margin of safety was considerably
+broadened.
+
+Then came an amendment to that first system. Some genius of a mechanic
+built an interlocking switch machine, a thing of cogs and clutches, by
+which a collision in a railroad yard became almost a physical
+impossibility. In these mechanical interlocking devices the tower levers
+are so controlled, one by another, that signals cannot be given for trains
+to proceed until all switches in the route governed are first properly set
+and locked; and conversely, so that the switches of a route governed by
+signal cannot be moved during the display of a signal giving the right of
+way over them. By installation of the interlocking, some of the
+responsibility is taken by mechanical device from human brain and the
+margin of safety broadened still further.
+
+This "piano box" represents still further condensation of the switch and
+signal control and interlocking devices. The men who designed this
+particular city gate designed it to accommodate more than a thousand
+outgoing and incoming passenger trains each twenty-four hours; they had
+found that the condensations given by earlier systems were not sufficient
+for their purpose. After bringing several switches, designed to act in
+concert, upon a single lever, they found that they would have a row of 360
+levers. Set closely together these would require a tower about 160 feet
+long. It is roughly figured that it is not desirable to assign more than
+twenty of these heavy levers to a single towerman and that meant eighteen
+men, working at a shift. Moreover, the throwing of a heavy switch half a
+mile distant from the tower is not a slight manual exercise.
+
+Then the "piano box"--electro-pneumatic--was installed; 150 feet of levers
+was reduced to 30 feet of small handles hardly larger than faucet handles
+and quite as easily turned. The control of a great terminal was brought
+down to three towermen, acting under the direction of their chief, the
+shirt-sleeved keeper of the city gate.
+
+"We've got to keep them hustling," he tells you. "There's the morning
+express in from New York. She's heavy this morning. That train over there,
+coming across the swing-bridge, is the millionaire's special. She's all
+club-cars, comes in every mornin' from the seaside. Her wheels'll stop on
+the same nick as the express. Watch them both, carefully."
+
+"Isn't it quite a trick handling those trains simultaneously?"
+
+"Not much," a smile fixed itself upon the chief towerman's features, as he
+fingered his greasy timetable. "Here's four trains pulling out here
+simultaneously at 5:40. On top of that we get a Forest Hills local in at
+5:39, a Hudson Upper local at 5:40, an Ogontz at 5:42, a Readville at
+5:43, all incoming, and pull out two more at 5:43. Ten trains in just four
+minutes isn't bad, and we haven't begun to feel the capacity of this
+terminal yet.
+
+"That isn't all of it. We get the whole thing criss-crossed on us
+sometimes; and perhaps they'll put on an extra getting out of here at
+5:40, and that'll bother us a little, for we have regular tracks assigned
+for all our scheduled trains. If they don't run in the extras on us, or we
+don't get a breakdown anywhere, it's pretty plain sailing. Ring off your
+10:10, Jimmy."
+
+Jimmy, the assistant at the far end of the tower, touched one of the
+little handles, a blade on a signal bridge opposite the end of the
+train-shed dropped, a big locomotive caught the rails instantly and
+cautiously led a long train of heavy cars out through the intricacy of
+tracks and switches until it was past the tower, over the "throat" of the
+yard, and, striking on the main line, was gaining speed once more.
+
+"It's as easy for him as unbroken rail off in the country," said the chief
+towerman to me, as he waved salutation at the engineer passing below him.
+
+Then he fell into a detailed and wondrous explanation of the intricacies
+of the "piano-box" mechanism. On the lower floor of the tower were air
+condensers, and through the medium of electricity and compressed air heavy
+switches and signals a half-mile off are worked almost by finger touch.
+Each switch is guarded by at least one signal, possibly two--home and
+distant--and these blades show an open or a closed path to the engineer.
+They are so arranged that normally they stand at danger and in case of
+breakdown they return by gravity to danger. At night the blades, which in
+various positions show safety and danger and caution, are replaced by
+lights--red for danger, yellow for caution, green for safety--according to
+the present standard rules.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+This physiology of the passenger terminal has dwelt so far upon its brain
+and its nerve structure; the anatomy is hardly less interesting. Almost
+every great passenger terminal in America is built upon the head-house
+plan. In this scheme trains arrive and depart upon a series of parallel
+tracks terminating within some sort of train-shed. It is the ideal scheme
+from the standpoint of the passenger, for no stairs or bridges or subways
+are necessary to reach any track. The tracks are generally laid in pairs,
+and between each pair a broad platform is built, which is in reality a
+long-armed extension of a common distributing platform or concourse
+extending across the head of the tracks. Sometimes these extension
+platforms are laid on both sides of a single track for greater facility in
+handling baggage and for the quick unloading of heavy trains.
+
+But in case any number of trains are to be operated through the terminal,
+the head-house scheme becomes impracticable and an abomination to the
+operating department. It makes necessary all manner of backing and turning
+trains and a tremendous amount of energy and time is spent in so doing. So
+we find the head-house stations--the real terminals of America--for the
+most part along the seaboard or at the termination of really important
+railroad routes. They are an expensive luxury at any other point.
+
+At the outer end of the train-shed, its tracks begin to converge. They are
+in rough similarity to the sticks of an open fan and at the handle they
+are reduced to anywhere from two to eight main tracks, the connections
+with the through tracks that serve the station. The point of convergence
+is known to the towerman and all the other workers as the "throat" of the
+yard. It is by far the most important point of the terminal, and is the
+usual location of the control tower, with its authority over several
+hundred switches and signals.
+
+Upon the number of main tracks in this "throat" depends the capacity of
+the terminal, quite as much as the number of tracks in the train-shed or
+the size of any other of its facilities. If there are as many as eight
+tracks in this "throat"--an unusual number--the signals and switches will
+probably be arranged so that in the morning five tracks may be used for
+the rush of incoming business, and three tracks for outgoing business,
+while in the late afternoon conditions are exactly reversed, five tracks
+being used for hurrying the suburbanites homeward, three for the lesser
+business incoming to the terminal. With four tracks in the "throat"--a
+usual number--three may be used in the direction of the volume of greatest
+business. Each of these tracks is like a separate entrance to the
+terminal, and when five are open from the train-shed simultaneously, as in
+this first case, five outgoing trains may be started simultaneously from
+as many tracks.
+
+In this connection, a comparative table of the capacity of several of the
+largest American passenger terminals may not be without interest:
+
+ Approach Station
+ Tracks Tracks
+ Broad Street Station, Philadelphia 4 16
+ Market Street Station, Philadelphia 4 13
+ North Station, Boston 8 24
+ South Station, Boston 8 28
+ Union Station, St. Louis 6 32
+ Union Station, Washington 6 33
+ Northwestern Station, Chicago 6 16
+ Lackawanna Terminal, Hoboken 4 14
+ Pennsylvania Station, New York 2 21
+ Grand Central Station, New York 4 32
+
+But the approach and train-shed tracks are only a part of the yards that
+are necessary at every large passenger terminal. Certain provisions are
+necessary for mail and express service (freight of every sort is handled
+as far as possible in separate yards and terminals), and extensive
+provision for the storage and care of cars and motive power. In the last
+case, it becomes advisable to have the roundhouse, or roundhouses, for
+locomotive storage within short striking distance of the terminal station.
+These are vast structures, their very form requiring large tracts of land.
+The American plan of radiating engine-storage tracks from a common centre,
+occupied by a turntable, has never prevailed in England. Some few
+attempts have been made in this country to build parallel storage tracks,
+with the transfer table for an operating arm, but almost every attempt of
+this sort has been induced by a necessity for unusual economy in
+land-space. We shall need the turntables as long as we continue to use
+steam as a motive power, and the early method of grouping storage tracks
+and radii from the table has never lost its favor with operating officers.
+
+A full-size roundhouse, with a diameter approximating 300 feet, has as its
+necessary accessories, facilities for coaling the locomotives--several at
+a time--as well as supplying them with water, sand, and other necessities.
+Possibly the terminal will be big enough to demand shop facilities for
+trifling repairs and maintenance of both cars and motive power. A big
+passenger terminal is a much bigger thing than that gaudy waiting-room in
+which you sit, whilst your train is being made ready to take you out from
+the city.
+
+Great as the room assigned to locomotives, greater must be yard-room for
+car-storage, in rough proportions, as the length of the locomotive to the
+average train length. It takes something approaching a genius to lay out
+the car-yards, particularly in the case of passenger terminals, which are
+almost invariably in the heart of great cities where land values are
+fabulously high. These yards, in order to earn the appreciation of the men
+who must operate them, must be easy of access and be of sufficient size to
+meet the heavy demands that are to be put upon them. To appreciate them,
+let us consider them in daily use.
+
+The heavy express which has discharged its baggage and passengers in the
+train-shed is hauled out to the yards by one of the sturdy little
+switch-engines that are eternally poking their way about the yards. The
+engine that has pulled it in from the road backs itself down to the
+roundhouse, without another thought of the train. Its responsibility ended
+as soon as the run ended in the train-shed. The engineer simply has to
+see that his locomotive is carefully put away in the roundhouse; and, on
+some roads, that his fireman cleans its upper parts before the next run
+out upon the line. The roundhouse crew is then supposed to take care of
+the rest of the engine.
+
+In the meantime, the stout little switching-engine has hauled the cars out
+to the yards, separating the Pullman equipment and placing day-coaches,
+baggage cars, and the like in a position by themselves. An effort is made
+to keep the equipment for the heavy through trains reserved, allowance
+being made for occasional changes for repair and maintenance. In the case
+of the local and suburban trains, their varying traffic requires varying
+lengths; and it is possible that two or three of the train-shed tracks
+contain a supply of extra coaches in order that emergencies of sudden and
+unexpected traffic may be met.
+
+The yards must afford full facilities for storing and cleaning cars. This
+last is a thorough operation, compressed air being used in many cases and
+to great advantage. Within, seats are thoroughly dusted, floors swept,
+woodwork wiped, while the railroad's pride in the outer appearance of its
+equipment is shown by the scrupulous care with which a small army of
+cleaners, ladders in hand, wash down the varnished sides of the coaches.
+In addition, both coaches and Pullmans must be stocked with linen and
+ice-water, lighting tanks filled and trucks inspected while in storage
+yards. Most elaborate provisions are made for the stocking of dining and
+buffet cars.
+
+Through equipment will rest in the yards from six to twenty-four hours, as
+an average. The local and suburban trains have a programme of their own,
+slightly different. The engine that is to make the run will get its train
+in the first place from the storage yard. It is only a big express run,
+where the locomotive is privileged to back into the station, to find its
+train made ready there for it by some fag of a switch-engine. The engine
+that hauls the local backs its own train into the station, makes its run
+out upon the line, 15, 25, 50 miles, whatever the case may be, and brings
+the train back into the station. It kicks the cars out, just beyond the
+cover of the train-shed and while it is hurrying to the turntable the cars
+are being hastily swept and dusted. An hour will be allowed the engineer
+to turn his engine and get his coal and water supply, and then he will
+start out again on his local run. This performance will be repeated one or
+more times, before the coaches are sent to the yard for thorough cleaning
+and stocking, and the locomotive housed for a little rest in the
+programme.
+
+This is not the universal programme, but it is typical. It seems simple;
+but with the multiplicity of local trains in service, the demands of the
+regular through traffic, and the special demands that come unexpectedly
+day after day, that car storage yard has got to be arranged for an economy
+of operation, as well as with the economy of space in view. Each storage
+track must be of convenient access and the chances are that a separate
+tower and interlocking may be set aside for the quick, convenient, and
+safe operation of the storage yard. In any event, it must be so built as
+to be worked without interference of any sort on the main line tracks of
+the terminal.
+
+So much for the terminal, in reference to its operation; now let us
+consider it for a moment from the standpoint of the passenger. The first
+point to be considered by the engineers who design it is the point that we
+have just considered--safety and convenience in operation. A terminal
+might be, and sometimes is, an architectural triumph and a thing of
+monumental beauty, but a curse and an extravagance as an operating
+proposition. The architects, the mural painters, the furniture designers
+and the like are called in last. It is their province to make the setting
+for the thing the engineers have already created.
+
+So in considering the terminal station as a building, we must still give
+ear to the engineer. He must plan for the future, anticipate the number of
+persons who are to pass through this city's gate fifty years hence, and
+plan his concourse, so many square inches for each one of those future
+users of the terminal. Exits and entrances to the trains must be built in
+order that incoming and outgoing streams of persons shall not conflict.
+All these points require careful study. It is possible to design a
+baggage-room so bad as to make the station all but a failure; a stuffy
+ticket-office that is almost an impossibility to use under pressure
+conditions. The good engineer thinks two or three thousand times before he
+begins the design of a passenger terminal.
+
+The concourse, or head platform, that joins all the different track
+platforms is the main feature of the terminal building. Upon it some
+persons congregate preparatory to going through the gates to their trains,
+and other persons congregate awaiting the arrival of trains--a matter
+which is carefully bulletined for their convenience. Arriving and
+departing passengers, with a percentage of idlers, must be accommodated
+upon it. It must be capacious. Exits to the street should be provided,
+without the necessity of passing through the station building, and the
+carriage stand should be close at hand.
+
+The waiting-room will be the monumental and artistic expression of the
+terminal. It may or may not be a portion of the entrance to the concourse
+and train-shed, but it is essential that it be conveniently located, that
+smoking-rooms, women's waiting-rooms, parcel-check, telephone, telegraph,
+news-stand, and restaurant facilities be close at hand. It is hardly less
+desirable that the ticket-offices adjoin the waiting-room yet the
+architect who so places his ticket-offices that the belated traveller has
+unnecessary delay in purchasing his tickets, will bring down unnumbered
+curses upon his defenceless head.
+
+The modern station will make provision for numerous railroad offices--be a
+complete modern office-building in fact, although not emblazoning that in
+its architectural design--and will have lunch-stand and restaurant
+facilities, with their necessary addenda of store-rooms, refrigerators
+and kitchens, as complete as those of the largest hotels.
+
+The baggage accommodations deserve a paragraph by themselves. Americans,
+due to the liberal baggage provisions of our railroads, travel each year
+with increased impedimenta. Each year the task of the baggage-handlers
+multiplies. Making room for trunks has come to be an important terminal
+provision. In the large terminals, this traffic is divided, an in-baggage
+room receiving from incoming trains and distributing to various forms of
+city baggage delivery and an out-baggage room receiving and checking
+baggage for outgoing trains. The in-baggage room is always much the
+largest, because of the delays that almost invariably hold trunks for a
+time--short or long--upon their arrival at a terminal.
+
+It is desirable that baggage be handled with as little inconvenience as
+possible to passengers; and for this reason almost all terminals have
+subways extending from the "in" and "out" rooms beneath all train-shed
+platforms and connected with each of these by elevators, large enough to
+receive a full-sized baggage-truck. In this way annoyance and delay to
+passengers is minimized. In the case of heavy through trains, where
+baggage runs unusually heavy, the baggage-cars are frequently detached and
+switched in upon special tracks that run alongside the baggage rooms.
+
+The passenger terminal must also provide mail and express facilities among
+these structures, but these, as has already been intimated, are generally
+apart and quite separate from the passenger facilities. A power plant is
+another necessity. The buildings must be heated, cars warmed in freezing
+weather long before the locomotives are attached, ice-machines operated
+for the station restaurant, power supplied to elevators, dynamos, and
+lesser mechanisms about the terminal. This is a feature that is not
+radically different from that of other large commercial structures.
+
+The capacity of a modern railroad is measured by the capacity of its
+terminals rather than by that of its main line tracks. The railroads were
+not quick to realize nor to appreciate this fact at the first. It was
+finally forced upon their attention, and in that way became one of the
+fundamental principles of American railroad construction and operation.
+
+The terminal became recognized as one of the most efficient possible
+solutions of the congestion problem, a little more than a quarter of a
+century ago. It was then that the double-tracking and four-tracking
+devices were found to measure all out of cost with the relief that was to
+be derived from them. It was then that the engineers were told to meet the
+situation with a relief that should be measurably low in cost.
+
+The result of their work has been to put America foremost with her
+railroad terminals. The engineers have worked against great odds in many
+cases. The railroads in the beginning took little or no forethought for
+their terminals. They neglected rare opportunities to buy land for these
+facilities in the beginning, when the cities were small and the land
+cheap. They have paid in millions of dollars for this neglect. In some
+cases, the early railroads had little money to expend upon this city real
+estate; but in few cases did any of their managers have the gift of
+prophecy that made them foresee the great cities of to-day or the great
+tides of traffic they would be called upon to move.
+
+Nor has this phase of the situation improved within recent years. A great
+railroad rebuilt its passenger terminal in an important city ten years ago
+and blindly imagined that the increase in facilities would carry it a
+quarter of a century at the least. To-day it is carrying off the remnants
+of that station improvement to the scrap-heap and trying to see far enough
+into the future to build a station that shall last it fifty years at
+least.
+
+There is not an engineer employed by that railroad who will assert
+himself as possessed of the absolute belief that the new station will be
+adequate for the traffic of a half century hence, if indeed the great
+spreading palace of steel and marble be in existence at all at that time.
+All that they will tell you is to point to the fact that another one of
+America's greatest passenger carriers has doubled its traffic within the
+past ten years.
+
+"How can we gamble with an unknown future of such dimensions?" they ask
+you in return.
+
+When the Park Square Station of the Boston & Providence Railroad in Boston
+and the Grand Central Station in New York were built, in the early
+seventies, they were the first railroad passenger terminals of size that
+the country had seen. It was thought that _they_ would stand a hundred
+years as monuments to the genius of the men who designed them. To-day they
+are both gone, each supplanted by a station that both together might be
+packed within.
+
+Do you wonder then that railroad operator and engineer alike stand
+appalled at the tremendous terminal problem that our great cities, growing
+awesome overnight, are constantly presenting to them?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In the beginning, there were no passenger or freight terminals, nor,
+indeed, a traffic that demanded them. The passenger cars were apt to be
+hauled by horses from some downtown depot through the centre of the street
+to an "outer depot" at the edge of the town where the locomotive replaced
+the horses. When the cars became heavier, the trains longer and more
+frequent, the railroads were gradually forced in most cities to remove
+their rails from the streets and the use of horses was generally
+abandoned. Still, passengers crossing Baltimore, for some years after the
+war on their way from the North to Washington, noticed that the trains
+were broken into cars and drawn one by one by horses across the city,
+through crowded streets, from one outer railroad station to the other. A
+venerable white horse was the switching-engine in the Rochester depot
+until the beginning of the eighties.
+
+When the passenger traffic on the railroads had become a business of
+extent--about the middle of the past century--the construction of sizable
+railroad stations began. The Fitchburg Railroad built its stone fortress
+at Boston, which still stands and was for many years regarded as a marvel
+of its sort. Down in Baltimore, the Susquehanna Railroad--afterwards the
+Northern Central--built Calvert Station, and stanch old Calvert is still a
+busy passenger gateway of the Monumental City. A few years later the
+Baltimore & Ohio built Camden Station there and Camden Station was
+regarded as something rather unusually fine for a number of years.
+
+In the sixties, the railroad terminals grew in size, and the old custom of
+having separate stations at the far sides of important towns was
+disappearing, as the American began to see and to demand the advantages of
+through traffic. So Cleveland built at the close of the war a stone Union
+Station, of such size that Cleveland folks bragged of it for many years.
+The stone Union Station at Cleveland is still in use, but the folk of that
+town do not brag of it nowadays. Cleveland has grown a good deal since
+they built the Union Station there.
+
+The first real passenger terminals of importance in the country were the
+Park Square in Boston, and the Grand Central in New York, to which
+reference has already been made. These presented architectural pretensions
+such as the railroads of the country had not before offered to the cities
+they served. They also served as models for bigger things that were to
+follow. In Boston, the Lowell Road planned and built a large new station,
+and the era of the passenger terminal was begun.
+
+When the Pennsylvania Railroad built Broad Street Station, at
+Philadelphia, it built a terminal a little finer than anything
+accomplished up to that time. Even to-day, with the dignity of years
+creeping upon it, Broad Street is still one of the foremost American
+stations. The policy of its owners has been to keep it abreast of the
+demands of the day, and only recently it has been greatly enlarged again,
+its protecting, interlocking, and signal system being made second to none
+in the world. To the traveller, the ivory-white waiting-room, where
+Philadelphians delight to congregate, is an unending source of admiration;
+engineers find interest in the intricate system of tunnels and bridges by
+which a number of trunk-line divisions are brought into the station
+without crossing at level. Broad Street Station shows a yearly increase in
+its passenger traffic of about five per cent. It has a daily movement of
+more than 600 loaded trains in and out, in addition to a heavy switching
+movement. But because of the steady increase of its traffic the
+Pennsylvania has already planned to relieve it by building a new main for
+express trains out at West Philadelphia. When that is done Broad Street
+will be used exclusively for suburban traffic. A short distance away
+stands the Market Street Station, of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad,
+a terminal rivalling Broad Street in beauty, and only slightly inferior in
+capacity. Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
+
+But the first big station terminals--in our American sense that a thing
+big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world--were
+those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a
+traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second
+has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the
+cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad
+station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it
+worthy of attention.
+
+The Boston terminal--South Station--was preceded by a giant structure
+erected along the bank of the Charles River to receive a multitude of
+through and suburban railroad lines entering from the north. This
+terminal--North Station--embraced the structure of the Boston & Lowell
+Railroad and superseded those of the Boston & Maine and Fitchburg
+railroads. The merging of these and other interests into the present
+Boston & Maine made the North Station a possibility. It is not a structure
+of particular distinction, from either an architectural or an engineering
+standpoint, but it has proved itself a mighty convenience to a travelling
+public, using a multiplicity of busy lines.
+
+The convenience of it made the South Station a possibility. Boston, like
+Philadelphia, spreads out well beyond its actual boundaries and measures
+itself as a vast community, including many near-by cities and villages.
+With the consolidation of a number of railroads in Southern New England
+into the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, and the popularity of the
+North Station so close at hand, the South Station came as a matter of
+course. It replaced the stations of the New York & New England--whose site
+forms part of its site--the Old Colony, the Boston & Albany, and the Park
+Square Station. To accommodate the vast traffic of all these railroads, a
+great terminal was designed and built, a thing whose bigness is hardly
+realized by the passenger coming and going through it and who knows it
+only as a thing of some thousands of shuffling feet, giant shadows, and
+long distances.
+
+In addition to the 28 sub-tracks in the train-shed, South Station is, in
+effect, a through station for electric suburban traffic. This service has
+not yet been installed, but the tracks are ready for use upon short
+notice, when the facilities of the main train-shed shall become overtaxed.
+This through station has been ingeniously devised underneath the
+train-shed and waiting-rooms of the terminal. It is served by two tracks
+leading from the main entrance tracks to the station--guarded by separate
+interlocking and tower controls, and consists of two extensive loops. For
+suburban service, with no baggage to be handled, these loops will some day
+afford a great accommodation. Three or four electric trains may be stood
+upon each. The time and necessity of reversing the trains is entirely
+obviated, and upon the two tracks of this sub-station a short-haul traffic
+can be handled almost equal in numbers to that of the train-shed overhead.
+
+What such a statement means can be better realized by a recourse to bold
+statistics. South Station handled 31,831,390 passengers in 1909, who
+travelled two and fro in some 800 trains daily. It has handled more than
+900 trains in a single day. Its baggage men take care of more than
+2,500,000 trunks in a twelvemonth. The statistics of a city gate like
+South Station are, in themselves, sizable.
+
+St. Louis has one passenger station to serve as city gate for the traffic
+that comes and goes at that important railroad centre. That gate is the
+chief through passenger traffic point of the world. From its train-shed
+one may take through trains to every corner of the United States and a few
+distant corners of Mexico and Canada. St. Louis, like most Western cities
+has no volume of suburban traffic as New York, Boston, or Philadelphia,
+but it is a consequential point for through passengers. The better to
+serve the needs of the 22 different railroad systems entering that city,
+the Union Station was built a dozen years ago. It was thought to be big
+enough to last St. Louis many years. Before the World's Fair of 1904
+opened in that city the Union Station was already judged inadequate, and
+an elaborate plan was consummated for its enlargement.
+
+When the Union Station was originally planned, St. Louis demanded a gate
+that would be worthy of her size and dignity. No type of through station
+would do, the head-house terminal was demanded and built, even though in
+actual practice it necessitated backing each arriving train into the
+shed. A station of giant size with the largest train-shed in the world was
+built and hailed with a glad acclaim by the Western town.
+
+When the station was found inadequate, the engineers found their plans for
+enlarging it would have to be adapted to a very confined area, proscribed
+by immovable railroad properties to the south, highway viaducts to the
+east and west, and a granite head-house, costing several million dollars,
+to the north. Within that confined area, they were to correct the evils of
+insufficient capacity--a train-shed with a single 4-track throat and some
+standing tracks of but 3 cars' length, inadequate baggage arrangements,
+and lesser evils. Within two years, they had substituted, without
+increasing the area of the Union Station property, a 10-car capacity for
+each of the 32 tracks of the train-shed, a double throat with 6 tracks,
+increased concourses and distributing platforms for passengers, and a
+complete subway system for the handling of baggage. The prosecution of
+that work, while the station was in constant and busy use, ranks as one of
+the marvels of latter-day practical engineering.
+
+From the standpoint of the architect, no other station has yet been built
+in the United States that can compare with the new Union Station at
+Washington. For years, the overcrowded railroad stations at that city have
+been but wretched gateways to the national capitol. Now the city that is
+fast becoming the Mecca of all Americans has an entrance worthy of her
+dignity, and in keeping with the increasing magnificence of her
+architectural works.
+
+The Washington Station is in full accord with the wonderful architectural
+development of that city, and has a setting in the creation of a great
+facing plaza, in which 100,000 troops may be gathered in review. Some day
+the plaza is to be surrounded by a group of public buildings but even in
+that day the white marble station, exceeding in size all other Washington
+buildings save the Capitol itself, will remain the dominating feature of
+that facing plaza. It has been created in simple classic outline, a
+vaulted train-shed being purposely omitted, in order that the station
+should not overshadow the proportions of the near-by Capitol.
+
+Similarly, the vaulted train-shed has been omitted in the splendid new
+white granite terminal which the Chicago and Northwestern Railway has just
+completed on the West Side of Chicago. That new terminal is a real
+addition to a town which has long boasted two model stations--one in La
+Salle Street and the other upon the Lake Front. The Northwestern terminal
+is one of the fine architectural features of Chicago--a structure of
+classic design, the dominating feature of which is a colonnaded portico,
+monumental in type and towering to a height of 120 feet above the main
+street entrance.
+
+This new terminal has a possible capacity of a quarter of a million
+passengers each day. It has some novel features for the comfort of
+passengers. A great many travellers cross Chicago in the course of
+twenty-four hours; in many cases this is the single break in a weary and
+dirty journey. For these, the new terminal not only provides the customary
+lounging rooms and barber shops, but also private baths. There is a series
+of rooms where invalids, women with children, or other persons seeking
+privacy, may go directly by private elevator where they may rest while
+waiting for connecting trains. For women there are tea-rooms and hospital
+rooms, with trained nurses in attendance. That is almost the last note in
+comfort for the traveller. There are, in addition to all these, private
+rooms where the suburbanite may change into his evening clothes and
+proceed in his various social duties, changing back again before he
+catches his late train out into the country.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+New York City is still in the process of rebuilding and readjusting her
+gateways. Two magnificent terminals in her metropolitan district have
+already been finished; the third is still under construction. The first of
+these terminals is a real water-gate, built for the Lackawanna Railroad
+and situated in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from the corporate
+New York. It is a handsome architectural creation in steel and concrete.
+Its tall clock-tower dominates the river front by night and day and those
+who come and go through its portals find themselves in a succession of
+white and vaulted hallways and concourses that suggest a library or museum
+more than the mere commercial structure of a railroad corporation.
+
+An interesting feature of the Hoboken Station is the abandonment of the
+high train-shed such as has come to be a distinguishing feature of some of
+the world's great terminals. Engine smoke and gases work havoc with the
+structural steel work of such sheds, and the engineers of the Hoboken
+Station fashioned a low-lying roof, slotted to receive the locomotive
+stacks. The result is a clean train-house, yet admirably protected from
+the stress of weather. It is a novel note in terminal engineering.
+
+The Pennsylvania Station, opened in November, 1910, has already become one
+of the notable landmarks of New York. Beneath it disappeared the biggest
+hole ever excavated at one time in the metropolitan city; for the great
+station is not so famed either for its architectural beauty or for the
+completeness of its details (although it is in the foreguard of the
+world's great terminals in both of these regards), as for the stupendous
+engineering project that was found necessary to connect it with the
+trunk-line railroads that it serves. To the west, this takes form in two
+parallel tunnels underneath the city, the Hudson River, and the Jersey
+Heights; to the east a still heavier traffic, composed of empty trains in
+Pennsylvania service and a great army of Long Island commuters, is carried
+under the very heart of Manhattan Island and under the East River in four
+parallel tunnels. Trains run for six miles under the greatest city of the
+continent, with its flanking rivers and environs, without ever seeing
+more than a momentary flash of daylight. The terminal has no train-shed or
+other of the familiar external appearances of the usual railroad station
+in a large city.
+
+[Illustration: A MODEL AMERICAN RAILROAD STATION--THE UNION STATION OF THE
+NEW YORK CENTRAL, BOSTON & ALBANY, DELAWARE & HUDSON, AND WEST SHORE
+RAILROADS AT ALBANY]
+
+[Illustration: THE CLASSIC PORTAL OF THE PENNSYLVANIA'S NEW STATION IN NEW
+YORK]
+
+[Illustration: THE BEAUTIFUL CONCOURSE OF THE NEW PENNSYLVANIA STATION, IN
+NEW YORK]
+
+[Illustration: "THE WAITING-ROOM IS THE MONUMENTAL AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
+OF THE STATION,"--THE WAITING-ROOM OF THE UNION DEPOT AT TROY, NEW YORK]
+
+The Pennsylvania terminal also departs radically from the other great
+terminals in its track arrangements. The twenty-one parallel station
+tracks, with their platforms, are placed in a basement forty feet below
+street level. In fact, the great building is divided into three levels. At
+the street level are the broad entrances, the chief of these forming
+itself into a broad arcade, lined with shops that cater particularly to
+the demands of the traveller. On this floor are also the railroad's
+commodious restaurant and lunch-room.
+
+On the intermediate plane, or level, the real business of the passenger
+prefatory to his journey is transacted. The concourse, the great general
+waiting-room, with its subsidiary rooms for men and women, the ticket
+offices, and the telegraph offices are there gathered. From the roomy
+concourse, covered in steel and glass after the fashion of the famous
+train-sheds in Frankfort and Dresden, Germany, individual stairs and
+elevators lead to each of the track platforms. A sub-concourse, hung
+directly underneath the main structure, is reserved for exit purposes
+only, and serves to separate the streams of incoming and outgoing
+passengers. The north side of the station is separated and reserved for
+the use of the Long Island passengers, chiefly commuters.
+
+The theory of operation of the station is simplicity itself. A
+Pennsylvania through train from the West, after discharging its passengers
+and baggage, will not be backed out of the train-house, but will continue
+on through the station, under more tunnels and another river, to the
+storage yards just outside of Long Island City. Similarly, trains made
+ready for a long trip at the yards will proceed empty under the East River
+tunnels to the big station, where they will receive their outbound load.
+This is the theory of the station, an operating theory which makes it in
+part like a giant way-station and saves much terminal congestion. The Long
+Island trains and a few short-line Pennsylvania express trains will be
+turned in the station. These are the exception.
+
+Of interest fully equal to that of the new Pennsylvania Station, is the
+construction of a new Grand Central Station upon the site of and during
+the use of the old. The Grand Central Station, used by both the New York
+Central and the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroads, has been for
+many years New York's great gateway to the east as well as the north and
+west. It has developed a great suburban and a great through traffic since
+the construction of the first station--away back in 1871. Temporary relief
+was gained in the early eighties by the construction of an annex to the
+east of the original station. Still further improvement was gained ten
+years ago by tearing out a series of ill-arranged public rooms and
+substituting for them the single beautiful waiting-room that has proved so
+great a delight to travellers. Now that waiting-room is about to be
+demolished in the face of plans for the newer and greater Grand Central.
+
+The building of the new station has offered tremendous problems to the
+engineers, for it has demanded a complete reconstruction within extremely
+limited area, while not placing hindrances in the way of the constant
+operation of one of the world's greatest terminals. Coincident with the
+rebuilding of the new station has come the substitution of electricity for
+steam on the terminal lines of its two tenants, the New York, New Haven, &
+Hartford, and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroads. In order to
+work the three-mile tunnel through Park Avenue and the sole entrance for
+trains to the station at greatest capacity, it was found necessary to
+extend the yards of the new station far north of those of the old. This
+work, alone, has necessitated the acquisition of whole city blocks of
+tremendously valuable real estate and the excavation of several million
+cubic yards of rock and earth.
+
+To accomplish the work of reconstruction and still enable the station to
+handle its great traffic without serious interruption, serious forethought
+and definite plans of action were found necessary. The plan was developed
+by constructing a temporary building of brick and plaster covering a
+vacant city block in Madison Avenue, at the west of the station. Into this
+temporary structure a branch post office, an important adjunct of the
+Grand Central, was moved from the extreme eastern side of the terminal.
+Excavation for the new terminal began at its eastern edge and at that edge
+the first portions of the new structure have been completed. A
+waiting-room was then established in temporary quarters, the last vestiges
+of the old Grand Central removed, and the main front and centre of the new
+station fabricated. Similarly, as the excavation has progressed from the
+east to the west side of the terminal, the great bulk of the traffic has
+been gradually shifted from the old high-level to the new low-level.
+
+The new Grand Central complete will have its main train-shed devoted to
+through traffic. A second train-shed of similar arrangement and of
+slightly smaller dimensions will be constructed underneath the main shed
+for suburban traffic, and a single head-house will serve both floors. The
+head-house will have as its chief architectural feature, a concourse of
+mammoth proportions. The lesser features of the new Grand Central will
+contribute to make the new terminal, built upon the site of the historic
+old, one of the world's greatest gateways. The fact that steam locomotives
+are absolutely prohibited from entering either of the two new stations on
+Manhattan Island makes these the cleanest railroad terminals yet built.
+
+So not only have our railroads begun to build great stations; they are
+to-day building really beautiful stations. An age in which the American
+demands the exquisite and the monumental in his architecture, palatial
+homes, palatial shops, palatial hotels, demands that the railroad station
+be something more than the mere expression of a commercial utility. Stone,
+the sturdy and durable building material of all the ages, has become the
+expression of these buildings from without. Within, they are gay with rare
+marbles and mural paintings. There is nothing too fine for the railroad
+passenger terminal of to-day in the United States.
+
+When the master fancy of the architect, Richardson, designed the splendid
+stations at Worcester and Springfield, as well as a host of smaller
+attractive stations along the line of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the
+beginnings were made. More recently this rising American desire for beauty
+and good taste has shown itself in such elaborate and artistic structures
+as the stations at Albany and Scranton. The last step has come in the
+designing of the palatial terminals in Chicago, in Washington, and in New
+York City. It would take a bold prophet to anticipate what the next step
+might be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS
+
+ CONVENIENCE OF HAVING FREIGHT STATIONS AT SEVERAL POINTS IN A
+ CITY--THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD'S SCHEME AT NEW YORK AS AN
+ EXAMPLE--COAL HANDLED APART FROM OTHER FREIGHT--ASSORTING THE
+ CARS--THE TRANSFER HOUSE--CHARGES FOR THE USE OF CARS NOT PROMPTLY
+ RETURNED TO THEIR HOME ROADS--THE HARD WORK OF THE YARDMASTER.
+
+
+All the folk who come and go upon the railroad know the passenger
+stations. Few of them know the freight terminals. Yet it is from this last
+source that the railroad will derive the greater part of its revenue. The
+freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for
+varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a
+single structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all
+its passengers, even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so
+to concentrate this part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal.
+
+With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of
+trucking is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in
+order to eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the
+stimulus of competition, will establish freight stations at each point
+where any considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These
+stations will consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight
+(your traffic expert calls this "LCL," meaning "less than carload"), and
+wagon yards for carload lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses,
+one for inbound, the other for outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have
+to be ample for the accommodation of a host of trucks and drays as well
+as for the long rows of freight-cars.
+
+In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be
+a freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its
+shipping-rooms and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American
+city there may be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So
+much for the general commodity freight. Then there are the special
+commodities.
+
+Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in
+the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets
+and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a
+hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see,
+after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each
+opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line
+gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic
+burden that increases yearly.
+
+It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to
+accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates
+there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and
+the handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal
+scheme. It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic;
+and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of
+every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves,
+elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.
+
+So you see the railroad's freight terminal in any large city is like the
+fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive
+centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside
+from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together
+somewhere; and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city
+the railroad creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and
+outgoing--100 trains a day, perhaps--is gathered together and sorted with
+system and regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and
+the mail packages.
+
+To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme,
+let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by
+which the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the
+metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.
+
+The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a
+great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through
+Eastern New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island,
+Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in
+addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth,
+lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a
+tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and
+east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many
+piers and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the
+smoky, busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight
+terminal. There are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight
+station at Jersey City (the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and
+another much larger plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper
+harbor, almost behind the Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now
+awaiting its greatest development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its
+ownership control of the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling
+line, 4 and 6 tracks wide, around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger
+terminal yards at Long Island City. This encircling line--the New York
+Connecting Railroad it is called--will be continued by a splendid bridge
+over the East River to an actual connection with the New Haven system
+reaching up into New England. When this is done, one of the bugaboos of
+the freightmen--the slow and ofttimes dangerous movement of barges and
+car-floats through the East River, past the entire length of Manhattan
+Island--will be ended. Greenville will become the distributing point for
+the bulk of New England freight that comes and goes from the south and the
+west through New York.
+
+Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable
+magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that
+reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey
+meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank well
+to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and
+Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.
+
+Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the
+neck of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main
+line from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that
+carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark,
+united to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a
+gateway by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in
+reality. A big assorting or classification yard was built there for
+outgoing freight, and another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added
+and one of the great transfer houses of the country--but of that, more in
+a moment.
+
+The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of
+Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o'clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the
+railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are
+closed and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy
+floats are being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville.
+There is not much loafing at either of those points along about
+supper-time. Switching crews show feverish activity in snatching the cars
+from the floats, and yardmasters bend themselves nervously toward forming
+the long trains that are to go rumbling toward the west throughout the
+night.
+
+Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a
+wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city
+at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and
+only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that
+busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago
+train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard
+without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a
+dozen switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no
+longer. They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals,
+cars that are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting
+begins. The night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser
+officers in the field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns
+in hand, they are running along the trains (these are pulling in from the
+waterfront every five minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping
+and revamping the freight traffic of the night.
+
+This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for
+Pittsburgh, the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the
+points diverging therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has
+been in progress for more than an hour at one end of the classification
+tracks, there are long trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some
+large city or important distributing point. After that it is a simple
+enough matter to bring engines and cabooses and start the trains through.
+Then the sorting of the cars is begun again and continues until the
+freight receiving points and the freight interchange points in the
+metropolitan district have been swept clean for the night.
+
+The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller
+scale, for it handles package freight--"less than carload." It is a long
+structure, stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long
+sidings and unloading sheds. It takes the "LCL" stuff coming by night
+from the connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses,
+and a little after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great
+mass of matter, from 200 to 500 carloads a day.
+
+Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a
+gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is
+hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of
+the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by
+day and by night.
+
+You ship a box--sixty pounds to one hundred pounds--from Wilkes-Barre,
+Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to
+Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.;
+a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, _ad
+infinitum_. You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a
+problem in freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail
+service. Ten thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising
+here and there and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to
+destination, make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts
+have finished their difficult work.
+
+If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the
+problem would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds
+weight, or less, perhaps--"LCL" anyway. From its destination it goes with
+other boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house
+the car in which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track,
+seals are broken, doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The
+transfer-house is roomy and systematic. If it were anything less it would
+resemble chaos.
+
+But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting
+points have regular stands, upon which nightly are placed cars bound for
+these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house),
+each transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite
+that number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a
+checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its
+proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is
+mail-sorting on a Titanic scale.
+
+Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through
+car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the
+transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than
+enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one
+of the switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to
+replace it. Beyond that, the yardmaster's superiors are all the time
+demanding that he show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.
+
+When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects
+forfeits from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not
+expedite its passage; this the railroaders know as "_per diem_." The great
+trick in operating is to keep _per diem_ down; and so the "foreign" cars,
+so called, must be promptly returned to their home roads.
+
+"We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern
+from Chicago every day," the man who has this yard in charge explains.
+"It's up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I
+can't, I do the best I can." He scratches his head. "Perhaps I'll use a
+Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not,
+something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car
+over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out
+beyond Washington there'd be trouble, and I've got to dig out something
+empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell. Mos'
+generally, though, when we've got a turn of Western stuff, I've got my
+'empty' tracks stuffed full o' them New England cars."
+
+We mention something about the transfer-house being a mighty good thing.
+
+"It's a necessary evil," says our guide, correcting us.
+
+He starts to explain. "See here. The X----, over in its Jersey City
+transfer-house, got near a carload of that fancy porcelain brick through
+from Haverstraw las' week, and that young whelp of a college boy that's
+hangin' round there learnin' the railroad business gets it into his noodle
+that it's somethin' awful, awful for that stuff to be goin' through to
+Middle Ohio in a Maine Central box, an 'LCL' at that. So out he dumps it
+into a system car right here an' now, and saves his road about one dollar
+and fifty cents _per diem_. Of course they pay about one hundred and
+thirty-five dollars for damages to that brick in the transferrin'. But the
+boy's all right in the transfer-house. If he was out on the engine he
+might blow up the biler."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Here is another great railroad yard--this almost filling a mighty crevice
+between God's eternal hills. This is within the mountain country, and the
+gossip that you get around the roundhouse is all of grades. You hear how
+Smith and the 2,999 pulled seven Pullmans around the Saddleback without a
+pusher; how some of the big preference freights take four engines to mount
+the summit; the tales of daring are tales of pushers and of trains
+breaking apart on the fearful mountain stretches.
+
+Randall is yardmaster here, and Randall is the opposite of the layman's
+picture of a yardmaster--a slovenly, worn, profane sort of fellow. Randall
+does not swear; he rarely even gets excited; his system of administration
+is so perfectly devised that even in a stress he rarely has to turn to
+work with his own hands. With him railroading is a fine, practical
+science. He will tell you of the methods at Collinwood, at Altoona, at
+Buffalo, at Chicago--wherein they differ. He is cool, calculating, clever,
+a capital railroader in addition to all these.
+
+[Illustration: SOMETHING OVER A MILLION DOLLARS' WORTH OF PASSENGER CARS
+ARE CONSTANTLY STORED IN THIS YARD]
+
+[Illustration: A SCENE IN THE GREAT FREIGHT-YARDS THAT SURROUND CHICAGO]
+
+[Illustration: THE INTRICACY OF TRACKS AND THE "THROAT" OF A MODERN
+TERMINAL YARD: SOUTH STATION, BOSTON, AND ITS APPROACHES]
+
+You speak of his yard as being overwhelmingly big. He answers in his
+deliberate way:
+
+"We've more than 200 miles of track in this yard; something more than
+2,000 switches operate it."
+
+Then he takes you down from his office, elevated in an abandoned
+switch-tower, and looking down upon his domain. He explains with great
+care that, his yard being a main-line division point and not a point with
+many intersecting branches or "foreign roads," its transfer-house is
+inconsequential. The same process that goes forward with the
+package-freight in the transfer-houses, Randall carries on in this yard
+with cars. These operations are separated for east-bound and west-bound
+freight and each is given an entirely separate yard, easily reached from
+the group of roundhouses that hold the freight motive power of that part
+of the system. Randall's, being an unusually large yard, further divides
+these activities into separate yards for loaded and empty cars on the
+west-bound side. No east-bound "empties" are handled over his road.
+
+We follow him to the nearest operating point, the west-bound
+classification yard for loaded cars. In the old days this was a broad flat
+reach of about 20 parallel tracks, terminating at each end in approaches
+of lead of "ladder" track. Upon each set of 3 or 4 tracks a switch-engine
+is busy in the eternal classification process. In these more modern days
+you may see the "hump" or gravity-yard, although you will still find
+skilled railroaders who are prejudiced against its use. In the hump-yard
+half of the work of the switch-engines is done by gravity. This new type
+of railroad facility has an artificial hill, just above the termination of
+the parallel tracks where they cluster together, and upon this hump one
+switch-engine with a trained crew does the work of six engines and crews
+in the old type of yard.
+
+A preference freight rolls into the receiving yard for the west-bound
+classification. Its engine uncouples and steams off for a well-earned rest
+in the smoky roundhouse. A switch-engine uncouples the caboose that has
+been tacked on behind over the division, and it is shunted off to the
+near-by caboose track, where its crew will have close oversight of
+it--perhaps sleep in it--until it is ready to accompany some east-bound
+freight a few hours hence.
+
+Blue flags (blue lights at night) are fastened at each end of the
+dismantled cars, and the inspectors have a quarter of an hour to make sure
+if the equipment is in good order. If the car is found with broken
+running-gear it is marked, and soon after drilled out from its fellows,
+sent to the transfer-house to have its contents removed, to the shops for
+repairs, or the "cripple" track for junk, if its case is well-nigh
+hopeless.
+
+With the "O. K." of the car inspectors finally pronounced, the train that
+was comes up to the hump, and the expert crew that operates there makes
+short work of sorting out the cars--this track for "stuff" southwest of
+Pittsburgh, this next for Cleveland and Chicago, the third for
+transcontinental; and so it goes. Two lines of cars are drilled at the
+same time, for just ahead of the switch-engine is an open-platform car,
+known as the "pole-car," and by means of heavy timbers the "pole-man"
+guides two rows of heavy cars down the slight grades to their
+resting-places.
+
+The cars do not rest long upon the classification-yard tracks. From the
+far end of each of these they are being gathered in solid trains, one for
+Pittsburgh, another for Cleveland and Chicago, the third transcontinental,
+and so on. Engines of the next division are being hitched to them, pet
+"hacks" brought from the caboose tracks, and the long strings of loaded
+box-cars are off toward the West in incredibly short time.
+
+Of course there are some trains that never go upon the "classification" at
+Randall's yard. There are solid coal trains bound in and out of New York,
+of Philadelphia, and of Boston, that pass him empty and filled, and only
+change engines and cabooses at his command. There are through freights,
+bound from one seaboard to the other, from the Far East to the Far West,
+that do likewise. But the majority of the freight movement has the sorting
+out within his domain, his four humps are busy day and night with an
+ordinary run of traffic, and you shudder to think what must be the
+condition when business begins to run at high tide.
+
+"We get it a-humming every once in a while," he finally confesses. "We had
+one day, a little time ago, when we received 121 east-bound trains in
+twenty-four hours, more than 3,200 cars all told. That meant, on an
+average, a train every 11-1/2 minutes. That same day we got 78 west-bound
+freights, with more than 3,600 cars. That meant nearly 7,000 cars handled
+on the in-freight in twenty-four hours, or a train coming in to me every
+7-1/2 minutes during day and night. They don't do much better than that on
+some of the subway and elevated railroads in the big cities; and I haven't
+said a word about the trains and cars we despatched--just about as much
+again, of course."
+
+Through yards such as these there are incoming streams of merchandise,
+equal at least to the outgoing, passing through classification yards in
+carload lots and the great transfer-houses in "LCL." These streams must be
+kept separate and from clogging one another or themselves. Cars must carry
+loads whenever they are moved--"empties" are the bogy-men of the
+superintendents of transportation--and cars from "foreign" systems must be
+quickly returned to their home roads. The yardmaster at a busy freight
+point has his own worries. His puzzle is unending. To it he must bend the
+bigness of a big mind, he must be prepared to handle the unequal volumes
+of traffic that pass through his domain with an equal skill: in dull times
+he must seek to keep his plant working under conditions of rare economy;
+when the freight rises to flood tide, he must fight in harness to prevent
+the freight from congesting. The word "failure" has been stricken out of
+his vocabulary by his superiors.
+
+It takes a high grade of railroader to serve as yardmaster.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LOCOMOTIVES AND THE CARS
+
+ HONOR REQUIRED IN THE BUILDING OF A LOCOMOTIVE--SOME OF THE EARLY
+ LOCOMOTIVES--SOME NOTABLE LOCOMOTIVE-BUILDERS--INCREASE OF THE SIZE OF
+ ENGINES--STEPHENSON'S AIR-BRAKE--THE WORKSHOPS--THE VARIOUS PARTS OF
+ THE ENGINE--CARS OF THE OLD-TIME--IMPROVEMENTS BY WINANS AND
+ OTHERS--STEEL CARS FOR FREIGHT.
+
+
+From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. We have already
+told of the honor that is forged in the building of the bridge; honor of
+no less degree has gone into the forging of the most vital and most human
+thing upon the railroad, outside of man himself. That man has ever been
+able to create and build the locomotive, a giant creature of some 200
+tons, perhaps, built together with infinite care of some 5,000 to 7,000
+parts, and these parts acting with the delicacy of the hair-spring of a
+watch, almost passes ordinary belief. The wonder becomes even greater when
+it is realized that this monster creature, set upon two slender rails, is
+capable of pulling a 4,000 ton train, through every stress of weather and
+over considerable grades.
+
+To tell in detail of the locomotive in one chapter is short allowance to a
+subject that fairly demands for itself a whole book, a technical mind for
+the telling, and at least a fairly technical mind for the understanding; a
+subject that in its history goes hand in hand with that of the railroad
+itself. Yet the limitations of this book forbid a more lengthy
+description.
+
+We have already told of a very few of the earliest and most famous
+American locomotives; the _Stourbridge Lion_, which Horatio Allen brought
+to the Delaware & Hudson Company; the _Best Friend_, which was built in
+New York City, and which went to Charleston, South Carolina, to be the
+first American locomotive to run in the United States, the _De Witt
+Clinton_, which awoke the echoes of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in a
+single day; and the _Tom Thumb_, built by Peter Cooper, which induced the
+directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to change their motive power
+from horses to steam, and so opened a great new development for their
+property.
+
+A little while after Cooper's _Tom Thumb_ had achieved the astounding feat
+of beating a team of horses in hauling a railroad coach, the directors of
+the B. & O. offered a prize of $4,000 "for the most approved engine that
+shall be delivered for trial upon the road on or before June 1, 1831; and
+$3,500 for the engine which shall be adjudged the next best." It was
+determined in this prospectus that "the engine, when in operation must not
+exceed three and one-half tons weight and must, on a level road, be
+capable of drawing day by day fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of
+wagons, fifteen miles an hour."
+
+Three locomotives answered this generous offer. Of them but one, the
+_York_, oftener called the _Arabian_, built at York, Pa., by Davis &
+Gartner, and hauled to Baltimore by horses over the turnpikes, was of
+practical service. Phineas Davis was a watch and clock maker, but he
+succeeded in devising a locomotive that was the forerunner of the famous
+_Grasshopper_ upon the Baltimore & Ohio. Better name was never given to a
+locomotive, the rude and ungainly angles formed by rods and levers giving
+a distinct resemblance to the long-legged bugs. Yet the Grasshoppers
+served their purpose. In the late eighties, the _Arabian_ was still in
+service in the Mount Clare yards at Baltimore. With a single exception, it
+never had an accident or even left the rails. That exception was just
+before the completion of the Washington branch, and Davis was a passenger
+upon the engine. It was going at a fair rate of speed when suddenly it
+rolled over upon its side in the ditch. No one was hurt, save Davis, who
+was instantly killed. It seemed a strange caprice of Fate, for although
+careful examination was immediately made, both of the engine and of the
+track, no reason could ever be assigned for the accident.
+
+In that same year, 1831, the _John Bull_, which was built by George &
+Robert Stephenson & Company, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England, was
+received in Philadelphia for the Camden & Amboy Railroad. As long as the
+locomotive continues to serve the railroad the name of George Stephenson,
+its inventor, must be indissolubly linked with it. The _John Bull_ was
+easily the most famous Stephenson engine ever sent to the United States.
+It has been shown at all our great expositions, and now occupies a
+position of honor in the great Smithsonian institution at Washington. Of
+these early engines, which it was found necessary to bring from England, a
+volume once issued by the Rogers Locomotive Works, of Paterson, N. J., has
+said:
+
+ "These locomotives ... furnished the types and patterns from which
+ those which were afterwards built here were fashioned. But American
+ designs soon began to depart from their British prototypes, and a
+ process of adaption to the existing conditions of the railroads in
+ this country followed, which afterwards differentiated the American
+ locomotives more and more from those built in Great Britain. A marked
+ feature of difference between American and English locomotives has
+ been the use of a forward truck under the former."
+
+As a matter of fact, the English engines, built for use on long straight
+stretches of line would never have served on the early roads in this
+country with their steep and curving routes through the mountains. So, in
+the latter part of the year 1831, John B. Jervis invented what he called
+"a new plan of frame, with a bearing-carriage for a locomotive engine" for
+the use of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, in which he introduced the
+forward truck which is to-day a distinctive feature of American engines.
+Its effectiveness was at once recognized, and its almost general adoption
+immediately followed. Five years later, Henry R. Campbell, of
+Philadelphia, had patented his system of two driving-wheels and a truck,
+and the distinctive type of American locomotive was born.
+
+In the development of that peculiarly successful type, great names have
+been written into the history of American locomotive-building--the names
+of such men as Rogers and Winans and Hinckley and Mason and Brooks and
+Matthias Baldwin and William Norris; the last two both of Philadelphia.
+Norris, after some interesting smaller engines, built the _George
+Washington_ in 1835. This engine was not one whit less than a triumph. It
+ascended the steep plane of the Columbia Railroad in Philadelphia, a grade
+of 7-1/2 per cent, carrying two passenger cars in which were seated 53
+persons. It came to a stop on that grade and started up again by its own
+efforts. After reaching the summit, the engine was turned around and came
+down, stopping once in its descent.
+
+That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane,
+and the performance of the _George Washington_ has not been attempted in
+all these years save in the case of Latrobe's temporary line at Kingwood
+Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment,
+pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine
+overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in
+England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American
+locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170
+others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony.
+William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for
+the growing nation across the Atlantic.
+
+Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the
+beginning of his life. He lived long enough to lay the foundation of one
+of the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm
+that has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and
+kept it alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin's first locomotive was
+built in 1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad;
+and that it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed
+twenty years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built
+two years later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg
+Company. After that his works were regularly established, their head to
+give his patience and untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive.
+The history of Baldwin locomotives is, in an important sense, the history
+of the industry in the United States.
+
+It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for
+much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger
+locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the
+_Governor Paine_ for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in
+1848, and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a
+pair of driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back
+of the fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin
+must have given full value, for it is related that the engine could be
+started from a state of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The
+Pennsylvania Railroad ordered three of the same sort, and one of these
+once hauled a special train carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty
+miles an hour. In weight, the locomotive was steadily increasing. In the
+beginning, these engines weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late
+forties engines of twenty-five tons each were being built for the Reading
+Road, and these were regarded as monsters.
+
+Year by year the locomotive was being perfected in all its details. The
+cab made its appearance and was first opposed by the engineers, who
+imagined that they would be badly penned in, in case of accident. The
+Erie contributed the bell-rope signal from the train; we have already
+heard of that first whistle on the locomotive of the Sandusky and Mad
+River Railroad. The Boston & Worcester devised the headlight, so that time
+might be saved by handling freight at night. More important than these
+were the experiments by Ross Winans and by S. M. Felton that led to the
+substitution of coal for wood as a fuel, and the development by Rogers at
+his Paterson works of the link device, so necessary in stopping, starting,
+and reversing the locomotive.
+
+Gradually the size of the locomotive increased to 28 and 30 tons in the
+late fifties. Finally James Milholland, engineer of machinery for the
+Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, built in 1863 a pusher engine for coal
+trains that weighed something over 50 tons. When folk saw that engine they
+almost gasped, and wondered what the railroads were coming to. But the
+wiser men kept silent. They knew that as long as bridges and roadbeds and
+fine steel rails were increased in strength, the limit of size of the
+locomotive had not been reached. The greater grip the locomotive has upon
+the rail, the greater its pulling power, the greater its efficiency. Sheer
+weight, and weight alone, gives that grip. It certainly takes a weight of
+seven tons to give a grip of one ton upon a dry rail; in the case of wet
+rails this ratio becomes ten to one.
+
+Then wonder not that the locomotive steadily increased in size, that the
+Moguls with six driving-wheels, and the Consolidations with eight, came
+into vogue a few years after the close of the war, and that these kept
+increasing in weight all the while. Height and width were and still are
+rigidly limited by the clearance of the line. The locomotive must stand no
+more than fourteen or sixteen feet high and from nine to eleven feet wide;
+in length the problem only meets the genius of the designer.
+
+But it is altogether possible that the limit of the size of the
+locomotive would have been reached long ago if it had not been for the
+coming of the air-brake. This most important assurance of the safety of
+the railroad passenger came into its being in 1869, when George
+Westinghouse, its inventor, was permitted to try it on a Panhandle train.
+From the beginning of railroads the necessity for brakes was apparent, and
+in 1833 Robert Stephenson patented a steam brake for the driving-wheels.
+That same brake, with compressed air substituted for steam, is essentially
+the Westinghouse device of to-day. But Westinghouse made the air do the
+work of steam. After he had developed the idea he offered it to leading
+Eastern railroads, but they one and all declined it.
+
+Finally, he was permitted to place it on a Panhandle train, full assurance
+having been given to the railroad officials that he would be personally
+responsible for any injury done to their equipment. Four cars and an
+engine were fitted with the new device and the train started forth from
+Pittsburgh to Steubenville. On the way its progress was halted by a farm
+wagon which was caught in the rail at a highway crossing. The engineer
+whistled for the handbrakes in the good old-fashioned way but he knew that
+he was too late. Then he thought of the air-brake. He had little faith in
+the contraption, but he gave its handle a wrench and the train stopped ten
+feet from the wagon. Several lives were saved and the air-brake was
+proven. From that day forth it was simply a question of developing the
+device to its fullest possibility, and Mr. Westinghouse has proved himself
+able to do that very thing.
+
+The air-brake was a fact. Steel had come into use for axles, driving-wheel
+tires, frames, and every other vital or bearing part of the locomotive;
+and the designers were again increasing its size. They passed the
+_Consolidation_ and built the _Mastodon_. These were freighters--each with
+ten drivers--drivers with tremendous gripping force. They went through
+what M. N. Forney has called a "period of adolescence in railroad
+progress," and in that period they experimented with huge driving-wheels
+only to discard them once again. Then they built bigger engines than even
+the _Mastodon_; the _Decapod_, with twelve driving-wheels; the _El
+Gobernador_ which was built by the Southern Pacific at its Sacramento
+shops in 1884, weighing, with engine and tender fully equipped, 113 tons.
+
+Still the locomotive grows and its progenitors talk of the 500-ton
+machine. They have recently built the Mallet articulated compound, which
+because of its very great weight has splendid gripping force and is
+especially adapted for pushing-service on heavy grades. The Baltimore &
+Ohio, the Erie, the New York Central, the Great Northern, and the Santa Fe
+have already become committed to this type of engine. The American
+locomotive Company has just completed for the Delaware & Hudson several
+Mallet articulated compounds that are among the most powerful locomotives
+yet constructed. They were designed for pusher service, on heavy grades,
+north from Carbondale on the main line of the D. & H., which average from
+.81 to 1.36 per cent. Up to recently the heavy northbound coal traffic up
+these grades has been handled by the use of two heavy pusher engines. A
+single one of the new Mallets will do the work of the two pushers, and
+therein lies the economy in their use.
+
+These new giants are, in operation, two 8-wheel engines, with individual
+cylinders, steam chests and supplies from a single boiler and fire-box.
+The gripping power of 16 driving-wheels under the enormous weight of 223
+tons can be imagined; the designers estimate it at the high figure of
+forty-three tons. The exceptional length of these monster engines--a
+fraction over ninety feet--is carried around the curves of mountainous
+lines by an ingenious joint in their solid steel frames. This then is only
+the latest of American engines; but not quite the biggest, for the Topeka
+shops of the Santa Fe Railroad claim that honor with their new Mallets,
+each 121 feet long and weighing complete 810,000 pounds. The 500-ton
+locomotive does not seem so very far away when one comes to consider the
+Santa Fe giants. These engines, which are operated in pushing freights
+over the heavy grades in the Southwest, were built from two of the Santa
+Fe's heaviest freight engines. They operate with equal facility in either
+direction as there is not a turntable in the land which would come
+anywhere near accommodating them.
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF THE "DIAMOND-STACK" LOCOMOTIVES USED ON THE
+PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES
+
+PRAIRIE TYPE PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF THE LAKE SHORE
+
+PACIFIC TYPE PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
+
+ATLANTIC TYPE PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE, BUILT BY THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD AT
+ITS ALTOONA SHOPS]
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF THE GREAT MALLET PUSHING ENGINES OF THE DELAWARE &
+HUDSON COMPANY
+
+A TEN-WHEELED SWITCHING LOCOMOTIVE OF THE LAKE SHORE
+
+SUBURBAN PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
+
+CONSOLIDATION FREIGHT LOCOMOTIVE OF THE PENNSYLVANIA]
+
+In recent years, the rather graceful custom of giving names to the
+classification of locomotives has been extended to the passenger
+motive-power. In 1895, the Baldwins created the Atlantic type of
+four-driver locomotive for high-speed service both on the Atlantic Coast
+Line and on the Atlantic City Railroad, from Camden to the ocean--and the
+name has stuck. The Brooks plant of the American Locomotive Company at
+Dunkirk similarly developed the Pacific type for passenger locomotives
+with six drivers instead of four. The Prairie type was appropriately
+enough sponsored by the Burlington system. It is like the Pacific type
+save that the forward or lead truck (the Englishman would blandly call it
+the "bogey") has but two instead of the conventional four wheels.
+
+Your locomotive-builder is apt to be more systematic about these types of
+engine, and he falls back on what is generally known as Whyte's
+classification. The basis of this simple system is in the number of wheels
+of the engine itself. Each type is described by a series of three numbers,
+the first of these being the number of wheels in front of the drivers, the
+second the number of drivers, and the third the number of wheels to the
+rear of these. The eight-wheel American type, the simplest for
+illustration here, would thus be described as "4-4-0."
+
+The trailer, which is described by the third number in this series, is a
+recent addition to the locomotive family in this country. It came from
+the constant lengthening of the fire-box, due to the necessity of
+providing greater steam-power for engines of increasing weight and
+cylinder capacity. When the fire-box began to overhang too far, the
+trailer-wheels were introduced, and a device was affixed to the locomotive
+by which they might receive its weight for hill-climbing purposes. This
+last device has not proved particularly successful. But the trailer itself
+has become a fixed device in locomotive construction. When the third
+figure in Whyte's classification is a cypher it simply means that there
+are no trailers. Similarly the first figure a cypher, indicates the
+absence of a forward truck or even wheels, which is common in some forms
+of switch-engines, where the weight is entirely concentrated on the
+drivers for better gripping power upon the rail.
+
+Such, in brief, is the development of the locomotive. It has been
+development rather than change, for while some designers have fretted
+about whether the engine's cab should be in the middle of the boiler or at
+its end and others have recently developed the Walsheart gears upon the
+outside of the engine frame, where it is of easier access than the
+old-style links, the general design of the iron-horse remains practically
+the same as that given it by our grand-daddies. They planned carefully and
+they planned for the long years. The essential features of their designs
+have not been questioned. It has simply been a problem of growth.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. If you would
+better understand the iron horse, find your way to any of the great plants
+in which he is being built. Begin at the beginning in a factory, which
+seems, with dozens of shops and great yards, to be almost a miniature
+city. Begin at the draughting-rooms where each locomotive is given a whole
+ledger page--sometimes two or three--for specifications. From those
+specifications, the young draughtsmen take their instructions. They work
+out their charts and elevations, their detailed plans; and the ink is
+hardly dry upon their drawings before they are being whisked away to the
+blueprint rooms. The blueprints are still damp, when in turn they are
+hurried to the different construction shops of the plant.
+
+You see these shops, one by one, in care of an expert guide. You see the
+wooden patterns going to the blast furnaces at the foundries and to the
+sullen tappings of the trip-hammers. You leave the blacksmiths and stand
+for a moment--not long--under the terrific din of the boiler-makers. The
+boiler, the great trunk of the locomotive, is built of steel plate--plate
+that is the very pride of the rolling-mills. In some foreign lands, copper
+fire-boxes are demanded; but the real American locomotive has these also
+of steel.
+
+The steel plates are rolled to form the boiler itself, flanged by
+angle-workers into the square fire-box. Finally the boiler and the
+fire-box are riveted together, section by section--made as fast by steel
+thread as man's ingenuity can make them. Together they form a unit.
+Another unit is being formed in an adjacent shop, the solidly welded steel
+frame in which the boiler shall yet set, and to which truck and drivers
+will be firmly fastened. Forward on this frame will sit the cylinders; in
+another corner of this shop they are being made ready. Cast-iron still
+remains the best material for the cylinders and the steam-chests. These
+are cast in one piece and the rule holds good where there are two
+cylinders, as in the case of the compounds. The cylinders, and steam-chest
+for one side and half the "saddle" of the locomotive, upon which the
+forward end of the boiler rests, are nowadays generally made in a single
+casting. After that it is a simple enough matter to smooth down the outer
+surface, bore the cylinders to perfect surfacing, and line the
+steam-chests with a bushing that can be readily removed once it is worn
+out.
+
+The driving-wheels are an important detail of the construction of the
+locomotive. They are made in rough castings--of steel for fast passenger
+engines, and of iron for other forms of motive power--and are then made
+true in giant lathes. The steel tires are shrunk on the wheels, a work of
+astounding nicety; and in turn the wheels themselves are heated and shrunk
+upon the axles--of the best steel that man can forge. To place these
+wheels upon the axles is hair-line work. A 9-inch hub receives an axle
+just 8.973 inches--no more, no less--in diameter. It is keyed and then
+under the slight expansion of a gentle heat it is rammed upon the
+axle-end. It goes on to stay, and stay it must.
+
+From all these shops, a busy industrial railroad brings the different
+parts to the great and busy hall of the erecting-shop, a vast place of
+vast distances and filled always with the noisy clatter of great industry.
+Here the different parts, which have been carefully built by skilled
+artisans, are assembled into the finished whole. The cylinders and
+saddle-halves are placed and firmly riveted together. Into the collar of
+that saddle a giant overhead crane carefully sets the boiler and the
+fire-box. They are quickly riveted to the upper flange of the saddle: the
+locomotive is coming into a semblance of itself.
+
+The cab is fastened into position; then the boiler-makers descend upon the
+unfinished engine and place the 200 or more flue-tubes that run from
+fire-box to smoke-box, just underneath the stack. They make every tube and
+joint fast--put into the growing locomotive all the energy and all the
+skill of good workmanship. When they are gone the giant crane again comes
+noiselessly down along the ceiling. It reaches down, grasps the
+engine-trunk, and swings it high aloft.
+
+Down there, resting on real railroad tracks, are the driving-wheels and
+the lead truck, carefully spaced in anticipation. The crane, lifting the
+fifty tons of boiler and frame with no apparent effort whatsoever, places
+its load squarely upon the wheels that are to carry it. Again the
+mechanics are busy; the engine is growing into a solid unit. Upon their
+heels follow testers, men who must look for steam or water leaks. They
+work under a test of air, carrying lighted candles into every nook and
+cranny of the giant. If the candle flutters, air is escaping, and the leak
+must be found.
+
+Finally comes the report "O. K." from the testing crew. The stacks, the
+steam and sand domes, and the air-brakes are being made fast. The engine
+is hurried off to the paint-shop. There it may find its companion in life,
+the humble useful tender already awaiting it. It came direct from the
+tender shop; for the appendage of the locomotive is no longer a specially
+rigged flat-car but a solid steel plate construction built to carry some
+9,000 gallons of water and about 16 tons of coal. Only a little time ago,
+a New Yorker, scion of a wealthy and famous family of railroaders, proved
+himself worth his oats by designing a tender of great practicability and
+of great economy of construction.
+
+When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and
+refulgent--brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it
+must be partly dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the
+road which has purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled
+through a freight train--never coupled together--in charge of an inspector
+from the locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never
+leave his charges until they have been receipted for. After that the
+locomotive begins to bend to the work for which he was created. Unless he
+is of a very unusual sort or was built for some very especial purpose, he
+soon loses his identity. The days are gone when locomotives were
+christened after the fashion of ships. There are too many of them. Each is
+given the cold informality of a number, marshalled for service in a mighty
+company.
+
+Cars came as corollary to the locomotive. In the beginning the passenger
+coaches were nothing more or less than old-time stage-coaches which had
+been set upon wheels so flanged as to enable them to stay upon the rail.
+So it was that the first cars built for the railroad followed stage-coach
+models. It was a practical necessity from the first to draw more than one
+small coach at a time, so the couplings and the bumper devices came as a
+matter of development. Then came the day when an aspiring inventor grouped
+several stage-coaches together on a single rigid frame and he had really
+developed a form of railroad coach--a form which our English and
+continental cousins still cling fondly to, in despite of its most apparent
+disadvantages.
+
+Four wheels quickly gave way to eight. In the early thirties, Ross Winans
+developed a double-truck car for use on the Baltimore & Ohio. Compared
+with anything that had gone before it was certainly a pretentious vehicle.
+It was thirty feet in length, four-wheel trucks being attached at the
+ends, very much after the present fashion. There were seats on the flat
+roof, which were reached by a ladder in the corner, and the car itself was
+divided into three compartments. A little later Winans tore out the cross
+partitions in the car and introduced the end doors and the centre aisle,
+thus establishing the American passenger coach of to-day. The Baltimore &
+Ohio manufactured a number of these coaches at its famous Mount Clare
+shops. They were known for years as the "Washington cars," probably
+because they were the first run on the Washington branch.
+
+If Winans had been able to establish his patent rights to the double-truck
+car he might have reaped a fortune from its royalties alone. But when he
+went to assert his right as an inventor, it was discovered that the idea
+was not absolutely new. Gridley Bryant, in his old Quincy Granite
+Railroad, just south of Boston, had used the device in crude form. The
+four-wheeled flat cars which he had employed in bringing stone from the
+quarries down to the dock were not long enough for granite slabs. He had
+met that emergency by fastening two of them together with coupling-rings,
+and thus in a way had created the eight-wheel car. So Winans lost his
+patent although credit is given him for having really developed the
+passenger car of to-day.
+
+The form, once set, came quickly into vogue. In a few of the Southern
+States, old-fashioned gentlemen followed the early English fashion of
+having their private carriages attached to flat freight-cars whenever they
+went on railroad trips, but even this was a passing fad. At that time
+carriages were no novelty, and railroad cars were. They were stuffy little
+affairs compared with the coaches of to-day, miserably lighted and heated
+and ventilated, but Americans were very proud of them. The fashion that
+made early locomotives gay with color, with brass and burnished metals of
+other sorts, found full scope upon the passenger cars, both inside and
+out. They were pannelled and striped, ornamented and lettered to the limit
+of the skill of gifted painters. A coach, named the Morris Run, on the old
+Tioga Railroad, which began running south from Elmira about 1840, was
+decorated in red and green and yellow and blue and gilt and several other
+colors. It would have made a modern circus band wagon inconspicuous. But
+the day came when the brass stars and the red stack-bands began to
+disappear with the names from the locomotives and in that day the railroad
+cars became subdued in colorings. Some of the gay frescoes of the
+interiors, typical of the taste of an earlier day, were in use within the
+present generation.
+
+While the "Washington cars" set a type, there was much yet to be
+accomplished in the development both of the passenger coach and of the
+freight car, and this much was chiefly in the line of the development of
+safety devices. The old-time passenger rode in a very decent fear of his
+life. Sometimes a loosened end of one of the "strap rails" would come
+plunging up through the flimsy floor of the coach and impale some
+unfortunate passenger upon its end against the ceiling; other times the
+cars would go rolling off the banks and crashing into kindling-wood
+against one another. They were lightly built contrivances, incapable of
+standing any sort of shock or collision.
+
+But improvements came one by one--better devices for coupling them
+together, culminating in the modern automatic "jaw coupler," better
+framing, better platforms, better trucks, improved hand-brakes; and after
+them the now universal air-brakes made life safer both for the traveller
+and the railroad employee. Finally came the steel-end vestibule; and where
+cars have been equipped with this very comfortable device, telescoping in
+collision, a very common and disastrous accident in which one car-shell
+enveloped another, has been rendered impossible.
+
+The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An early
+railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting on an
+inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave, surmounted
+by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: "Sacred to the memory of a man who
+stood upon a platform." The railroad used every method to keep its
+passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they began to encourage
+it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse between the cars.
+
+The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor
+in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use
+necessitated passengers going the length of the train, a movement which,
+in itself, was facilitated by the main design of American cars, as
+differentiated from those of English railroads. When the English roads
+began the universal use of dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan
+of their car construction and produce what are still known across the
+Atlantic as "corridor trains."
+
+To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman, the sleeping-car man,
+set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had
+been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut,
+rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to
+facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after
+three or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform
+enclosure of folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his
+vestibule that did more than merely protect passengers from the stress of
+weather; these, of course, then served as effective anti-telescoping
+devices. The Pennsylvania Railroad began the use of these vestibules in
+1886 and they were soon universally adopted by American railroads on their
+fast through trains.
+
+After that a better vestibule was devised by Col. W. D. Mann, one that
+extended the full width of the car. In fact the platform of the car had
+practically ceased to exist, the structure being full-framed to include
+its entrances at both ends.
+
+After the vestibule came the steel car, introduced within the past ten
+years for freight service, and within the past five or six for passenger
+equipment. It has everything to commend it, save a slightly increased
+original cost, which is more than compensated by economy of maintenance,
+to say nothing of the intangible but certain raised factor of safety. It
+is to become universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American
+railroads almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to
+the scrap-heap.
+
+Of the forms and varieties of railroad passenger coaches there are many,
+and these will be described when we come to consider in a later chapter
+the luxury of modern railroad travel. But the variety of passenger
+equipment quite pales before that of the freight service. Flat-cars,
+coal-cars, box-cars, grain-cars, live-stock cars--the list runs on into
+catalogue form. There are refrigerator cars that are kept filled with salt
+and ice or ice alone, precooled cars that are merely kept air-tight, and
+ventilator cars employing a distinct reverse of that method; and up in
+northern climates there are heater-cars which are kept warm by lamps or by
+stoves and which are used for the transportation of fresh fruit and
+vegetables in winter just as the refrigerator-cars and the precooled cars
+are used for that same purpose in summer.
+
+Almost all the safety devices that have been added to the running-gear of
+the passenger equipment have been added to the freight equipment also, to
+the great safety and peace of mind of the railroad employee. The car
+itself remains the simple essential of the very beginnings of the
+railroad. Its change has been a change in size, in weight, and in
+strength.
+
+The first freight cars of the very old railroad at Mauch Chunk weighed
+1,600 pounds each, and were permitted to carry a weight or "burden" of
+only 3,200 pounds. When the Boston & Albany first began using freight cars
+30 feet long, it was so confused that it gave each end of the car a
+separate number for convenience in billing and designating consignments.
+Nowadays 40 tons is the right load for an efficient car, although they go
+as high as 55 and 60 tons' capacity; the car itself may weigh
+approximately half that figure.
+
+Freight cars by hundreds of thousands go bumping all over the different
+railroads of the land, and all the while they are getting bumped and
+broken in accidents--large and small. In such cases they are hauled to the
+nearest shop of the railroad upon which they are travelling and there
+repaired at the cost of the road that owns them. In earlier days, the job
+of master mechanic was no sinecure, for each road built its cars upon its
+own plans and no two of these plans were alike. A simple broken part
+necessitated the manufacture of a new part. It was a matter of great
+confusion and expensive to every line.
+
+The organization of the Master Car Builders, in 1867, solved that problem.
+This organization, through committee, made first the freight car standard
+and then the passenger standard. Axles, bolts, king-pins--every one of the
+intricate car-parts--were brought to standard and numbered sizes. After
+that all that a master mechanic had to do was to keep an assortment of
+standard car parts in his store-room, and he could make reasonable repairs
+to any car that travelled rails. The standardization has gone steadily
+forward year by year; it has included a variety of things, even such
+details as systematic numbering and lettering of cars. It is one of the
+evidences of the constant bettering of the American railroad, the steady
+effort to bring it to an economical and scientific basis.
+
+Recently some of the railroads have made intelligent experiments, seeking
+to devise a vehicle that should be both locomotive and car, and that
+should be especially adapted for small side-lines, where traffic runs
+exceedingly light. Some success has been found in the use of a passenger
+coach, into which a gasolene engine has been introduced, and several of
+these cars are in regular use in the West. Two or three of them have been
+employed for three or four years on Union Pacific branches in and around
+Denver. They render a possible solution for one railroad problem--the
+problem of providing sufficient service for some branch where local
+traffic is slight. The gasolene car requires but two men, as against a
+minimum crew of five men for even the smallest steam passenger train. It
+can be quickly handled, will make many successive stops readily, and
+generally provides an efficient addition to the regular passenger
+equipment. A few years ago it would have given the standard steam
+railroads an excellent weapon against the constant encroachments of
+paralleling electric roads through their good passenger traffic districts;
+even to-day it offers a possible solution of the difficult problem of the
+very small branch side-lines.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+REBUILDING A RAILROAD
+
+ RECONSTRUCTION NECESSARY IN MANY CASES--OLD GRADES TOO HEAVY--CURVES
+ STRAIGHTENED--TUNNELS AVOIDED--THESE IMPROVEMENTS REQUIRED ESPECIALLY
+ BY FREIGHT LINES.
