The Modern Railroad

The great bridge of the New York
Central at Watkins Glen

Building the wonderful bridge of the Idaho & Washington
Northern over the Pend Oreille River, Washington

To fill the coal-bins of New York City alone, requires some 10,500,000 tons of anthracite yearly. Now you cease to wonder why this road has a coal traffic expert, a man of surpassingly good salary. He keeps keen oversight over the operating department in its handling of this giant traffic, sees to it that the trains come over the mountains and into the great terminals at Jersey City in good order, and that the railroad’s marine department is ready with tugs and scows and lighters to handle the product as it comes in, in thousands of tons every twenty-four hours. This would all be quite simple if the trains and the boats were always running on schedule. But the unexpected constantly comes to pass in railroading, and so the railroads provide against emergencies by establishing great coal storage plants outside of New York and other large cities—communities that would be in dire distress if their coal supply were cut short even for twenty-four hours. Sometimes about 500,000 tons will be kept in a single one of these storage piles—a black mountain running lengthwise between sidings and served with giant cranes.

We are back in the traffic-manager’s comfortable office for a final word with him. He is fumbling with his own correspondence. It seems that a lawyer down in Washington has been saying that he could save the railroads of the land a million dollars a day in the economical operation of their property, and the railroader is exceedingly wroth at that assertion.

“He speaks of pig iron, and says that we should teach our laborers the minimum movements necessary to put a single pig in a car—just as masons have been taught to handle brick with minimum effort and a maximum economy in work accomplished has been effected.” The traffic-man laughs, rather harshly. “The lawyer is all right, except for two things; and his anecdote about the brick is certainly well told. Only it just happens that the railroad does not load or unload freight by the carload—that is the duty of the consignor and the consignee—and it also happens that pig iron rarely is handled “L.C.L.” In carload lots it is not loaded or unloaded by hand, but by big magnets on a crane which picks up a ton of the bars at a time and thinks nothing of it.”

The freight traffic-manager has made his point once again, and he is satisfied. He tells a little of the modern methods in freight handling, one of them how an ingenious packing-house expert in Chicago saved thousands of dollars annually in the handling of lard. In other days lard was rolled aboard box-cars, a barrel to a hand-truck, a rather slow and a rather costly process. The Chicago man devised a method of melting lard and, while it was fluid, pouring it, like petroleum, into a tank-car. When it reached its destination at some big terminal, the lard was again melted to fluid and poured out from the tank. That is the science of big freight handling to-day. Not alone do cranes, with magnet-bars handle pig-iron and castings by the ton, but great hoists at Cleveland and Conneaut and the other big lake towns close to the Pittsburgh district reach deep into the hearts of giant ships, bring from them the ore of Lake Superior’s shores, and fill the whole waiting trains within fifteen or twenty minutes. Into the empty holds of the ships they pour bituminous coal from Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, a carload at a time. The hoist-crane reaches down to the dock siding for a gondola, snaps the car-body off from the trucks, lifts it aloft over the open hatch of the waiting vessel, and turns it upside down. In less time than it takes to tell it, the coal is in the ship, and the car-body is being slipped back again upon its trucks.

CHAPTER XXI

There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city’s larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets, building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the constant replenishing of the city’s larder.

That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that are the pride of the railroad’s traffic head, go so quickly over the rails to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight conductor thumbing his “Sartor Resartus,” and discussing Carlyle as a stylist.

“Yes, we do bring some food up to town,” he admits. “I’ve got enough grub aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We’ve two refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago. The Chicago car has been iced twice—at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago. Soon we’ll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing.

“The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he’ll be fretting about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He’s got a lake tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we’ve got a branch running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a lake for its refrigerating stations. It’s just one of the many little kinks in running a road.”

We express a desire to see the big preference train, and—the block being still set against her—we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the train boss’s arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a string of white and yellow box-cars.

“California fruit,” he says; “they don’t think anything of sending it all the way across the continent. You might have thought those ranchers over there on the Pacific coast would have been discouraged when they were told that there were a dozen icing stations between the two oceans, and that the icing cost was prohibitive. They weren’t a bit. They just sat down and did some tall thinking, and after a while they developed this type of car. We call it pre-cooled. The car is cleaned and brought to a chill before loading. After that the temperature is not allowed to rise while the fruit is being piled away inside. It is closed and sealed, while still ice-cold, and icy-cold she comes bumping her way east over three or four thousand miles of track. It may be scorching down there along the S. P.; they may be just gasping for air in the Missouri bottoms; but that pre-cooled car comes right along, keeping its cargo fresh and cool and pure. We can deliver her anywhere here on the Atlantic seaboard, and no risk of spoiling the stuff.”

