The Modern Railroad

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.

“Even in winter there is a homely, homey air about the commuter’s station”

Entrance to the great four-track open cut which the Erie
has built for the commuter’s comfort at Jersey City

A model way-station on the lines of the Boston & Albany Railroad

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

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.

“The inside of any freight-house is a busy place”

St. John’s Park, the great freight-house of the New York
Central Railroad in down-town New York

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.