+
+
+To the operating heads of the great railroad systems, rebuilding a line is
+to-day a far more important problem than the building of new routes. The
+country has grown--grown in wealth, among other things. The causes that
+demanded the very greatest economy in the building of early railroad lines
+no longer exist. The hill that the early engineer carefully rounded with
+his line is now pierced without a second thought. Grades that were once
+deemed slight are now classed as impossible. The almost infinite
+development in the operation of the railroad has seen the grade or the
+curve, not as a slight matter, but as a matter which, however slight in a
+single instance, becomes in the course of constant operation a heavy
+operating expense. To-day the operating folk of the big railroads are
+counting the pennies where they countlessly multiply in these fashions; it
+is one of the greatest factors in the grinding operation competition
+between the great railroad systems of the country.
+
+It is all quite as it should be. The early builders did the best that they
+might do with the opportunities that were theirs. They got the railroad
+through. It developed wealth for itself, as well as for the territory it
+served; and with that wealth it is enabled in these piping days of peace
+and plenty to correct the alignment errors of the early builders.
+Moreover, there are frequent cases where the steady increase of traffic
+has rendered it necessary for a railroad to parallel its trunks with new
+lines, quite aside from the consideration of grade and curve.
+
+As far back as the early fifties this great work of rebuilding the
+trunk-line railroads was begun. Certain serious errors in the original
+alignment of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad between Baltimore and the
+Potomac River were corrected, even though at a considerable expense. As
+time went on, other railroads continued this correction work. It is still
+being prosecuted east and west of the Mississippi. Ten million dollars,
+fifty million dollars, looks like a lot of money to the stockholders of
+any company, when their president tells them that this is to be the cost
+of this new relief line, this reconstruction, that cut-off; but what is
+$1,000,000 when it is going to save more than $100,000 a year in the
+operation of your railroad? It is the big sight of the big situation that
+the railroads make nowadays at this reconstruction work.
+
+Mr. Harriman, with his transcontinentals from the Mississippi watersheds
+west, was almost the pioneer in this work of wholesale reconstruction. The
+wholesale operating benefits that have resulted from it in the case of his
+group of Pacifics have been largely responsible for his preëminence in the
+railroad world. And yet, once his method was tried, it all seemed simpler
+than A, B, C.
+
+Take the case of the Lucin cut-off on his Southern Pacific. When the Union
+Pacific was being pushed across the plains and threaded over the Rockies
+and the Sierras, the Great Salt Lake of Utah lay directly in its path. The
+railroad did the obvious thing and carefully made a detour around the
+lake. When Mr. Harriman took over the Union Pacific, then in a state of
+physical decadence, and linked it with his Southern Pacific, and surveyed
+the situation carefully, he decreed that the Great Salt Lake should no
+longer cause a trunk-line railroad to double in its path. He caused a line
+to be surveyed direct across the marshy lake from Ogden to Lucin and when
+that was done he had a line--on paper--103 miles long as against 147
+miles by the old line. The engineer hesitated, but Harriman urged and they
+courageously began the construction of miles and miles of embankment and
+of trestle. Then new difficulties arose. Sink-holes developed. In a few
+minutes structures that had been the work of long months silently
+disappeared. The engineers in charge came to Harriman.
+
+"It is not possible," they told him.
+
+"You must carry it through whether it is possible or not," Harriman
+replied.
+
+Eventually they carried it through.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When it was done, the Union Pacific had not only shortened its
+transcontinental line 44 miles, but it had eliminated more than 1,500 feet
+of heavy grade and 3,919 degrees of curvature. An operating economy of
+between $900,000 and $1,000,000 a year had been effected and the
+stockholders of the company had a good investment for the $10,000,000 that
+the Lucin cut-off had cost them.
+
+Nor was that all on the Union Pacific. On other sections of its main line
+similar reconstruction work has added to the economy of operation by
+millions of dollars each year. For twenty miles west from Omaha, where the
+old historic transcontinental formerly dipped south to avoid a series of
+undulating hills, the new Lane cut-off cuts squarely across them--20 miles
+of deep cuts and heavy fills--"heavy railroad," as the engineers like to
+put it. And again, where the old line twisted and wound itself over the
+Black Hills, and wobbled unsteadily through Wyoming, the reconstruction
+engineers pressed their work.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE HARRIMAN STRETCHED THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC IN A STRAIGHT
+LINE ACROSS THE GREAT SALT LAKE]
+
+[Illustration: LINE REVISION ON THE NEW YORK CENTRAL--TUNNELLING THROUGH
+THE BASES OF THESE JUTTING PEAKS ALONG THE HUDSON RIVER DOES AWAY WITH
+SHARP AND DANGEROUS CURVES]
+
+[Illustration: IMPRESSIVE GRADE REVISION ON THE UNION PACIFIC IN THE BLACK
+HILLS OF WYOMING. THE DISCARDED LINE MAY BE SEEN AT THE RIGHT]
+
+It is not generally understood that the summit of the Union Pacific is in
+the Black Hills, which are the first foothill range of the Rockies, rather
+than in the mountain crest beyond. The Black Hills have always been a
+baffling proposition, with their short, steep slopes. The engineers
+wrinkled their brows at the thought of correcting the old line through
+there, but Harriman simply said that they must, that the board--which
+meant E. H. Harriman himself--had directed that 247 feet be cut from the
+road's crest there; and 247 feet, almost to the inch, was cut. It took
+giant fills and embankments and an army of men but the grades were brought
+to a minimum for a Rocky Mountain stretch. Wooden trestles, old and
+affording a constant fire-risk, were swallowed up in embankments; a single
+slice through a hill-top, a quarter of a mile long and eighty feet deep,
+did its part in reducing the grades; antiquated cars disappeared before
+equipment of the modern class; dilapidated shanties were supplanted by
+fine, permanent railroad stations. The new Union Pacific is a monument to
+the reconstruction engineer--and to E. H. Harriman.
+
+The Canadian Pacific Railway, while traversing but one small northeastern
+corner of the United States, is essentially an American railroad, both in
+equipment and in operation. It forms an important half of that all-British
+Red Line encircling the globe, of which any Englishman is so very proud.
+When the Canadian Pacific Railway was completing its last link in this
+unbroken line of rails from St. John, N. B., and Montreal, to Vancouver,
+the question of grades was indeed a secondary one. The vital thing was to
+cut the line through, and to that end great sacrifices of grade efficiency
+were made. So that when the line was through, and the first Imperial
+Limited was making its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific over a single
+railroad system, it was indeed a line with structural defects. At one
+point--the famous Big Hill, near Field, Alta.--in order to overcome the
+steep Rocky Mountain climbs, it was necessary to use from four to six
+engines for comparatively light freight and passenger trains. And at that,
+it was difficult to attain a speed of more than four or five miles an
+hour.
+
+Within the last three years, this fearful grade has been corrected by the
+very first spiral tunnels ever built upon the American continent. Spiral
+tunnel construction of this kind is not new. It has been used with
+remarkable success by the railroads of Continental Europe, in piercing the
+High-Alpine boundaries between France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
+
+Coming from the east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train first
+enters the spiral tunnel--they call it the "corkscrew" out in
+Alberta--under Cathedral Mountain. This first bore is some 3,200 feet in
+length. Emerging from it, the train runs back east across the Kicking
+Horse River, then enters the eastern spiral tunnel, and after describing
+an elliptic curve, emerges, and again crosses the Kicking Horse westward.
+This whole thing is a perfect maze--the railroad doubling back upon itself
+twice, tunnelling under two mountains, and crossing the river twice in
+order to cut down the grade. The work cost $1,500,000. The mere cost of
+the explosives came to over $250,000. It was one of the really great
+tunnel jobs of the world. Yet despite the complicated work caused by the
+spiral shape of the tunnels, they met exactly. The worth of the thing to
+the Canadian Pacific is shown in the fact that those same trains that
+formerly required four to six engines, are now handled easily over this
+Big-Hill grade with but two engines, and at a speed of about twenty-five
+miles an hour.
+
+Other railroads by the dozen, whose lines traverse mountainous or even
+hilly country, are engaged in this proposition of lowering their grades.
+F. D. Underwood, president of the Erie, and known as one of the ablest
+operating heads in this country, has been engaged in cutting off some of
+the heavy hill-climbs on that old-time route from the seaboard to the
+lakes. Underwood has already seen Erie's hopes of success in developing
+the property as essentially a freighter and for the immediate improvement
+of that portion of its facilities he has built three new relief lines, a
+small stretch near Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and then through
+the upper Genesee Valley, the third and most important eastward from a
+point near Port Jervis and piercing the summit of the Shawangunk
+Mountains.
+
+The line through the Genesee Valley extends from Hunts, on the Buffalo
+division, about 20 miles west of Hornell, to Hinsdale on the main line,
+and is 33 miles long. It cuts off a heavy grade between Hornell and
+Hinsdale on the main line--a little over one per cent--for both east-bound
+and west-bound freight. At that particular point, Erie's west-bound
+freight approximates 75 per cent of the east-bound, and so the new line
+recognizes that fact by establishing the west-bound maximum grade at 3-10
+of one per cent, as against a maximum of 2-10 of one per cent in the other
+direction. Brought to a plain understanding, a single locomotive has no
+difficulty in handling 80 cars, each bearing 40 tons of coal, over this
+new low-grade line. To take one-half that load over the old main line
+required a pusher.
+
+On the east end of the line, where Erie's engineers built their greatest
+low-grade cut-off, the coal rolls down to the seaboard in such quantities
+as to make the west-bound tonnage only a quarter of the east-bound; so the
+reconstruction engineers were satisfied with a maximum west-bound grade at
+6-10 of one per cent as against the maximum of 2-10 east-bound, in the
+direction of the heavy traffic. The cut-off, which is double-tracked and
+is 42-1/2 miles long, increases the distance from New York to Chicago 8
+miles; but this is not an essential fact, for, like the Genesee Valley
+Road it is built exclusively for freight service, and not only almost
+triples the hauling capacity of a locomotive but actually permits of
+faster running time for the freight trains between Jersey City and Port
+Jervis. To build the cut-off required a really great expenditure, for like
+all these new lines it was "heavy work," embracing a tunnel nearly a mile
+long under the crest of the Shawangunk Ridge, and a steel trestle over the
+Moodna Valley, 3,200 feet in length and 190 feet high. Still President
+Underwood can contemplate his locomotives hauling three times their old
+loads over it. The economy of such a proposition becomes apparent upon the
+face of it.
+
+The Baltimore & Ohio, the Southern, and the Norfolk & Western have
+recently lowered their grades and straightened their curves in similar
+fashion; the Lehigh Valley, by the erection of a great new bridge at
+Towanda, Pa., has taken a bad link out of its main line; the Chicago &
+Alton, when the engineers told it that it must abandon miles upon miles of
+its main line (for long years its pride) and build anew, told those
+engineers to go ahead. Stretch by stretch the old road was revamped to
+meet in every way modern conditions. A steel bridge across the Missouri,
+which was the first steel bridge built in America, and which cost
+$500,000, was sent to the scrap-heap while the old-timers groaned. "That
+which yesterday was a railroad marvel becomes a curiosity to-morrow,"
+observes Frank H. Spearman, in speaking of this very thing.
+
+The rebuilding of the Chicago & Alton was a clean-cut affair. The 70-pound
+rails were torn from the main line and sent to sidings and branch lines in
+favor of the 80-pound rails; for while men were tearing at the tracks, the
+shops were working overtime; 55-ton freight engines that could haul 30
+cars were to give way to 165-ton motive power, capable of picking up and
+carrying a hundred cars with ease. That was why the old bridge had to go
+in favor of one which cost an even million dollars. And when the Alton
+built heavy new bridges at dozens of other points besides the Missouri, it
+built them after the new fashion, with solid rock ballast floor, affording
+additional comfort and safety to its patrons.
+
+In a flat State like Illinois there were no very serious grade defects to
+be corrected, but through the gentle undulations of rolling country the
+line twisted and turned like a lazy brook. The rebuilders stopped that.
+When they were done there was a single section of 40 miles, straight as
+the arrow flies, and many tangents of from 15 to 29 miles. In some cases
+when the trains were transferred to the completed line, the old, spindly,
+wobbly affair could be seen for miles in roadbed, to the one side or the
+other of the new. In some cases, this abandoned right-of-way was sold to
+interurban electric railroads; in one particular case one of the abandoned
+bridges was included in the sale.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western is one of the old time Eastern Roads
+that have waxed immensely prosperous with the years. Originally built as
+an anthracite coal carrier from the Eastern Pennsylvania Mountains to the
+seaboard, it has developed into a through freight and passenger carrier of
+importance. The old-time engineer knew how to plan good railroads; the
+Pennsylvania to-day is building its new low-grade freight line on the very
+surveys made by its pioneer surveyors three-quarters of a century ago;
+but, as we have already intimated, those railroads were financially weak.
+Early annual reports of the Pennsylvania tell how its stock was peddled in
+Philadelphia from house to house--up one street and down another--and how
+sometimes two houses joined together to buy a single share. Money was not
+plentiful in the middle of the last century.
+
+So the Lackawanna engineers were compelled to build their road in
+semi-mountainous districts, along the lines of least resistance, rather
+than by the most direct routes. As it came east from Scranton over the
+Pocono Mountains it found its way in a roundabout course to the middle of
+Northern New Jersey. The road wound south and then wound north again, its
+grades were steep, some of its curves were short, and it dipped through
+two tunnels--one at Oxford Furnace, the other at Manunka Chunk.
+
+To iron out those time-taking dips, the sharp curves, the grades, and the
+tunnel, the Lackawanna cut-off--the "heaviest" bit of railroad in the
+world--was begun three years ago. A new route 28-1/2 miles long was
+surveyed diagonally across from Port Morris on the main line in New Jersey
+to the main line again at the Delaware Water Gap. Despite the fact that it
+must cross the watersheds diagonally--the watersheds formed by deep
+valleys and high rocky ridges--the line as surveyed and built is only
+three miles longer than an absolute air-line. It shortens the Lackawanna's
+main stem from New York to Buffalo--already the shortest route between
+these two cities--by 15 miles, and brings that busy lake port a trifle
+within 400 miles from the seaboard.
+
+To cross those watersheds at a sharp diagonal meant "heavy work"; and the
+engineers, to run their straight-cut, low-grade line, found that they
+would have to make tremendous cuts and fills--these last alone totalling
+14,600,00 cubic yards. The Lackawanna's engineers will give you a faint
+idea of the stupendous size of these embankments. To build them up of
+stone and earth at the rate of a cartload a minute for each working-day of
+the year would require 81 years for the job. To do it in less than three
+years has meant the employment of whole trains of dump-cars, the purchase
+of 600-acre farms for single borrow-pits, the energy and administration of
+real engineers.
+
+There have been cuts through solid rock, 65 bridges and culverts to be
+wrought of concrete, a single embankment (at the Pequest River) three
+miles in length, 110 feet high, and 300 feet wide at its base. The
+traveller who rides over the completed double-track road will have but a
+faint idea of the human labor and the human energy that have gone to
+construct it.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The great railroad that traverses the State of Pennsylvania is another
+monument to the engineer. The Pennsylvania Railroad was no wobbly affair
+at any time. Its grades and curves, considering the character of the
+country through which its trunk rests, are not excessive. It has been a
+good standard railroad for a good many years past. But in 1902, the
+Pennsylvania found that its troubles rested in the volume of traffic that
+was being offered it. Over its middle division from Harrisburg to
+Pittsburgh it was handling as much tonnage as J. J. Hill's entire Great
+Northern system. The heavy tonnage business began to clog the road's fast
+passenger traffic (its especial pride) and the fast freight traffic (the
+mainstay of its shippers), and appeal was made to the reconstruction
+engineers.
+
+It was no slight appeal at that. Pittsburgh, handling 400,000 freight cars
+a month, was clogged, congested with such streams as had never before
+tried to crowd through that narrow neck of the Pennsylvania's bottle and
+the orders that went forth for relief were emphatic. Vice-presidents,
+general managers, superintendents and general superintendents, and
+engineers of every sort crowded into the president's office in Broad
+Street Station, and out of that conference the plans for an exclusively
+low-grade freight line from New York to Pittsburgh and for the traffic
+relief of Pittsburgh itself were born.
+
+Every large city has become, in a sense, a bottle-neck for the important
+railroads that pierce it. In some cases like Chicago or St. Louis or
+Kansas City or Indianapolis, the situation has been solved by the creation
+of belt-line freight railroads partly or entirely encircling the town. At
+Buffalo, the New York Central lines have built a connecting line to enable
+through traffic to escape the congestion of city yards and terminals,
+while at New Haven, the road of the same name has recently spent several
+million dollars in enlarging its narrow throat in the middle of the town.
+
+But nowhere else did the situation approach that at Pittsburgh. Through
+the Pennsylvania's passenger station there poured not only an abnormally
+heavy passenger traffic, owing to a heavy suburban service, but every
+pound of freight bound between the parent company and its two great
+subsidiaries, the Panhandle and the Fort Wayne. There were further
+complications right at the station, owing to the proximity of two of the
+very worst grade-crossings in America, where Penn and Liberty Avenues
+swept their busy tides of city traffic all day long over the Fort Wayne's
+main line tracks. It was a problem that called for the best in engineering
+skill--and received it.
+
+The Pennsylvania dug deep into its pocket-book and solved the problem
+magnificently. It began by going back to the vicinity of its great
+Pitcairn freight-yards at the east of the city, and from them building two
+connecting laterals (the one to the south and across the Monongahela River
+to connect with the Panhandle tracks, the other to the north--known as the
+Brilliant cut-off) across the Alleghany and connecting with the tracks of
+the West Penn Railroad, which in turn connected with those of the Fort
+Wayne in the one-time city of Allegheny. That sounds simple, but it was in
+reality a fearfully expensive undertaking. The mile of Brilliant cut-off,
+"heavy work" every inch of it, cost $5,500,000, and is to-day the most
+expensive mile of railroad track in the world.
+
+But the gripping hand was off the traffic throat of Pittsburgh and
+commercial Pittsburgh breathed more easily once again. The Union Station
+and its approach tracks were restored to passenger uses; and in the course
+of things the Pennsylvania tore down the old station, built a new one, and
+wiped out the two wicked city crossings, as with the stroke of an
+Aladdin's hand.
+
+So much for Pittsburgh. Now consider the great new freight line leading to
+the east from there. Not all of that railroad has yet been built, but the
+greater part of it is already completed, and every part of the old road
+that was under tension because of freight congestion has already been
+relieved.
+
+To build this new double-track railroad across 350 miles of a mountainous
+State, the engineers studied two points--grade and curvature. Distance
+was no object, for speed is the very last attainment of heavy tonnage
+movement. The new route consisted in part of the enlargement of the old
+routes, and in part of the construction of brand new line. It started east
+from Pittsburgh, where the great Brilliant cut-off had been built to
+relieve the tremendous terminal freight congestion, and followed up the
+valley of the Alleghany River on the route of the West Penn Road, a
+Pennsylvania property. The main line of the Pennsylvania comes east from
+Pittsburgh up the valley of the Monongahela for a distance, and then
+across country to Blairsville Intersection, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh,
+where it is intercepted by the low-grade freight route.
+
+From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and
+forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the
+slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the
+Pennsylvania's engineers were ordered to four-track the original
+double-track through that narrow defile in God's great world, they shook
+their heads dubiously; then--after the fashion of engineers--they went
+ahead and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same
+narrow pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast
+out a shelf on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the
+low-grade line.
+
+Just beyond Gallitzin, where the Pennsylvania pierces with two great
+tunnels the very summit of the Alleghanies, the low-grade line takes its
+own course once more, breaking farther and farther away from the main
+line, and for long sections following the trail of the long-since
+abandoned Portage Railroad. The day is coming when Gallitzin Tunnels are
+to be left high in the air. The Pennsylvania's officers tell you that
+frankly.
+
+"We have plans for a six-mile tunnel, to be handled by electric
+motive-power already made," said one of them, just the other day, "and
+every year we wait, that tunnel grows longer, the approaching grades less
+and less. It will cost money--money into millions of dollars--and it will
+earn 10 per cent on the investment."
+
+From Gallitzin, the low-grade line delves far south to Hollidaysburgh and
+then follows the tracks of a former branch line up to Petersburg on the
+main line, which it parallels to the Susquehanna. Where the main line
+crosses the Susquehanna at Rockville, the low-grade freight route diverges
+once again and follows the west bank of the river for a number of miles,
+completely avoiding in that way Harrisburg and the steel-making towns to
+the south of it with all of their conditions of congestion. The freight
+route crosses the broad Susquehanna at Shock's Mills, eight miles north of
+Columbia, and follows the east bank of the river for twenty miles to
+Shenks Ferry, where it turns abruptly eastward through the rugged hills of
+Lancaster County to a connection with the main line at Parkesburg. From
+thence it follows the main line nearly all the way to Glen Loch, crossing
+and re-crossing it but at all times retaining its nominal grades. At Glen
+Loch it makes a wide detour around Philadelphia and its suburbs and
+reaches with a long straight "short cut" over to the main line at
+Morrisville near Trenton.
+
+So much for the location of this great line of reconstruction. In grades
+and in curvatures it has achieved real triumphs. The great tonnage here is
+also always east-bound--coal and iron coming to the seaboard. Its grades
+also are chiefly consequential then to the east-bound movement. To that
+movement the heavy grades are again at the almost incredible figure of
+3-10 of one per cent--some seventeen feet to the mile. That will mean more
+when it is understood that that figure is equal to the pull that is
+required of an engine to start a heavy freight train upon an absolutely
+level track. With such a pull, grades become as nothing, and the
+Pennsylvania's operating department is enabled to run 75 trains an hour
+over this low-grade line; hour after hour upon a 15 minutes' interval.
+
+Ask a Pennsylvania officer what he would do with such traffic on his old
+main line to-day, and he will tell you that he would rather resign than
+tackle the proposition. The same thing is true on the New York Central
+lines. Like the Pennsylvania, that railroad thought a little time ago that
+with its four tracks it might move all civilization. Its acquisition of
+the bankrupt West Shore Railroad in the eighties gave it two extra tracks
+across New York State that for a long time were carried on the company's
+books as deadwood. Now they are filled with freight operation and bringing
+in a healthy return to their owners. The growing land is always catching
+up to its new railroad facilities, no matter how rapidly they may be
+constructed.
+
+To-morrow?
+
+The railroad operator does not like to think of that. He meets to-day and
+he plans as best he may against that to-morrow. To meet the great unknown
+he bids the engineers--those who construct and those who reconstruct--to
+him, and begs that they exercise their best wits to help him to see a
+little way into the dim and shadowy future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE RAILROAD AND ITS PRESIDENT
+
+ SUPERVISION OF THE CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES--ENGINEERING, OPERATING,
+ MAINTENANCE OF WAY, ETC.--THE DIVISIONAL SYSTEM AS FOLLOWED IN THE
+ PENNSYLVANIA ROAD--THE DEPARTMENTAL PLAN AS FOLLOWED IN THE NEW YORK
+ CENTRAL--NEED FOR VICE-PRESIDENTS--THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS--HARRIMAN A
+ MODEL PRESIDENT--HOW THE PENNSYLVANIA FORCED ITSELF INTO NEW YORK
+ CITY--ACTION OF A PRESIDENT TO SAVE THE LIFE OF A LABORER'S
+ CHILD--"KEEP RIGHT ON OBEYING ORDERS"--SOME RAILROAD PRESIDENTS
+ COMPARED--HIGH SALARIES OF PRESIDENTS.
+
+
+All the widely divergent lines of human activity in the organization of
+the railroad converge in the office of its president. He is the focal
+point of the entire system. More than that, he is its head and front. If
+he is anything less, the sooner he is out of his job the better for both
+the railroad and himself; for, although there is a great variety of
+departments in the organization of steam railroad transportation and each
+department will have still greater varieties of activities, there is but a
+single activity delegated to the office that bears only the modest word
+"president" in gilt letters upon its door. The function of that office is
+to supervise. To understand that supervision better, consider for a moment
+the rough structure of the railroad.
+
+Its activities are grouped into classes. The activity of soliciting
+business, both freight and passenger, forms the traffic department, in
+many ways the most important of all; for from it comes nearly all the vast
+revenue needed for the maintenance of the organism. The legal department
+looks after the railroad's rights--its franchises, its charters, the law
+fabric of its almost innumerable relations with the various railroad
+commissions, legislatures, city councils, and town and country boards. If
+the road be really sizable--with 8,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 miles of
+track--it will probably organize into separate departments the buying of
+its great quantities of supplies, the keeping of its intricate books, and
+the handling of its money. The business of building its lines and
+structures will need special talent for an engineering department. The
+department that will employ the great rank and file of the railroad's army
+of employees is the operating department, called by some big roads the
+transportation department.
+
+There are two other great factors of conducting a railroad; maintaining
+its lines--the tracks, bridges, tunnels and other features of the
+permanent way; and keeping both cars and engines fit for service. This
+last work, organized as the mechanical department, will probably rank next
+to operating in the number of its employees, and the value of its
+equipment is one of the greatest assets of the railroad. It is generally
+expressed in great shops located here and there and everywhere, at
+convenient points upon the system.
+
+Generally the maintenance-of-way department comes under operating--it is
+only fair that a general manager should supervise the condition of the
+line over which he is expected to operate his trains at high speed and in
+absolute safety. The same argument should hold true as to the equipment.
+But right here is the great rock upon which the principle of American
+railroad organization splits in twain.
+
+From the president's office downward, the system of organization may be
+divisional or departmental. In the former case, the division
+superintendent is the real unit of railroad operation: under his guidance
+and responsibility come not only the operation of the trains but the
+maintenance both of the line and of the rolling-stock. In the case of
+departmental organization that superintendent--and also, above him, the
+general superintendent--exercises no authority over the engineers of
+maintenance-of-way or the master mechanics of the shops along the system.
+Those lines of railroad activity do not converge with that of train
+operation below the office of the general manager. The greatest outside
+power that is given to a division superintendent on a purely departmental
+road is a sort of coöperation with the master mechanic in the matter of
+the men who handle the road's motive power. This coöperation is many times
+intricate and involved. If the master mechanic and the division
+superintendent are not harmoniously inclined toward one another, and
+things very naturally go wrong with the motive-power, it is a difficult
+matter to locate responsibility.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The Pennsylvania system, which is one of the most perfectly organized in
+the world, is strongly organized upon the divisional system. The division
+superintendent upon the Pennsylvania is indeed a prince above his
+principality, and he is well trained for his rulership. Pennsylvania men
+go through the mill. It takes a pretty capable man to combine the ability
+for handling trains and handling men with the intricate knowledge for
+command over an engineering corps devoted to maintenance-of-way, as well
+as command over a machine-shop which may employ a thousand skilled
+workmen. In order to give its division heads that tremendous training, the
+Pennsylvania sends its men through its own West Point, the great shops at
+Altoona. The men who have sat in the big, roomy office in Broad Street
+Station, Philadelphia, and who have been addressed as president, have been
+proud of the days when they were up in the hills of the Keystone State,
+standing their trick in overalls at the lathe, or carrying chain and rod
+over long stretches of track. To-day every Pennsylvania superintendent,
+possibly with a single exception or two, is a civil or mechanical
+engineer.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD AND THE NEW ON THE GREAT NORTHERN--THE "WILLIAM
+CROOKS," THE FIRST ENGINE OF THE HILL SYSTEM, AND ONE OF THE NEWEST
+MALLETS]
+
+[Illustration: THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC FINDS DIRECT ENTRANCE INTO SAN
+FRANCISCO FOR ONE OF ITS BRANCH LINES BY TUNNELS PIERCING THE HEART OF THE
+SUBURBS]
+
+[Illustration: PORTAL OF THE ABANDONED TUNNEL OF THE ALLEGHANY PORTAGE
+RAILROAD NEAR JOHNSTOWN, PA., THE FIRST RAILROAD TUNNEL IN THE UNITED
+STATES]
+
+On the other hand, the New York Central has also been brought into a
+high state of organization, and stands firmly on the departmental plan.
+
+"We believe that our superintendents should specialize in train
+operation," says one of the high officers of that road. "In other words,
+we do not believe that a man, to get his traffic through over a stretch of
+line, should necessarily know to a fraction of an inch the best wheel-base
+for an engine of a given type or the precise construction of a truss
+bridge. Such requirements take away from the special training that is
+to-day needed for every high-class railroader. A railroader is made better
+by sticking to one thing and sticking to it faithfully; and our
+departmental method, by which the maintenance of line and rolling-stock
+comes under the sole supervision of men expert in those specialties, we
+think the best. Sometimes we develop a very wizard in traffic handling,
+who has never had a chance at a technical education."
+
+And there you have the very essence of the other side of the proposition.
+Between these two sides there are various shadings and gradings, but the
+question has never been definitely solved. It has reduced the vast
+complexity in the organization of the modern railroad of the larger size.
+That has become so very complex it fairly cried for expert relief. One man
+has recently spent a busy term of years in simplifying the organization of
+the Harriman lines. To cut the intricate lines of red-tape in a big
+railroad office, to reduce to a minimum the vast needless correspondence
+between departments and between branches of a single department, is a
+problem that calls for genius--and offers for its solution no small
+reward.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In other days--and we refer to no ancient history, for the electric light
+was proved and the hundred-ton locomotive already increasing the average
+tonnage of the American freight train--the presidents of the biggest roads
+were content to worry along with one or two assistants. But two decades
+ago, the railroads were still simple matters; there did not exist the
+intimate relations between one and the others of them, as shown by
+stockholdings in competing and feeding lines to-day--the constant waiting
+of their executives upon the sessions of the different railroad
+commissions. These complications of American railroading have also further
+complicated the organizations of the different systems, and have brought a
+demand for executives of the keenest type. It is no slight strain that a
+man works under when he becomes the head of a ten-thousand-mile railroad.
+
+So to-day the president of the railroad has fortified himself in the only
+possible way--by creating vice-presidencies. Each ranking department
+to-day is apt to be recognized in council by a vice-president; and these
+heads form a cabinet as informal as that of the Federal Government and, in
+its way, quite as important. Legal traffic, and engineering traffic each
+demands a vice-president at that cabinet-board, and gets him. The general
+manager usually is the vice-president representing operation. One big road
+has eight vice-presidents. It is indeed a poor property that cannot show
+three or four men that are the fittest to hold this title.
+
+There is another cabinet where the president must sit, which is formal and
+recognized; it is the board of directors. Between it and the lesser
+cabinet the president must take good care that he is not ground as between
+millstones. The cabinet of his department heads will tell him how he can
+spend his money; but he must get it from the upper cabinet. It is not
+always harmonious pulling in the upper cabinet. Imagine for a moment the
+troubles that sometimes arise in the lower.
+
+You are sitting in the office of a big railroad president, talking
+straight to that big-shouldered soul himself. Outside is the shadowy roof
+of the train-shed of a terminal, which is filled with long lines of cars
+that come and go, of platforms that are black with humans one instant and
+quite deserted the next. The room has the quiet elegance of a comfortable
+home library. There are long rows of books upon the shelves; a great table
+is set squarely in the centre. But it is business--for a ticker is slowly
+spelling the fate of that railroad and every other railroad, upon the
+endless tape; a huge map of the system--many thousands of miles of
+high-class railroad--lies under the glass that covers the table top.
+
+"They don't always pull together," the president of the railroad admits,
+when you ask him about the lower cabinet. "Sometimes they pull apart when
+they have honestly different ideas as to policy, and other times--there's
+to be a big college football game up at G---- next Saturday. We have only
+two private cars for our four vice-presidents, every single blessed one of
+whom wants to go. I don't want to go myself, and I've contributed my car,
+but we're one short then, and the man that's left is going around like a
+boy who's had a chip knocked off his shoulder. He's just been in here, and
+I've settled the matter by hiring a car for his party from the Pullman
+folks and footing the bill myself. I sent him out ashamed of himself.
+
+"That's Pete every time. Flares up quick, and every time he flares up I
+can remember when we were working the day-and-night tricks in a
+God-forsaken junction out on a prairie stretch of the Great West. He's
+like a boy in some ways--awfully fussy about the rights and prerogatives
+of his department; and he'll go all to pieces over some little thing if he
+thinks another man has stepped over on to his side of the line. But let a
+big situation arise--a flood that sets a whole division of our lines
+awash; a wicked congestion of traffic in midwinter blizzards; a nasty
+accident that takes away our nerve--and you ought to see Pete! He'll be
+handling the thing as if he were putting a ball up on the links, and he'll
+never lose his confident smile. That man in one such emergency is worth
+the hire of a dozen Pullmans."
+
+You ask about the upper cabinet, and the president lowers his voice. The
+board is no matter for light conversation. He steps to the window and
+points down into the concourse of the train-shed.
+
+"I happen to know that young fellow over there by the mailbox," he
+answers. "He's one of our travelling freight-agents. He's lucky. He works
+for one boss, and is responsible to him; I work for a whole regiment of
+bosses, and am held responsible by a group of pretty keen old citizens who
+gather around this table and put me on the rack.
+
+"There are many interests in this property, and some of them are too big
+to sleep in the same bed. I have three directors who never speak to one
+another outside of this room, and rarely ever in it. There is another who
+represents the holdings of a road that fights this at every turn, and he
+hurts the property worse than any good husky plague. A big estate, with a
+bitter aversion to spending money for any purpose whatsoever, has another
+director here; and a banking interest presents a director who seconds him
+in every move, fool or good. That is the crowd I have got to work with
+when I want ten or fifteen millions to hold our own against some other
+fellow who is crowding us hard for business in our competitive territory
+or threatening to run a line into one of our own private melon-patches.
+That boy down there is lucky. He has only got to get out and land a couple
+of hundred carloads from a shipper who hates corporations worse than
+politics, and who has just had a claim for spoiled goods turned down by
+this particular corporation. That boy has the cinch job."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+This imaginary railroad president has told you of one of the vital points
+in the business of the railroad, the necessity for constant teamwork. A
+railroad head may have the genius of a Napoleon, the stubborn persistence
+of a Grant, or the marvellous executive ability of a Pierpont Morgan, and
+be worthless if his board is not working enthusiastically with and for
+him. It is not all pie and preserves by any means. The board may set its
+sweet will straight against his, and he may be forced to execute a policy
+of which in his own mind he has no trust. It is only once in a generation
+that a man like Harriman, who can bend a whole mighty directorate to his
+absolute will, arises. Harriman was a railroad president in the fullest
+sense of the word.
+
+He rode in his car north from Ogden one day, toward the great National
+Park of the Yellowstone. At that time the only direct rail entrance to
+that splendid reserve was by the rival Hill lines. Harriman had called for
+a report upon the opportunities for the Southern Pacific to strike its own
+line into the west edge of the Park. That report was being explained to
+him in great detail as he rode north from Ogden. His chiefs had a hundred
+practical reasons against building the line. Harriman listened faithfully
+to the explanation, as was his way. Then he turned to one of the signers
+of the report, a high officer of his property.
+
+"You have never been in the Yellowstone?" he asked.
+
+The officer admitted that he had not.
+
+"I have," said Harriman triumphantly, "and I am going to build that road."
+
+That road was built and became successful from its beginning; but Harriman
+was a railroader with the intuitive sense that gives genius to a great
+statesman or to a great general. The average railroad president does not
+hold a controlling interest himself and he must be guided pretty carefully
+by the judgment of his department heads; he must win the coöperation of
+his board by tact and subtlety rather than by the display of an iron will;
+and where he leads he must take the responsibility.
+
+The Pennsylvania Railroad, as has already been told in an earlier chapter,
+recently forced its entrance into New York City and marked its terminal
+there with a monumental station. That move was a strategy of the highest
+order, and was made that the road might place itself upon an even fighting
+basis for traffic with its chief competitor. But it cost. Two mighty
+rivers had to be crossed, whole blocks of high-priced real estate secured,
+a busy city threaded, the opposition of local authorities (who stood with
+palms outstretched) honestly downed. That all cost. That would have been a
+mighty expenditure for the Federal Government; for a private corporation
+it was all but staggering.
+
+When the station was finished, a rarely beautiful thing with its classic
+public rooms, its long vistas, and its vast dimensions, that private
+corporation built, within a niche of the great waiting-room, a bronze
+figure of its former president, the late A. J. Cassatt, where all hurrying
+humanity might see it. But, though a thousand nervous travellers see that
+statue in the passing of a single hour, not a hundred of them will know
+the splendid tragedy it represents; for many of the high officers of that
+railroad--some of the men who caused the bronze to be erected--to this day
+believe that the production of that great station was the cause of the
+death of their chief. He had dreamed of that terminal for years; his
+engineer had deemed it all but impossible, and he had sent overseas for
+other engineers. One of these, who had conquered the busy Thames, said
+that he could tunnel the two great rivers. He was asked the cost, and he
+gave it. His first figures were staggering, but the railroad president did
+not abandon his hope. He summoned his board and put the problem to them.
+
+There was pulling power between that president and his board, and the
+pulling was all in a single direction. Their system--a railroad that
+acknowledged no superior--could not keep in the very front rank without
+its terminal in the heart of the seaboard city, eliminating forever the
+delays and the inconveniences of a ferry service; the road could not
+afford to drop into second rank, and so it assumed the great undertaking.
+
+That meant many things more than laymen understand; the selling of
+securities in delicate markets, home and foreign, which fluctuate wildly
+on the promulgation of anticorporation talk; the evading of untiring
+competitors; the appeasing of hungry politicians, only too anxious to feed
+at the hands of a wealthy corporation. In this case, it meant more than
+all these things, for the two rivers were quite as treacherous as the
+American engineers had pronounced them. They would sound in their tunnel
+bearings and find rock which seemed soft, and their dynamite charges would
+be sufficient. Then it would prove hard, and their blast as inefficient as
+that of a child's toy cannon. Again, the rock would drill as hard as the
+hardest gneiss--the very backbone of Mother Earth herself, and the
+hard-rock men would prepare a heavy charge of dynamite. Then the stuff was
+as soft as gravel, and their heavy charge would have torn off the roofs of
+half a dozen houses. When they were under one of the rivers they found its
+bed--the roof of their tunnel--as soft as mud. There came a day when the
+little foaming swirls of water above their headings became a geyser: the
+river-bed had blown entirely out.
+
+After that, some of the younger engineers felt like throwing themselves
+into the wicked river, but the biggest engineer of all never lost his
+faith. He sent upstream and brought down a whole Spanish Armada of clumsy
+scows, each heaped high with sticky clay. That clay--in thousands of cubic
+yards--made a new river-bottom and the tunnel shields went forward.
+
+There were other obstacles and discouragements, almost an infinite array
+of them, to be surmounted, but this railroad president had steeled his
+mind to the accomplishment of that terminal. In the making of it he gave
+his life. When the day came for the drafts upon the railroad's treasury,
+mounting higher and higher, he was cheer; when bad news came from the
+burrowing engineers, he was courage; when timid stockholders and directors
+began to worry, he was comfort. He gave of his vitality to the
+organization, to the making of the terminal, until the day came when he
+gave too much--and his life went out while he was still like a mighty king
+in battle. He did not live to see the classic lines of the great station
+building. As he stands in the waiting-room, he stands in bronze. Those
+bronze eyes are powerless to see the splendid fruition of his endeavors.
+
+That sort of thing--heroic courage and death-bringing devotion to an
+enterprise--repeats itself now and then among the executives of the
+railroads. When the panic of 1907 reached high tide, there was a certain
+railroad president who, like his fellows, viewed it with no little alarm.
+He had lunched with a big steel man, the kind the newspapers like to call
+a magnate, and the steel man had scared him. The company for which the
+former labored was going to close half a dozen of its plants--was going to
+throw some thousands of poorly provided men out of work.
+
+The railroad president took that bad news back to his comfortable office;
+at night it travelled with him in his automobile to his big and showy
+house. It would hit his company hard in its heavy tonnage district, but
+that was only a single phase of the situation. He thought of things
+becoming more disjointed when the news became public--before that week had
+run its course. That night the president made up his mind to take a big
+step. It was risky business, but he thought it worth the risk.
+
+He sent for the steel man in the morning and asked him what was the best
+price he could make for his product. The steel man cut his regular profit
+in half, but the president was not satisfied.
+
+"You'll have to show me a better margin than that," he said.
+
+"We'll eliminate profits," said the steel man, "and give you the stuff at
+cost, to save shutting down our plant."
+
+"Is that the best you can do?" persisted the president.
+
+Before he was done, the steel man had also eliminated depreciation on
+plants and half a dozen minor expenses. He agreed to deliver at the mere
+cost of raw material and labor. Then he received an order that would have
+broken some records in prosperous times. The road was committed to some
+big building projects and it needed whole trainloads of girders and
+columns; bridges by the dozen. The railroad president went further, and
+helped out the steel man's car-building plant. He ordered 3,000 steel
+freight cars, and every day he was getting reports from his general
+manager of a further falling of traffic tides. They had motive-power
+rusting on sidings, and they were dumping freight cars in the ditches
+along the right-of-way because they did not have storage-room for them.
+That took courage of a certain high-grade sort. When those freshly-painted
+new steel cars began to be delivered in daily batches of sixty, some of
+his directors asked him where he was going to find room to store them. He
+did not answer, for he did not know; but in the long run he won out. His
+company had a new equipment for the returning flood-tide of traffic which
+had cost it 25 per cent less than that of its competitors. When the time
+came to build its big improvement it had the steel all stored and ready.
+The president was able to tell his directors then that he had saved them
+$1,700,000 on that close bargain that he had driven in panicky times.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Sometimes a little thing makes a railroad president big.
+
+The head of a busy road in the Middle West was hurrying to Chicago one day
+to attend a mighty important conference of railroad chiefs. His special
+was halted at a division point for an engine-change, and the president was
+enjoying a three-minute breathing spell walking up and down beside his
+car. An Italian track laborer tried to make his way to him. The
+president's secretary, who was on the job, after the manner of presidents'
+secretaries, stopped the man. The signal was given that the train was
+ready, but the president saw that the track-hand was crying. He ordered
+his train held and went over to him. The story was quickly told. The
+track-hand's little boy had been playing in the yards and had hidden in an
+open box-car; so his small companions had reported. Afterwards the car had
+been closed and sealed by a yardmaster's employee. Somewhere it was
+bumping its weary way in a lazy freight train, while a small boy, hungry
+and scared, was vainly calling to be let out.
+
+Perhaps that president had a boy of the same size--they always do in
+stories; and perhaps--this being reality--he did not. But he stopped there
+for three precious hours, at that busy division point, while he sent
+orders broadcast to find the boy, orders that went with big authority
+because they came from the high boss himself. He was late at the
+conference, because that search was taking his mind and his attention. He
+hung for hours at a long-distance telephone, personally directing the
+boy-hunt with his marvellously fertile and resourceful mind. When action
+came entirely too slowly he ordered the men out of the shops and all
+interchange freight halted, until every one of 12,000 or 14,000 box cars
+had been opened and searched. Finally, from one of these they drew forth
+the limp and almost lifeless body of a small boy.
+
+The railroad chief died a little while ago and was buried in a city 500
+miles away from the line that he had controlled. The track-hands of his
+line, with that delicate sensibility that is part and parcel of the
+Italian, dug deep into their scanty savings and hired a special train,
+that they might march in a body at his funeral.
+
+It sometimes takes a big man to do a little thing in a big way.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Here is Underwood, the railroad president who took hold of the Erie when
+the property was a byword and a joke, who began pouring money into it to
+give it real improvements and possibilities for economical handling, and
+made it a practical and a profitable freighter, a freighter of no mean
+importance at that. He once issued an order that any car on the road (no
+matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel should be immediately
+cut out of the train. The order was posted in every yardmaster's office up
+and down that system.
+
+Some time after it went into effect, Underwood was hurrying east in his
+private car. It was essential that he should reach Jersey City in the
+early morning, for he had a big day's grist awaiting him at his office. A
+real railroad president, working 18 hours a day, can brook few delays. But
+when the president awoke, his car was not in motion; the foot of his bunk
+was higher than the head. He looked out and found himself in a railroad
+yard three or four hundred miles from his office. When he got up and out
+he saw why his bed had been aslant. The observation end of his car was
+jacked up and the car-repairers were slipping a new pair of wheels
+underneath it. A car-tinker bossed the job and Underwood addressed him.
+
+"Who gave you authority to cut out my car?" he asked.
+
+"If you will walk over to my coop," said the car-tinker, politely, "you
+will find my authority in orders from headquarters to cut out any car (no
+matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel."
+
+When the new wheels were in place the president of the road put his hand
+upon the shoulder of the car-tinker and marched him uptown. The man
+obeyed, not knowing what was coming to him. Underwood walked him straight
+into a jeweller's shop, picked out the best gold watch in the case and
+handed it to the car-tinker.
+
+"You keep right on obeying orders," he said.
+
+The relations between a railroad president at the head of the
+organization, and some man who struggles ahead in the army of which the
+president is general, would make a whole book. They still tell a story in
+Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, of Mr. Cassatt, the Pennsylvania's
+great president, and the brakeman.
+
+It seems that one of the suburban locals that took Cassatt to his country
+home up the main line was halted one night by an unfriendly signal. The
+president, mildly wondering at the delay, found his way to the rear
+platform. On the lower step of that platform, in plain violation of the
+company's rule, sat the rear brakeman. Cassatt was never a man who was
+quick with words, but he said in a low voice:
+
+"Young man, isn't there a rule on this road that a brakeman shall go a
+certain distance to the rear of a stalled train to protect it by danger
+signal?"
+
+The brakeman spat upon the right-of-way and, without lifting his eyes from
+it, said:
+
+"If there is, it's none of your damn business."
+
+Cassatt--the man who could strike an arm of Pennsylvania into the heart of
+metropolitan New York at a cost of many millions of dollars--was much
+embarrassed.
+
+"Oh, certainly it isn't," he said with an attempt at a smile. "I was
+merely asking for information."
+
+The next morning the president of the Pennsylvania summoned the
+trainmaster of that suburban division to his desk and reported the matter.
+The trainmaster turned three colors. It was _lèse-majesté_ of the most
+heinous sort. He proposed the immediate dismissal of the offending
+brakeman. Cassatt ruled against that. He was too big a man to be seeking
+to rob any brakeman of his job.
+
+"Just tell him," he said to the trainmaster, with a suggestion of a smile
+about his lips, "that he cussed the president, and that, as a personal
+favor, I should like him to be more polite to passengers in the future."
+
+No two railroad presidents come up to their problem in quite the same way.
+Take the two members of the Western railroad world--one gone now--Hill and
+Harriman. In J. J. Hill's domain the personality of the man counts for
+everything. He picks his men, advances them, rejects or dismisses them,
+by a rare intuitive sense, with which he judges character. A high chief in
+his ranks once asked for a vacation in which to take his family to Europe.
+Hill granted it. When the man came back from Europe another was at his
+desk. Hill did not approve of long vacations, and that was his method of
+showing it. The department head should have known better.
+
+On the other hand, Harriman measured his men impersonally--as if in a
+master scale. He measured them by results. A man might personally be
+somewhat repugnant to him, but if he accomplished results for the road, he
+held his place, at least until some one came along who could do even
+better.
+
+W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, and James McCrea, of the
+Pennsylvania, are the heads of two railroads great in mileage and in
+volume of traffic; yet their methods are in many essentials radically
+different. McCrea is the essence of Pennsylvania policy--coldly
+impersonal. It is easier to gain an audience with the president of the
+United States than with the president of the Pennsylvania. No Pennsylvania
+man from president down to the lowest ranking officer, grants an interview
+to a newspaper reporter. It would be risky business for any officer of the
+Pennsylvania to have his photograph published or himself glorified by
+reason of his connection with the company. The company is the corporation.
+
+When it speaks, it speaks impersonally through its press agent, a clever
+young man with clever assistants, who both answers newspaper questions and
+advances newspaper information. His function is a new one of the American
+railroad, and allies itself directly with the office of the president.
+
+W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, probably stands preëminent to-day
+among American railroad executives. He has shouldered himself up from the
+ranks of the railroad army, and only good wishes have gone to him as he
+has stepped from one high post to a still higher one. He has come, as
+nine out of ten successful executives have come, from the operating end of
+the railroad.
+
+Brown is particularly accessible to newspaper reporters. He talks with
+them, carefully and painstakingly, and sees to it that they are correctly
+informed as to each of the great railroad problems of the day. He believes
+sincerely that the head of a railroad should be personality and that the
+personality should stand forth directly in the guidance of the property.
+In his own case, at least, he has demonstrated the value of his theory.
+
+For all this work and all this strain, the railroad president demands that
+he be adequately paid. He has a good many perquisites--chief among them a
+comfortable private car at his beck and call; but perquisites are not
+salary. The head and front of the American railroad to-day receives
+anywhere from $15,000 to $75,000; an astonishingly large percentage of
+railroad presidents are receiving at least $50,000 annually. But they work
+for their pay--sometimes with their life-devotion, as in the case of the
+big man who built the big terminal; other times with the hard sense of the
+president who bought his steel girders and cars in the time of panic. Here
+is a case in point.
+
+A road in the Middle West, which was so compact as to make it quite local
+in character, had a big traffic proposition to handle and was handling it
+in a miserable fashion. One local celebrity after another tackled it,
+until the directors were laying side bets with one another as to the
+precise day when the receiver should walk into the office. Finally,
+Eastern capital, which was heavily interested in the property, revolted at
+the local offerings, and sent out an operating man with a big reputation
+to take hold of it.
+
+The directors received him with a certain veiled distrust as coming from
+another land, but in the end they hired him. The matter of salary came up
+last of all.
+
+"Fifty thousand," said the New Yorker in a low voice.
+
+One of the local directors spoke up.
+
+"Fifteen thousand!" said he. "It's out of the question. We've never paid
+more than twelve."
+
+"So I should imagine," was the dry response. "But I said fifty, not
+fifteen."
+
+The consternation that followed may be imagined! In the end the New Yorker
+carried his point. At the end of just twelve months he had, through his
+acquaintance in Wall Street, and his keen insight into the big channels of
+finance, cut that little road's interest charges just $800,000 a year. The
+receiver has not come yet. The road has accomplished a miracle and has
+begun to pay dividends. There is another miracle to relate. Last spring,
+the directors of the road voted an increase in salary to their
+president--and he courteously refused it!
+
+"I think the presidency of this road is worth $50,000 a year," he said,
+frankly, "and not one cent more."
+
+That is the way a president should stand above and with his board.
+
+Only a little time ago, another president, who had no easier proposition
+to set upon its feet, was criticised by a querulous old director for his
+lavish use of private cars and special trains. That president was having
+his own troubles--his job had no soft places; but he said nothing when the
+testy old fellow lectured him as he might have lectured a sin-filled
+schoolboy. When the director was done, the president spoke in a low voice.
+
+"Gentlemen, my resignation is on the table," was his reply to the censure.
+
+The next moment there was consternation in that board. The president
+slipped out of the room and left them to consider the matter. When he
+returned, the chairman of the board, who had nodded in half approval at
+the censure, was at the door to greet him.
+
+"We refuse to accept your resignation," he said; "but the board does feel
+that you ought to have a new car--the present one's getting shabby, Phil."
+
+And in that moment the president felt that his work had gained one little
+ounce of appreciation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE LEGAL AND FINANCIAL DEPARTMENTS
+
+ FUNCTIONS OF GENERAL COUNSEL, AND THOSE OF GENERAL ATTORNEY--A SHREWD
+ LEGAL MIND'S WORTH TO A RAILROAD--THE FUNCTION OF THE CLAIM-AGENT--MEN
+ AND WOMEN WHO FEIGN INJURY--THE SECRET SERVICE AS AN AID TO THE
+ CLAIM-AGENT--WAGES OF EMPLOYEES THE GREATEST OF A RAILROAD'S
+ EXPENDITURES--THE PAY-CAR--THE COMPTROLLER OR AUDITOR--DIVISION OF THE
+ INCOME FROM THROUGH TICKETS--CLAIMS FOR LOST OR DAMAGED
+ FREIGHT--PURCHASING-AGENT AND STORE-KEEPER.
+
+
+At the very elbow of the railroad president stands the general counsel. He
+is shrewd, resourceful, diplomatic. He has quick perception and action,
+the faith and the loyalty of a friend. In many cases he is a personal
+officer of the president--in the highest sense. If there is a change of
+administration of the railroad, there is apt to be a change in the office
+of the general counsel. If B----, who has been guiding the destinies of
+the T. & S., goes to Transcontinental, he is apt to take Y----, his
+general counsel along with him. For except in the case of some exquisitely
+organized roads like the Pennsylvania, for instance, the general counsel
+is in every sense personal to the president. He advises him privately,
+urges him to this step, cautions him from that.
+
+On the other hand, the general attorney is more apt to be the legal
+officer of the railroad. Like the general counsel he has an old-fashioned
+pride in his profession that makes him hesitate at accepting a
+vice-presidency; he likes the ring of "general attorney" or "general
+counsel" in his own ears. Railroad history and tradition both go to prove
+that. He will hardly drop those titles for anything less than that of
+president.
+
+The general attorney, unlike the general counsel, in most cases will
+make his offices in the railroad's headquarters. He will handle its
+litigation, and if in half a dozen years he can bring down its verdict
+costs from $1,250,000 to $750,000 for an average twelve month, as one man
+did, he will be well worth the large salary that he demands and gets. And
+his salary will be only one of many of the heavy expenses of the legal
+department. When that functionary asks for money he gets it and without
+many questionings. The operating department, the traffic department, the
+engineers, may have to give sharp account for their appropriations; the
+legal end of the railroad is trusted to accomplish accurate results,
+without detailed accounting. In some cases it might prove embarrassing.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+You want to know the value of the shrewd and perceptive legal mind to a
+big railroad? Here is a case that proves his worth:
+
+A certain transportation company in the East had a legal vice-president
+who many people supposed was a political heritage to the road, a man for
+whom it was supposed a berth had been made by the owner of the property,
+who was something of a politician himself. A quick turning of the wheel of
+fortune had thrown one political party out of business at the capital, and
+another in. The man was given a place in the railroad offices, and a
+little later was made a vice-president. It so happened that the
+vice-president knew more than supposers might even imagine; but he was a
+quiet man, and sometimes some of his own clerks wondered why he drew his
+big salary. After he had been at his desk a dozen years they found the
+reason.
+
+In gathering up a number of railroad properties to make the parent
+company--after the fashion of modern railroad practice--one of the most
+important of these old-time units was found to be in woefully shabby
+physical form. It was a valuable road in the consolidation. The new parent
+was willing to guarantee an annual rental of 10 per cent on its stock;
+but as a railroad it fairly shook at the knees. It stood in dire need of
+reconstruction, and the men who were offering it a high rental made that a
+provision of the deal. The old road finally agreed to spend $12,000,000 in
+revising its line and in buying new locomotives, cars, and bridges. With
+much ado it accomplished its revision, and brought itself up closer to
+modern standards of railroading.
+
+A decade later when the governmental supervision of the railroads had come
+into the full flush of its authority, the quiet vice-president had an
+armful of State commission reports and vouchers brought to his desk. He
+locked himself in his room, and in a week he had made from them a
+20,000-word abstract in long hand. Then he took his report in to the
+president of the road.
+
+The acute mind of that general counsel--you see that he was vice-president
+in this particular case--searching here and there and everywhere, had
+discovered a mouse-hole. The old-time road had not fulfilled its part of
+the contract. It had found that it could revise its lines at a cost of a
+little less than $9,000,000 and had quietly pocketed the change. The big
+rent-paying consolidation went into the courts, after its cool, impassive
+way. The case went to a referee and the referee took four years to hear
+the case and decide it. There were 5,000 exhibits offered in evidence and
+8,000 closely written pages of evidence, making a case nearly equal to
+that of the receivership of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New
+York City, which fills twenty pudgy volumes of some 800 pages each.
+
+The referee decided in favor of the parent company, and rendered a verdict
+close to $6,000,000, principal and interest. The case was appealed, and
+sustained. That vice-president had proved his worth. The president of the
+defendant road came to him.
+
+"We simply can't pay," he pleaded. "We've no reserve fund."
+
+"Then we will take it out of your rental," was the emotionless reply of
+the quiet vice-president.
+
+That type of man stands forth as a possibility to every one of the dozens
+and dozens of young men who make the main staff of the railroad's legal
+department. Those fellows come to the railroad fresh from the law schools.
+Their salaries are small but their experience and their opportunities are
+enormous. It is a far better career at the beginning than a briefless
+existence in one's own office, even though one's own name is emblazoned in
+brilliant gilt letters upon the door. A young man coming into the legal
+department of a large railroad has a diversity of work offered him. He
+draws up the simplest of papers at first, acts as assistant to a trial
+lawyer, then finally comes to the time when he will alone fight the
+railroad's case in some minor cause in a small court. After that the
+causes get bigger, the courts more important, he begins to delve into law
+libraries and to write briefs. Gradually he emerges into a full-fledged
+lawyer. He may eventually become general attorney or general counsel, and
+he may find himself welcome to the partnership of some really important
+law firm. He has knowledge that may be of value in fighting the railroad;
+whether he will use that knowledge in afterwards fighting his employer is
+a matter for his own conscience to determine.
+
+There are special departments under the main heading of the law
+department. Counsel, the ablest of counsel, is retained at each important
+point reached by the railroad, and these counsel must act in conjunction
+and coöperation with headquarters. Special tax counsel have an important
+office by themselves, for the railroad sometimes finds itself in a
+difficult position. In its pride it may announce to the world, through the
+newspapers, that the new Bingtown depot has cost $400,000, but when the
+Bingtown appraisers come around, possessing in their bosoms no inherent
+love for the railroad, those newspaper clippings in their hands, the tax
+counsel begins to earn his salary.
+
+In these days of Federal and State supervision and regulation of railroad
+management, with now and then an aldermanic chamber or a county board of
+supervisors trying its hand at the game, there is sure to be special
+counsel, generally known as the commerce or commission counsel, assigned
+to the complaints and hearings. For intricate, involved, or unusual cases
+the road may go outside of its own ranks and hire special counsel--lawyers
+who are specialists in the very thing involved.
+
+Just as the big and tactful attorney stands back of the railroad's
+president, so there crouches at his feet the claim-agent of the company,
+who is its watch-dog and its scenting hound. Back of this claim-agent, who
+must have achieved a reputation for keen-sightedness and marked ability
+before receiving his position, is a busy company of claim agents, at
+headquarters and every division headquarters upon the system. Together,
+these form a militant organization that stands with the legal department
+to defend the railroad's treasury against indiscriminate raiding.
+
+Sometimes, because the work dovetails in many ways closely with that of
+the operating department, these claim-agents work under the order of the
+general manager and the division superintendents. A sly old fellow who
+once headed a big road in the Middle West once explained the reason
+why--in the case of his property--without even a trace of a smile.
+
+"John says," he was speaking of his own general counsel, "that a
+claim-agent can't be yanked up before any of these touchy bar associations
+and charged with unprofessional practices if we can show cases--that
+they're just railroad men and not lawyers, at all."
+
+That was an exaggerated case. As a rule, the young claim-agent has
+abundant need to be upon his mettle. The public, with an inborn itching
+against the corporation, keeps him upon that mettle. The man who has had a
+slight bump upon a railroad train--to make an instance--hunts out the
+claim office at headquarters. He gets quick treatment and mighty courteous
+treatment. If he can prove himself in any way entitled to a reimbursement,
+he gets it--in cash upon the spot. Likewise he signs a release--a most
+ponderous and impressive document. When his "John Smith" goes upon that
+document he has, in its own magnificent phrasing "in consideration of
+money received" released the railroad company from all obligation to him
+from the beginning of the world, the fall of man and the decline of the
+Roman Empire up to the very moment of the signing.
+
+He goes home, pretty well satisfied with himself. It was only a little
+bump at that. A twenty-five cent bottle of arnica had made him physically
+himself once again; and as for his suit, well, that was pretty well worn,
+anyway, and three dollars to a tailor would make it a good "second best"
+for next winter. He feels that the ten dollars that the railroad gave him
+was pretty abundant compensation.
+
+But wait until he sees his neighbor. The neighbor almost froths at the
+mouth when he hears of the transaction--of the impressively worded release
+that was signed.
+
+"You're a chump," he says. "You could have gone to bed, stayed there a
+week and they would have been glad to give you a hundred."
+
+After which the man looks upon his ten dollars with contempt and a feeling
+of injury, and becomes a corporation hater. Or perhaps he was really hurt
+and had some sort of a bill from his doctor and his druggist, lost time to
+be compensated at his job. The railroad has figured these together and
+paid him the sum, with the signing of the release as a necessary feature
+of the transaction. The thing was not very serious, we will say, in this
+instance also, and the hundred dollars that he received was really a fair
+compensation. Now watch the neighbor, who it happens is a pretty shrewd
+attorney:
+
+"Let me take the case, even now," he urges slyly. "I'll get a verdict of
+five thousand for you, if you are wise, and we will divide the proceeds."
+
+"But I've signed their release," groans the other.
+
+The shyster laughs in his face.
+
+"You were drugged," he whispers, "drugged, and we will prove it."
+
+That is not an exaggerated case. It is the sort of thing that the
+railroad's claim-agents are combating every day of the year; and then
+wonder not, that some of them finally lose the fine sense of honor,
+themselves.
+
+And beyond this class of folk, is another--nothing less than criminal.
+There are men and women in this broad land who make a business of feigning
+injury, and make it a pretty astute business, too, so that they may dig
+deep into the strong-boxes of the railroad. The most dramatic of this
+particular brand of "nature fakirs" has been Edward Pape, the man with the
+broken neck. Pape has a most remarkable deformity and has not been slow to
+avail himself of it as a money-making device far beyond the figures that
+might be quoted for him by circus side-shows or dime museums. Pape makes a
+specialty of the trolley companies. He can so alight from a car, coming
+slowly to a stop, that he will fall and go rolling into the gutter.
+Instantly there is excitement and a group of men to pick up the prostrate
+form. He is found to be badly injured and is hurried to a hospital. There
+the internes discover that he has a broken neck. A marvellous set of X-ray
+photographs are made, and the railroad is usually willing to settle a
+large cash sum rather than stand suit. Within a week he will probably be
+away and practising his trick on some unsuspecting railroad.
+
+"There was a time over in Philadelphia that was hell," Pape once told the
+writer. "I'd just finished my fancy fall, and they got me into the
+sickhouse and rigged out most to kill. They put hip-boots on me there in
+bed, with their soles fastened to the foot-board and a rubber bandage
+under my chin and over my head. They put seventy-five pounds in weights
+on a cord and a pulley-jigger to that bandage and it nearly killed me all
+day long. At night I used to wait until it was dark and then I'd haul up
+the weights and put them under the blanket with me. Otherwise, I don't
+know how I'd 'a' got my sleep."
+
+[Illustration: THE FREIGHT DEPARTMENT OF THE MODERN RAILROAD REQUIRES A
+VERITABLE ARMY OF CLERKS]
+
+[Illustration: THE FARMER WHO SUED THE RAILROAD FOR PERMANENT INJURIES--AS
+THE DETECTIVES WITH THEIR CAMERAS FOUND HIM]
+
+Little things like the discomfort of hospital treatment and searching
+examinations by railroad surgeons do not seem to discourage these
+criminals. They take these as necessary hardships that go with their
+profession. Inga Hanson, the woman who impersonated deafness, dumbness,
+blindness and paralysis to win a heavy verdict from the Chicago City
+Railway Company, and who was afterwards convicted of perjury, was wheeled
+daily into the court-room in a chair apparently nothing more than a
+living, inert, shapeless mass of humanity, exquisitely trained to enact
+her role of deception.
+
+Sometimes the claim-agents, working in conjunction with the railroad's
+secret service, have used the camera to great advantage. A farmer who
+lives in New Jersey drove into a seaboard city with a load of produce. At
+a grade crossing, a switch-engine overturned his craft, about as gently as
+such an accident could be accomplished. The farmer was lucky in that he
+was bruised, rather than seriously hurt. Then he saw a lawyer and learned
+that he was incapacitated for life by severe internal injuries. He entered
+suit for $25,000 against the railroad.
+
+There was a case for the secret-service bureau of the railroad, and it
+took little time to find the right detectives, husky enough to get out
+into the fields and work for four long weeks as farmhands. When the Jersey
+farmer began haying that August, he found less trouble than he had ever
+before experienced in hiring low-priced help. He was able to get two big
+lads, who were hard workers.
+
+It was a big hay year and the farmer was not averse to turning in to do
+his part of the work. He liked to be with the boys he had hired and one of
+them had a camera that he could take "great" pictures with. He showed him
+some of the pictures that he took those August days on the Jersey farm.
+The farmer liked them immensely.
+
+He liked them rather less when his attorney came down from the city one
+day, with prints of the same pictures that had been sent him by the law
+department of the railroad. The farmer was given a chance to withdraw from
+the limelight or else stand a criminal trial for perjury, with the
+penitentiary's gray walls looming up behind. He took the chance. Few of
+the dishonest claimants will proceed after such evidence has been put
+before them. As for the railroad, it usually works better through getting
+signed confessions of guilt than by going through the somewhat intense
+workings of a criminal trial.
+
+The secret service stands just back of the claim-agents. It has greater or
+less recognition in the case of different railroads but its work is
+generally much the same. It is police. Sometimes it is organized like the
+police department of a small city, with captains and inspectors at various
+division headquarters, and at other times its very existence is denied by
+the railroad heads. But its work is much the same. Its men, generally
+chosen for fitness from city police or detective staffs, sometimes root
+out tramps or small thieves along the line and in the freight-yards,
+sometimes in gay uniform patrol the platforms of crowded passenger
+terminals, sometimes work with greatest secrecy in "plain clothes"--which
+in this case may be jeans or overalls--to detect theft or treason among
+employees, and sometimes they receive their greatest laurels in connection
+with the "fake" suits that are brought against the railroad.
+
+The secret-service works night and day. Its members, with the
+claim-agents, are at the scene of a serious accident as quickly as the
+wrecking-train itself. Together with the railroad's own corps of surgeons,
+retained in every important town, and chosen for absolute honesty and
+integrity, they form an important adjunct of the personal injury claim
+service.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The financial officer of the railroad is, of course, the treasurer. It is
+he who receives its earnings--running possibly into a hundred millions
+dollars in the course of a twelvemonth--and disburses them for supplies
+and for wages, for taxes and for bond coupons, and, it is to be hoped, for
+dividends. He works through appointed banks; and the bank president who
+can go out and capture one or two good railroad accounts for his
+institution has earned his salary for several years to come. The selection
+of the banks is one of the dramatic phases of the inside politics of
+railroading; it is a cause of constant wire-pullings and heartburnings.
+
+"Do you see that whited sepulchre down there?" a big railroad head laughs
+to you as he points to a white marble skyscraper closing the vista of a
+city canyon. "This road built that temple of business. Our account is its
+backbone. Sometimes we deposit a million dollars a day and it is no
+uncommon thing for our balance there, approaching coupon or dividend times
+to reach sixteen or seventeen million dollars."
+
+He laughs again, then grows confidential.
+
+"We're in a bit of a hole," he admits. "Some of the big manufacturers
+downtown are organizing a bank, and it looks as if it was going to be a
+pretty solid sort of institution. They want a big account from us, and our
+traffic people are urging their cause. In the long run they'll get the
+account."
+
+Then he explains to you that the railroad endeavors to hold down its bank
+accounts, although it must have them in a large number of different
+cities, to avoid the long shipments of large quantities of money. The
+agents and the conductors will, following a carefully arranged system,
+send their receipts to the nearest designated banks, mailing memorandum
+slips of the deposit both to the treasurer and to the comptroller. The
+bank in its turn, sends receipt slips to both of these officers, so the
+deposit transaction is hedged about with a sufficient degree of formality
+and detail.
+
+When it comes to pay out its money, the railroad has no lessened degree of
+formality and detail. For the wages of its employees--generally the
+greatest of all expenditures--the railroad has proper system and order.
+The paymaster makes out the voluminous pay-rolls, they are each properly
+attested by the heads of departments; and for his pay-roll totals, the
+necessary vouchers are issued to him by the treasurer. He may pay the
+railroad army by check or he may send his deputies out over the system in
+the pay-cars.
+
+The pay-car is one of the pleasantest of the surviving old-time railroad
+customs. The shriek of the whistle of the engine that hauls it is the
+pleasantest melody that can come to the ears of the man out upon the line.
+To shuffle in a long line up to its platform window where the railroad's
+money is being paid out in tiny envelopes, as each man signs the
+impressive roll, is one of the greatest joys that anticipation can hold
+out. As the car makes its routine trip over the line each month or each
+fortnight, it draws its money from the various repository banks, or else
+the cash is forwarded to it at division points from headquarters.
+
+But, like many old customs, the pay-car is disappearing. The railroads are
+more and more paying their men by check. It is a better system in many
+ways. It avoids the handling of large sums of money, and many of the men
+prefer not to have a roll of bills thrust into their hands. The old
+prejudice among them against checks is practically over. The checks are
+constant incentives toward saving, the small banks in the little town are
+shrewdly reaching for the accounts of the thrifty railroaders. There may
+not be much for the bank in just one of these accounts, but they can
+quickly multiply into considerable sums.
+
+We have already spoken of the comptroller; he is called the auditor upon
+some of our railroads. The comptroller is the most passionless and
+unemotional of all railroad officials. He measures the worth of his
+fellows by cold mathematical rules, by addition, by subtraction, by
+multiplication, by division. Even as big a man as the president may
+shudder at the result of such coldly accurate measurings.
+
+No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval of
+the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a
+governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and
+wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise, men
+fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight.
+
+His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule,
+an auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight
+receipts report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of
+sharp-eyed young men, each also having an almighty respect for
+mathematical accuracy, will be up and down the line for him, catching up
+careless agents on the one hand, and on the other gently showing them how
+to keep their accounts better, and conform more carefully to the company's
+established standards. Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the
+mileage of the company's cars travelling over other roads, and the
+equipment of other roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the
+comptroller, oftener, however, directly to the operating department. All
+these make a considerable office--an office which usually treads its
+monotonous path and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well
+considered in the organization of the railroad.
+
+The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels--as we
+have already indicated--passenger receipts, freight receipts and
+disbursements, and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the
+accounting has, of course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash
+fare collections made by conductors upon the trains. This would be simple
+enough bookkeeping if a good many years ago the interline or coupon
+ticket, entitling the bearer to ride upon several different roads, had not
+come into popularity. To apportion the revenue of a ticket between the
+half-dozen different lines upon which it has been used requires almost no
+end of system and accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting
+with its fellows, with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The
+coupons themselves are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single
+road--because of the freight as well as the passenger business--may be
+kept standing in the treasuries of several hundred other roads. It is a
+system quite as intricate, in itself, as the relations between city and
+country banking and yet it is only a single small phase of the conduct of
+the railroad.
+
+The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization,
+make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors
+at the end of each day's run. He must see to it that the conductor is
+neither careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will
+bring the matter quickly to the attention of the operating department.
+
+In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad
+passenger traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones
+across the country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad
+transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which
+may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps
+be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles' riding at a saving over
+local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has
+complied with its provisions within the year's life of the book, he will
+be paid $5 rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding
+at two cents a mile. Sometimes these books take the form of "scrip" which
+is silent upon mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent
+portions, sold at wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five
+cents each.
+
+In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger
+receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where
+there is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have
+to be very careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage
+books. The law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to
+passenger receipts, for the law seems to point to even finer lines than
+the comptroller. He cannot even subtract the $5 which will probably return
+to the purchaser, and charge the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales
+must be credited to a separate account, and only transferred to the main
+receipts of the railroad as the strip is turned in for passage, a few
+miles at a time.
+
+Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that
+the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The
+passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts
+of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle
+that comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and
+each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone
+will sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office,
+will involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the
+railroads.
+
+And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation
+and settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the
+railroad. There is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an
+overcharge claim, the routine is comparatively simple. The audit office
+should have information at hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle
+it immediately. But if the claim is for lost or damaged freight, the thing
+complicates. Before the freight claim department will draw a voucher
+against the treasurer, it will have to assure its own conscience that the
+claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.
+
+From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or
+telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills--pays its
+men, as we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and
+its fire insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the
+twelve months of the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between
+receipts and expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and
+attested vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed
+the very best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt
+stating the precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid.
+
+In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call
+him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to
+locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical
+department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system
+for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of
+the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the
+number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the
+mileage of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement.
+Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores,
+and the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these
+the comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive
+performances--so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then
+he will show the average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon,
+for the railroad never forgets the cost.
+
+It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost
+and revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The
+statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the
+railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics become graphic, and
+the comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office,
+prepares charts, in which statistics become "curves of averages" or jotted
+and wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning.
+
+"Government by draughting-board," sniffs the old-time railroader as he
+sees these great "cross-hatched" sheets with their crazy lines of
+intelligence spun across them, but it is "government by draughting-board"
+that has made the old-time railroader--well, the old-time railroader. The
+new-time railroader gives heed to those charts--the pulse readings of the
+creature that he is directing--guides his course in no small way by them.
+They are veritable charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.
+
+Branching, as a rule, direct from the president's office and occasionally
+from the general manager's, are the purchasing agent and the store-keeper,
+many times one and the same, or the former acting as superior to the
+latter. The purchasing agent has no easy role. If he is not above sharp
+practices--the gift of a bit of furniture or a theatre box, in the least
+instances--he will fulfil only part of the reputation of his office; and
+if he is--as many, many of them are--absolutely honest down to the keenest
+degree of an acute conscience, he will probably still be under the
+suspicion of some querulous minds. His opportunities for deceit and guile
+are many, so much the more must he be an honest man in every full sense of
+that word.
+
+He brings the modern railroad's passion for standardization down to the
+purchase of its every sort of supplies; for his office goes out into the
+market for anything, from a box of matches to a locomotive. The very fact
+that his department is a non-revenue department, save for an occasional
+sale of scrap-iron or discarded materials, only serves to put him the more
+upon his guard. He must not yield to the wiles of crafty salesmen. He must
+measure their wares by a single standard--economy, as expressed in
+selling-price, in durability, and in cost of maintenance; and upon that
+standard he must decide between them, as impartially as a justice upon the
+bench.
+
+He must be guided by standard. If it be typewriters, he must struggle
+against the preference of this department or that for some particular
+machine, and bring all to the test of his three-headed economy. The
+successful machine will then be adopted for the system and brought as
+such. No small responsibility rests upon his accuracy of judgment.
+
+His store-keeper must see to it that there is no waste of supplies. He
+must see to it, for instance, that the engineers are as careful in their
+use of oils as the clerk in that of stationery.
+
+"We use $4,000 worth of lead pencils alone in the course of a single
+year," says one of them; "and if we didn't keep hammering at the boys,
+that figure would jump to $5,000 or $6,000 without realizing it."
+
+He keeps check on the supplies that he issues. His stock of blank forms,
+alone, would do credit to a wholesale stationery house in a sizable city;
+for the railroad is a liberal user of printer's ink in its own devices. He
+must be thrifty and he must be economical; he must look to it that the
+railroad's money is not wasted in the purchase and use of its supplies.
+
+Together with the general counsel, the general attorney, the claim-agent,
+the treasurer, and the comptroller, the purchasing agent and the
+store-keeper stand as guardians of the railroad's strong-box.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE GENERAL MANAGER
+
+ HIS DUTY TO KEEP EMPLOYEES IN HARMONIOUS ACTION--"THE SUPERINTENDENT
+ DEALS WITH MEN; THE GENERAL MANAGER WITH SUPERINTENDENTS"--"THE
+ GENERAL MANAGER IS REALLY KING"--CASES IN WHICH HIS POWER IS ALMOST
+ DESPOTIC--HE MUST KNOW MEN.
+
+
+The general manager operating the railroad is held strictly responsible
+for the economical movement of the trains and the maintenance of the
+property. To the greatest portion of the railroad army (nine-tenths of it
+employed in the operating department) he is an uncrowned king. The
+superintendent, as we shall presently see, is the unit of the operation of
+the road, just as the division over which he is head is one of the
+physical units that go to make up some thousands of miles of first-class
+railroad track. The division superintendent deals in men; the general
+manager deals in division superintendents; and right there is the radical
+difference between the two.
+
+The superintendent must see to it that his men get a square deal. If he
+does not see to it in the first instance they will see to it in the last,
+and woe to him if such be the case. For the men who work on the steam
+railroad are well-paid, well-read, keenly sensitive as to their privileges
+and their rights. And from these men have come the division
+superintendents, as different each from the other as men can be grown. It
+is the general manager's chief duty to bring these very different men into
+harmonious action. That is absolutely essential to the successful
+operation of the railroad. The general manager must have absolute firmness
+with his superintendents. He can appoint or discharge them as they can
+appoint or discharge their trainmen--more quickly in fact, for up to the
+present time there is no brotherhood of railroad superintendents.
+
+A certain division superintendent in the East had 150 miles of busy
+double-track trunk line under his direction. At his headquarters were a
+big classification yard and a coaling-station for the engine of the two
+divisions that intersected there. In the course of gradually increasing
+business, the coaling-station, which stood in a narrow ledge beside the
+main-line tracks and under the breast of a steep mountain-side, had to be
+enlarged. In so small a place, that was a difficult engineering problem.