We slip along another half-dozen cars. The conductor halts again and fumbles with his way-bills.

“There’s the boy,” he laughs. “He’s halibut. There’s half a dozen halibuts along here in a string.”

We do not like to show an utter ignorance of the food question and we venture an assertion.

“Halibut comes from Newfoundland?” we ask. “How do you get it around here?”

The freighter grins sympathetically at our lack of knowledge.

“Bless you,” he says. “That little fishing pond up there on the Banks isn’t big enough for a land which has 27,000,000 folks gathered in its cities. These cars have come in from big Yem Hill’s road—all the way from Tacoma up on Puget Sound—State of Washington. Some of those people who live in Boston might have a fit if they knew that their beloved halibut was born and raised in the Pacific Ocean; but that’s the truth of the matter.

“This fish (and some of it’s going straight to Boston to be sold in the very shade of Faneuil Hall), has come 7,000 miles to be eaten on the very shores of the Atlantic. When the fishing ship that caught this cargo was fifty miles off the docks, she began calling Tacoma with her wireless. The yardmaster of the Northern Pacific was ready there for the news from that rat-a-tap. He had a string of refrigerator cars ready; they were ready and set out along the wharf by the time the ship was made fast.

“Five minutes later the fish were being loaded into the cars. They had a gang of stevedores working there clock-like, as those fellows work around the big tents of a three-ring circus. First there went in a layer of ice, then a layer of fish, then another of ice. In thirty minutes the job was done. In forty-five minutes that string of fish-cars was coming east on an express-train schedule. It was knocked apart at St. Paul and again at Chicago. Here’s our share of the spoils, and we’re not loafing here on the old main line.

“We’re preference freight, if you please, and no old bumpety-bump with coal and ore taking the low-grade tracks. They sandwich us in among the all-Pullmans, even when we’re on the four-track divisions, for food is quick; food won’t keep forever; and those folks down in the city are getting hungry.”

He starts to say more, but the engine call halts him. The block is clear once again. The conductor catches a car step, the “preference” starts forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us—more market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession, these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part. To-night again, the food is going up to the city.

The scene changes. Now we are off in the rolling country of up-State—dairy country, if you please. The railroad that stretches its thick black trail the length of the valley is no four-track line, with heavy trains coursing over it every three or four or five or ten minutes. This is but a single-track branch; in the parlance of the railroaders it is a “jerkwater”; and the coming of its two passenger trains and that of the way-freight each day are events in the little towns that line it. Still, even this little branch is doing its part in the filling of the city’s larder. This branch has the filling of the city babies’ milk bottles as its own particular problem.

At early dawn, the muddy brown roads that lead to the little depot there at the flour mills are alive. The farmer boys are bringing the milk to the railroad. Down the track a few hundred yards beyond the depot is the slick, clean, new milk-station. Over across the brook is the cheese-factory, deserted and given over to the gentle fingers of decay. Those two buildings tell the story of changing times; in their mute way they tell the growth of the American city.

In other days this township made cheese. To-day they drive the milk to the depot. Each morning finds a big refrigerator car, built in the fashion of passenger equipment, so that it may be handled on passenger trains, at the milk station. The farmer boys are prompt with their milk, it is checked and weighed and placed in the car, in cans and in bottles. Hardly has the last big ten-gallon can gone clattering into the car before the whistle of the warning local is heard up the line, just beyond the curve at the water-tank. While the train is at the depot, in all the bustle of the comings and goings at a country station, the engine makes quick drill movement and picks up the milk-car.

Farther down the line that same train picks up more milk-cars. By the time it reaches the junction where it intersects the main line it is a considerable train for a branch line. Indeed at the junction there are more milk-cars, from other branches that ramble off into the real back-country. There are enough of them now to make a train through to the city. The trainmaster has a good engine ready for every afternoon, and the milk express goes scurrying into town with passenger rights and on passenger schedules. You cannot hurry the babies’ milk through to town any too quickly.

