The Modern Railroad

Triple-phase alternating-current locomotive built by the General Electric Co.
for use in the Cascade Tunnel, of the Great Northern Railway

Heavy service, alternating and direct current freight locomotive built by the
Westinghouse Company for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad

The monoroad in practical use for carrying passengers at City Island, New York

The cigar-shaped car of the monoroad

The locomotive that hauls the train goes to its “stall” in the roundhouse directly after its work is done. Its crews, having finished their run, desert it for the time being, and it comes within the charge of the roundhouse foreman and his “hostlers.” These old terms are reminiscent of the days when the roundhouse was a real stable and its denizens flesh and blood horses. Now the denizens of the roundhouse are iron horses, and in their great size as they rest within their house they are indicative of the progress that has been made in the design and construction of railroad equipment.

On the way to the roundhouse, possibly on the way from it (the practice varies on different railroads) the engine will stop at the ash-pit. It will have its fires cleaned in a long pit that runs underneath a section of track, and then pass on to the coaling-shed. The long pit at some points is filled with iron buckets that run on wheels into which the ashes are dumped and these are emptied by overhead crane apparatus into a nearby line of empty gondolas, ready to be taken away to be disposed of.

At the coaling shed the tender is filled, some twelve or fifteen tons being required if the engine is large; the water-spout fills the capacious tanks, while the hostlers take good care to see that the sand-box is filled, as a precaution against slipping on the next steep grade. Then on to the turntable and the waiting stall, until ready to go out again upon the regular service or extra duty. During that time it will be both cleaned and inspected. The fireman may be held responsible for the cleanly appearance of his engine above the running-board. Below that, the work will be delegated to the roundhouse force. The fireman will probably feel that it should clean all the engine. When he feels particularly aggrieved over the matter it is time for him to meet one of the veterans of the service, who will tell him of the days when the engines were gayly ornamented with brass and light-colored paints, and the fireman’s career had added to it an endless campaign with his wiping rag against the tendency of the bright-work to tarnish. There are some things that decidedly favor the fireman of the present time.

There are not always sufficient roundhouse facilities at every point; the traffic of our railroads has a way of constantly running away from the facilities; and so there are many times when the engines must be housed in the open. But the vigilance and the care upon them are never relaxed. The railroad that is foolish enough to try to save upon the maintenance of its motive power sooner or later pays a terrible price for its penurious folly.

So it comes to pass that every engine makes a regular visit to the shops, generally at periods of from ten to fourteen months, depending upon the service in which it is engaged. On some of these visits, it will be pretty completely dismantled, and a travelling crane running the full length of the erecting shop will soon lift the heavy boiler from frame and wheels and carry it down to the boiler-makers, with no more difficulty than an automatic package carrier in a dry-goods store would have. There is a deal of pride and rivalry between the men as to the facility and speed that can be shown in taking an engine in hand, dismantling it completely, making necessary repairs, setting it up again and placing it in service once more. The men of the Erie shops at Hornellsville succeeded in doing the trick a year or so ago in the remarkably short time of twenty-four hours. In that brief time a locomotive came in from the road, bedraggled and begrimed and marked “TBMF” for the benefit of the shop-men. “TBMF” translated means “Tires, Boxes, Machine, Flues,” so specifying the engine parts to be repaired. In the slang of the repair shop the men say “To Be Made Fast.” These four requisites are the ones most necessary to make the locomotive fit for from 50,000 to 75,000 miles of service before she shall again turn into the shop. To make them in twenty-four hours required some planning on the part of the Erie shop foremen at Hornellsville, and yet it was only a few weeks after 1734 had come out of the Hornellsville plant fit for revenue service in a single day and night, before the men of the rival Susquehanna shop wished a chance at a contest of that sort. “TBMF” generally keeps a locomotive in the shop for from a fortnight to three or four weeks; the Canadian Pacific considered that it had done a remarkable thing in effecting these repairs on a locomotive, with a super-heater, at its Winnipeg shops in 57½ hours. The Hornellsville record was one most remarkable. But the Susquehanna shop men took 2018 in off the road after 70,000 miles without repairs; took in the big puller at 7 o’clock in the morning, made the heavy “TBMF” repairs, and turned her out for revenue service at 7:34 o’clock in the evening—thirteen hours and thirty-four minutes. At midnight she was pulling a heavy through freight west once again, and a most astounding record in American shop work had been consummated.