+It was necessary to build much bigger coal-pockets and while the engineers
+were removing the old and building the new station, temporary coaling
+facilities had to be provided for the busy engine point. That part of the
+problem--more operating than engineering--was finally solved by going
+across the main-line tracks and locating a temporary coaling-station
+there. That made a bad situation--with the heavy main-line traffic
+constantly intersecting with engines drilling back and forth to their coal
+supply, and the general manager was quick to realize it. He went up there
+and warned his superintendent.
+
+"This is a danger place," he said, "and a mighty bad one at that. That
+tower's too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two
+flagmen here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard
+every engine that crosses these main-line tracks."
+
+Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility
+for that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The
+division superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed.
+The requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of
+the system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn't tell a
+coal-pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered
+that he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll--and the requisition went
+into the waste-basket. The division superintendent did not try to get
+another requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing
+and told the towerman in the cabin--almost half a mile away--to keep as
+good a watch as possible of the cross-over.
+
+The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast
+Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were
+half a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division
+superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager's
+office.
+
+"I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special
+signalmen," that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so
+cleared himself of the responsibility.
+
+And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big
+land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling
+anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of
+the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase,
+it offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the
+man who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them
+are far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek
+to remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.
+
+Here is the yardmaster at a great interior railroad centre--we call it
+Somerset for the sake of convenience. His is one of the biggest yards in
+all this land, and he is a man whose judgment should be solidly respected.
+There are four improvements in his yards that he deems absolutely
+necessary in the face of a rapidly increasing traffic, and for a portion
+of the property that depreciates rapidly under hard usage. His is a most
+important position; and yet as he cannot spend a cent himself for the use
+of the railroad, not even to buy matches, he embodies his four requests
+for necessities into a requisition and forwards it to headquarters--at a
+seaboard city. His superior officer thinks that Somerset is asking a good
+deal, and he cuts the request down to three items. The next link in the
+chain is a man--an auditor, perhaps--who happens to be imbued with a
+strong streak of economy at that time. Middle division has had its
+appropriation cut thirty-three per cent, so off comes another item from
+Somerset yard. After a time, the yardmaster is lucky to get one single
+item through--and that is sure not to be the essential item that he needed
+most of all. Good, plucky, valiant railroader that he is, he is sure to
+think the whole outfit in the general offices a set of arrant fools.
+Perhaps the big accident comes, and then perhaps he has full opportunity
+to set himself straight. It is more likely that he does not, and that he
+is made the target for Grand Jury indictment and a lot of other fireworks.
+
+That is an instance of the complications of the modern railroad--the vast
+intricacy of organization. Wonder not, then, that many a general manager
+of to-day must think twice before he remembers that some particular inland
+town is one of the obscure branches of his property.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The superintendent deals with men; the general manager, with
+superintendents. That statement is open to a slight modification. The
+superintendent deals with the operating army in individual cases; the
+general manager deals with them collectively. Somewhere in rank between
+the division superintendent and the general manager stands the general
+superintendent, but in the rapidly changing structure of American railroad
+operation, his office is fast losing its individuality, is to-day in real
+danger of utter extinction. On some railroads he is hardly more than a
+chief clerk to the general manager, a rubber-stamp whose signature goes
+mechanically upon papers bound upwards from division superintendent to
+general manager. At the most he is to-day an outside man, getting up and
+down the line and making constant reports to his boss, the general
+manager.
+
+[Illustration: OIL-BURNING LOCOMOTIVE ON THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC SYSTEM
+
+THE STEEL PASSENGER COACH, SUCH AS HAS BECOME STANDARD UPON THE AMERICAN
+RAILROAD
+
+ELECTRIC CAR, GENERATING ITS OWN POWER BY A GASOLINE ENGINE
+
+BOTH LOCOMOTIVE AND TRAIN--GASOLINE MOTOR CAR DESIGNED FOR BRANCH LINE
+SERVICE]
+
+[Illustration: THE BIGGEST LOCOMOTIVE IN THE WORLD: BUILT BY THE SANTA FE
+RAILROAD AT ITS TOPEKA SHOPS]
+
+For the general manager is really king of the entire situation. Just now
+his reign is threatened from a new quarter, and you find him receiving the
+opposition with both distrust and anger. This is the fine figure of a fine
+man. He has come up the ladder, rung by rung--station assistant, telegraph
+operator, despatcher, train-master, assistant superintendent,
+superintendent, general superintendent, general manager; he knows
+railroading, stick and wheel. His own railroad he knows as he might know
+the fingers of his hand.
+
+When we come into his office, the last of a committee of well-dressed
+citizens is slipping out of his door; they are citizens from a prosperous
+town in an adjoining State, and he may tell us of their errand.
+
+"K---- is a good town," he will say, "and gives us a good and growing
+traffic. We've a lot of nasty grade-crossings there, for the two of our
+big lines that right-angle into there seem to get over about every street
+in the place at level. They want us to elevate or depress our tracks
+through there, and it should be done. This road wants it as much as
+K----wants it; for it's one of the worst bottle-necks on our main line,
+and Lord only knows how many thousands of dollars it's cost us in delayed
+traffic."
+
+This king of the railroad points to a sheaf of blueprints upon his desk.
+
+"That tells the story," he says simply, "and the end of the chapter is a
+bill for nine millions of dollars to get rid of those crossings. According
+to law, K---- will have to stand about half of the cost of the work, and
+K----, like most progressive American towns, has been running pretty close
+to her debt limit. She is staggered at the thought of having to dig out
+three or four millions of perfectly good dollars, and so her mayor has
+made the naive suggestion that we advance the money and let them pay back
+their share in the shape of refunded taxes and annual payments.
+
+"We advance that money--and the big boss has to slip over to France and
+try to sell our securities for mere necessities. The truth of the matter
+is that we haven't the money to advance. We're grubbing to get enough cash
+to buy locomotives and cars to keep pace with our business, not running a
+loan business for upstart towns that have run through their capital."
+
+In comes a second delegation, this one another group of commuters. They
+have been asking for an additional train in on the Valley branch. The
+general manager has said that the road cannot afford it, for the train
+would have to be operated at a loss. He proves his statement.
+
+"But," urges the spokesman of the party, "you will make traffic by it, and
+eventually the train will pay."
+
+"Eventually isn't to-day," said the G. M. stanchly, "and it is on to-day
+that we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a
+train in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your
+office, and when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon
+your ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent."
+
+"But this one train?" protests the spokesman.
+
+"Violates that very principle," replies the general manager. "Not another
+car that does not pay its way."
+
+And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering
+sundry threats about going to the commission, the general manager
+stretches his leg over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a
+big map, in colors, of his system--miles and miles and miles of
+first-class railroad.
+
+"They come to me--towns like K---- and tell me of their troubles," he
+says, "as if I already did not know of them. I've a reconstruction plan
+for every ten miles of our main-line." His finger traces upon the map to a
+great division point. "Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some
+yard, as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a
+good-sized side-line division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of
+a superintendent.
+
+"You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its
+shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would
+think it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and
+Chicago. It isn't. It isn't really big enough to handle our decent share
+of that traffic to-day. We're trying to pour the business through it
+to-day, and are succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It's a weak
+valve in our biggest artery, and some day it's going to clog.
+
+"It won't be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years
+ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of
+freight through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder.
+They got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate
+east-bound and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I'd been
+fairly down on my knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that
+thing. I always am; that's part of the job of general manager.
+
+"I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to,
+at this point and at that. Here's where a couple of our biggest feeders
+from the north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly
+haulers dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where
+we pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our
+system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and
+we've got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled.
+Don't think I don't know every bit of that. I can see necessary
+improvements all the way up our main line; but every one of them takes
+money, and just now the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and
+raise the money. But when we know and can't improve--that's railroading."
+
+A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite
+frankly at us.
+
+"Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh," he announces.
+"They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they're entitled to a new one,
+costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give them
+every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend $100,000
+because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural wonder in
+Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to go Stenton
+one better."
+
+"You've got a lot of these delegations?" we venture.
+
+"I lose track of them," says the general manager. "It's all a part of the
+day's work; it's railroading."
+
+We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal
+there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight
+the fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before
+he was there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days
+before that he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen
+hours a day. That's railroading, too.
+
+The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems.
+His biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills;
+and these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe
+its area. The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight
+for his road--running in strongly competitive territory--comes to this
+terminal. Three hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for
+different points, and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find
+any one of those cars without an instant's delay. And still the narrow
+physical limitations of that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a
+big man.
+
+And sometimes the big man must stoop to examine carefully into the little
+things. When McCrea, the present president of the Pennsylvania, was a
+general manager off on the western end of that system, his car was halted
+in the middle of the night by a bad wreck on a single-track side-line. He
+might have remained in his comfortable bed, but that would not have been
+McCrea. He got up and dressed, went outside and offered his services to
+the wrecking-boss. The wrecking-boss was competent and he knew it.
+
+"There's nothing you can do, boss," he said.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing that I can do--with a road
+blocked on both sides with wreckage and stalled trains and track to be
+laid?" said McCrea. "Well, let me tell you that there are ties down there
+in the ditch that will have to be placed before another train goes over
+here, and we might as well be beginning."
+
+And with that General Manager McCrea suited action to word. He went down
+into the ditch, picked up a heavy tie, put it over his shoulder, and
+brought it up into position. In an instant he was in the ranks, working to
+bring order out of chaos. That was the way a big man could do a little
+thing in a big way.
+
+It takes a really big man for that very sort of thing. And the big man,
+general manager of several thousand miles of railroad, must understand the
+smaller men beneath him--any one of whom is apt in some future day to
+supersede him. Here is a man who has been known as one of the best general
+managers in the whole land. Soon after he was made operating head of a
+really big road, a certain train on which he was travelling was much
+delayed. The new G. M. inquired the exact reason for the trouble. He was
+not so much concerned for his own convenience as he was curious to know
+why one of the road's best through trains should have halted until
+assistance should come from the nearest roundhouse.
+
+"The fireman lost his rake," was the somewhat perfunctory report that the
+G. M.'s secretary returned to him. But if that young man thought that his
+boss was going to be satisfied with that report, he was mistaken,
+decidedly.
+
+"Bring the fireman to me," commanded the chief.
+
+That fireman was not of the sort that is easily feazed. He stood stockily
+and in a low voice gave a very circumstantial explanation of the whole
+occurrence. It seemed that he had missed the rake that morning when they
+had started out from the yard roundhouse to take the Limited down over the
+division. He was just going back for another, when they were called to
+lend a hand at a small yard wreck. When they were done shoving and bunting
+there, they had no time to run back to the roundhouse and get a rake. They
+had barely enough time to get to the passenger station for the engine
+change. That was a good story, with a deal of explanation, and the fireman
+thought that the G. M. must be impressed with it.
+
+The G. M. was not in the least impressed. He looked the coal shover up and
+down, from head to feet, then said:
+
+"How about those seven freights that you passed laid out on sidings? You
+could have forced any one of those engineers to lend you his rake rather
+than lay out this train."
+
+The effect of that slight observation from the G. M.'s car was not lost on
+a man on the system. The new man made good. From that time forward word
+went out to the far corners of his road that the "new boss" knew
+railroading; that he had four eyes in his head and that you had to be
+pretty careful what sort of a story you put up to him. Calculate, if you
+can, in dollars and cents the moral effect of such a stand upon the rank
+and file of the king's army. The general manager, as we have already said,
+must know men.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+You are back with your first general manager again. He is tired of all
+these problems, and yet he is now turning to another. This is formally
+entitled the Situation. It is placed upon his big desk every morning. It
+is a morning paper, if you please, prepared for a single reader. The
+general manager is "Old Subscriber," in good measure; and if the paper
+lacks both editorials and advertising, it is none the less interesting to
+its star reader. Its news is as exclusive as its reader, and exclusively
+the news of his system.
+
+By it he knows first of the traffic that has been handled in twenty-four
+hours, by cars and by trains. He knows by it the reserve forces of the
+railroad, in cars and in locomotives, and just where they are located. By
+the _Situation_, he can discover the over-massing of equipment upon one
+division, the shortage upon another. After that he can begin to give
+orders to his general superintendents and his superintendents of
+transportation--these last the men who are directly responsible for car
+movement--toward bringing a better balance between traffic and equipment.
+The _Situation_ is on his desk at ten o'clock in the morning. By eleven,
+whole brigades of locomotives may be under way, moving from their stalls
+in some giant roundhouse out toward another division whose superintendent
+is fairly shrieking for power.
+
+But the _Situation_ tells more than merely this. It goes into history, and
+in its own cold-blooded fashion tells what the road is doing by
+comparison. It gives weather conditions and traffic for the corresponding
+day, one year, two years, three years, five years before; and the general
+manager will do well if he avoids giving mere cursory examination of such
+tables. The _Situation_ not only notes weather conditions, it brings to
+the eyes of the man whom we have called king in railroad operation the
+more important train delays and the reasons that have caused them. Every
+fact or incident that may affect the traffic or the operation of the road
+is noted in its fine-filled pages. It is in every way a guide and a
+barometer of the condition of a great property up to the very hour that
+the general manager comes to his desk.
+
+But the _Situation_ does not tell the entire story. Out in the nearest
+passenger yard is a big private-car, almost as handsome and as well
+equipped as that of the president of the road, and that car is in service
+as many days as it stands idle there upon the siding. This man has 4,000
+miles of railroad empire in his domain; there are nearly 70,000 faithful
+privates for his army. To cover that territory means constant travel.
+There are side-lines of less importance that sometimes do not see him for
+six months at a time.
+
+Of less importance, did we say? We had better not let him hear us breathe
+that, for there are men in his employ who remember the first council of
+the operating department staff after this G. M. came to the road. They
+were gathered there for the time-table meeting--a general superintendent,
+a whole round dozen of division superintendents, serious traffic-minded
+folk from the passenger department, an auxiliary corps of chief clerks and
+stenographers. Division by division, the passenger time-table problem was
+adjusted. This superintendent asked a little more running time, for they
+were putting in a cluster of new bridges, which made slow orders
+necessary; another was thereupon forced to shorten his schedule, for the
+total running time between main-line terminals of a road in hot
+competitive territory could not be increased a single sixty seconds.
+Finally, after a vast amount of argument, the main-line divisions were
+settled, and attention was given to the side-lines. The first of these ran
+through a section purely rural, but there was not a busier 500 miles of
+single track in the East.
+
+The general superintendent called attention to it, with a laugh.
+
+"We'll now tackle the hoejack," said he.
+
+It was an old joke, and the division heads began to laugh. They stopped
+laughing the next instant. The new general manager was on his feet and
+pounding thunderously upon his table top. His face was crimson, as he
+demanded attention.
+
+"Gentlemen," said he, scathingly, "the great railroad from which I have
+had the honor to come has prided itself upon being a standard railroad.
+Its standard is universal wherever its cars and engines run, and its
+jurisdiction extends. Some of its lines are the busiest traffic-haulers in
+the land. The four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough
+for the great volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that
+press upon their rails. There are some side-lines, with but two or three
+trains a day--side-lines that reach the main-line only through other
+branches. But there are no hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters
+upon that system. Hereafter there are to be none upon this. The man who is
+hauling a train on the most remote corner of this railroad is doing its
+work quite as much as the biggest trainmaster here at the terminal. I
+trust you follow me?"
+
+They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally
+accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by
+inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the
+railroads of the land.
+
+But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular
+side-line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us
+quite aside he tells it to us:
+
+"The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they
+got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the
+tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute
+on the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. 'Are you the general manager of
+this 'ere road?' he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle
+bucolic soul, and he says 'yes,' and offers him a real cigar. But the
+gentle bucolic doesn't smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up
+and says, 'Well, General, here's somethin' fer ye,' and shoves a paper
+with a big red seal into the boss's hand.
+
+"It seems that up in that neck o' woods they get grade crossings removed
+as a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the
+constable served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight
+for a hearing on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in
+West Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent
+for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn't enough
+traffic over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we
+never had an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in
+use. And at that the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way
+they rubbed it into him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a
+decent way--first sent a committee down to the division superintendent to
+request that flagman.
+
+"He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got
+there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing
+was right 'in the heart of the community,' as they put it themselves, and
+the big citizens' houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our
+right-of-way. Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town
+Hall, the boss starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in
+the morning before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with
+their rods and sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front
+lawns. And the next thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the
+flower-beds. There hadn't been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook
+since the last time Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk
+hustled down to the depot. The agent didn't ease their minds. The boss
+wasn't working hand in glove with him.
+
+"When the night came for the big time at the Town Hall, it was a regular
+'standing-room only' business. The boss kept in the background while the
+great minds of the township did their best. When it came his turn he
+clamped across the platform like an avenging angel. He is a big fellow,
+and that night he looked seven-foot-six, as he stuck his long fingers out
+over that intelligent body politic and asked what it meant by trying to
+cow the only first-class railroad that had ever had enough energy to put
+its rails down in that township. Then he calls up an engineer from our
+construction department.
+
+"'Mr. Blinkins,' he says, in a voice that you could have heard across the
+public square, 'this railroad has decided to temporize no longer in this
+highway crossing situation on its lines. How much will it cost to put a
+subway under our track at this crossing?'
+
+"The engineer dove into his drawings and said: 'It'll be quite a big job,
+and we'll have to cut quite a way into some of the front yards to get the
+foundations for our abutments. My estimate of the cost of the proposed
+improvement is $160,000.'
+
+"Then it was the boss's turn again. 'Under the state law, work on
+abolishing a grade crossing begins by the railroad expressing its
+willingness,' he told them. 'The cost is divided--half being borne by the
+railroad, the other half being divided between the township and the State.
+West Lyndonbrook's share will reach $40,000.' Forty thousand dollars--why
+$40,000 would have built either the new union school or the waterworks
+that that burg had been hankering for and thought it couldn't afford. When
+the boss breathed about that $40,000 it started the old feuds between the
+waterworks crowd and the school crowd. They forgot all about the crossing
+and our sin-filled railroad, and got to hammering anew on the old issue.
+We slinked out while they were still at it--had the car hooked on to the
+rear of thirty-eight and got started while the oratory was taking a fresh
+turn.
+
+"The boss? The boss is a diplomat. That's how he keeps his job."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE SUPERINTENDENT
+
+ HIS HEADSHIP OF THE TRANSPORTATION ORGANISM--HIS MANNER OF DEALING
+ WITH AN OFFENDED SHIPPER--HIS MANNER WITH COMMUTERS--HIS MANNER WITH A
+ SPITEFUL "KICKER"--A DISHONEST CONDUCTOR WHO HAD A "PULL"--A SYSTEM OF
+ DEMERITS FOR EMPLOYEES--DEALING WITH DRUNKARDS--WITH SELFISH AND
+ COVETOUS MEN.
+
+
+If the general manager is king in modern railroad operation, the division
+superintendent is not less than prince. His principality is no mean state.
+It may consist of some 500 miles of what he modestly admits is the "best
+sort of railroad in all this land"; or it may be a little stretch of 100
+miles, or even less, losing its way back among the hills; but it _is_ a
+principality, and his rule is undisputed. If ever it be questioned, it
+will then be high time for him to abdicate.
+
+Just as the division is the physical unit of railroad operation, so is its
+superintendent the human unit. By him the transportation organism stands
+or falls. If it stands, he is able to go forward; the path from his door
+leads to the general manager's office. If it falls--Well, there is to-day
+in Central Illinois a gray-haired station-agent who once held his own
+principality--4,000 men to take his orders.
+
+"We only discharge for disobedience or dishonesty," said the president of
+that railroad at the time he signed the order reducing the prince to the
+ranks. "When we fail to get the real measure of a man, it is our fault,
+not his. We never turn out a man who has done his level best for us."
+
+This man is superintendent of one of the most prosperous of the
+trunk-line railroads that reach the metropolis by stretching their rails
+across New Jersey. His is a "terminal division," so called, and he has
+assumed command of one of the busiest city gates in all America. His
+railroad day begins almost as soon as he is awake. There is a telegraph
+outfit in the corner of his bedroom, and as he dresses and shaves he
+listens mechanically to its scoldings--to the gossip of the division. It
+comes as casually to his ear as the prattle of his children; the key began
+to be music to him long before he left the little yellow depot where he
+first began to be a railroader.
+
+"They're in pretty good shape this morning, John," laughs his wife. She,
+too, has been listening half unconsciously to the gossip of the wire.
+Years ago she "stood her trick" with her husband back in that little
+yellow depot.
+
+"Got a coal train in the ditch up the other side of Greyport," is his
+reply. "We'll rip out that nasty cross-over up there some day, when the
+big boss wakes up to the cash we've put out in wrecks at GP."
+
+"Going up there?"
+
+"Not this morning, Maggie," he laughs. "I've a committee from the firemen
+coming in to see me. They're nagging for a raise." He lowers his voice, as
+if he almost thought that the walls had ears. "It's beginning to grind the
+boys, too--butter 48 cents, eggs 45, and all their hungry kiddies. But the
+big boss--whew!"
+
+He whistles, goes to his key, cuts in, and begins to give orders to the
+wrecking-boss up at Greyport.
+
+"Steady, Jim," he says, in a low voice. "You've got all day on that job if
+you need it, only watch out for the number two track with your crane. We
+can't risk a side-swipe on one of our pretty trains. We're detouring the
+east-bound passengers over the Central. How's Hinckley?"
+
+He closes the circuit softly.
+
+"Poor Hinckley," he says gently. "Do you remember, Maggie? He was married
+the same summer we were."
+
+Through with his breakfast, he hurries down to the station, and before he
+slips aboard the suburban train that is to carry him in to his Jersey City
+office, he has had the wire again into Greyport. They are getting things
+cleaned up there a bit; a baggage-car has been sent up with a special
+engine for Hinckley. The superintendent turns from these. One of the
+little trains that come out from town in the dusk of early dawn has
+brought a leather bag filled with mail. He runs through it as his train
+slips across the meadows. By the time he is in his roomy office it is
+ready to be answered, a pencilled memorandum on each is sufficient guide
+for his chief clerk.
+
+Throughout the morning his calendar is a crowded thing. There is a
+constant line of restless men sitting on the long bench just without the
+guarded rail of the outside office. One by one these are called; they
+disappear behind swinging baize doors to stand in front of the
+superintendent.
+
+For the first of these there is a smile--the caller is a big shipper, big
+enough to go to the head of the line and have instant access to the boss.
+This shipper is the sort who gives the railroad tonnage in trainload lots.
+He is hot. He cannot get cars. He will begin to route over the Triple
+B----, even though his siding facilities are wrong for it. _They'll_ dig
+him out the cars he needs, they have folks over there who make it their
+business to find cars. And while he is on the subject it seems pretty bad
+to have stuff coming twelve and fourteen days through from Chicago.
+Perhaps he'd better be getting after the Commission. The shipper is very
+hot. He expatiates upon his wrongs, hammers upon the superintendent's
+desk, grows scarlet in his heavy face.
+
+The superintendent's smile never wavers. He gives close attention, does
+not grow excited. A few orders over the telephone, a word of explanation,
+the shipper smiles now. Down in his heart he begins to be sorry that he
+made these threats about the Triple B----.
+
+That is getting traffic, you say, and the superintendent is an operating
+man. You are a bit wrong there. The superintendent is a _railroad_ man and
+that means that any part of the railroad business is his business. There
+is a man, by name A. H. Smith, who is to-day operating vice-president of
+the New York Central system, who held to that idea from the beginning. In
+the beginning, Smith was the superintendent of a little side-tracked
+division of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern which centred in at
+Hillsdale, Michigan. It was a strong competitive territory, and Smith
+found that the traffic that came to his road was so slight that it did not
+take a great deal of his time to move it. The superintendents before him
+had had a lot of time to speed their fast horses and fuss around their
+gardens. Not so with Smith. He went into the business of making traffic.
+It was a decade that took keen delight in singing societies, and Smith's
+robust voice allied itself to every choir of importance in three counties.
+He sang himself into personal popularity, he sang traffic into coming over
+the Michigan Southern. After a while, the folks over in the general
+offices at Cleveland began to take notice. The traffic folks were the
+first to notice, after that--well, a long story's short when you know that
+Smith found himself on a short cut to his present job.
+
+The superintendent's smile remains while a solemn-faced delegation of
+commuters files into his room. These grave folk have been coming into town
+on the 8:52 almost since the road first laid its rails. It is part of
+their lives, and they fondly imagine that it is a big part of the
+road's--that the twenty-hour train over the mountains to Chicago is a
+matter of considerably less importance than the 8:52. The superintendent
+broadens his bland smile and rings for his train sheets. There are other
+trains than the 8:52 coming into that terminal--almost a train a minute
+from a little before eight o'clock until half-past nine. The
+superintendent's finger runs for corroboration over the train sheets.
+Twenty-five days this month when 94 per cent of his suburban trains come
+under the protection of the big shed of the terminal right on the
+scheduled moment--how was that for consistency of operation?
+
+The commuters' committee seem a little dazed. Individually, the men are
+expert on a good many things--printing, indictments, breakfast foods,
+patents, wholesale feathers; but consistency of train operation and train
+sheets are a bit confusing.
+
+"The 8:52 has been late a whole lot recently," doggedly affirms the
+chairman. "Last Thursday we were pretty near fifteen minutes late."
+
+A gleam of triumph comes into the superintendent's eye. He fumbles anew
+among the flimsy train sheets. His forefinger alights upon a line of the
+typewritten copy.
+
+"Last Thursday," he comments, "you can see that we were all laid out by
+the Hackensack River draw. A schooner filled with brick got caught by the
+ebb tide and laid down on us in the open draw. What you want to see,
+gentlemen, is the Treasury departments down at Washington. It is
+outrageous that the antiquated navigation laws should be allowed to hold
+up business in that way."
+
+The committee confer among themselves and decide to make the life of the
+Secretary of the Treasury uncomfortable for a while.
+
+"You cannot hope for anything better with that Hackensack Bridge," urges
+the superintendent almost malevolently.
+
+He does not tell them, but the boys out on the line know his own
+experience with the Hackensack River bridge. Last December and just in the
+evening rush-hours they found that the cabin that stands perched at the
+top of the trussed draw was afire. The trains bringing home the tired
+suburbanites were beginning to line up back of the fire for solid miles.
+The tired suburbanites were saying things about this particular railroad.
+It chanced that this superintendent was a passenger on one of the trains.
+He went forward to the blaze. The towerman had beat a retreat. The
+superintendent started to climb up the ice-covered ladder tower toward the
+burning cabin. The towerman halted him. The wiry superintendent turned
+upon him with a look of infinite scorn:
+
+"We've got to hand signal those trains across here--there's thousands of
+folks out here in the meadows that we can't let miss their supper--"
+
+"I've got a family--" began the towerman.
+
+"That's all right. I'll signal these across."
+
+"That ain't it, boss. Back o' th' cabin's the gasolene tanks, the stuff
+for openin' th' draw."
+
+The superintendent gave a low whistle.
+
+"That settles it," he said. "We've _got_ to put this fire out. I can't
+risk cutting this draw out of service."
+
+It is a matter of record on that railroad that he climbed alone to the top
+of the draw and began to put out the fire with his own stout endeavors. He
+was not alone for long. Inspired by him, the men that gathered
+there--engineers, firemen, trainmen, and conductors, crawled up upon that
+freezing cold draw and lent him their efforts. In a half-hour the fire was
+out, and the stalled trains were moving again.
+
+This, then, is the measure of the man who sits across the wide office
+table from you. The mollified commuters are marching out.
+
+"You don't encourage kicking?" you ask.
+
+"We don't discourage it," he replied. He is reminded of a story and tells
+it to you.
+
+"When they made Blank superintendent over there at Broad Street, in
+Philadelphia, he went in to make a clean record. He called his chief
+clerk to him. 'Mind you, if you hear kicks, don't let them get in one ear
+and out the other. You bring them in here and we'll investigate.' In three
+days the chief clerk was busy. 'Lots of trouble with the suburban traffic
+to-day,' he would say. 'Wilmington train laid out at Grey's Ferry; third
+day that's happened.' 'Ugly trainman on the main line wouldn't close the
+rear doors. That fellow's unpopular.' 'Not enough equipment on the Central
+division.' 'No fire in the stove at Lenden Road,'--a long string of
+commuter troubles. After Blank had heard this for a week he began to get
+nervous. He called his chief clerk to him. 'See here,' he demanded,
+'what's the matter with our service? Where are all these kicks coming in
+from?' The chief clerk looked at him--never a snicker. 'You said you
+wanted the kicks,' he replied. 'Well, I've been letting the head barber
+downstairs shave me after he was done with the commuters. He gets every
+one of the howls.'"
+
+Sometimes the kicks represent a serious side of the superintendent's
+problem. A while ago a man came to a railroad superintendent in Boston and
+demanded that a certain ticket-examiner in the passenger terminal be
+dismissed. There had been some sort of dispute and the man insisted that
+the ticket-examiner be discharged, nothing less. The ticket-examiner, on
+his part, told a pretty fair sort of story. Moreover, he said that if in
+the heat of the dispute he had transgressed on good manners he was frankly
+sorry and that it would not happen again. Back of all that he had a good
+record: no complaints had ever before been registered against him. The
+superintendent then wrote a letter to the man who had complained and
+stated that the offending ticket-examiner had been reprimanded and that
+the offence would probably not be repeated.
+
+[Illustration: THE CONDUCTOR IS A HIGH TYPE OF RAILROAD EMPLOYEE]
+
+[Illustration: THE ENGINEER--OIL-CAN IN HAND--IS FOREVER FUSSING AT HIS
+MACHINE]
+
+[Illustration: RAILROAD RESPONSIBILITY DOES NOT END EVEN WITH THE TRACK
+WALKER]
+
+[Illustration: THE FIREMAN HAS A HARD JOB AND A STEADY ONE]
+
+That did not satisfy the man who complained. He was of the sort that are
+supposed to have a "pull," and he threatened to use his pull if the
+ticket-examiner were not discharged. He refused to accept apologies or
+explanations. He said he was hot. So was the superintendent. He keenly
+resented anything that approached interference with his discipline, and he
+refused to discharge his employee. Pressure was exerted, the pull was
+doing its fine work. The superintendent was--like every other railroad
+superintendent in this land--a fine diplomat. He took the man from the
+train gate in the terminal and gave him an equally good job in a city a
+hundred miles distant from Boston. He flattered himself that he had seen
+the last of the man with the pull.
+
+Not a bit of it. That brisk soul chanced to pass through the distant town,
+and gasped at sight of the former ticket-examiner still drawing pay from
+the railroad. He hastened into the superintendent's office in Boston and
+demanded that the subterfuge end--that the man be actually discharged from
+the road's employ. The superintendent looked at him coolly, not speaking.
+The man again threatened his pull. The railroad boss looked at him through
+slitted eyes. It was a real crisis for him. His diplomatic smile was
+ready. He pointed with his lean forefinger toward the door.
+
+"The case is closed. Good-morning," was all he said.
+
+After that he began wondering what road would have him after that pull was
+exerted. He wondered for a day, for a week, then a month. Then he forgot
+the occurrence. The pull, like many other sorts of threats, was thin air.
+
+Of a different sort was the problem that confronted a superintendent in
+Chicago. On a certain suburban train for many years the conductor had
+remained with an unchanged run. Gossip had come into the super's office
+that this conductor was systematically stealing from the company. The boss
+started a quiet investigation. The conductor with apparently no other
+income than his $3 a day, had purchased a neat home in the suburbs, had
+sent his boy to Yale, his girl to Vassar. That was Thrift, with a capital
+T. The superintendent took the case sharply in hand and summoned the
+conductor before him. He was one of the older sort, gray-haired,
+kind-faced.
+
+"Johnson," said the boss, "you've been with the road a long time and never
+had a vacation. I want you to lay off a month and run over to either
+coast. I'll get the transportation for you."
+
+Johnson protested. He belonged to a generation of railroaders that was not
+educated to vacations. The superintendent insisted and had his way, as
+superintendents generally do. Johnson started on his vacation, and a
+substitute, knowing nothing of the real situation, replaced him. The
+returns from that daily run doubled, and the superintendent knew that he
+was right.
+
+Nowadays when a railroad finds that a conductor is stealing, it invokes
+the majesty of the Interstate Commerce Law and prepares to hurry him off
+toward a Federal prison. In that day they were content to fire Johnson;
+that was sufficient disgrace to the old man. The railroad could not begin
+to get back the money that had been trickling out throughout the long
+years.
+
+But Johnson showed fight. His was an important train in the Chicago
+suburban service, and his passengers were important merchants and
+manufacturers--big shippers. They got together, under Johnson's
+supervision, and made the hair on the heads of the traffic men turn gray.
+Those fellows were Johnson's friends, and they were not going to see the
+N---- turn out a faithful employee. Johnson said that he had not stolen,
+and Johnson was not the sort to lie. It might do the N---- good to send
+some tonnage over to the M----. The traffic department and the operating
+locked horns, as ofttimes they do on roads, both big and little. Traffic
+won. The superintendent lost, Johnson went back to his job, and the road
+put on a checking system that made its conductors wonder if they had held
+convict records.
+
+That case was an exception. There are not many superintendents who are
+compelled to back water, mighty few Johnsons among the thousands of
+conductors across the land.
+
+We are still in that superintendent's office in Jersey City. The boss's
+smile is gone. A big railroader just in from the line, his jeans covered
+with engine grease, shuffles into the place and stands before the super,
+hat in hand, like a naughty boy ready to be whipped. The superintendent
+speaks in a few low sentences to him, makes a notation on an envelope. The
+big man trembles in front of the little. A bit of a smile comes to the
+lips of the boss.
+
+"You think of the wife and the kiddies first next time," he says.
+"Good-bye and good luck to you. I'm not much for lecturings," he adds,
+after the man has gone. A little later he begins to explain. "That big
+fellow had to be disciplined. There was no two ways about it for either of
+us. He's an engine-man, got a good train, too; but he's been running
+signals. We've caught him twice on test. We can't stand for that. Suppose
+we have a nasty smash and the coroner's jury begins to ask nosey
+questions? I had to put black on his envelope."
+
+He goes into further detail. In other days he would have been forced, in
+order to uphold his discipline, to suspend the engineer for from five days
+to two weeks--the punishment preceding discharge. There was a
+possibility--disagreeable to the superintendent--that the engineer's
+family might have been crowded for sufficient food for a fortnight. Some
+of those fellows live pretty close to the proposition all the while.
+Nowadays the offender is demerited--once again like the schoolboy. That is
+what the superintendent meant by that reference to the envelope, the
+road's record of the man's service with it.
+
+Sixty demerits--dismissed. That's the rule of one big road. But the record
+does not always continue to be negative. Its positive side rests in the
+fact that for every month a man keeps his envelope clear five demerits are
+taken from the black side of his envelope. A trainman might have
+forty-five demerits against him, be on the narrow edge of discharge, and
+in eleven months, after turning the new leaf, have as clean a sheet as the
+best man on the division. This is as it should be. The demerit plan--often
+called the "Brown system"--represents the triumph of modern railroad
+operation over the old.
+
+The superintendent may have all the advantages of a time-tried disciple
+and a modern record system; have the prestige and the reputation that come
+from the operation of 500 miles of railroad, and still have a hard row to
+hoe. Out in the Middle West there was, until recently, a stretch of what
+was known as "booze railroad." It was a division where reputations and
+records alike counted for naught, where discipline was a mockery.
+Train-crews went from their runs direct to saloons and, what was a deal
+worse, began their day's work within them. The wreck record of that
+division that went forward to the State Commission was appalling--and half
+the wrecks were not reported. Yardmasters were busy day after day stowing
+away damaged equipment far from the curious eyes of passengers--the
+wrecking crews were hammering for big over-time pay. It was a thoroughly
+demoralized stretch of railroad.
+
+The distressed president of the system sent East for a superintendent who
+had a reputation. He thought he had his man. The new broom was a
+book-of-rules man. He had a quarter of his operating force laid off all
+the time, to go before him. He was a man fond of words, and he lectured
+those old fellows as if they had been school children. He might have done
+quite as well with his division if he had been operating it from
+Kamchatka. The men began to call their rule-books the "Joe Millers."
+
+The superintendent got mad and was lost--hopelessly. He began discharging
+right and left, and the wrath of the gods and of the brotherhoods (the
+great labor unions of the railroads), was upon him. The road was
+threatened with a big strike at the very time that it could least afford
+it. He avoided that strike only by acceding to the demand of the
+brotherhood chiefs that the superintendent's head be given to them on a
+silver platter. After that the "Man Without a Country" was in a more
+enviable position. There was not a railroad in the country that dared
+employ him, despite his excellent technical training. He drifted up into
+Canada, got a job running a state-operated line. He held that job less
+than a year. He was murdered of a winter's night in a shadowy railroad
+yard, shot down by a discharged train hand.
+
+The grim situation on the "booze division" grew much worse. The president
+of that system gave the matter his keen personal attention; he began
+scouring the entire width of the land for material, without much success.
+When he was thoroughly discouraged, a raw-boned trainmaster from a far
+corner of the demoralized division applied for the job of superintendent;
+he reckoned he could handle the situation. He had caught the president
+unawares standing outside of his private car. The president told him that
+he was superintendent.
+
+"There was something in Matt's eye that took me," he confessed afterwards.
+"You do see something in a man's eye now and then that beats a whole
+barrel of references."
+
+So Matt Jones (that is nothing like his real name), took up the nastiest
+operating proposition in the country. He did not lecture nor discharge,
+not he; but the men knew that there was a boss behind the super's desk.
+The fellows who began trifling with the new broom were down in his office
+the next morning. Jones selected the leading spirit; he had the advantage
+of knowing him.
+
+"Pete," he said in a quiet way, "you've been drinking. It doesn't go. I'm
+not going to discharge you,"--he gave grim thought to the fate of his
+predecessor--"but in thirty days you are going to send in your resignation
+voluntarily and leave our service."
+
+The man protested. He had not been drinking; and Matt Jones had better not
+try that game anyway. The superintendent wished him a pleasant
+good-morning and bowed him out of the office.
+
+In five days the engineer was back, uncalled. The superintendent saw him,
+even though he had no more to say than he had not been drinking; that is,
+he had quit drinking long ago. In ten days he was back again. This time he
+admitted that he had been drinking up to the day that Matt Jones took
+office. The superintendent said nothing. He bowed the engineer out again.
+A month is a short thing at the best. At the end of the twenty-second day,
+the engineer again found his way to the superintendent's office. He seemed
+like a man who had been through a sickness. Big human that he was, he
+began crying at the sight of the man who was a real boss.
+
+"For God's sake, Matt, don't forget the old days up on the branch. I can't
+get out from the old road," he said.
+
+"I gave you thirty days' chance to get on another road," was all the
+satisfaction that he got.
+
+But on the thirtieth day the engineer went to work with a clean envelope
+and the new superintendent had an ally of no mean strength. The patient
+grinding won; complete victory was only a question of time; the president
+five hundred miles away began to notice. You may say what you want,
+railroad executives are born, not made. This reads like romance, but it is
+truth. Matt Jones is to-day general manager of that system, and a little
+while ago a New York paper said he was going to take charge of one of the
+big transcontinental that needs a firm hand at its reins.
+
+This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a clean
+stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the
+transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling
+it. The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where
+headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local
+reporters each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the
+metropolitan district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of
+railroaders; up here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real
+to the folk of half a dozen populous counties than is the president of the
+road, a stuffy gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen
+years to the dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the
+townspeople to thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M.
+running through their "lovely little city."
+
+You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be
+entirely disappointed.
+
+"I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the
+wire," he tells you quietly. "We've organization on this stretch of line."
+He says this with a bit of pride. "We have men and we have system. My
+train-masters are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected
+to organize beneath them."
+
+Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry
+for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters
+his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on
+the line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards.
+After that he talks over the long-distance 'phone with the G. M., four
+hundred miles away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters,
+just as the summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions
+and at terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the 'phone
+is rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made
+Congress pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That
+bill promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit
+by it.
+
+The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and speaks
+to his chief clerk.
+
+"W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get
+rattled," he says.
+
+That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his
+three hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this
+superintendent's heart. If it were Europe--the troops would be drawn out,
+all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of
+the royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But
+it is not Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because
+it so excessively differs from Europe.
+
+Only the military aides of the President lament upon the informality of
+his travel. Some time since a great executive was making the familiar loop
+throughout the West. The superintendent of a division of line the far side
+of the Missouri was a worrier, and was personally watching the progress.
+In order to facilitate rear platform oratory the President's cars were
+placed at the rear of a train that hardly ranked as express. Between towns
+the delays grew frequent and a stuffy little aide in uniform protested to
+the superintendent.
+
+"Look a' here, sir," he said stiffly, "why don't you let these other
+trains up the line wait?" The division was single-track. "You know this is
+the President's train."
+
+A twinkle came into the super's eye.
+
+"You're wrong," he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. "This
+is _not_ the President's special. This is train number 67 of the B----main
+line, and she hasn't many more rights on the time-card than a gravel
+limited. Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon
+Limited--there's some train, sir. They wouldn't lay her out. She's
+double-extra first-class all the way through to the coast."
+
+The point of that was not lost.
+
+An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr.
+Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The
+superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch
+of line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection
+engine.
+
+"Dee-lighted," said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the
+big cab. The superintendent wondered what he'd think of that nifty stretch
+of track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as
+he was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle's
+"French Revolution" out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way
+from Utica to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along
+thereafter without that superintendent's vote.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad
+presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of
+the best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince
+grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King.
+When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee--the
+men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster's office--to talk
+in whispers.
+
+Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world--it is near kingdom
+in itself--miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight
+yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes
+eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For
+years there reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a
+great railroad system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word
+to be called superintendent. They called him "the lion" and did not misuse
+that word either. He was a lion, guardian of a great railroad gate, a
+stern old lion whose word and whose law were unquestioned.
+
+But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer
+office began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder
+who the new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable--one
+an assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other
+holding similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to
+assume greater honor, to sit in command at the lion's great desk.
+
+That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the
+whisperings of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of
+them would creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone
+there, head in hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents
+gained courage; they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At
+other times they locked horns.
+
+They locked horns over one great question. It was not operation that set
+them at odds, not a vexing practical question of how some congested yard
+might be lanced so that traffic should flow the more freely, or a main
+line section be aided to give a greater daily tonnage. Nothing of that
+sort for the two ambitious assistants.
+
+A new pony inspection engine, with an observation room built forward over
+the boiler--just the sort that Col. Roosevelt had once used as a
+reading-room--was to be built for the division, and each assistant thought
+that he needed that engine for the dignity of his job. Each in turn went
+before the lion and stated his claims for the possession of the pretty
+toy. The old man listened with grave dignity. A week later he sent down to
+the master mechanic at the big Depew shops and had him deliver a brand new
+hand-car, with his compliments, to each.
+
+The pony-engine went into the roundhouse until the real Prince should
+come. Then he sat long hours alone at his desk once more.
+
+Finally they brought a man to him, a fine, upstanding man. The lion rose
+from his comfy old chair and gave greeting to the newcomer.
+
+"I'm glad to see you," was all he said; but to the general manager, who
+had come up from New York, his eyes seemed to ask: "You've brought the
+right man here at last?" He turned to the stranger.
+
+"Would you like a pony engine to get over the division?" was his question.
+
+"I'm willing to go to hell, and go in a caboose," laughed the stranger.
+
+The old superintendent grasped him by the hand.
+
+"Thank God, they've sent a real man to be superintendent at Buffalo," was
+all he said. That was the only recognition that he gave to one who since
+has become one of the master railroaders of America, but in that moment
+the act of succession had been consummated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+OPERATING THE RAILROAD
+
+ AUTHORITY OF THE CHIEF CLERK AND THAT OF THE ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT--
+ RESPONSIBILITIES OF ENGINEERS, FIREMEN, MASTER MECHANIC, TRAIN-MASTER,
+ TRAIN-DESPATCHER--ARRANGING THE TIME-TABLE--FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF
+ OPERATION--SIGNALS--SELECTING ENGINE AND CARS FOR A TRAIN--CLERICAL
+ WORK OF CONDUCTORS--A TRIP WITH THE CONDUCTOR--THE DESPATCHER'S
+ AUTHORITY--SIGNALS ALONG THE LINE--MAINTENANCE OF WAY--SUPERINTENDENT
+ OF BRIDGES AND BUILDINGS--ROAD-MASTER--SECTION BOSS.
+
+
+The administration of the division runs quite naturally into several
+channels. The routine of the work, the making and filing of records and
+reports, the handling of the mass of correspondence that must constantly
+arise, is usually in the hands of a chief clerk, who has control over the
+office force at division headquarters. If there is an assistant
+superintendent, the chief clerk will divide responsibility with him, the
+theory at all times being to cut off the detail wherever possible. This
+office work is not radically different from the office management of any
+other large business. Its clerks are about the only unorganized force in
+railroad employ.
+
+If the management of the road is of the divisional type, the
+superintendent of course is a more important executive than if it is of
+the departmental type. In either of these cases, as we have seen, he will
+probably have at least partial authority over the engineer of maintenance
+of way, whose force keeps the line and track structures in full repair,
+and also looks after ordinary construction work along the division. In the
+road of divisional type, he will also have partial authority over the
+master mechanic, in charge of the shops and roundhouses and the
+locomotives of the division. These last are regarded by the railroad as
+part of its machinery, like the planers and drills in the shops
+themselves; and for the care and operation of the locomotives the
+engineers and firemen are held responsible to the mechanical department.
+This is the case even upon those railroads where, under the departmental
+system, the superintendent has no direct authority over the master
+mechanic upon his division. For the conduct of the trains which their
+locomotives pull, both engineers and firemen are directly responsible to
+the operating department. The master mechanic simply sees to it that the
+railroad's property is maintained to a certain degree of efficiency and
+that the man who operates the locomotives is capable from every point of
+view. A reasonable amount of deterioration is expected, and each
+locomotive is expected to turn in to the shops for inspection, overhauling
+and repairs, at certain stated intervals.
+
+The superintendent has absolute authority over the two officials who are
+chiefly interested in the conduct of the trains over the division--the
+train-master and the train-despatcher. The first of these two officers,
+who must dove-tail their work both night and day, has the assignment of
+the train crews. His opinion will be called for whenever the vexed
+questions of seniority and promotion arise, and he will be asked to help
+to plan all extra or special freight and passenger trains. To show how
+this is done brings us close to the question of schedules, and we may
+pause for a moment to consider how this important phase of the railroad's
+operating is builded together.
+
+That time-table that you have just pulled from the folder rack seems at
+first glance an interminable mass of meaningless figures; yet when you
+come to find your journey upon it, it quickly simplifies itself, and you
+begin to marvel at the relation the figures bear to one another, how
+easily you may pick your course through the long columns of numerals. The
+more extensive time-tables that the railroad employees carry are quite as
+simple, and yet they are great feats of typographical composition. In
+reality, both these forms of printed time-tables are but transcripts of
+the real time-table of the division, which is kept set out upon a great
+board.
+
+This board is ruled in two directions. The regularly spaced intervals in
+one direction are marked as time, and represent time--one entire day of
+twenty-four hours. In the other direction of the board the stations are
+spaced in proportion to their actual spacing upon the line.
+
+The reproduction of a portion of such a board for an imaginary division of
+a railroad will illustrate. This line runs from Somerset to Rockville, 120
+miles; and portions of it are double-tracked, the rest single-track, as
+shown at the top of the diagram. On the double-track, trains going in the
+same direction may pass one another only at the vertical lines, which
+represent station passing sidings, and on the single-track sections this
+rule holds, with the additional one, of course, that trains running in
+opposite directions may also pass one another at the vertical station
+lines. For economy of room only the seven hours from six o'clock in the
+morning until one o'clock in the afternoon are shown here. Following an
+old-time practice, odd numbers will represent up-bound trains, from
+Somerset to Rockville; even numbers, the down trains.
+
+So we have an early morning accommodation passenger train, No. 1, leaving
+Rockville at 6:10 o'clock and proceeding at a leisurely rate of about
+twenty miles an hour (which makes allowances for local stops) all the way
+to Somerset at the far end of the division, which it is due to reach at
+11:45 A. M. It is halted for any length of time only at Honeytown, where
+upbound No. 8--local accommodation--and upbound No. 6--fast express--will
+pass it. At 6:20 o'clock an upbound local accommodation of the same nature
+as No. 1, and hence known as No. 2, leaves Somerset and, halting only at
+Robbins's Corners to permit the fast upbound No. 6 to overhaul and pass
+it, reaches Rockville at 1 P. M. Train No. 31, which follows No. 1 out of
+Rockville forty minutes later, is a milk train, and so must have a
+liberal allowance for stops. It proceeds only as far as Stoneville, where
+the dairy country ends, stops there long enough to turn and to water the
+engine, and then returns to Rockville as No. 32. Train No. 117 is a
+way-freight, and still slower. So it follows the milk-train. It is known
+as a "low-class" train by the railroaders. It must wait everywhere for
+better class trains to pass it. Train No. 118 is the same class of train,
+proceeding in the opposing direction. Train No. 5 is a down express.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE REAL TIME TABLE OF THE DIVISION LOOKS--THE ONE USED
+IN HEADQUARTERS]
+
+Sometimes unforeseen demands of traffic necessitate the running of extra
+trains, and these may be strung across the board. This board, in reality,
+has all its trains placed upon it by strings and pins, to admit of the
+constant changes that the schedules are always undergoing, and the
+addition of a new train is a quick proceeding. As a matter of fact, a
+skilled train-master or despatcher will rarely take the time actually to
+string an extra train. He carries the schedule too completely in his head
+to admit of such a necessity.
+
+But the extra train is best placed following, as a second section, some
+good passenger train, as indicated on the diagram. The regular train will
+then carry signals showing that it is followed on this particular day.
+While the train orders protect its movement in any event, as will be shown
+in a moment, the billing of the extra train as a second section is less of
+an upset to the regular operation of the division. Practised operating men
+found years ago that the fewer deviations made from the regular programme
+of the day, the higher the proportion of safety arose.
+
+Now you begin to see the use of the train-despatcher. If the unforeseen
+never came to pass upon the railroad, instead of coming to pass nearly
+every hour, there might be no need of that officer. Each engineer, each
+conductor, each station agent would have his complete time-tables, and the
+road would run every day in full accordance with them. That was the very
+earliest and the most primitive way of operating railroads. Almost as
+early the need arose of having a special direction over the operation of
+the trains. Emergencies arose daily. Trains were often late; storms beat
+down upon the line; the snow covered its rails; what might have been,
+according to the time-card, an orderly operation of line, became chaos. If
+a train was ordered by schedule to meet a train bound in the opposite
+direction at P----, it might wait there for long hours, not knowing that
+the other engine was broken down at A----.
+
+The invention of the telegraph and its almost instant application to the
+railroad service made such special direction possible. So now we find the
+explicit directions of the schedule supplemented by even more explicit
+directions from the train-despatcher at the head of the train movements
+upon each division. Briefly stated, it may be said that the engineer and
+the conductor in charge of a train are first guided by the schedule,
+which, after many revisions, has been compiled with great care, and in
+reference to connecting lines, branches, and adjoining divisions. This
+schedule acts in conjunction with certain simple fundamental rules of
+operation, the A, B, C of every railroader. By one of these, trains of the
+same class bound north or east are given precedence, all other things
+being equal, over trains bound south or west. This rule is sometimes
+superseded by one giving right-of-way to trains bound up the line--or the
+reverse.
+
+High-class trains, like the fastest limited expresses, have precedence
+over trains of graduated lower classes--down to the slow-moving heavy
+freights. When any sort of train loses a certain length of time--usually
+half an hour or more--it loses all rights that it might ever have had, and
+everything else on the line has precedence over it. A train may lose time
+if it has to, but there are never any circumstances that will justify it
+in running ahead of time.
+
+All this is the part of railroad operation which governs the relation of
+one train to another. There are even simpler but not less vital rules
+that control its own operation. In order that the engineer who is guiding
+the train, and the conductor who shares the responsibility, may keep in
+touch with one another, the device was adopted many years ago of having a
+cord run through the cars of passenger trains to a bell signal in the cab
+of the engine. This bell signal during recent years has given way to an
+improved form of locomotive signal, sounded by means of compressed air in
+tubes throughout the train, and operated in connection with the air-brake
+equipment.
+
+The air-whistle, or bell cord-code of signals, is standard upon all
+American railroads, and is as follows:
+
+When the train is standing:
+
+ Two signals--start.
+ Three signals--back.
+ Four signals--apply or release air-brakes.
+ Five signals--call in flagman.
+
+When the train is in motion:
+
+ Two signals--stop at once.
+ Three signals--stop at the next station.
+ Four signals--reduce speed.
+ Five signals--increase speed.
+
+There also arises a necessity for communication between men who stand
+outside the train and who seek to guide the movement of the locomotive.
+This necessity has given rise to still another code, transmitted by the
+hands--holding a flag, if possible--by day, and a lighted lantern at
+night. This signal code follows:
+
+ Method of Transmitting Signal. Indication.
+
+ Swung across track. Stop.
+ Raised and lowered vertically. Proceed.
+ Swung vertically in a circle across the track:
+ When the train is standing-- Back.
+ When train is in motion-- Train has parted.
+ Swung horizontally in a circle:
+ When the train is standing-- Apply air-brakes.
+ Held at arm's length above head:
+ When the train is standing-- Release air-brakes.
+ Any object waved violently by any person on
+ or near the track is a stop signal.
+
+By use of his locomotive whistle, the engineer is enabled to acknowledge
+these signals, as well as to signal upon his own initiative. His code is
+also a standard in railroading. It follows:
+
+ ---- A short blast. -------- A long blast.
+ ---- Stop, apply brakes.
+ -------- -------- Release brakes.
+ ---- ---- -------- -------- -------- Flagman go back
+ ---- -------- -------- -------- and protect rear
+ end of train.
+ ------- -------- -------- -------- Flagman return to
+ train.
+ -------- -------- -------- Train in motion,
+ has parted.
+ ---- ---- Acknowledgment of
+ signals, not otherwise
+ provided for.
+ ---- ---- ---- Standing train--back.
+ ---- ---- ---- ---- Call for signals.
+ -------- ---- ---- Calls attention to
+ following section.
+ -------- -------- ---- ---- Highway crossing
+ signal.
+ ---------------- Approaching stations,
+ junctions or
+ railroad crossings
+ at grade.
+
+A succession of short blasts is an alarm for persons on the track and
+calls the attention of trainmen to danger ahead.
+
+These signal codes operate fundamentally in connection with the essential
+rules of schedule that we have already shown.
+
+Suppose now that we consider the workings of all this system as it comes
+down to actual practice in a single concrete instance. We are finding our
+way to a big terminal yard in all the murkiness and cloudiness of very
+early morning, and once again we hunt out that urbane soul, the
+yardmaster. He holds in his hand the yellow tissue of an order from the
+despatcher of the division. In the conciseness of telegraphy it tells him
+to start a third section of train 118--through freight--at 6:15 o'clock.
+Just back of his little grimy box of an office is the big sprawling
+roundhouse--a dozen freighters with banked fires standing in the stalls,
+awaiting summons to work. The twelve engines are divided into several
+classifications according to pulling strength and speed, but the
+despatcher has designated the particular engine he wishes for third-118,
+and he gets it--a big lanky puller--1847. She is chosen chiefly because
+she has had the longest roundhouse rest, having brought in a through
+freight from up the line, and having been received with engineer's report
+showing her to be in good running order, at five o'clock yesterday
+afternoon. Before the 1847 slipped from the turntable into the waiting
+stall, the hostlers and the wipers were at her. The hostlers had taken her
+over the cinder-pit and cleaned out the fire-box. Then they went over her,
+cleaning her, inch by inch, a mechanical inspector in their wake, testing
+and sounding and checking every item in the engineer's report which showed
+1847 to be in good order at the end of his run with her. There was not
+much chance left for any shirking of responsibility, no matter what might
+arise upon the 1847 on any coming day.
+
+We turn and watch the yardmaster once again. He has the roundhouse foreman
+send one of the bright young boys who hang around his office night and
+day, and who dream of that coming hour when they will handle an 1847 for
+themselves, to call the engineer and fireman, whose names are posted
+"first out." Or perhaps the telephone has come into play--in these days in
+the smaller towns there is hardly a house too humble to have receiver and
+transmitter hanging somewhere upon its walls. In any event the engine-crew
+are supposed to stay home when off duty, unless especially excused, and to
+live within reasonable distance--say a mile--of the roundhouse.
+
+The caller tells the engineer and fireman to report at the roundhouse at
+5:45 A. M. At that hour the hostlers have made the 1847 fit for service.
+Her tender has been filled with coal, her tanks with water, even her sand
+is packed aboard the box that stands upon the boiler and is ready to help
+on slippery rail and upgrade. The engineer makes keen inspection of the
+1847 before he moves her a single inch, makes sure with his keen and
+practised eye that she is quite fit for service, pokes here and there and
+everywhere with his long-spouted oil-can. At a minute or two after shop
+whistles have shrieked "six o'clock" he pulls the 1847 out from the
+shadows of the roundhouse. He gets an open signal and switch to the main
+yard and finds waiting on a siding in that great place, the trail of
+freight cars and the caboose that are going with him to make Third-118.
+
+Now come back for a moment in your thought. While we were still scurrying
+down to the grimy yard, the despatcher was creating Third-118. On his desk
+were car reports, showing what had been received and sent out, and there
+was enough accumulation of stuff in the yards last night to justify a
+Third-118. Because good railroading means yard-sidings cleared, and
+standing cars and freight, like passengers, kept constantly moving, he did
+not hesitate at ordering her out. He found that there would be 32 cars
+between tender and caboose, weighing approximately some 1200 tons, and so
+he ordered from the roundhouse an engine of a class which the mechanical
+department guaranteed capable of pulling from 1,000 to 1,500 tons,
+gross weight.
+
+[Illustration: _Courtesy of the "Railroad Age Gazette"_
+
+THE ELECTRO-PNEUMATIC SIGNAL-BOX IN THE CONTROL TOWER OF A MODERN
+TERMINAL]
+
+[Illustration: THE RESPONSIBLE MEN WHO STAND AT THE SWITCH-TOWER OF A
+MODERN TERMINAL: A LARGE TOWER OF THE "MANUAL" TYPE]
+
+[Illustration: "WHEN WINTER COMES UPON THE LINES THE SUPERINTENDENT WILL
+HAVE FULL USE FOR EVERY ONE OF HIS WITS"]
+
+[Illustration: WATCHFUL SIGNALS GUARDING THE MAIN LINE OF A BUSY RAILROAD]
+
+The yardmaster had given the numbers of the cars that were to make
+Third-118, just as he received them from one of the despatcher's
+assistants, to a switching foreman, who arranged them, with the quick
+facility that comes from long practice, into an order that would permit
+them to be set off at various points up the line, with the least possible
+amount of switching. That practical sequence worked out in pencil and
+paper, a stubby switch-engine effected in reality. The cars and the
+caboose, in proper order, were ready, with the crew, and inspected when
+the 1847 backed to them and Third-118 came into her being.
+
+A yard caller had summoned the train-crew while the roundhouse caller was
+rounding up the two men of the engine-crew. Collins, the conductor, and
+his brakemen had reported at the yard-office, and were assigned to
+Third-118. Collins found the cars and caboose waiting just a few minutes
+before the 1847 had been coupled to them, with little ado and no formality
+whatsoever, beyond the testing of the air-brakes. Into his train-book he
+had entered the number of each car and the initials of the road owning it,
+its destination, its empty or tare weight; the weight of its load, and the
+sum of these or its gross weight. He sees to it that each box-car is
+firmly seal-locked. If not, he refuses to accept it from the yardmaster
+until it has been resealed, and makes a note of the occurrence. Like the
+engineer and the hostlers in the roundhouse, he takes no chances, no
+responsibilities that do not fairly belong to him.
+
+With both conductor and engineer ready, Third-118 starts upon her day's
+run. The yard operator has telegraphed the despatcher's office that 3-118
+is awaiting instructions. In that despatch he has given the locomotive
+number, the number and total weight of the cars it hauls, the name of both
+engineer and conductor. The train-despatcher enters these details of
+train and crew at the head of a column of his train register. On that
+register there are spaces for the entries of arriving and leaving times of
+the train as telegraphed him by the operators at each telegraph station on
+the division.
+
+The train once so entered by a despatcher's clerk, the despatcher sends a
+clearance card to the telegraph operator at the little yard office who
+repeats it back for accuracy. Then the yard operator presents that
+clearance order to the engineer and conductor, who read it aloud to
+him--also for accuracy, of course--and then sign that they have read and
+understood the order. The signatures are then reported to the despatcher's
+office, which wires "Complete." "Complete" goes in writing upon the copies
+of the order made in manifold, which go to engineer, to conductor, and to
+the operator's own files. The engineer reads his order to the fireman, who
+repeats it back to him; the conductor follows the same routine with his
+brakemen. That all sounds complicated, but quickly becomes mechanical and
+rapid; the danger is that it may become so mechanical and rapid as to
+permit of serious errors passing unchecked through the routine. But the
+railroad has done its part. It has, for itself, taken every possible
+precaution against error and resulting accident.
+
+We are privileged, and we climb into the caboose of Third-118. We hold
+credentials to Collins, her conductor, and they are unimpeachable. We can
+see that from his face as he holds his lantern over them: he would not
+even let us into his caboose until his own mind was set. After that there
+was barely time to jump aboard. The 1847 is beginning to clear the yard
+before we have had time for a good look at the inside of the little
+caboose.
+
+"You won't find our hack any fancy place," says Collins. "But we've had it
+nine years now, and it seems kind of homelike to us after all this time."
+
+The "we" consists of Collins and his rear brakeman. The forward brakeman,
+who is held responsible for the front half of the train, has his
+headquarters in the cab of the 1847. The caboose is a home-like place,
+snugly warmed by a red-hot stove placed in its corner and lined with bunks
+made into beds, Pullman fashion; only never was there a Pullman sleeper
+that gave you less sense of the impressive and a greater sense of a snug
+cabin. Squarely placed in its centre is a sort of wooden pyramid and the
+steps up this lead to the lookout from where the long snaky train can be
+watched.
+
+"Kind o' ol'-fashioned, that," apologizes Collins. "Th' las' time I had
+th' cabin into the shops for over-haulin', they offered to take it out an'
+put in th' ladders; but I says 'no'; an' this is why."
+
+One by one he lifts its hinged steps. This is a pyramid built of lockers,
+a regular treasure house of railroad necessities. There are all sorts of
+ropes and jacks and wrenches, extra parts against every emergency. There
+is a food closet, and another locker filled with neat stacks of
+stationery.
+
+"They give us more forms to fill out now than th' super's office got
+twenty years ago," he laughs. "I spend more than half my time at that
+desk."
+
+The clerical work on Third-118 is considerable. Collins has to keep all
+the way-bills of his train--32 cars, almost $100,000 worth of merchandise,
+and if he makes a serious error it is apt to cost him his job. He writes a
+neat hand, and his records, like his caboose, are kept in ship-shape
+fashion. He is a careful student of the ethics and the practices of
+railroad management and operation. He has his own ideas on each of these,
+and when you get to them they are good ideas. Of such as he railroad
+executives are every year made in America.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We slip up the line, slowly threading our passage through the mass of
+passenger trains, fast and slow, that all times have the right-of-way over
+the third sections of rather ordinary freights. Collins sometimes thrusts
+his orders into our hands in order that we may see something of the
+great detail of this branch of operating. Each is wonderfully specific,
+and we know by that "complete" on the corner that it has been given in
+detail.
+
+"No. 1 Engine 2236 will wait at Morris Level until 10:00 A. M. for 3-118,
+Engine 1847."
+
+The signature is that of the initials of the division superintendent, the
+numerals have been spelled out. It would seem as if the railroad had taken
+every possible precaution for safety. And yet again, remember that great
+accidents have happened upon American railroads just because men's minds
+have perversely refused to read what eyes and ears have read. And yet
+there seems to be nothing to be done, more thorough than is already being
+done.
+
+"Are all these freights upon schedule?" you may ask Collins, after you
+meet a few dozen of them within the limits of a single-track division. He
+is decent enough not to laugh at your ignorance.
+
+"Schedule?" he repeats. "It's a joke. They give our first section a time
+to get out on, in the time-card and then one o' them bright office-boys
+gets a figger out o' his head an' puts it down for an arrivin' time. He
+never hits it an' he never expects to. So more an' more they're gettin' to
+move this freight on special orders. They can better regulate it then,
+'cordin' to volume of business. Mos' of the men carry the schedules of the
+fas' an' th' way-freights in their domes. Th' coarse tonnage stuff doesn't
+even get special orders. When they get enough of it, down on th' main
+line, they get an engine out o' th' roundhouse, give the train th' engine
+number, and start off. Railroad traffic along the freight end follows
+business conditions mighty close."
+
+It is still daylight when we halt at a junction, across a frozen river
+from a city. The city is set upon a steep hillside, and its houses rise
+from the river in even terraces. At the top a great domed structure--the
+State House--crowns it. It is a still winter's morning, and the smoke
+from all the chimney-pots extends straight heavenward. We wait patiently
+upon a long siding until everything else has been moved--through fast
+expresses heavily laden with opulent-looking Pullmans, jerky little
+suburban trains, long draughts of empty coaches, being drawn by
+consequential switch-engines in and out of the train-shed of the passenger
+station. Finally a certain semaphore blade drops, we cross over to the
+important main line and begin pulling on a sharp curve, across the river,
+clear of the station with its confusion, through and past the city to a
+busy division yard.
+
+In a very little time, for this is their home town, Collins and his crew
+are registering at the yardmaster's office. The engineer of the 1847, and
+his fireman, turn in their time-slips and proceed with the locomotive to
+the roundhouse where they make a report upon its condition. Their names
+are posted on the "in" list or register, and they are off duty until they
+are summoned by the callers at this end of the division. The despatcher
+has, of course, been apprised of the safe ending of the run of Third-118.
+
+In the despatcher we have a high type of railroad official who works
+almost unknown to the great travelling public, and yet accepts a very
+great measure of the responsibility for the safe operation of the lines.
+His orders, sent by telegraph and bearing that cabalistic initial
+signature of his superintendent, are the products of his own mind. There
+can be no mistake in these, and he knows it. Each message that he sends
+may produce disaster, and he knows that.
+
+He is an executive of a type that is not to be passed by lightly. He has
+risen from the ranks of the telegraphers, most likely from some lonely
+country station or forlorn signal-tower, and his knowledge of railroad
+operation, both theoretical and practical, must approach perfection. On
+sunny, serene days he proceeds with the theoretical railroading; when
+storms or unexpected influxes of traffic come to harass the division, he
+will need every bit of his practical knowledge. Handling a number of
+special trains--freight or passenger--is a strain, and that strain is most
+felt at the despatcher's desk.
+
+Now and then your morning paper tells of a railroad wreck, and laconically
+adds, "The despatcher was at fault." The stories of the wrecks that were
+forestalled by the sheer genius of the men who sit night and day at the
+telegraph instruments at headquarters are the stories that are for the
+most part untold, and that far surpass in thrill and interest the stories
+of the failures.
+
+The despatcher must also be the full measure of a man. He is, like the
+silent figure upon the bridge of a great ship, of unquestioned authority
+as he sits at his desk. He may or may not have a map of the line before
+him as he sits there, but you may be certain that he knows where every
+moving train on the division is at the moment you see him, just as clearly
+as if it were all visible there to the naked eye in some sort of picture
+map. No trains proceed without his express orders. He has "reliefs" and
+there is no hour of day or night when one of these is not at the
+despatcher's desk, having the work of the line under his exact
+supervision.
+
+The order that any train receives from the despatcher by means of the
+telegraph will, as we saw in Collins's case, direct it to proceed to a
+certain point on the line, and will specify every train, regular or extra,
+that it will meet, and the meeting point. When the train has proceeded to
+the end of its orders there will be more orders from the train-despatcher
+to be receipted for, and so it will proceed to the end of the route. It is
+quite possible that at any stage of the journey orders will come from
+headquarters nullifying those already issued, in part or entirely; and
+these must be accounted for in the same thorough and accurate fashion.
+Some of this seems "red tape" to the men on the line, and there come times
+when they are a bit disposed to rebel at what seems to them useless
+formality. There also come times when trains crash into one another; and
+at those times the railroad, with its infinite system of recording its
+orders, is generally apt to be able to place the blame pretty accurately.
+Those are the times when the system of train orders justifies its worth.
+
+Recently the telephone has come into something more than an experimental
+use in despatching trains upon American railroads. Various causes have
+contributed to this. For one thing, the use of the telephone enables the
+average road to make good use of its veterans, men who would indignantly
+refuse to become pensioners, and yet who have come to a time in their
+lives when they must set their pace in gentler key. A trusted old
+employee, a man crippled perhaps in loyalty to the company's service, a
+keen-witted responsible woman, any one of these can competently handle
+train orders over a telephone, without having to have the education and
+the wonderful expertness that comes only from long experience in
+telegraphy; and they all become available in the despatching service.
+Still another cause has contributed to the change, which is being reported
+each week from some fresh corner of the country--the telegraphers,
+themselves. Within the past few years they were able to induce Congress to
+reduce their day's work to eight hours. Translated, this meant that the
+average way-station which had been manned by one or two operators would
+correspondingly need two or three operators. The telegraphers, by reason
+of the expert training needed in their business, kept their wage-scale up,
+and the railroads felt that eight-hour bill keenly in their treasuries. So
+there may have been the least bit of retribution in their seeking the
+telephone as a relief. The change has certainly been made in the keen hope
+of effecting economy. No railroad operator would feel ashamed to admit
+that fine impeachment.
+
+Modern railroading simply makes the same demand of the telephone that it
+makes of the telegraph--that it keep the probability of safety high. It
+makes the same demand of the men who maintain the signals, the track, the
+bridges, and other portions of the right-of-way. Let us consider them in
+the passing of an instant.
+
+You know the signals along the line of the railroad--those gaunt, uncanny
+things that spell danger or safety to the men in the engine-cabs. A little
+while ago, we stood beside a man in the sun-filled tower of a great
+railroad terminal and watched him operate the most complicated switch and
+signal system in the land, watched him with the crooking of a finger upon
+the lever of an electric machine raise this blade, lower that, as he made
+new paths for the many trains, coming and going.
+
+A plant of that sort is known as the interlocking. In its simplest form,
+it will guard a junction between two single tracks. The mast of the signal
+will rise, according to standard custom, at the right of the track in the
+direction of travel, and there will probably be two semaphore blades, the
+upper of which guards and signals the straight main-line or "superior"
+track, the lower, the diverging branch, known as the "inferior" track. The
+blade raised--automatically showing a red light--indicates that the main
+line is closed to the engineer. "Stop!" "Danger!" are the words it tells
+him. The blade lowered, a green light is automatically displayed, and the
+engineer knows that he can go ahead at full speed on the main line. The
+road is clear for him. The lower blade gives similar indications for the
+branch diverging line. Normally, both blades stand at "stop" and "danger,"
+and the one guarding the line for which the train is destined, is dropped
+only on the approach of the train, itself. In fact, to facilitate the
+movement of trains, these guarding signals--known to the signal experts as
+"home signals"--are generally interlocked with "distant signals" several
+hundred feet down the line, on which blades indicating the diverging
+tracks forecast the story that the "home signal" is to tell the engineer.
+The blade raised--by night displaying a white or safety signal--on the
+"distant signal" indicates that the line it guards is blocked at the
+"home signal," and that the engineer must be prepared to bring his train
+to a full stop. Dropped--showing the green safety light--that particular
+line is open and ready, and the engineer can be prepared to pass the
+junction without a very great diminution of speed.
+
+That is the fundamental rule of the signal. Some roads have experimented
+with other forms of indicators--disks of one sort or another, semaphore
+blades that turn upwards rather than drop. The devices are numerous, but
+the principle is the same. When the tracks begin to multiply, and the
+signals begin to multiply in even greater proportion, they are generally
+carried over the tracks on a light bridge construction--our English
+cousins call it a "gantry"--and a series of small semaphore masts built up
+from the bridge. One of these masts, or "dolls," will be assigned to each
+track; and if there chances to be an unsignalled siding-track of little
+importance passing under the bridge, it will have its own "doll" rising
+from the bridge although quite devoid of semaphore blades. So it is all
+quite as clear as print to the engineer, even when forty or fifty lights
+blink at him from a single bridge. The signals tell their story to him
+quite as simply as to the man in the tower, who is setting their blades in
+accordance with his carefully arranged plans.
+
+Where signals are not of this interlocking type, guarding some junction,
+railroad grade crossing, draw-bridge or other point of possible danger,
+they are likely to resolve themselves into the block system. This system,
+in a rather crude form, with the use of operators at each block-tower or
+way-station, has been in development for something less than thirty years
+upon the American railroad. In brief, it divides a line--usually
+double-tracked, but sometimes used by the so-called "staff" method upon a
+single-track road--into sections, or blocks, of from three to five miles
+each. On double-track under this system, no two trains, even though
+travelling in the same direction are permitted in the same block. At the
+entrance to each block stands a tall mast with two of the conventional
+signal blades. The upper of these raised denotes that a train is still in
+the block, and an engineer must stop his train and wait till it drops,
+before he can proceed. The lower blade, when raised, indicates that a
+train is in the second block ahead, and the engineer must proceed only
+with caution and expecting to find that block closed against him. It is
+all quite simple; and if the engineers followed the signals absolutely,
+there never could be any rear-end collisions on lines protected by block
+signals. As a matter of fact, there rarely ever are, although the
+engineers do take chances time and time again.
+
+"Why should I stop for that thing," said a veteran engineer on a fast
+express train as we went whirring by one of those upper blades raised and
+commanding us in a blood-red point of light to stop, "when I can look down
+this straight stretch and see they're clear? Like as not something's got
+into the mechanism of it and let her flop that way."
+
+Do not insult the intelligence of that engineer. A little while before, he
+had told us, with a deal of pride, that the rolling stock of "his road"
+placed end to end would reach from New York to Omaha, a distance of some
+1300 miles. Keenest of the keen, he had a sort of contempt for a rule-book
+in such a case as that.
+
+"Isn't it sort of positive?" we began. "Good excuse anyway--"
+
+"It is," he shouted back, "but somehow it don't go if you fall behind on
+your running time. We're here to use ordinary good sense--and bring our
+trains in on time."
+
+And yet the railroad has a sharp way of insisting upon compliance with
+that book of rules by making, once in a great while, surprise tests. A
+signal is set at danger, without any more apparent reason than in the case
+just cited; a secret watch is kept, and judgment and discipline are
+visited upon the heads of the engineers who permit themselves to run past
+it.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+To operate the signals calls for one body of men, and to maintain them for
+faithful service against all manner and stress of wear and weather,
+another; just as there must be a working corps to keep the right-of-way in
+working order. This last is a mighty brigade of the railroad's army; for
+one man in every four who works for it is employed in keeping the track in
+order. One dollar in every six that the railroad spends goes for that
+purpose.
+
+Maintenance of way on each division divides itself into a superintendent
+of bridges and buildings, who sees to the upkeep of those facilities; and
+a roadmaster, who specializes upon the track itself. This last officer,
+almost invariably one who has begun to shoulder himself up in the ranks of
+the railroad army from the very beginning, has his territory divided into
+sections from two to five miles in length on double-track, from four to
+ten on single. In command of each section a faithful hand-car and a group
+of more or less faithful section-hands, figured on an allowance of one to
+each mile of track, is a section-boss. The section-boss is a wry and a
+wise soul, or should be. He may not know as much about the formulas for
+compensating curves as that bright boy who has just come out of a "tech"
+school to stand his turn at a transit, but he has a marvellous sort of
+intuitive sense in keeping his little stretch of track in order. He can
+sight his rail and discover flaws in alignment as a blind man can find
+surface flaws with the developed tips of his fingers, and all the while he
+may be growling at the railroad management for adding to the weight of its
+rolling-stock and "pounding the elevations out of his track."
+
+In summer he is expert with the "track jacks" and constantly putting in
+bits of ballast here and there; and in the winter, when the frost and snow
+have made it impossible to touch the ballast, he keeps his elevations by
+means of "shims." A "shim" is a piece of wood, from shingle thickness to
+the width of two ties piled one upon the other, and is wedged between the
+tie and the rail till summer comes and the line can be corrected by
+ballasting.
+
+The section-boss must keep pace with a job that is no sinecure. If his
+gang, in eagerness to be on dress parade, almost throws dirt on the rear
+steps of the boss's private car as it goes whizzing down the line, he must
+also see to it that they keep plugging at it where there is not even a
+locomotive whistle within sound. He must be thrifty, economical. He must
+remember that the humble cross-tie which once cost a quarter now costs
+almost a dollar, and that for one of these to be found neglected in the
+ditch is almost a capital crime. He must have an eye for loose spikes and
+angle-plates, for the big boss has hinted at the annual loss to the road
+in these simple factors.
+
+At his call and that of the superintendent of bridges and buildings is a
+work-train, made up of a few flat-cars and discarded coaches, doing
+boarding-house Pullman service in their declining years, which looks after
+work too sizable for the section-boss and his little gang, and yet not
+large enough for the attention of the dignified gentlemen who are known as
+the reconstruction engineers. Yet some of the feats of these work-train
+gangs have the crackle of engineering genius. It takes brains to rip out a
+little timber span and replace it in the interval between two trains
+spaced a couple of hours apart, and in the railroad, brain work often
+comes from the shabby workman, from the man who graduates from the command
+of his own battered hand-car.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+All this elaborate system of railroad operation has been built up through
+many years of practice. Experience has been more than a teacher in the
+business, which becomes yearly more and more nearly a developed science;
+she has been a whole faculty and a curriculum, too. Methods that promised
+well at the outset have been found faulty after trial, and rejected.