This is all first-day milk. You can take a compass, place the pin-leg squarely in the heart of the busy town—a place of brick and asphalt, of steel and concrete, without ever a hint of growing things—and with the pencil-leg trace a segment of a circle—the outer line some 200 miles distant from the centre. Afterwards you can draw a second circle segment, its outer line some 350 miles from the same town centre. From within the inner circle comes the first-day milk, delivered to the railroad during the early part of a day and on the householder’s table in the big city the next morning. From without this inner circle and within the outer, comes the second-day milk which has another twenty-four hours in its transit to town. The whole thing, once rather badly handled by itinerant single dealers, has been reduced to scientific business by skilful coöperation between the big milk-dealers of the present day and the railroads.

It is night.

The last of the office lights in the towering buildings has been snuffed out. Downtown is quiet—quiet for a little time, for soon after sun-up it will be a vortex once again; these narrow, deep-canyoned streets will be astir and human-filled once again. But at nine o’clock in the evening the policeman’s footfall on the pavement echoes in lonely streets. A tired bookkeeper scurrying home after a vexatious hunt for his balances gets sharp scrutiny from the policeman. Downtown is asleep.

Then, from around the turn of a sharp corner comes a night train of wagons, drawn by a small brigade of horses. These are not filled with market-truck; market-truck will not reach the town till midnight at the earliest. These are great high-boxed vans, painted white, a bit gaudy in lettering. They make you think of those long-ago days when you used to go down to the depot to see the circus come in, for the big wagons are precisely like those that used to shroud mystery as they rolled from the trains down to the show-lot. We follow this procession of half a dozen great vans, follow it through the twisting, narrow streets of downtown, across a famous old ferry, straight up to the long sheds of a railroad terminal.

On the one side of the terminal, the passenger trains are coming and going at all hours. By day this shed at which the big vans back, each into its own carefully marked place, is a general freight-house; by night it is given over to the stocking of the city babies’ milk bottles. The ferried vans are hardly emptied of their empty cans and cases before the first of the milk trains comes backing in at the other side of the long covered platform. Hissing arcs up under that slimsy roof throw high lights and deep shadows here and there and everywhere. They show the platform-men tugging at the car fastenings before the brakes are fairly released. In another minute, the big side-doors are thrown open, almost simultaneously, in still another, the place is alive with the rattle of trucks. The milk—tons upon tons of it—in ten-gallon cans and in cases of individual bottles, is being loaded within those circus-like cans. A second milk-train comes bumping in at a far platform. There is another brigade of vans waiting for it there. A third train is due to arrive in another half-hour. The vans that it will fill are already beginning to back into place and unload their cans and cases upon the platforms.

Here are almost 200 great four-horse trucks being filled simultaneously, and all working with the almost rhythmic harmony of organization. You want to know how they do it? Ask that man over there, he in a short rough coat, who carries a lantern on his arm and with it peers interestedly into every one of the cars. That man’s word is law on this platform, for he is its boss. He has been filling the babies’ milk bottles from this particular terminal for almost a quarter of a century now. His railroad was the first to bring milk into a large city.

“We get it over,” he will tell you, “by the experience of some little time, and by planning. You saw the numbers on the team side of this milk platform. That’s only half the problem. There are a dozen different milk-handling concerns doing business at this shed, and their stuff comes together on this one train. Yet we get the thing out by having each concern—each truck—come up to its own position at the team side. The other half of the problem we solve by having a certain position for each milk-car.

“Here is the Hygienic Milk Company up on the Heights. You have seen their fancy dairies all over town. Well, the Hygienic has a station up at Bottger’s, on our Lancaster & Essex division, that fills two cars at that station every blessed day. Their two cars stand in beyond this No. 14 pillar every night; so we know just where to direct their trucks. That’s business—just system. We spot the cars every night.”

“Spot the cars?” you interrupt. He smiles a bit at your ignorance.

“This train is made up in just the same fashion every night,” he explains. “These two Hygienic cars are always the fifth and sixth. If they were the eighth and ninth some nifty evening—if some smart Aleck of a yardmaster up the line would take to shuffling up these cars as you shuffle a deck of cards—we would have a near riot here, and I couldn’t get these platforms cleared of the milkmen for that market-truck train that backs in here from the south every night at 11:55.