The United States have few such towns as England possesses in Swindon and in Crede, railroad towns in the distinctive sense that they were the absolute creation of the railroad in the first instance. There is many a town from one ocean to the other that has owed its stimulus and development to the location of large railroad shops and terminals within its boundaries, but the railroads have, as a rule, dodged the creation of distinctive towns. Pullman, within the outskirts of Chicago, was a monumental failure in this very sort of enterprise. It was designed and built to accommodate the great car-building shops of that man who did the most of all men to make luxury in railroad traffic—George M. Pullman; and no greater care was shown in the construction and design of the works than was given toward the stores, the churches, the schools, and the homes of the workmen. Pullman was decidedly a model town; yet Pullman was a failure. Other model towns of the same sort in Europe have been marked successes, and that very thing may well serve to illustrate the difference in temperament between the American and the European workingman. The American resents too much being done for him; he is instinctively jealous of his individuality.

Away back in the long-ago the Erie created a railroad town at Susquehanna in the extreme north part of Pennsylvania. It built shops there and soon after repeated the experiment at Hornellsville in the southwestern part of New York State. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad similarly developed Cumberland, Maryland; and the Lake Shore, Elkhart, Ind. These are few of many instances where a great railroad shop has served to develop a sizable town. In some others they have developed important suburbs of large cities, as the Lake Shore’s plant at Collinwood, at the eastern edge of the city of Cleveland; and the great shops of the New York Central at Depew, in the outskirts of Buffalo, which were built when the plant at West Albany could no longer accommodate the rolling-stock of a rapidly growing system.

In Altoona, Pa., the United States possesses probably the only distinctive railroad town of extent within its boundaries. Altoona was the creation of the Pennsylvania Railroad more than half a century ago, and its progress, carefully stimulated, has proceeded step by step in company with the progress of one of the largest of American railroad systems. The mistakes of Pullman have not been repeated at Altoona. If the Pennsylvania Railroad has ruled the city in the hills, it has ruled it tacitly and tactfully at all times. It has avoided even the appearance of paternalism, and the growth of Altoona has been measured by the growth of the country, which in its turn is measured with marvellous accuracy by the growth of the railroad traffic. So a trip to Altoona and through its great shops will be illustrative of the very best practice in the construction and maintenance of a railroad’s car and engine.

The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men—is divided into several divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six miles.

The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000 car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day.

The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with respect.

The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for which it was created.

The testing-table is one of the most interesting of Altoona’s activities. The engine is run upon a series of wheels that fit exactly underneath its own; it is fastened snugly into place; connections are made with a score of pipes and rods that fit upon its mechanism, and it starts off for a run up over the division. It runs miles and miles, snorting furiously over the hard grades and under the heavy loads it has to haul, and yet it does not move even the finest fraction of an inch from that testing table. Its mechanism throbs with energy, its wheels revolve at a fearful rate; yet it is a helpless caged creature in a seemingly impotent energy, as the men in charge of the test watch a dozen dials, notebooks in hand. The big driving wheels turn only upon the friction wheels beneath them but the engineers who are conducting the test can tell the speed at which the locomotive is travelling—in theory—by the almost human needles upon the dial-faces. There is more delicate scientific apparatus behind the engine. It is stripped from its tender for this test, and by this apparatus the pull of the engine upon the dead load of the train can be exactly estimated in pounds and ounces. Nor is this all. The friction wheels underneath the drivers are controlled by powerful water brakes, and by the regulation of these brakes, strains or handicaps can be placed upon the engine exactly similar to those of the grades it may have to reach over a heavy mountainous stretch of railroad.

There is no guess-work about modern railroading. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent each year in expert scientific tests of every sort, in the salaries of men who devote their entire time to this work; and the railroads reap the benefits in many more hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating economies. Railroading is a pretty exact science; the big engine on the testing-table at Altoona is only one of a host of evidences of the skill and genius that are being brought to bear upon the operation of the great railroad properties of the country at the present time.

This engine goes upon diet. Dr. Wiley down at Washington with his young men sustaining themselves scientifically upon measured and selected foods has something of the same method that is shown with the test engine up at Altoona in the hills. Its supply of coal is carefully weighed and analyzed by sample. An accounting of the amount consumed down to ounces is carefully kept, the water supply is also examined and measured with great care. When the test is finished and the big chaotive engine has covered miles of theoretical grades with a long theoretical train hitched on behind, the experts get busy with their pencils and begin to prepare the reports upon which their chief may rely when he goes ahead to construct another gross of 100-ton locomotives.