+Committees of trained experts have pondered and reported voluminously; the
+standard railroad codes of every sort have been born because of them. The
+operation of the railroad has been brought close to science. It would seem
+as if the entire field had been completely covered.
+
+And yet new situations constantly arise, the like of which have never
+before presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves
+in unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track
+stretches through the Middle West that starve through eleven months of the
+year, and for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a
+double-track trunk-line in the East. Obviously such lines cannot be
+double-tracked for thirty days of business; quite as obviously the
+overtaxed division, its equipment, and its men must rise to every
+necessity of the floodtide of business. There are fat years and there are
+lean years. There come years of bumper crops, years when the factory
+lights burn from sunset to dawn, and wheels turn unceasingly, and then the
+superintendent wonders how his equipment and men are going to stand the
+strain. Engines are kept from the shops and in service; nothing that is
+even a semblance of a car is kept out of service; the demand for men is
+keen; prosperity strains the resources of the railroad.
+
+In the lean years, engines are sometimes kept from the shops because the
+railroad feels that it must hold down its running expenses to keep pace
+with reduced revenues, and such a course it can stoutly defend as nothing
+else than good business. Equipment begins to stand idle. Engines are
+tucked away on empty sidings, boarded and forlorn; and if the year be very
+lean indeed, the superintendent may find it necessary to send out a
+wrecking crane and begin lifting empty cars off the rails and leaving them
+in the ditch at the side of the right-of-way, until the golden times come
+again. At such seasons his ingenuity is tested quite as much as in the
+times of floodtide. Orders come to cut expenses, and his big expense is
+the pay-roll. When he begins to blue-pencil that pay-roll, some one is
+going to be hungry. The superintendent knows that. He must move with great
+care in such emergencies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE FELLOWS OUT UPON THE LINE
+
+ MEN WHO RUN THE TRAINS MUST HAVE BRAIN AS WELL AS MUSCLE--THEIR
+ TRAINING--FROM FARMER'S BOY TO ENGINEER--THE BRAKEMAN'S DANGEROUS
+ WORK--BAGGAGEMAN AND MAIL CLERKS--HAND-SWITCHMEN--THE MULTIFARIOUS
+ DUTIES OF COUNTRY STATION-AGENTS.
+
+
+One man in every twelve in the United States is on the pay-roll of a
+railroad. No wonder that that great organism comes so close to human life
+throughout the nation, that we seem to touch it at every turn.
+
+This one out of twelve is the great army of industrial America. Composed
+of nearly 1,500,000 men, it is an army that inspires loyalty and
+coöperation within its own ranks, and confidence and admiration from
+without. To a nation whose creed is work, it stands as the uniformed host
+stands to a fighting nation like England or France or Germany. The army of
+industrial America inspires not one whit less affection than those great
+crops of paid fighters in Europe.
+
+Ninety-six per cent of this army of railroaders are engaged in the
+business of maintaining and operating the great avenues of transportation,
+an overwhelming proportion in the last phase of the business. The
+operating department is, to the average mind, the railroad. Its members
+are the men with whom the public come oftenest in contact; they are the
+men who are oftenest called upon to hazard life and limb in the pursuit of
+their callings. The romance of the railroad--a romance that is told in
+unending prose and verse--hovers over the men who operate it. The men who
+labor in the shops and keep engines and cars safe and fit for the most
+efficient service have no small responsibilities. Moreover, their work,
+forging and finishing great masses of metal, is not without its own
+hazards. The men who give their time and talents to the maintenance of the
+track and the structure of the railroad have equal responsibilities. It is
+not doubted for an instant that both of these are important functions in
+the conduct of railroad transportation, and each in turn will have full
+attention given to it.
+
+In a previous chapter we have considered the men who control the actual
+operation of the railroad, the safe conduct of its trains up and down the
+line. How about the privates in the ranks of this industrial army, the
+men, who by their loyalty and ability form the very foundations of
+successful operation, who also form the material from which executives are
+chosen every day?
+
+There are no common laborers in this phase of railroad work. A man with
+stout muscles and less than the average amount of brains can ofttimes
+shovel ballast out with the track-gangs; there are many, many
+opportunities for crude labor in the heavy metal work of the railroad's
+shops; there are none within the scientific activity that gives itself to
+the running of the trains. The humblest of these folk must have a
+particular talent, a talent so peculiar that it might almost be described
+as "latent Americanism." The lowest-priced man in the train-service must
+understand the entire complicated theories of railroad operation to a T.
+He may be the man on whom responsibility--the responsibility for the
+safety of not one but many human lives--may suddenly be thrust. A
+gate-tender at a highway crossing has not ordinarily a place of gravest
+responsibility; yet in some least expected hour this humblest employee of
+the operating department may hold the fate of human life in the balancing
+of his steady hands.
+
+Americans run the American railroads. For this great service men must
+possess not only the mental capacity for understanding the technique of
+operation, but the physical strength to meet the stress of hard labor, and
+of every sort of weather, and of long hours spent upon moving trains.
+Moreover, there is a requirement of morals--that a man must fully know and
+quite as fully accept the responsibility for human life that is placed in
+his hands. These things combined make that "latent Americanism" of which
+we have just spoken; and the railroad that digs deep into this mine of
+"latent Americanism" finds its material, not in the great cities with
+their vast colonies of foreigners, but on the farms of a broad, broad
+land. The boy standing in the pasture sees the express train go skimming
+past him from an unknown great world into another unknown great world, and
+straightway he has the railroad fever. He drives to the depot with the
+milk cans, and there he comes in contact with the personnel of that link
+of steel that stretches across the farm where he was born. It is only a
+little time after that before he is applying for work as a railroad man.
+
+So it is that the railroad finds fine timber for its service. It picks and
+chooses. For its choice it has the pick of American timber, the ironwood
+of our national forests of humanity. It gathers its army of men, inspects
+them carefully for physical, mental and moral requirements and then it
+impresses upon them the necessity of good living, the absolute necessity
+of deference to an established and rigid system of discipline as a
+requirement in the successful handling of the different transportation
+business.
+
+Thus we have the railroad men as the best workers of the nation. If you
+want proof of that, ask any of the great mail-order concerns which class
+of business they prefer and they will tell you without hesitation that it
+is the railroad man. Come closer home and ask the merchants of any
+community the same question. Their answer will be the same. Rigid
+conditions, out-of-door life, sober habits make desirable citizens out of
+this class of workers. There are none better anywhere.
+
+In the train service, the ordinary route of promotion is through the
+freight service to the passenger. Thus, for the farmer's boy who hankers
+to sit in the cab of the locomotive that hauls the Limited there is a long
+hard path. Chances are that at the beginning the road foreman of engines
+will start him at odd chores, calling crews, wiping engines, and the like,
+around some one of the big roundhouses. He will work hard, but here he
+will begin to absorb the romance of the line, the romance that, like fog
+and engine smoke, lies around the engine house, thick enough to cut.
+Perhaps after a while they will give him a little authority and make him a
+hostler. The "hostler" and the "stalls" in the roundhouses are quaint
+survivals of the most primitive railroad days, when horses were really
+motive power.
+
+At odd times, night times perhaps, the boy will ride in engine cabs and
+gradually acquire a knowledge of one of these great machines such as no
+text-book would ever give him. Then comes his first big opportunity. There
+is a vacancy among the engine crews; the road foreman of engines gives him
+a good report, and he begins to have dealing with the train-master. He is
+made a fireman, and he travels the division end to end, day in and day
+out.
+
+Now he knows why the railroad requires physical tests as well as tests of
+eyesight and of hearing. Even after he has taken another step in advance
+and been promoted to the passenger service (we will assume that ours is a
+bright, ambitious boy), he will only find that his labors in the
+engine-cab have been increased. It is no slight task, firing a heavy
+locomotive over 100 or more miles of grade-climbing, curve-rounding
+railroad. It is a task that fairly calls for human arms of steel; for some
+firemen handle some 17 tons of coal in a single run. The appetite of that
+firebox is seemingly insatiable. There is hardly a moment during the run
+that it is not clamoring to be fed, and that the fireman is not hard at it
+there on the rocking floor of the swaying tender, reaching from tender
+coal to firebox door.
+
+But the day does come, if he sticks hard at it, when he becomes an
+engineer. He has learned the line well, during his countless trips over it
+as fireman. He has come to know every signal, every bridge, every station,
+every curve, every grade, every place for slow, careful running, every
+place for speeding, as thoroughly as ever river pilot learned his course.
+There have been many times when he has had to assume temporary charge of
+the engine. He is a qualified man at least to sit in the right hand of the
+cab, to have command over reverse lever and over throttle.
+
+His work is of a different sort already. The hard physical labor is a
+thing of the past, most of the time he sits at his work. But
+responsibility replaces physical stress, and the farmer boy now realizes
+which of the two is more wearing. Upon his judgment--instant judgment time
+and time and time again--the fate of that heavy train depends. After he
+has been promoted from freight engineer to passenger engineer he has a
+train filled with humanity, and he knows the difference. By day the
+inclination of a single blade, by night the friendly welcome or the harsh
+command of changeable lights must never escape him. One slip, and after
+that--
+
+The engineer prefers not to think of that. He prefers to think of a safe
+trip, terminal to terminal, to think of the long line covered, once again
+in safety, to think of the station at the far end of the division, where a
+relief engine and engineer will be in waiting to take the train another
+stage in its long journey across the land, to think of the home and family
+awaiting him. He is a big passenger man now. When he gets to the end of
+the run, there will be a crew to take his locomotive away to the
+roundhouse. He will have a bit of a wash and in a few minutes he will be
+bound through the station waiting-room, well dressed, smoking a good
+fifteen-cent cigar, quite as fine a type of American citizen as you might
+wish to see anywhere. You would hardly recognize in this well-dressed man
+of affairs, the keen-eyed, sound-bodied man in blue jeans who stood
+beside his engine, oil-can in hand, at the far end of the division.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The same type holds true through the man in care of the other parts of the
+trains. Take the brakeman--they call him trainman nowadays in the
+passenger service. In the old days this was a slouchy, somewhat slovenly
+dressed individual of a self-acknowledged independence. Time has changed
+him in thirty years. An increased respect for the service has taken away
+from him his slouchiness; a feeling that good work and hard work will take
+him through the ranks, through a service as conductor, perhaps to
+train-master, to superintendent, goodness knows how much further, has
+replaced that bumptious independence.
+
+He began as brakeman on a freight. There were two, possibly three, of
+these men to the train, under command of the conductor, back there in the
+caboose, and they were supposed to distribute themselves pretty equally
+over the top of the train. The forward brakeman would work from the cab
+backward, the rear brakeman from the caboose (he also probably calls it a
+"hack"), forward, the remaining man when a third was assigned to the
+train, having the middle. It was thought and confidently predicted that
+with the universal use of the air-brake to freight equipment the days of
+clambering over the tops of the cars to man the brakes were over. Brakemen
+twenty years ago were dreaming of the day when they might sit in a cab or
+caboose and have the difficult work of slacking or the stopping of a
+1,500-ton train accomplished, through the genius of mechanism, by a
+hand-turn of the engineer upon an air-brake throttle. But what looked so
+well in theory has not worked quite so well in practice. The railroads
+have found the wear and tear on the air-brake equipment, particularly with
+the steep grade lines and heavy equipment, a tremendous expense. For the
+sake of that and for the sake of still greater safety--following the
+railroad rule to use each possible safety measure, one upon the
+other--the brakemen are still compelled to keep to the top of the cars.
+
+[Illustration: "WHEN THE TRAIN COMES TO A WATER STATION THE FIREMAN GETS
+OUT AND FILLS THE TANK"]
+
+[Illustration: A FREIGHT-CREW AND ITS "HACK"]
+
+[Illustration: A VIEW THROUGH THE SPAN OF A MODERN TRUSS BRIDGE GIVES AN
+IDEA OF ITS STRENGTH AND SOLIDITY]
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW YORK CENTRAL IS ADOPTING THE NEW FORM OF "UPPER
+QUADRANT" SIGNAL]
+
+On a pleasant day this is a task that can give the average brakeman a sort
+of supreme contempt for the man whose work houses him within four walls.
+If the road lies through a lovely country, if it pierces mountain ranges,
+or follows the twisting course of a broad river, he may feel a contempt,
+too, for the passenger who observes the lovely scenes only through the
+narrow confines of a car window. To him there is a broad horizon, and he
+would be a poor sort of man indeed if he did not rise to the inspiration
+of this environment.
+
+There is quite another side of this in the winter. Let wind and rain and
+then freezing weather come, and that icy footpath over the top of the
+snaky train becomes the most dangerous way in all Christendom. It consists
+of only three narrow planks laid lengthwise of the train, and between the
+cars there is a two-foot interval to be jumped. Hand-rails of any sort are
+an impossibility, and the brakeman now and then will receive a sharp slap
+in the face that is not the slap of wind or of sleet, and he will fall
+flat upon the car-roof or dodge to the ladders that run up between the
+cars. That slap was the slap of the "tickler," that gallows-like affair
+that stands guard before tunnels and low bridges and gives crude warning
+to the man working upon the train roofs of a worse slap yet to come.
+
+There are other dangers, not the least of these the possibility of open
+battle at any time of day or night with one or more "hobos," tramps, or
+"yeggmen," who seem to regard freight trains as complimentary
+transportation extended to them as a right, and train-crews as their
+natural enemies. The list of railroad men who have lost their lives
+because of these thugs is not a short one. It is one of the many records
+of railroad heroism.
+
+Still the brakeman has a far easier time of it than his prototype of a
+generation or more back. The air-brake is a big help. When a train breaks
+in two or three parts on a grade, the pulling out of the air-couplings
+automatically sets the brakes on every part, and if you do not know what
+that means ask one of the old-timers. In the old days of the hand-brakes
+the very worst of all freight accidents came when a section of a freight
+train without any one aboard to set its brakes, broke loose and came
+crashing down a hill into some helpless train. Ask the old-timer about the
+hand-couplings and the terrific record of maimed arms and bodies that they
+left. The modern automatic couplings have been worth far more than their
+cost to the railroads.
+
+In the course of time and advancement the brakeman leaves the freight and
+enters the passenger service. Now he is called a trainman and is attired
+in a natty uniform. He has to shave, to keep his hands clean, wear gloves
+perhaps, and be a little more of a Chesterfield. He must announce the
+stations in fairly intelligible tones, and be prepared to answer
+pleasantly and accurately the thousand and one foolish questions put to
+him by passengers.
+
+As a conductor he will probably begin as Collins began, in the freight
+service. When he comes to the passenger-service there will be still more
+book-keeping to confront him, and he will have to be a man of good mental
+attainments to handle all the many, many varieties of local and through
+tickets, mileage-books, passes, and other forms of transportation
+contracts that come to him, to detect the good from the bad, to throw out
+the counterfeits that are constantly being offered to him. He will have to
+carry quite a money account for cash affairs, and he knows that mistakes
+will have to be paid out of his own pocket.
+
+All this is only a phase of his business. He is responsible for the care
+and safe conduct of his train, equally responsible in this last respect
+with the engineer. He also receives and signs for the train orders, and he
+is required to keep in mind every detail of the train's progress over the
+line. He will have his own assortment of questions to answer at every
+stage of the journey, and he will be expected to maintain the discipline
+of the railroad upon its trains. That may mean in one instance the
+ejectment of a passenger who refuses to pay his fare, and still he must
+not involve the road in any big damage suit; or in another, the
+subjugation of some gang of drunken loafers. The real wonder of it is that
+so many conductors come as near as they do to the Chesterfieldian
+standards.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In the forward part of the train are still other members of its crew, some
+of them possibly who are not paid by the railroad, but who are indirectly
+of its service. Among these last may be classed the mail clerks, who are
+distinctly employees of the Federal Government, and the messengers of the
+various express companies. If the road is small and the train unimportant,
+these workers may be grouped with the baggagemen in the baggage-car. If
+the train is still less important the baggageman may assume part of the
+functions of mail clerk and express messenger. If so, he is apt to have
+his own hands full. The mere manual exercise of stacking a 60-foot
+baggage-car from floor to ceiling with heavy trunks (and the commercial
+travellers and theatrical folk _do_ carry heavy trunks) is no slight
+matter. But that is not all. The trunk put off at the wrong place or the
+trunk that is not put off at all is apt to make the railroad an enemy for
+life and the baggageman is another one of the many in the service who are
+permitted to make no mistakes.
+
+When he has United States mail-sacks and a stack of express packages to
+handle, his troubles only multiply. His book-keeping increases
+prodigiously, and his temper undergoes a sharper strain. Give him all
+these, then a couple of fighting Boston terriers, which must, because of
+one of the many minor regulations of railroad passenger traffic, ride in
+the baggage-car--a cold and draughty car--and you will no longer wonder
+why the baggageman has a streak of ill-temper at times. His office is
+certainly no sinecure, neither is he in the direct path of advancement
+like his co-workers, the fireman and the brakeman.
+
+These train-workers who are so little seen by the travelling
+public--baggagemen, mail clerks and express messengers alike, ride in the
+most hazardous part of the equipment, the extreme forward cars of the
+train. Read the list of train accidents, involving loss of life, and in
+nine cases out of ten you will find that these have headed the list of
+killed or injured. There work is hard, their hours long, their pay modest.
+They form a silent brigade of the industrial army that is always close to
+the firing line.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+There remains in the operating service a great branch of the army that
+does not scurry up and down the line. Some of these men are at lonely
+outposts, forlorn towers hidden at the edge of the forest or set out upon
+the plain, where a desolate man guards a cluster of switch levers and
+hardly knows of the outer world, save through the clicking of his
+telegraph key or the rush of the trains passing below his perch. He knows
+each of these. If his is a junction tower or a point where two busy lines
+of track intersect or cross one another, it is his duty to set the proper
+switches and their governing signals.
+
+It seems a simple enough thing, and it is. But even the simple things in
+railroading must be executed with extreme care. If the towerman set those
+switches and signals 319 times in the course of a day, they must be set
+absolutely correct 319 times. There can be no slurring in this work.
+
+Those men in the towers have their own records of bravery. They are the
+sentinels of the railroad, and faithful sentinels they are. The lonely
+tower, like so many other scenes of railroad activity, gives long
+opportunity for thought and meditation; and so it is not so strange, after
+all, that one of them has recently given the country a most distinguished
+essayist upon national railroad conditions.
+
+There are even humbler positions in the operating service, each of them
+demanding a fine loyalty and a fair measure of ability. Even the young boy
+who draws a baggage-truck knows that the path of advancement starts at his
+very feet; and the humble track-walker feels that a good part of the
+railroad safety and the railroad responsibility rests upon his broad
+shoulders. His is also a forlorn task, as he trudges back and forth over a
+section of line, hammer and wrench in hand, looking for the broken rail or
+other defect, slight in itself, but capable of infinite harm.
+
+By day his task is dreary and arduous enough. By night it is far more so.
+With his lantern in hand he must patrol the line faithfully, even if the
+wind howl about him and the snow come to block his progress. The
+passengers in the fast express trains that whirl past him and who see, if
+they see anything at all without, only a blotch of a tiny spark of light,
+do not know that it is a part of their protection. There is a deal of
+"behind the scenes" in railroad operation.
+
+And so it goes. There are hundreds of hand-switchmen who make the safe
+path for the train and upon each of them hangs responsibility. It is a
+trite saying that each of them knows that, and that each lives up to the
+full measure of his responsibility.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The station-agent, even in the smallest towns, has a less lonely time. He
+comes in contact with the outside world, and ofttimes his life goes quite
+to the other extreme. A local train may be due within three minutes, and
+here comes Aunt Mary Clark, delayed until the train is already whistling
+the station stop. Aunt Mary is deaf and it takes her some time to buy her
+ticket and to ask endless questions which must bring an endless string of
+answers. At that very moment the agent's telegraph sounder begins to call
+him. A message, upon which the safety of the operation of that train
+depends, is being poured into his ear, and he cannot afford to miss a
+single click of that instrument; the responsibility will be his if
+anything goes wrong in its delivery. On top of all this some commercial
+traveller may be clamoring for the checking of his trunk. The
+representative of the railroad in the small town has to keep his wits
+about him in such times.
+
+Of course, if the town is of considerable size he may have a staff about
+him. In such a case, he may have a baggage-room with baggageman and
+baggage-handlers installed; he may have assistants to mind the telegraph
+instrument and to sell tickets, other assistants to look after the
+freight. He may even attain to the dignity of a station master in uniform
+or else have such a dignitary reporting to him.
+
+But in the majority of railroad stations throughout the United States the
+station-agent is the staff; he is lucky if he has a man to "spell" him in
+his "off" hours. He probably is the agent of the express company in
+addition, and probably the agent of the telegraph company, too, which, by
+arrangement with the railroad, transacts a general commercial business
+over its wires. There are frequent instances when the local post-office is
+situated within the depot and the agent proves the versatility of his
+profession by acting as postmaster, too. He serves many masters, as you
+can see, and not all of these are outside of the railroad. He is not only
+answerable to the superintendent, in almost every case he is
+freight-agent, too, making out the bills of lading and figuring the
+complicated rate sheet. For this part of his work he is under the control
+of the general freight-agent. The general passenger-agent is also his
+superior officer. To him he must account accurately for his ticket sales,
+and that is not always a very easy matter. The question of passenger rates
+is a fairly complicated one.
+
+Still, the agent must not only be able to figure the rate to South Paris,
+Me., or to Oshkosh, Wis., within two minutes, but he must make out a long
+and correct ticket within that time, while the railroad's patron demands
+information about some branch line connection on another system a thousand
+miles away. The country station-agent earns every cent of his humble
+salary. He works long hours; and then occasionally one of the railroad's
+travelling representatives will drop in upon him and casually suggest that
+in his leisure time he might get out and solicit a little business for the
+company!
+
+There is not much loafing at the little yellow depot in the country.
+Sometimes a group of trainmen from some freight awaiting orders will
+gather there to swap stories and the keen wit of the railroad. These are
+the exceptions. The most times are the times of long, hard grind, work,
+work, work like the men out upon the trains. This railroad army is truly
+the army of hard work. It was gathered for labor.
+
+Yet the station-agent leaning over his telegraph instrument in the bay of
+his office, and watching the Limited scurry by the little depot, and
+seeing the president's big and gay private car hitched on behind, knows
+that that very executive in charge of many miles of railroad and thousands
+of men, came from another little country depot like this. The time may yet
+come when he himself will have a private car and a deal of authority.
+There is a great goal for every man in the railroad service.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+KEEPING THE LINE OPEN
+
+ THE WRECKING TRAIN AND ITS SUPPLIES--FLOODS DAMMED BY AN EMBANKMENT--
+ RIGHT OF WAY ALWAYS GIVEN TO THE WRECKING-TRAIN--EXPEDITIOUS WORK IN
+ REPAIRING THE TRACK--COLLAPSE OF THE ROOF OF A TUNNEL--TELEGRAPH
+ CRIPPLED BY STORMS--WINTER STORMS THE SEVEREST TEST--TRAINS IN QUICK
+ SUCCESSION HELP TO KEEP THE LINE OPEN IN SNOWSTORMS--THE ROTARY PLOUGH.
+
+
+A cub reporter shouldered his way into a railroad superintendent's office.
+Outside, a late winter's storm howled around the terminal; the morning was
+nipping cold, the air curtained with myriad snow-flakes, a great railroad
+was making a desperate fight against the mighty forces of nature.
+
+"My city editor wants to know what you folks are doing to get the line
+open," demanded the reporter.
+
+The big superintendent swung in his swivel chair and faced him. It was a
+place where angels might well have feared to tread--a place surcharged
+with the electricity of fight. The superintendent's mind was filled with
+the almost infinite detail of the fight, but he liked the cub reporter and
+greeted him with a smile.
+
+"You can tell your city editor," he replied slowly, "that it is as much as
+a man's job here is worth for him to think that the line is going to be
+opened. I'd fire him if he as much as thought that it was ever closed. We
+don't die. We fight. It's a hard storm, sonny, but we make muscle in
+storms like this. We don't _get_ the line open, we are _keeping_ the line
+open. D'ye see?"
+
+In that the big superintendent had sounded one of the biggest principles
+of railroad operation.
+
+The line must be kept open. That slender trail of two rails, stretching
+straight across the open land and writhing and twisting through the high
+hills, is a living organism. The railroad is no mere inanimate
+organization, like a store, for instance. It is a right-hand of the
+nation's life; it is life. The railroad is like a great living thing, its
+many arms reaching long distances back into the land. You cannot cut off
+the living arm and then bring it back to pulsing life.
+
+Just so the railroad arm cannot be severed--the line must be kept open.
+Strange things may come to pass: the right-of-way may be littered with the
+wreckage of trains, brought together through a defect in the physical
+machine of the human; unexpected floods of traffic may seek to overwhelm
+the outlet; in spring the power and might of flood may descend upon it;
+winter's storms may seek to paralyze it; still, always the railroad must
+be kept open.
+
+"We can't lie down," the superintendent explained to the cub reporter.
+"We've got to get the traffic through. Do you know what it would mean if
+we were to follow the path of least resistance to-day--to let this storm
+get the best of us? Let me give you an idea of just one thing. There's
+food coming in here in trainload lots every night--fresh meat, fresh
+vegetables, fresh milk. Folks would go hungry if we were to say 'We can't,
+this storm is a gee-whilicker. We give up.'"
+
+To keep the line open, the railroad affords every sort of protective
+device; it trains men for especial duties.
+
+Take the matter of wrecks, for instance. The railroader does not like to
+think of wrecks, but his methods for removing them must be prompt and
+thorough: the line must be kept open. Each year sees equipment increasing
+in size and weight, and each increase brings additional problems in
+handling wrecked cars and engines.
+
+Twenty years ago, the wrecking-equipment of most of the big roads was
+comparatively simple. It was generally built in the railroad's own shops.
+To-day 60-ton cars and 100-ton locomotives require something of a
+wrecking crane or derrick to lift them from the right-of-way; and the
+wrecking-train is a device thought out and built by specialists.
+
+These wrecking-trains are the emergency arms of railroad operation. They
+stand, like the apparatus of a city fire department, at every important
+terminal or division operating plant, awaiting summons to action. You may
+see the wrecking-train at every big yard, waiting on a siding which has
+quick access to the main-line tracks. It consists of from four to six
+cars--a tool-car with all sorts of wrecking-devices--replacers, blocks and
+tackle, extra small parts of car-trucks for emergency repairs, and the
+like. There are more of these extra parts--axles and wheels and four-wheel
+trucks on a "flat" that is fastened to the tool-car; and if this
+wrecking-train has a couple of miles of heavy traffic line to serve, there
+may be three or four of the "flats" with tools and spare equipment. You
+cannot have too many of those in a big wreck. The wrecking-train is sure
+to have a crane--a big arm of steel, compressed to come within the slim
+clearances of bridges and of tunnels, but capable of reaching down and
+tugging at a 100-ton locomotive with almost no effort whatsoever. And
+quite as important as the crane is the cook-car--generally some old-time
+coach or sleeper descended to humble service on the road. The cook-car has
+a rough berth and a kitchen; and you may be mighty sure that there is a
+good griddle artist upon it. You cannot expect a wrecking-gang to get into
+a twenty-four hour job without being pretty constantly provisioned while
+it is at work.
+
+Only a little while ago, one of the officers of an Eastern trunk-line
+railroad and a member of one of the State railroad commissions were coming
+toward New York. The trip was in the nature of an inspection on the part
+of the State official, but as a matter of comfort and convenience to the
+two men, it was made upon the former's private car. The comfort and
+convenience suddenly ceased while the two were still nearly 300 miles away
+from the seaboard. The road rested there for many miles in heavy country;
+its rails found their curving way in the crevices between high hills. It
+had rained steadily for a fortnight; the little mountain brooks were
+raging mill-races. In the low flatlands of one deep valley lakes were
+being formed. There were long stretches where the four rails of the
+double-tracked trunk-line railroad lost themselves under the glassy
+surface of the waters. Up and down the valley trains were standing
+helpless between those lakes, their passengers fuming at the delay. Fast
+freights stood axle-deep in water; their title, for that moment, was an
+occasion for joyous humor. The comfortable, convenient trip of the
+railroad operating man and the railroad commissioner was at an end.
+
+An embankment that the railroad had built for a branch down the valley was
+blocking the waters, and orders had come from New York to dynamite out
+that embankment. It would cost the railroad nearly $50,000 to destroy that
+half-mile of track but it might save the valley millions. There had been
+no hesitation on the part of the "old man"--the road's tried executive.
+That is a phase of American railroading not often brought to light.
+
+Orders came that the engine hauling the "special" of the operating man and
+the railroad commissioner was to be taken for a work-train down at that
+damming embankment. That's the way with railroading. When the clattering
+telegraph keys sound the note of trouble, even that mighty soul, the
+chairman of the board, may find himself "laid out" at some jerkwater
+junction, while his pet engine goes into service with a wrecking-train.
+But the chairman of the board, whose time is real money, offers no
+protest. He knows that to block the main line costs his road $250 a minute
+for the first 60 minutes; that that figure doubles and trebles in the
+second hour; in the third, his auditors may check off $1,000 a minute, at
+the least, as the cost of a blocked railroad. No wonder that they insist
+that it is "keeping the line open."
+
+Before the engine of that special was cut off to go scurrying down to the
+embankment where the skilled workmen were making preparations to dynamite
+away a half-mile of track, the operating man lifted his hand. He had, like
+any trained railroader, been listening to the clattering telegraph key.
+
+"They've come away without their cook--those wreckers," he told the
+gentleman who regulated public utilities. "I think I'll go down with the
+'eats.' There's an old hotel across from the railroad track down at the
+next station, and the landlord, Uncle Dan Hortley, will fix me up."
+
+"I'll go with you," said the State official. "I want to get my finger in
+the pie."
+
+So it came to pass that they both went, the private car stopping at the
+little hotel long enough to get in an overwhelming supply of bread and
+ham. As they whizzed through the scene of trouble all hands joined at
+making sandwiches.
+
+"Butter them on both sides," said the railroad commissioner.
+
+"They're better with the butter on one side," insisted the operating man.
+
+The commissioner was not used to back-talk from railroaders, no matter how
+high their office, and he stuck to his point.
+
+"Both sides," he insisted.
+
+"One side only," reported the big operating man.
+
+"The commission has closed its hearing and issues an order for both
+sides."
+
+"The railroad appeals."
+
+But the commission won--it almost always does--and the men down at the
+embankment ate their sandwiches with a double thickness of butter.
+
+Sometimes a refrigerator train comes under the skilled hands of the
+wreckers, and the cook-car may have more than an abundance of good
+material right at hand. Beef, chickens, milk--all manner of edibles have
+been spilled like waste along the right-of-way, and there have been no
+regrets among the men of the wrecking-boss's crew. Once, a speeding
+cook-car hurrying to the relief of the laborers upon a wrecked meat-train
+that had tried to go tangent to a mountain curve, brought reinforcements
+in the form of ham sandwiches. The wreckers were pretty hungry, but it
+needed all their hunger to tackle those sandwiches. The meat-train had
+been filled with ham; it had caught fire. Somehow, three or four hours of
+work hauling out smoked hams gave no appetite for sandwiches of the same
+sort.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+On main-line divisions, where traffic runs exceeding heavy, a locomotive
+stands, steam-up, with the four cars of the wrecking-train. Even on
+side-line divisions the call for the wreckers will bring the fastest and
+best engine out of the roundhouse, no matter what her train assignment may
+be. Things on the railroad stand aside for the wrecker. Limiteds may paw
+their nervous heels upon sidings while she goes skimming up the line--all
+time-table rights are hers from the moment that she goes into service.
+
+A wire from the seat of trouble brings her into service.
+
+"Second Four-twelve in ditch at Grey's Bridge. Broken rail. Engine and two
+cars derailed. Both tracks blocked. About four killed and injured."
+
+That wire has itself had the right-of-way. When "W-K, W-K, W-K" comes
+persistently calling over a railroad wire, every key closes. "W-K" is the
+"C-Q-D" of railroading. It is as much as any operator's job is worth, to
+ignore it.
+
+When a despatch of the sort just cited comes into headquarters, things
+start to move. The despatcher, if he is after the manner of most
+despatchers, turns to his telephone and calls the yardmaster to order out
+the wrecking-crew. There is no more excitement in his voice than if he
+were ordering out any ordinary sort of special. He rings off quickly,
+calls up in turn the superintendent, trainmaster, perhaps the division
+engineer, the claim department. If there is a fatality list--the wreck one
+of those fearful things that sometimes show themselves upon the front
+pages of the newspapers--he will get the hospitals and the doctors. The
+list of surgeons who are allied to the railroad in every town on the
+division hangs above the despatcher's desk.
+
+He may run a special hospital train with doctors and nurses and emergency
+equipment. On one memorable occasion the hospital train was on its way out
+upon the main line before the wreck had been reported over the wire. The
+despatcher saw that the hospital special had a clear track; he gave a
+multitude of directions as to its running, with the quick clear word of a
+self-possessed man--then turned and shot himself dead. He had
+miscalculated: the human machine sometimes does. He knew that he had sent
+the two crack-a-jack trains on that single-track division, curling its way
+among the mountains, into each other at full speed. No need for him to
+know exactly where they met.
+
+But even if the wreck is no holocaust; if it is one of those minor smashes
+that are bound to come now and then on the best of lines, he must keep his
+head. As he caught up his telephone to get orders to that wrecking-boss
+out at the roundhouse, his assistant took instant notice of the wreck,
+first notifying the stations on either side of the accident to set
+danger-signals against all trains. After that, while the despatcher
+himself was busied with details, the assistant arranged to handle all
+traffic. If both tracks were blocked, there were plans to be instantly
+made to forward the fast through trains by detouring them over other lines
+of railroad. The assistant despatcher, wishing to know how long he
+could afford to hold his heavy traffic (remember that the line must always
+be kept open), wired the nearest station for additional details. Most of
+all he wanted to know how long the tracks would be blocked. Perhaps before
+he got his wire through there came a second message from the wreck, giving
+more facts about it. By means of code, great detail can be given in a
+short wire; headquarters gets a clear understanding of the trouble. After
+that the wire chatters constantly; there are a thousand orders to be
+given, a thousand details to be arranged.
+
+[Illustration: THE WRECKING TRAIN READY TO START OUT FROM THE YARD]
+
+[Illustration: "TWO OF THESE GREAT CRANES CAN GRAB A WOUNDED MOGUL
+LOCOMOTIVE AND PUT HER OUT OF THE WAY"]
+
+[Illustration: "THE SHOP-MEN FORM NO MEAN BRIGADE IN THIS INDUSTRIAL ARMY
+OF AMERICA"]
+
+While the first of these wires are beginning to swing back and forth the
+despatcher will hear the wrecking-train, pulled by the neatest and
+swiftest bit of motive power from their big roundhouse, go scurrying by
+down the line. The road is cleared. Everything stands aside, and for weeks
+after, the stove committee in every roundhouse on the division will be
+telling how she made the run.
+
+They don't talk about the run when they get to the accident. They pile off
+the train and get to work quickly. Every man is a trained wreck-worker, as
+a fireman is trained to his peculiar business. In such hours as they are
+not out on the road, the wreckers are repairers of cars. It keeps them
+busy during the long seasons when the line is lucky and has no wrecks, and
+it gives them the skill with which to tackle the difficult problems that
+confront them after a smash. By day these men--eight or ten or twelve of
+them to a crew--work in the yard close to the waiting wrecking-train; by
+night the telephone at the head of the bed of each man will bring him
+quickly to the near-by yard.
+
+"How do you handle a wreck?" we once asked an old-time wrecking-boss, a
+man grown gray in keeping his line open.
+
+"I don't know," was his frank response. "I've probably handled a thousand
+wrecks--perhaps more--but I have yet to see two that were the same.
+Different cases demand different treatments. Any surgeon will tell you
+that; and you know," this with a bit of a laugh, "we are the surgeons of
+the steel highway.
+
+"We've only one rule that is absolute, and that rule is to take care of
+the folks who are hurt in the first place, and in the second place to get
+the line open. If it is multiple-track line--two or three or four tracks
+in operation--and the muss is sprawled over the entire right-of-way we get
+a through track working in shortest interval. When we can wire "number two
+open" or whatever it is, the despatcher down at headquarters will catch
+the stations where there are crossovers and he'll be handling his
+first-class traffic of all sorts past us while we'll still be stocking the
+arm of the old bill crane down into the smash."
+
+The arm of that crane can lift a freight-car--if there is enough
+freight-car left to lift--off the rails and into the ditch in almost a
+twinkling. Two of these great cranes can grab a wounded mogul locomotive
+and put her out of the way. The wrecking-trains on a first-class road are
+kept along the line in profusion. Each is supposed to cover a territory of
+100 miles or so in every direction from headquarters, and a sizable smash
+will bring two or more to work in unison. Two wrecking-cranes working into
+the remnants of a head-on collision from each direction can accomplish
+marvels. They will come together finally at the chief test of their
+strength--the point where two locomotives have firmly locked horns in
+dying embrace. That is a point that finds the nerve and ability of every
+wrecking-boss.
+
+But all these wrecking-bosses have nerve and ability. They could not hold
+their jobs without both. They know when equipment--cars that might be made
+as good as new in the shops--must be burned like driftwood, and when the
+burning of a wreck would be criminal waste. That requires
+judgment--judgment to determine whether it is cheaper to burn than to
+lose valuable time; to delay traffic on a main-line division or to let the
+traffic on a less important side-line division wait for a little longer
+time. Judgment is part of a wrecking-boss's equipment. His superintendent
+knows that; and when the super grows nervous and gets down to the wreck
+himself, although he knows that he is ranking officer in charge of the
+work he shows good judgment, on his own part, in letting the wrecking-boss
+give all orders. That makes for skill, it makes for speed. If the
+wrecking-boss is not doing good work the superintendent can fire him
+to-morrow, or (what is far more usual) find him an easier berth somewhere
+on the division.
+
+There are times when the work-train must be summoned, when laborers by the
+dozen must get to work to build new track. A wash-out may require a
+half-mile of track to be laid in a night, and the railroad can do it. A
+young man wrote a very able story for _The Saturday Evening Post_ a few
+months ago, in which he told how an emergency track was laid across a
+highway bridge and a test fast-freight put through on schedule. That feat
+was but one of the many ordinary tasks that come in the lifetime of every
+operating man.
+
+Clearing a wreck may be a tedious business.
+
+There is a deep sink on the parade-ground of the Military Academy at West
+Point that is a monument to the nastiest railroad wreck from the point of
+view of time, that the Eastern railroaders have ever known. Just under
+that parade-ground the West Shore Railroad passes through a long tunnel.
+On an October night more than twenty years ago, the Chicago & St. Louis
+Express of that railroad was slowly poking through that bore, when a
+portion of the roof of the tunnel collapsed. It buried itself between the
+rear part of the baggage-car and the forward part of the express-car and
+the train came to an abrupt stop.
+
+Engineer William Morse saw in an instant the damage that had been done.
+He cut loose from that penned baggage-car and made record speed up the
+line to Cornwall, the nearest station. From there he a sent a wire
+post-haste to the despatcher up at Kingston, then the headquarters of the
+line.
+
+"Train caught by collapse of West Point tunnel," that despatch read in
+part. "Only engineer and fireman escaped."
+
+They began to get their hospital train ready at Kingston, notified Newburg
+to get all the doctors in sight and hurry them on a special to West Point.
+The chief despatcher went through the worst quarter of an hour of his
+life. He began to call Weehawken, the southern terminal of the line.
+Weehawken wires were all busy, and he could not cut in there.
+
+Weehawken wires were getting reports from Conductor Sam Brown of the
+Chicago & St. Louis Express, who had come running out of the tunnel to the
+West Point depot.
+
+"Wire headquarters," he shouted to the agent, "that we've run into an
+avalanche. Morse and his fireman are crushed under the tunnel roof."
+
+And they began to get the wreckers busy down at Weehawken.
+
+When the chief despatcher up at Kingston finally got Weehawken, they told
+him about Sam Morse's fate. The truth of the thing came to him in an
+instant. He laughed hysterically, and his assistant jumped up. The
+despatcher's bad quarter of an hour was over. He jumped to his telephone,
+caught the yardmaster with it.
+
+"We won't need that hospital train," he said. "There isn't a soul hurt."
+
+And there was not. But there remained the worst railroad block on record.
+It was three months before they pulled the baggage-car out of that tunnel,
+and then they had to use dynamite. After that it was found necessary to
+line the entire bore with solid masonry. That was an accident that might
+not have been so lucky on repetition.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Enough of wrecks. They are not the only test when it comes to keeping the
+line open. Sometimes a crippled telegraph service may be quite as
+effective. Out on the Pennsylvania lines west of Pittsburgh a couple of
+years ago a severe wind and sleet storm levelled more than 40 miles of
+telegraph poles, in most cases dropping them across main-line tracks in
+the dark. A few months later--the never-to-be-forgotten inauguration day
+of President Taft--a similar storm did similar work on the lines leading
+to Washington. Thousands of militiamen and excursionists never reached the
+inauguration at all. In both storms the resources of a great railroad were
+well tested.
+
+An old-time Erie man remembers wire troubles of a different sort. It was
+in his salad days, when he was serving as assistant superintendent over
+the Meadville, in the western part of Pennsylvania. They had but one
+telegraph wire for railroad purposes on the division then, and one night
+it "grounded." Keys were silent, the road might as well have had no wire
+at all.
+
+The assistant superintendent started that evening with two linemen on a
+hand-car to find that "ground." They went miles from Meadville, and every
+test showed the wire working. Finally they came to a deserted little depot
+at a cross-roads and the railroader lifting his lantern high against the
+window verified his suspicions: the careless agent had gone home and left
+his key open. The superintendent broke open the window, climbed in,
+removed the telegraph set, placed it in his overcoat pocket and closed the
+circuit. He knew that he would hear from the agent on the morrow. He did.
+Word came by tedious train mail, a formal report on the road's yellow
+stationery.
+
+"Station at A---- burglarized last evening," that formal report read, "and
+agent's telegraph set, best pants, and ten dollars taken."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The real test of keeping the line open comes when winter descends upon the
+land, when the heaviest freight traffic of the year comes, together with
+those forces of nature that sweep off the summer joys of railroading. The
+mighty battles of the western transcontinentals with the snows of the
+Rockies have long been known, their miles of snow-sheds making safe
+crawling bores for through trains under the snow-banks, and the avalanches
+of the mountain-sides are as familiar to the tourist as the Great Salt
+Lake or the wonders of the Yellowstone. Only a few months ago the
+newspapers told the story of how a passenger train, stalled at the
+entrance of a Washington tunnel, had been carried by an avalanche down a
+great cliff. Every railroader, east and west, knows full well the hazard
+of mountain line in the depths of a treacherous winter.
+
+There is a snow-belt extending around the south edge of the Great Lakes
+that annually gives the Eastern railroad men a good opportunity to
+sympathize with the Westerners. Long years ago a little railroad reaching
+north in this belt from the main line of the New York Central became
+discouraged in the all but hopeless task of keeping its line open. It had
+been a hard enough battle to find the rails of its main line from Rome to
+Watertown through one blizzard crowding upon the heels of another. There
+had been ten days when Watertown was entirely cut off from the world to
+the south of it. But that little railroad owed some obligations to its
+chief town, and it kept at its brave efforts although every night the
+fresh wind blowing down from the Canadas across Lake Ontario filled the
+long miles of railroad cuts, and nightly erased all trace of rails. But
+there was a branch from Watertown to Cape Vincent run at a dead loss
+throughout the entire winter, and in that hard winter the railroad gave up
+the branch, and hired a liveryman to take the mails in his cutter over the
+country drifts. It was one of the few instances on record of a railroad
+giving up the fight.
+
+After the railroad had been abandoned a fortnight a delegation of citizens
+from Cape Vincent drove to Watertown and there confronted H. M. Britton,
+the general manager of the line. They made their little speeches, and
+those were pretty hot little speeches--hot enough to have melted away one
+good-sized drift.
+
+"When are you going to cart that snow off our line?" finally demanded the
+spokesman of the Cape Vincent folk.
+
+Britton looked at the delegation coolly, and lighted a fresh cigar.
+
+"I'm going to let the man that put it there," he said slowly, "take it
+away."
+
+And he did. It was thirty-two days before a railroad engine entered Cape
+Vincent from the time that the last one left it.
+
+In recent years, that nasty stretch of railroad line has kept the
+railroaders still busy. Within the decade it was blocked for six long
+days, while a force of snow-fighters and a battery of ploughs forced their
+way into the drifts. And while the superintendent up at Watertown grew
+nervous, then desperate, there came the worst blow of all: the telegraph
+wire no longer brought news from the front.
+
+Afterwards that super knew the reason why. His train-master was at the
+front with ploughs and the hungry, tired, straggling men. The train-master
+was nervous, too, wearied explaining to his boss. He remembered Dewey at
+Manila, and he cut the cable! He lost sight of the outer world for long
+hours, for days, for nights, until that January evening when he brought
+his battered snow-fighting force triumphant into Richland Junction.
+
+When a big road whose rails rest through a snow belt finds the winter
+clouds blackening, it puts on its fighting armor. Every man at
+headquarters sticks by his desk. The superintendent will get bulletins
+from each terminal and important yard every hour, perhaps oftener. Those
+bulletins will give him exact information--the amount of motive-power
+ready at each roundhouse, freight congestion, if any, amount and direction
+of wind, cloud and snow conditions.
+
+In other days the signal for an oncoming storm was followed by quick
+orders from headquarters to pull off the snow-freights. Traffic was
+quickly cut down to passenger and perishable-freight trains, and, if the
+blizzard grew bad enough, the perishable-freights were run in upon the
+sidings. The railroad concentrated its motive-power upon the passenger
+trains and the ploughs. Nowadays they do it better. Not that the old
+fellows of the last generation were anything less than prize railroaders,
+for remember they did not have the locomotives in those days that even
+side-line divisions possess in these.
+
+So to-day the superintendent can growl at the first of his men who even
+hints that a scheduled train of any class be sent upon a siding.
+
+"We keep the traffic moving," said one of the biggest the other day. "We
+keep the line open. A train every thirty minutes over our rails will do
+more toward keeping them usable than a rotary going over them after a
+night's inaction.
+
+"So when she begins to blizz, we just fall back on our roundhouses, that's
+all. We cut our local freights down to 1500 tons, then to 1200, 900, 600,
+rather than send them into shelter. We tackle our through freights in a
+like proportion and while we are cutting off cars, we are adding power.
+Everything that goes out of this yard will be double-headed as long as
+there is danger in the air. There will be two engines to a passenger-train
+and ahead of each a rotary, with two or three locomotives to push her.
+You see the value of reserve motive-power, don't you? Why we have
+half-a-dozen extra engines trying to gather rust over there in the
+roundhouse. They're worth their weight in gold in a pinch of this sort,
+though when they're done with a week of snow fighting, they're fit
+candidates for the shops."
+
+A rotary plough has no powers of self-propulsion, but the mighty engine
+within her heart, driving the shaft of her great cutting-wheel has the
+power of three locomotives. That cutting-wheel approximates the width of a
+single-track in diameter. It will bore into a solidly packed drift, twelve
+or sixteen feet in height, suck in a great volume of snow, and then throw
+it--as a fire engine throws water--through a nozzle 60 to 100 feet to the
+right or left of the line. The nozzle is close to three feet in diameter,
+and the stream that it throws will bury a small barn. The man who sits in
+the lookout of the rotary controls the nozzle, changes it from side to
+side so as to avoid buildings.
+
+These rotaries are giants. Where the great flange or wing ploughs--the
+ordinary snow-fighting artillery of a railroad--fail, they come into
+service. Theirs is ever a mighty task to perform. We have seen a rotary
+spend sixty minutes in going sixty feet through a heavy drift, a drift
+three miles long and twenty deep. Snow can drift, and wet snow can pack,
+pack until you almost begin to think of dynamite as a resource.
+
+Three days of such snow-fighting would completely weary the ordinary man.
+Up in the snow-belts, they are likely to get a hard storm every week from
+December to March, and that atop of the heaviest traffic of the year. It
+is the sort of fighting that marks the fine-grained timber of a man; that
+sends him down to headquarters in some metropolitan city along the
+seaboard, to fight the weightier battles of traffic and of operation,
+which are unending within and between the mighty railroads of America.
+
+Sometimes the battle to keep the line open is fought close to a busy
+terminal. Here, before you, once again, is the division superintendent of
+one of the great lines entering Jersey City. Let him tell you of the nasty
+storm on Christmas night last, a storm that laid low all street
+transportation in every city along the North Atlantic seaboard. He will
+tell you how it was the first Christmas that he had spent with his family
+in seven years; the first holiday in three. He lives in a little suburban
+city within the 20-mile radius of New York City Hall, and in his bedroom a
+telegraph sounder, connected with the division's main wire, clicks in the
+early morning and late at night.
+
+Over that wire on Christmas night last, the superintendent gave orders.
+There was snow in the air at dusk when they finished their late afternoon
+dinner; by eight o'clock he had ordered the flanges (ploughs) on all his
+regular road engines. Along the entire line orders had gone to keep a
+sharp lookout for trouble. The superintendent turned into bed at ten
+o'clock, hoping for a clear winter's sky in the morning.
+
+He turned into bed but not into sleep. He had cut out his telegraph wire
+for the night but a telephone message from the agent down at the depot in
+the suburban city made him sit up wide awake. The storm was gaining. They
+were beginning to get trouble reports down at headquarters. The
+superintendent turned out of bed and began dressing. He cut in on the
+telegraph wire and began giving orders.
+
+He caught his train-master at the neighboring town and told him to meet
+him at 495, the last train into Jersey City that evening. He turned from
+the telegraph to the telephone and ordered the local livery man to get up
+to his house and take him down to the 11:42. He called the depot agent to
+hold that 11:42 until he arrived.
+
+[Illustration: "WINTER DAYS WHEN THE WIND-BLOWN SNOW FORMS MOUNTAINS UPON
+THE TRACKS"]
+
+[Illustration: "THE DESPATCHER MAY HAVE COME FROM SOME LONELY COUNTRY
+STATION"]
+
+[Illustration: "THE SUPERINTENDENT IS NOT ABOVE GETTING OUT AND BOSSING
+THE WRECKING-GANG ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE"]
+
+When that superintendent came puffing into his office in the Jersey City
+terminal it was one o'clock of a blizzardy Sabbath morn. He dropped into a
+chair beside his chief despatcher and took the entire situation in
+hand. Things looked pretty bad from every point of view. From up in the
+foothills came reports of discouraging nature, trains were losing time,
+they were having added trouble every hour in handling switches and
+cross-overs. At the terminal the switches were a most prolific source of
+annoyance. The intricacy of the interlocking system was being bothered by
+ice freezing about its exposed working parts.
+
+The superintendent was perplexed, but he did not show it. He kept lighting
+cigars and throwing them away half-smoked. And all the while he was
+sending orders over his wire. If a narrow strand of steel, stretching for
+miles through darkness and through storm could carry infectious courage,
+that wire carried the superintendent's courage out to every far corner of
+his division through those early hours.
+
+"Keep at it," was the tenor of his message. "Keep everlastingly at it."
+
+And between times he was planning how to help them to keep everlastingly
+at it. Men were summoned to report Sunday morning at the shops--they might
+need to make some quick repairs, and it is a matter of record on that
+division that a locomotive has been torn apart, entirely overhauled and
+placed in service again in twenty-four hours--others were ordered to stand
+by important switches against breakdowns in the interlocking.
+
+There were special problems in plenty to be considered, a new one arising
+every hour. One of them will suffice to show the measure of that
+superintendent's problem that night.
+
+Up in a narrow pass between overhanging hills a much-delayed local, with a
+light road-engine, was still struggling to get the Christmas celebrators
+home. It was a hard proposition; and just a block back of the suburban
+train was chafing the midnight express through to Chicago--one of the
+road's best trains. The superintendent saw in an instant that his main
+line stood in imminent danger of being blocked. He caught Middleport, the
+station ahead of the struggling local, and ordered it side-tracked there
+for a moment.
+
+"I want to get that midnight with her big engine ahead from there," he
+explained to his despatcher.
+
+But the towerman at Middleport said that he could not move the
+siding-switch there; it was packed in with ice and snow.
+
+"Tell him to get a pick-axe and shovel and get in at it," said the
+superintendent.
+
+"He says that it's 20° below up there; they've swiped his shovel, and he
+hasn't anything but a broom," the despatcher returned.
+
+"A broom! Tell him a broom's a God-send. He can sweep with the one end and
+pick with the other."
+
+Eight times that towerman tried there in the midst of the storm to open
+that switch and eight times he reported failure. Eight times the
+superintendent kept at him with his kind persistence, and the ninth time
+they reported that the midnight express with the best type of motor power
+on the division was ahead of the weak engine on the local.
+
+And while the superintendent struggled at the far end of a telegraph wire
+with that towerman, there were a dozen other Middleports, each with its
+own different and equally difficult problem. Each required quick,
+intelligent solution. He solved each. The line stayed open. The
+superintendent stayed at his desk.
+
+All that Sunday it snowed, and all that Sunday the superintendent was at
+his desk. He did not know the passage of the hours; the clicking sounder
+held his attention riveted. He worked all Sunday night and into Monday
+morning. There were 200 suburban trains to be brought into the terminal on
+Monday morning, and the commuter is a fussy soul about his train being on
+time. The superintendent knew that, and he was ready. He had extra men at
+the switches in the terminal yards, took particular pains to have snow
+swept from the platforms of even the lowliest suburban station.
+
+The trains came in on time that Monday morning, all save one. On that one
+train the regular fireman had been snowbound at his home upon the
+mountainside. They had to put on a green man to fire the engine--a
+raw-boned lad just off a freight. He made slow work of it, and the train
+was fourteen minutes late. That was the only exception to a clean record,
+a record made possible by long hours of work.
+
+"They ought to have been proud of that fight," you say to the big boss. He
+grins at your ignorance.
+
+"Proud?" he laughs. "They raised hell with me because we had 387 laid out
+fourteen minutes."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE G. P. A. AND HIS OFFICE
+
+ HE HAS TO KEEP THE ROAD ADVERTISED--MUST BE AN AFTER-DINNER ORATOR,
+ AND MANY-SIDED--HIS GENIALITY, URBANITY, COURTESY--EXCESSIVE RIVALRY
+ FOR PASSENGER TRAFFIC--INCREASING LUXURY IN PULLMAN CARS--MANY PRINTED
+ FORMS OF TICKETS, ETC.
+
+
+We have already called the division superintendent the Prince in the realm
+of railroad operation. But there is another, whom we see when we leave
+operation and consider traffic--another who might also be called
+Prince--Prince Charming. This prince of charm of the railroad is the
+general passenger agent. To a large proportion of folk he is almost the
+personification of the railroad itself. His signature, appearing upon each
+of the railroad's tickets and time-tables, is multiplied a million times a
+year. In his own self he appears many, many times as the road's
+mouthpiece. His evening clothes must always be kept in press and
+moth-balls, for his oratory is at all times close to the tap. His wit is
+ready, his tongue a good arguer for his line. At dinners of Chambers of
+Commerce and Boards of Trade, his urbanity is profound, his remarks to the
+point; and the road gets the advertising.
+
+For the general passenger agent is _per se_, an advertiser. There are two
+affiliated and yet quite distinctive functions to his office. The older
+function, the one for which it was really created when railroads were
+young, is that of issuing tickets and selling them. The newer function,
+and to-day the all-important function, is that of keeping the road before
+the eyes of the travel-mad public--an advertising function. A few years
+ago, a big Eastern road had to change general passenger agents because of
+this very thing. The man who had held the job was in almost every way
+absolutely efficient. He had been reared in the routine of his office; he
+knew its vast details as well as any man might ever hope to know them. But
+he was a detail man, and there he stopped. The road needed more of a
+figurehead, a better advertiser. The late George H. Daniels was in many
+respects the best passenger agent that American railroading has ever
+known. He was the forerunner of the general passenger agent of to-day--a
+well-known figure in the great State that his railroad served, being
+interviewed by reporters--and lady reporters, too--on every conceivable
+subject in the public eye; addressing dinners in metropolitan New York, or
+in suburban Yonkers, or anywhere else in the State, with rare facility,
+yet now and then adroitly bringing in reference to the "four-track trail"
+by which he was employed.
+
+Other roads took heed of Daniels. The general passenger agent became less
+and less a man of office routine and of ticket detail, more and more of a
+public figure. He called Mayors of important cities by their first names;
+he kept close to the pulsing heart of the public press by friendly
+intimacy with the reporters; spoke at two, three, four dinners a week. The
+Prince Charming of the railroad is, indeed, a development.
+
+But behind the smiles of this prince, behind the phraseology of words
+spoken or written that glorify "the road," there is a serious aspect of
+his life. He must capitalize that splendid urbanity, that jocose wit, into
+ticket-sales. In the beginning he was created to sell tickets, and sell
+tickets he must. On his ability to sell tickets, and not as a popular
+public figure, will he be measured by the board of directors--that
+delegation of grim-faced gentlemen, who place small market value on either
+urbanity or jocosity.
+
+So, while the general passenger agent presents his smiling face to the
+outside world, he is a man of system, no mean executive there within the
+inner. He must organize to sell his tickets. There is an inner
+organization of no small moment in the passenger office of any sizable
+railroad. In the first place, the area from which traffic is to be drawn
+is divided into districts. General agents or assistant general passenger
+agents (the title varies widely on the different railroads) are assigned
+to each. This traffic area is far larger than the area covered by one
+railroad system. It is generally nation-wide, while some of the biggest of
+our railroads maintain ticket-offices in the large cities all the way
+around the world. They are to-day fighting almost as sharply for American
+traffic in Paris or in London as they fight in Clark Street, Chicago, or
+in Broadway, New York.
+
+For it is a fight and an endless fight, which the Prince Charming--he of
+the urbane smiles--must wage. Despite the constant consolidating processes
+of our railroads, there are few large territories that are the exclusive
+field of any one road. The most of them must fight for their
+business--particularly for their profitable long-distance business. The
+fight divides itself between the freight and passenger traffic
+departments. No wonder, then, that the general passenger agent must be a
+many-sided man.
+
+From his district offices, there scurries forth a corps of smooth-tongued,
+quick-witted young men--the travelling passenger agents. These young men
+are skirmishers. They are up and down the steel highways of the nation,
+thirty days out of the month, skirmishing for business. Each carries in an
+inner pocket a wad of annual passes--such as might make any statesman
+green with envy. Those passes cover every steam line in the territory that
+is assigned to him and are return courtesy for the neat little cards which
+his road in turn issues to the traffic solicitors of other roads.
+
+In other days these skirmishers carried forth business which sometimes
+approached cut-throat tendencies. The weaker lines in hotly competitive
+territory--lines which, running fewer high-grade trains and running them
+at slower speed--which were naturally at a disadvantage, sought to obtain
+at least their normal share of passenger traffic, by sharp work. After
+that their stronger brethren often showed their religious belief in
+fighting them by fire. Tickets were sold at less than advertised rates to
+certain favored individuals; sometimes a few passes, adroitly placed, did
+the business. In these days those sharp things are forbidden, and the
+young man, soliciting railroad traffic, who breaks the rules of the game
+runs the risk of worse than facing an angry boss, getting discharged;
+perhaps he can see the doors of a Federal prison opening for him.
+
+So the fellow who skirmishes for the weak road has a hard time of it in
+these piping days. Passenger traffic, like kissing, seems to go by favor
+nowadays; and how hard the travelling passenger agent works to curry that
+favor! He drops off a local at some way-station, there is a smile and
+perhaps a cigar for the country-boy who sells tickets there, for the
+Interstate folk have not sent any one to prison yet for offering either a
+smile or a cigar. The T. P. A. knows that the local agent cannot, under
+the rules that govern him, recommend routes that connect with and extend
+beyond the line which gives him employment. Still, sometime the country
+agent may be approached by a man who demands that a connecting road be
+suggested for him, and the T. P. A. can see that man, without even
+shutting his eyes. If the country agent will only remember the nice T. P.
+A. that the Transcontinental sent in there a month before, and the good
+kind of cigars he dispenses, the Transcontinental may get a part of the
+haul on a long green ticket. Perhaps the man will be taking his wife, and
+there will be two of the long green tickets. Perhaps there will be a whole
+party to be routed over the Transcontinental--the T. P. A. can imagine
+almost anything as he swings overland in the dreary locals from
+way-station to way-station.
+
+Sometimes a wire from his chief quickly changes his schedule. The
+Magnificent Knights of the Realm--or some other impressive order of that
+sort--are to hold their annual convention at Oshkosh, and the T. P. A.
+must hustle down to Bingtown to see that Transcontinental gets the haul of
+the delegation that will go to Oshkosh from the bustling little community.
+He scurries into Bingtown to locate the officers of the local lodge of the
+M. K. O. R. there. On the train there may be a T. P. A. from some rival
+system--they are all partners in misery. The Transcontinental man will
+probably drop off the opposite side of the train at Bingtown from the
+crowded depot platform--it's an old trick of the T. P. A.--and be tearing
+over the pages of the Bingtown directory before that train is out of town
+again. Once located, the officers of that lodge of M. K. O. R. must be
+pleasantly instructed in the advantages of Transcontinental--the speed of
+its trains, the safety of its operation, the convenience of its terminals,
+the scenic splendors along the way, the excellence of its dining-car
+service; all these things are spun with convincing eloquence by the
+travelling passenger agent.
+
+A few years ago, two travelling passenger agents, whose lines supplement
+one another to make a through route across the continent, went down into
+an Eastern manufacturing city to land business bound west to a national
+convention of one of the biggest of the fraternal orders. There were other
+passenger men heading toward that same territory, and the two men from the
+connecting lines made an offensive and defensive alliance. When they
+reached this town, they found that the chief officers of the local lodge
+were two city detectives and a police justice. All three of the city
+officers showed little enthusiasm about the coming convention. The
+passenger men took off their coats--figuratively--and pitched in.
+
+For three days, they ran up an expense account that must have all but
+paralyzed the auditors of their companies, but they accomplished results.
+After the first day of entertainment, the police justice said that there
+would be an even dozen of them for the three-thousand-mile run, which was
+going some. Most passenger men would have rested content on those laurels,
+but this combination used that first day only to whet their appetites.
+They started briskly out on the second, a little fagged, but still in
+fighting trim, and by that night the two detectives united in promising
+one or two filled Pullmans. The third day saw the two traffic solicitors
+nearly dead, and the well-seasoned city officials just in fine trim. The
+trim must have been fine, for that night they completed arrangements for
+one of the biggest special train movements of that year: two hundred and
+fifty enthusiastic brethren went three-quarters of the way across the
+continent and back as a result of the work of these passenger men.
+
+Once a travelling passenger agent went nearly too far in this
+entertainment business. He got business, miles and miles and miles of it,
+but he also got drinking far too heavily. One day, when he came into the
+general offices very much the worse for entertaining, he bumped into no
+less a man than the president of the road. That president was a strict old
+soul. He had church connections, and he used to lecture his Sunday School
+class on the evils of the liquor habit. He decided to make an example of
+this young whelp of a passenger agent from off the road.
+
+But just as the sentence was about to be pronounced, the general passenger
+agent interfered. He went straight to the president and the wrath of an
+honest man was in his eye.
+
+"We don't intend to have drunken men working here," the president kept
+saying. "It's the example--"
+
+"If he drinks," said the G. P. A., "it's my fault, and I'm the man to let
+go."
+
+The president let his eyeglasses drop in astonishment.
+
+"You?" he said.
+
+"I'm guilty," said the G. P. A. "This man goes everywhere to get business
+for us, and he gets it. He kneels with the preacher, he talks high art
+with the Browning societies, and he gets drunk with the drinkers--all in
+the name of this railroad system. Now we propose to kick him out, still in
+the name of this railroad system."
+
+The president saw the point, and together they took hold of the T. P. A.
+and made him a decent, sober man. To-day he is one of the most efficient
+officers of that very road, and he owes it all to that broad-minded G. P.
+A.
+
+Geniality, urbanity, courtesy are the major part of a travelling passenger
+agent's equipment, as they are part of his chief's in these days, when the
+rates have ceased to enter into the fight for traffic.
+
+Rates?
+
+The rates must be the same nowadays by all routes of the same class; and
+so the T. P. A. _must_ bring out the excellence of his line, leaving none
+behind because of a false sense of modesty. He is silent about other
+roads, save as they may lead to and from the system that he represents.
+You want to go to Kickapoo. You could go to Milltown by the
+Transcontinental and get from there to Kickapoo most easily by the main
+line of the St. Louis Southwestern, but the travelling passenger agent
+frowns his first frown at the very suggestion. The St. Louis Southwestern
+is the worst competitor that Transcontinental has for passenger traffic,
+and the T. P. A. does not propose to send business over its rails. So he
+ignores your suggestion.
+
+"We have our own line into Kickapoo," he tells you--the old smile
+returning. "You won't have to leave Transcontinental."
+
+And such a line! It happens to be a branch of the worst jerkwater type. To
+reach Kickapoo over Transcontinental you must go to Milltown and change
+from the comfortable Limited to a less comfortable train, which takes you
+to Quashalong Junction. There you find a seat on a local which jogs along
+at twenty miles an hour for the greater part of the afternoon until you
+get into Miller's Forks. When you reach Miller's Forks you almost abandon
+hope. For the thirty-mile stretch from that cross-roads over into Kickapoo
+is a grass-grown stretch of half-neglected track over which a combination
+freight and passenger-train--adequately described on the time-card as
+mixed--ambles once in twenty-four hours. By the time you have finished
+that trip you will have arrived in Kickapoo without leaving the rails of
+the Transcontinental, but you will also probably have registered a vow
+never to travel on them again, if they can be avoided.
+
+Right there is a traffic mistake. If the T. P. A. had been wise he would
+have swallowed his hatred of St. Louis Southwestern and recommended that
+you use it for that stretch from Milltown to Kickapoo. He let his zeal for
+his road overrun his business judgment. A good many of them do. Only the
+other day a man walked into a railroad station of a small city in the
+Southern Tier of New York State and announced that he wanted to hurry
+through to Binghamton.
+
+"We have a train in five minutes, our 12:12," said the agent, all smiles.
+
+The man hesitated. He wanted to do two or three errands in that small city
+before he went on to Binghamton, and so he asked the leaving time of the
+next train.
+
+"Nothing until 6:18," the agent told him.
+
+"That will be too late for me to get into Binghamton," the passenger said.
+The agent did not reply, but turned his attention to other persons who
+were waiting at the ticket-window. But the man from Binghamton was still
+perplexed. An agent of the news company who ran the stand in that station,
+came over and helped him out.
+
+"The ---- (mentioning a rival and paralleling road) gets a train out of
+here for Binghamton at 3:30," he explained.
+
+The passenger thanked the news-agent, for his problem had been lightened
+and started out for the other station. When he was gone, the
+ticket-seller summoned the newsman and threatened to have him fired.
+
+But there is a new order of things coming to pass even in this hot rivalry
+for getting passenger traffic. Long ago, C. F. Daly, who is to-day
+vice-president in charge of traffic for the New York Central lines, was in
+charge of the city ticket-office of the Burlington, in Omaha. Those were
+days when no loyal traffic-man was ever supposed even to breathe the name
+of a competing road. But Daly held his loyalty firm, and still went
+straight against that absurd rule. If a woman came into his office and,
+after the way of some women travellers, finally decided that she wished to
+travel over the rival Northwestern, he would not let her get out of his
+office. He would give her a comfortable seat, and perhaps a magazine or
+paper to read, and send one of his office-boys over to the Northwestern
+office to buy a ticket for her. Sometimes before the office-boy could get
+out of the place the woman would change her mind in favor of the
+Burlington. If she did not, Daly did not worry. He knew that he was of the
+new order of railroaders.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Come back, for a final moment, to the travelling passenger agent. He may
+be forgiven an over-zeal for the line which employs him, for that has been
+his training from the beginning, and--which is far more to the point--he
+is being measured by the results that he accomplishes. The road does not
+pay him a salary and pay his heavy expense account (which the auditor
+generally permits to contain various unvouchered items for entertainment)
+without expecting results.
+
+If he is a new man in the territory, he is measured against his
+predecessor. Afterwards, he is measured month by month, against the
+corresponding month of the preceding year. All tickets which were sold
+from his territory, and in which his road shares, are credited to his
+influence. It becomes a matter of cold calculations and of dollars and
+cents. If this April does not show an increase over April of last year,
+the T. P. A. must make a mighty good explanation to his chief. It will
+have to be famine or pestilence or something nearly as bad to justify the
+slump in ticket sales. An insinuation on his part that a reduction of the
+service of his road was responsible for the slump would never be accepted
+at headquarters.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILROAD IS BUILDING A NEW GRAND
+CENTRAL STATION IN NEW YORK CITY, FOR ITSELF AND ITS TENANT, THE NEW YORK,
+NEW HAVEN & HARTFORD RAILROAD]
+
+[Illustration: THE CONCOURSE OF THE NEW GRAND CENTRAL STATION, NEW YORK,
+WILL BE ONE OF THE LARGEST ROOMS IN THE WORLD]
+
+[Illustration: SOUTH STATION, BOSTON, IS THE BUSIEST RAILROAD TERMINAL IN
+THE WORLD]
+
+[Illustration: THE TRAIN-SHED AND APPROACH TRACKS OF BROAD STREET STATION,
+PHILADELPHIA, STILL ONE OF THE FINEST OF AMERICAN RAILROAD PASSENGER
+TERMINALS]
+
+So, all in all, the life of the travelling passenger agent is no sinecure.
+It is easiest when he is in the home territory of his road, rather
+pleasant when that road is non-competitive. But when he is out in
+"foreign" territory, fighting for a road which is hardly more than a name
+to the folk with whom he comes in contact, his difficulties increase;
+when, if his road is one of the weaker fry, its trains slower and less
+frequent than some of the other trunk-lines, his difficulties increase.
+The differential-fares by which the slower competing roads are permitted
+by their stronger brethren to charge a reduced rate between important
+distant traffic points were adopted to help to equalize this difficulty.
+But the differentials do not count, neither do the differential lines now
+get their share of the through business. Last year fifty per cent of the
+passengers between New York and Chicago went on the eighteen-hour train,
+even though the regular full fare of $20 in each direction is increased by
+an excess fare of $10, aside from the Pullman rates. Twenty-five per cent
+more travelled on the limited trains, which makes an excess of $5, in
+addition to Pullman rates, in each direction. It begins to look as if the
+American public were willing to pay for added comfort and convenience.
+Pullman operation has doubled within the past ten years. Pullman
+chair-cars are operated to-day on hundreds of miles of branch line
+railroads that would not have dreamed of such a luxury a decade ago.
+
+In fact, we are moving toward first-class and second-class passenger
+service by leaps and bounds. Less than twenty years ago the New York
+Central established its Empire State Express between New York and
+Buffalo, and, by means of the almost marvellous resources of its
+advertising department, made it the most famous train in the world. Save
+for a single parlor car or two, it has always been a day-coach train, no
+excess fare being charged. Yet for many years (in recent years its
+running-time has been slightly lengthened) it was the fastest regular
+long-distance train in the world. Still, in the judgment of railroaders
+to-day, another Empire State would be a mistake, even though the original
+is, day in and day out probably one of the most popular and profitable
+express trains in the world. But the judgment is different: the Lehigh
+Valley, running the competing Black Diamond, between New York and Buffalo,
+has already found it advisable to make its equipment all Pullman.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Just as the travelling passenger agent forms the stock from which many of
+the general passenger agents are finally formed, so does the country agent
+aspire to the day when he will be given territory and sent out with his
+gripsack, to sell transportation upon the road. Sometimes, though, as in
+Daly's case, the road to traffic titles comes by way of the city
+ticket-offices. These form an important function of the railroad's
+passenger department. They are regulated carefully, through an
+inter-railroad harmony, as expressed in the great national passenger
+associations. We have already seen how they sell mileage-books and "scrip"
+on their own account. For instance, a sort of tacit agreement specifies
+how many ticket-offices a railroad may maintain in a given city.
+Otherwise, the biggest and richest road might completely overshadow its
+weaker neighbor in the number as well as in the magnificence of its
+agencies. So an unwritten agreement, which is as strict in its way as the
+law on cutting rates, states that this city may have so many offices for
+any road, and that so many. It has become an exact rule.
+
+The city ticket-offices, situated at advantageous corners in the various
+busy centres of metropolitan towns, and towns having metropolitan
+ambitions, save the average man a long trip, perhaps, to the station. They
+will sell tickets, check baggage, answer innumerable questions. Answering
+questions remains one of the big functions of the passenger-man.
+
+Only recently, a sign was hung in a city ticket-office of one of the large
+railroads in New York, which read:
+
+"Remember that we are Here to Sell Tickets as well as Give Information."
+
+That sign was a mistake. It was an affront to every person who entered
+that ticket-office, and remember that every person who enters a
+ticket-office is at least a potential passenger for the railroad that
+operates it. It is only charitable to believe that the agent meant to say:
+"Remember that we are here to give information as well as to sell
+tickets," for the giving of information is a function of a passenger
+ticket office. So important has this function become, that the railroads
+have established desks in the largest of these city offices at which no
+tickets are sold, but where questions are answered and railroad,
+steamship, and hotel folders given out. "Public Service stations," the New
+York Central has begun to call its city ticket-offices and, furthering
+this idea of courtesy and affability, its general passenger agent has
+opened a school for the training of its agents. They are taught to answer
+questions quickly and accurately, and to be, above all things, courteous
+to the persons who come before them and the potential travellers.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Just a final look before we leave this passenger department, at its
+equipment. Its complications are large. Take this matter of tickets, for
+instance. While the financial department of the road will receive the
+money that comes in for their sales, and the auditing department takes
+good care as to the accuracy of the agent's returns, the passenger
+department has charge of printing and issuing the contract slips by which
+it agrees to convey its passengers. There is a multiplicity of forms of
+these, each bearing the signature of the general passenger agent.
+
+On smaller roads, the number of forms of local tickets is greatly reduced
+by writing or stamping the name of the destination on tickets. On a single
+branch line, with 25 stations, just 600 different styles of printed
+railroad tickets would be required otherwise; you can imagine the number
+of styles required for an average system of 1,000 stations. Fortunately,
+for the passenger department, the use of simplified forms of tickets,
+where adroit cutting and tearing makes possible the use of a single ticket
+form for an entire division, has reduced the big ticket-printing bills.
+Only recently, a machine, on the order of a cash register, has been
+invented, from which a ticket, accurately stamped and dated, with the
+destination indelibly printed, can be delivered as demanded.
+
+Still, with all these simplified forms of tickets, a big road will hardly
+carry less than 5,000 standard forms. Then there will be anywhere from a
+dozen to twenty special forms a week that will have to be printed--for
+excursions, conventions, and special train movements of every sort. The
+ticket-printing bill of a big road will easily exceed $40,000 a year. Its
+folders will cost not less than $50,000, while the twelvemonths' bill for
+newspaper advertising will more than exceed the combined figure of these
+two.
+
+All these details come under the jurisdiction of that urbane general
+passenger agent. He supervises, in another department, the making and the
+readjustment of rates--this last a seemingly endless task.
+
+To make up rate-sheets, either in the freight or in the passenger
+department, requires expert work. The fare between the same points on
+competitive railroads must, in the present order of things, remain equal.
+To cite an interesting instance: The A---- railroad long ago established
+$6.00 as its passenger charge from N---- to S----. The B---- railroad,
+although charging a higher rate per mile over its line, is obliged to meet
+this rate of $6.00 in order to secure business from N---- to S----, even
+though that makes many perplexing problems in its local rates. The
+B----railroad mileage from N---- to S----, up its main line, is 288
+miles--practically the same as that of its competitor. For the 146-mile
+ride to G----, the first large way-station, it charges $4.50, for the
+208-mile ride to M----, the next, $5.00. If a man were to go over its line
+to S---- and stop off at G---- and M---- his fare from N---- to S----would
+be $8.80. That is a typical case, and one that is repeated in every corner
+of the country. Where a road comes into competitive territory its rates
+must adjust themselves to those of its lowest-priced rival, otherwise it
+could hardly hope for a fair share of the business. So the rates must
+shade here and there; the rate-clerk must take good care to see that
+wherever it is in any way possible, no combination of tickets can be
+formed that will sell at less rate than a through ticket. When the
+rate-sheet is completed and copies of it forwarded to the railroad
+commission, it is, indeed, a sensitive organization.
+
+But no sooner will the cumbersome rate-sheet be completed, before some
+little road off in a distant corner of the country will send a printed
+announcement of some slight change in its passenger charges. In an
+instant, the whole mighty fabric of the rate-sheet must be torn apart and
+reconstructed. If the St. Louis Southwestern, by reason of a single change
+in the rates of the little Blissville, Bulgetown and Beyond (with which it
+connects) is enabled to charge a few cents less than the rival
+Transcontinental, its rate-sheet must be torn asunder and a new one
+adopted.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Beyond the long desks where the rate-clerks keep at their tedious jobs of
+constant readjustment of local and through rates, the passenger department
+has located its ticket redemption bureau. It announces publicly its
+willingness to redeem unused portions of its tickets, and the work of
+figuring out the amount due on a ticket, sometimes half or three-quarters
+used, requires a rate-clerk of ability and patience. The redemption clerk
+holds a ticket up to the light for your inspection.