Inside the West Albany shops of the New York Central:
picking up a locomotive with the travelling crane

A locomotive upon the testing-table at the Altoona shops of the Pennsylvania

“The roundhouse is a sprawling thing”

Denizens of the roundhouse

“So they keep closely to the formation of our trains, and that of itself is no terminal problem. Away up the line 90 miles—150,—250,—everywhere that we have a big junction yard, the yard boss has his positive instructions about these milk trains. By the time this fellow has cleared out of P—— J——, 90 miles up the road and our nearest road yard outside of the metropolitan district, it’s always in just the shape you see it to-night. After that there’s nothing to be done here except cut off the road engine at our terminal yard and pick out a switcher to back her into position at this shed. It’s nice work, and night after night that engineer of the switcher does not vary four inches in the locations of these car-doors.”

He lifts his lantern, and we peek into the interior of one of these cool milk-cars. This has the bottled milk in cases. The cases are packed four tiers high—never higher—and your guide explains to you that four cases is the limit of a hand-truck. All these things make for simplicity in handling. You peer into another car. The ten-gallon cans are in long diagonal rows, covering the entire floor of the car. They form a regular tessellated pattern, like the marble tiling of old-fashioned hotels and banks.

“Those little farmer boys,” says the platform boss, “sure do that trick well. That speaks pretty neat for Sullivanville. They all used to put the cans in straight rows, running lengthwise of the car. One day one of the smartest of those Sullivanville boys discovered that by putting the cans in diagonal rows, this-wise, he would gain a hundred cans in the loading. That added a thousand gallons to the capacity of the car. The Super gave him a good job, and some day you’ll see he’ll be running a railroad of his own.”

Midnight.

Downtown is still more deserted, if that is possible, than when we first saw it three hours ago. The stillness of the deep night is hard upon the city; yet here on this broad quay street which runs its stone-paved length up and down past the wharves of the harbor-front, all is alive.

This is the midnight market. Under the very noses of the steamships that have brought this garden-truck up from the south, it is being auctioned off to a hundred or so keen-nosed, keener-witted wholesalers. They wander about under long awning roofs erected in the centre of the street, through the gaunt open shadowy spaces of the piers, poking into the tops of barrels, pinching, tasting, critically examining all the while that they are dickering in prices. When the day is fully born and downtown alive once again, there will be other wholesale markets, more sedate-looking affairs in rooms that have been built for the purpose by the traffic departments of the railroads. In these rooms, with the seats arranged in tiers and each seat having a broad writing arm like a college classroom, fruit and vegetables will be sold in carload lots. There will be records of prices—quotations. The thing will approach the dignity of those bourses where cotton and coffee and metals and securities are sold.

But the midnight market scorns such formalities, such dignities. It clings to its own hubbub—its own unsystematic way of accomplishing a great business. It prefers to sell as the stuff is unloaded; that has been its method for three-quarters of a century and any method that has stood 75 years is at least entitled to a measure of consideration. But not all its offerings have come by these big coasting steamships, whose outlines show vague at their piers in the darkness of the night. For, grinding against the piles of these same wharves, as the unseen tide changes, are groups of car-floats that have been ferried from the great railroad terminals across the river. Each car-float has two trackfuls of refrigerator cars—12 or 14 or 16 in all—lined against a long roofed platform running just above keel. When the pert and busy little tugs have pushed and pulled and bunted the floats all into position, the platforms are quickly connected by gangways, canvas-covered against the stress of hard weather. A great freight-house, almost Venetian in type, floats upon the surface of the silent river and becomes part and parcel of the pier itself. After that it is quick work to open each of the cars—to wheel out sample barrels of potatoes, of cabbage, of celery, of lettuce, of cauliflower—all the growing things of country farms that go to feed the hungry city.

The trading here is over in an hour, or two hours at the longest when the shipments are heavy; and then the wholesalers are wheeling their wagons into place to cart away their purchases to their own stores and warehouses. From these the retailers—the men who carry on their businesses in stalls in the public market-houses and those that have their own little shops on the street corners—make their selections. If you are a city man, you may now know that your grocer at the corner is up betimes, when the sun is just showing himself on lazy September mornings. He has been poking his way with his own horse and wagon down to the wholesalers, buying his day’s stock and getting it placed just before the earliest of the housewives begins her marketing.