The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself, some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings. Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily reached by use of a long transfer table.

The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant. One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills of the freight-cars—“fish-bellies,” the master car-builders call them—and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers. The press makes many hundred “fish-belly” sills every working day, and it pays its way.

The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop.

Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance, always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be even compared with the steel car.

It should not be forgotten, though, that the railroads have many thousands of wooden passenger-coaches still in service, and the substitution of steel equipment for these has only just begun. The average life of a car approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands that these cars be retained for their active life. As they wear out steel cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems. This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad’s best equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of less importance.

With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches, dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet work still demands the cunning of his hands. Here in the miscellaneous carpenter-shop he is at work upon a seat frame for a day-coach, a shade fixture, a broken chair from a dining car, a baggage truck from some station; there is plenty of work for the carpenter around a car-shop.

It is a matter of pride with the railroad to keep its passenger equipment bright and shiny and new of appearance. It is part sentiment and part good business. For a railroad cannot hope to attract passengers with dirty, unkempt, weather-beaten cars. So it is that the paint-shop is a large function of the car-shop. American railroads may not go quite as much into gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a private carriage or an automobile.

So it is that a passenger coach spends from eighteen to twenty days in the paint-shop alone, in its period of refurbishing. It is primed at first and then it receives from three to five coats of surfacer. This is all hand-work, requiring both strong muscles and infinite patience on the part of the painters. Two or three coats of the standard color of the railroad, by which its equipment is known distinctively, are given to the exterior. Lettering and striping follow, then finally two coats of fine varnish are flowed and rubbed to a high and brilliant polish.

The car is now ready for the dust and the dirt of the line. About every year it will come back again for re-varnishing and at the end of about eight years it will again undergo practically the same treatment within the paint-shop as was given it at the beginning. It will come in rusty and begrimed after many thousands of miles up and down the toilsome line. Within three weeks it will emerge from the paint-shop fresh and radiant, having obtained a new lease of life.

If the same process were to be applied to the freight equipment, the paint-shop would be of almost unlimited size. But freight-cars are not varnished. They are merely painted with the best of time-resisting pigments, usually a dull and sombre red. The freight-cars literally go through a bath in the paint-shop. Expert painters stand, like fire-fighters, with a hose-nozzle in their hands. Through the hose the paint is forced, gallons upon gallons of it; and when it is all over the freight-car is a fine, even red, just like the painters themselves. The lettering is a quick matter, with the use of stencils.

There remain two other great divisions of a central plant of this sort—locomotive repair shops and car repair shops, for the needs of the immediate divisions with their heavy traffic. These shops, extensive in themselves, present no radical differences from the usual division shops which a great railroad maintains at every division operating point in order to keep its rolling stock in the best of order. They are used to make light repairs. The master mechanic is a discerning man. He must know and judge accurately when a disabled car or locomotive should go to the company’s main shops, when the repairs can best be made at the local plant. It is one of the points upon which the economy of the shop system depends.

On this matter of shop economy whole volumes might be written, and have been written. In the beginning of shop practices there was little system in these matters, just as the shop work was reckoned far below its real importance. One of the earliest of real railroads was the Columbia & Philadelphia—nowadays one of the main stems of the Pennsylvania’s trunk line—and it was from the beginning a railroad of quite heavy traffic, double-tracked and reaching into a fat country. Yet a shop at Parkersburg, halfway up the line, employing forty men in all, was considered quite enough for the maintenance of equipment. If one of those early engines broke down at either terminal, the engineer, the fireman and perhaps the local blacksmith had to make their own repairs.

Nothing was standard, not even the sizes of such simple affairs as nuts and bolts. Years of railroading have changed all this. The master-mechanics and the master car-builders meet in annual sessions; and by means of reports from their expert committees have been evolved standards in every detail of rolling stock—standard materials, standard compositions, standard sizes, even standards in nomenclature of railroad apparatus down to the smallest parts.

Even with this assistance there still remains a mass of detail in every railroad shop; and a large clerical force is one of its greatest efficiencies. A sharp and accurate accounting is kept of the cost of repairs upon each locomotive and car, even such general shop costs as gas and heat are pro-rated against it. There is no time that the railroad cannot tell to a nicety the precise cost of each unit of its equipment.

These units are not, in many roads, increased, without precise orders from the board of directors or the executive committee of the board. In order to get around this rule some niceties in reconstruction have been known. A single timber of a worn-out freight car has kept the unit and the number of the old car, and going into the new has prevented the creation of a forbidden unit.