+
+"They tried to put this over on me," he says as he shows a local ticket
+which had been sent to him for redemption at full value. The pasteboard is
+filled with small burned holes. "The breezy young man who forwarded this
+exhibit to me claimed that he had used no portion of this ticket and then
+apologized to me for its condition. His small boy, he said, had burned it
+with Fourth-of-July punk.
+
+"Punk? That was punk. The small boy did not do a thorough job. Every hole
+burned there was burned to hide a conductor's punchmark. You can see the
+edges of three of them; and those three punch marks show that the ticket
+issued from B---- to T---- was used 300 miles from B---- to A---- and not
+used from A---- to T----. When that young man threatened us with trouble
+on that ticket deal, we threatened him with arrest. After that he shut
+up."
+
+So does the general passenger agent come in constant contact with the
+great American public. His outside mail is probably the largest at
+headquarters, and it contains letters of every sort, asking innumerable
+questions, praising and damning his road with equal interest and force.
+One letter will commend a courteous conductor, the next will find some
+fault with the dining-car service. It is not so very long ago that a big
+Eastern railroad sent out a general order that the raw oysters on its
+dining-cars should be served affixed to their shells, because a woman from
+Sioux City had written a positive assertion that the shells were being
+used over and over again for canned oysters.
+
+Some of the railroads have already begun to systematize this whole matter
+of complaints. One New York City line which sells a large amount of
+transportation in small packages every day (two million passengers is its
+average in twenty-four hours) has a Harvard man at high salary just to
+receive those letters and give diplomatic answer to each of them. Each
+complaint is first acknowledged and then investigated; the person who made
+the complaint is notified of the final action taken. If a matter of fare
+is involved (the complicated transfer systems of New York make such
+questions frequent), and the company is wrong, it cheerfully acknowledges
+its fault and forwards car tickets as reimbursement. Many times when a
+conductor or a motorman has forgotten his manners, he is sent to make a
+personal apology to the aggrieved passenger, as a price of holding his
+position. That street railway company has won many friends out of persons
+who had complained to it, because of this method.
+
+But here is the general passenger agent of a big steam road, who holds a
+considerably different view of this very matter.
+
+"We never get in writing on one of these complaints," he says. "We send a
+man every time to make the matter right, and the man must be a diplomat.
+He must understand human nature, and so well does he understand it, that
+he makes the matter right in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred--turns an
+enemy into a friend, a liability into an asset, makes a firm patron for
+our road."
+
+"Liabilities into assets!" That then is the work of the general passenger
+agent and his remarkable department. "Liabilities into assets!" In these
+days of cold judgments upon the managements of the big railroad
+properties, such a man is worth his weight in gold to a big system. He
+measures his worth in the assets that he brings to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE LUXURY OF MODERN RAILROAD TRAVEL
+
+ SPECIAL TRAINS PROVIDED--PRIVATE CARS--SPECIALS FOR ACTORS, ACTRESSES,
+ AND MUSICIANS--CRUDE COACHES ON EARLY RAILROADS--LUXURIOUS OLD-TIME
+ SLEEPING-CARS--PULLMAN'S SLEEPERS MADE AT FIRST FROM OLD COACHES--HIS
+ PIONEER--THE FIRST DINING-CARS--THE PRESENT-DAY DINING-CARS--DINNERS,
+ TABLE D' HÔTE AND A LA CARTE--CAFÉ-CARS--BUFFET-CARS--CARE FOR THE
+ COMFORT OF WOMEN.
+
+
+If a man stops you in Nassau Street, New York, in the late afternoon, and
+you miss your favorite eighteen-hour train; if it is imperative that you
+be in Chicago the next morning at ten o'clock, and (this a most important
+"if") if you are willing to spend your money pretty freely, the railroad
+will accomplish it for you. If you are well known, and your credit
+accomplished with the railroad folks, it is highly probable that you will
+find your special, ready to accomplish an over-night run of nearly 1,000
+miles, standing waiting in the train-shed when you hurry to the station.
+Even if your credit is not so established, the sight of several thousand
+dollars in greenbacks will accomplish the trick for you. The train will be
+ready in any event almost as soon as you.
+
+If you are planning a novel outing, you may ring for a railroad
+representative and he will bring to your house or to your office tickets
+on any train and to any part of the world, or he will be prepared to
+arrange a special train for a night's run or for a three months' swing
+around the country. Your train may be of any length you desire and are
+willing to pay for. You can hire a car and it will be handled either as
+regular express trains or with special engines. You pay the bills and you
+have your choice.
+
+A run in a private car is the acme of luxury to the average man. These are
+used for a variety of purposes in these comfort-loving days, and the sight
+of one or more of them attached to the rear of a heavy train has ceased to
+excite comment. The average luxury-loving millionaire has one--possibly
+two--of these expensive toys attached to an entourage that embraces
+ocean-going yachts, complete stables, and dozens of motor-cars of every
+description. If he can claim some sort of responsible connection with a
+large railroad system, he is likely to have his car hauled free from one
+ocean to the other; and the millionaire likes these little perquisites. He
+is not so far removed, after all, from the man who huddles in the corner
+of the smoking-car and secretly hopes and prays that the conductor will
+forget to collect his ticket.
+
+To appreciate the number and variety of these cars take a look at the
+passenger sidings at any of the large Florida beach hotels in midwinter.
+Better still, run down to Princeton or up to New Haven at any large
+football game. You will see parked there at such a time from sixty to one
+hundred of these palatial cars, some of them private property, others
+chartered for the occasion.
+
+Even in the middle of the night this branch of luxurious railroad traffic
+is still at your disposal. An emergency call summons you out of town for a
+distance, and the night train schedules do not meet your needs. The night
+train-master will meet your needs. He will act as the agent of the
+railroad and arrange, while you hold the telephone receiver in your
+fingers, the entire schedule for you. Trains will be held, connections
+made; the telegraph is capable of arranging the details. If you demand
+speed, the railroad will give it to you--if you are willing to pay the
+price and give a release against damage to your precious bones. Increased
+speed means increased risk to your railroader.
+
+Maude Adams uses a special many Saturday nights to carry her down to her
+Long Island farm at Ronkonkoma. Her place is far out of the regular
+suburban district, and there are no regular trains that will enable her to
+reach it after the evening performance. For ordinary service she is quite
+content with a private car--the mania has its deathly grip on a good many
+of our prosperous theatrical folk.
+
+Lillian Russell used to live down in the Rockaway section of Long Island,
+hardly outside of the New York City limits. When she played in the
+metropolis a special train carried her six nights in the week out to her
+suburban home. There were plenty of regular trains--theatre trains, in the
+colloquialism of the railroaders--but the prima donna would have none of
+them. She had acquired the private-car mania while she was on the road. So
+her special stood night after night in the big railroad terminal in Long
+Island City--a neat little acquisition for a prosperous lady. The nightly
+ride cost her fifty dollars to the railroad company; and the generous tips
+she lavished, from the engine-cab back, doubled that sum.
+
+Hardly a prosperous star, these days, but demands in the contract a
+fully-equipped car for the long, hard days on the road. The car has some
+value for advertising; its greatest value, however, lies in the maximum
+degree of comfort that it affords, as compared with the constant changing
+from one country hotel to another. Sometimes the biggest of these folk let
+the mania seize so tightly upon them that they go to excess.
+
+Paderewski, on his first trip to America, made a flying journey up to
+Poughkeepsie to bewilder the fair Vassarites. He shuddered at the thought
+of what he was pleased to call the provinces. He had the popular European
+notion of American small towns and their hostelries. Poughkeepsie has very
+comfortable hotels, but Paderewski would not risk them. He would not sleep
+in them, neither would he eat in them. A private car solved the first of
+these problems; the second was met by bringing two cooks and a waiter up
+from the New York hotel in which he was staying. He was paid $1,000 for
+the concert, and his travelling expenses cost him more than half that sum,
+which was a pretty good ratio.
+
+Still, stage folk are not in the habit of counting either ratios or their
+pennies, and the average prima donna would make some sacrifices at the
+savings-bank in order to indulge herself in this extravagant and purely
+American mania. The grand-opera folk indulge themselves to the limit,
+invariably at the expense of the beneficent _impresario_. But even this
+long-suffering publicist does not feel the expense so bitterly. Special
+trains for opera companies make splendid advertising, but they do not cost
+one cent more than regular transportation. For the railroads, acting under
+the guidance of an all-wise and all-powerful commission down at
+Washington, will issue, without extra cost, from sixty to one hundred
+tickets for the man who orders a special train at two dollars a mile. In
+this way the wise theatrical manager keeps his little flock segregated
+while _en route_, and reaps gratuitously the prestige and the advertising
+that ensue.
+
+Even the cheaper companies have their own cars--gaudy affairs most of
+them, their battered sides still reflecting the brilliancy of some gifted
+sign-painter. You must remember seeing them in the long ago, back there at
+the home-town, stuck in the long siding next the coal-shed, and surrounded
+by admiring youth, getting its first faint taint of the mania. The
+All-Star Imperial Minstrel Troupes, and the Uncle Tom shows, are the
+graveyards of the private cars. Proud equipages that in their days have
+housed real magnates and have been the theatres of what we like
+mysteriously to call "big deals," once supplanted, drop quickly down the
+scale of elegance. In their last days they come to the hard use of some
+itinerant band of entertainers, to squeak their rusty joints and worn
+frames as if in protest against a fly-by-night existence over jerkwater
+railroad branches.
+
+Come back again to those cars you see at the college football games, the
+travelling private palaces that migrate up to Newport, the White
+Mountains, and the Adirondacks in summer; that flock south in the winter
+like the birds. The astonishing thing is that few of these cars are owned
+by the persons who are using them. Of course, as we have already said, if
+a man can lay claim to some railroad connection, he can get his car hauled
+free over other lines and, perhaps, get it built for him; but more of that
+in a moment. There are probably not more than 40 private cars in the land
+that are owned by persons not connected with the railroads. This is an
+astonishingly low figure, considering the number of these craft that are
+constantly drifting about our 200,000 miles of track. Some society folk
+have cars as a part of their daily life, but the storage costs are apt to
+cause a man to think twice before he buys one. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr.
+Morgan have managed to worry along very comfortably without contracting
+the disease. As a rule, both of these men are willing to accept the
+comfort of any of the fast limited trains that form part of the luxurious
+equipment of the American railroad.
+
+But the fact remains that the average citizen, when he is felled by an
+intermittent attack of the private-car mania, is content to hire one of
+the very comfortable equipages that the Pullman Company keeps ready at big
+terminals at various points across the country. The arrangements for these
+are exclusive of the price paid to the railroad companies for their haul.
+A complete private car, equipped with staterooms, baths, private
+dining-room, observation parlor and the like, costs seventy-five dollars a
+day. For two or more days this rate drops to fifty dollars a day. An extra
+charge is made for food; but the railroad will deliver the car without
+charge at the point from which you wish to begin your journey.
+
+[Illustration: CONNECTING DRAWING ROOM AND STATE ROOM]
+
+[Illustration: "A MAN MAY HAVE AS FINE A BED IN A SLEEPING CAR AS IN THE
+BEST HOTEL IN ALL THE LAND"]
+
+[Illustration: "YOU MAY HAVE THE MANICURE UPON THE MODERN TRAIN"]
+
+[Illustration: "THE DINING-CAR IS A SOCIABLE SORT OF PLACE"]
+
+For the haul of these cars the railroads will charge you according to
+their regularly filed tariffs, unless you have that valued connection with
+some common carrier. This varies from a minimum of from eighteen to
+twenty-five first-class fares. In other words, let us assume that the
+minimum in a particular case is twenty fares. That particular railroad
+will carry up to twenty persons in the car at its regular fares; if there
+are more than twenty aboard it will get a full fare ticket from each over
+the minimum allowance. That is all a matter established as the special
+train rates are established, not by whim, but by law.
+
+Strange as it may seem, the private car mania, in chronic form, seems to
+attack some railroad presidents most violently. For reasons which show
+that railroading is a business filled with fine tact and diplomacy, these
+cars are called business cars. It is also remarkable that for size and
+elegance they vary in almost inverse ratio to the size and importance of
+the railroad that owns them. Big railroads, like the Pennsylvania, the
+Harriman lines, and the New York Central rather pride themselves upon the
+simplicity of their official cars. Some of these are plain almost to the
+point of shabbiness. Contrasted with these are the private cars belonging
+to the head of a great interurban electric line in Southern California, a
+car so wondrously beautiful that it was carried all the way to Washington,
+in the Spring of 1905, so that a thousand foreign railroad managers there
+gathered in convention, might see the attainments of American
+car-builders. Another Western railroad, a small steam line this time,
+boasts a president's car with a dining service that cost $2,500. A little
+Mississippi lumbering road spent $40,000 in providing a private car for
+its operating head.
+
+The big Eastern roads know about all of these cars. Their heads get
+frequent invitations to take a run over the K., Y. & Z., or some other
+enterprising jerkwater road that runs from the back waters to the bad
+lands. Of course, they never take the trip, but they invariably see the
+next step in the developments. It comes in the form of requests for a
+"pass for haul of car and party" from Chicago to New York and return.
+Time was when the New York Central and the Pennsylvania were laid low
+under the avalanche of requests of this sort. Some of their slower trains
+were laden down with long strings of these deadhead caravans, and on one
+memorable occasion a whole section was made up of the prominent private
+cars of decidedly unprominent railroad officers.
+
+Since the introduction of the eighteen-hour trains between these two most
+important cities of the country this burden has been lessened. These
+fastest trains will absolutely not haul any private cars at any price; it
+is a rule that would not be abrogated for the President of the United
+States. So the railroaders of the West, from the big men like Stubbs and
+Kruttschnitt of the Union Pacific down to the small fry, leave their cars
+in the roomy terminal yards at Chicago and come to New York most of the
+time on one or the other of the eighteen-hour trains. About the only time
+their cars come East nowadays is when they are bringing their families to
+the seashore for the Summer.
+
+So much for the private cars. They are perhaps one of the most typical
+things of the America of to-day, as we have seen. Actresses and
+millionaires use them for their private comfort and convenience; tourist
+parties roam forth in them; delegations proceed in them to conventions;
+civic bodies find them agreeable aids to junketing. Sometimes a party of
+sportsmen will charter a car and hie themselves off to a secluded spot
+where the railroad roams through the forest, find an idle siding and use
+their car for a camp for a week, a fortnight, or even a month. Cities and
+States use private cars as travelling museums to exploit their charms,
+some of them are travelling chapels for religious propagandism. The uses
+of the private car are nearly as manifold as those of the railroad itself.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In the beginning things were different. Our great grand-daddies drew no
+class lines when they travelled, but were content to find shelter from
+the storm, or upon pleasant days from the showers of sparks scattered by
+the locomotive. But when the railroad began to stretch itself and to be a
+thing of reaches, it was found advisable to run trains at night in order
+to make quick communication between distant points. Travelling at night in
+the crude coaches of the early railroads was an abominable thing, and
+before the forties the old Cumberland Valley Railroad was operating some
+crude sort of sleeping-cars. Within another decade there was much
+experimenting of this sort. Old-timers on the Erie still remember the
+sleeping-cars that were built on that road soon after the close of the
+Civil War. There were six of them, more like summer cottages than cars,
+for the Erie was then of 6-foot gauge, and its cars were 12 feet wide. The
+berths were made up in crude form by hanging curtains from iron rods and
+bringing the bedding from a storage closet at the end of the car. There
+was a little less privacy in them than in the modern Pullman, but in the
+eyes of Jim Fisk, whose love of elegant luxury was first responsible for
+their construction, they were nothing less than palaces. One of them was
+named after Fisk and carried his portrait in an immense decorative
+medallion on each of its sides. The other cars were the _Jay
+Gould_--without decorative medallions--the _Morning Star_, the _Evening
+Star_, the _Queen City_, and the _Crescent City_. All you have to do
+to-day, to set an old Erie man's tongue wagging, is to speak of one of
+these cars. They were triumphs, and away back in that day and generation
+they cost $60,000 each.
+
+But while many men were fussing in futile ways to build comfortable cars
+for long journeys, a man named George M. Pullman, over in Western New
+York, was packing his goods and making ready to go to Chicago and build
+his world-famed car-works there. Pullman's cars survived the others. He
+bought in the Woodruff Company and some lesser concerns, and for many
+years his only important rival was the Wagner Palace Car Company, a
+Vanderbilt property. In course of time this too was absorbed, and the
+Pullman Company had virtual control of the luxurious part of American
+traffic, few railroads caring to run their own parlor and sleeping-car
+service.
+
+There are economic and sensible reasons for this in many cases. Some
+railroads have great through passenger traffic, demanding Pullman
+equipment in summer and little or none in winter. Others reverse this need
+and so whole trains of sleeping and parlor cars go flocking north and
+south and then north again with the private cars. Special occasions, like
+great conventions, call for extra Pullmans by hundreds; and because of the
+enormous capital that must be tied up, a single supplying company is best
+able to handle the problem. Still, big roads like the New Haven, the
+Milwaukee, and the Great Northern have been most successful in building
+and operating their own sleeping and parlor-car service. A great road like
+the Pennsylvania might do the same thing, and because of that possibility
+the Pennsylvania was one of the first roads in the country to make the
+Pullman Company pay it for the privilege of hauling its cars. As a rule,
+the railroad pays the Pullman Company for hauling by the mile--a very few
+cents a mile--and the Pullman Company also takes the entire receipts to
+itself.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The body of Abraham Lincoln was carried to its final resting-place in the
+first real Pullman car that was ever built. President Lincoln rode in one
+of Pullman's earliest attempts at railroad luxury, some sleeping-cars that
+he had remodelled from day coaches on the Chicago & Alton Railroad and
+that were put in service between Chicago and St. Louis in 1860. These cars
+were almost as crude as the barbaric predecessors that had induced Pullman
+to tackle the problem of railroad comfort approaching the standards of
+boat comfort.
+
+Leonard Seibert, a veteran employee of the Chicago & Alton, told a few
+years ago of Mr. Pullman's first attempts to remodel the old coaches of
+that road into sleeping-cars. Said he:
+
+"In 1858 Mr. Pullman came to Bloomington and engaged me to do the work of
+remodelling the Chicago & Alton coaches into the first Pullman
+sleeping-cars. The contract was that Mr. Pullman should make all necessary
+changes inside of the cars. After looking over the entire passenger car
+equipment of the road, which at that time constituted about a dozen cars,
+we selected Coaches Nos. 9 and 19. They were 44 feet long, had flat roofs
+like box cars, single sash windows, of which there were fourteen on a
+side, the glass in each sash being only a little over one foot square. The
+roof was only a trifle over six feet from the floor of the car. Into this
+car we got ten sleeping-car sections, besides a linen locker and two
+washrooms--one at each end.
+
+"The wood used in the interior finish was cherry. Mr. Pullman was anxious
+to get hickory, to stand the hard usage which it was supposed the cars
+would receive. I worked part of the Summer of 1858, employing an assistant
+or two, and the cars went into service in the Fall of 1858. There were no
+blue prints or plans made for the remodelling of these first two
+sleeping-cars, and Mr. Pullman and I worked out the details and
+measurements as we came to them. The two cars cost Mr. Pullman not more
+than $2,000, or $1,000 each. They were upholstered in plush, lighted by
+oil lamps, heated with box stoves, and mounted on four-wheel trucks with
+iron wheels. The berth rate was fifty cents a night. There was no porter
+in those days; the brakeman made up the beds."
+
+Pullman built his first real sleeping-car in 1864. It was called the
+_Pioneer_ and he further designated it by the letter "A," not dreaming
+that there would ever be enough Pullman cars to exhaust the letters of the
+alphabet. The _Pioneer_ was built in a Chicago & Alton car shop, and it
+cost the almost fabulous, in those times, sum of $18,000. That was
+extravagant car-building in a year when the best of railroad coaches could
+be built at a cost not exceeding $4,500 each. But the _Pioneer_ was
+blazing a new path in luxury. From without, it was radiant in paints and
+varnishes, in gay stripings and letterings; it was a giant compared with
+its fellows, for it was a foot wider and two and a half feet higher than
+any car ever built before. It had the hinged berths that are to-day the
+distinctive feature of the American sleeping car, and the porter and the
+passengers no longer had to drag the bedding from closets at the far end
+of the car.
+
+The _Pioneer_ was not only wider and higher than other passenger cars, it
+was also wider and higher than the clearances of station platforms and
+overhead bridges. But when the country was reduced to the deepest distress
+because of the death of President Lincoln, the fame of Pullman's _Pioneer_
+was already widespread, and it was suggested that the fine new car should
+be the funeral coach of the martyred president. This involved cutting
+wider clearances all the way from Washington by the way of Philadelphia,
+New York, and Albany to Springfield, Ill.; and gangs of men worked night
+and day making the needed changes. Pullman knew that the increased
+convenience of an attractive car built upon proper proportions would
+justify these changes in the long run, and it is significant that the
+height and width of the Pullman cars to-day are those of the _Pioneer_;
+the changes have been made in the length. Not long after that car had
+carried President Lincoln to his grave, General Grant started on a trip
+west, and the Michigan Central Railroad anxious to carry him over its
+lines from Detroit to Chicago, widened its clearances for the same
+celebrated car. After that there were several paths open for the big car,
+and work was begun upon its fellows. It went into regular service on
+the Chicago & Alton Railroad; and the Pullman Palace Car Company was
+formed in 1867. The alphabet soon ran out, and the company to-day operates
+between four and five thousand cars in regular service. There is a popular
+tradition, several times denied, to the effect that Pullman for many years
+gave his daughters $100 each for the names of the cars, and that that
+formed the source of their pin money.
+
+[Illustration: AN INTERIOR VIEW OF ONE OF THE EARLIEST PULLMAN
+SLEEPING-CARS]
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A STANDARD SLEEPING-CAR OF TO-DAY]
+
+While the dimensions of the car were largely set, improvements in its
+construction have gone steadily forward, as has been told in an earlier
+chapter. The interior of these luxurious modern cars has not been
+neglected. From the beginning they have been elaborate in rare woods and
+splendid textile fittings. The advancing era of American good taste has
+done much toward softening the over-elaboration of car interiors--the sort
+of sleeping car that George Ade used to call "the chambermaid's dream of
+heaven." The newest cars present the quiet elegance and good taste of a
+modern residence. Nothing that may be added in wealth of material or of
+comfort is omitted, but the foolish draperies and carvings that once made
+the American car the laughing-stock of Europeans have already gone their
+way.
+
+To make for luxury all manner of devices have been added to these cars.
+The superintendent sometimes hears complaints from a traveller that the
+sharp curves on some mountain division have spilled the water on his
+bath-tub; and the switching-crews at the big terminals know that
+turntables are kept busy turning the big observation platform cars so that
+they will "set right," and the big piazza-like platform will rest squarely
+at the rear of the train. For those persons who wish to pay for the luxury
+there are staterooms, and the best of these staterooms have the baths and
+big comfortable brass beds. After many years of unsatisfactory experiment
+the electric light has come into its own upon the railroad train; and
+even upon unpretentious trains the night traveller no longer has to
+wrestle with the difficulties of dressing or undressing in an absolutely
+dark berth.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Once the problem of housing folk at night had been met and solved, another
+rose. If travellers might sleep upon a train, why might they not eat
+there, too? The American eating-houses had met with a degree of fame.
+There are old fellows who will still tell you of the glories of the
+dining-rooms at Springfield, at Poughkeepsie, at Hornellsville, and at
+Altoona. But the eating-house scheme had its great disadvantages. For one
+thing, it caused a delay in the progress of through fast trains to halt
+them three times a day while the passengers piled out of the cars and went
+across to some lunch-counter or dining-room to ruin their digestions in
+the twenty minutes allotted for each meal. For another thing, the process
+of clambering in and out of the comfortable train in all sorts of weather
+was unpopular. The well-established and equally well-famed eating-houses
+along the trunk-line railroads were doomed from the time that the Pioneer
+won its first success.
+
+No more should a train tie up at meal-time than a steamboat should tie up
+at her wharf for a similar purpose. The first dining-cars were called
+hotel-cars; and the first of these, the _President_, was placed in
+operation by the Pullman company on the Great Western Railway--now the
+Grand Trunk--of Canada, in 1867. The hotel-car was nothing more or less
+than a sleeping-car with a kitchen built in at one end and facilities for
+serving meals at tables placed at the berths. It was well enough in its
+way, but travellers demanded something better, something more hygienic
+than eating meals in a sleeping place.
+
+Pullman went hard at his problem, and in another year he had evolved the
+first real dining-car, the _Delmonico_, which went into regular service on
+the Chicago & Alton Railway. The _Delmonico_ was a pretty complete sort
+of a restaurant on wheels, and not far different from the dining-car of
+to-day.
+
+To-day there are 750 successors to the old _Delmonico_ in daily service on
+the railroads of the United States. A small regiment of men earn their
+livelihood upon them; some genius, handy with a lead pencil, has estimated
+that these serve some 60,000 meals--breakfast, lunch, and dinner--every
+day. The amount of food and drink consumed is a matter that is left to the
+statistician.
+
+The average full-sized dining-car seats 40 persons, but that does not
+represent the business it does. Unless the car can be completely filled
+two or more times at each meal, it is not considered a profitable run. The
+European method of reserving seats at "first table" or "second table" has
+never obtained in the United States, and the wise man on a popular train
+sacrifices his dignity and hurries toward the dining-car at the first
+intimation that the meal is ready.
+
+To take care of the hungry folk a dining-car crew of nine men is kept
+busy. The car is in absolute charge of a conductor or steward, who is held
+sharply accountable by the dining-car superintendent of the road for the
+conduct of his men and of his car. He signs a receipt for the car
+equipment before starting on his run out over the line, and he must see to
+it that none of that equipment, not a single napkin or spoon out of all
+his stock, is missing at its end. He is held in as strict account for the
+appearance and behavior of his men. The waiters must be neatly dressed,
+must have clean linen; the conductor himself must be something of a Beau
+Brummel, carrying a certain polite smile toward each one of the road's
+patrons, no matter how disagreeable or cranky he or she may be. For all of
+these things and many others--maintaining a sharp guard over the car's
+miniature wine-cellars, adding "specials" to the bill-of-fare for a given
+day, acting as a cashier for the service--he receives a princely salary,
+varying from $75 to $110 a month.
+
+His crew, as far as the passengers see it, consists of five men, almost
+always negroes. Back in the tiny kitchen is the chef, with two assistants,
+preparing the food. The kitchen is tiny. It is less than five feet wide
+and fifteen feet long, and the three men who work within it must have a
+place for everything in it, including themselves. Obviously there is no
+room for the waiters, and these receive their supplies through a small
+wicket window.
+
+If the kitchen is tiny, it is also marvellously complete. An ice-box fits
+upon and takes half the space of the wide vestibule platform; the range
+has the compact dimensions of a yacht's range; sinks, pots, and kettles
+fit into inconceivably small spaces. Yet in these tiny cubbyholes one
+hundred, ofttimes many more dinners, of seven or eight courses each, are
+carefully prepared, with a skill in the cooking that is a marvel to
+restaurateurs.
+
+The _table d'hôte_ dinner--the famous "dollar dinner"--of the American
+railroad has almost disappeared. The constant increase in foodstuffs is
+most largely responsible for this. The Pullman Company long ago gave up
+this particular feature of passenger luxury, save in a few isolated cases.
+It had ceased to be a particularly profitable business, this serving of
+fine meals for a dollar each; and so the railroads themselves took it up
+and prepared to make it a cost business for the advertising value to them.
+Each railroad plumed itself upon its dining-car service--some of them
+still do--and each was willing to lose a little money, perhaps, to induce
+travel to come its way because of the superior meals it served upon its
+trains. But as the price of food-stuffs continued steadily to rise, the
+advertising feature of these meals began to be more and more expensive,
+and the dollar dinner quickly disappeared. A high priced _à-la-carte_
+service took its place, and the railroads sought to establish their
+commissary upon a money-making basis.
+
+The attempt has not been very successful. For the lifting of the
+dining-car prices and the attempt to reduce running expenses has, on
+some roads in particular, hurt the reputation of these "restaurants on
+wheels," and so in due season hurt their patronage; brought their patrons
+from folk who went out of their way to eat on dining-cars to folk who eat
+there only because of dire necessity. And these last still have found
+prices high and the result is to be eventually a return to former methods
+in part--slower trains stopping again for meals at important stations, the
+faster trains returning to the _table d'hôte_. Beginnings have been made
+along that line recently. The dollar dinner may never return to some
+roads--although it remains a joy and a delight to travellers upon the New
+Haven system--but the "regular dinner" at least, capable of quick service
+in a crowded car, bids fair to have a renaissance.
+
+While the problem of dining-car economy, and profit even, remains a
+problem, the idea is nevertheless being steadily extended all the while to
+branches and to trains that could not support full-sized dining-cars. To
+meet these needs smaller cars--generally called _café_-cars--in which the
+dining-compartment is much reduced in size, have been built and operated.
+In these two cooks, two waiters and a steward form the working force and
+the fixed charges of the outfit are correspondingly reduced. They are
+further reduced in the operation of the so-called broiler-coach, which is
+nothing more or less than a day-car with a kitchen built in, the entire
+service being performed by one or two cooks and a like number of waiters.
+Some sleeping-cars and some parlor cars still have kitchens where a single
+accomplished negro may act as both cook and waiter, and these cars are
+designated commonly as buffet sleepers or buffet parlor cars.
+
+The dining-car department of the railroad will probably have more to do
+than supervise the operation of these various sorts of equipment.
+Restaurants and lunch-rooms at terminals and stations along the line may
+fall under its direct supervision, and it will probably also conduct the
+cuisine of the private cars of the railroad's officers.
+
+The dining-car department has direct charge of all the men employed on
+cars and in the lunch-rooms; it sees to it that the railroad's culinary
+equipment is fully maintained; it buys food and drink, linen, silver,
+china, kitchen supplies of every sort. The routing of the cars is
+carefully planned to secure the most economical use of them. Few trains
+running from New York to Chicago will carry a single diner throughout the
+entire trip. These trains will use two, sometimes three cars during a
+single-way trip between the cities. A single car will generally make the
+daylight run with the train, to be dropped at night to continue its course
+west again at daylight upon some other train needing meal service. The
+first train will pick up a fresh diner in the morning to carry into
+Chicago. In this way, a diner may take a week or more to make the round
+trip from New York to Chicago. Obviously, her commissary must meet all
+needs along the way. Staple supplies, liquors, dry groceries are all
+placed aboard the car at the terminals. Fresh meats and vegetables are
+picked up along the route. This town has an especial reputation for its
+chickens; this for its grapes; this other for its celery. The dining-car
+department knows all these, and it selects under the rare opportunity of a
+housewife who has a market nearly a thousand miles long within which to do
+her marketing.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Just as the glorious comfort of the American river steamboat of the
+fifties was responsible for the plans for eating and sleeping aboard the
+railroad trains, so it was responsible for the introduction of a finer
+luxury in railroad travel, until to-day, when the resources of the general
+passenger agent are taxed to discover some new ingenious joy to add to the
+pleasure of going by this particular line. The full development of the
+protected vestibule platform and the opportunity it afforded of easy
+intercourse between the coaches of a train led to many new devices to make
+the long cross-country trip of the traveller more than ever a thing of
+joy. First came the buffet-car, with all the conveniences of a man's club;
+and the car-builders have shown remarkable ingenuity in imitating the
+mission-like grillroom interiors, despite the many limitations placed upon
+them. No club was complete without a barber-shop, and soon every
+fast-rushing limited of any consequence had a dusky servitor whose
+sharp-bladed razor was warranted not to cut even when the train struck a
+sharp curve at fifty miles an hour. Stationery, books, and magazines
+became features of the buffet-car. After that there came a stenographer,
+whose services were free to the patrons of the train.
+
+Most of these things were for the comfort of men, who form the majority of
+patrons of the railroad. But a considerable portion of femininity travels,
+and it sent in a complaint that its comfort was being neglected. The
+general passenger agents gave quick ear. The men's buffet, with its
+comfortable adjuncts of smoke and drink was at the forward end of the
+train, the women were considered in the big, comfortable observation cars
+at the rear. They were given more stationery, more magazines, even a
+caseful of books, running from the severe standard works to the gayest and
+lightest of modern fiction. Ladies' maids were installed upon the trains,
+and the girl running from New York up to Albany could have her nails
+manicured while upon the train.
+
+These are all details, but each goes to make the comfort of the traveller
+upon the American railroad train. Such comfort is not equalled in any
+other country in the world. From the moment he steps from his cab, the
+American traveller passing through the magnificence of superb
+waiting-rooms enters palatial trains, superior to the private trains of
+royalty upon the other side of the ocean. A corps of well-trained
+_attachés_ look to his comfort and his ease, every moment that he is upon
+the train, whether his ride be of an hour's duration or a four-days' run
+across the continent. Other railroaders whom he does not see, engine
+crews, changing each few hours upon his run, signalmen in the towers along
+the route, telegraphers, despatchers, train walkers, car inspectors help
+in their small but important ways to make his trip one of comfort and of
+safety. The entire organization of the railroad lends itself to that very
+purpose.
+
+The railroad does not stop at the mere exercise of its great function as a
+carrier; it does not even stop with the exercise of its every ingenuity
+toward safety in its transportation; it goes a little further and gives to
+the man or woman who rides upon its rails, a degree of luxurious comfort
+equal to if not even greater than that man or woman can receive at any
+other place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+GETTING THE CITY OUT INTO THE COUNTRY
+
+ COMMUTERS' TRAINS IN MANY TOWNS--RAPID INCREASE IN THE VOLUME OF
+ SUBURBAN TRAVEL--ELECTRIFICATION OF THE LINES--LONG ISLAND RAILROAD
+ ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY SUBURBAN--VARIED DISTANCES OF SUBURBAN HOMES FROM
+ THE CITIES--CLUB-CARS FOR COMMUTERS--STATEROOMS IN THE SUBURBAN
+ CARS--SPECIAL TRANSFER COMMUTERS.
+
+
+When the Commuter slams his desk shut at the close of a busy day, he is
+fully aware that he is a superior being. Other mortals condemned to hard
+labor in the city may squeeze within the ill-ventilated confines of
+trolley-car, elevated or subway train, may find their way to stuffy
+apartments, which, if their fronts were to be suddenly removed, would look
+for all the world like shoe-boxes stuck tier upon tier in a shop. The
+Commuter thrusts out his chest. Not for him. His is a different life. He
+even feels justified in thinking that his is the only life. There is
+nothing narrow about the Commuter; the open breath of the country has
+tended to widen him.
+
+He finds his way to the showy railroad terminal, down the crowded
+concourse with a human stream of other Commuters to the 5:37. That train
+is part of his regular calendar of life. It has been such ever since he
+took flight to the country, a dozen years ago. If the 5:37 should ever be
+stricken from the time-card the Commuter would feel as if the light had
+been extinguished. Once, when some meddler violently assumed to change it
+into a 5:31, the Commuter was one of a committee who visited a terrified
+general passenger agent and had the course of time set right again. There
+is only one other train which must approach the 5:37 in regularity; that
+is the 7:52, on which the Commuter slinks sorrowfully into the dirty town
+each morning. Other trains may be jumped about on the time-card, the
+Commuter is oblivious of their fate. But let his 7:52 be ten minutes late
+into the big terminal three mornings in succession, and the Commuter
+begins to write letters to the papers and to the officers of the railroad.
+
+Once aboard the 5:37 the Commuter trails his way into the smoker. Jim, the
+brakeman, who is the source of all trustworthy information about the
+railroad, and who can even foreshadow the resignation of the president,
+has stored away the table and the cards. They are produced for the daily
+consideration of a dime and a game that runs week in and week out is ready
+to begin. Smith, of the Standard Oil crowd, drops into his seat; Higgins,
+the lawyer, into his; the others are quickly filled; packages--foodstuffs
+from the cheaper city markets and hurried purchases made at noon from
+handy shops--go into the racks, and the Commuter is oblivious until, as if
+by instinct, a familiar red barn goes flying backwards. The game is off
+again until to-morrow morning; he is sorting his own packages out of the
+rack. The train halts for a single nervous moment, and he is on the
+platform. The cars roll past him; the party are at a three-handed game
+now.
+
+The Commuter finds his way up a steep road to his home on the hillside,
+his very own home. It looks as sweet, set in there among the bushes and
+the trees, as it did the day he bought it; and that day it looked to him
+as Paradise. When night comes, there comes a peace and quiet, a peculiar
+country coolness in the air. The city is steaming from the hot day, and
+through the night the pavements and the roofs still emit heat. The
+Commuter has forgotten the city. He sleeps as he slept as a boy on a farm,
+where a city was but a hazy dream in his mind. When he awakes he is
+refreshed, invigorated. The country has repaid him for the trouble that he
+has taken to reach it. He goes into town again on that blessed 7:52,
+twice as good a workingman as the man who has the next desk to his, the
+poor chap who had to sit on the apartment steps until after midnight in
+order to get even a miserable degree of comfort.
+
+That is why the city goes out into the country.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The Commuter is apt to settle his thoughts upon himself, to forget that he
+is but an infinitely small part of a mighty home-going army that nightly
+calls all the passenger resources of the railroad into play. There are
+more than 100,000 of him alone in the metropolitan district around New
+York. The busy Long Island Railroad takes a host of him nightly off to the
+garden spots of that wonderful land from which it takes its name; the
+Central Railroad reaches off into the lowlands, and the Erie and the
+Lackawanna into the highlands of New Jersey; the New York Central and the
+New Haven tap the picturesque shores of the Hudson and the Sound.
+
+Boston repeats New York in this human tide that ebbs and flows daily
+through her gates. From both her North and South stations mighty armies of
+Commuters come and go until one wonders sometimes if any one really lives
+in Boston itself. There are more than 60,000 of this army at the Hub. In
+Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and the Reading handle from their terminals
+an army of equal size each night; another finds its way from the smoky,
+dirty heart of Pittsburgh out into the attractive towns that perch the
+hills in her vicinage.
+
+Middle West cities, even those of good size, differ from Eastern in the
+fact that they are rarely hampered in their growth by natural conditions.
+In big towns like Cleveland and Detroit, for instance, the natural and the
+artificial electric transit facilities are so good as to bring the
+commutation business to a minimum. Not so with Chicago. The Illinois
+Central from the south, the Northwestern and the St. Paul from the north,
+serve rapidly growing suburban areas that will compare with some of the
+best in the East. Then, after the Commuters in the East are safely home,
+another army is finding its way across the bay, and off to the north and
+the south of San Francisco. These are the big centres of commuting as the
+American railroads know it. In smaller measure it exists at every large
+city in the country. The familiar monthly card ticket, representing its
+cousin, that holy-of-holies--the annual pass, is issued from good-sized
+villages and pretentious country seats. The Commuter is already a national
+institution.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Conductor John M. Dorsey, who used to run an Erie train out of Jersey City
+in the long ago, once showed us what he thought was the first example of a
+pure commutation business. It was a list issued to Erie conductors in
+1860, and containing the names of 162 persons who travelled daily in and
+out of New York by the way of Jersey City. These folk lived in Passaic
+(they called it Boiling Springs in those days), and in Paterson, and all
+the way up the line to Goshen and Middletown. When a man wanted to commute
+then he paid a monthly fee to the railroad and they printed his name on
+this official list. Such a scheme would be obviously out of the question
+these days.
+
+When New York refused to stop growing, and more and more people began
+making the daily trip in and out of Jersey City, the handy method of the
+commutation ticket was substituted for the cumbersome printed list, and
+the Erie and all the other railroads began to cater to the Commuter with
+special short-distance trains. Committees came to railroad officers from
+various small towns and aided them in fixing a definite basis of fare,
+which remains to-day at something between six-tenths and three-quarters of
+a cent a mile. In later years, the real estate business became the science
+that it is to-day, and the suburban business began to move forward in long
+leaps.
+
+[Illustration: "EVEN IN WINTER THERE IS A HOMELY, HOMEY AIR ABOUT THE
+COMMUTER'S STATION"]
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE GREAT FOUR-TRACK OPEN CUT WHICH THE ERIE
+HAS BUILT FOR THE COMMUTER'S COMFORT AT JERSEY CITY]
+
+[Illustration: A MODEL WAY-STATION ON THE LINES OF THE BOSTON & ALBANY
+RAILROAD]
+
+[Illustration: THE YARDMASTER'S OFFICE--IN AN ABANDONED SWITCH-TOWER]
+
+"It seems incredible," said a railroad officer just the other day "but
+this suburban problem is all but overwhelming for us. It does not increase
+our revenues at so wonderful a pace, but it does increase in volume from
+20 to 25 per cent a year; and think how that keeps us hustling, making
+facilities for it. There is not a railroad entering New York to-day that
+could not dismiss its passenger terminal problems to-morrow, if it were
+not for the Commuter. There is not a railroad coming into New York that
+could not handle all its through business in a train-house of from four to
+five tracks. Instead of that, what do we see? The Erie with five through
+trains requiring a terminal of sixteen tracks; the Lackawanna, with the
+same number of through trains, a new terminal of even greater size, the
+overwhelming passenger terminal problem being repeated at every corner of
+New York, just because of the tremendous annual increase in the suburban
+passenger business."
+
+The great reconstruction of the Grand Central terminal facilities in the
+heart of New York, and the erection of a new station there, as described
+in detail in an earlier chapter, is directly due to the Commuter. When the
+new station with its double tier of tracks is finished, there will be
+thirty-two platform tracks in the double train-house, an amount far in
+excess of that needed for even the great volume of through business that
+goes and comes over the lines of the New York Central and the New York,
+New Haven, & Hartford, the two systems that use it. And the new station,
+involving a tremendous expenditure of money, of brains, and of energy, is
+not all.
+
+The New Haven has electrified its four-track main line all the way out to
+Stamford, Conn., in order that it may in some measure cope with this
+increasing flow of suburban traffic over its already crowded main-line
+tracks. It has wrestled with the unanticipated problems of electrification
+because it has been facing a situation that left it no time to experiment
+elsewhere and approach its main-line problem with deliberation. More and
+more folk were settling in the suburban towns in its territory each month,
+and deliberation was quite out of their calculations. The Commuter is
+rarely deliberate.
+
+So the New Haven, with all the resources of a giant carrier, has found
+each new measure of relief swallowed up in the new flood and has turned to
+more radical methods. It has been apparent to its managers for some time
+past that even the new Grand Central, with its wonderful capacity, would
+some day prove inadequate, for the reason that the New York Central--the
+actual owners of the property--was also trying to cope with its own great
+increase in suburban traffic, and would eventually require more and more
+space for its own Commuters. With such a possibility in the future--not a
+distant future with the suburban business doubling in volume every four or
+five years--the New Haven sought to develop an unimportant freight branch
+leading from New Rochelle down to the Harlem River. It has almost finished
+the work of transforming this into a great electric carrier, six tracks in
+width. Railroad engineers show no hesitancy in saying that eight-track
+trunks will be needed out of New York in every direction within a dozen
+years. The Harlem River branch of the New Haven, once it is provided with
+a suitable terminal, will become a great artery of suburban traffic. It
+will give trunk capacity to make possible the development of a great new
+area lying just inland from the Sound, and yet within from 40 to 50 miles
+of New York City.
+
+A third project in which New Haven capital is known to be interested is
+that of a high-speed, four-track suburban electric railroad also to reach
+into the Sound territory as far as Port Chester, with an important branch,
+diverging to White Plains, the shire-town of Westchester County. This line
+will feed into the main line of the New York subway, and so avoid cramping
+the terminals still further. The terminals are the crux of the whole
+great problem of handling suburban traffic.
+
+The New York Central has also electrified its tracks for a zone of some 40
+to 50 miles from its terminal. This work was started primarily by a
+distressing accident in its old smoke-filled tunnel, that ran the length
+of Park Avenue under Manhattan Island, but New York Central officers are
+to-day free to admit that the electrification was close at hand in any
+event. The operation of a terminal so closely planned as the new Grand
+Central, with its train-sheds and yards built in layers, would have been a
+physical impossibility with smoky, dirty, steam locomotives.
+
+The New York Central has been, as we shall see in greater detail in the
+chapter on the coming of electricity, the first of the standard steam
+railroads entering New York to provide suburban trains of multiple unit
+motor-cars, similar to those used in rapid transit subway and elevated
+trains. The great advantage of these trains over trains handled by either
+steam or electric locomotives is an operating advantage. The train may be
+so quickly turned in terminals as to bring the terminal problem down an
+appreciable percentage, and so to give a greater hauling capacity to
+main-line tracks. The Central, wedged in tightly by the high hills that
+lie to the north of the metropolis, has had to pin its faith to plans that
+utilize the present tracks to the uttermost capacity.
+
+The railroads crossing New Jersey and reaching the west bank of the Hudson
+have not been behind the routes that enter from the north in providing for
+the suburban business. The recently opened McAdoo Tunnel, linking the
+Jersey terminals of the Erie, the Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania with
+both the downtown and the uptown theatre, hotel, and shopping district of
+Manhattan, has been a great stimulus to the suburban development across
+the Hudson.
+
+The Lackawanna has done its part by boring a second tunnel under the
+Bergen Hill, parallel to its original tube, giving a four-track entrance
+to its fine new terminal, and relieving the congestion of suburban traffic
+night and morning at its worst point, the neck of the bottle. The Erie has
+already completed, as a part of its extensive terminal reconstruction-work
+in Jersey City, a similar project, a four-track open cut through the stout
+backbone of Bergen Hill. The open cut replaces completely the so-called
+Bergen Tunnel, which has already become a matter of history.
+
+We have already told of the Pennsylvania terminal in New York. The
+Pennsylvania built the new station for through travel rather than for the
+Commuter, at the outset. But the Pennsylvania, with the exception of a
+brisk traffic out to Newark, is hardly a big suburban road, in the New
+York metropolitan district. The great volume of Commuters who will flock
+to its station nightly, will be bound east, not west. The Long Island
+Railroad, its property stretching less than one hundred miles east from
+New York, through what is one of the most attractive residential
+localities in the world, is almost exclusively a suburban system. Long
+Island is not a manufacturing or agricultural territory of consequence.
+There is not a town of 10,000 souls east of the New York City line.
+Freight traffic and through traffic, aside from some summer excursion
+business, is conspicuous by its absence. Yet the Long Island operates
+through its local station at Jamaica (an even dozen miles distant from the
+new Pennsylvania terminal), more than 800 trains a day. That, of itself,
+represents a volume of traffic, and speaks wonders for the desirability of
+the broad and sandy island as an escape from the city to the country.
+
+"We have from 18,000 to 20,000 Commuters all the year round," said a Long
+Island official, just the other day; "and this branch of our traffic--our
+chief stronghold--is increasing at the rate of 25 per cent annually. We
+are trying to increase our facilities to keep pace with the demand made
+upon them; that is why we became tenants in the new Pennsylvania Station.
+For our share of that work we will pay $65,000,000--some money. But we cut
+twenty minutes off every Commuter's trip in each direction every day, and
+that is worth while in a day when every road is reaching out for new
+business. We do not consider that $65,000,000 to save a man forty minutes
+a day is money ill-spent; but I am frank in saying that we also expect our
+25 per cent annual increase to remain for several years in order to make
+good such an expenditure."
+
+Part of that $65,000,000 is yet to be spent on the electrification of the
+Long Island suburban lines, within a zone of from 30 to 40 miles out from
+the new terminal. The through trains running to the far eastern points of
+the island will run direct from the Pennsylvania Station as far as Jamaica
+by electricity, heavy motors hauling the standard equipment. At Jamaica,
+in a million-dollar transfer station that is part of the big improvement
+scheme, the steam locomotives will take up their part of the work.
+Electricity for long stretches of standard railroad where the traffic is
+comparatively slight is still an economic impossibility.
+
+So much for New York, where the lead has been taken in providing suburban
+service on the railroads operated by electricity. The problem is being
+approached in Boston--who, like her larger sister, refuses to stay "put."
+South Station and North Station, on opposite sides of the city, are of the
+largest size, but they are beginning to feel the strain of traffic, which
+forges ahead every year. The Metropolitan Improvements Commission of that
+city has already made a careful study of the problem. It plans to relieve
+the situation by constructing a four-track tunnel from one station to the
+other, and operating both of them--as far as suburban traffic is
+concerned--as through stations rather than as terminals. In a word, Boston
+& Maine local trains entering North Station would not end their runs
+there as at present, but would continue through the proposed tunnel to a
+second stop at South Station, where they would become outgoing New York,
+New Haven, & Hartford suburban locals. The same operation would be
+continued in a reverse direction. A more complicated adaptation of the
+scheme from a construction standpoint would still use the connecting
+tunnel and provide car-yards for the Boston & Maine trains outside of
+South Station, with a similar yard for the New Haven locals just beyond
+North Station. The main gain made by such a plan is the elimination of
+switching--the same point at which the New York Central and the Long
+Island have aimed in making their suburban trains of multiple units. With
+the hauling in and out of empty trains to and from a terminal eliminated,
+the capacity may be almost doubled. Another gain is the convenience to
+passengers who under such a plan would be enabled to reach either side of
+the city without changing cars, and a recourse to street transit
+facilities. The Boston plan, of course, embodies a change from steam to
+electricity as a motive power. It is one of the most comprehensive plans
+yet submitted for the solving of the great problem of getting the city out
+into the country.
+
+In Philadelphia, they are feeling the pressure of the Commuter at both the
+big downtown terminals, the Pennsylvania and the Reading, while the first
+of these roads is already planning to electrify its suburban lines and to
+give Broad Street Station exclusively to this class of traffic.
+Philadelphia is such a wide-spreading and sprawling town that the trolley
+lines have afforded little real rapid transit to the outlying sections,
+while relief by subways and elevated lines has so far been meagre. As a
+result, a great burden of interurban as well as suburban traffic has been
+laid upon the railroads there, and they have been compelled repeatedly to
+enlarge both track and station facilities.
+
+The Illinois Central, carrying a heavy traffic south of Chicago, has
+prepared plans for the electrification of 325 miles of its suburban lines,
+and radical enlargement of terminal facilities. The Illinois Central has
+been very progressive in its methods of handling the Commuter traffic. Its
+side-door cars, permitting quick loading and unloading, have long marked a
+progressive step in equipment. The Chicago and Northwestern, in its
+splendid new white marble terminal on the West Side of Chicago, will give
+its chief use toward the upbuilding of a suburban traffic, already strong
+and well developed.
+
+The Commuter covers a varied zone. His station may be less than a mile
+from the terminal and his home still within the crowded confines of the
+town, or he may be the last passenger of the train as it reaches the far
+end of its suburban run. The average commutation district runs about 30
+miles out, with by far the heavier part of the traffic in the first 15
+miles of this. Most of the railroads that cluster in at New York, however,
+issue commutation tickets out over a 70 or 80-mile radius. One man for
+many years held the record as a long-distance Commuter. He preferred to
+sleep nights within the quiet confines of Philadelphia and his 90-mile
+trip to New York, with a 90-mile return at the end of every day became a
+mere incident in his life. His record was beaten this year. A man arrives
+and departs from the Grand Central Station five days out of the week, who
+travels 320 miles on every one of them. He catches a fast train from his
+home town at seven o'clock in the morning, breakfasts on the train, and is
+at his New York office at 11:30 o'clock. He leaves his desk at 3:30
+o'clock, dines on the returning express, and is home by eight. His daily
+trip, with all incidental expenses, aggregates more than $12.00; so he
+deserves to rank as the Champion Commuter.
+
+If few Commuters can approach the mileage record of this man there are
+many who do not hesitate at extra expenditures for their comfort. About
+all of the best suburban expresses that come into New York carry some sort
+of club or private-parlor cars. The club car is one of the most elaborate
+developments of the entire Commuter idea. It is a comfortable coach, which
+is rented to a group of responsible men coming either from a single point
+or a chain of contiguous points. The railroad charges from $250 to $300 a
+month for the use of this car in addition to the commutation fares, and
+the "club" arranges dues to cover this cost and the cost of such
+attendants and supplies as it may elect to place on its roving house. It
+must guarantee a certain number of riders to the railroad every trip, so
+the membership of the "club" is kept high enough to allow for a reasonable
+percentage failing to use the car daily. Some railroads go at the thing in
+another way. They supply the car and its attendants and make a monthly
+extra charge, in addition to commutation. The car is entirely filled with
+regular riders, so it is in a sense a club car.
+
+Such a car has been running for some years on one of the suburban trains
+of the Harlem road. It is unique in some ways, and in these an outgrowth
+of early customs. The first of these began years ago, when the Oldest
+Commuter began his habit of riding to and from town in the baggage-car.
+There is something about a baggage-car that fascinates the ordinary man
+traveller. Perhaps it is the solemn rule of the railroad that attempts to
+prevent him from riding in this form of conveyance. At any rate in this
+particular case the Oldest Commuter gradually picks up an acquaintance
+with the baggageman; and, presuming upon that acquaintance gradually
+appropriates the baggageman's old chair for his own use. The baggageman
+was good-natured, for the Oldest Commuter was a generous fellow and never
+forgot Christmas-times and the like. He got another old chair from
+somewhere, and all was well until the Next Oldest Commuter absorbed the
+baggageman's chair, and the baggageman had to bring a third into his car.
+The Next to the Next Oldest Commuter swallowed that up, and after a time
+there was a row of comfy old-fashioned chairs all around the edge of the
+dingy baggage-car, and an atmosphere of smoke and good stories that warmed
+the cockles of the baggageman's heart. You could have raised $100,000,000
+for an enterprise from the crowd of men who rode regularly in that little
+car, but the baggageman neither knew nor cared about that. He simply knew
+that there was a good crowd of Commuters who rode with him daily.
+
+After another little time the railroad took cognizance of that particular
+baggage-car. The general passenger agent, who was a fellow both wise and
+solemn, talked with the general manager, and one day that little club of
+Commuters had a surprise. Instead of their baggage-car, the down train
+hauled a bright new car all fitted with fancy things--curtains and carpets
+and big stuffed chairs, and the baggageman was rigged out in a fine new
+uniform as an attendant. The general passenger agent fondly imagined that
+he had made the one really happy stroke of his existence.
+
+He had not. His was a colossal mistake. The "club" called for its
+baggage-car back again. Its members were men who were surfeited with
+mahoganies and impressive stuffed chairs and thick carpets. They demanded
+their old dingy car, with its four little windows, its rough board floor
+and the wooden armchairs. They got it back. The big, new, showy car was
+sent off upon another route; and the baggage-car--itself a club to which
+many a soul enviously craves for admission--makes its run six times a week
+on one of the fastest expresses on the line.
+
+Groups of men have staterooms regularly reserved for them in the parlor
+cars of the finest suburban expresses, and there is never a word said of
+what goes on behind those closed doors. There come whispers of "antes"
+that are as high as a church steeple, but the railroad does not concern
+itself with the morals of its passengers to the point of breaking in upon
+closed doors. The porters may know, but the porters are traditionally wise
+and more than traditionally close-mouthed. One big New York editor hired
+a stateroom for his daily ride in and out to his suburban home. His
+secretary and his stenographer are closeted in it with him, and on the
+50-minute ride twice each day he dictates the daily editorial utterances
+that delight a great congregation of his readers.
+
+Special trains for Commuters are no particular novelty. Almost every big
+system has some daily suburban trains that are on its working time-tables
+and not upon the schedules that are given out to the public. A group of
+aristocratic Commuters living north of Boston in the district around
+Manchester have their private special into the North Station every summer
+morning. It is an all-parlor-car train, the most luxurious suburban on the
+line, yet not one Commuter in a thousand knows a thing about it. A similar
+train arrives and departs daily at the South Station. Others are in
+service out of New York. You can buy both exclusiveness and elegance from
+the railroad.
+
+The Commuter is not more concerned about that 5:37 than is the railroad.
+It makes train and Commuter both its concern, because that is the way it
+seeks to build up its profitable suburban traffic.
+
+"We are getting more of the city out into the country each year," says a
+big suburban passenger agent; "and with the wide increase in the use of
+electricity as a motive power for the standard railroads this business is
+bound for increases that we can hardly foresee to-day. I think that I am
+quite safe in predicting that another decade will see the belt of from 30
+to 50 miles outside of New York terminals as thickly settled as the belt
+from 10 to 30 miles is to-day settled. The railroaders have done their
+part by expensive increase in terminal and track facilities; they have
+helped the real-estate men in their broad advertising of the possibilities
+of suburban life: the harvest is all that now remains to be reaped."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FREIGHT TRAFFIC
+
+ INCOME FROM FREIGHT TRAFFIC GREATER THAN FROM PASSENGER--COMPETITION
+ IN FREIGHT RATES--AFTERWARDS A STANDARD RATE-SHEET--RATE-WARS
+ VIRTUALLY ENDED BY THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION CLASSIFICATION
+ OF FREIGHT INTO GROUPS--DIFFERENTIAL FREIGHT RATES--DEMURRAGE FOR
+ DELAY IN EMPTYING CARS--COAL TRAFFIC--MODERN METHODS OF HANDLING LARD
+ AND OTHER FREIGHT.
+
+
+In England they speak of it as "goods" and regard it as almost a minor
+factor in the conduct of their railways. In the United States it is
+freight-traffic, and is the thing from which the railroads derive by far
+the greater part of their revenues. In England it is represented by
+delicious little trails of "goods-wagons," four-wheelers of from five to
+eight or nine or ten tons' capacity, the "goods" often left exposed to the
+rigors of winter, save for possibly a tarpaulin covering; in the United
+States, fast-freights and slow-freights crowd upon one another's heels;
+the sixty-ton steel car has long since come into its own.
+
+If you do not realize the importance of the freight traffic, you should
+talk to those shrewd old souls in Wall Street who measure a carrier, not
+by its ticket sales, but by that fascinating thing that they call
+"tonnage"; you should go out upon the line and ask any operating man how
+his territory is holding up in traffic. He will answer you in tons, in
+freight-cars moved within a single twenty-four hours. If you are still
+unconvinced, go to the passenger man you know best. He will tell you that
+while he is pleading vainly with the biggest boss of all for some new
+Limited, eight or ten passenger cars all told, some shouldering
+freight-hustler has been welcomed into the inner sanctum and comes out
+with an O. K. for 800 or 1,000 box-cars or gondolas in his fist, a dozen
+new freight-pulling locomotives in addition, for good measure. There is
+your answer.
+
+The passenger terminals may have all the magnificence in which we have
+seen them, but the freight terminals are the real core of a railroad's
+entrance into any town. For when you come to even the roughest figures,
+you find that in extreme cases--such as the New Haven's, where there is a
+congested territory, closely filled with thickly populated cities and
+towns--the passenger receipts will hardly do more than approach a balance
+with those from freight. In some cases the passenger earnings are hardly
+25 per cent of the railroad's entire income; and cases like these are more
+common than the New Haven, holding New England as its own principality.
+Wonder not that Wall Street looks askance at any new line until it can
+prove itself able to develop "train-load"--freight traffic, measured in
+thousands of tons.
+
+Your general freight agent, who is a sort of official cousin to the
+general passenger agent, is the man who studies tonnage. More likely in
+these days of the exaltation of titles, he is the freight traffic-manager,
+with a group of subordinates around him and a traffic-skirmishing corps
+out on his own road and the other connecting roads, who are making friends
+with shippers, just as the young travelling passenger agents round up the
+theatrical managers and the brethren from the lodges. The travelling
+freight agents hang around sidings and breathe affection for manufacturers
+and wholesalers; they welcome to their very arms the business
+traffic-managers, who are really glorified shipping clerks for great big
+concerns. And while they cultivate the road in detail, their big boss
+studies the territory in general. The trade papers and the market
+bulletins litter his desk; he can tell you strength or weakness in this
+thing or that--why cotton is off, and wheat rushing upwards. Moreover, the
+freight traffic-manager, himself, is not above friendships. He will pack
+his own evening suit into a bag and go 500 miles willingly to give
+shippers his own private explanation of the national rate complication.
+
+Did we say rate complication? That seems almost too simple a name for the
+subtle and intricate structure which tells us how much we must pay the
+railroad for the transportation of our goods. When we were visiting the
+passenger office, we saw something of the work of the rate-clerks there.
+We learned that, in fact, the railroad creates various classes of rates in
+the first place; local or round-trip tickets, at, say, three cents a mile
+for occasional travellers; mileage books for more constant travellers,
+which bring a wholesale rate of two cents a mile; a third and lowest rate
+of something less than a cent for that urbane soul, the Commuter. For
+excursions, where many, many persons were to be moved at one time, perhaps
+upon a single train, other very low passenger rates were created. We also
+saw how the railroad, trying to base its passenger charges on the number
+of miles covered, is compelled to make delicate adjustments on through
+charges between competitive points.
+
+We speak of these things now, because in a way the passenger tariff
+resembles the freight, and yet compares with it as a child's primer with a
+Greek lexicon. In an earlier day the thing was very much worse. In fact,
+at the very beginning there was no real scientific way in which the
+railroad might regulate its charges, and on some of the very earliest of
+steel highways the rates were made just half what they had been on the
+toll-roads, and without regard to the cost of transportation. Thus the
+competitive feature had its way early in the formulation of a rate-sheet;
+and there is evidence to assert that in those early days when the railroad
+had an opportunity it made its tariff as high as it thought folk would
+stand without a riot, and thus the now historic phrase "what the traffic
+will bear" came into coinage. As a matter of fact, in those days when
+scientific bookkeeping was unknown the railroad had no way of accurately
+knowing just how much it cost to operate, and how that cost should be
+fairly apportioned between the different classes of its traffic.
+
+The thing went from bad to worse as the great land carriers developed.
+Each made its rate-sheet according to its own sweet will; it classified
+freight precisely as it pleased, and the man down in New Orleans sending
+goods to New Hampshire was puzzled as to the charges that would accrue
+upon his shipment when it finally reached the northeastern corner of the
+country. The competitive feature grew to be the strongest in the making of
+the rate-sheet, unless it was the subtle influence of the railroad's
+favored friends, an influence that showed its ugly head oftener in the
+practice of rebating than anywhere else. The fierce competition that ruled
+between the railroads in the seventies has never been approached at
+another time. Ruinous rate-war after rate-war followed upon each other's
+heels, and little roads kept dropping into bankruptcy, one after another.
+There was a time in 1877 when a man might ship a carload of live-stock
+free from Chicago to Pittsburgh, from Chicago away through to New York for
+five dollars; and there is hardly a more expensive commodity for the
+railroad to handle, than cattle. To appreciate what these wars meant to
+the carriers, bear in mind that the week after this particular one was
+settled it cost the old rate--$110 a car--to ship cattle from Chicago to
+New York.
+
+Out of such guerilla warfare came the one possible thing--coöperation. The
+railroads were not then big enough to consolidate their properties, J. P.
+Morgan had not then developed his fine art of welding them together. So
+they did the next best thing and made secret contracts--pooling. That is,
+they established a standard rate-sheet in their mutual territories and
+bound themselves to abide by it for a certain length of time. They figured
+out their relative percentages of business at the beginning of any
+agreement, and took from the combined earnings of the pool, the same
+percentages of receipts. The bitter outcry that went up across the land
+against pooling still echoes. That practice with another now also
+prohibited--rebating--really gave birth to governmental regulation of
+railroads.
+
+[Illustration: "THE INSIDE OF ANY FREIGHT-HOUSE IS A BUSY PLACE"]
+
+[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S PARK, THE GREAT FREIGHT-HOUSE OF THE NEW YORK
+CENTRAL RAILROAD IN DOWN-TOWN NEW YORK]
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT ORE-DOCKS OF THE WEST SHORE RAILROAD AT BUFFALO]
+
+In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Commission was born, and ruinous
+rate-warring practically came to an end. The Commission required the
+railroads to file with it copies of all their rate-sheets, both freight
+and passenger, and ordered that in almost every case thirty days' notice
+should be given of any change in the tariff. This meant that the old
+practice of tearing a rate-sheet apart in a single night, so as to jab
+vitally into the heart of a competitor, was at an end. And a dignified
+rate-war, with the opponents giving thirty days' advance notice of their
+strategic intentions, is almost an impossibility.
+
+Now come to the present. The freight-rate system of to-day is intricate,
+fearfully intricate, but it is a system. It begins by classifying all
+manner of freight into groups, for it must be apparent to any one that to
+the railroad the cost of handling different commodities must vary
+tremendously. Several factors make for such variation: the value of the
+shipment and the degree of risk for its safe transportation that the
+railroad must assume; its bulk, its weight, and the cost of handling at
+terminals, as well as the cost of any special equipment that may be
+necessary to carry it over the rails. No one would expect a railroad to
+haul a box-car filled with several hundred thousand dollars' worth of silk
+for the same price that it hauled the same car filled with coke. So the
+railroad has grouped its freight into six general classes--varying from
+the most difficult and expensive to handle down to the easiest and the
+cheapest; and the rates for these six different classes also run in a
+rough proportion.
+
+Some 8,000 articles, ranging from arsenic to step-ladders and from
+Christmas trees to locomotives, are grouped into these classes. Into them
+has gone about everything that the railroad will handle, save coal and a
+few other specialties which are rated as specific commodities and have
+special published rates. So a man shipping feather dusters from South
+Brooklyn to Ogdensburg, N. Y., would find that they came under Class 1,
+and that he would have to pay 44 cents a hundred pounds for the haul. If
+he was shipping steel beams between the same points he would find them
+under Class 4 and he would find the tariff at 23 cents a hundred. These
+six classes have been made standard throughout the country by all the
+railroads in coöperation. The roads north of the Ohio River and east of
+the Mississippi use the so-called Official Classification; south of the
+Ohio and still east of the Mississippi, the Southern Classification; while
+all those west of the Mississippi use the Western Classification. So the
+shipper is no longer in much doubt in these matters, particularly in view
+of the fact that the three classifications are very much the same in all
+save minor details.
+
+So much for the classification at this moment. It is quite simple when you
+come to place it beside the tariff sheets themselves, the printed form of
+an intricate structure, so great as to be almost shadowy in its workings.
+You ask a freight traffic-manager about rates. He is a skilled man, a man
+skilled in the economics of common carriers, and he tries his best to
+explain simply to you the basing charges for the transportation of
+commodities.
+
+"Our rates," he says, "are formed by many things. In a general way, by the
+competitive territory into which we go, and in specific cases by the
+volume of business that comes or goes from a single point. The direction
+of the movement, including whether cars must return empty or loaded, is
+another factor. Then, of course, there is the great factor to which both
+passenger and freight rates must comply--the necessity for the railroad
+earning more than it pays out. Acworth, the English economist, says that a
+railroad must pay for three things, the expense of maintaining the
+organization, that of maintaining the plant, and that of doing the work.
+Our revenues, from one source or another, must meet that triple expense."
+
+Ask this big freight-man about charging "what the traffic will bear" and
+he looks grieved. He turns about sharply and asks you:
+
+"The earning-sheets of every railroad are public and they will show you
+that they are but making expenses, in a few cases paying about half the
+dividends that a healthy national bank or trust company or manufacturing
+enterprise might be expected to return to its investors. That makes it
+look as if we had begun to get some sort of scientific adjustment between
+expense and revenue, does it not?"
+
+You dodge the point. You have no desire to quarrel or to delve into high
+railroad finance, and so you say you simply want to know about rates.
+
+"It's a little simpler than Sanscrit," says the freight-man. "We begin to
+figure on common or basing points--"
+
+You interrupt and inquire as to what a "common point" really is. Then the
+traffic expert gets down to primer talk and begins to explain the thing to
+your real understanding. It seems that some years ago, when the railroads
+first "pooled" they had to find an equitable method of making a
+rate-sheet. Everybody made suggestions, and a Pennsylvania freight-clerk,
+named James McGraham, made the right one. It was adopted and became the
+standard of to-day--which goes to show that good can sometimes come out of
+iniquity.
+
+In this arrangement, the rate for each of the six different classes and
+all the special commodities, between New York and Chicago was made 100 per
+cent. Other towns, both further and less distant from New York than
+Chicago were given proportionate percentages, St. Louis being fixed at
+117, Pittsburg 60, Cleveland 71, Detroit 78, Indianapolis 93, Peoria 110,
+and Grand Rapids at 100--the same as Chicago. At the eastern end of this
+particular bit of territory--the Official Classification--a reduction of
+two or three cents a hundred was made from the New York rates in favor of
+Baltimore and Philadelphia, a corresponding addition of two or three cents
+to meet the increased haul to Boston. No matter how you ship freight,
+these rates now hold standard, as long as the railroads remain faithful to
+their traffic associations. You may ship from Indianapolis to New York by
+way of Cleveland and Albany, by Marion and Salamanca, by Columbus and
+Pittsburgh, or by Cincinnati and Parkersburg, and although there is quite
+a wide variance in mileage between these routes, the rate is the same on
+all the different roads that go to form them.
+
+This standard, simple as things go in freight-rates, was not adopted in a
+moment. Bitter contentions on the part of cities and of shippers had to be
+settled before it ruled. After it ruled, it was easy for each road to
+build its own tariff upon it. Together these form a vast structure, one
+that is constantly changing, as one road or another changes its tariff
+under the pressure of shippers or of civic bodies, or possibly a desire to
+establish more equitable schedules; and the work these changes make can be
+imagined when it is stated that a single one of them in the Official
+Classification territory causes more than eight thousand changes in the
+rate-sheets of the railroads.
+
+The choosing of Chicago as the "one hundred per cent" city in the
+northeastern territory of the United States repeated the compliment to her
+prowess as a traffic city, that the great yards which hedge her in for
+miles have paid her for many years. She is one of the very greatest basing
+points, where multiple rates or percentages are built from the single.
+Most of the very important commercial cities share this distinction, which
+is further shared sometimes by comparatively unimportant points that
+happen to be the terminals of rather important railroads. Thus we find
+Cincinnati and Henderson, Louisville and Evansville, St. Louis and
+Davenport, Chicago and Peoria, Omaha and Sioux City, Kansas City and
+Leavenworth, all possessing this railroad distinction.
+
+So much for the standard rates. Just as certain railroad lines running
+from New York to Chicago are permitted to charge two dollars less for
+tickets than other "standard lines," because of slower running time, so
+does the same factor make a "differential" in freight rates. Big roads
+boast that they can haul the first-class freight--the "preference
+freights"--from one city to the other in sixty hours. Others take a longer
+time, and are permitted by their larger competitors to make their prices a
+shade lower because of slower running time in freight service. Such a
+"differential" is the Grand Trunk, handling New York-Chicago freight by a
+roundabout route, from New York by water to New London, Conn., and thence
+over the Central Vermont up into Canada and the Grand Trunk's main line.
+Obviously such a longer route adds to the running-time and would be at a
+keen disadvantage in securing travel, without a lower rate as bait for the
+shipper. We have used New York-Chicago differentials simply as
+illustrative cases. The differentials are apt to be found in any corner of
+the country where there are long hauls and a number of railroads fighting
+to secure them.
+
+But the Grand Trunk as a factor in Chicago traffic to and from Boston
+brought one of the earliest and most interesting decisions from the
+Interstate Commerce Commission. St. Albans, Vt., complained to that board
+that its local freight rate by Boston & Maine and Central Vermont from
+Boston was higher than the through rate from Boston to Chicago. On the
+face of it, it seemed as if justice must have rested with St. Albans, but
+the railroad was able to prove its case and win a decision. It showed that
+it could not live on shipments between Boston and St. Albans and other
+local non-competitive points, or on the business interchanged between
+these points. To earn its bread and butter it must fight for the rich
+Chicago traffic; and to be in a position to fight for that traffic,
+despite some disadvantage of location, it must make very low rates.
+
+It proved that these low rates were possible for business that went
+through in solid trains, like Boston-Chicago traffic, and that each of
+these trains earned its proportion of the railroad's profit. For when you
+come to handle freight at St. Albans, more particularly the case in still
+smaller towns, you bring on a new traffic expense, and because of this
+expense we get what is known as "back haul."
+
+On the "back haul" small towns suffer and must probably continue to suffer
+until a still more equitable system of railroad rates can be devised.
+Sometimes it may come about in such a case at the St. Albans one just
+cited; in other times because of water competition, as in the famous
+Spokane case, to which we shall again refer; and sometimes it is merely an
+arbitrary charge laid by the railroad. In such cases the railroad reasons
+that it would cost, in time and train delay ten dollars for every dollar's
+worth of freight switched off and delivered at certain small towns; and so
+it figures upon hauling to the nearest large division point with large
+yards, and sending it back from there on a way-train. When such a small
+town is nearer the division yard at the far end of the route the back haul
+charge develops, and the small town must grin and bear it. If the small
+towns and the small cities, with their vigorous organizations, begin to
+complain too bitterly of the present system, the traffic experts will turn
+to them and say:
+
+"Devise a better system. Perhaps you would like the Australian system,
+where the charges diminish per mile, for each additional mile covered by a
+consignment?"
+
+That may look good to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, who has
+come down to headquarters with wrath in his eyes; it looks absolutely
+equitable to every one; and he nods yes. The traffic-manager gleams with
+joy. His quarry has stepped into the trap. He turns upon him.
+
+"Where would your dandy little town of 35,000 contented folks be under the
+Australian system?" he demands. "The Australian system would concentrate
+all business at water traffic points, along the seaboard and the great
+lakes and rivers; it would concentrate all manufacturing at the points
+from which comes the raw material. Where would the seven wholesalers of
+your town that we are all so proud of be located under the Australian
+plan? If the railroads were to adopt it, it would save millions of dollars
+in bookkeeping alone, but there would not be an interior distributing
+point in the entire country."
+
+The Secretary of the C. of C. is flustered. He was a young newspaper
+reporter before he reached his present high estate. He flounders. The
+traffic man is a man of ready wit and even readier figures. Still the
+young Secretary feels that he must show a few grains of wisdom, and so he
+gently makes inquiry about the Spokane case.
+
+That Spokane case, also a famous decision of the Interstate Commerce
+Commission, shows another factor in railroad rate-making, the serious
+influence of water competition. Indirectly it also includes the principle
+of the back haul. Spokane, which is much nearer Chicago than Seattle, was,
+like St. Albans, paying a higher rate for the "short haul" than Seattle
+was paying for a much longer haul. But Seattle is a prosperous port, and
+if the railroad did not make a very low rate to it, all the slow freight
+would go to it by water, where much lower transportation expense
+invariably makes much lower rates, and the railroad, to save its own skin,
+as it were, must make a low through rate there, charging a back haul or
+higher rate to Spokane from the large eastern points. If it charged
+Spokane a proportionate rate of the one to Seattle, which would then be
+lower, all the other inland towns would demand the same privilege, and the
+railroad would then be hauling property at a loss--a business which can
+have but one inevitable result.
+
+"You see how complicated it all is," the traffic manager tells the young
+Secretary, "and how we must use judgment all the while. We've got to
+figure individual cost for certain distances and localities and directions
+of traffic, figure in the varying cost of handling different sorts of
+freight, and then put in a percentage of the general cost of the business,
+just as the restaurant-keeper makes each patron pay proportionately for
+the cost of bread and butter, heat, light, service and rent, no matter how
+large or how small his check may be on any one occasion.
+
+"We must use judgment, and we must make rates to keep the goods moving all
+the while. Suppose that both nails and crowbars are made in Pittsburgh and
+only nails are made at Williamsport. Suppose then that the rate from
+Pittsburgh to New York for both crowbars and nails is fifty cents a
+hundred, but that the rate from Williamsport to New York was but 38 cents.
+What chance would the nail manufacturer in Pittsburgh have against his
+competitor in Williamsport, when both men are making annually nails in
+tens of thousands of tons? It is to help the Pittsburgh man that we make a
+special 38-cent rate on nails from his town to New York; and when we keep
+filing these commodity rates at Washington, your shippers ask why we can't
+have a standard rate-sheet, or the Australian system. The next time some
+one of them finds that he cannot sell plough shares in Texas because a man
+down in Fort Wayne has him beaten on standard rates, you watch him hurry
+here and ask for a special one.
+
+"It is out of this clamor and contention of almost myriad interests, the
+ambitions of just such thriving little cities as your own, out of the
+skilled arguments of brainy men that the rate-sheet is born and kept
+living in a state of perpetual healthy change."
+
+We are tired of rates and the factors that go to make them, and inquire
+what is the A, B, C of a freight transaction between the railroad and a
+shipper. The traffic-man makes it quite clear to us.
+
+"When one of our agents receives a consignment of freight," he says, "he
+immediately issues a bill of lading to the shipper, or consignor, as a
+receipt and as a contract for the shipment. From his duplicate of this
+bill of lading he makes out a way-bill, or manifest, which will accompany
+the car until the freight reaches its destination. This way-bill describes
+the shipment and the car into which it has been loaded, specifies the
+shipping point and the destination, the consignor and the consignee, the
+rate and whether or not the charges have been paid in advance or are to be
+collected at destination. A copy of this way-bill is given to the
+freight-conductor, who gives the station agent a receipt for the
+consignment. At that place of destination a freight-bill, containing a
+description of the shipment similar to that of the way-bill, and showing
+in addition the total charge collected or to be paid, is rendered to the
+consignee, and his receipt is taken for the shipment when it is
+delivered."
+
+"It seems quite simple," you breathe softly.
+
+"It is not," is his reply, "for it has its complications. I'll show you
+one of them."