You demand a concrete example of a city freight-house; and here it is—the historic St. John’s Park of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad in New York. Up over the lines of the Central, back for hundreds of weary miles, you may hear the railroaders speak of “the Park,” you may see long strings of cars, bearing merchandise tagged through to it. At Sixtieth Street, where the big freights of the New York Central come to a final halt, you see the cars sent south in long strings, each hauled by a red dummy locomotive and preceded by a boy astride a horse and holding a red flag, a familiar sight to all New Yorkers who reside upon the far west side of the town.

St. John’s Park handles a very large percentage of all the perishable food that comes into New York each day. It is the dingy freight-house that fills the double block between Hudson and Varick and Beach and Laight Streets; and when you ask, “Where is the park?” they will tell you that there was a day when the entire site of this freight-house—possibly the most congested in the world—was a gentle tree-filled square that faced old St. John’s Church. There is never a trace of the park nowadays. The old church now faces a narrow street wherein truckmen shove and elbow and disappear in the gates of the freight station.

On the Hudson Street side of the structure six pairs of railroad tracks curve into it; and far above on the cornice of the structure one can see the benign figure of the old Commodore—a heroic bronze surrounded by replicas of the trains and the steamships that he loved so well. The building of the large freight station on the site of St. John’s Park away back in 1868 was a real accomplishment to the first of the house of Vanderbilt. Think of it: that freight-house could hold 100 cars. There was nothing else in all the broad land quite like that!

Into St. John’s Park at dawn come trainloads of produce. Even before the doors of the freight-house have opened, at six, a string of “coolers” has stopped in Hudson Street and the commission men are carting out the poultry. As soon as the station gets down to real business, butter and eggs and cheese pour in through it in carload lots.

“It doesn’t bother us much,” the foreman tells you. “Still, on the Monday before Christmas we had a fairly brisk day. We had 155 cars of turkeys alone that morning.”

CHAPTER XXII

The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an unpopulated country would never be any great “shakes” of a railroad until people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to Chicago—afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern—the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes again.

At the close of the war these tides rose to flood. The railroads no longer struggled. There was a steady flow of traffic over their rails, and they were able because of it to engage capital to stretch their rails a little farther west. After they had moved another stretch, the tides of emigration still flowed. That process might have gone ahead in orderly fashion until the Pacific had been reached, if the scheme had not been upset.

They built too many railroads, they overworked their idea. In the broad reaches of the Middle West, lines of steel crumbled into rust, and cross-roads dreamed vainly that they would become villages. Many a struggling village failed to become the city that her enthusiastic residents had fancied. They had the big boom in Kansas, and the bigger collapse that followed. After that, folk stayed East for a while, and the business of making traffic in that territory became an advanced science.

There was another factor in the situation. You will remember that the Summer of ’69 saw the first continuous railroad across the American continent—the combination of Central Pacific and Union Pacific. The huge success of that railroad was inspiration for others. In the generation of men that followed the rails that reached from Atlantic to Pacific were multiplied. After that there was a new problem for the owners of the transcontinental railroads. Their statistical charts of originating traffic showed great black masses at either end of the line—where connections were made with the great traffic-bringers from the East, and where the rails ran upon the docks of the Pacific shore. Between those two points was a thin black line, like spider-thread. To make that line black and firm at all points, to bring masses of new traffic at intermediate points, was the demand that the railroad-owner made of his traffic-manager.

It is being done to-day. It has taken time, money and almost incredible patience; but it is being done. This is a broad land, and there is still much to be done. In Montana, there is a single county with an area exceeding that of Maryland and a population less than that of the smallest ward of Baltimore; and near-by there is another county, as large as Delaware and Connecticut combined, with mere handful of residents. These are typical. There are great open stretches to the southwest; and the Santa Fe, working hand in hand with the Harriman lines, is busy populating and developing these. In the North Country, James J. Hill’s railroads and the new outstretched arm of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul are doing much to exploit the unfarmed lands of Montana, and the intensive possibilities of Washington for fruit-raising, market-gardening and the like. Up and down the Pacific coast, the railroads are uniting in similar campaigns of development.

Hill began the campaign in Montana. He is a dreamer and a far-seer. When he began making presents of blooded bulls to the farmers out along the Great Northern, folk laughed at him, some of his directors thought that he had gone crazy. They thought differently when they knew the results, when they got the traffic reports of the cattle business that was growing along the line.

