The Modern Railroad

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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

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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

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.

Where Harriman stretched the Southern Pacific in a
straight line across the Great Salt Lake

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

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 42½ 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 28½ 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