+
+We step through swinging doors of green baize and for a moment from a
+traffic into an operating department, but an operating department that for
+the telling in a work of this sort is best allied with the story of the
+freight traffic. The traffic-manager points to a man sitting at a square
+and littered desk, his thoughts with sturdy intent upon the mass of
+correspondence which he is quickly sifting.
+
+"He is the best car-service man in the country," says our guide; and you
+recall when you were in the auditor's office, that an accounting was being
+kept between the lines for the use of one another's cars that went on
+through runs off upon strange or "foreign" lines. The traffic-man
+continues: "Ours is not a big road, as some roads go. Yet we receive about
+40,000 cars a month and, of course, deliver something like the same number
+in the same thirty days. Yet there is not an hour of any day of the month
+that this man cannot tell where any one of these cars is, just how long it
+has been upon our tracks, just how much free time the consignee has for
+unloading it, or just how much he will have to pay the railroad for his
+delay in emptying it, so it can get back into service once again."
+
+That waiting charge, the traffic-man explains, is known in the parlance of
+his business as "demurrage"; and it is another keen example of the
+constant use to which a railroad puts its equipment, of the tremendous
+economy that is beginning to be practised in the modern science of
+railroading. You are introduced to the car-service man, bend low over his
+desk as he explains a bit of his work to you. Here, for example, is a car
+filled with automobiles bound from Detroit to a dealer in Worcester, Mass.
+This car, in a train of some 60 others, leaves Detroit east-bound over the
+Michigan Central Railroad. At Buffalo it is switched to the tracks of the
+New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. On the evening of the second day
+it arrives at Rensselaer, across the Hudson River from Albany, and is
+given over to the Boston & Albany Railroad. To make a concrete instance,
+let us see how the B. & A. handles the thing through its car-service
+department.
+
+That department swings into quick action automatically, as soon as the car
+strikes B. & A. rails at Rensselaer. The freight agent there makes a note
+of the car and its contents from the way-bill which accompanies it; makes
+special note, perhaps, of the fact that it is a car designed particularly
+for the transportation of automobiles. Now let us presume that this big
+box-car is owned by the Michigan Central. The Boston & Albany will pay
+that owner railroad 35 cents a day rental--"_per diem_," in the
+phraseology of the railroads--for the time it is upon B. & A. rails. There
+are at that very time perhaps hundreds of B. & A. cars on the Michigan
+Central, and at the end of 30 days these accounts and many, many others
+are sent to the auditor's department, where they are balanced between the
+roads with the general freight and passenger accounts.
+
+This movement of freight cars makes a valuable barometer of the general
+condition of business. The daily papers have a custom of making national
+compilations of car-service reports part of their most interesting market
+news. In dull seasons the cars come home from long service on other roads.
+But in very busy seasons all roads have little compunction about borrowing
+"foreign" cars for use in their local service. With shippers begging cars
+from every quarter and threatening all manner of dire things, 35 cents
+daily is a small rental to pay for the use of a roomy car. Besides, the
+other fellows are all doing the same thing, and no one road can hope to
+get all its cars back even with the use of a vigilant corps of young men
+who search "foreign" yards. But in the dull seasons they come trundling
+home, like lost cattle finding the big barn once again. In the business
+depression of 1907, a Western car-service man received cars that had been
+absent from the home road for seven years.
+
+We turn from the car-service men back into a department that is strictly
+traffic. Coal service is one of the principal sources of income for this
+particular railroad. It stretches some of its branches into bituminous
+fields, and others through the anthracite fields that Nature, in some
+freakish mood, implanted in just a few counties of Northeastern
+Pennsylvania. That entire country is comparable to a cut of beef, the coal
+veins resembling streaks of fat that run hither and thither. As in beef,
+the lean predominates. The fat streaks are the valuable coal veins, the
+lean the earth, slate and rock in which the coal was planted during some
+great convulsion of Nature in the process of the creation of the world.
+How it got into this particular spot science cannot tell. What it is,
+further than the fact that it is mostly carbon, science only guesses. It
+guesses that it was originally bituminous coal and that by some process of
+intense squeezing in an upheaval of Nature, the oil and tar and gas of the
+bituminous coal was squeezed out and the much more valuable anthracite
+deposits created.
+
+Mining consists in getting the streaks of fat anthracite out of the bulk
+of lean earth and rock. The veins run well down into the mountains, and,
+as do the little streaks of fat, lose themselves in the rock, or lean, to
+continue the simile. Some of the veins are but a few feet in thickness,
+while some run to as high as twenty and thirty feet, and, as a rule, the
+farther down into the earth they go the better the coal; and the farther
+down you go the more difficult and expensive is the mining.
+
+Now, here is a traffic that demands and receives special attention. In
+other days the mining of anthracite coal was, itself, merely a department
+of operating for the half-dozen systems that stretched their rails into
+that valuable Pennsylvania corner. That work has now been removed into the
+control of separate mining companies; but the handling of coal is a great
+function of not only these roads, but of the systems that reach their
+tendrils into the valuable bituminous fields here and there about the
+country.
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT BRIDGE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL AT WATKINS GLEN]
+
+[Illustration: BUILDING THE WONDERFUL BRIDGE OF THE IDAHO & WASHINGTON
+NORTHERN OVER THE PEND OREILLE RIVER, WASHINGTON]
+
+To fill the coal-bins of New York City alone, requires some 10,500,000
+tons of anthracite yearly. Now you cease to wonder why this road has a
+coal traffic expert, a man of surpassingly good salary. He keeps keen
+oversight over the operating department in its handling of this giant
+traffic, sees to it that the trains come over the mountains and into the
+great terminals at Jersey City in good order, and that the railroad's
+marine department is ready with tugs and scows and lighters to handle the
+product as it comes in, in thousands of tons every twenty-four hours.
+This would all be quite simple if the trains and the boats were always
+running on schedule. But the unexpected constantly comes to pass in
+railroading, and so the railroads provide against emergencies by
+establishing great coal storage plants outside of New York and other large
+cities--communities that would be in dire distress if their coal supply
+were cut short even for twenty-four hours. Sometimes about 500,000 tons
+will be kept in a single one of these storage piles--a black mountain
+running lengthwise between sidings and served with giant cranes.
+
+We are back in the traffic-manager's comfortable office for a final word
+with him. He is fumbling with his own correspondence. It seems that a
+lawyer down in Washington has been saying that he could save the railroads
+of the land a million dollars a day in the economical operation of their
+property, and the railroader is exceedingly wroth at that assertion.
+
+"He speaks of pig iron, and says that we should teach our laborers the
+minimum movements necessary to put a single pig in a car--just as masons
+have been taught to handle brick with minimum effort and a maximum economy
+in work accomplished has been effected." The traffic-man laughs, rather
+harshly. "The lawyer is all right, except for two things; and his anecdote
+about the brick is certainly well told. Only it just happens that the
+railroad does not load or unload freight by the carload--that is the duty
+of the consignor and the consignee--and it also happens that pig iron
+rarely is handled "L.C.L." In carload lots it is not loaded or unloaded by
+hand, but by big magnets on a crane which picks up a ton of the bars at a
+time and thinks nothing of it."
+
+The freight traffic-manager has made his point once again, and he is
+satisfied. He tells a little of the modern methods in freight handling,
+one of them how an ingenious packing-house expert in Chicago saved
+thousands of dollars annually in the handling of lard. In other days lard
+was rolled aboard box-cars, a barrel to a hand-truck, a rather slow and a
+rather costly process. The Chicago man devised a method of melting lard
+and, while it was fluid, pouring it, like petroleum, into a tank-car. When
+it reached its destination at some big terminal, the lard was again melted
+to fluid and poured out from the tank. That is the science of big freight
+handling to-day. Not alone do cranes, with magnet-bars handle pig-iron and
+castings by the ton, but great hoists at Cleveland and Conneaut and the
+other big lake towns close to the Pittsburgh district reach deep into the
+hearts of giant ships, bring from them the ore of Lake Superior's shores,
+and fill the whole waiting trains within fifteen or twenty minutes. Into
+the empty holds of the ships they pour bituminous coal from Western
+Pennsylvania and West Virginia, a carload at a time. The hoist-crane
+reaches down to the dock siding for a gondola, snaps the car-body off from
+the trucks, lifts it aloft over the open hatch of the waiting vessel, and
+turns it upside down. In less time than it takes to tell it, the coal is
+in the ship, and the car-body is being slipped back again upon its
+trucks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE DRAMA OF THE FREIGHT
+
+ FAST TRAINS FOR PRECIOUS AND PERISHABLE GOODS--CARS INVENTED FOR
+ FRUITS AND FOR FISH--MILK TRAINS--SYSTEMATIC HANDLING OF THE
+ CANS--AUCTIONING GARDEN-TRUCK AT MIDNIGHT--A HISTORIC CITY
+ FREIGHT-HOUSE.
+
+
+Perhaps you have seen a gay Limited in green and gold start forth with
+much ado from some big city station, and have concluded that the romance
+of the railroad rests with it; that the long lines of murky-red freight
+cars have little of the dramatic about them. If you have thought that, you
+have thought wrong.
+
+Romance and drama reach high climax sometimes in the transportation of
+commodities. Fast trains, running upon the express schedules of the finest
+Limiteds, sometimes bring silk, $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 worth to the
+train, across the continent. A special may be hired by some impatient
+manufacturer to send a shipment through half a dozen States. There are
+notable speed records in the handling of fast freight, records of notable
+trains that are as well known among the traffic specialists as the
+Limiteds are known to the outside world.
+
+There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for
+it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city's
+larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for
+the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for
+gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal
+facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes
+it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets,
+building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the
+constant replenishing of the city's larder.
+
+That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that
+are the pride of the railroad's traffic head, go so quickly over the rails
+to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly
+lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb
+aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of
+the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight
+conductor thumbing his "Sartor Resartus," and discussing Carlyle as a
+stylist.
+
+"Yes, we do bring some food up to town," he admits. "I've got enough grub
+aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We've two
+refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago.
+The Chicago car has been iced twice--at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other
+cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago.
+Soon we'll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing.
+
+"The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut
+down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he'll be fretting
+about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He's got a lake
+tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we've got a branch
+running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during
+the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a
+lake for its refrigerating stations. It's just one of the many little
+kinks in running a road."
+
+We express a desire to see the big preference train, and--the block being
+still set against her--we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the
+train boss's arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a
+string of white and yellow box-cars.
+
+"California fruit," he says; "they don't think anything of sending it all
+the way across the continent. You might have thought those ranchers over
+there on the Pacific coast would have been discouraged when they were told
+that there were a dozen icing stations between the two oceans, and that
+the icing cost was prohibitive. They weren't a bit. They just sat down and
+did some tall thinking, and after a while they developed this type of car.
+We call it pre-cooled. The car is cleaned and brought to a chill before
+loading. After that the temperature is not allowed to rise while the fruit
+is being piled away inside. It is closed and sealed, while still ice-cold,
+and icy-cold she comes bumping her way east over three or four thousand
+miles of track. It may be scorching down there along the S. P.; they may
+be just gasping for air in the Missouri bottoms; but that pre-cooled car
+comes right along, keeping its cargo fresh and cool and pure. We can
+deliver her anywhere here on the Atlantic seaboard, and no risk of
+spoiling the stuff."
+
+We slip along another half-dozen cars. The conductor halts again and
+fumbles with his way-bills.
+
+"There's the boy," he laughs. "He's halibut. There's half a dozen halibuts
+along here in a string."
+
+We do not like to show an utter ignorance of the food question and we
+venture an assertion.
+
+"Halibut comes from Newfoundland?" we ask. "How do you get it around
+here?"
+
+The freighter grins sympathetically at our lack of knowledge.
+
+"Bless you," he says. "That little fishing pond up there on the Banks
+isn't big enough for a land which has 27,000,000 folks gathered in its
+cities. These cars have come in from big Yem Hill's road--all the way from
+Tacoma up on Puget Sound--State of Washington. Some of those people who
+live in Boston might have a fit if they knew that their beloved halibut
+was born and raised in the Pacific Ocean; but that's the truth of the
+matter.
+
+"This fish (and some of it's going straight to Boston to be sold in the
+very shade of Faneuil Hall), has come 7,000 miles to be eaten on the very
+shores of the Atlantic. When the fishing ship that caught this cargo was
+fifty miles off the docks, she began calling Tacoma with her wireless. The
+yardmaster of the Northern Pacific was ready there for the news from that
+rat-a-tap. He had a string of refrigerator cars ready; they were ready and
+set out along the wharf by the time the ship was made fast.
+
+"Five minutes later the fish were being loaded into the cars. They had a
+gang of stevedores working there clock-like, as those fellows work around
+the big tents of a three-ring circus. First there went in a layer of ice,
+then a layer of fish, then another of ice. In thirty minutes the job was
+done. In forty-five minutes that string of fish-cars was coming east on an
+express-train schedule. It was knocked apart at St. Paul and again at
+Chicago. Here's our share of the spoils, and we're not loafing here on the
+old main line.
+
+"We're preference freight, if you please, and no old bumpety-bump with
+coal and ore taking the low-grade tracks. They sandwich us in among the
+all-Pullmans, even when we're on the four-track divisions, for food is
+quick; food won't keep forever; and those folks down in the city are
+getting hungry."
+
+He starts to say more, but the engine call halts him. The block is clear
+once again. The conductor catches a car step, the "preference" starts
+forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight
+train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half
+a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us--more
+market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which
+houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train
+follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession,
+these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part.
+To-night again, the food is going up to the city.
+
+The scene changes. Now we are off in the rolling country of
+up-State--dairy country, if you please. The railroad that stretches its
+thick black trail the length of the valley is no four-track line, with
+heavy trains coursing over it every three or four or five or ten minutes.
+This is but a single-track branch; in the parlance of the railroaders it
+is a "jerkwater"; and the coming of its two passenger trains and that of
+the way-freight each day are events in the little towns that line it.
+Still, even this little branch is doing its part in the filling of the
+city's larder. This branch has the filling of the city babies' milk
+bottles as its own particular problem.
+
+At early dawn, the muddy brown roads that lead to the little depot there
+at the flour mills are alive. The farmer boys are bringing the milk to the
+railroad. Down the track a few hundred yards beyond the depot is the
+slick, clean, new milk-station. Over across the brook is the
+cheese-factory, deserted and given over to the gentle fingers of decay.
+Those two buildings tell the story of changing times; in their mute way
+they tell the growth of the American city.
+
+In other days this township made cheese. To-day they drive the milk to the
+depot. Each morning finds a big refrigerator car, built in the fashion of
+passenger equipment, so that it may be handled on passenger trains, at the
+milk station. The farmer boys are prompt with their milk, it is checked
+and weighed and placed in the car, in cans and in bottles. Hardly has the
+last big ten-gallon can gone clattering into the car before the whistle of
+the warning local is heard up the line, just beyond the curve at the
+water-tank. While the train is at the depot, in all the bustle of the
+comings and goings at a country station, the engine makes quick drill
+movement and picks up the milk-car.
+
+Farther down the line that same train picks up more milk-cars. By the time
+it reaches the junction where it intersects the main line it is a
+considerable train for a branch line. Indeed at the junction there are
+more milk-cars, from other branches that ramble off into the real
+back-country. There are enough of them now to make a train through to the
+city. The trainmaster has a good engine ready for every afternoon, and the
+milk express goes scurrying into town with passenger rights and on
+passenger schedules. You cannot hurry the babies' milk through to town any
+too quickly.
+
+This is all first-day milk. You can take a compass, place the pin-leg
+squarely in the heart of the busy town--a place of brick and asphalt, of
+steel and concrete, without ever a hint of growing things--and with the
+pencil-leg trace a segment of a circle--the outer line some 200 miles
+distant from the centre. Afterwards you can draw a second circle segment,
+its outer line some 350 miles from the same town centre. From within the
+inner circle comes the first-day milk, delivered to the railroad during
+the early part of a day and on the householder's table in the big city the
+next morning. From without this inner circle and within the outer, comes
+the second-day milk which has another twenty-four hours in its transit to
+town. The whole thing, once rather badly handled by itinerant single
+dealers, has been reduced to scientific business by skilful coöperation
+between the big milk-dealers of the present day and the railroads.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It is night.
+
+The last of the office lights in the towering buildings has been snuffed
+out. Downtown is quiet--quiet for a little time, for soon after sun-up it
+will be a vortex once again; these narrow, deep-canyoned streets will be
+astir and human-filled once again. But at nine o'clock in the evening the
+policeman's footfall on the pavement echoes in lonely streets. A tired
+bookkeeper scurrying home after a vexatious hunt for his balances gets
+sharp scrutiny from the policeman. Downtown is asleep.
+
+Then, from around the turn of a sharp corner comes a night train of
+wagons, drawn by a small brigade of horses. These are not filled with
+market-truck; market-truck will not reach the town till midnight at the
+earliest. These are great high-boxed vans, painted white, a bit gaudy in
+lettering. They make you think of those long-ago days when you used to go
+down to the depot to see the circus come in, for the big wagons are
+precisely like those that used to shroud mystery as they rolled from the
+trains down to the show-lot. We follow this procession of half a dozen
+great vans, follow it through the twisting, narrow streets of downtown,
+across a famous old ferry, straight up to the long sheds of a railroad
+terminal.
+
+On the one side of the terminal, the passenger trains are coming and going
+at all hours. By day this shed at which the big vans back, each into its
+own carefully marked place, is a general freight-house; by night it is
+given over to the stocking of the city babies' milk bottles. The ferried
+vans are hardly emptied of their empty cans and cases before the first of
+the milk trains comes backing in at the other side of the long covered
+platform. Hissing arcs up under that slimsy roof throw high lights and
+deep shadows here and there and everywhere. They show the platform-men
+tugging at the car fastenings before the brakes are fairly released. In
+another minute, the big side-doors are thrown open, almost simultaneously,
+in still another, the place is alive with the rattle of trucks. The
+milk--tons upon tons of it--in ten-gallon cans and in cases of individual
+bottles, is being loaded within those circus-like cans. A second
+milk-train comes bumping in at a far platform. There is another brigade of
+vans waiting for it there. A third train is due to arrive in another
+half-hour. The vans that it will fill are already beginning to back into
+place and unload their cans and cases upon the platforms.
+
+Here are almost 200 great four-horse trucks being filled simultaneously,
+and all working with the almost rhythmic harmony of organization. You want
+to know how they do it? Ask that man over there, he in a short rough
+coat, who carries a lantern on his arm and with it peers interestedly into
+every one of the cars. That man's word is law on this platform, for he is
+its boss. He has been filling the babies' milk bottles from this
+particular terminal for almost a quarter of a century now. His railroad
+was the first to bring milk into a large city.
+
+"We get it over," he will tell you, "by the experience of some little
+time, and by planning. You saw the numbers on the team side of this milk
+platform. That's only half the problem. There are a dozen different
+milk-handling concerns doing business at this shed, and their stuff comes
+together on this one train. Yet we get the thing out by having each
+concern--each truck--come up to its own position at the team side. The
+other half of the problem we solve by having a certain position for each
+milk-car.
+
+"Here is the Hygienic Milk Company up on the Heights. You have seen their
+fancy dairies all over town. Well, the Hygienic has a station up at
+Bottger's, on our Lancaster & Essex division, that fills two cars at that
+station every blessed day. Their two cars stand in beyond this No. 14
+pillar every night; so we know just where to direct their trucks. That's
+business--just system. We spot the cars every night."
+
+"Spot the cars?" you interrupt. He smiles a bit at your ignorance.
+
+"This train is made up in just the same fashion every night," he explains.
+"These two Hygienic cars are always the fifth and sixth. If they were the
+eighth and ninth some nifty evening--if some smart Aleck of a yardmaster
+up the line would take to shuffling up these cars as you shuffle a deck of
+cards--we would have a near riot here, and I couldn't get these platforms
+cleared of the milkmen for that market-truck train that backs in here from
+the south every night at 11:55.
+
+[Illustration: INSIDE THE WEST ALBANY SHOPS OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL:
+PICKING UP A LOCOMOTIVE WITH THE TRAVELLING CRANE]
+
+[Illustration: A LOCOMOTIVE UPON THE TESTING-TABLE AT THE ALTOONA SHOPS OF
+THE PENNSYLVANIA]
+
+[Illustration: "THE ROUNDHOUSE IS A SPRAWLING THING"]
+
+[Illustration: DENIZENS OF THE ROUNDHOUSE]
+
+"So they keep closely to the formation of our trains, and that of
+itself is no terminal problem. Away up the line 90
+miles--150,--250,--everywhere that we have a big junction yard, the yard
+boss has his positive instructions about these milk trains. By the time
+this fellow has cleared out of P---- J----, 90 miles up the road and our
+nearest road yard outside of the metropolitan district, it's always in
+just the shape you see it to-night. After that there's nothing to be done
+here except cut off the road engine at our terminal yard and pick out a
+switcher to back her into position at this shed. It's nice work, and night
+after night that engineer of the switcher does not vary four inches in the
+locations of these car-doors."
+
+He lifts his lantern, and we peek into the interior of one of these cool
+milk-cars. This has the bottled milk in cases. The cases are packed four
+tiers high--never higher--and your guide explains to you that four cases
+is the limit of a hand-truck. All these things make for simplicity in
+handling. You peer into another car. The ten-gallon cans are in long
+diagonal rows, covering the entire floor of the car. They form a regular
+tessellated pattern, like the marble tiling of old-fashioned hotels and
+banks.
+
+"Those little farmer boys," says the platform boss, "sure do that trick
+well. That speaks pretty neat for Sullivanville. They all used to put the
+cans in straight rows, running lengthwise of the car. One day one of the
+smartest of those Sullivanville boys discovered that by putting the cans
+in diagonal rows, this-wise, he would gain a hundred cans in the loading.
+That added a thousand gallons to the capacity of the car. The Super gave
+him a good job, and some day you'll see he'll be running a railroad of his
+own."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Midnight.
+
+Downtown is still more deserted, if that is possible, than when we first
+saw it three hours ago. The stillness of the deep night is hard upon the
+city; yet here on this broad quay street which runs its stone-paved
+length up and down past the wharves of the harbor-front, all is alive.
+
+This is the midnight market. Under the very noses of the steamships that
+have brought this garden-truck up from the south, it is being auctioned
+off to a hundred or so keen-nosed, keener-witted wholesalers. They wander
+about under long awning roofs erected in the centre of the street, through
+the gaunt open shadowy spaces of the piers, poking into the tops of
+barrels, pinching, tasting, critically examining all the while that they
+are dickering in prices. When the day is fully born and downtown alive
+once again, there will be other wholesale markets, more sedate-looking
+affairs in rooms that have been built for the purpose by the traffic
+departments of the railroads. In these rooms, with the seats arranged in
+tiers and each seat having a broad writing arm like a college classroom,
+fruit and vegetables will be sold in carload lots. There will be records
+of prices--quotations. The thing will approach the dignity of those
+bourses where cotton and coffee and metals and securities are sold.
+
+But the midnight market scorns such formalities, such dignities. It clings
+to its own hubbub--its own unsystematic way of accomplishing a great
+business. It prefers to sell as the stuff is unloaded; that has been its
+method for three-quarters of a century and any method that has stood 75
+years is at least entitled to a measure of consideration. But not all its
+offerings have come by these big coasting steamships, whose outlines show
+vague at their piers in the darkness of the night. For, grinding against
+the piles of these same wharves, as the unseen tide changes, are groups of
+car-floats that have been ferried from the great railroad terminals across
+the river. Each car-float has two trackfuls of refrigerator cars--12 or 14
+or 16 in all--lined against a long roofed platform running just above
+keel. When the pert and busy little tugs have pushed and pulled and bunted
+the floats all into position, the platforms are quickly connected by
+gangways, canvas-covered against the stress of hard weather. A great
+freight-house, almost Venetian in type, floats upon the surface of the
+silent river and becomes part and parcel of the pier itself. After that it
+is quick work to open each of the cars--to wheel out sample barrels of
+potatoes, of cabbage, of celery, of lettuce, of cauliflower--all the
+growing things of country farms that go to feed the hungry city.
+
+The trading here is over in an hour, or two hours at the longest when the
+shipments are heavy; and then the wholesalers are wheeling their wagons
+into place to cart away their purchases to their own stores and
+warehouses. From these the retailers--the men who carry on their
+businesses in stalls in the public market-houses and those that have their
+own little shops on the street corners--make their selections. If you are
+a city man, you may now know that your grocer at the corner is up betimes,
+when the sun is just showing himself on lazy September mornings. He has
+been poking his way with his own horse and wagon down to the wholesalers,
+buying his day's stock and getting it placed just before the earliest of
+the housewives begins her marketing.
+
+You demand a concrete example of a city freight-house; and here it is--the
+historic St. John's Park of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad
+in New York. Up over the lines of the Central, back for hundreds of weary
+miles, you may hear the railroaders speak of "the Park," you may see long
+strings of cars, bearing merchandise tagged through to it. At Sixtieth
+Street, where the big freights of the New York Central come to a final
+halt, you see the cars sent south in long strings, each hauled by a red
+dummy locomotive and preceded by a boy astride a horse and holding a red
+flag, a familiar sight to all New Yorkers who reside upon the far west
+side of the town.
+
+St. John's Park handles a very large percentage of all the perishable
+food that comes into New York each day. It is the dingy freight-house that
+fills the double block between Hudson and Varick and Beach and Laight
+Streets; and when you ask, "Where is the park?" they will tell you that
+there was a day when the entire site of this freight-house--possibly the
+most congested in the world--was a gentle tree-filled square that faced
+old St. John's Church. There is never a trace of the park nowadays. The
+old church now faces a narrow street wherein truckmen shove and elbow and
+disappear in the gates of the freight station.
+
+On the Hudson Street side of the structure six pairs of railroad tracks
+curve into it; and far above on the cornice of the structure one can see
+the benign figure of the old Commodore--a heroic bronze surrounded by
+replicas of the trains and the steamships that he loved so well. The
+building of the large freight station on the site of St. John's Park away
+back in 1868 was a real accomplishment to the first of the house of
+Vanderbilt. Think of it: that freight-house could hold 100 cars. There was
+nothing else in all the broad land quite like that!
+
+Into St. John's Park at dawn come trainloads of produce. Even before the
+doors of the freight-house have opened, at six, a string of "coolers" has
+stopped in Hudson Street and the commission men are carting out the
+poultry. As soon as the station gets down to real business, butter and
+eggs and cheese pour in through it in carload lots.
+
+"It doesn't bother us much," the foreman tells you. "Still, on the Monday
+before Christmas we had a fairly brisk day. We had 155 cars of turkeys
+alone that morning."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+MAKING TRAFFIC
+
+ ENTICING SETTLERS TO THE VIRGIN LANDS OF THE WEST--EMIGRATION
+ BUREAUS--RAILWAYS EXTENDED FOR THE BENEFIT OF EMIGRANTS--THE FIRST
+ CONTINUOUS RAILROAD ACROSS THE AMERICAN CONTINENT--CAMPAIGNS FOR
+ DEVELOPING SPARSELY SETTLED PLACES IN THE WEST--UNPROFITABLE BRANCH
+ RAILROADS IN THE EAST--DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC FARMING--IMPROVED
+ FARMS ARE TRAFFIC-MAKERS--NEW FACTORIES BEING OPENED--HOW RAILROAD
+ MANAGERS HAVE DEVELOPED ATLANTIC CITY.
+
+
+Your railroad manager of other days was content with the traffic that was
+offered him--if indeed he deigned to accept it all. For those were the
+business methods that obtained everywhere in the other days. When
+competition became the moving force in modern business, the railroad felt
+it. The land had become gridironed with tracks; business did not offer
+itself so freely as it had at the outset. When there came a division
+between routes of a traffic that had formerly belonged to a single route,
+earnings fell away and stockholders began to ask uncomfortable questions
+of the men who operated their railroad properties. Then the fight for
+business began--at first, as we have already seen, by a lively rivalry
+which showed itself in a merciless slashing of rates. Such fighting
+methods reacted on the railroads, and their rate-sheets became code and
+law, only a little less holy than the Federal Constitution, long before
+the Interstate Commerce Commission exerted its beneficent paternalism over
+the railroads of the land. But with the rates equalized between the
+railroads, the competition remained. The one obvious solution of the
+situation which was left was put into effect. The railroads began to make
+traffic.
+
+The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed
+branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized
+business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads
+had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the
+Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along
+those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an
+unpopulated country would never be any great "shakes" of a railroad until
+people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to
+Chicago--afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern--the
+Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration
+bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities
+of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition
+that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even
+those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these
+same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they
+accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those
+days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war
+the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who
+had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them
+with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and
+struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and
+so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes
+again.
+
+At the close of the war these tides rose to flood. The railroads no longer
+struggled. There was a steady flow of traffic over their rails, and they
+were able because of it to engage capital to stretch their rails a little
+farther west. After they had moved another stretch, the tides of
+emigration still flowed. That process might have gone ahead in orderly
+fashion until the Pacific had been reached, if the scheme had not been
+upset.
+
+They built too many railroads, they overworked their idea. In the broad
+reaches of the Middle West, lines of steel crumbled into rust, and
+cross-roads dreamed vainly that they would become villages. Many a
+struggling village failed to become the city that her enthusiastic
+residents had fancied. They had the big boom in Kansas, and the bigger
+collapse that followed. After that, folk stayed East for a while, and the
+business of making traffic in that territory became an advanced science.
+
+There was another factor in the situation. You will remember that the
+Summer of '69 saw the first continuous railroad across the American
+continent--the combination of Central Pacific and Union Pacific. The huge
+success of that railroad was inspiration for others. In the generation of
+men that followed the rails that reached from Atlantic to Pacific were
+multiplied. After that there was a new problem for the owners of the
+transcontinental railroads. Their statistical charts of originating
+traffic showed great black masses at either end of the line--where
+connections were made with the great traffic-bringers from the East, and
+where the rails ran upon the docks of the Pacific shore. Between those two
+points was a thin black line, like spider-thread. To make that line black
+and firm at all points, to bring masses of new traffic at intermediate
+points, was the demand that the railroad-owner made of his
+traffic-manager.
+
+It is being done to-day. It has taken time, money and almost incredible
+patience; but it is being done. This is a broad land, and there is still
+much to be done. In Montana, there is a single county with an area
+exceeding that of Maryland and a population less than that of the smallest
+ward of Baltimore; and near-by there is another county, as large as
+Delaware and Connecticut combined, with mere handful of residents. These
+are typical. There are great open stretches to the southwest; and the
+Santa Fe, working hand in hand with the Harriman lines, is busy populating
+and developing these. In the North Country, James J. Hill's railroads and
+the new outstretched arm of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul are doing
+much to exploit the unfarmed lands of Montana, and the intensive
+possibilities of Washington for fruit-raising, market-gardening and the
+like. Up and down the Pacific coast, the railroads are uniting in similar
+campaigns of development.
+
+Hill began the campaign in Montana. He is a dreamer and a far-seer. When
+he began making presents of blooded bulls to the farmers out along the
+Great Northern, folk laughed at him, some of his directors thought that he
+had gone crazy. They thought differently when they knew the results, when
+they got the traffic reports of the cattle business that was growing along
+the line.
+
+That thing was typical. The railroad--Hill's railroad and all the other
+big transcontinentals--lent itself to the fine development of all the
+traffic that might possibly be obtained within its territory. Heretofore
+it had roughly combed traffic possibilities, now it began to screen them
+with a fine mesh screen. The emigrant bureau did its part of the work; the
+railroad went further and set itself to develop every inch of available
+land along its lines. Attractive excursions brought settlers to the new
+country, the railroad was of practical assistance in finding locations for
+them. Everything is being brought toward the development of those great
+new States of the West: cross-roads are beginning to become villages;
+villages, cities. A little time before his death, Mr. Harriman announced
+that there would be four great cities spread across the American
+continent--New York, Chicago, Salt Lake, and San Francisco. He then took
+it upon his own rather roomy shoulders to make Salt Lake City worthy of a
+place in the file.
+
+From this activity in the West, the Eastern railroads have stolen a
+lesson. Originally built in many cases to serve the needs of the farmers
+of some particular locality, they have become merged and welded in a way
+that has caused them to serve the industrial interests of the country more
+particularly than the agricultural. One of the valuable old properties of
+the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey rejoices in the name of Freehold
+and Jamesburg Agricultural Railroad.
+
+When, after the serious slump in traffic that followed the panic in 1907,
+the railroads of the East found themselves, for the first time in a
+decade, with more facilities than freight, they began to cultivate more
+carefully the traffic branch of transportation science. They took quite
+readily to the lesson that the transcontinentals gave them. Then they
+proceeded to put it into effect in practical fashion.
+
+For some years past the problem of the unimportant branches has been a
+serious one with the big Eastern systems. These branches, many of them
+once profitable feeders, have been allowed to deteriorate and retrograde,
+while main-line traffic developed and increased under active conditions of
+competition. The little towns along the branches seemed to retrograde too;
+while the busy cities of the country, strung along the main lines of the
+railroad, absorbed new growth and new energy. Sometimes the branch lines
+were paralleled by interurban electric railroads, which were able to
+operate at far less cost than steam railroads, and consequently to charge
+lower rates of fare; and their slight passenger traffic continued to grow
+lighter. The freight traffic had long since dwindled to slim proportions;
+the branch lines were almost entirely agricultural railroads; and the
+farmers of the East were discouraged and disheartened.
+
+The new movement began in Western New York, which is fairly gridironed
+with a network of these unprofitable branch railroads. It was started even
+before the panic of 1907. New York State, with its great resources and
+its fat treasury, has long been engaged in the development of scientific
+farming--which means farming for the largest profit that can be brought
+from the soil. It has a great agricultural school as a part of Cornell
+University, and an interesting experimental school along similar lines at
+Geneva. These schools have done a great work. They have educated young men
+to be modern farmers, in every sense of that phrase; and they have sent
+leaflets to every corner of the Empire State. But even these methods were
+not far-reaching enough. It is not every farmer's boy in these days who
+can afford to go down to Ithaca for a college education in the tilling of
+the soil; few of the older men care to mingle with the boys at such an
+institution. Even the pamphlets sent out from Geneva were not sufficient.
+
+So when the railroads, seeking to make traffic in a dull time and to
+rehabilitate their branches in the farming districts, made alliance with
+the agricultural schools, special trains were sent out into the farming
+districts, and these trains carried a competent corps of instructors from
+the schools. Day coaches made good school-rooms for the itinerant
+institutions; and a baggage-car, filled with specimens of fruit and grains
+grown under scientific methods, was generally attached. The Western roads
+had used similar trains with success in building up their virgin
+territories. The use of the scientific schools in connection was the
+Eastern adaptation of the idea.
+
+A train of this sort will "make" half a dozen towns in the course of a
+day. The towns are not far apart, and the schedule generally permits a
+stop of about an hour in each. The coming of the "farmers' special" has
+been thoroughly announced by handbills, posters, and the local newspapers.
+Whether the day be wet or fair, the appreciation of the enterprise that
+started the special out is sure to be manifest in a crowd that packs the
+day-coaches and not infrequently causes overflow meetings to be held
+from the rear platform of the train.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE FAR WEST THE FARM-TRAIN HAS LONG SINCE COME INTO ITS
+OWN]
+
+[Illustration: "EVEN IN NEW YORK STATE THE INTEREST IN THESE ITINERANT
+AGRICULTURAL SCHOOLS IS KEEN, INDEED"]
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE DAIRY DEMONSTRATION CAR OF AN AGRICULTURAL
+TRAIN]
+
+There is no cause for disheartenment in the soul of the farmer after he
+has been down to the train. He learns the things that his land is capable
+of and yet has never reared for him. Take the perennial and hardy alfalfa,
+for instance. Crowd into the car, where a hundred earnest men from the
+country-side are gathered and listening to the man from the State
+Agricultural College, who talks on it.
+
+"An acre of good alfalfa," he is saying, "produces twice as much
+digestible nutriment as an acre of good clover. It is therefore profitable
+to our farmers to make every effort to establish alfalfa fields. Your
+climate is favorable to alfalfa, which can be grown on a variety of soils.
+The most favorable is a gravelly loam with a porous sub-soil. There must
+be drainage, fertility, lime, and inoculation. Alfalfa is a lime-loving
+plant, and if you haven't a limy soil, apply lime at the rate of one to
+two thousand pounds per acre. These figures will be given you in a
+pamphlet as you leave the car."
+
+And so it goes. If the train is in one of the great fruit-growing
+districts of western New York, fruit is the theme of the lecturers. There
+is no product that the soil may give, directly or indirectly, that is too
+humble for the attention of the farmers' special. All the roads in Western
+New York have taken part in the campaign--the New York Central, the Erie,
+the Lehigh Valley, and the smaller roads have sent out the train over the
+lines, each in due turn.
+
+The idea has gone into the Middle West and back to Pennsylvania. The
+Pennsylvania Railroad, which creates traffic from every conceivable
+source, has operated since November, 1908, four agricultural specials and
+two fruit-tree and shrubbery specials. The agricultural schools of the
+great territory it traverses have furnished the lecturers and the
+material. Now it is preparing to establish down in the Eastern Shore
+country between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, a development
+farm, in which it will show the farmers of that agricultural district the
+greatest use that they can make of their land, the greatest results that
+it can be brought to yield. It has gone down into the sandy southern part
+of New Jersey and made the potato crop for New York and for Philadelphia
+into a vast yield,--a profit both for the farmer and for the railroad
+which has created the traffic.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The first of these development farms in the East was that established by
+H. B. Fullerton, under the auspices of the Long Island Railroad, at Wading
+River, N. Y. The Long Island possesses a territory that particularly needs
+development of that sort. It has a good suburban territory adjacent to New
+York City, but after that there is not a town of importance the entire
+length of its lines. There is no manufacturing of consequence out upon its
+line and it has been driven to the necessity of making traffic.
+
+Fullerton's Farm is another traffic-maker by educational process. He has
+taken the worst of the sandy soil that makes thousands of acres at the
+east end of the Island, and he has created from it a model farm. The farm
+has had to pay its way. It has not been nurtured under any extensive
+appropriations from the railroad, but it has had to win its success under
+the same conditions that would confront the farmer who measured his
+capital in hundreds, rather than in thousands of dollars. It is teaching
+the lesson that it has sought to teach. Arid soil, on the very hearthstone
+of a metropolitan city, is being given over to profitable truck-farming;
+and the Long Island Railroad for its modest farm investment is beginning
+to harvest appreciable traffic returns.
+
+The New York Central, under the guidance of its president, W. C. Brown,
+who is keenly interested in the revival of farming in the East, and who
+personally directed the operation of the "farm specials" over its lines,
+has purchased two demonstration farms--one in Central, the other in
+Western New York. It has hired a competent farmer to have charge of
+them--T. E. Martin, of West Rush, who made a famous record for himself in
+growing 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre on land that had never before
+grown more than sixty. They will also serve as object lessons, and when
+they have been developed to their capacity, they will be sold at a far
+higher price than the song for which they were purchased in rundown
+condition. The proceeds will be turned over to the purchase and
+development of neglected acres in other sections along the lines of that
+system.
+
+The New York Central is also making its own special development of the
+"farm special" idea, by taking two coaches and making them into
+"agricultural cars" at its West Albany shops. These cars will not run
+sporadically on special trains but will be in use the entire year round,
+being dropped at one little town after another for a day or two days or
+three days, in order that the farmers from the surrounding district may
+drop in to receive a little practical information.
+
+Through the schools of a number of corn-growing States, into which this
+work has spread, boys and girls are being stimulated by prizes to plant
+little patches of corn. Out of each community where such an exhibit is
+held, ten prize-winning ears are sent to the country fair. From this the
+best ten ears are sent to the State fair, and interstate competition is
+already being developed.
+
+There is another side to this. The railroads are making more than a new
+traffic for themselves, they are making a new wealth for the communities
+through which their rails are stretched. It has been estimated by a
+Pennsylvania agronomist that the value of the staple farm crops in the
+Keystone State in a single year exceeds $170,000,000; and that some
+224,000 farmers entered into this production. If by training and
+education each of these farmers can increase his yield of corn one bushel
+to the acre, the additional corn revenue from that one State would be
+$1,044,000. Further than that, he says that $780,000 would roll into the
+pockets of these farmers if they would choose their seed corn carefully
+and thus add ten kernels to each ear of corn grown by them in the course
+of a twelvemonth. That sort of thing looks like a cooperative benefit from
+almost any angle from which you may view it.
+
+The Rock Island Railroad has begun to preach dry farming down through the
+Southwest. Wheat six feet in length is exhibited by that railroad in its
+offices throughout the East as sample of what the farmers in its territory
+do, under its help and supervision. That sort of thing silently makes
+traffic every day in the year. It is worth a dozen times what it costs the
+railroad.
+
+But the railroad is not confining its efforts at making traffic to the
+products of the soil. What is good method with the farmer is similarly
+good method with the manufacturer. So you now see the railroads, east and
+west, working with the aid of industrial commissioners. The industrial
+commissioner is like a High Minister of Commerce.
+
+Take, for instance, a typical railroad running from New York to Chicago.
+It has ample docks upon the sea board, extensive ramifications within the
+coal-mining districts; in the West it taps both the Great Lakes and the
+transcontinentals, which reach across the land to the Pacific. In all this
+district it is under hard competition, gaining its traffic--every ton of
+it--by the sweat of the general traffic-manager's brow. That railroad has
+its Industrial Commissioner, and if you are a prospective manufacturer
+looking for a site for a new plant, you are sure to come to him. You tell
+him that you want to build a factory. He tilts back his chair and looks at
+you easily.
+
+"What kind of a factory?" he asks. "We've room for 10,000 more along our
+rails. If it's a silk mill I can suggest Paterson, where the help is
+trained, and the dyes and raw materials handy. If you are going to turn
+out a steel product somewhere in the Pittsburgh district, Youngstown,
+Ohio, is the most economical point in the United States to-day for the
+turning out of finished steel. Perhaps yours is a canning factory," he
+laughs. "If you want to can fruit we can fix you out up in Western New
+York among the orchards; if you want to can tomatoes, well, sir, there is
+nothing like Indiana for tomatoes."
+
+You specify your new business and its requirements in some detail. The eye
+of this practical Minister of Commerce illumines.
+
+"I have the very thing you want," he says, without hesitation. "Over at
+W----, just half a mile above the city limits along the river. It has
+siding facilities." (You may be fairly certain that the siding facilities
+give chief access to the railroad that employs this particular
+Commissioner.) "And you say you want fresh water. Well, there's five
+thousand gallons a day of the purest soft water in the East for you."
+
+His eyes shine with enthusiasm. He reaches for his paper block and the
+next instant he is sketching the plot for you with remarkable accuracy,
+and with a similitude of scale. Here is the river and there is where you
+can build your dam. Over there is the main line of the best railroad in
+America (he leaves no doubt in your mind as to that); and your siding can
+go in there with less than a quarter of one per cent grade. The highroad
+is there, and close by it the trolley leading into town.
+
+"They've a surplus of help of the kind you want in W----," he adds.
+"You'll never run short of hands there."
+
+It sounds good, and within a week you are bound to W---- with him to meet
+the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. If things are as he has
+represented them to you, and your mind is unbiased, you build your
+factory, and the railroad picks up 200 tons a day off your siding. That
+single transaction has been worth the Commissioner's salary for a year to
+it. There is a variety of method in making traffic.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The general passenger agent has to keep his end up. Any G. P. A. of to-day
+found entertaining the old-fashioned idea that the traffic that flows of
+its own volition up to the ticket-wickets is going to be sufficient to
+satisfy his employers is out of present-day development. The general
+passenger agent who gets patted on the back nowadays is the man who goes
+to the president in a dull season with a sheet showing gains over a
+preceding busy season. He may have to bring water from stones to increase
+that tide of traffic, but it must be increased. There are no two ways
+about what is expected of him.
+
+So he gets out, like the traffic people from the freight end of the
+railroad, and he keeps in constant touch with his territory, with the
+towns along the line and the agents who are working under him. If he is
+instrumental in locating a big convention at some point where his line
+will receive the lion's share of the business, that is a good trick and
+worth while. A lively convention will do a lot toward bracing up a weak
+passenger sheet in some dull month.
+
+One railroad reaching out of New York into the mountains at the
+northeastern corner of that State and losing itself at some obscure town,
+a railroad without valuable connections and ramifications, has made its
+passenger business a little gold-mine by scientific nurturing. It sent its
+passenger representatives up into the country towns, and they sought to
+improve conditions of every sort there. They started agitation for better
+roads from the railroad into the uplands where city folk were prone to
+wander; they helped the boarding-house landlord and the country
+hotel-keeper to bring their facilities up to attractive standards. In some
+cases they induced capital to come in and build new hotels. In every case
+they offered free space in the railroad's summer resort literature.
+Under a single general passenger agent pursuing such a campaign
+unflaggingly the passenger receipts of that small railroad increased 125
+per cent in eight years!
+
+[Illustration: THE FAMOUS THOMAS VIADUCT, ON THE BALTIMORE & OHIO AT
+RELAY, MD., BUILT BY B. H. LATROBE IN 1835, AND STILL IN USE]
+
+[Illustration: THE HISTORIC STARUCCA VIADUCT UPON THE ERIE]
+
+[Illustration: THE CYLINDERS OF THE DELAWARE & HUDSON MALLET]
+
+[Illustration: THE INTERIOR OF THIS GASOLINE-MOTOR-CAR ON THE UNION
+PACIFIC PRESENTS A MOST UNUSUAL EFFECT, YET A MAXIMUM OF VIEW OF THE OUTER
+WORLD]
+
+Take the case of Atlantic City. That town used to be a collection of
+wooden hotels, set along a sandy, pleasant beach, which were content with
+six or eight weeks of good business in midsummer. The railroads that
+stretched their rails down to it registered good earnings during that hot
+season, and they had to put in extensive plants to handle that six or
+eight weeks of heavy traffic. The extensive--and expensive--plants were
+idle a great part of the year, and there was a lot of capital wasted. The
+managers of the railroads told the summer hotel proprietors that, and
+asked why beach property should be a losing investment ten months out of
+the year. That was a new sort of proposition for a summer resort hotel
+proprietor but it seemed sound argument and the hotels extended their
+seasons at either end. They combined with the railroads in making
+attractive special rates for these duller parts of the season, and before
+long the spring was well nigh as popular and as profitable as midsummer.
+
+Folk came over from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and up from Baltimore and
+Washington, to spend their summers at Atlantic City, and the scientific
+business-making there created a fashionable season for Northerners from
+Easter forward. The building of wooden hotels ceased, and fireproof
+structures of brick and stone, steel and concrete, began to rise along the
+beach. Capital ceased to lie idle at Atlantic City. The hotels began to
+keep open the year around, and the scientific method of the biggest of the
+railroads had been so effectual that it built a million-dollar bridge
+across the Delaware at Philadelphia to handle through traffic down to
+Atlantic City.
+
+Still the railroads worked in harmony with the hotels, and the fashionable
+season began at Christmas instead of Easter. Before long they will make
+the fall fashionable, and then the hotels will be crowded all the year
+round. When there is a lull in the season they bring on half a dozen
+conventions and fill the trains and the hotels with the delegates. That
+Atlantic City plant does not lie idle much of the time. There are nearly
+800 hotels there to-day--more than fifty of them huge structures--and on a
+busy day 300,000 people are along the famous boardwalk above the beach. In
+dull days the big hotels are comfortably filled. The hotel men have made
+fortunes, the railroads have added millions of dollars to their passenger
+earnings because of Atlantic City.
+
+There you have the best example of this new creed of the practical
+railroader--making traffic. It is not a lost example. Across the land
+every city and town, every resort, from the haughty spa with a cluster of
+brilliant hotels down to the humblest inn that ever cuddled by the shore
+of a silvery lake, is taking notice of the creed. The farmer is bending
+himself to increase the yield of his land, while the railroad reaps a
+benefit. The marketman from town is reaching out for better sources for
+his needs; the railroad helps him and reaps a benefit. The resort hotel
+arranges a joint rate and ticket with the railroad, which covers both
+transportation and board for a "week-end" in the dull season, and the
+passenger receipts are swelled in some degree.
+
+That is what the railroader calls making traffic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE EXPRESS SERVICE AND THE RAILROAD MAIL
+
+ DEVELOPMENT OF EXPRESS BUSINESS--RAILROAD CONDUCTORS THE FIRST MAIL
+ AND EXPRESS MESSENGERS--WILLIAM F. HARNDEN'S EXPRESS SERVICE--POSTAGE
+ RATES--ESTABLISHMENT AND ORGANIZATION OF GREAT EXPRESS COMPANIES--
+ COLLECTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF EXPRESS MATTER--RELATION BETWEEN
+ EXPRESS COMPANIES AND RAILROADS--BEGINNINGS OF POST-OFFICE
+ DEPARTMENT--STATISTICS--RAILROAD MAIL SERVICE--NEWSPAPER DELIVERY--
+ HANDLING OF MAIL MATTER--GROWTH OF THE SERVICE.
+
+
+While the great transportation functions of the railroad are devoted to
+the comparatively simple problems of soliciting and carrying both
+passengers and freight in ordinary channels, there are, nevertheless,
+special functions of the carrier that demand some slight attention in
+passing. These functions might quite properly be known as the by-products
+of transportation. The most important of them are the carrying of small
+packages of rather greater value than that the railroad ordinarily gives
+to the goods that it handles in its own cars, and the carrying of letters
+and periodicals. These last two are handled as a monopoly by the Federal
+Government, which also competes with a half-dozen big private corporations
+in the transportation of merchandise in small individual lots. The
+Government calls its service the railroad mail and it is the bone and
+sinew of the Post-office Department. The private corporations, creeping in
+upon what is also generally a government monopolistic privilege in other
+lands, handle what they are pleased to call the express business. Their
+business has grown up alongside of that of the United States Government
+and the development of the two has run in very similar channels.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The express business, like a good many other big businesses, began in
+rather simple fashion. Before the railroad came into being, the citizens
+in the different towns of the young and rather sprawling nation along the
+Atlantic seaboard found it a difficult problem to communicate with one
+another. They used to entrust letters and valuable packages to the drivers
+of stage-coaches or to the captains of coasting-vessels. If the drivers or
+the captains remembered the letter-packet or the package, it was safely
+delivered. If they forgot--! So, when the railroad came and drove the old
+stage-lines out of business, the conductors of the trains were asked to
+accept this side responsibility as an informal part of their work. As long
+as this messenger function remained a slight thing, the railroads paid
+little attention to the practice, but after a while, the conductors got to
+paying more attention to it than to running the trains and the railroads
+finally had to stop it.
+
+In the golden age when the conductor's job was developing this valuable
+perquisite, William F. Harnden had charge of a passenger train on the old
+Boston & Worcester Railroad--a part of the Boston & Albany, which, in
+turn, is a part of the New York Central lines. Harnden had entered
+railroad service in 1834, when he was but twenty-two years old. He foresaw
+the day when the railroads would have to put a stop to their conductors
+acting as messengers for the general public, and so, a few years after he
+had gone to work for the Boston & Worcester, he went to the superintendent
+of that highly prosperous little line, as well as to the highly prosperous
+Boston & Providence, and asked for an exclusive contract for an express
+service over it as part of a through route between New York and Boston. So
+it came about that in a Boston newspaper of February 23, 1839, the
+following advertisement appeared:
+
+ "Boston and New York Express Car. William F. Harnden has made
+ arrangements with the Providence railroad and the New York Boat
+ company to run a car through from Boston to New York and vice-versa
+ four times a week commencing Monday, March 4. He will accompany the
+ car himself, take care of all small packages that may be entrusted to
+ his care and see them safely delivered. All packages must be sent to
+ his office, 9 Court street, Boston; or 1 Wall street, New York."
+
+That "car" was a flight of Harnden's imagination, because for several
+months a valise sufficed to carry all the packages that were entrusted to
+his care. But he progressed, and after a little time he found it necessary
+to engage his brother and still another man to act as messengers with him.
+The following year he extended his express service to Philadelphia and to
+Europe. You may be sure that the success of Harnden's experiment was being
+noticed by the thrifty New Englanders. Alvin Adams, who had been in the
+grocery commission business up in Vermont, established an express service
+of his own in 1840, which in due course of time was to become the Adams
+Express Company. It is possible that there might have been to-day a
+Harnden Express Company as well, if America's pioneer expressman had not
+died six years after establishing his interesting venture.
+
+After Alvin Adams, came a host of express services springing up all over
+the eastern end of the United States. Henry Wells, who had been the
+associate of Harnden in the development of his business, formed a
+partnership with one George Pomeroy for a service between Albany and
+Buffalo. William G. Fargo, the freight-agent for the one-time Albany and
+Syracuse Railroad, was the freight-agent for Pomeroy and Wells at Buffalo
+in 1842. Wells and Fargo eventually got together, and in the throbbing
+days of the late forties and the fifties, Wells, Fargo & Co. became an
+express service of magnitude, a concern not to be lightly reckoned with.
+
+Strangely enough, the express companies came to their first prosperity
+through the thing that they are now forbidden to carry--letters. For in
+the early forties the United States Post-office Department demanded six
+cents for carrying a letter thirty miles, eight cents for sixty miles, ten
+cents for one hundred miles--the ratio steadily progressing until
+twenty-five cents was charged for 450 miles. Those rates had been in
+effect since the department was first established, and the service was
+fearfully slow, and untrustworthy into the bargain. The new express
+companies took advantage of their opportunity and--to cite a single
+instance--they would carry a letter from Buffalo to New York for six
+cents, while the Government charged twenty-five cents for a similar, but
+an inferior service.
+
+In 1850 the express services were beginning to be merged--Livingston &
+Company and Wells & Company had already formed the American Express
+Company. Four years later, Adams & Company, Harnden & Company, and some of
+the smaller express services united in the formation of the Adams Express
+Company,--and in that year the minstrel men began to ask the question:
+"For whom was Eve made?" The United States Express Company was also
+organized in 1854, and all this while Wells, Fargo & Company were forming
+history for themselves in the Far West--carrying mail out to the gold
+miners and their precious dust east in return.
+
+[Illustration: A PORTION OF THE GREAT DOUBLE-TRACK SUSQUEHANNA RIVER
+BRIDGE OF THE BALTIMORE & OHIO--A GIANT AMONG AMERICAN RAILROAD BRIDGES]
+
+[Illustration: "IN SUMMER THE BRAKEMEN HAVE PLEASANT ENOUGH TIMES OF
+RAILROADING"]
+
+[Illustration: A FAMOUS CANTILEVER RAPIDLY DISAPPEARING--THE SUBSTITUTION
+OF A NEW KENTUCKY RIVER BRIDGE FOR THE OLD, ON THE QUEEN & CRESCENT
+SYSTEM]
+
+By the beginning of the Civil War, there was a well established business,
+a business established with admirable foresight. Such men as Adams, Wells
+and Fargo, and Benjamin F. Cheney, one of the founders of the American
+Express Company, said that the express business should be kept within
+narrow limits--so within narrow limits it has been kept, and to-day when
+Harnden's suitcase has developed into a business paying luscious
+dividends on more than a hundred million dollars of capital stock, there
+are five great companies: the American Express Company, the Adams Express
+Company, the Wells, Fargo Express Company, the United States Express
+Company, and the National Express Company. The interests of these
+companies are closely interwoven--for instance: while the National Express
+Company is operated as a separate business, it is absolutely controlled by
+the American Express Company. In addition to this Big Five, there is a
+cluster of smaller companies, such as the Great Northern Express Company,
+of J. J. Hill's system, the Southern Express Company, the Long Island
+Express Co., and two thriving carriers in the Dominion of Canada. These in
+turn are more or less closely affiliated with the larger companies.
+
+The express companies no longer force a man to bring his shipment to their
+offices. In every considerable town, there are whole fleets of wagons that
+reach to the outermost limits, both for collection and for distribution.
+In this service the automobile truck has begun readily to displace the
+older type of horse and wagon. The wagon service brings the express
+package, no matter how small or how large, to a central distributing
+depot, where all are gathered together and sent, in through railroad cars,
+to their destinations, being handled very largely as we have seen the L.
+C. L. freight handled in the great transfer houses of the railroads. The
+express company guarantees the safe delivery of the package that is
+entrusted to its care. This package may be of the smallest sort
+imaginable, or it may be a consignment of a million dollars in specie. In
+either case, the express company still accepts the entire responsibility.
+
+If there are whole brigades of delivery wagons in the cities there are
+also whole platoons of special cars owned by the railroads and dedicated
+to the express service. This brings us to the crux of the express
+question--its relations to the railroad. These are embraced in voluminous
+contracts and subcontracts--which are generally placed among the secret
+archives of all the companies that subscribe to them. The Interstate
+Commerce Commission, at Washington, has had, however, access to most of
+these contracts and of them it has said:
+
+ "The contract between an express company and a railroad company
+ usually provides that the express company shall have the exclusive
+ right to operate upon the lines named for a definite term of years;
+ that all matter carried on passenger trains, except personal baggage,
+ corpses, milk cans, dogs, and certain other commodities, shall be
+ turned over by the railroad company to the express company; that the
+ railroad company shall transport to and from all points on its lines
+ all matter in charge of the express company; that special or exclusive
+ express trains shall be provided by the railroad company when
+ warranted by the volume of express traffic; that the railroad company
+ shall furnish the necessary cars, keep them in good repair, furnish
+ light and heat and carry the messengers of the express company as well
+ as all necessary equipment; that the railroad company shall furnish
+ such room in all its depots and stations as may be necessary for the
+ loading, unloading, and storing of express matter; that the express
+ company may employ during the pleasure of the railway any of the
+ agents of the latter as express agents and may employ the train
+ baggage-men as its messengers.
+
+ "The express company, on its part, agrees to pay a fixed per cent of
+ its gross receipts from handling express matter; to charge no rate at
+ less than an agreed per cent of the freight rates on the same
+ commodity--usually one hundred and fifty per cent; to handle, free of
+ charge, money, bonds, valuables, and ordinary express matter of the
+ railway."
+
+The railroad mail service is, in many ways, closely analogous to that of
+the express service. To it also, are devoted whole platoons and brigades
+of especially equipped cars, and it comes under the direction of the
+capable traffic officers of a great government department.
+
+The Post-office Department is practically as old as the nation itself. For
+it was away back in November, 1776, that Ebenezer Hazard, who had been
+appointed Postmaster General to the Continental Congress, filed a
+memorandum of gentle complaint because of the long distances he was
+compelled to travel to keep pace with the wanderings of the Continental
+Army. But it was not until George Washington had become President of the
+United States, in April, 1789, that the Post-office Department came into
+any real semblance of organization. Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts, was
+the man to whom was given the task of making a real business out of what
+had once been a haphazard courtesy of the past of stage-drivers and ships'
+captains. Some men had made individual businesses out of the management of
+stage-routes--in fact, Benjamin Franklin was an early postman. But the
+United States Government from the beginning created the mail service as a
+monopoly for itself--following the rule of other nations.
+
+In 1789 the Post-office Department was a crude enough affair. The
+Postmaster General had but one clerk, there were but 75 post-offices and
+1,875 miles of post-roads in the whole country. In the first year of the
+department's activities the cost of mail transportation is given as being
+$22,081, with the total revenue $37,935. The total expenditures of the
+department that year were $32,140, leaving a surplus for the twelvemonth
+of $5,795, a somewhat better showing than has been made in some years
+since that time.
+
+The report of the Post-office Department for the year ending June 30,
+1910, lies before us as we write this chapter. It tells the graphic growth
+of a great business in one hundred and twenty years. For in this last
+twelvemonth the receipts were $224,128,657--a really vast sum compared
+with that modest $37,935 for 1789-90. The expenditures for this year
+ending June 30, 1910, were even higher--$229,977,224--leaving a deficit of
+$5,848,567. The Postmaster General has asserted, however, that he will
+have succeeded in turning that loss into a slight profit for the year
+ending June 30, 1911. These figures do not alone show the growth of the
+mail service of a great land that has become entirely dependent upon this
+great function of its business and social life. Think of the 75
+post-offices of 1789, compared with the 59,580 offices of 1910--and that
+because of the marvellous development of the rural free delivery during
+the past ten or twelve years, a decrease from the high-water mark of
+76,688 in 1900. Figures are sometimes impressive and the statistics of the
+Post-office Department show that 78,557 postmasters, clerks, and carriers
+give the major portion of their time to its service. In addition to these,
+those same statistics enumerate 40,997 rural delivery carriers, who bring
+the entire post-office force up to the astounding total of 119,554 men and
+women.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Without the railroad the Post-office Department could not have come to its
+present great development as one of the chief arms of government activity.
+The postal service is an interesting adjunct of the railroad; the railroad
+is a vital factor in the successful conduct and development of the postal
+service. Away back in 1836, Postmaster General Barry, in his annual
+report, spoke of the rapid multiplication of railroads in all parts of the
+country and asked if it was not worth while to secure the transportation
+of mail upon them. He added:
+
+"Already have the railroads between French Town, in Maryland, and New
+Castle, in Delaware, and between Camden and South Amboy, in New Jersey,
+afforded great and important facilities to the transportation of the great
+Eastern Mail."
+
+As General Barry wrote, the Baltimore & Ohio was spinning its extension
+lines from Baltimore to Washington, and he expressed an opinion that with
+that line a through mail service from New York to Washington might be
+accomplished in sixteen hours. That service is now made between those
+cities in five hours. General Barry's appeal must have brought fruit, for
+Congress, on July 7, 1838, passed an act approving every railroad in the
+United States as a post-route.
+
+The railroads accepted this responsibility with alacrity. The Baltimore &
+Ohio equipped compartments in baggage-cars running between Baltimore and
+Washington, which were kept tightly locked and to which only the
+postmasters of those two cities had access. Still the early methods of
+handling merchandise of every sort were crude and it was not until the
+days of the Civil War that the railroad mail service began to attain
+anything like its present precision and dispatch. Most great organisms are
+apt to trace their development to the brilliancy or the inspiration of one
+man or a group of men, and the railroad mail service has been no exception
+to that rule.
+
+W. A. Davis, a clerk in the post-office at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1862,
+conceived the idea that railroad mail could be assorted on the cars before
+it reached St. Joseph. In those days, St. Joseph was a pretty important
+sort of a place. The overland mail started west from there, and Davis
+thought that if it could be at least partly assorted before it reached St.
+Joseph, there would be no delay in starting overland. The Post-office
+Department encouraged him and he began what was destined to become the
+most important and interesting function of the railroad mail service.
+
+In the same years that Davis was studying out postal problems at St.
+Joseph, Col. G. B. Armstrong was assistant postmaster at Chicago. He was
+asked by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, of President Lincoln's
+Cabinet, to undertake the development of the railroad mail service. He
+accepted the task August 31, 1864, and a little later was made General
+Railway Mail Superintendent, a position which he held until 1871, when he
+was compelled to retire because of ill health. Col. George S. Bangs, of
+Illinois, succeeded him, and to Col. Bangs was given the opportunity of
+the third great development in the railroad mail service. In his report
+for the year 1874 he discussed the possibilities of establishing a fast
+and exclusive mail train between the two great postal centres of the
+land--New York and Chicago. To quote from Colonel Bangs' report:
+
+ "This train is to be under the control of the department so far as it
+ is necessary for the purpose designed, and to run the distance in
+ about twenty-four hours. It is conceded by railroad officials that
+ this can be done. The importance of a line like this cannot be
+ overestimated. It would reduce the actual time of mail between the
+ East and the West from twelve to twenty-four hours. As it would
+ necessarily be established on one or more of the trunk lines having an
+ extended system of connections, its benefit would be in no case
+ confined, but extended through all parts of the country alike."
+
+Postmaster General Jewell liked Col. Bangs' idea and told him to arrange
+with the Lake Shore Railroad and the New York Central & Hudson River
+Railroad for a fast mail train to leave New York at four o'clock in the
+morning and make Chicago in twenty-four hours. But the Post-office
+Department, while it might grandly order fast mail trains into service,
+had no appropriation from which to pay for them. Nevertheless, Col. Bangs
+appealed to the older Vanderbilt, owner of both the New York Central and
+Lake Shore Railroads. Commodore Vanderbilt was not a sentimentalist. He
+had little use for men who came to him with risky propositions and empty
+pocketbooks. Nevertheless, the mail train idea appealed to the old
+railroader, and he turned to his son, William H. Vanderbilt, and asked him
+what he thought of the idea. The younger Vanderbilt suggested building the
+special cars needed for this service and placing the train in operation,
+with hopes of remuneration by the following Congress. He felt that the new
+trains would instantly become so popular as to compel Congress to provide
+for their up-keep.
+
+"If you want to do this, go ahead," said Commodore Vanderbilt, "but I know
+the Post-office Department, and you will, too, within a year."
+
+William H. Vanderbilt went ahead. He constructed and placed in service
+such trains--of glittering white and gold--as the railroad had never seen.
+Nightly they made their spectacular run between New York and Chicago with
+clock-work regularity. They never missed connections. The Pennsylvania
+Railroad quickly followed the example of its traditional rival. Within a
+half-year the United States had such a mail service as it had never
+dreamed of possessing, a mail service a quarter of a century ahead of any
+other nation in the world.
+
+And yet Congress did the very thing that the sagacious old Commodore
+Vanderbilt had predicted. It absolutely refused to pay for the fast mail
+trains, and they were taken out of service. There was another factor in
+the situation, however, and that always a lively factor--the public. When
+the man out in Sioux City found that his mail was again taking eighteen
+additional hours to reach him from New York, he rose up in all the fulness
+of upstrung wrath and let his Congressman hear from him. And he was only
+one of tens of thousands whose business comfort had been heightened, quite
+imperceptibly, by the new trains, and upset very perceptibly by their
+withdrawal. They were returned to service in 1877, and have since become
+so recognized and useful a function of the mail service that it would be a
+brash Congress or Postmaster General who would even attempt to tinker with
+them.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Sometimes you brush elbows with the railroad mail service. You notice
+perhaps, the big heavy car up forward in the long train, with its open
+door and its gallows-like crane for snatching mail-bags, at cross-road
+stations, where the through train does not even deign to slacken speed. If
+you have had an important and delayed letter to post, you may have
+breathed your little prayer of thanks to the railroad mail because you are
+able to drop it into the slot of a car that stood, that was halted for an
+impatient minute or two in its race overland. But these are hardly more
+than superficialities of the service. If you wish to come closer to its
+heart, present yourself sometimes just before dawn at one of the great
+railroad terminals of a really metropolitan city. You had better present
+yourself in spirit and not in flesh, because this busy time--when most
+honest men are asleep--is not a time when visitors are welcomed. The
+Government is singularly diffident about showing the inner workings of its
+Post-office Department.
+
+But these inner workings are alive and alert at three o'clock of the
+morning that you come to the platform sheds of the big terminal--you can
+see the shadowy outline of the darkened building itself rising up behind
+you. Most of its platforms which by day are constant and brisk little
+highways, are also darkened. The long files of empty coaches that line
+these platforms reflect in their many windows the signal lights of the
+outer yard. Now and again you catch the flicker of a pointed yellow light
+against the background of blackness--the bobbing of a watchman's lantern
+as he sees that all is well in the few hours of comparative quiet that
+come to this great terminal.
+
+This one train platform is alert and alive--brilliant under the
+incandescence of electricity. A brigade of shirt-sleeved men line it,
+while to its outer edge one great wagon after another--each showing the
+red, white, and blue of government service under the reflections of the
+arcs--comes rolling up, with a fearful clatter over the rough pavement of
+the station yard. From the cavernous recesses of these great wagons their
+stores are poured forth--dozens and dozens of mail sacks of leather and
+canvas, each tagged and directed with absolute accuracy.
+
+The grimy granite bulk of the general post-office is a scarce half-dozen
+blocks away from this terminal--an easy span for each of the great
+mail-wagons. Into that general post-office the mail--letters, newspapers,
+packages, all of inconceivable variety--has been pouring at flood-tide
+ever since the close of business nine hours before. The carriers with
+their heavy pouches began this tide; wagons bringing their contribution
+greatly swelled it. From the nearer stations the mail came, silent and
+unseen, through the giant pneumatic tubes that reach out from the general
+post-office, under city streets, like great arteries. Underneath the
+ghastly green mercury lamps of the distributing floor of the general
+post-office, the first steps were taken toward separating the flood.
+Expert mail-clerks, working under tremendous tension, made a rough
+classification of all that come under their trained fingers--sometimes by
+counties, again by States, or even a group of States. One great
+subdivision was transcontinental and transpacific. This train with its
+close connections on the Western lines will reach San Francisco just in
+time to catch there a big, red-funnelled steamship about to depart for
+Yokohama and Hong Kong. At Hong Kong the red-funnelled boat will connect
+with a P. & O. steamer whose screws will hardly cease revolving until she
+reaches Calcutta. The railroad mail service is a thing that reaches much
+farther than the rights-of-way of the railroads themselves.
+
+There are seven cars in this train--five cars for the postal service and
+two chartered by the morning newspapers. There are no coaches. Now and
+then one of these flyers will deign to carry a single sleeper, but such is
+the exception. The fast mail does not stop to quibble with such trifles as
+passengers. It even turns its shoulders upon the express companies--they
+have their own fast special trains across the continent.
+
+The last of the mail-wagons has delivered its valuable load to the cars.
+The final newspaper wagon comes dashing up to the platform--its horses
+a-froth and its driver on the edge of profanity.
+
+"Here's the firsts," he yells. "Big fire down the water-front and they
+wanted to make the edition with it. We were three minutes late."
+
+Three minutes late! Seventeen minutes ago the last of the smoking-hot
+forms came from that newspaper's stereotyping rooms and here are the first
+ten thousand copies of the morning's run--fresh and damp smelling of the
+forest. Before the driver began his hurried explanation of delay, the
+copies were being thrown into the last car. He had hardly finished before
+a big bell, high-hung somewhere in the invisible blackness, speaks its one
+brief note of authority; lanterns are raised alongside the full length of
+the train--the seven big cars are softly getting into motion. And before
+this train is fully in motion the newspaper's messengers are busy with the
+papers that have been thrown in at the open door; before it has bumped its
+way over the wide-spreading "throat" at the entrance of the terminal, they
+are bringing the first semblance of order out of the miniature mountain of
+newspapers piled high on the car floor.
+
+Chaos, did we say? Well, hardly that. The circulation manager of the
+metropolitan morning newspaper has been called a "field marshal of the
+empire of print," and field marshals incline to order rather than to
+chaos. It is less than seventeen minutes from the first of that torrent of
+newspapers pouring from the hopper of the grinding press, yet here they
+are, each in an accurate bundle of not more than two hundred and fifty
+copies, and accurately tagged. The label of each bundle bears in big clear
+letters the news company or dealer to whom it is consigned, the town, the
+railroad and its connections. There is not much chance for errors here.
+
+As the newspaper messengers begin to arrange their stock--the papers for
+the nearest towns on top so that they may be most easily reached, to be
+thrown off while it is still dusk, so that Mr. Early Riser may read his
+favorite metropolitan journal as he sips his breakfast coffee--so are the
+mail-clerks in the cars ahead bending to their tasks. Roundabout them are
+rows of pouches held in iron frames, with their hungry throats held wide
+open, and infinite racks of small pigeon-holes--the same kind that you
+remember in the up-country post-offices. When the pouches first come into
+the car they are opened and their contents "dumped-up," to use the
+parlance of the service, upon the shelf-like tables that run the length of
+the place. The next process is "facing-up"--bringing addressed sides of
+all the matter uppermost for facility in distribution. And after that the
+distribution itself--no easy matter when all the world is constantly
+writing to all the world, and the criss-cross currents are all but
+innumerable.
+
+So come all classes of mail to these swift-flying cars--letters,
+newspapers, packages, the specially protected registered mail,--and for
+all of these classes the apparently endless sorting goes steadily forward,
+while the train rounds sharp curves and sends the ordinarily sure-footed
+clerks clutching handrails for balance, under the dead glow of acetylene,
+holding each separate mail-piece for a fraction of a second--sometimes
+longer if it be a "sticker" in the chirography or the detail of its
+address--and then shooting it into the proper pigeon-hole or open-mouthed
+pouch. Some of these cars are destined for cities or States or groups of
+States--the wheels under one of them are not going to cease revolving for
+any length of time until it stands on the long Mole, opposite San
+Francisco, and the through pouches, with the British coat-of-arms and the
+meaningful "G. R." stamped upon them, are being shipped aboard the
+red-funnelled steamship which is to carry them on the last leg of their
+long journey over two seas and a broad continent, from London to Hong
+Kong.
+
+These trains are no longer novel on the modern railroad. They are
+established features of the train service. From New York City goes forward
+one-sixth of all the mail matter originating in the United States. The
+aggregate circulation of all the New York morning newspapers is somewhat
+larger than the aggregate circulation of the morning newspapers of the
+other cities of the country, so from New York there goes forth between
+midnight and dawn a flotilla of special mail and newspaper trains. Two of
+the fastest of these start from the Grand Central Station. The "Boston
+Special" of the New York, New Haven & Hartford leaves that spacious
+terminal at just 2:10 A. M., no matter what desperate excuses may be
+telephoned at the last moment by some circulation manager who is
+confronted by a disabled press, or some such disaster. It slips through
+the suburban territory without halting--the nearby commuters are served
+with their papers and their mail by the early morning locals. Bridgeport,
+at 3:31 A. M., is the first halt; New Haven, at 3:52, the second. At New
+Haven, the papers for Hartford, Springfield, and the whole Connecticut
+valley country are thrown off. At New London, which is reached at 4:53 A.
+M., go the papers for Norwich, Worcester, Newport, and New Bedford. One
+more halt, at Providence, and the train, running as fast as the fastest of
+New Haven flyers, is at the South Station, Boston--at just 7:20 o'clock. A
+Boston & Maine flyer, taking mail and newspapers away up the coast through
+three States, leaves the North Station at 8:01 A. M., and so there follows
+a quick transfer of mail and newspapers through the twisting streets of
+the Hub.
+
+The other early morning flyer leaves the Grand Central at 3:05 o'clock,
+and it makes its course over the main stem of the New York Central Lines.
+It reaches Albany at 6:30 o'clock and not only distributes there for
+Western Massachusetts and Vermont, the upper Hudson Valley and the Lake
+Champlain territory north to Montreal, but overhauls a passenger train
+that left New York a little after midnight. It continues its course
+through the heart of the Empire State--reaching Syracuse at 10:05 A. M.
+and Rochester at 11:47 A. M. At Buffalo, which is reached at 1:20 P. M.,
+there are important connections for the West and Southwest, and the
+Chicago letters in that grimy train are going out on the first delivery
+from the Chicago post-office the next morning.
+
+The Pennsylvania hauls two great trains--built up of mail sections from
+its new terminal on Manhattan Island, which has a great post-office in
+process of growth, built over a portion of its platform tracks, and
+newspaper sections from the old Jersey terminal, which is still most
+convenient to a majority of the metropolitan papers. The first of these
+trains is bound for the South and the Southwest. It leaves New York at
+2:20 A. M., passes Philadelphia at 4:25, and steams into Baltimore at 6:40
+A. M. Another hour sees it in Washington and transferring its load to the
+mail-trains that are about to start for the long journey to Atlanta and
+New Orleans. A New Yorker sojourning for a part of the winter at Palm
+Beach, Florida, can be sure of having his favorite Sunday paper not later
+than Tuesday morning.
+
+The second Pennsylvania train leaves thirty minutes later and follows the
+main line of that much-travelled highway all the way to Pittsburgh, which
+it reaches just at noon. Other railroads out of New York start fast
+newspaper and mail trains just before dawn and combine regular passenger
+facilities with them--the Lehigh Valley despatching a flyer at 2:00
+o'clock from the old Pennsylvania terminal in Jersey City for the populous
+northeastern corner of Pennsylvania and the so-called Southern Tier of New
+York State. The Lackawanna reaches a somewhat similar territory by its
+fast express, which leaves Hoboken at 2:30 o'clock.
+
+A similar cluster of mail and newspaper flyers starts out of Chicago early
+each morning--east over the Lake Shore, the Michigan Central, and the
+Pennsylvania, south over the Monon and the Illinois Central, and west and
+northwest over the Northwestern, the Rock Island, and the Santa Fe. Other
+great cities follow the same programme in lesser scale--there are many
+important fast-mail trains that make their departures from initial
+terminals throughout all the daylight hours and late into the evening. A
+regiment of mail-cars make their way over the face of the land on fast
+through expresses of every sort. The postal service is a business of
+magnitude within itself.
+
+The Postmaster General's report for the year ending June 30, 1910, gives a
+clear conception of its magnitude. He showed then that there were 176 full
+railroad post-office lines, manned by 1,736 crews of 8,332 clerks. There
+were also 1,392 compartment railroad post-office lines--lines in which a
+portion of a baggage or smoking-car is partitioned for the sole use of the
+postal service--manned by 4,085 crews of 5,407 clerks, 18 electric car
+lines with 20 crews and 22 clerks, and 55 steamboat lines with 98 crews
+and 86 clerks. Of the cars built for the exclusive use of the railroad
+mail service, 1,114 were in use and 206 held in reserve, while 3,208 of
+the compartment cars were in use, 559 of these being held in reserve. In
+addition, the Post-office Department operates 25 trolley mail-cars.
+
+Great progress has been made in the substitution of steel mail-cars for
+wooden ones--a real step forward when one pauses to consider the dangerous
+position in which the mail-cars are placed in most trains. The records of
+the Post-office Department are filled with stories of heroism on the part
+of mail-clerks in saving, both the extremely valuable merchandise that is
+given to their care, and vastly more valuable human lives. The list of the
+post-office employees who have met death while on duty in the railroad
+mail service is not a short one.