That thing was typical. The railroad—Hill’s railroad and all the other big transcontinentals—lent itself to the fine development of all the traffic that might possibly be obtained within its territory. Heretofore it had roughly combed traffic possibilities, now it began to screen them with a fine mesh screen. The emigrant bureau did its part of the work; the railroad went further and set itself to develop every inch of available land along its lines. Attractive excursions brought settlers to the new country, the railroad was of practical assistance in finding locations for them. Everything is being brought toward the development of those great new States of the West: cross-roads are beginning to become villages; villages, cities. A little time before his death, Mr. Harriman announced that there would be four great cities spread across the American continent—New York, Chicago, Salt Lake, and San Francisco. He then took it upon his own rather roomy shoulders to make Salt Lake City worthy of a place in the file.

From this activity in the West, the Eastern railroads have stolen a lesson. Originally built in many cases to serve the needs of the farmers of some particular locality, they have become merged and welded in a way that has caused them to serve the industrial interests of the country more particularly than the agricultural. One of the valuable old properties of the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey rejoices in the name of Freehold and Jamesburg Agricultural Railroad.

When, after the serious slump in traffic that followed the panic in 1907, the railroads of the East found themselves, for the first time in a decade, with more facilities than freight, they began to cultivate more carefully the traffic branch of transportation science. They took quite readily to the lesson that the transcontinentals gave them. Then they proceeded to put it into effect in practical fashion.

For some years past the problem of the unimportant branches has been a serious one with the big Eastern systems. These branches, many of them once profitable feeders, have been allowed to deteriorate and retrograde, while main-line traffic developed and increased under active conditions of competition. The little towns along the branches seemed to retrograde too; while the busy cities of the country, strung along the main lines of the railroad, absorbed new growth and new energy. Sometimes the branch lines were paralleled by interurban electric railroads, which were able to operate at far less cost than steam railroads, and consequently to charge lower rates of fare; and their slight passenger traffic continued to grow lighter. The freight traffic had long since dwindled to slim proportions; the branch lines were almost entirely agricultural railroads; and the farmers of the East were discouraged and disheartened.

The new movement began in Western New York, which is fairly gridironed with a network of these unprofitable branch railroads. It was started even before the panic of 1907. New York State, with its great resources and its fat treasury, has long been engaged in the development of scientific farming—which means farming for the largest profit that can be brought from the soil. It has a great agricultural school as a part of Cornell University, and an interesting experimental school along similar lines at Geneva. These schools have done a great work. They have educated young men to be modern farmers, in every sense of that phrase; and they have sent leaflets to every corner of the Empire State. But even these methods were not far-reaching enough. It is not every farmer’s boy in these days who can afford to go down to Ithaca for a college education in the tilling of the soil; few of the older men care to mingle with the boys at such an institution. Even the pamphlets sent out from Geneva were not sufficient.

So when the railroads, seeking to make traffic in a dull time and to rehabilitate their branches in the farming districts, made alliance with the agricultural schools, special trains were sent out into the farming districts, and these trains carried a competent corps of instructors from the schools. Day coaches made good school-rooms for the itinerant institutions; and a baggage-car, filled with specimens of fruit and grains grown under scientific methods, was generally attached. The Western roads had used similar trains with success in building up their virgin territories. The use of the scientific schools in connection was the Eastern adaptation of the idea.

A train of this sort will “make” half a dozen towns in the course of a day. The towns are not far apart, and the schedule generally permits a stop of about an hour in each. The coming of the “farmers’ special” has been thoroughly announced by handbills, posters, and the local newspapers. Whether the day be wet or fair, the appreciation of the enterprise that started the special out is sure to be manifest in a crowd that packs the day-coaches and not infrequently causes overflow meetings to be held from the rear platform of the train.

In the Far West the farm-train has long since come into its own

“Even in New York State the interest in these
itinerant agricultural schools is keen, indeed”

Interior of the dairy demonstration car of an agricultural train

There is no cause for disheartenment in the soul of the farmer after he has been down to the train. He learns the things that his land is capable of and yet has never reared for him. Take the perennial and hardy alfalfa, for instance. Crowd into the car, where a hundred earnest men from the country-side are gathered and listening to the man from the State Agricultural College, who talks on it.

“An acre of good alfalfa,” he is saying, “produces twice as much digestible nutriment as an acre of good clover. It is therefore profitable to our farmers to make every effort to establish alfalfa fields. Your climate is favorable to alfalfa, which can be grown on a variety of soils. The most favorable is a gravelly loam with a porous sub-soil. There must be drainage, fertility, lime, and inoculation. Alfalfa is a lime-loving plant, and if you haven’t a limy soil, apply lime at the rate of one to two thousand pounds per acre. These figures will be given you in a pamphlet as you leave the car.”

And so it goes. If the train is in one of the great fruit-growing districts of western New York, fruit is the theme of the lecturers. There is no product that the soil may give, directly or indirectly, that is too humble for the attention of the farmers’ special. All the roads in Western New York have taken part in the campaign—the New York Central, the Erie, the Lehigh Valley, and the smaller roads have sent out the train over the lines, each in due turn.

The idea has gone into the Middle West and back to Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which creates traffic from every conceivable source, has operated since November, 1908, four agricultural specials and two fruit-tree and shrubbery specials. The agricultural schools of the great territory it traverses have furnished the lecturers and the material. Now it is preparing to establish down in the Eastern Shore country between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, a development farm, in which it will show the farmers of that agricultural district the greatest use that they can make of their land, the greatest results that it can be brought to yield. It has gone down into the sandy southern part of New Jersey and made the potato crop for New York and for Philadelphia into a vast yield,—a profit both for the farmer and for the railroad which has created the traffic.

The first of these development farms in the East was that established by H. B. Fullerton, under the auspices of the Long Island Railroad, at Wading River, N. Y. The Long Island possesses a territory that particularly needs development of that sort. It has a good suburban territory adjacent to New York City, but after that there is not a town of importance the entire length of its lines. There is no manufacturing of consequence out upon its line and it has been driven to the necessity of making traffic.

Fullerton’s Farm is another traffic-maker by educational process. He has taken the worst of the sandy soil that makes thousands of acres at the east end of the Island, and he has created from it a model farm. The farm has had to pay its way. It has not been nurtured under any extensive appropriations from the railroad, but it has had to win its success under the same conditions that would confront the farmer who measured his capital in hundreds, rather than in thousands of dollars. It is teaching the lesson that it has sought to teach. Arid soil, on the very hearthstone of a metropolitan city, is being given over to profitable truck-farming; and the Long Island Railroad for its modest farm investment is beginning to harvest appreciable traffic returns.

The New York Central, under the guidance of its president, W. C. Brown, who is keenly interested in the revival of farming in the East, and who personally directed the operation of the “farm specials” over its lines, has purchased two demonstration farms—one in Central, the other in Western New York. It has hired a competent farmer to have charge of them—T. E. Martin, of West Rush, who made a famous record for himself in growing 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre on land that had never before grown more than sixty. They will also serve as object lessons, and when they have been developed to their capacity, they will be sold at a far higher price than the song for which they were purchased in rundown condition. The proceeds will be turned over to the purchase and development of neglected acres in other sections along the lines of that system.

The New York Central is also making its own special development of the “farm special” idea, by taking two coaches and making them into “agricultural cars” at its West Albany shops. These cars will not run sporadically on special trains but will be in use the entire year round, being dropped at one little town after another for a day or two days or three days, in order that the farmers from the surrounding district may drop in to receive a little practical information.

Through the schools of a number of corn-growing States, into which this work has spread, boys and girls are being stimulated by prizes to plant little patches of corn. Out of each community where such an exhibit is held, ten prize-winning ears are sent to the country fair. From this the best ten ears are sent to the State fair, and interstate competition is already being developed.

There is another side to this. The railroads are making more than a new traffic for themselves, they are making a new wealth for the communities through which their rails are stretched. It has been estimated by a Pennsylvania agronomist that the value of the staple farm crops in the Keystone State in a single year exceeds $170,000,000; and that some 224,000 farmers entered into this production. If by training and education each of these farmers can increase his yield of corn one bushel to the acre, the additional corn revenue from that one State would be $1,044,000. Further than that, he says that $780,000 would roll into the pockets of these farmers if they would choose their seed corn carefully and thus add ten kernels to each ear of corn grown by them in the course of a twelvemonth. That sort of thing looks like a cooperative benefit from almost any angle from which you may view it.