+
+But the railroads are coöperating with the Government in giving the
+finest type of steel cars to its mail service,--sixty of these are already
+in use on the Pennsylvania system,--for, as we stated at the outset of
+this chapter, the transportation of Uncle Sam's mail is no slight function
+of the modern railroad. The big operating men across the land are
+constantly bending their heads with those of the post-office officials
+toward the betterment of that transportation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS
+
+ CARE AND REPAIR OF CARS AND ENGINES--THE LOCOMOTIVE CLEANED AND
+ INSPECTED AFTER EACH LONG JOURNEY--FREQUENT VISITS OF ENGINES TO THE
+ SHOPS AND FOUNDRIES AT ALTOONA--THE TABLE FOR TESTING THE POWER AND
+ SPEED OF LOCOMOTIVES--THE CAR SHOPS--STEEL CARS BEGINNING TO SUPERSEDE
+ WOODEN ONES--PAINTING A FREIGHT CAR--LACK OF METHOD IN EARLY REPAIR
+ SHOPS--SEARCH FOR FLAWS IN WHEELS.
+
+
+To care for its rolling-stock the railroad creates two distinct functions
+of its business. All the care of its permanent way, including tracks,
+tunnels, bridges, comes under the control of the Maintenance Way
+Department. Similarly, the Mechanical Department assumes control of the
+cars and engines, sees to it that each is maintained to its fullest
+efficiency, both by care in daily service and by certain visits to the
+shops at regular intervals, for repairs, reconstruction, and painting.
+
+To do all this requires a large plant, both in buildings and machinery. It
+is distributed at every important point along the railroad. At terminal
+and operating points, roundhouse facilities of greater or less extent are
+sure to be located, and at the headquarters of each division these are
+generally expanded into shops for the making of light repairs and to avoid
+handling crippled equipment for any great distance. One large shop plant
+is apt to suffice the average railroad for the heavy repair work. If the
+road stretch to any extraordinary length, even this feature is apt to be
+duplicated in order to concentrate this repair work as far as possible.
+
+All this concerns the care and repair of the locomotive--which the
+railroader quickly groups under the title "motive-power." To care for the
+engines while they are in use out upon the line, to see to it that
+engineers and firemen alike handle these mechanisms with economy and
+skill, is a responsibility that is placed upon the road foreman of engines
+of each division. He has supervision over smaller roundhouses but at any
+of the larger of these structures there is a roundhouse foreman in direct
+charge. The railroad long ago learned that its best economy rested in
+having plenty of executive control. That has come to be one of the maxims
+of the business.
+
+There is a master mechanic in charge of the division shops and in many
+cases he has authority over the road foreman of engines and the roundhouse
+foremen. Then under him he has his various assistants, forming a working
+force not at all unlike that of the average iron-working shop. All this
+organism is gathered together under a superintendent of motive power, who
+in turn may report to a general mechanical superintendent. This official
+answers only to the general manager, or, in some cases, to a
+vice-president to whom these functions of the care of the railroad are
+delegated.
+
+The proposition of the cars is generally treated quite apart from that of
+the locomotive, and separate shops under the direction of a master
+car-builder and his assistants are located at a few points upon the
+system, where they may be of fairly easy access. Rough repairs (the
+car-builders term these "light" repairs) to cars are carried forth at each
+division yard. This work is almost entirely confined to the freight
+equipment, and a good part of it goes upon "foreign" cars--cars that do
+not belong at all to the railroad making the repairs.
+
+This feature of the repair work is a direct result of an elaborate system
+of interchange in freight equipment upon American railroads, in order to
+prevent the breaking of bulk in the shipment of merchandise from one line
+to another. Cars will break down when they are many hundreds of miles away
+from home, and the railroad upon which they are operating at the time
+carts them to the nearest temporary repair yard or to its own shops, makes
+the necessary repairs, and charges for them in accordance with a scale
+prepared by the national association of Master Car-Builders. This
+necessitates a vast deal of bookkeeping and is only one of the many
+complications brought about by our extensive plan of railroading in
+America.
+
+The railroad will probably build the greater part of its freight
+equipment, although in these days of the supplanting of wood by steel in
+car-construction the companies are apt to stand appalled at the cost of
+the steel working machinery, and to buy their cars direct from the
+manufacturers very much as they purchase their locomotives. Passenger
+equipment is almost invariably secured in this way. It is a big railroad
+indeed that seeks to construct for itself the huge travelling palaces that
+the passenger of to-day has come to demand for his comfort. The repairing
+and the painting of these elaborate vehicles is enough of a proposition in
+itself.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+To begin at the beginning, one first comes in contact with the mechanical
+department as it comes into constant contact with the operation of the
+railroad. This is the more quickly observed at the roundhouses, those
+great circular structures that are a feature of the railroad section of
+every important town. In England the "engine sheds," as they are there
+known, are simple enough structures, housing a series of parallel tracks,
+which are served by either a transfer table or switches. Such a plan is
+pursued in this country only where space is at a premium--as in the heart
+of some great city where realty is exceedingly high-priced; for the heads
+of our railroads have held tenaciously to the easily operated turntable
+and roundhouse scheme. The table, generally driven by electricity or a
+small dummy engine, forms the centre, the roundhouse a segment of the
+entire rim of the wheel. The great advantage of its simple design lies in
+the fact that it is instantly possible to get at any one of the fifty
+or more locomotives that it houses. It is this feature that has endeared
+it to the railroad man for many years.
+
+[Illustration: TRIPLE-PHASE ALTERNATING-CURRENT LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE
+GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. FOR USE IN THE CASCADE TUNNEL, OF THE GREAT NORTHERN
+RAILWAY]
+
+[Illustration: HEAVY SERVICE, ALTERNATING AND DIRECT CURRENT FREIGHT
+LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE WESTINGHOUSE COMPANY FOR THE NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN &
+HARTFORD RAILROAD]
+
+[Illustration: THE MONOROAD IN PRACTICAL USE FOR CARRYING PASSENGERS AT
+CITY ISLAND, NEW YORK]
+
+[Illustration: THE CIGAR-SHAPED CAR OF THE MONOROAD]
+
+The locomotive that hauls the train goes to its "stall" in the roundhouse
+directly after its work is done. Its crews, having finished their run,
+desert it for the time being, and it comes within the charge of the
+roundhouse foreman and his "hostlers." These old terms are reminiscent of
+the days when the roundhouse was a real stable and its denizens flesh and
+blood horses. Now the denizens of the roundhouse are iron horses, and in
+their great size as they rest within their house they are indicative of
+the progress that has been made in the design and construction of railroad
+equipment.
+
+On the way to the roundhouse, possibly on the way from it (the practice
+varies on different railroads) the engine will stop at the ash-pit. It
+will have its fires cleaned in a long pit that runs underneath a section
+of track, and then pass on to the coaling-shed. The long pit at some
+points is filled with iron buckets that run on wheels into which the ashes
+are dumped and these are emptied by overhead crane apparatus into a nearby
+line of empty gondolas, ready to be taken away to be disposed of.
+
+At the coaling shed the tender is filled, some twelve or fifteen tons
+being required if the engine is large; the water-spout fills the capacious
+tanks, while the hostlers take good care to see that the sand-box is
+filled, as a precaution against slipping on the next steep grade. Then on
+to the turntable and the waiting stall, until ready to go out again upon
+the regular service or extra duty. During that time it will be both
+cleaned and inspected. The fireman may be held responsible for the cleanly
+appearance of his engine above the running-board. Below that, the work
+will be delegated to the roundhouse force. The fireman will probably feel
+that it should clean all the engine. When he feels particularly aggrieved
+over the matter it is time for him to meet one of the veterans of the
+service, who will tell him of the days when the engines were gayly
+ornamented with brass and light-colored paints, and the fireman's career
+had added to it an endless campaign with his wiping rag against the
+tendency of the bright-work to tarnish. There are some things that
+decidedly favor the fireman of the present time.
+
+There are not always sufficient roundhouse facilities at every point; the
+traffic of our railroads has a way of constantly running away from the
+facilities; and so there are many times when the engines must be housed in
+the open. But the vigilance and the care upon them are never relaxed. The
+railroad that is foolish enough to try to save upon the maintenance of its
+motive power sooner or later pays a terrible price for its penurious
+folly.
+
+So it comes to pass that every engine makes a regular visit to the shops,
+generally at periods of from ten to fourteen months, depending upon the
+service in which it is engaged. On some of these visits, it will be pretty
+completely dismantled, and a travelling crane running the full length of
+the erecting shop will soon lift the heavy boiler from frame and wheels
+and carry it down to the boiler-makers, with no more difficulty than an
+automatic package carrier in a dry-goods store would have. There is a deal
+of pride and rivalry between the men as to the facility and speed that can
+be shown in taking an engine in hand, dismantling it completely, making
+necessary repairs, setting it up again and placing it in service once
+more. The men of the Erie shops at Hornellsville succeeded in doing the
+trick a year or so ago in the remarkably short time of twenty-four hours.
+In that brief time a locomotive came in from the road, bedraggled and
+begrimed and marked "TBMF" for the benefit of the shop-men. "TBMF"
+translated means "Tires, Boxes, Machine, Flues," so specifying the engine
+parts to be repaired. In the slang of the repair shop the men say "To Be
+Made Fast." These four requisites are the ones most necessary to make the
+locomotive fit for from 50,000 to 75,000 miles of service before she
+shall again turn into the shop. To make them in twenty-four hours required
+some planning on the part of the Erie shop foremen at Hornellsville, and
+yet it was only a few weeks after 1734 had come out of the Hornellsville
+plant fit for revenue service in a single day and night, before the men of
+the rival Susquehanna shop wished a chance at a contest of that sort.
+"TBMF" generally keeps a locomotive in the shop for from a fortnight to
+three or four weeks; the Canadian Pacific considered that it had done a
+remarkable thing in effecting these repairs on a locomotive, with a
+super-heater, at its Winnipeg shops in 57-1/2 hours. The Hornellsville
+record was one most remarkable. But the Susquehanna shop men took 2018 in
+off the road after 70,000 miles without repairs; took in the big puller at
+7 o'clock in the morning, made the heavy "TBMF" repairs, and turned her
+out for revenue service at 7:34 o'clock in the evening--thirteen hours and
+thirty-four minutes. At midnight she was pulling a heavy through freight
+west once again, and a most astounding record in American shop work had
+been consummated.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The United States have few such towns as England possesses in Swindon and
+in Crede, railroad towns in the distinctive sense that they were the
+absolute creation of the railroad in the first instance. There is many a
+town from one ocean to the other that has owed its stimulus and
+development to the location of large railroad shops and terminals within
+its boundaries, but the railroads have, as a rule, dodged the creation of
+distinctive towns. Pullman, within the outskirts of Chicago, was a
+monumental failure in this very sort of enterprise. It was designed and
+built to accommodate the great car-building shops of that man who did the
+most of all men to make luxury in railroad traffic--George M. Pullman; and
+no greater care was shown in the construction and design of the works than
+was given toward the stores, the churches, the schools, and the homes of
+the workmen. Pullman was decidedly a model town; yet Pullman was a
+failure. Other model towns of the same sort in Europe have been marked
+successes, and that very thing may well serve to illustrate the difference
+in temperament between the American and the European workingman. The
+American resents too much being done for him; he is instinctively jealous
+of his individuality.
+
+Away back in the long-ago the Erie created a railroad town at Susquehanna
+in the extreme north part of Pennsylvania. It built shops there and soon
+after repeated the experiment at Hornellsville in the southwestern part of
+New York State. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad similarly developed
+Cumberland, Maryland; and the Lake Shore, Elkhart, Ind. These are few of
+many instances where a great railroad shop has served to develop a sizable
+town. In some others they have developed important suburbs of large
+cities, as the Lake Shore's plant at Collinwood, at the eastern edge of
+the city of Cleveland; and the great shops of the New York Central at
+Depew, in the outskirts of Buffalo, which were built when the plant at
+West Albany could no longer accommodate the rolling-stock of a rapidly
+growing system.
+
+In Altoona, Pa., the United States possesses probably the only distinctive
+railroad town of extent within its boundaries. Altoona was the creation of
+the Pennsylvania Railroad more than half a century ago, and its progress,
+carefully stimulated, has proceeded step by step in company with the
+progress of one of the largest of American railroad systems. The mistakes
+of Pullman have not been repeated at Altoona. If the Pennsylvania Railroad
+has ruled the city in the hills, it has ruled it tacitly and tactfully at
+all times. It has avoided even the appearance of paternalism, and the
+growth of Altoona has been measured by the growth of the country, which in
+its turn is measured with marvellous accuracy by the growth of the
+railroad traffic. So a trip to Altoona and through its great shops will
+be illustrative of the very best practice in the construction and
+maintenance of a railroad's car and engine.
+
+The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars
+of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition
+to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all
+times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of
+heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men--is divided into several
+divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six
+miles.
+
+The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to
+the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive
+cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000
+car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this
+particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a
+railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal
+introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern
+shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for
+cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day.
+
+The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive
+repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that
+point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story
+structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within
+a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired
+locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with
+respect.
+
+The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are
+built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new
+castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant
+foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that
+almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges
+from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical
+experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes
+out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for
+which it was created.
+
+The testing-table is one of the most interesting of Altoona's activities.
+The engine is run upon a series of wheels that fit exactly underneath its
+own; it is fastened snugly into place; connections are made with a score
+of pipes and rods that fit upon its mechanism, and it starts off for a run
+up over the division. It runs miles and miles, snorting furiously over the
+hard grades and under the heavy loads it has to haul, and yet it does not
+move even the finest fraction of an inch from that testing table. Its
+mechanism throbs with energy, its wheels revolve at a fearful rate; yet it
+is a helpless caged creature in a seemingly impotent energy, as the men in
+charge of the test watch a dozen dials, notebooks in hand. The big driving
+wheels turn only upon the friction wheels beneath them but the engineers
+who are conducting the test can tell the speed at which the locomotive is
+travelling--in theory--by the almost human needles upon the dial-faces.
+There is more delicate scientific apparatus behind the engine. It is
+stripped from its tender for this test, and by this apparatus the pull of
+the engine upon the dead load of the train can be exactly estimated in
+pounds and ounces. Nor is this all. The friction wheels underneath the
+drivers are controlled by powerful water brakes, and by the regulation of
+these brakes, strains or handicaps can be placed upon the engine exactly
+similar to those of the grades it may have to reach over a heavy
+mountainous stretch of railroad.
+
+There is no guess-work about modern railroading. Many hundreds of
+thousands of dollars are spent each year in expert scientific tests of
+every sort, in the salaries of men who devote their entire time to this
+work; and the railroads reap the benefits in many more hundreds of
+thousands of dollars in operating economies. Railroading is a pretty exact
+science; the big engine on the testing-table at Altoona is only one of a
+host of evidences of the skill and genius that are being brought to bear
+upon the operation of the great railroad properties of the country at the
+present time.
+
+This engine goes upon diet. Dr. Wiley down at Washington with his young
+men sustaining themselves scientifically upon measured and selected foods
+has something of the same method that is shown with the test engine up at
+Altoona in the hills. Its supply of coal is carefully weighed and analyzed
+by sample. An accounting of the amount consumed down to ounces is
+carefully kept, the water supply is also examined and measured with great
+care. When the test is finished and the big chaotive engine has covered
+miles of theoretical grades with a long theoretical train hitched on
+behind, the experts get busy with their pencils and begin to prepare the
+reports upon which their chief may rely when he goes ahead to construct
+another gross of 100-ton locomotives.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman
+of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new
+passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself,
+some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings.
+Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling
+equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily
+reached by use of a long transfer table.
+
+The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate
+from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in
+the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which
+still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a
+large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant.
+One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is
+a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the
+steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down
+upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills
+of the freight-cars--"fish-bellies," the master car-builders call
+them--and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in
+thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as
+easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers.
+The press makes many hundred "fish-belly" sills every working day, and it
+pays its way.
+
+The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car
+construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees
+the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the
+far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel
+workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy
+switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop.
+
+Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of
+thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars
+will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in
+advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into
+cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of
+extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of
+steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance,
+always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and
+tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be
+even compared with the steel car.
+
+It should not be forgotten, though, that the railroads have many thousands
+of wooden passenger-coaches still in service, and the substitution of
+steel equipment for these has only just begun. The average life of a car
+approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands
+that these cars be retained for their active life. As they wear out steel
+cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems.
+This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through
+trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad's best
+equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of
+less importance.
+
+With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter
+has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser
+work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches,
+dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet
+work still demands the cunning of his hands. Here in the miscellaneous
+carpenter-shop he is at work upon a seat frame for a day-coach, a shade
+fixture, a broken chair from a dining car, a baggage truck from some
+station; there is plenty of work for the carpenter around a car-shop.
+
+It is a matter of pride with the railroad to keep its passenger equipment
+bright and shiny and new of appearance. It is part sentiment and part good
+business. For a railroad cannot hope to attract passengers with dirty,
+unkempt, weather-beaten cars. So it is that the paint-shop is a large
+function of the car-shop. American railroads may not go quite as much into
+gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental
+Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the
+car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make
+car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a
+private carriage or an automobile.
+
+So it is that a passenger coach spends from eighteen to twenty days in the
+paint-shop alone, in its period of refurbishing. It is primed at first and
+then it receives from three to five coats of surfacer. This is all
+hand-work, requiring both strong muscles and infinite patience on the part
+of the painters. Two or three coats of the standard color of the railroad,
+by which its equipment is known distinctively, are given to the exterior.
+Lettering and striping follow, then finally two coats of fine varnish are
+flowed and rubbed to a high and brilliant polish.
+
+The car is now ready for the dust and the dirt of the line. About every
+year it will come back again for re-varnishing and at the end of about
+eight years it will again undergo practically the same treatment within
+the paint-shop as was given it at the beginning. It will come in rusty and
+begrimed after many thousands of miles up and down the toilsome line.
+Within three weeks it will emerge from the paint-shop fresh and radiant,
+having obtained a new lease of life.
+
+If the same process were to be applied to the freight equipment, the
+paint-shop would be of almost unlimited size. But freight-cars are not
+varnished. They are merely painted with the best of time-resisting
+pigments, usually a dull and sombre red. The freight-cars literally go
+through a bath in the paint-shop. Expert painters stand, like
+fire-fighters, with a hose-nozzle in their hands. Through the hose the
+paint is forced, gallons upon gallons of it; and when it is all over the
+freight-car is a fine, even red, just like the painters themselves. The
+lettering is a quick matter, with the use of stencils.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+There remain two other great divisions of a central plant of this
+sort--locomotive repair shops and car repair shops, for the needs of the
+immediate divisions with their heavy traffic. These shops, extensive in
+themselves, present no radical differences from the usual division shops
+which a great railroad maintains at every division operating point in
+order to keep its rolling stock in the best of order. They are used to
+make light repairs. The master mechanic is a discerning man. He must know
+and judge accurately when a disabled car or locomotive should go to the
+company's main shops, when the repairs can best be made at the local
+plant. It is one of the points upon which the economy of the shop system
+depends.
+
+On this matter of shop economy whole volumes might be written, and have
+been written. In the beginning of shop practices there was little system
+in these matters, just as the shop work was reckoned far below its real
+importance. One of the earliest of real railroads was the Columbia &
+Philadelphia--nowadays one of the main stems of the Pennsylvania's trunk
+line--and it was from the beginning a railroad of quite heavy traffic,
+double-tracked and reaching into a fat country. Yet a shop at Parkersburg,
+halfway up the line, employing forty men in all, was considered quite
+enough for the maintenance of equipment. If one of those early engines
+broke down at either terminal, the engineer, the fireman and perhaps the
+local blacksmith had to make their own repairs.
+
+Nothing was standard, not even the sizes of such simple affairs as nuts
+and bolts. Years of railroading have changed all this. The
+master-mechanics and the master car-builders meet in annual sessions; and
+by means of reports from their expert committees have been evolved
+standards in every detail of rolling stock--standard materials, standard
+compositions, standard sizes, even standards in nomenclature of railroad
+apparatus down to the smallest parts.
+
+Even with this assistance there still remains a mass of detail in every
+railroad shop; and a large clerical force is one of its greatest
+efficiencies. A sharp and accurate accounting is kept of the cost of
+repairs upon each locomotive and car, even such general shop costs as gas
+and heat are pro-rated against it. There is no time that the railroad
+cannot tell to a nicety the precise cost of each unit of its equipment.
+
+These units are not, in many roads, increased, without precise orders from
+the board of directors or the executive committee of the board. In order
+to get around this rule some niceties in reconstruction have been known. A
+single timber of a worn-out freight car has kept the unit and the number
+of the old car, and going into the new has prevented the creation of a
+forbidden unit.
+
+The system upon which cars and locomotives are numbered varies greatly
+upon different systems. In some cases the first figures of the numbers
+indicate the class and style of the car or locomotive, in others they mean
+nothing. When a car or a locomotive is nigh worn out its number passes
+from it and is given to some newcomer. The old servant has a neatly
+painted "X" placed before its number. That "X" is its death warrant. In a
+little time it leads the way to the scrap heap.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the
+line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of
+large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other
+railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns
+are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel,
+a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least
+foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad
+man sees at one time or another. It may not always be possible to trace
+the responsibility for such an accident. But there is a responsibility,
+and the men who work at forge or lathe, at press or planer feel that it is
+there. They form no mean brigade of this great industrial army of America.
+
+Such responsibility continues outside of the main shops to the smaller
+shops, down to the roundhouse forces, by whose care and vigilance the big
+locomotives are kept fitted for their important work; down still farther
+to the car-inspectors, who, blue signal-lights in hand, creep through the
+long freight-yards of a winter's night to strike the flaw in the metal, to
+sound the note of alarm before the worst may come to pass. Some of these
+last you hear in the night as you scurry across the country. As you rest
+in your berth, and the express is changing engines at some division point,
+you may hear the car inspectors coming along the train, striking with
+their hammers against the wheels, listening intently for the false ring
+by which they may detect trouble. If you trouble yourself to lift the
+curtain of your berth, you may see them, a grimy crew, working busily with
+their hammers, thrusting their torches in among the trucks to see that all
+is well.
+
+Responsibility for the safety in railroad operation does not cease at the
+doors of the mechanical department.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE RAILROAD MARINE
+
+ STEAMSHIP LINES UNDER RAILROAD CONTROL--FLEET OF NEW YORK CENTRAL--
+ TUGS--RAILROAD CONNECTIONS AT NEW YORK HARBOR--HANDLING OF FREIGHT--
+ FERRY-BOATS--TUNNEL UNDER DETROIT RIVER--CAR-FERRIES AND LAKE ROUTES--
+ GREAT LAKES STEAMSHIP LINES UNDER RAILROAD OWNERSHIP.
+
+
+In the beginning land transportation must have looked up in something
+resembling fear and awe to water. We can picture the railroad of the
+thirties as a slender but resourceful David facing the veritable Goliath
+of water carriage. In earlier chapters of this book we have shown how the
+canals, representing a distinct phase of water transportation, sought to
+throttle the railroads at the beginning. But the modern railroad has no
+fear of water rivalries, either upon the coast or inland. Just as the
+first railroads were ofttimes timidly built as feeders or complements to
+water routes, so to-day almost every inland water route is part of a
+railroad--in operating fact if not in actual ownership. The tables have
+been turned--the railroad finally dominates. Nine-tenths of all the great
+water routes in and aroundabout the United States are more or less
+directly owned and controlled by the railroads. They have become, in every
+sense, corollaries to land transportation.
+
+This is more distinctly shown in some sections of the land than in others.
+For instance, up in New England, where the interests owning the New York,
+New Haven & Hartford Railroad have accomplished direct or indirect control
+of all but a comparatively few miles of the steam and electric railroads
+in five great States, they have also acquired the steamship interests of
+that district. The New Haven's original excursion into the steamboat
+business was when it absorbed the Old Colony Railroad--almost a score of
+years ago--in order to ensure its entrance into Boston. The Old Colony
+owned a well-famed and highly prosperous steamboat line from Fall River,
+Massachusetts, to New York City, part of its through New York-Boston
+route. Eventually the New Haven acquired all the brisk and busy steamboat
+lines which ran up the Sound from New York to several Connecticut
+ports--Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, New London, and Stonington. Any
+one of these lines was not, perhaps, so much of an acquisition in itself,
+but all of them were potentials in a future rate situation that might
+arise. It was good executive management to have these potentials under
+firm control, and so the New Haven established water routes as a
+recognized factor of its business--under the separate corporation title of
+the New England Navigation Company. Once when a new company, under the
+mellifluous title of the Joy Line, sought to injure its coastwise business
+by establishing cut-rates from Providence to New York, the New Haven
+placed two of its older boats in a rival and lower-priced service, and, by
+means of its great resources, was able to bring the Joy Line into its
+fold. Later, when the Enterprise Line tried a like programme, the New
+Haven followed the same aggressive tactics and brought the Enterprise Line
+to bankruptcy. These things are mentioned here in no spirit of criticism.
+But they are the facts that make it impossible for really independent
+lines of steamboats to run between New York and Providence for any great
+length of time, despite ample docking facilities and a great free port at
+each of these cities.
+
+The Metropolitan Line tried to maintain an independent line between New
+York and Boston with the two finest steamers ever placed in coastwise
+service--the _Yale_ and the _Harvard_. One of these boats left each city
+at five o'clock in the afternoon and performed the ocean voyage of 330
+miles over the "outside route" in just fifteen hours--and with amazing
+regularity. But the New Haven Railroad found it to its interest to control
+the coasting lines around about New England, and so the _Yale_ and
+_Harvard_ were last winter banished to the Pacific coast.
+
+This is all part of the business of managing great railroad systems. For
+similar reasons the Pennsylvania Railroad found it advisable to bring a
+group of steamboat lines plying on Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries
+under its control, the Harriman lines to reach out and establish ownership
+of the lines plying up and down several thousand miles along the Pacific
+coast--these are but a few instances out of many. As yet no large American
+railroad has essayed to control a transatlantic line, although both the
+Hill and the Harriman properties are interested in the transpacific
+carrying business. The Canadian Pacific, however, has already
+well-established lines across both of the great oceans--making a
+continuous route under one management from Liverpool, England, to Hong
+Kong, China. Moreover, it is now building four great steamships which are
+to be finished simultaneously with the Panama Canal and which will ply
+through it from New York direct to Hong Kong. The Canadian Northern has
+also recently embarked in the transatlantic carrying business. The
+Canadian Pacific and several of the large railroads of the northern part
+of the United States maintain lines of sizable gross tonnage on the Great
+Lakes--but of these, more in a little while.
+
+[Illustration: A MODERN RAILROAD FREIGHT AND PASSENGER TERMINAL: THE
+TERMINAL OF THE WEST SHORE RAILROAD AT WEEHAWKEN, OPPOSITE NEW YORK CITY]
+
+[Illustration: HIGH-SPEED, DIRECT-CURRENT PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY
+THE GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY FOR TERMINAL SERVICE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
+AT THE GRAND CENTRAL STATION]
+
+Even if a railroad is not engaged in the steamship business, as such, even
+to the extent of one or two small steamboats on inland waters, it may
+still possess a considerable harbor fleet,--wharves, and slips--that,
+taken together, make a sizable aggregate. Every railroad that has any sort
+of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or
+two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will
+protect itself by having its own wharves and landing-stages--even grain
+elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic
+in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation
+routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet--ferries, scows,
+lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. It means that the
+railroad must pay attention to marine laws and marine customs.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When a railroad boasts of a terminal in such a city as Boston, New York,
+Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco, its fleet of harbor craft is apt
+to be quite a sizable navy. Take, for instance, the New York Central's
+fleet in and around New York harbor. It consists of 269 vessels, divided
+into the following classes: 9 ferry-boats, 22 tugs, 7 steam-lighters, 50
+car-floats, 10 steam-hoist barges, 25 open barges, 6 scow barges, 105
+covered barges, and 35 grain-boats. And out of all these barges, 10 are
+further equipped for refrigerator use.
+
+In such a fleet, eliminating of course the ferry-boats which have their
+own peculiar uses, the tugs are almost the sole motive power. There is a
+bit of poetry about them, too, even if they are short and stubby, ofttimes
+poking their cushioned noses impertinently up against larger and far more
+stately craft. But no captain, even though he walk the bridge of an
+eight-hundred foot steamship, sneers at a tug. It takes eighteen of them
+to place the new giant _Olympic_ in her wharf on the North River, and no
+crack company of horsemen ever moved in more precise drill or better
+coöperation than these noisy, punting, helping-hands of the harbor of New
+York. For ocean ports are different from those along the lakes. A captain
+sailing a five-thousand ton ship on fresh water would be ashamed to use a
+tug at Detroit, or any other of the Great Lake ports, even where the
+current runs almost like a mill-race, unless he was turning in a channel
+whose width was but a wee bit more than the length of his ship. But
+Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and Chicago do not have the tides--and
+it is the tide that makes harbor navigation a finely specialized science
+at the big ocean ports.
+
+All of the big Atlantic ports save New York have abundant track facilities
+alongside the piers, where berth the ships from half the world over. In
+New York, the same geographical conditions that have gone to make her so
+superb a port and given her so generous a harbor-frontage have blocked the
+railroads in their efforts to reach all her piers with unbroken rails. So
+the railroads entering that harbor have found it necessary to provide
+themselves with such fleets as we have noticed as belonging to the New
+York Central. For inland shippers seem to have a preference for sending
+their east-bound export merchandise through New York, because of the
+frequency of sailings from her wharves to half the recognized ports of the
+world.
+
+If you are a manufacturer--at Utica, N. Y., let us say--and you wished to
+send a carload of your product to London, Eng., you would find that the
+railroad definitely agrees to do certain things for you. On your minimum
+basis of a carload lot it will place that carload at any pier in the
+harbor of New York. Indeed, it would do a little more. If some of that
+carload lot that starts down out of Utica is going to London, some more on
+a different ship to Calcutta, and still some more on a tropic-bound liner
+to South America, the railroad would make free delivery of your
+consignment to the piers of these three ships. It limits, however, the
+delivery of a carload lot to three different piers.
+
+This sounds simple, perhaps, and, in reality, is not. For in a single day
+of twenty-four hours there may arrive at Weehawken and Sixtieth Street,
+Manhattan--the two great freight terminals of the rails of the New York
+Central system at New York--from four to six hundred, eight hundred cars,
+perhaps, filled with merchandise bound for half a hundred different
+piers, along from forty to sixty miles of water-front.
+
+Now you see the use of all this army of lighters and barges--stubby-nosed
+craft, awkward craft, boats that have not even a single stanza of the
+poetry of the sea written upon their contents. By night, by day, when an
+imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it
+tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter,
+when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive
+with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot's path is
+fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of
+mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. The
+eight or ten great railroads that terminate in New York are pouring export
+merchandise to all of her piers, while from those long sprawling
+structures they are drawing up imported goods to go forward to every
+corner of the land. And in addition to this there is the vast local
+commerce of the City of New York, which, as we saw when we were
+considering the freight terminals, back in Chapter VII, is no slight
+matter of itself. But this traffic, as well as much of that of the great
+interchange between the railroads terminating at New York, is handled most
+effectively by the car-floats on each of which twelve to sixteen standard
+box-cars may be loaded with great expedition.
+
+But the clumsy barges and the lighters and the still clumsier car-floats
+are of little use without the tugs, and these last are the quick couriers
+of the harbor. Twenty of that New York Central fleet are kept in constant
+use in the North and East Rivers, and along the harbor shores to Jersey
+City, Bayonne, and the southern parts of Brooklyn. They do not lie idle,
+save when they are finally forced to "lay up" for a little time for
+repairs. And then a reserve tug is in service without delay.
+
+Here is the modern economy of railroad equipment--even though this be the
+part of the railroad that is afloat. A tug pulls up to a dock, its crews
+are off almost before their "relief" is standing at its station, and
+making sure that the craft is in as good order as they left it. While the
+"relief" is finding its tired way toward home the tug is off again. Its
+work is constant. Its work is not easy. It does not seem to be systematic
+and yet it is--wonderfully systematic.
+
+For here and there about the harbor the captains of these N. Y. C. tugs
+get their orders--just as conductors of the trains upon the steel highways
+get their clearance cards and yellow tissues. A half-dozen stations give
+orders, and these are but the speaking stations of a single man who sits
+before a telephone switchboard close by a narrow street of down-town
+Manhattan and directs tug movements through the crowded harbor, just as
+easily as a despatcher moves extra freights over a crowded stretch of
+single-track line.
+
+The traffic runs flood-high and the station men gossip of the whispered
+complaints of the tug-crews, but the man at the switchboard only smiles. A
+traffic solicitor who plies his heartbreaking work on the floor of the
+near-by Produce Exchange comes over to him and says:
+
+"I've promised Smith & Russell delivery of ten cars of flour at Pier 32,
+East River, at seven o'clock to-morrow morning. We can't go back on them."
+
+The man at the switchboard does not lose that smooth-set smile, even
+though the loudly ticking clock, just above the plugs and cords, shows him
+that it is already six o'clock of the evening of a day when the harbor
+freight has run flood-high.
+
+"All right," he laughs, "Smith & Russell can count upon us."
+
+And the next moment he is ordering Tug Twenty-seven to go from the
+Sixtieth Street pier over to Weehawken to get that small mountain-range of
+flour-bags that the "huskies" have already begun to build on a
+pier-floor, alongside of a string of dusty, grimy cars that have bumped
+their way east from Minneapolis.
+
+Perhaps you are interested in the personality of Tug Twenty-seven. Take
+yourself away from the cool-witted despatcher and look down upon this
+craft--the queen of a railroad pet marine. She is as resplendent in her
+green and gold as any gentleman's yacht, and her crew even more proud of
+her. She stands in the water, a mere 110 feet long and 24-1/2 feet beam,
+but those wonderful shining engines in her heart can develop 1,200
+horse-power--as much as many steamboats of three times her size. Her
+watertube boilers can withstand a locomotive pressure of 185 pounds to the
+square inch, she has all the accoutrements of coast liners--steam steering
+gears and electric lights among them. No wonder that her captain waxes
+eloquent about her.
+
+Now ask him about what she can do. That he takes as personal achievement,
+and these harbor men are a bashful lot. Still, you can worm it out of him,
+and after a while you find that Tug Twenty-seven has just brought a
+punt-nosed car-float, with sixteen loaded cars upon her rails, around from
+Corlears Hook, through the press of shipping, and around the Battery where
+cross-tides battle against one another and against craft of all sorts, up
+to Weehawken "bridge" in forty minutes--which is not so very bad for a
+ten-mile run through a congested harbor.
+
+"Time counts," adds the captain. "If they had given me another twelve or
+fifteen minutes I could have brought around two of the floats--put
+together 'V' fashion and the Twenty-seven with her nose stuck up into the
+'V'."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In the harbor of New York is a great cluster of ferry-boats operated to
+overcome her barrier rivers by the several trunk-line railroads whose
+systems terminate at a long water-jump from the congested Island of
+Manhattan. To compete with railroads boasting terminals on Manhattan
+Island itself, these lines have been compelled to equip and operate
+extensive ferry fleets across both the East and the North Rivers. Across
+the first of these streams operates the navy of the Long Island Railroad,
+while across the Hudson ply in an intricate interlacing more than a dozen
+ferry routes of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania,
+Erie, Lackawanna, and the West Shore Railroads. The recent completion of
+the New York-Jersey City-Newark routes of the Hudson tunnels, as well as
+the inauguration of passenger traffic through both North and East River
+tunnels to the new Pennsylvania terminal in Manhattan, has caused the
+abandonment of two ferry routes and curtailment of service upon several
+others. Tunnel-diggers and bridge-builders make havoc with ferry routes,
+which must always remain liable to many delays because of fog, floating
+ice, and such other adverse weather conditions.
+
+Still the railroad ferries round about New York derive no small income
+from the trucking service of a metropolitan city which has had to struggle
+for many years against great intersecting rivers, and so they will
+probably continue to be for many years interesting and picturesque
+features of New York harbor.
+
+But perhaps the most interesting of all the ferry routes of New York
+harbor is the attenuated line from the New York, New Haven & Hartford
+Railroad's waterside terminal at Port Morris in the Bronx, for ten miles
+through the East River, Hell Gate, around the sharp turn and tides of
+Corlears Hook and again of the Battery, and across the Hudson River to the
+old terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City. Over this route
+goes through traffic--freight and passenger--from New England to the South
+and the Southwest. The freight-traffic is handled largely by car-floats in
+charge of the busy puffing tugs, while the passenger traffic goes in
+ferry-boats different from the others that ply in New York harbor.
+
+For these ferry-boats are really nothing more than a bettered type of
+car-float--a type equipped with powerful engines for self-propulsion.
+Through passenger trains run each day and each night between Boston and
+Baltimore and Washington, and these trains are handled between Port Morris
+and Jersey City upon them. The familiar _Maryland_, which is operated
+jointly by the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems upon this route,
+will receive an entire passenger train of ordinary length, excepting, of
+course, the locomotive, upon her great deck, which is, in reality, a
+miniature railroad yard, equipped with two long parallel tracks that can
+be quickly attached to the ferry-bridges at Port Morris and Jersey City.
+The trip, with the loading and unloading of the train, is accomplished,
+under favorable weather conditions, in about an hour.
+
+It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England
+to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down
+a broad ship's deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New
+York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the
+run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to
+seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two
+greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. This
+ferry is also finally threatened by the bridge-builders. As this is
+written, workmen are already preparing the pier foundations for a great
+railroad bridge that is to span the East River not far from Hell Gate, and
+which is to give an unbroken line of rails from the New Haven's terminal
+at Port Morris, through Long Island City, to the Pennsylvania's tunnels
+and terminal in Manhattan Island.
+
+So, also, have the tunnel-builders contrived to rob the through traveller
+on the Michigan Central of the more or less thrilling water transfer from
+Canada to the United States at Detroit. The Detroit River tunnel has
+superseded one of the most important car-ferries in the country, but it
+has given to the operating heads of the Michigan Central one of the very
+shortest through routes from New York to Chicago and robbed them of one of
+the fearful handicaps of their main line--the possibilities for constant
+and exasperating delays to their through trains while being ferried across
+the Detroit River.
+
+Do not underestimate the possibilities of those delays. Within the past
+ten years, the transport _Michigan_, plying from Detroit to Windsor, the
+Canadian town directly opposite, and carrying a Chicago-Montreal flyer,
+was stuck for ten hours in the ice, so near the slip that a long plank
+would have almost reached from her deck to the wharf. That, in the lesser
+form, has been the history of winter after winter at the Detroit ferry.
+Shipbuilders have done their best to meet the obstacle by building
+car-ferries of tremendous power, sometimes even equipping them with both
+side-wheels and screws. But the real problem of possible delay can only be
+solved there by tunnels, and it is expected that the Grand Trunk, the
+Canadian Pacific, and the Wabash--which still use the car-ferries across
+the Detroit River--will sooner or later either tunnel beneath it or
+acquire trackage rights through the Michigan Central tubes.
+
+The Detroit River is a narrow but important part of the tremendously
+important water highway up the Great Lakes, and at every part of the whole
+length of that highway the railroads have tried to break their way across.
+It has not been found impossible to bridge the St. Lawrence or the Niagara
+Rivers or the wide straits at Sault Ste. Marie, but there are other
+points, even besides Detroit, that have as yet baffled the genius of the
+bridge-builder. One of the most important of these is where Lake Michigan
+forces its outlet into Lake Huron through the two peninsulas of the great
+State that bears its name. To make the two parts of Michigan physically
+one with unbroken rail will probably not be accomplished in many years.
+In the meantime the stout and tremendously powerful ferry _Algomah_--built
+so as to literally crush the ice down under her tremendous bows--plies
+between Mackinac City, the Island of Mackinac, situated midstream, and St.
+Ignace, on the north shore of the broad strait. Despite the fearful
+severity of the winters in northern Michigan the _Algomah_ keeps that
+important path open the year round--not only for herself but for the great
+car-floats that follow in her wake.
+
+What is possible at the Straits of Mackinac is also possible across the
+widest part of any one of the Great Lakes--excepting always the
+emotionless Superior. At least that is the way the railroad traffic men
+have argued for many years, and so for these many years car-ferries have
+plied successfully across the very hearts of three of the lakes. Of all
+the chain, Lake Michigan offers the greatest natural obstruction to the
+natural traffic movements of the land--its great length, stretching north
+and south, forming an obstacle to through rail movements, and contributing
+not a little to the railroad importance and the wealth of Chicago.
+
+So it was that car-ferries were established many years ago across Lake
+Michigan and are operated throughout the lake to-day--from Manitowoc,
+Kewaunee, Milwaukee, Menominee, and Manistique on the west shore of the
+lake, to Frankfort, Ludington, Northport, Grand Haven, St. Joseph, and
+Benton Harbor upon the east shore. These vessels are of different
+construction from the ferries that cross the narrow Detroit River. They
+lack the low freeboard and the other typical ferry construction, and are,
+instead, deep-gulled vessels, generally built of steel and always of great
+structural strength.
+
+"Like the river ferries," says James C. Mills, "they are ice-crushers, but
+of greater size and power. During two or three of the winter months the
+lakes are frozen in a solid sheet of ice for twenty and thirty miles from
+the shores, and in extremely severe winters the ice-fields meet in
+mid-lake. To keep a channel open in the depth of winter even for daily
+passages back and forth, is a hazardous undertaking for the hardy
+mariners. The frequent gales which sweep the lakes break up the fields
+into ice-floes which, driven one way or another with great force, pile up
+in huge banks, often in the direct course of the transports and as high as
+their upper decks. At such times they free themselves only after repeated
+buckings of the shifting mass of ice, sometimes miles in extent, by
+running their stout prows up on the edge of the mass, breaking it down by
+their sheer weight, and ploughing through the ragged, grinding blocks of
+ice thus formed."[1]
+
+ [1] "Our Inland Seas," by James C. Mills, 1910.
+
+Four tracks, running the full length of the ship, generally fill the main
+deck of these trans-lake ships. The loading of the cars on to these tracks
+is accomplished at the stern, the bow being built high and, as we have
+just seen, somewhat after the fashion of an overhanging prow. The main
+deck is completely roofed over with cabins and deck-houses, so that,
+viewed from the rear, the ship seems to be an itinerant pair of railroad
+tunnels, dark and gloomy. The upper decks are gay with the resources of
+the marine architect--for the greater part of these boats offer
+accommodations for passengers as well as for from eighteen to thirty
+freight cars. These great ferries form valuable feeders to the Grand
+Trunk, the Pere Marquette, the Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids & Indiana, and
+some minor routes crossing Michigan.
+
+Similarly, car-ferries crossing Lake Erie from Cleveland to Port Stanley
+are considerable factors both in general merchandise and in the coal
+trade. Another Lake Erie route of heavy tonnage extends from Ashtabula,
+Ohio, to Port Burwell, Ontario. Within the last few years a car-ferry has
+been established across Lake Ontario, from Charlotte--which is the port of
+Rochester, N. Y.--to Coburg on the Canadian side, which has already
+developed for itself a considerable traffic.
+
+But the car-ferries, extensive as they are, form but a small portion of
+the railroad interests upon the waters of the Great Lakes. Almost all of
+the great lines through those much-travelled waters are the property of
+some railroad system whose rails touch one or more of their terminals.
+Thus the Northern Steamship Company, running from Buffalo to Chicago and
+Duluth, touches the rails of its parent company, the Great Northern
+Railroad, at this last port. The Erie & Western Transportation
+Company--popularly known as the Anchor Line--also running from Buffalo to
+Duluth, is a Pennsylvania property. Both of these lines are operated for
+passenger service, as well as freight. The New York Central and the Erie
+cover the same territory with exclusively freight routes. The Rutland
+Railroad has a line all the way from its western terminal at Ogdensburg,
+on the St. Lawrence River, to Chicago. The Canadian Pacific and the Grand
+Trunk operate important lines through Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. Even
+a small road, like the Algomah Central, has its own freight and passenger
+steamboats running south from the Soo as far as Cleveland, Ohio. It is a
+pretty poor line with Great Lakes terminals that cannot boast some sort of
+steamship service of its own.
+
+In the development of the coastwise and the inland waterways of the United
+States, the railroad may be doing the nation a far greater service than it
+imagines. For the general trend of railroad expansion in the country
+to-day seems to be toward a development of the auxiliary water-routes
+rather than toward their curtailment. The railroad has finally realized
+that some coarse commodities can be carried far more economically by water
+than by rail. It is to-day seeking to avail itself of that acquired
+knowledge. If competing and feeding trolley lines are good things for
+railroads to own--and the present-day judgment seems to be that they
+are--the same rule holds doubly good in regard to both competing and
+feeding water-routes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH THE MEN
+
+ THE FIRST ORGANIZED BRANCH OF THE RAILROAD Y. M. C. A.--CORNELIUS
+ VANDERBILT'S GIFT OF A CLUB-HOUSE--GROWTH OF THE RAILROAD Y. M. C.
+ A.--PLANS BY THE RAILWAYS TO CARE FOR THE SICK AND THE CRIPPLED--THE
+ PENSION SYSTEM--ENTERTAINMENTS--MODEL RESTAURANTS--FREE LEGAL
+ ADVICE--EMPLOYEES' MAGAZINES--THE ORDER OF THE RED SPOT.
+
+
+The historic gray Union Station, which still stands at Cleveland, housed
+what was destined to be the very first systematic effort of the railroad
+to get in touch and keep in touch with its men. In that building, once new
+and splendid, but now old and grimy, George Meyers, the depot master,
+gathered a group of railroaders on a Sunday away back in 1870. The man
+came again on a second Sunday, still again on a third; after a little
+while those Sunday afternoon gatherings became habitual, and a new kink in
+all the intricacy of railroading was established. The meetings were partly
+religious and partly social, and eventually they led to a distinct
+innovation in that depot.
+
+This little conference of Meyers was, in 1872, developed into the first
+organized branch of the railroad Young Men's Christian Association.
+General John H. Devereux, the general manager of the Lake Shore & Michigan
+Southern Railway; Reuben F. Smith, of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad,
+and Oscar Townsend of the Big Four Railroad were chosen directors of the
+branch. Henry W. Stage, a train-despatcher on the Lake Shore, was
+earnestly and intensely enthusiastic in this work; and because of his zeal
+and enthusiasm, together with that of George Meyers, this branch was
+successful from the outset.
+
+The Lake Shore Railroad, whose headquarters were in that same Union Depot
+at Cleveland then was and still is a pet property of the Vanderbilt
+family, also owners of the great New York Central system. The heads of
+that family began watching the Cleveland experiment with unusual interest.
+The reports that came from them were unusual. That scheme of the depot
+master's seemed to be making a better grade of railroader in and around
+Cleveland, and any institution that bettered the type of railroaders
+interested the Vanderbilts. So the thing that Meyers had founded soon had
+wealthy patrons and strong friends.
+
+The Vanderbilts kept their shoulders to the wheels of the railroad Y. M.
+C. A., kept it out of the ruts and from falling. They saw it introduced
+here and introduced there on their group of railroads; saw it spread to
+other lines; and finally, Cornelius Vanderbilt himself built a splendid
+club-house for railroad men at the great terminal of his road in New York
+City and turned it over to the management of the railroad Y. M. C. A. That
+house, standing almost in the shade of the Grand Central Station, after a
+quarter of a century, still ranks as one of the distinctly fine club-homes
+of a city that is opulent in club-houses. It is still dedicated to
+simplicity, to democracy, to decency, and to good fellowship.
+
+There is not a railroader coming into the big passenger terminal--from
+either the New York Central or the New Haven system--who is not welcome to
+it, day or night. Engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen all come into
+its hospitable door after a long hard run to find the clean comfort of
+good meals, bath, comfortable beds, good fellowship awaiting them. There
+is the peculiar and the successful field of the railroad Y. M. C. A.;
+perhaps as much as any, the real reason for its pronounced success.
+
+Few railroaders in train service can leave their homes in the morning,
+"double their runs," and be home at night. The hard part of the business
+is that in most cases a man will have to spend one night, occasionally
+two nights, out on the run. The difficulties of this are not readily
+understood without a slight examination. In a large city the railroader
+finds that it is a shabby sort of a hotel or lodging-house that can come
+regularly within his scheme of economy. When he strikes the little town,
+or frequently the big terminal or division freight-yard around which is no
+town at all, the problem only multiplies. J. M. Burwick, a veteran
+conductor of the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad, told that problem in his
+own sincere way last year at a big dinner of railroad men in St. Louis.
+
+"I left home a beautiful morning in '72," said Mr. Burwick. "I went down
+to Lafayette and to my first boarding-house; and up to that time I don't
+think any railroad man ever found a boarding-house except it was tied up
+to a saloon. I was in a place like that. Another place I was running into
+was where they made a division point in a corn-field. The company built a
+large building for the benefit of the men, and then they rented it to be
+run as a hotel. But the man in charge ran it to make money, and the steak
+he cut with his razor. I know he did, because it was so thin. At other
+places we had to sleep in a hot yard, in a hot caboose not fit for a man
+to try and sleep in; and then we had to stay awake on the road that
+night."
+
+That was Burwick's testimony as to the conditions just before the coming
+of the railroad Y. M. C. A. An engineer from the New York Central, a man
+who had slept many nights in that comfortable club-house at the Grand
+Central, went up into Canada a few years ago and took an engine on a
+division running out of Kenora. The only place that a railroad man could
+find board and lodging in that town at that time was a boarding-house with
+the saloon attachment, and he was welcome there for but a limited time,
+unless he was a reasonably liberal patron of the saloon. The engineer--his
+name is McCrea--changed that order of things and established a branch
+of the railroad Y. M. C. A., which in four years gained 300 members and
+threatened to close the saloons of the place.
+
+[Illustration: THIS IS WHAT NEW YORK CENTRAL MCCREA DID FOR THE MEN OF THE
+CANADIAN PACIFIC UP AT KENORA]
+
+[Illustration: A CLUBHOUSE BUILT BY THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC FOR ITS MEN AT
+ROSEVILLE, CALIFORNIA]
+
+[Illustration: THE B. & O. BOYS ENJOYING THE RAILROAD Y. M. C. A., CHICAGO
+JUNCTION]
+
+[Illustration: "THE BROOKLYN RAPID TRANSIT COMPANY HAS ORGANIZED A BRASS
+BAND FOR ITS EMPLOYEES"]
+
+Now you get the reason for the welcome that the railroad-owners gave this
+work of the Y. M. C. A. It was not the religious idea alone--men differ in
+their views of that sort of thing--but one of the most stringent of all
+railroad rules is that prohibiting the use of liquor by the men, or their
+frequenting bar-rooms. The necessity of that rule appears upon the face of
+it. But the Canadian railroad could do little toward enforcing it in a
+place like Kenora, before McCrea, of the New York Central, arrived there.
+The railroad Y. M. C. A., with its comfortable housing facilities, its
+vigorous stand for better morals and better men, has made that rule one of
+the easiest in the book to be strictly observed. That is why the
+railroad-owners and the railroad heads, whose religious views have
+sometimes been at variance with those of the Y. M. C. A., have given
+hearty endorsement to its work along their lines. They like the sort of
+man it finishes.
+
+So the railroad Y. M. C. A. has grown. It now has some 240 branches
+reaching from Hawaii, in the West, to some important division points in
+Eastern Maine. None of these have houses that can be compared, of course,
+with the comfortable home at the Grand Central Station in New York. In
+fact, some of them are still housed in crude fashion, in an abandoned shed
+or depot that some railroad has fitted up as a start in the work, over
+some store or freight-house perhaps; but each year sees these replaced by
+neat homes, such as those at Harrisburgh, on the Pennsylvania; at
+Collinwood, O., on the Lake Shore; at Baltimore, on the B. & O.; at the
+St. Louis Union Station, and the Williamson, W. Va., on the Norfolk and
+Western Railway. On a single system--the New York Central--there are 38
+associations, with 27 buildings built for the purpose and valued at
+$700,000, and a very active membership of 12,799 railroaders. In the
+national organization membership there are more than 85,000 men,
+representing every department of the railroad service. An average of
+15,500 meals--and mighty good reasonably priced meals they are, too--is
+served daily, while more than 50,000 railroaders come to the club-houses
+each twenty-four hours.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Beyond the necessity for maintaining the moral fibre of the railroader
+(and it is astonishing how little maintenance such a corps needs) is the
+decent necessity of taking care of him in case of illness. Railroading,
+with all the safety devices that have multiplied in its service within the
+past quarter of a century, is still a hazardous occupation to the men who
+are out upon the line. The list of cripples, and the death-list of a
+twelvemonth, are still appalling things--appalling in the aggregate,
+fearful in any single concrete case, a case where there may be a helpless
+wife and little children to be brought into the reckoning.
+
+The railroads have begun to shoulder their responsibility in this matter.
+Legislation has helped in the matter but to-day big carriers are preparing
+to do even more--to pay premiums and carry some form of casualty insurance
+on each of their employees, who may be engaged in a hazardous part of the
+work. That thing is going to do more than any other one thing possibly
+could do. When a big railroad realizes that its bill for premiums is going
+to be reduced by the addition of many simple protective devices, those
+devices are going to be instantly adopted. That is the way of railroads,
+and of business, although it is not to be charged for a single moment that
+the American railroads have not done much within the past 25 years toward
+raising the margin of safety for their employees.
+
+Of course, the railroaders have long since had their insurance, although
+the regular life companies look upon them with distrust as risks. They
+have been forced either to pay high premiums in the regular companies or
+else to organize insurance of their own. Their brotherhoods have carried
+forth this work with interest and with skill. These brotherhoods, or
+unions, of the locomotive engineers, the firemen, the conductors, the
+trainmen, and several other branches of the service, have been mighty
+agents, too, in the development of the moral fibre of the American
+railroader. Lack of space prevents a consideration of each in detail. To
+do them but simple justice, to sing the epic of the mighty Brotherhood of
+Locomotive Engineers, for instance (which has only recently finished a
+great building of its own in Cleveland), would require a volume for
+itself.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+But the railroads have not been negligent in this matter. For instance, a
+man on the Baltimore & Ohio can pay $1.00 a month out of his pay envelope
+and have $1,000.00 life insurance. He can likewise pay $3.00 a month, and
+$3,000.00 will be paid his heirs upon his death. The railroad company
+stands back of this fund and guarantees the insurance. It makes good from
+its own treasury any deficit or shortage that might be incurred in its
+operation.
+
+For twenty years the Pennsylvania has conducted a similar work, under the
+title of the Voluntary Relief Department. Membership in this is, as the
+name indicates, purely voluntary, the road's employees being admitted,
+after favorable physical examination, up to the age of 45 years and 6
+months. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company in this instance also stands as
+guarantor of the insurance fund.
+
+A close examination of it in some detail may interest. The following table
+shows the detail--the five classes into which employees may enter:
+
+ 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
+ Class Class Class Class Class
+ Monthly pay Any $35 or $55 or $75 or $95 or
+ rate more more more more
+
+ Contributions per month:
+ Class $0.75 $1.50 $2.25 $3.00 $3.75
+
+ Additional Death Benefit,
+ equal death benefits of
+ class:
+ Taken at not over 45 years
+ of age .30 .60 .90 1.20 1.50
+ Taken at over 45 years
+ and not over 60 years
+ of age .45 .90 1.35 1.80 2.25
+ Taken at over 60 years of
+ age .60 1.20 1.80 2.40 3.00
+
+ Disablement benefits per
+ day, including Sundays
+ and holidays:
+ Accident:
+ First 52 weeks .50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50
+ After 52 weeks .25 .50 .75 1.00 1.25
+
+ Sickness:
+ After first three days and
+ not longer than 52
+ weeks .40 .80 1.20 1.60 2.00
+ After 52 weeks .20 .40 .60 .80 1.00
+
+ Death Benefits:
+ For Class 250.00 500.00 750.00 1000.00 1250.00
+ Additional that may be
+ taken 250.00 500.00 750.00 1000.00 1250.00
+
+An employee, however, who is under forty-five years of age, who has been
+five years in the service and a member of the relief fund for one year,
+may enter any higher class than that determined by his pay, upon passing
+satisfactory physical examination.
+
+Payments from the fund vary from forty cents per day for sickness and
+fifty cents for accident in the service, for members in the first class,
+to $2.00 per day for sickness and $2.50 for accident with a death benefit
+of from $250.00 to $2,500.00, according to class of membership and death
+benefit held.
+
+Since the fund has been in operation, the following payments have been
+made, to December 31, 1909, inclusive:--
+
+ For Accident death benefits $2,185,343.40
+ Sickness death benefits 5,914,811.18
+ Accident disablement benefits 4,076,636.89
+ Sickness disablement benefits 7,855,069.73
+ Superannuation allowances 415,367.55
+ Operating expenses 3,207,131.06
+ ---------------
+ Total $23,654,359.81
+
+During the same period, the Pennsylvania has contributed to the fund in
+operating expenses, gratuities, etc., exclusive of interest, the
+following:
+
+ For Operating expenses $3,207,131.06
+ Special payment, etc. 424,571.91
+ For deficiencies 733,913.89
+ --------------
+ Total $4,365,616.86
+
+In addition to what the Pennsylvania is doing in the payment of the
+pensions and contributions for the maintenance of the relief fund, the
+relief and pension departments have the use of the telegraph and the train
+service free of charge; and in case of accident in the service to
+employees, free surgical and hospital attendance is furnished, and, where
+necessary, artificial limbs or other appliances, without cost to the
+employee. No figures are available as to the cost of surgical attendance,
+or the furnishing of artificial limbs, but it is conservatively estimated
+by the Pennsylvania officers as equalling the amount paid for the
+operation of the relief department.
+
+The modern railroad does not wait, however, for a man to become injured or
+to die before assuming any responsibility for his care. There may come a
+day when the burden of years makes him a little less fit for the strenuous
+service of railroading. It is Nature's way of telling man that he has
+labored well and that he is entitled to a rest. In other days, the
+railroad recognized this in a rather informal way. It took its veteran
+employees, retired them into a comfortable ease, and had the paymaster
+send them checks each month for a part of their old wages. Out of that
+custom the railroad pension system was born, only with this sharp
+distinction: In the old way the man was taught to believe his monthly
+check a favor or gratuity on the part of the railroad; under the pension
+system he comes to know it, not as an act of charity but as his right, a
+right earned by long hard years of faithful service.
+
+This idea has begun to be recognized as fundamental by railroad managers.
+Directors and officers now realize that the pension fund and some of these
+other features that we have just considered, are causes directly
+contributing to the efficiency of the railroad. The policy is merely one
+of good management. Again, let us see the way the Pennsylvania handles
+this matter, not because the Pennsylvania is alone in this thing, but
+rather because it is one of the largest and most distinctive of American
+railroads, and almost a pioneer in this work. Before it began paying
+pensions to retired employees, the Pennsylvania had already long conducted
+a relief fund and a savings fund, and had contributed to libraries and
+railroad branches of the Y. M. C. A.
+
+The pensions are paid entirely by the company. In the year 1909, for
+instance, $594,000 was paid out to the men who had retired between the
+ages of 65 and 70. From the time the fund was established until the end of
+1909, appropriations for it amounted to more than $4,000,000, now paid to
+some 2,300 men annually.
+
+Employees may retire for age at 70, or for physical incapacitation between
+65 and 69. If they have been in the service as long as 30 years, they are
+granted an allowance based on one per cent of the monthly wages for each
+year of service. The percentage is based on the wages received for the ten
+years preceding retirement.
+
+Thus, if an engineer, or a brakeman, or a fireman, has served the
+Pennsylvania 30 years, he may retire between 65 and 70 and receive not
+less than 30 per cent of his monthly wages during the last 10 years of
+work.
+
+The other railroads using the pension scheme have followed these general
+outlines for their work. It has become an established feature of railroad
+operation, and recently a second vice-president was created on the
+Baltimore & Ohio for the express purpose of handling the company's relief
+work. Sometimes the railroad organizes savings-funds for employees, paying
+from three and one-half to as high as five per cent on their deposits,
+limiting these to something like a hundred dollars a month, and making
+every agent on the system a depositary of the fund.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The street railroad systems in the large cities, together with a few of
+the larger interurban systems, have recently begun to adopt systematic
+methods of keeping in touch with their employees. The Brooklyn Rapid
+Transit Company, operating a great system in a part of metropolitan New
+York, and employing more than 15,000 men, was a pioneer in this work. It
+found that while the railroad Y. M. C. A. was efficient for the club-house
+work on steam railroads, there were local conditions in Brooklyn that made
+it best for the company to build and operate its own club-houses.
+
+The first of these was remodelled from an old car-barn. It became a very
+interesting club, with reading-rooms, baths, a barber-shop, a gymnasium,
+class-rooms for evening study, and a theatre, seating some 1,200 folk. For
+the theatre the railroad hires vaudeville actors, and gives its great
+semi-official family free entertainments--followed by dancing and
+refreshments. On very especial nights the talent is furnished entirely by
+the trolley-men and very effective talent it is, too. On all nights the
+music is furnished by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit band, made up entirely of
+street-car men and men from the elevated roads of the system. The railroad
+company has furnished the music, the uniforms, the instruments, and the
+directors--all that the men have had to furnish is their time and
+interest, and these they have furnished in such good measure that there is
+a waiting-list now large enough to equip a second full brass band.
+
+The Brooklyn system has also begun to establish model restaurants in its
+outlying barns, where clean and good food is furnished to the men at cost.
+The street railroad is, in some such cases as these, confronted with a
+steam railroad problem. Many of the big car-barns are in sparsely settled
+suburbs of the city where the only eating-places have been saloons or
+their adjuncts. The street railroad can no more afford to have its men in
+saloons, than its bigger brother. To take from them the one decent excuse
+for being in such places it is establishing its restaurants, where the men
+can have cleaner and better food than in the saloons, and without the risk
+to the railroad.
+
+The Brooklyn road and the other large systems have adopted the relief and
+pension funds; the idea seems to spread as rapidly among the electric as
+it did among the steam railroads. Some of them have added odd and
+efficient "kinks" of their own. For instance, the Boston Elevated Railway
+makes presents of gold at New Year's Day, ranging from $20 to $35 each, to
+each of its men who has a clean record for courtesy to patrons, and Boston
+gains a reputation through that for the uniform courtesy of her
+trolley-men. The Boston Elevated has also inaugurated a policy of giving
+free legal advice to each of its employees who may need it. It has always
+been a perquisite of high railroad officers to avail themselves of the
+road's legal department for their personal needs. Under the Boston plan
+this perquisite is extended to every man on the road--the young motorman
+who had foolishly gone to a loan shark, and who is now being harried by
+him; the old conductor who wishes to convey a house or draw a will. The
+road's legal department will advise him sincerely, in his own best
+interest. It will draw up his legal papers, do anything for him except
+take his case into court, and even then it will advise an honest and
+capable attorney for him. As for that motorman who went to the loan shark
+when he found an immediate need of fifty dollars, the road stands ready to
+advance him the money upon good cause, and will charge him only a nominal
+rate of interest until it has gradually repaid itself from his wages. His
+division superintendent is empowered to hear his story with sympathetic
+ear, and to arrange for the loan.
+
+Employees' magazines have been decided factors in both bringing and
+keeping the railroad in touch with its army of men. The Erie was a pioneer
+in this work five years ago; the plan has since been adopted with signal
+success by the Northwestern, the Illinois Central, the Santa Fe, the Pere
+Marquette, and some other lines. These little magazines, made interesting
+enough in a general way to catch and hold the attention of their readers,
+are sent out each month to every man on the system with his pay-check.
+
+They spread railroad interest and railroad enthusiasm among their readers.
+On one page they tell of styles for the engineer's wife, and on the next
+they show an economical use of coal for the engineer; and so they may help
+to pay their way. They tell of errors and mistakes among the railroad's
+employees, without mentioning names, so that men may profit by them and
+act differently. But they print the names of the railroaders who do the
+good things, the novel things, the practical things, the economical
+things, the heroic things, out along the line. And this roll of honor is a
+long one.
+
+But it is not always in the big things that a railroad keeps in touch with
+its men, sometimes it is in very small things. Some time ago, a division
+superintendent on the Erie Railroad decided that for each of his engineers
+who kept his engine in particularly good order for a given length of
+time, he would have the number plate on the front of the boiler painted in
+red. "We will have the Order of the Red Spot," laughed Superintendent
+Parsons, of the Susquehanna Division, as he signed a bulletin announcing
+the thing. Now that was a little thing. The cost of painting that red spot
+on the breast of some proud locomotive was but nominal; but listen to the
+result!
+
+A big Erie officer was up the line a few months later, and was loafing in
+a junction-town on the Susquehanna Division, waiting for a through train.
+He walked down to the end of the station platform and there stood a
+passenger locomotive waiting to take a train in the other direction. It
+belonged to the proud Order of the Red Spot, an order of which this
+particular officer had not heard; and the engineer was already about it
+with his long-handled oil-can. The officer did not reveal his identity,
+but said:
+
+"Waiting to take out a special?"
+
+The engineer did not look up, but said:
+
+"We carry forty-six over the division."
+
+"I didn't think that forty-six was due for two hours yet," said the
+railroad officer.
+
+"She is not," answered the engineer, "but I've been down here an hour and
+a half already fussing with this baby to have her in shape. You may notice
+that she belongs to the Order of the Red Spot."
+
+Then that particular man came to know about the Red Spots. All the way
+back to Jersey City he kept looking for Red Spots, and every time he saw
+one, he saw an engine slick and clean, as if she had just come from the
+shops. That set him to thinking; and after he was done thinking, Parsons
+was promoted in service, and the Order of the Red Spot was established for
+the system. There has been an exalted division made of that order
+recently. When a man can be assigned to one engine and he brings her into
+the Red-Spot class and keeps her there, the railroad dedicates that engine
+to him for the rest of his lifetime upon the system. His name, in gilt
+letters, goes upon the cab-panel of the engine, whereas in other days you
+used to see those of statesmen and of railroad-owners; and there it stays
+until the engine goes to the scrap-heap. The other day the first of these
+engines, drawing a Waldwick local, pulled into the Jersey City passenger
+terminal; on its cab was "Harvey Springstead" so large and clear that you
+could read it across the yard; in the cab-window was Harvey Springstead,
+prouder for that moment than any earthly prince or potentate.
+
+Sometimes the competitive idea is the best to foster to accomplish results
+from the men, and to bind them and the road a bit closer together. We have
+seen how a fortnight of "T. B. M. F." repairs to a locomotive has been
+quickened down under contest to 13 hours and 34 minutes. Many of the more
+successful railroads began some years ago to institute annual contests
+between their section-bosses. The section-boss who kept his stretch of the
+right-of-way in cleanest, trimmest shape for a twelvemonth got a black and
+gold sign at his hand-car house, so big that folk who rode in the fast
+expresses could read the honor that it conferred upon him. Sometimes he
+gets more--a trip pass for his wife and himself to some distant point, or
+even a cash prize. Annually the superintendent of maintenance may run a
+special train, with a specially devised observation grandstand at its rear
+or pushed ahead of the engine. On that grandstand sit all the section
+bosses and other track maintenance experts. They see the other fellow's
+sections--and their own; and some time on that trip there is a little
+dinner and the awarding of the prizes.
+
+Do not even dare to think that these things count for little upon the
+railroad. They are mighty factors in the maintenance of one of its very
+greatest factors, the human one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE COMING OF ELECTRICITY
+
+ ELECTRIC STREET CARS--SUBURBAN CARS--ELECTRIC THIRD-RAIL FROM UTICA TO
+ SYRACUSE--SOME RAILROADS PARTIALLY ADOPT ELECTRIC POWER--THE BENEFIT
+ OF ELECTRIC POWER IN TUNNELS--ALSO AT TERMINAL STATIONS--CONDITIONS
+ WHICH MAKE ELECTRIC TRACTION PRACTICAL AND ECONOMICAL--HOPEFUL OUTLOOK
+ FOR ELECTRIC TRACTION--THE MONORAIL AND THE GYROSCOPE CAR, INVENTED BY
+ LOUIS BRENNAN--A SIMILAR INVENTION BY AUGUST SCHERL.
+
+
+It is barely more than a quarter of a century since electricity first
+became practical for use as a motive power upon railroads. The early
+experiments of Thomas A. Edison at Menlo Park, N. J., and upon the now
+abandoned railroad up Mount McGregor, N. Y., soon gave way to real
+electric street railroads in Montgomery, Ala., in Richmond, Va., and from
+Brooklyn to Jamaica, N. Y. These, in turn, gave way to still better forms
+of electric traction, until the trolley has not only all but entirely
+driven the horse-car and the cable-car from city streets, but has
+performed a notable new transportation function in giving quick
+communication from one town to another in the well-settled portions of the
+country. These enterprises are quite outside of the province of this book;
+the cases where the electric locomotive and electric motor-car have
+usurped the steam locomotive upon its own rails are pertinent.
+
+As soon as the electric railroad had begun to reach out into the country
+from the sharp confines of the towns, the steam railroad men began to take
+interest. It would have been even better for them if some of them had
+taken sharper interest at the beginning. But the few men who were
+long-sighted enough a dozen years ago to see the development
+possibilities of a form of traction that was comparatively inexpensive to
+install and to operate have been repaid for their sagacity. These men
+began a dozen years ago to wonder if electricity could not be brought to
+the service of the long-established steam railroad.
+
+In most cases the short suburban steam roads outside of large cities,
+which were as apt to be operated by "dummy engines" as by standard
+locomotives, were the first to be electrified, and in these cases they
+usually became extensions of the then novel trolley lines. Folk no longer
+had to come in upon a poky little "dummy train" of uncertain schedule and
+decidedly uncertain habits, and then transfer at the edge of the crowded
+portion of the city to horse-cars. They could go flying from outer country
+to the heart of the town in half an hour, and upon frequent schedule, and
+the business of building and booming suburbs was born. After these roads
+had been developed, other steam lines began to study the situation. A
+little steam road that had wandered off into the hills of Columbia County
+from Hudson, N. Y., and had led a precarious existence, extended its rails
+a few more miles and became the third-rail electric line from Albany to
+Hudson, and a powerful competitor for passenger traffic of a large
+trunk-line railroad. The New York, New Haven, & Hartford found the
+electric third-rail of good service between two adjacent Connecticut
+cities, Hartford and New Britain; the overhead trolley a good substitute
+for the locomotive on a small branch that ran a few miles north from
+Stamford, Conn.
+
+But the problems of electric traction for regular railroads were somewhat
+complicated, and the big steam roads rather avoided them until they were
+forced upon their attention. The interurban roads had spread too rapidly
+in many, many cases, where they were made the opportunities for such
+precarious financing as once distinguished the history of steam roads--and
+they had in most of these cases made havoc with thickly settled stretches
+of branch lines and main lines. In a great many cases the steam roads
+have had to dig deep into their pockets and buy at good stiff prices the
+very roads the building of which they might have anticipated with just a
+little forethought.
+
+The New York Central & Hudson River took such forethought after some of
+its profitable branches in western New York had been paralleled by
+high-speed trolleys, and a very few years ago installed the electric
+third-rail on its West Shore property from Utica to Syracuse, 44 miles.
+The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading.
+Built in the early eighties from Weehawken (opposite New York City) to
+Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely the
+New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of
+the fine business it had held for many years. After bitter rate-war, the
+New York Central, with all the resources and the ability of the
+Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively, and bought its new rival for a
+song. But a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been
+practically useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a
+relief line for the overflow of through freight.
+
+So the West Shore tracks for high-class high-speed through electric
+service from Utica to Syracuse was a happy thought. Under steam conditions
+only two passenger trains were run over that somewhat moribund property in
+each direction daily, while the two trains of sleeping-cars passing over
+the tracks at night were of practically no use to the residents of those
+two cities. Under electric conditions, there is a fast limited service of
+third-rail cars or trains, leaving each terminal hourly; making but two
+stops and the run of over 44 miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is
+also high-speed local service, and the line has become immensely popular.
+By laying stretches of third and fourth tracks at various points, the
+movement of the New York Central's overflow through freight has not been
+seriously incommoded. The electric passenger service is not operated by
+the New York Central, but by the Oneida Railways Company, in which the
+controlling interests of the steam road have large blocks of stock.
+
+[Illustration: A HIGH-SPEED ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE ON THE PENNSYLVANIA
+BRINGING A THROUGH TRAIN OUT OF THE TUNNEL UNDERNEATH THE HUDSON RIVER AND
+INTO THE NEW YORK CITY TERMINAL]
+
+[Illustration: HIGH-SPEED DIRECT-CURRENT LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE
+WESTINGHOUSE COMPANY FOR THE TERMINAL SERVICE OF THE PENNSYLVANIA
+RAILROAD, IN NEW YORK]
+
+[Illustration: TWO TRIPLE-PHASE LOCOMOTIVES OF THE GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY
+HELPING A DOUBLE-HEADER STEAM TRAIN UP THE GRADE INTO THE CASCADE TUNNEL]
+
+[Illustration: THE OUTER SHELL OF THE NEW HAVEN'S FREIGHT LOCOMOTIVE
+REMOVED, SHOWING THE WORKING PARTS OF THE MACHINE]
+
+Similarly, the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system,
+running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street railroad
+system, although reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of
+Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system, and now
+operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch.
+
+Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas, and
+decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger
+service than to rent its branches again to an outside company; and perhaps
+because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of
+suburban lines around New York, and wished to test electric traction to
+its own satisfaction; but five years ago it changed the suburban service
+of its lines from the south up into Rochester from steam to electric.
+
+It is now preparing to continue this work further. The Pennsylvania, while
+its great new station in New York was still a matter of engineer's blue
+prints, began practical experiments with electric traction in the flat
+southern portion of New Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally
+situated in every respect for such experiments, its original and rather
+indirect route from Canada to Atlantic City, which had since been more or
+less superseded by a shorter "air line" route. The third-rail was
+installed, and the new line became at once popular for suburban traffic in
+and out of Philadelphia and for the great press of local traffic between
+Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Of the success of that move on the part of
+the Pennsylvania there has never been the slightest question. Regular
+trains have been operated for several years over this route at 60 miles
+an hour, and not the slightest difficulty has been found in maintaining
+the schedules.
+
+But nowhere has the substitution of electric locomotive for the steam
+worked greater comfort for the railroad passenger--to say nothing, of the
+raising of that somewhat intangible factor of safety--than in long
+tunnels. The Baltimore & Ohio, which was a pioneer among the steam
+railroads in the use of electric locomotives, began to use them in 1896 in
+its great tunnel that pierces the very foundations of the city of
+Baltimore. That system, once adopted, became permanent. What was at one
+time a fearful summer experience between Camden Station and Mount Royal
+Station in that city has become merely a pleasant novelty upon the trip.
+
+What could be done at Baltimore has been done under the Detroit River,
+twice. The Grand Trunk pierced underneath that stream in 1890, by a
+single-track tunnel 6,000 feet in length, in which for seventeen years
+both freight and passenger trains were hauled by special locomotives,
+fitted for the burning of anthracite coal. Although these engines rendered
+rather satisfactory service, it was found desirable to substitute electric
+locomotives for them in order to remove the limitations of haulage
+capacity in the tunnel; for it is a known fact that electric trains can be
+operated much more rapidly and also more closely together than steam. The
+change obviated the danger and inconvenience due to locomotive gases in
+the tunnel. The electric locomotives first went into service in February,
+1908. The tunnel is now clean, well-lighted, and safe to work in; and
+trains of much greater length than before can be hauled, thus relieving
+the congestion in the freight-yards on both sides of the river.
+
+Similarly, electric locomotives have become the tractive power in the
+great new tunnel which the Michigan Central has just completed across the
+Detroit River at Detroit, and upon the Cascade Tunnel where the Great
+Northern Railroad pierces one of the great ranges of the Western Divide.
+The Cascade Tunnel is interesting from the fact that it is entirely built
+upon a heavy grade of 1.7 per cent for its length of more than three
+miles. The steam locomotives are cut out from the service, while on the
+heavy up-grade of the tunnels an electric locomotive, of tremendous
+pulling power, will carry even the heaviest freights through the bore at
+an average speed of fifteen miles an hour. These Cascade Tunnel
+locomotives are the only ones in the country taking alternating current at
+triple phase and at the tremendous voltage of 6,600 directly from an
+overhead trolley wire. And that will bring us in a moment to another
+consideration of this question of the development and the delivery of
+power.
+
+The most recent of tunnel installations has just been completed in the
+greatest of all American mountain bores--the Hoosac Tunnel. This famous
+tube, four and three-quarters miles in length, gave itself very readily to
+the skill of the electric engineer, with the result that the Boston &
+Maine system, its present owner, finds the greatest impediment to the
+operation of its main line from Boston to the west entirely removed.