The Rock Island Railroad has begun to preach dry farming down through the Southwest. Wheat six feet in length is exhibited by that railroad in its offices throughout the East as sample of what the farmers in its territory do, under its help and supervision. That sort of thing silently makes traffic every day in the year. It is worth a dozen times what it costs the railroad.

But the railroad is not confining its efforts at making traffic to the products of the soil. What is good method with the farmer is similarly good method with the manufacturer. So you now see the railroads, east and west, working with the aid of industrial commissioners. The industrial commissioner is like a High Minister of Commerce.

Take, for instance, a typical railroad running from New York to Chicago. It has ample docks upon the sea board, extensive ramifications within the coal-mining districts; in the West it taps both the Great Lakes and the transcontinentals, which reach across the land to the Pacific. In all this district it is under hard competition, gaining its traffic—every ton of it—by the sweat of the general traffic-manager’s brow. That railroad has its Industrial Commissioner, and if you are a prospective manufacturer looking for a site for a new plant, you are sure to come to him. You tell him that you want to build a factory. He tilts back his chair and looks at you easily.

“What kind of a factory?” he asks. “We’ve room for 10,000 more along our rails. If it’s a silk mill I can suggest Paterson, where the help is trained, and the dyes and raw materials handy. If you are going to turn out a steel product somewhere in the Pittsburgh district, Youngstown, Ohio, is the most economical point in the United States to-day for the turning out of finished steel. Perhaps yours is a canning factory,” he laughs. “If you want to can fruit we can fix you out up in Western New York among the orchards; if you want to can tomatoes, well, sir, there is nothing like Indiana for tomatoes.”

You specify your new business and its requirements in some detail. The eye of this practical Minister of Commerce illumines.

“I have the very thing you want,” he says, without hesitation. “Over at W——, just half a mile above the city limits along the river. It has siding facilities.” (You may be fairly certain that the siding facilities give chief access to the railroad that employs this particular Commissioner.) “And you say you want fresh water. Well, there’s five thousand gallons a day of the purest soft water in the East for you.”

His eyes shine with enthusiasm. He reaches for his paper block and the next instant he is sketching the plot for you with remarkable accuracy, and with a similitude of scale. Here is the river and there is where you can build your dam. Over there is the main line of the best railroad in America (he leaves no doubt in your mind as to that); and your siding can go in there with less than a quarter of one per cent grade. The highroad is there, and close by it the trolley leading into town.

“They’ve a surplus of help of the kind you want in W——,” he adds. “You’ll never run short of hands there.”

It sounds good, and within a week you are bound to W—— with him to meet the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. If things are as he has represented them to you, and your mind is unbiased, you build your factory, and the railroad picks up 200 tons a day off your siding. That single transaction has been worth the Commissioner’s salary for a year to it. There is a variety of method in making traffic.

The general passenger agent has to keep his end up. Any G. P. A. of to-day found entertaining the old-fashioned idea that the traffic that flows of its own volition up to the ticket-wickets is going to be sufficient to satisfy his employers is out of present-day development. The general passenger agent who gets patted on the back nowadays is the man who goes to the president in a dull season with a sheet showing gains over a preceding busy season. He may have to bring water from stones to increase that tide of traffic, but it must be increased. There are no two ways about what is expected of him.

So he gets out, like the traffic people from the freight end of the railroad, and he keeps in constant touch with his territory, with the towns along the line and the agents who are working under him. If he is instrumental in locating a big convention at some point where his line will receive the lion’s share of the business, that is a good trick and worth while. A lively convention will do a lot toward bracing up a weak passenger sheet in some dull month.

One railroad reaching out of New York into the mountains at the northeastern corner of that State and losing itself at some obscure town, a railroad without valuable connections and ramifications, has made its passenger business a little gold-mine by scientific nurturing. It sent its passenger representatives up into the country towns, and they sought to improve conditions of every sort there. They started agitation for better roads from the railroad into the uplands where city folk were prone to wander; they helped the boarding-house landlord and the country hotel-keeper to bring their facilities up to attractive standards. In some cases they induced capital to come in and build new hotels. In every case they offered free space in the railroad’s summer resort literature. Under a single general passenger agent pursuing such a campaign unflaggingly the passenger receipts of that small railroad increased 125 per cent in eight years!