+
+The earlier installations were all what is known as direct current; that
+is, the power is brought directly from the dynamos in the power-houses and
+by means of third-rail or overhead trolley it is delivered to the motors
+of the locomotives of the cars. But some years ago the larger of the
+distinctively electric railroads found that for great current demands over
+a large distributing district, this system was expensive and
+impracticable; that, for the chief thing, it required copper cables for
+carrying long-distance current so large as to be of very great cost. So
+some of these, with the aid of the electrical manufacturers, experimented
+and developed the alternating current of high voltage and low amperage,
+which is capable of being carried to distant transforming or sub-stations
+and there reduced to low voltage and high amperage. This alternating
+current system, because of its great operating economies, is rapidly
+becoming the standard for the city railroad systems of metropolitan
+communities, as well as for the great trunk-line interurban electric roads
+that are beginning to gridiron the country. The New Haven Railroad, when
+it first began to electrify its extensive suburban service into New York
+City, was the first to bring it to the service of a standard steam road,
+and by a clever adaptation of its locomotives was able to bring a
+single-phase alternating-current directly to them at the enormously high
+voltage of 11,000, without the use of transforming stations or
+direct-current transmission. After some fearfully disappointing
+experiments at the outset, the New Haven system has finally proved the
+worth of its alternating-current, and the road is now engaged in erecting
+its overhead transmission construction all the way from Stamford (the
+present terminal of the electrical service) to New Haven, 72 miles distant
+from New York. Within ten years its heavy New York and Boston traffic will
+probably be entirely handled by electricity, and the run of 232 miles will
+be made without difficulty in four hours or even less.
+
+At present the steam locomotives of these trains and the other trains that
+serve almost all of New England are detached from the inbound movement at
+Stamford, and the remaining 33 miles of the run into the Grand Central
+Station is made behind a powerful electric locomotive. The process is, of
+course, reversed on outbound trains. For the 12 miles from Woodlawn into
+the Grand Central the run is made over the tracks of the Harlem division
+of the New York Central Railroad which uses direct current at a voltage of
+650, and third-rail instead of overhead transmission. The wonderful
+adaptability of the alternating current is shown, not in the fact that a
+change must be made from overhead trolley to third-rail alone, for that is
+merely a slight mechanical problem, but in the fact that a locomotive
+hauling a heavy train can, without a great slacking of speed, change from
+receiving an alternating current of 11,000 volts to a direct current of
+650 volts. Outbound, it reverses the process.
+
+The necessity of clearing out the smoke-filled Park Avenue Tunnel approach
+to the Grand Central Station brought both the New York Central, its owner,
+and the New Haven, its tenant, to electric traction for terminal and
+suburban service at New York. The New York Central's system, as has
+already been stated, is direct-current and it is supplied from two great
+power-houses in the suburban district. Through trains are hauled in and
+out of the station by electric locomotives, while suburban trains, which
+make their round-trip runs entirely within the 25 or 30 miles of electric
+zone, are run without locomotives, the steel suburban coaches having
+motors set within their trucks, after the ordinary fashion of electric
+cars across the land. The change from steam to electricity at the Grand
+Central Station did more, however, than merely clear the long-approach
+tunnel of smoke and foul gases, so that nowadays a man can ride on the
+observation-platform over its entire length. The traffic in that
+wonderfully busy station has for many years had sharp limitations because
+of the four tracks in that tunnel, two tracks being used for the train
+movement in each direction. The limited station-yard capacity at the
+terminal has necessitated many trains being stored at Mott Haven yards;
+and the drilling of these empty trains in and out of the station, combined
+with the normally heavy movement of regular and special trains, has only
+added to the great congestion. The minimum three-minute headway between
+trains operated by steam through the tunnel, and its four-tracked viaduct
+approach, fixed the maximum traffic at 40 trains an hour in each
+direction. The capacity of the terminal with this limitation of service
+was taxed to its utmost, and some relief for the constantly increasing
+traffic was imperative. Now, owing to the improved conditions of electric
+operation, trains may be run on a two-minute headway, or less--this one
+measure thus increasing the station capacity by 50 per cent at the least.
+
+The New Haven road has also adopted the practice of running some of its
+suburban trains without locomotives, but by means of motors underneath
+each coach--the multiple-unit system, as electrical engineers have come to
+know it. This is the system, with some slight variations, upon which the
+elevated and subway lines of New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and
+Chicago are operated; and it is quickly applicable, as we have just seen,
+to some phases of terminal operation for the standard steam railroads. But
+the steam locomotive is to hold its own for many years, in many, many
+phases of railroad operation; electric traction is practical and
+economical only when there are fairly congested traffic conditions. The
+coaches that are standard for it, and which it must haul for many miles
+across the land, must be handled in the electrically equipped terminals by
+electric locomotives of one type or another. These locomotives are
+generally equipped with coal-heaters for maintaining the steam in the
+heating-pipes of the through equipment; and in these days, when the
+electric lighting of through trains is all but universal, they may supply
+current for this purpose also.
+
+Electric locomotives have been completely successful where they have been
+used, both alone and in connection with multiple-unit suburban trains, in
+the Grand Central Station and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City as
+the first complete installations. But what has been so successfully done
+in New York will soon be repeated in other big cities in the land; Boston
+is already insisting that the network of suburban lines that spreads over
+her environs be electrified; Philadelphia is preparing for the
+electrification of the Pennsylvania's fan-work of lines into Broad Street
+Station; Baltimore is demanding that what has been done in one great
+tunnel underneath her foundation hills be repeated in two others. Chicago
+will see great installations of this service within the next few years.
+
+Nor is the use of electricity upon the standard steam railroad to stop
+bluntly with these terminal changes and improvements; many and many a
+decaying branch is yet to be fanned into new life, new strength, new
+activity, through a skilful transformation of its tractive powers. What
+has been done at the Detroit River and the Cascade tunnels is to be done
+elsewhere across the land--through the dozens of points where railroads
+pierce the mountains and go under the rivers by tunnels. Electric tunnels
+are yet to bring the Pennsylvania at lower grade at Gallitzin and the
+Southern Pacific through the high crest of the Sierras. Electric traction
+for the big steam roads is still in its infancy. Only 1,000 miles out of a
+total of 220,000 miles of steam railroad in the land are as yet operated
+by electricity. The other day a big traffic-man sat in his Chicago office
+and said:
+
+"The first railroad that electrifies for the thousand or less miles
+between this town and New York is going to get all the rich passenger
+business. Not a big portion of it, mind you, but every single blessed bit
+of it!"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Consider for a final moment, in passing, the mono-rail, the gyroscope. If
+you are a practical railroader you may laugh and say: "A toy." Perhaps it
+is a toy to-day. But just remember history and you will recall that the
+toy of to-day becomes the tool of to-morrow, and then give the mono-rail a
+moment of sober thought. Less than 2,000 feet of this construction formed
+a most interesting exhibit at the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. A railroad
+man who rode on that experimental track said:
+
+"If you had built more than 300 feet of track you could have given a
+better demonstration of your system." To this the inventor smilingly
+replied:
+
+"You have gone over 1,800 feet."
+
+The investigator had ridden faster than 45 miles an hour and had not
+realized the speed. You never do in the mono-rail car. It rides more
+gently over the roughest bit of track than the finest Limited moves over
+heavy rail and stone ballast, the best track that men can maintain.
+
+An actual railroad of the mono-rail type has been built and is being
+developed in the suburbs of New York City. It supersedes a railroad of the
+oldest type--horse-cars--from Bartow to City Island, in the Bronx. Balance
+is kept for its cars by means of a light overhead metal construction,
+hardly more conspicuous than that of the overhead trolley-work used in
+city streets. This overhead work, like the trolley-wire, supplies electric
+power to the cars; only in emergencies will it come into play to hold the
+one-legged car erect. On this stretch of line speed and balance tests will
+be made when passenger traffic is at low-tide. Upon the result of these
+tests will be drawn the construction plans for a four-track rapid transit
+railroad from New York to Newark, ten miles. This last plan has already
+been financed by New York men who have made transportation their chief
+problem for many years. It may be developed upon the rails of a
+double-track railroad, more than doubling its capacity, without increasing
+the width of the right-of-way.
+
+All of these mono-rail roads will become applicable to the gyroscope when
+that wondrous man-toy becomes a man-tool. And the gyroscope demands no
+overhead construction of any sort. It simply asks a single rail upon which
+to find a path and offers no objections either to the steepest of grades
+or to the sharpest of curves. The first model of gyroscope car showed its
+ability to navigate easily the full length of a piece of crooked gas-pipe,
+laid in rough semblance of a track.
+
+For there is a gyroscope car already--in fact, several of them. On May 8,
+1907, Louis Brennan, a brilliant Irish inventor, living in England,
+exhibited the first model of the gyroscope car, and the news was flashed
+in detail all the way around the world. The little car he then showed was
+enough to interest the keenest of scientists. It traversed every sort of
+mono-rail track that could be devised, at varying rates of speed, it stood
+still at the inventor's command and retained its balance perfectly. When a
+man's hand was pushed against it as if to throw the car off its seemingly
+slight balance, it pushed back, stanchly held that balance, and Brennan
+laughingly said that there was something that compared with the velocity
+of the wind. When he spoiled the even trim of his ship (it did look like a
+boat as it sped around the lawn upon its narrow, guiding thread) and
+placed the weights upon one side of the car, that side rose up to receive
+them. The car still held its balance perfectly, and Brennan said that his
+act represented forty or fifty persons moving suddenly across a full-sized
+passenger coach. Finally, he placed his little daughter in the car and
+sent it out over a deep gully where a single stout steel cable served as a
+suspension bridge. The inventor's assistant swung that bridge like a
+hammock but the car laughed at the old-fashioned domineering laws of
+gravity, and the little girl waved her hand at her daddy.
+
+Well might she wave her hand at him. His achievement was a real triumph.
+From a top revolving in a frame at any angle he had evolved the gyroscope
+car, the one thing required for the successful development of the
+mono-rail. From that car he has been steadily developing better ones. On
+the tenth of November, 1909, he built a full-sized car upon which twenty
+men and boys rode in glee. On that self-same day, by strange coincidence,
+a German inventor, August Scherl, exhibited in a large hall in Dresden, a
+mono-rail car, held at perfect equilibrium by a gyroscope which he had
+quietly built and perfected. The car was 18 feet long and 4 feet wide, and
+mounted on two trucks. The net weight was 2-1/2 tons, while the gyroscope
+itself, turning in a vacuum at the fearful rate of 8,000 revolutions a
+minute, weighed but 5-1/2 per cent of the total weight of the car. It
+carried eight persons, and when first shown in Berlin it caused a
+tremendous sensation, 60,000 persons witnessing the trial during a period
+of five days. Even royalty took its turn at riding in the novel
+conveyance.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The first question that the average man asks when he sees a gyroscope is:
+
+"Well, this thing may be all right when it is in motion, but how the deuce
+is it going to support itself when it is standing still?"
+
+But it does support itself. The gyroscope wheels continue to revolve at
+something close to 8,000 revolutions a minute, and they hold the car, so
+that the fluctuation in the weight it carries, due to loading or
+unloading, does not affect it, even in slight degree. The average man
+remains unconvinced.
+
+"Suppose the electric power that spins the gyroscope goes back on you?" he
+demands. The inventor tells him that that is easy enough. The gyroscope,
+revolving in a vacuum, will keep on turning at sufficient speed to balance
+the car for nearly an hour. Long before that the side-stays, that make the
+car a three-pronged structure while out of service, can be dropped.
+
+When To-morrow finally comes and the gyroscope car is in its own,
+provision will be made on all through mono-rail routes against just such
+an emergency. At various points sidings will be constructed with low
+walls, just high enough to receive the cars when their gyroscope
+equilibrium ceases. These will be just as much a part of the equipment of
+the mono-rail trunk line as wharves are a part of steamship service. It
+will be a part that will receive less and less attention as folk begin to
+realize how little dependent the gyroscope car is upon the old laws of
+gravity.
+
+"We will have billiard cars in our fastest trains," says Brennan. "A man
+will be able to play that delicate game on a railroad train all the way
+from New York to San Francisco, if he chooses."
+
+Contemplate that, you railroaders and travelled folk of to-day. Those cars
+will make the cars of to-day seem like pygmies. Each will be 200 feet in
+length and 30 feet in width. No wonder that people can talk of billiard
+tables. A train of six of these cars will be longer than the longest of
+our transcontinental expresses of to-day. They will be fastened together
+with vestibule connections, and the forward end of the first car will have
+a sharp beak. The blunt front of an ordinary train begins to be a speed
+obstacle at more than 50 miles an hour.
+
+Speed? Do you think that 50 miles an hour is speed? Our locomotives do far
+better than that every day in the United States. A train on a standard
+railroad and hauled by steam as a motive power has gone faster than the
+rate of 135 miles an hour. With the mono-rail and the gyroscope, with the
+countless mountain brooks and rivers harnessed and grinding out
+electricity, the inventors say calmly that they will begin at 200 miles an
+hour.
+
+Do you realize what 200 miles an hour means? It means that your grandson
+or your grandson's son can leave New York in the morning, do half a dozen
+errands in Cincinnati, and be back in his home in West Four Hundred and
+Thirty-eighth Street in time for a late supper. It means that he can lunch
+in Chicago, span half a dozen mighty States, threading the mountains,
+through the towns and over the cities, skimming the broad expanses of fat
+farms, and dine in New York the same night. It means that he can go from
+one ocean across the continent to the other in twenty-four hours.
+
+But To-morrow is not yet here. Yesterday was just here. In Yesterday men
+were boasting of their ability to go from New York to Philadelphia by
+coach in two nights and two days and were asking:
+
+"What next?"
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+EFFICIENCY THROUGH ORGANIZATION
+
+
+In a local freight-house in an inland manufacturing city of thirty
+thousand inhabitants between forty and fifty freight-handlers had been
+employed for a term running from twelve to fifteen years. The
+freight-house boss was of the old school. When he thought that he needed
+more help, he made a fearful noise, scared headquarters, and more help was
+given him. The strong-armed gang reported at seven o'clock in the morning
+and then held a two-hour _conversazione_, while the book-keeping force in
+the dingy office at the end of the freight-shed arranged the way-bills and
+the bills-of-lading for the day's work. Before ten o'clock, if all went
+well, the freight-house gang was generally at work pushing its way through
+a seeming chaos of less-than-carload freight.
+
+After a time the old freight-agent died and a new one came in his place.
+The new man was on his job less then three months before he arranged a new
+schedule in that freight-house--and dropped twenty-five men from its
+pay-roll. First he summoned the bookkeeping force together, and announced
+that it would report at five o'clock in the morning, instead of seven; of
+course, leaving two hours earlier each afternoon. The bookkeeping force
+demurred. It was not pleasant getting up before daybreak in the winter
+darkness of a chill northern town, and such a scheme interfered with the
+social plans of one or two of the bookkeepers. But the new boss only
+smiled and said, "Try it."
+
+And after they had tried it, the way-bills and the bills-of-lading were
+ready at seven o'clock when the handlers reported for work, and the
+freight-house got to work upon the shriek of the roundhouse whistle. After
+that, the pay-list was cut--you may be sure that a house-boss who could
+scheme out such a plan could weed out the shirkers and the idlers among
+his staff--and, better still, the consignees began to get their freight
+sooner than ever before in the history of that town.
+
+Eventually--and a wonderfully short "eventually" it really was--the
+freight-agent climbed the ladder to the superintendent of that division
+and under his bailiwick came a railroad which had recently become attached
+to the parent system through the process of benevolent assimilation. The
+ordinary less-than-carload business was moved out of the freight-house of
+the smaller road and it was given over entirely to carriage and automobile
+shipments--the inland city makes a specialty of manufacturing vehicles of
+every sort. The division superintendent went over to the carriage
+freight-house and saw that it took a dozen men to man it, although it was
+not more than a six-car stand. Carriage bodies and automobile bodies
+crated are both heavy and awkward, and the boss of that house was asking
+for more help.
+
+The superintendent went straight from that freight-house to a local
+foundry, sat there for fifteen minutes with its draughtsman and then and
+there evolved an overhead trolley-arrangement, very much the same as the
+big packing-houses use for handling heavy carcasses. A requisition for the
+thing went through a-flying, and now the carriage-house in that city is
+handled with two trained men. The scheme is fast becoming standard in the
+newer freight-houses and in St. Louis, the M. K. & T. has just adopted it
+for its splendid new terminal, whole fleets of platforms hung close to the
+floor and suspended from an overhead "trolley arrangement" entirely
+supersede the brigades of hand trucks formerly in use.
+
+That is the point of it. There must be dozens of other cities of thirty
+thousand population, of sixty thousand, of ninety, of one or two or three,
+of five hundred thousand, where a little such method would produce similar
+results. In that first house, a saving of about $350 a week was made, when
+the young freight-agent brought some system into the dusty place. A dozen
+such savings or even greater, would be quite a help on the railroad's
+balance sheet. At least that is the gospel which Louis Brandeis, of
+Boston, preached, and which attracted world-wide attention when he made
+the exact statement that he could save the railroads of the country a
+million dollars a day in the operation of their lines.
+
+The railroads made a perfectly good legal case before the Interstate
+Commerce Commission--or let us assume that, at any rate, in the present
+instance. But one such clarifying statement as that of Brandeis' produced
+more effect both upon the land and the Commissioners than all the legal
+briefs that together were filed in advocacy of the raises in the freight
+tariffs. At no time did the railroads successfully controvert Brandeis'
+sweeping statement, and so they lost their fight.
+
+And yet the railroads are accomplishing some remarkable improvements in
+their internal affairs--for which they are being given not an iota of
+credit. And one of the most interesting of these is the promotion of
+efficiency through organization, or better yet, through reorganization.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Along in the fifties, Herman Haupt, who was afterwards a brigadier-general
+of the United States army and brevetted major-general, devised the
+wonderful organization scheme of the Pennsylvania system, which is still
+in use to-day on that well-managed property. The scheme has been adopted
+since then by practically all the large railroads in the country. Before
+General Haupt evolved it, there was no real organization among the great
+railroads. Like Topsy, they "just growed" from the little individual horse
+and steam lines from which they were formed and they were even more like
+Topsy in some other details. But Haupt's plan brought dignity to a great
+business that needed dignity--and system. For fifty years it has been
+accomplishing something more than merely serving its purpose. But railroad
+terminals and railroad equipment of fifty years ago are long since
+obsolete, and so within recent years the larger railroads have found their
+organization schemes not up with the times. The growing complexity of
+their work, the intricacy of their relations with the various city, state,
+and national governing boards, the constant tendency to enlarge and to
+consolidate these, have all proved fearful taxes upon the Haupt plan.
+Great masses of correspondence have accumulated, the whole business of
+conducting the railroad has been enmeshed in whole miles of red-tape--and
+men like Brandeis, of Boston, have been permitted to make their challenges
+and stand uncorrected.
+
+Go back into the sixties for this last time, and pause for a moment at the
+fighting of the American Rebellion. Men in the North were beginning to
+hear that the Confederate army had something different, something better,
+in its organization than the Union army. It was an intangible something,
+but it seemed to make for efficiency, and, after all, that was the main
+thing. So after the war was history, there were far-sighted Northerners
+who said that it would be well to bring that intangible something into the
+United States army. At such a time that thing was, however, tacitly
+impossible, and it was dropped for more than thirty years.
+
+But Von Moltke picked up the idea, and incorporated it in the intensely
+modern army of modern Germany. It helped to win the great Franco-Prussian
+War, and when the other nations of Europe began to examine it it had a
+name; it was beginning to be a tangible something. Military men called it
+the "staff idea," and when you asked them to explain it they told you
+that officers who handled men were known as "line officers," and those who
+handled things as "staff officers." In other words, men could be
+lifted--as it were, in an aëroplane of scientific organization--away from
+their commands and their narrow environments, up to a point where they
+could have perspective, where they could handle men, regiments, small
+arms, heavy ordnance on a large scale. The staff officers work in things
+in the abstract, just as the line officers mould men in the concrete.
+
+There then is the rough theory of staff organization which was picked up
+and adapted to its use by the United States army at about the time of the
+Spanish-American War. Of its value there can be no doubt; of its
+efficiency no question.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+A young man--Major Charles Hine--who had seen the operation of modern
+staff in the regular army, decided that it was a good thing for the great
+railroad systems of the country. Hine knew railroads. In order that he
+might know them thoroughly, he one day packed his uniforms and his saddle
+away in his trunk and went quietly out and got a job as brakeman on a
+freight train. He did not stay on the car roofs very long; he has served
+in about every conceivable post in railroad divisional organization, and
+he has had a good chance to study the weaknesses of those very
+organizations.
+
+"We have got to eliminate government by chief clerks," said Major Hine at
+the very beginning. "We are growing too rapidly for the men higher up. We
+are forced to delegate official authority to clerks and foremen, and then
+we build up an autocracy around some person of official rank. It is
+pernicious feudalism, this permitting the chief clerk, and a good many
+times some other clerks, to sign the name of the officer whom they attempt
+to represent."
+
+A railroad is really so spread out that its officers live a double
+official life; a part of the time they are at their desks, and another
+part out upon the line. Yet the average railroad officer, be he of high or
+low degree, flatters himself that by some subtle method of personal
+superiority, he is enabled to act intelligently in two places at the same
+time.
+
+Major Hine saw how that worked at the very beginning of a special service
+with the Southern Pacific Railroad. He was down in the Yaqui River country
+in Mexico, where heavy construction work was under way. In company with
+the division engineer, he was riding the line mule-back. The division
+engineer had several parties under him, each in charge of a resident
+engineer, and all engaged in laying out and checking the contractor's
+work. The headquarters of the division engineer were presided over by a
+ninety-dollar-a-month chief clerk, who was dealing in the absence of his
+superior with one hundred and twenty-five dollar resident engineers. The
+division engineer assured his guest that the telephone permitted close
+personal contact with headquarters, that every hour questions were
+referred to him. The vice-president of the company, desiring to change the
+assembling point for luncheon, sought for two hours from engineering
+headquarters to locate the division engineer, who was on the grade all the
+time.
+
+The condition mentioned necessitates the chief clerk's signing the name of
+his superior to heads of departments lower down, which heads are receiving
+lower salaries, and are presumably of wider experience than the chief
+clerk who essays to be their monitor. This is done in the name of routine
+business. Unfortunately no two men often agree upon what constitutes
+routine business. Almost every railroad officer will tell you that "my
+chief clerk handles only routine business and never assumes too much
+authority." When closely questioned, the same officer will reveal in the
+utmost confidence the fact that the same condition does not obtain with
+the chief clerk of the officer who is over the informant. Strangely
+enough, if the complaining witness is promoted to his boss's job, the same
+condition still exists, showing that the system is at fault, rather than
+its individual members. Worst of all, the chief clerk has to break in all
+the new bosses and thus has only limited promotion himself.
+
+Major Hine has said that the bigness of things on the Harriman lines, the
+breadth of the policies of Napoleon Harriman and Von Moltke Julius
+Kruttschnitt, the vice-president in the change of the operation of that
+far-reaching group of railroads, strengthened his nerve to advocate
+radical departure from preconceived notions of railway organization. Hine,
+at his home in Virginia, had once acted as receiver of a suburban trolley
+system, where he had introduced a simplified organization. He found, at
+that time, that the underlying principle of that organization would apply
+to a thousand times as many men on the great Harriman lines. Incidentally,
+after the receivership was lifted, the new owners of the property
+discontinued the organization which Major Hine had created, for they took
+the ground that no other electric road had such a system, and that
+therefore there could be nothing in it.
+
+Kruttschnitt decided to let Major Hine begin on the Harriman lines with
+the reorganization of the divisions. He declined to order any changes, but
+placed the burden of missionary work and conversions among his
+subordinates on the shoulders of his special representative. There are not
+a dozen letters bearing on this subject in Kruttschnitt's office. The work
+was done by personal contact, which in two years involved over one hundred
+thousand miles of travel by Hine. Major Hine states that, notwithstanding
+the splendid spirit of the officers of the Harriman lines, little would
+have been accomplished without the tactful support of Kruttschnitt, the
+man whose supremacy and whose brilliant abilities are unquestioned in the
+railway world. On the other hand, Kruttschnitt has been heard to say that
+the credit lies with the enthusiastic younger man whom he attached to his
+staff.
+
+Most of the divisions of the Harriman lines had an assistant
+superintendent, engaged mainly in outside duties, with an office near the
+superintendent's, presided over by a chief clerk. Both the superintendent
+and the assistant superintendent had his own chief clerk, who consumed
+reams of paper annually in intercommunications over their respective
+superior's signatures. The new system provides, as a first step, that if
+the division has no assistant superintendent, one shall be appointed. The
+next step is to order the assistant superintendent to remain at
+headquarters in charge of the office, in effect, but not in name, the
+chief-of-staff idea, so successfully applied by the Germans through Von
+Moltke. When necessary, an additional trainmaster is appointed for the
+previous outside duties of the assistant superintendent. The old chief
+clerk is placed in line of promotion by appointing him, when possible, to
+a position with outside duties on the road.
+
+Next, the division shop is raided, the division master mechanic and the
+travelling engineer (road foreman of engines) are moved bodily to the same
+building with the division superintendent, where are usually already
+located, the division engineer, the trainmaster, and the chief despatcher.
+The old theory has been that the master mechanic should be at his shop to
+supervise the shop force. The new conception is that the master mechanic
+has passed the stage of a shop foreman; that, located at one shop, he
+unconsciously comes to underestimate the importance of roundhouses and car
+repair plants at outlying points on the division. He is brought to
+division headquarters to get the atmosphere of transportation, to be in
+touch with the train sheet, and to realize that motive power is one of the
+component elements of transportation; that the shop is incident to the
+railroad, not the railroad to the shop.
+
+The official family, now being gathered under the parental roof of the
+superintendent, are politely requested to deposit the official
+shooting-iron, the typewriter, in one official arsenal, from which all
+shooting will be done in the future. The office files are consolidated in
+one office of record. This idea is borrowed from the courts of justice,
+where one clerk of the court, with as many deputies as necessary, records
+all transactions regardless of the number of judges and other officers.
+
+You must have worked in a railroad office to appreciate the fearful
+condition of official files in this year of grace, nineteen hundred
+eleven. You ask for the file on that culvert at Jones' farm on the
+Martinsburgh branch, and an anæmic office-boy staggers toward you with
+enough manuscript to be the making of a novel. There are the contract
+arrangements and the correspondence with the J. B. & G. concerning the
+union station privileges that are enjoyed with it at Blissville; why,
+there was a whole chapter given over to that episode of July, three
+summers ago, when the leaders had to be renewed on that magnificent
+structure, and its roof re-shingled. Here is the contract for handling
+milk on a single side-line division--and the accompanying symposium of
+thought from chief clerks and minor officers in the form of
+miscellaneous--and entirely useless--correspondence. This is the agreement
+with the bridge-builders' union--four inches thick. No wonder the shelves
+of the record room sag, and that the clerks are hollow-eyed. Tons of
+unprotected paper have been scrawled upon, perfect rivers of helpless
+black ink have done the work--and all for that!
+
+The heaviest file in the office of the Harriman system to-day is half an
+inch in thickness, and there is no one to deny that the property is being
+run at a high stage of efficiency--particularly in comparison with some
+other railroad systems of the land. As the result of a single record
+system at any division headquarters, the astounding saving has been to
+that group of railroads, of five hundred thousand letters a year, and it
+now goes without saying that they were unnecessary letters. In a year or
+two, that figure will cross the million mark--and you must take second
+breath to imagine the time and thought that goes into the making of a
+million letters in a twelvemonth. The material saving in stationery is
+considerable--although trifling in the operation of a system that spends
+about $225,000,000 a year, but the logical claim is made that the five
+hundred thousand letters eliminated retarded rather than helped
+administration, that they produced more harm than good. Deeper than all
+this is the dwarfing effect upon the individual initiative of the man
+below, for whom the letter attempts to think.
+
+Elimination of red tape is not the sole object of the new system. Mr.
+Kruttschnitt regards this as incidental. What has appealed to him is the
+final step in the organization which is to confer the uniform title of
+"assistant superintendent" upon the former division engineer, master
+mechanic, trainmaster, travelling engineer, roadmaster, and chief
+despatcher. These officers retain their former duties and
+responsibilities, but they broaden authority to meet emergencies on the
+spot. This means increased supervision of employees, more scientific
+management of men. The officials of the Harriman lines faced here a
+ticklish problem. The attitude of organized labor was in doubt. Would the
+men object to too many bosses? Would confusion result from several men
+issuing orders that might possibly conflict? The results have been a
+splendid vindication of the intelligence of the men who are close to
+things. The men were often quicker to catch the idea than were the
+officers. What appealed to them most of all was the dictum that no man
+could sign another man's name or initials.
+
+"We old men do our work, no matter how many bosses there are; we realize
+that younger men need more instruction than supervision," said a veteran
+conductor on the Union Pacific, when the matter was brought to his
+attention. "We used to make one report to the master mechanic and another
+to the superintendent. Now one report addressed simply 'assistant
+superintendent' is enough. It means less red tape. But what we like best
+of all is that some smart Aleck of a clerk can no longer jack us up."
+
+That veteran ticket-puncher recalled that in older days conductors had
+been dismissed for allowing operators to sign their names to telegraphic
+train orders; perhaps the letter of dismissal was signed by the
+superintendent's chief clerk. There was railroad system for you!
+
+After a year and a half of what the local officers called trial--for Mr.
+Kruttschnitt and Major Hine have always regarded that period as
+demonstration rather than as experiment--the system was broadened. It was
+applied to some of the higher units. For nearly a year, the U. P. general
+officers at Omaha have had five assistant general managers. In other days
+there were a general superintendent, a superintendent of motive power, a
+chief engineer, a superintendent of transportation, and an assistant to
+the general manager. The new million dollar general office building of the
+U. P. at Omaha will have its office space arranged according to the new
+conception. Until it is completed, the consolidation of office records
+will not be practicable, because the various general offices are now
+scattered over town. But a start has been made, and plans laid for full
+development.
+
+What is good at the east end of a railroad is generally as good at the
+west end, and so the plan, working handily in general offices at Omaha,
+has been transplanted to the general offices of another Harriman
+road--the newly combined Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Company
+at Portland, Ore., and at Seattle, Wash. Other general headquarters of the
+Harriman roads are only awaiting the construction of new and modern office
+buildings, before they will be asked to fall in line with the plan.
+Kruttschnitt does not order these things. He is far too wise a railroader
+for that. He directs by suggestion and the family circle talks of Major
+Hine. And yet twenty-three out of the thirty-three divisions of the
+Harriman railroad group have fallen into the new groove within two short
+years.
+
+"Consider for an instant the overwhelming importance of a title to some
+railroaders," says a high officer of one of that group as he sits at his
+desk. He is one of the men to whom a title is as hollow as a brass
+cylinder. "I have known a man to almost froth at the mouth because some
+stupid underling wrote a letter and addressed him as 'assistant to the
+general manager' instead of 'assistant general manager.' We have gone
+title crazy on some of our railroads. Take that overworked word
+'superintendent.' We have more superintendents on this system to-day than
+there used to be track hands on a good sized road, and we have what is
+even worse, a superintendent of motive power, and a superintendent of
+transportation ranking the division superintendent who is the head of an
+important subordinate unit, and entitled to respect among the rank and
+file of our men as such. Under the new plan, the superintendent of
+transportation together with the superintendent of motive power, as you
+have already seen, become assistant general managers.
+
+"Right there is an impersonality that is delightful--and efficient; it has
+proved most efficient in division organization. Out on our ---- division
+we had several washouts simultaneously last year. We sent at once an
+assistant superintendent to each point of interruption and so we had at
+each vital place, a man with sufficient brains and authority to use the
+forces on the ground to the best advantage. Isn't that good railroading?"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It is good railroading all along the line. It is good railroading to
+handle as big a question as the reorganization of a system employing a
+quarter of a million men and women, without writing a whole library of
+rules and regulations for its enforcement. Ask Major Hine, himself, how he
+handles that problem.
+
+"Easily enough," will be his reply to you. "We have a constitution--also
+unwritten like that splendid old bulwark of English liberties--and any
+superintendent, any general manager, can make his own rules for his
+division or his stretch of railroad as long as they will stand the tests
+of that constitution. And the railroad's bulwark consists of but three
+very simple principles:
+
+"The first of these is that no man may sign the name or the initial of
+another. That is rank feudalism, and out of place in the twentieth century
+sort of railroading. Our second clause is that there must be at all times
+an assistant superintendent in charge of the office. Normally, this
+assistant, in effect chief-of-staff, is the senior or No. 1 on the list.
+Here again, elasticity is introduced. The unwritten law provides that
+whatever assistant may be assigned to the office is the senior of the
+others for the time being. The chief-of-staff reviews the incoming and
+outgoing correspondence and reduces it to its lowest terms. Each assistant
+superintendent signs his own communications, but they pass through the
+focus of the administrative hour-glass on the desk of the watchful
+chief-of-staff.
+
+"In the third place, correspondence must be addressed impersonally; from
+below, 'assistant superintendent,' from above, 'superintendent.' This
+requirement is based upon the idea that authority, as in the courts, is
+abstract and impersonal, that the exercise of authority is highly
+concrete and personal. The court exists if the judge is dead; the court is
+silent until the judge speaks."
+
+Already there is noted a greater willingness to take responsibility. More
+and more is heard about "this division" and "the company" and less and
+less about "my department." The mathematical axiom that "the whole is
+greater than any of its parts" is sometimes violated in corporate
+administration, because there is no chief-of-staff to balance the
+specialization of some department head.
+
+This system of playing trumps in the new science of railroads
+incidentally, but not essentially, provides for rotation in the position
+of senior assistant or chief-of-staff. Some conservative divisions have
+not availed themselves of this feature. On one division the superintendent
+in the first year of the new organization had four of his five assistant
+superintendents, each occupy the senior chair at headquarters for three
+months each. Finally, it came the turn of the old master mechanic.
+
+"I am sweating blood," he said, "but I never knew before how much there is
+about a railroad."
+
+When that master mechanic returned to his shop interests, his vision had
+been broadened, and he was more alert to protect the company's interests
+when riding over the road. The sponsors for the new system deny that this
+may lead to the neglect of an official's own special responsibility. They
+point to the superintendent as a balance wheel to maintain proper
+equilibrium. Over two years' experience has led the high officials of the
+Harriman lines to lay some stress upon urging the assistant
+superintendents forward rather than holding them back. The tendency has
+been to settle back in former grooves. As long as no harm is done, those
+who avail themselves of their new opportunities are becoming more valuable
+assets both for themselves and for the company.
+
+When a division is reorganized, the persons concerned are assembled to
+listen to a lecture by Major Hine. To their great astonishment, he usually
+leaves town the same evening. He takes the position that the system which
+depends for its success upon the presence of any individual is a system
+which the company has no business to adopt. He says, "We have pushed you
+off the bank. Now swim ashore." They all do. On the next visit of his
+grand rounds, the instructor often finds his pupils beating him at his own
+game. Dropping in one day at the headquarters of a large division on the
+coast, he found the senior assistant superintendent and the old master
+mechanic in frequent conference. The senior assistant tossed a letter over
+the desk, and asked, "Did Jim here need to write this letter?" "It looks
+good to me," said the instructor; "what is the matter with it?" "You told
+us," said the interlocutor, "that one record in this office is enough. I
+handled a letter this morning from the mechanical assistant telling the
+foreman to repair this outfit car. Now I get another letter this afternoon
+about the same thing." "You are dead right," said the major; "you fellows
+will soon have me worked out of a job."
+
+The old master mechanic caught the spirit of the occasion and said: "Yes,
+Jack, you caught that one, but there were two just like it this morning
+that you didn't catch. Next time I won't have to dictate them."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+There then is efficiency through organization--the playing of trumps in
+the developing science of railroading. Other railroads have been watching
+the reorganization plan upon the Harriman system with critical eyes, and
+can find nothing but success in its workings. It is paving its own way,
+and shouldering itself abreast of a railroad generation that figures not
+in lines of from five hundred to a thousand miles each, but giant systems
+of grouped lines that may easily stretch their steel cobwebs for fifteen
+thousand miles--over whole sovereign States, from ocean to
+ocean--properties whose management calls for a degree of skill not yet
+demanded in the very greatest of our industrial or manufacturing
+corporations.
+
+The old order changeth and giveth way to the new.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+ Acworth, the English economist, 330, 331.
+
+ Adams, Alvin, 371, 372.
+
+ Adams, Maude, 293, 294.
+
+ Adams Express Company, 371-373.
+
+ Adams & Company, 372.
+
+ Ade, George, 303.
+
+ Advertising, railroad, 276;
+ bill for newspaper, 288;
+ open territory, 356.
+
+ Agricultural schools maintained by the railroads, 360, 361, 363.
+
+ Air-brake, 42, 125, 134, 249, 250.
+
+ Albany, bridge at, 14.
+
+ Albany & Syracuse Railroad, 371.
+
+ Algomah Central, 417.
+
+ _Algomah_, ferry, 415.
+
+ Alleghany Portage Railroad, 11, 12, 48, 149.
+
+ Allen, Horatio, 5, 6, 7, 8, 119.
+
+ Altoona shops of Pennsylvania Railroad, 12, 61, 154, 394, 395-398.
+
+ American bridge-builders do work of world, 74.
+
+ American Express Company, 372, 373.
+
+ American Locomotive Company, 126, 127.
+
+ "American Notes," Dickens, quoted, 11.
+
+ Anchor Line, the, _see_ Erie & Western Transportation Company.
+
+ Ann Arbor railway, 416.
+
+ _Arabian_, locomotive, 120.
+
+ Armstrong, Col. G. B., 377.
+
+ Ashtabula, Ohio, bridge disaster, 61.
+
+ Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 2, 32, 126, 127, 358, 386, 429.
+
+ Atlantic City, 367, 368.
+
+ Atlantic City Railroad, 127.
+
+ Atlantic Coast Line, 127.
+
+ Atlantic type of locomotive, 127.
+
+
+ Baggage, handling of, 93;
+ duties of baggagemen, 251, 252;
+ use of baggage-car, 322, 323.
+
+ Baldwin, Matthias, 122, 123.
+
+ Baltimore, railroad connections of, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19;
+ tunnels in, 49;
+ stations in, 96, 436.
+
+ Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 2, 9, 15-23, 41, 49, 58-60, 64, 65, 77, 96,
+ 120, 126, 132, 139, 144, 376, 377, 394, 421, 427, 436.
+
+ Baltimore & Potomac R. R., 20.
+
+ Bangs, Col. George S., 377, 378.
+
+ "Bends," cause and treatment of, 68, 70.
+
+ Bergen Tunnel, 318.
+
+ Bessemer, Sir Henry, 61.
+
+ _Best Friend of Charleston_, locomotive, 8, 120.
+
+ Big Muddy River, Illinois Central's bridge over, 78.
+
+ Big Four, 27, 418.
+
+ Binghampton, N. Y., 81.
+
+ Black Diamond Express (Lehigh Valley Railroad), 286.
+
+ Black River Road, 217.
+
+ Blair, Postmaster General Montgomery, 377.
+
+ Blizzards, fighting of, 268-275.
+
+ Boards of directors of railroads, 156-158.
+
+ Bollman, --, designer of bridges, 61, 63.
+
+ Bonds, railroad, 36, 37.
+
+ Boston Elevated Railway, 428.
+
+ Boston, in 1831, 9;
+ railroad connections of, 10;
+ Josiah Perham's excursions to, 29;
+ stations in, 88, 95-99, 313, 319, 320, 384;
+ suburban traffic of, 98, 99, 319.
+
+ "Boston Special" (New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad), 384.
+
+ Boston & Albany Railroad, 60, 77, 98, 106, 136, 370.
+
+ Boston & Lowell Railroad, 9, 10, 96, 98.
+
+ Boston & Maine Railroad, 1, 98, 319, 320, 333, 384, 437.
+
+ Boston & Providence Railroad, 95, 370.
+
+ Boston & Worcester line, 10, 124, 370.
+
+ Brakeman, duties of, 248-250.
+
+ Brandeis, Louis, 451, 452.
+
+ Brandywine Viaduct, 77.
+
+ Brennan, Louis, 442, 443.
+
+ Bridge-builders, personality and nationality of, 72-74.
+
+ Bridges--
+ at Albany, across Hudson, 14.
+ first across Mississippi, 28.
+ building of, 42, 56-79.
+ at Trenton, across Delaware, 57, 77.
+ at Springfield, across Connecticut River, 57.
+ of timber, 57-60, 62-64.
+ at Waterford, across Hudson River, 57.
+ Permanent Bridge, across Schuylkill River, 58.
+ of stone, 58, 59, 76, 77.
+ Starucca Viaduct, 58.
+ Thomas Viaduct, 58, 59, 76.
+ of iron, 60, 61.
+ of Rider design, 60.
+ B. & O. Monongahela River, 60.
+ Ashtabula, 61.
+ of steel, 61, 62, 76, 77.
+ at Portage, over Genesee River, 62.
+ forms of, 62-64.
+ through span, 64.
+ deck span, 64.
+ over Susquehanna River, between Havre-de-Grace and Aiken, 64, 65.
+ at Cincinnati, over Ohio River, 65.
+ suspension, 65.
+ cantilever, 65, 66.
+ over Kentucky River, 66.
+ Minnehaha, at St. Paul, 66.
+ over Niagara River, 66.
+ over Frazer River, 66.
+ at Poughkeepsie, 66.
+ personality of builders of, 72-74.
+ over Pend Oreille River, 73.
+ on line of Rio Grande & Western, 74.
+ replacing of, 75, 76.
+ Roebling's, at Niagara Falls, 75.
+ at Steubenville, Ohio, 75, 76.
+ over Hackensack River, 76, 206, 207.
+ of concrete, 76-79.
+ Brandywine Viaduct, 77.
+ Pennsylvania, over Susquehanna River, 77.
+ New Brunswick, over Raritan River, 77.
+ over Florida Keys, 78.
+ at Slateford, Pa., 78.
+ over Big Muddy River, 78.
+ at Washington, D. C., 78.
+ Moodna Valley, steel trestle over, 143.
+ at Towanda, Pa., 144.
+ first steel bridge in America, 144.
+ across the Delaware, 367.
+
+ Brilliant cut-off (Pennsylvania Railroad), 148, 149.
+
+ Britton, H. M., 269.
+
+ Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, 88, 96, 97, 154, 320, 440.
+
+ Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, its care for employees, 427, 428.
+
+ Brooks plant, Dunkirk, 127.
+
+ Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, 423.
+
+ Brown, George, 16.
+
+ Brown, W. C., 167, 168, 362.
+
+ "Brown system," _see_ Demerit plan.
+
+ Bryant, Gridley, 6, 132.
+
+ Buffalo & Attica Railroad, 27.
+
+ Buffet sleepers, 307, 309.
+
+ Burlington, _see_ Chicago, Burlington & Quincy R. R.
+
+ Burr, Theodore, 57, 63.
+
+ Burwick, J. M., 420.
+
+
+ Cab, use of, 123.
+
+ Caissons, their use in tunnel-construction, 52.
+ in bridge-building, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77.
+
+ Calvert Station, Baltimore, 96.
+
+ Camden Station, Baltimore, 96, 436.
+
+ Camden & Amboy Railroad, 10, 121.
+
+ Campbell, Henry R., 122.
+
+ Canadian Pacific Railway, 2, 32, 141, 142, 406, 414, 417.
+
+ Canals, 4, 5, 9, 13, 34, 35.
+
+ Car-ferries, 416, 417.
+
+ Car-inspectors, duties of, 402, 403.
+
+ Cars, storage of, 89;
+ cleaning of, 90;
+ construction of, 132;
+ platforms and vestibules of, 134, 135, 308;
+ use of steel for, 135;
+ "foreign cars," 389.
+
+ Carroll, Charles, of Carrollton, 17.
+
+ Carter, C. F., quoted, 24.
+
+ Cascade Tunnel, 436, 437, 441.
+
+ Cassatt, A. J., 160, 166.
+
+ Cathedral Mountain, the spiral tunnel under, 142.
+
+ Cattle, shipping of, on railroads, 328, 329.
+
+ Central Pacific Railroad, 30, 31, 32, 45, 357.
+
+ Central Railroad of New Jersey, 2, 313, 412.
+
+ Central Vermont, 333.
+
+ Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, 8, 123.
+
+ Cheney, Benjamin F., 372.
+
+ Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, 2, 10, 16, 18.
+
+ Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, 2, 127.
+
+ Chicago City Railway Company, 177.
+
+ Chicago Fast Mail, 189.
+
+ Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, 3, 32, 300, 313, 356, 358.
+
+ Chicago-Montreal flyer, 414.
+
+ Chicago, railroad connections of, 27;
+ Northwestern station at, 88, 101, 106, 321;
+ La Salle Station at, 101.
+
+ Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, 3, 28, 364, 386.
+
+ Chicago & Alton Railroad, 144, 300-304.
+
+ Chicago & Northwestern Railway, 3, 27, 28, 313, 356, 386.
+
+ Chicago & St. Louis Express (West Shore Railroad), 265-267.
+
+ Chief clerk, duties of, 220.
+
+ Civil War, railroad building during period of, 19, 20;
+ might have been averted by railroad development, 35.
+
+ Claim-agents, 174-179.
+
+ Cleveland stations in, 96, 418, 419.
+
+ Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad, 418.
+
+ Coal, handling of, 13;
+ as a freight business, 108, 109, 126, 339, 342;
+ substituted for wood as a fuel, 124;
+ mining of, 340.
+
+ Collinwood, Ohio, the Lake Shore's plant at, 394.
+
+ Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad, 12, 122, 401.
+
+ Commuter, the, 311;
+ his use of rapid transit, 313-324, 327, 384.
+
+ Competition among railroads, 355.
+
+ Complaints of public in regard to railroad service, 290, 291.
+
+ Conductor, duties of, 250, 251.
+
+ _Consolidation_, locomotive, 124, 125.
+
+ Construction work of railroads, 454.
+
+ Cooper, Peter, 17-19, 120.
+
+ Coöperation of railroads, 328.
+
+ Cornell University, agricultural school at, 360.
+
+ "Corridor trains," 134.
+
+ Cowan, John F., 22.
+
+ Crede, the English railroad town, 393.
+
+ _Crédit mobilier_, 31.
+
+ _Crescent City_, the, 299.
+
+ Crocker brothers, 30.
+
+ Crossings, railroad, 42.
+
+ Cumberland, on the National Highway, 16, 19, 394.
+
+ Cumberland Valley Railroad, 299.
+
+
+ Daly, C. F., 284.
+
+ Daniels, George H., 277.
+
+ Davis, Phineas, 120-122.
+
+ Davis, W. A., 377.
+
+ Davis & Gartner Co., 120.
+
+ _Decapod_, locomotive, 126.
+
+ Dee, River, bridge, 60.
+
+ Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, 2, 44, 78, 88, 102, 145,
+ 313, 315, 317, 385, 412.
+
+ Delaware & Hudson Railroad, 1, 5, 119, 126.
+
+ _Delmonico_, the, 304, 305.
+
+ Demerit plan, 211, 212.
+
+ Depew (New York), shops of the New York Central at, 394.
+
+ Detroit River tunnel, 54, 55, 413, 436, 441.
+
+ Devereux, John H., 418.
+
+ _De Witt Clinton_, locomotive, 13, 120.
+
+ Dexter, Judge, 29.
+
+ Dickens's "American Notes," quoted, 11.
+
+ Dining-cars, conveniences of, 134, 304-307.
+
+ Division superintendent, duties of, 187-189, 202-219, 272-275.
+
+ Dorsey, John M., 314.
+
+ Dresden, Germany, train-sheds in, 103.
+
+ Duluth & Iron Range Railroad, 420.
+
+
+ Eagle Pass, 40.
+
+ Edison, Thomas A., 432.
+
+ Efficiency in railroad service, 449-464.
+
+ Eighteen-hour trains, between New York and Chicago, 298.
+
+ Electricity, its use in tunnel-construction, 51, 52.
+ in bridge-building, 70.
+ substituted for steam, 104, 105, 137, 432-441.
+ used for lighting, 303, 315-321.
+
+ Elevated and subway lines, 440.
+
+ _El Gobernador_, locomotive, 126.
+
+ Elkhart, Indiana, railroad shops of the Lake Shore Railroad at, 394.
+
+ Embankment, construction of, 44;
+ largest, 45.
+
+ Emigration bureaus, 356, 358.
+
+ Empire State Express (New York Central), 285, 286.
+
+ Employees, protection of, 176-179, 422, 423.
+
+ "Engine sheds," 390.
+
+ Engine wheels, first turning of, in America, 7.
+
+ Engineer, duties of, 90, 247, 248.
+
+ Engines in yards and roundhouses, 89, 90.
+
+ English roundhouse principle, 89.
+
+ Enterprise line, the, 405.
+
+ Erie Canal, New York State, 4, 13, 14, 15.
+
+ Erie, Pa., transfer of passengers at, 14.
+
+ Erie Railroad, 22-25, 59, 60, 124, 126, 142, 143, 164, 299, 313-315,
+ 317, 361, 392-394, 412, 417, 429, 430, 435.
+
+ Erie & Western Transportation Company, 417.
+
+ _Evening Star_, the, 299.
+
+ Excursions, use of, 358.
+
+ Express business, 369.
+
+ Express messenger, duties of, 251, 252.
+
+
+ Fargo, William G., 371, 372.
+
+ "Farmers' special," 360, 361, 363.
+
+ Felton, S. M., 124.
+
+ Ferry fleets, 412-415.
+
+ Fillmore, President, his trip on the Erie, 23.
+
+ Finances of railroad, 179-186.
+
+ Fireman, duties of, 90, 246, 391, 392.
+
+ Fish, shipping of, 345, 346.
+
+ Fisk, Jim, 299.
+
+ Fitchburg, Railroad, 96, 98.
+
+ Florida East Coast Railroad, 77, 78.
+
+ Florida Keys, 78.
+
+ Folders, bill for printing of, 288.
+
+ Food, shipping of, to the city, 343, 344.
+
+ Forbes, James M., 27.
+
+ Forney, M. N., 125.
+
+ Fort Wayne subsidiary, the, 147, 148.
+
+ France, railroad in, 35.
+
+ Frankfort, Germany, train-sheds in, 103.
+
+ Franklin, Benjamin, 375.
+
+ Frazer River bridge, 66.
+
+ Freehold & Jamesburg Agricultural Railroad (Pennsylvania Railroad), 359.
+
+ Freight claims, 183.
+
+ Freight, railroads once prohibited from carrying, 9;
+ Erie's profits from, 25;
+ handling of, 34, 88, 107-118, 194;
+ traffic, 318, 325-354;
+ rate system for, 329-331;
+ threefold classification of, 330-332;
+ "back haul," 334;
+ Australian system of, 334-336;
+ "demurrage," 338;
+ fast trains for, 343.
+
+ Freight terminals, 107-115, 408.
+
+ Freight traffic-manager, duties of, 326, 327.
+
+ Fruit, shipping of California, 344, 345.
+
+ Fullerton, H. B., 362.
+
+
+ Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, 27.
+
+ Gallitzin Tunnel, 12, 50, 149, 441.
+
+ Garrett, John W., 20, 21.
+
+ Garrett, Robert, 21, 22.
+
+ Gasolene engine, use of, 137.
+
+ Gauge, standard, 46.
+
+ General attorney of the railroad, duties of, 170-174.
+
+ General counsel of the railroad, duties of, 170-174.
+
+ General manager, duties of, 187-201.
+
+ General passenger agent, duties of, 276-291, 366.
+
+ General superintendent, duties of, 190.
+
+ Genesee Valley Road, 143.
+
+ Geneva, N. Y., agricultural experimental school, 360.
+
+ _George Washington_, locomotive, 122.
+
+ Gould roads, 2, 3, 32.
+
+ Government regulation of railroads, 329.
+
+ _Governor Paine_, locomotive, 123.
+
+ Grades, railroad, 40, 41, 48, 139-151.
+
+ Grand Central Railroad, 316, 317, 420.
+
+ Grand Canal (Erie), 4.
+
+ Grand Central Station, New York, 88, 95, 96, 104, 315, 321, 384, 419,
+ 421, 438, 439, 440.
+
+ Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad, 416.
+
+ Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 3, 32, 42, 304, 333, 414, 416, 417, 436.
+
+ "Grangers," 3.
+
+ Grant, General, 302, 303.
+
+ _Grasshopper_, locomotive, 120.
+
+ Great Lakes, highway up the, 414.
+
+ Great Northern Express Company, 373.
+
+ Great Northern Railroad, 2, 32, 126, 147, 300, 358, 417, 437.
+
+ Great Western Railway, _see_ Grand Trunk.
+
+ Greenville, freight station at, 109, 110.
+
+ Gyroscope, _see_ Mono-rail.
+
+
+ Hackensack River Bridge, 76, 206, 207.
+
+ Hadley, President, of Yale, 17.
+
+ Hand-brakes, use of, 250.
+
+ Hanson, Inga, 177.
+
+ Harbor fleet, a, 406, 407, 408.
+
+ Harlem River Branch (New Haven), 316, 317, 438.
+
+ Harnden, William F., 370, 371, 372.
+
+ Harriman, E. H., 139-141, 159, 166, 167, 358.
+
+ Harriman lines, 2, 297, 358, 406, 455-458, 460-463.
+
+ Harsemus Cove, 109, 110.
+
+ _Harvard_, the, 405, 406.
+
+ Haupt, Herman, 451, 452.
+
+ Hazard, Ebenezer, 374.
+
+ Headlight, first use of, 124.
+
+ "Head-room," 42.
+
+ Hill, J. J., his roads, 2, 147, 159, 166, 167, 358, 373, 406.
+
+ Hinckley, --, a locomotive builder, 122.
+
+ Hine, Charles, 453-455, 459-461, 463.
+
+ Hoboken, Lackawanna Terminal at, 88, 102, 109.
+
+ Honesdale, Pa., switchback at, 41.
+
+ Hoosac Tunnel, 49, 437.
+
+ Hopkins, Mark, 30.
+
+ Hornellsville, Erie shops at, 392-394.
+
+ Horse Shoe Curve, 12.
+
+ Hotel-cars, _see_ Dining-cars.
+
+ Howe, --, designer of bridges, 63.
+
+ Hudson, Commodore, bronze statue of, 354.
+
+ Hudson River Tunnel, 102, 412.
+
+ Huntington, Collis P., 30, 32.
+
+
+ Ice-floes, obstructions to the railroad marine, 416.
+
+ Idaho & Washington Northern Railroad, 73.
+
+ Illinois Central Railroad, 1, 28, 78, 313, 320, 321, 385, 429.
+
+ Imperial Limited (Canadian Pacific Railway), 141.
+
+ Inland Water Ways, 404-417.
+
+ Insurance, for railroad employees, 423.
+
+ Interstate Commerce Commission, 13, 329, 333, 335, 355, 374, 451.
+
+ Interstate Commerce Law, 210.
+
+ Interurban electric service, 432-434.
+
+ Ithaca, N. Y., switchback at, 41.
+
+
+ Jamaica, station at (Long Island), 318, 319.
+
+ Jamestown Exposition of 1907, 441.
+
+ _Jay Gould_, the, 299.
+
+ Jersey City, 109.
+
+ Jersey Heights Tunnel, 102.
+
+ Jervis, John B., 121.
+
+ Jewell, Postmaster General, 378.
+
+ _John Bull_, locomotive, 121.
+
+ Joy line, the, 405.
+
+ Judah, Theodore D., 29, 30, 31.
+
+
+ Kansas, boom in, 357.
+
+ Kentucky River bridge, 66.
+
+ Kicking Horse River, tunnel near, 142.
+
+ Kingwood Tunnel, 41, 49, 122.
+
+ Kirkwood, James P., 59, 77.
+
+ Kruttschnitt, Julius, 298, 455, 456, 458-460.
+
+
+ Lackawanna cut-off, 145.
+
+ Lackawanna Railroad, _see_ Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.
+
+ Lake Michigan, an obstruction to land traffic, 415.
+
+ Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad, 14, 27, 205, 378, 385, 394,
+ 418, 419, 421.
+
+ Lane cut-off (Union Pacific), 44, 140.
+
+ Lard, shipping of, 342.
+
+ La Salle Street Station, Chicago, 101.
+
+ Latrobe, B. H., 19, 41, 49, 58, 60, 63, 122.
+
+ Lehigh Valley Railroad, 2, 144, 286, 361, 385.
+
+ Leiper, Thomas, 6.
+
+ Lewis, Isaac, Erie engineer, 25.
+
+ Lickey plane, 122.
+
+ Lights, code of, 86.
+
+ Lincoln, Abraham, 300, 302.
+
+ Link device, use of, 124.
+
+ Liquor, prohibition of use of, 421.
+
+ Livingston & Company, 372.
+
+ Locomotives, 5, 7, 8, 18, 26, 119-131.
+
+ Long Island commuters, 102, 103.
+
+ Long Island Express Company, 373.
+
+ Long Island Railroad, 1, 109, 313, 318, 320, 362, 412.
+
+ Long Key Viaduct, 78.
+
+ Loree, L. F., 22.
+
+ Lowell, Mass., in 1831, 9.
+
+ Lucin cut-off, The (Southern Pacific), 139, 140.
+
+
+ M. K. & T., 450.
+
+ McAdoo Tunnel, 317.
+
+ McCrea, James, 167, 194, 195.
+
+ McCrea, the engineer, 420, 421.
+
+ McGraham, James, 331.
+
+ McPherson, Logan G., quoted, 20.
+
+ Mad River & Lake Erie Railroad, 26, 124.
+
+ Magazines, railroad employees', 429.
+
+ Mail clerks, duties of, 251, 252, 377-383.
+
+ Mail-service, railway, 369-387.
+
+ Maintenance Way Department, 388.
+
+ Mallet articulated compound, 126, 127.
+
+ Manchester & Liverpool line, 9.
+
+ Mann, Col. W. D., 135.
+
+ Manunka Chunk, tunnel at, 145.
+
+ Marine, the railroad, 404-417.
+
+ Market Street Station, Philadelphia, 88, 97.
+
+ Martin, T. E., 363.
+
+ _Maryland_, the, 413.
+
+ Mason, a locomotive builder, 122.
+
+ Master Car Builders, organization of, 136, 137, 390, 401.
+
+ Master mechanic, duties of, 389, 400, 401.
+
+ _Mastodon_, locomotive, 125, 126.
+
+ Mauch Chunk, colliery railroad at, 9, 41, 136.
+
+ Metropolitan Line, the, 405.
+
+ Metropolitan Street Railway Company, New York City, 172.
+
+ Meyers, George, 418, 419.
+
+ Michigan Central Railroad, 27, 28, 54, 302, 385, 413, 414, 436.
+
+ Michigan Southern Railroad, 27, 28.
+
+ _Michigan_, the transport, 414.
+
+ Middlesex Canal, traffic on, in 1829, 9.
+
+ Milholland, James, 124.
+
+ Military Academy at West Point, parade-ground of, 265.
+
+ Milk, carrying of, to city, 347-351.
+
+ Mills, James C., quoted, 415, 416.
+
+ Minnehaha Bridge, at St. Paul, 66.
+
+ Minot, Charles, 25.
+
+ Missouri Pacific Railroad, 29.
+
+ Missouri, steel bridge across the, 144.
+
+ Moguls, locomotives, 124.
+
+ Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, 13, 41, 121.
+
+ Mono-rail, 441-445.
+
+ Monon Railroad, 385.
+
+ Monongahela River Bridge, 60.
+
+ Moodna Valley, steel trestle over, 143.
+
+ Morgan, J. P., 296, 328.
+
+ _Morning Star_, the, 299.
+
+ Morris Run, the, 133.
+
+ Morse, William, 265-267.
+
+ Mott Haven yards, 439.
+
+ Mount Clare yards, Baltimore, 120, 132.
+
+ Mount Royal station, Buffalo, 436.
+
+ Murray, Oscar G., 22.
+
+
+ National Express Company, 373.
+
+ Naugatuck Railroad, 135.
+
+ New Brunswick bridge, over Raritan River, 77.
+
+ New England Navigation Company, 405.
+
+ New Haven Railroad, 1, 109, 147, 300, 313, 315, 316, 413, 419, 438-440.
+
+ New York Central, 2, 14, 22, 27, 41, 104, 126, 147, 151, 154, 155, 167,
+ 205, 268, 284, 285, 297, 298, 313, 315-317, 320, 361-363, 370,
+ 384, 394, 407-410, 419-421, 435, 438.
+
+ New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, 14, 104, 353, 378, 417, 434.
+
+ New York Connecting Railroad, 109.
+
+ New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, 98, 104, 315, 320, 404-406,
+ 412, 433.
+
+ New York, railroad connections of, 10, 21;
+ tunnels in, 49;
+ stations at, 88, 95, 96, 102-104, 159-162, 315, 318, 319, 321, 412,
+ 419, 421, 438-440;
+ harbor and commerce of, 409-412;
+ ferries in, 413-415.
+
+ New York & Harlem Railroad, 14, 60.
+
+ New York & New England Railroad, 98.
+
+ Newspapers, rapid delivery of, 382.
+
+ Niagara River bridge, 66.
+
+ Norfolk & Western Railroad, 144, 421.
+
+ Norris, William, 122.
+
+ North Station, Boston, 88, 97, 98, 313, 319, 320, 324, 384.
+
+ Northern Central Railroad, 11, 96.
+
+ Northern Cross Railroad, 26.
+
+ Northern Pacific Railroad, 2, 29, 32, 50, 51.
+
+ Northern Steamship Company, 417.
+
+ Northwestern station, Chicago, 88, 101, 106, 321.
+
+ Norwich, Conn., 10.
+
+
+ Observation cars, 308, 309.
+
+ Officials of railroads, 170-219.
+
+ Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, 19.
+
+ Old Colony Railroad, 98, 405.
+
+ _Olympic_, the, 407.
+
+ Oneida Railways Company, 435.
+
+ Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Company, 460.
+
+ Organization, as a means to secure efficiency, 449-464.
+
+ Osgood, Samuel, 375.
+
+ "Our Inland Seas," quotation from, 416.
+
+ Oxford Furnace, tunnel at, 145.
+
+
+ Pacific coast, railroad connections of, 28-32.
+
+ Pacific type of locomotive, 127.
+
+ Paderewski at Vassar, 294, 295.
+
+ Palmer, Timothy, 58.
+
+ Panhandle subsidiary, The, 147, 148.
+
+ Panic, of '37, 13;
+ of '07, 162, 359, 360.
+
+ Pape, Edward, 176, 177.
+
+ Park Avenue Tunnel, 439.
+
+ Park Square Station, Boston, 95, 96, 98.
+
+ Parkersburg, W. Va., railroad connections of, 19;
+ grade at, 41.
+
+ Parsons, Superintendent, 430.
+
+ Passenger coaches, 132-134, 398-400.
+
+ Passenger service, first road to have regular, 8.
+
+ Paterson works, 121, 122, 124.
+
+ Pay-car, gradual disappearance of the, 180.
+
+ Pend Oreille River bridge, 73.
+
+ Pennsylvania Railroad, 2, 12, 49, 50, 61, 76, 77, 96, 109, 110, 123,
+ 135, 145, 146, 154, 159, 167, 170, 194, 297, 298, 300, 313, 317,
+ 320, 359, 379, 385, 386, 394, 401, 406, 412, 413, 417, 421,
+ 423-427, 435, 441, 451.
+
+ Pennsylvania Station, New York, 88, 102-104, 159-162, 318, 319, 412,
+ 440.
+
+ Pensions, granted to employees, 425, 426.
+
+ People's line, 12.
+
+ People's Pacific Railroad, 29.
+
+ Pere Marquette Railway, 416, 429.
+
+ Perham, Josiah, 29, 30.
+
+ Permanent Bridge, across Schuylkill River at Philadelphia, 58.
+
+ Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad, 123.
+
+ Philadelphia, railroad connections of, 10, 11, 15, 21;
+ stations at, 88, 96, 97, 154, 320, 440.
+
+ Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, 20.
+
+ Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad, 12.
+
+ Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, 2, 97, 124.
+
+ "Piano-box" system of switches, 84, 85, 86.
+
+ Pig iron, handling of, 341, 342.
+
+ _Pioneer_, locomotive, 27.
+
+ _Pioneer_, sleeping-car, 301, 302, 303.
+
+ Pittsburgh, railroad connections of, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19;
+ suburban traffic of, 147, 148;
+ Union Station at, 148.
+
+ Planes, inclined, disuse of, 11, 12.
+
+ Plumbe, John, 29.
+
+ Pomeroy, George, 371.
+
+ Pooling, objections to, 328, 331.
+
+ Portage, N. Y., bridge at, 62.
+
+ Portage Railroad, _see_ Alleghany Portage Railroad.
+
+ Post-office Department, United States, 372-387.
+
+ Poughkeepsie Bridge, 66.
+
+ Prairie, type of locomotive, 127.
+
+ Pratt, --, designer of bridges, 61.
+
+ _President_, the, 304.
+
+ President of the railroad, the, 152-169.
+
+ Prince Rupert, on Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, 32.
+
+ Private car lines, 13, 293-298.
+
+ Promotion in railroad service, 245, 255.
+
+ Providence, R. I., railroad connections of, 10.
+
+ "Public service stations," 287.
+
+ Pullman, George M., 134, 299, 393.
+
+ Pullman and its railroad shops, 393, 394.
+
+ Pullman cars, construction of, 303.
+
+ Pullman Palace Car Company, 303.
+
+
+ _Queen City_, the, 299.
+
+ Quincy Granite Railroad, 132.
+
+
+ Railroad, The.
+ history of, in United States, 3-33.
+ English, 5, 7.
+ first American, 6.
+ horse-power, 6, 12, 17.
+ communal nature of early, 12.
+ paper of, 23.
+ treatment of bankrupt, 23.
+ telegraph first used by, 23.
+ development and building of, 34-48.
+ grants for, 35, 36.
+ cost of, 36.
+ financing of, 36, 37, 179-186.
+ keeping open for winter traffic, 38, 268-275.
+ water for use of, 41.
+ crossings on, 42.
+ tunnels, 48-55, 145-150, 436, 437.
+ bridges, 42, 56-79.
+ stations, 80-106.
+ suburban service, 80, 81, 90, 311-324.
+ roundhouses, 88-90.
+ yards, 83-91, 115-118.
+ freight terminals, 107-115, 408.
+ locomotives and cars, 119-137, 388-404.
+ building of the locomotive, 128-132.
+ building of cars, 132-137.
+ reconstruction of, 138.
+ grades, 139-151.
+ officials, 152-169, 187-219, 276-287.
+ legal department, 170-179.
+ financial department, 179-186.
+ tickets, 181-183, 288-290.
+ operating, 220-242.
+ time table, 221-223.
+ signals, 225-227, 236-238.
+ use of telephone, 235.
+ employees, 243-255, 418-431.
+ wrecking trains, 256.
+ rates, 282-287.
+ special trains and private cars, 292-310.
+ commuters' trains, 311-324.
+ freight traffic, 325-355.
+ freight rates, 327-337.
+ scientific farming, 359-366.
+ express service, 369-374.
+ mail service, 374-387.
+ marine, 404-418.
+ ferries, 407-418.
+ electricity, 432-445.
+ mono-rail, 441-445.
+ organization, 449-464.
+
+ Rails laid on stone sleepers, 11.
+
+ Reading Railroad, 123, 313, 320.
+
+ Rebating, prohibition of, 328, 329.
+
+ Reconstruction of railroads, 138-151.
+
+ Red Line, All-British, 141.
+
+ Red Spot, Order of the, 430, 431.
+
+ Repair shops, locomotive and car, 400.
+
+ "Residences," in railroad construction, 43.
+
+ Richardson, the architect, 106.
+
+ Rider, Nathaniel, 60.
+
+ Rio Grande & Western Railroad, 74.
+
+ Roadmaster, duties of, 239, 240.
+
+ Roads as compared with canals, 5.
+
+ Rochester, railroad connections of, 13, 14;
+ depot, 96.
+
+ Rock Island, _see_ Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific R. R.
+
+ Rockaway section, Long Island, home of Lillian Russell, 294.
+
+ Rockefeller, Mr., 296.
+
+ Roebling's suspension at Niagara Falls, 75.
+
+ Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum, locomotive builders, of Paterson, N. J.,
+ 26;
+ locomotive works, 121, 122, 124.
+
+ Ronkonkoma, Long Island, home of Maude Adams, 293, 294.
+
+ Roosevelt, Governor, 217, 218.
+
+ Rotary plough, 271.
+
+ Roundhouses, 88-90, 270, 388-402.
+
+ Rural free delivery, development of, 376.
+
+ Russell, Lillian, 294.
+
+ Rutland Railroad, 417.
+
+
+ Sacramento Valley Railroad, 30.
+
+ Sails on cars, experiments with, 17.
+
+ St. Albans, Vt., 333, 335.
+
+ St. John's Church, New York, 354.
+
+ St. John's Park, New York, 353, 354.
+
+ St. Louis, railroad connections of, 19, 29;
+ Union Station at, 88, 97, 99, 100, 106.
+
+ St. Paul, _see_ Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul R. R.
+
+ Salaries, paid to railroad presidents, 168, 169;
+ to the general attorney, 171.
+
+ "Sand-hogs," 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73.
+
+ _Sandusky_, first locomotive with whistle, 26, 124.
+
+ Santa Fe, _see_ Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe R. R.
+
+ Schedules, Train, _see_ Time Tables.
+
+ Scherl, August, 443.
+
+ Secret service, the railroad's, 177-179.
+
+ Section-boss, duties of, 239, 240, 431.
+
+ Seibert, Leonard, 301.
+
+ Signal, bell-rope, 124, 225, 226, 227;
+ along line of railroad, 236;
+ interlocking, 236;
+ block system of, 237;
+ operation of, 236-239;
+ maintenance of, 239.
+
+ Signal towers, 82, 84-87.
+
+ _Situation_, The, the official daily report, 196, 197.
+
+ Slateford, Pa., bridge, 78.
+
+ Sleeping-cars, introduction and use of, 299, 301, 302.
+
+ Smith, A. H., 205.
+
+ Smith, C. Shaler, 66.
+
+ Smith, Reuben F., 418.
+
+ Snow-belt of Great Lakes, 268.
+
+ Snow ploughs, 38.
+
+ Snow-sheds, 268.
+
+ South Carolina Railroad, 8.
+
+ South Station, Boston, 88, 97-99, 313, 319, 320, 384.
+
+ Southern California, interurban electric line in, 297.
+
+ Southern Express company, 373.
+
+ Southern Pacific Railroad, 2, 32, 126, 139, 144, 159, 441, 454.
+
+ Spearman, Frank H., 144.
+
+ Spiral tunnels, 141, 142.
+
+ Spokane case, the, 334, 335.
+
+ Springfield, Mass., bridge, 57.
+
+ Springfield, station at, 106.
+
+ Springstead, Harvey, 431.
+
+ Stage, Henry W., 418.
+
+ Stampede Tunnel, 50, 51.
+
+ Stanford, Leland, 30, 31.
+
+ Starucca Viaduct, 58, 59, 77.
+
+ Station-agent, multifarious duties of, 253-255.
+
+ Stations, _see under_ Railroad.
+
+ Statistics, making of railroad, 184-186.
+
+ Steam brake, 125.
+
+ Steamships, 352, 353, 404, 405.
+
+ Steel, use of, 56, 61, 72, 125, 386, 397-400.
+
+ Stephenson, George, inventor, 5, 121.
+
+ Stephenson, George & Robert & Company, 121.
+
+ Stephenson, Robert, 125.
+
+ Steubenville, Ohio, bridge, 75, 76.
+
+ Stonington, Conn., railroad connections of, 10.
+
+ _Stourbridge Lion_, locomotive, 7, 8, 119.
+
+ Street railroad systems, 427, 428.
+
+ Stubbs, of the Union Pacific, 298.
+
+ Suburban service, 80, 81, 90, 98, 99, 147, 148, 315-319, 440.
+
+ Superintendent of bridges, 239, 240.
+
+ Superintendents, 153-155, 187, 220, 221-242.
+
+ Susquehanna Railroad, _see_ Northern Central Railroad.
+
+ Susquehanna River, Pennsylvania R. R. bridge over, 77.
+
+ Susquehanna River bridge, between Havre-de-Grace and Aiken, 64, 65.
+
+ Susquehanna shop, 393, 394.
+
+ Swindon, the English railroad town, 393.
+
+ Switchback principle, 41.
+
+ Switches and switchmen, 84-86, 111-118, 252, 253, 320.
+
+
+ Tacony, Philadelphia trains stopped at, 10.
+
+ Taylor, President Zachary, 123.
+
+ Telegraph, Erie first railroad to use, 24;
+ development of, in 1851, 24;
+ introduction of, 25, 224;
+ substitution of telephone for, 235, 236;
+ crippling of service of, 267, 268.
+
+ Telephone, use of, 235, 236.
+
+ Terminal, keeper of the, 82;
+ map of tracks and station of, 83, 84;
+ guarded by interlocking switches, 84, 85.
+
+ Terminals, _see_ Railroad stations;
+ _also_ Freight terminals.
+
+ Thomas, Philip E., 16, 19.
+
+ Thomas Viaduct, 58, 59, 76.
+
+ Thompson, A. W., 65.
+
+ Thomson, J. Edgar, 6.
+
+ Thomson, John, 6.
+
+ "Throat" of station yard, 87, 88.
+
+ Tickets and mileage-books, 182, 276-278, 286;
+ bill for printing, 288;
+ rate-sheet for, 289;
+ redemption of, 289, 290.
+
+ Time Tables, 221.
+
+ Tioga Railroad, 133.
+
+ _Tom Thumb_, locomotive, 18, 120.
+
+ Towanda, Pa., bridge at, 144.
+
+ Towermen, 82, 83, 85, 274.
+
+ Townsend, Oscar, 418.
+
+ Track-laying, world's record of, 45;
+ profession of, 45, 46;
+ machine for, 46.
+
+ Track, on which _Stourbridge Lion_ locomotive ran, 7.
+
+ Track-walker, responsibility of, 253.
+
+ Traffic, making of freight and passenger, 355-368.
+
+ Trailer, the, 128, 129.
+
+ Train-despatcher, 221, 223, 224, 228-231, 233-235, 261.
+
+ Trainman, _see_ Brakeman, duties of.
+
+ Train-master, duties of, 221.
+
+ Transcontinental railroads, 357, 358.
+
+ Transfer-house, 111-116.
+
+ Travelling passenger agents, duties of, 278.
+
+ Trenton, bridge at, 57, 77.
+
+ "Trolley arrangement" in freight-houses, 450.
+
+ Trumbull, --, bridge-builder, 60.
+
+ Tug, use of, 407, 409, 412.
+
+ Tunnels, 41, 48-55, 102, 104, 122, 141, 142, 145, 160, 161, 317-319,
+ 412-414, 436, 437, 439, 441.
+
+ Turner, John B., 28.
+
+ Turn-tables, 89.
+
+
+ Underwood, F. D., 23, 142, 143, 164.
+
+ Union line, 13.
+
+ Union Pacific Railroad, 2, 28, 31, 32, 44, 137, 139-141, 298, 357, 459.
+
+ Union Station, Cleveland, 96, 418, 419.
+
+ Union Station, Pittsburgh, 148.
+
+ Union Station, St. Louis, 88, 97, 99, 100, 106.
+
+ Union Station, Washington, 88, 100, 101, 106.
+
+ United States Express Company, 372, 373.
+
+ Utica, railroad connections of, 13, 14.
+
+
+ Vanderbilt, Commodore, 14, 22, 378, 379.
+
+ Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 419.
+
+ Vanderbilt, William H., 378, 379.
+
+ Vanderbilt family, the, 354, 419, 434.
+
+ Vermont Central Railroad, 123.
+
+ Vice-presidents of railroads, 156.
+
+ Voluntary Relief Department, 423-425.
+
+ Von Moltke, his reconstruction of the German army, 452.
+
+
+ Wabash Railroad, 26, 51, 414.
+
+ Wagner Palace Car Company, 300.
+
+ Walcott, --, builder of Springfield, Mass., bridge, 57.
+
+ Walsheart gears, 128.
+
+ Washington, George, 375.
+
+ "Washington cars," 132, 133.
+
+ Washington, Connecticut Avenue Bridge at, 78;
+ Union Station at, 88, 100, 101, 106.
+
+ Water for use of railroad, 41.
+
+ Water transportation, _see_ Inland Water Ways.
+
+ Waterford bridge, over Hudson River, 57.
+
+ Watertown, blizzard at, 268.
+
+ Waverley, the interchange yard, 110.
+
+ Webster, Daniel, and his trip on the Erie, 23, 25.
+
+ Weehawken "bridge," 411.
+
+ Wells, Henry, 371, 372.
+
+ Wells, Fargo & Co., 372, 373.
+
+ West Penn Road, 149.
+
+ _West Point_, locomotive, 9.
+
+ West Shore Railroad, 75, 151, 265, 412, 434, 435.
+
+ Western Pacific Railroad, 29, 32.
+
+ Western Railroad, 10.
+
+ Westinghouse, George, 125.
+
+ Wheeling, railroad connections of, 18, 19.
+
+ Whipple, Squire, 61, 63.
+
+ Whistle on locomotive, first use of, 26, 124.
+
+ Whitney, Asa, 29, 30.
+
+ Whitney, Silas, 6.
+
+ Whyte's classification, 127, 128.
+
+ Wiley, Dr., 397.
+
+ Willard, Daniel, 22.
+
+ Winans, Ross, 19, 122, 124, 132, 133.
+
+ Winnipeg shops, 393.
+
+ Women, conveniences for travelling, 309.
+
+ Woodruff Company, 299, 300.
+
+ Worcester, station at, 106.
+
+ World's Fair of 1904, St. Louis, 99.
+
+ Wrecks, railroad, 189, 194-196;
+ wrecking-trains for, 257-265.
+
+
+ _Yale_, the, 405, 406.
+
+ Yardmaster, duties of, 189, 190, 193, 227-229.
+
+ _York_, _see_ _Arabian_, locomotive.
+
+ Young Men's Christian Association, 418, 419.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Modern Railroad, by Edward Hungerford
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40242 ***
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