The system upon which cars and locomotives are numbered varies greatly upon different systems. In some cases the first figures of the numbers indicate the class and style of the car or locomotive, in others they mean nothing. When a car or a locomotive is nigh worn out its number passes from it and is given to some newcomer. The old servant has a neatly painted “X” placed before its number. That “X” is its death warrant. In a little time it leads the way to the scrap heap.

The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel, a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad man sees at one time or another. It may not always be possible to trace the responsibility for such an accident. But there is a responsibility, and the men who work at forge or lathe, at press or planer feel that it is there. They form no mean brigade of this great industrial army of America.

Such responsibility continues outside of the main shops to the smaller shops, down to the roundhouse forces, by whose care and vigilance the big locomotives are kept fitted for their important work; down still farther to the car-inspectors, who, blue signal-lights in hand, creep through the long freight-yards of a winter’s night to strike the flaw in the metal, to sound the note of alarm before the worst may come to pass. Some of these last you hear in the night as you scurry across the country. As you rest in your berth, and the express is changing engines at some division point, you may hear the car inspectors coming along the train, striking with their hammers against the wheels, listening intently for the false ring by which they may detect trouble. If you trouble yourself to lift the curtain of your berth, you may see them, a grimy crew, working busily with their hammers, thrusting their torches in among the trucks to see that all is well.

Responsibility for the safety in railroad operation does not cease at the doors of the mechanical department.

CHAPTER XXV

This is more distinctly shown in some sections of the land than in others. For instance, up in New England, where the interests owning the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad have accomplished direct or indirect control of all but a comparatively few miles of the steam and electric railroads in five great States, they have also acquired the steamship interests of that district. The New Haven’s original excursion into the steamboat business was when it absorbed the Old Colony Railroad—almost a score of years ago—in order to ensure its entrance into Boston. The Old Colony owned a well-famed and highly prosperous steamboat line from Fall River, Massachusetts, to New York City, part of its through New York-Boston route. Eventually the New Haven acquired all the brisk and busy steamboat lines which ran up the Sound from New York to several Connecticut ports—Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, New London, and Stonington. Any one of these lines was not, perhaps, so much of an acquisition in itself, but all of them were potentials in a future rate situation that might arise. It was good executive management to have these potentials under firm control, and so the New Haven established water routes as a recognized factor of its business—under the separate corporation title of the New England Navigation Company. Once when a new company, under the mellifluous title of the Joy Line, sought to injure its coastwise business by establishing cut-rates from Providence to New York, the New Haven placed two of its older boats in a rival and lower-priced service, and, by means of its great resources, was able to bring the Joy Line into its fold. Later, when the Enterprise Line tried a like programme, the New Haven followed the same aggressive tactics and brought the Enterprise Line to bankruptcy. These things are mentioned here in no spirit of criticism. But they are the facts that make it impossible for really independent lines of steamboats to run between New York and Providence for any great length of time, despite ample docking facilities and a great free port at each of these cities.

The Metropolitan Line tried to maintain an independent line between New York and Boston with the two finest steamers ever placed in coastwise service—the Yale and the Harvard. One of these boats left each city at five o’clock in the afternoon and performed the ocean voyage of 330 miles over the “outside route” in just fifteen hours—and with amazing regularity. But the New Haven Railroad found it to its interest to control the coasting lines around about New England, and so the Yale and Harvard were last winter banished to the Pacific coast.

This is all part of the business of managing great railroad systems. For similar reasons the Pennsylvania Railroad found it advisable to bring a group of steamboat lines plying on Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries under its control, the Harriman lines to reach out and establish ownership of the lines plying up and down several thousand miles along the Pacific coast—these are but a few instances out of many. As yet no large American railroad has essayed to control a transatlantic line, although both the Hill and the Harriman properties are interested in the transpacific carrying business. The Canadian Pacific, however, has already well-established lines across both of the great oceans—making a continuous route under one management from Liverpool, England, to Hong Kong, China. Moreover, it is now building four great steamships which are to be finished simultaneously with the Panama Canal and which will ply through it from New York direct to Hong Kong. The Canadian Northern has also recently embarked in the transatlantic carrying business. The Canadian Pacific and several of the large railroads of the northern part of the United States maintain lines of sizable gross tonnage on the Great Lakes—but of these, more in a little while.

A modern railroad freight and passenger terminal: the terminal of
the West Shore Railroad at Weehawken, opposite New York City

High-speed, direct-current passenger locomotive built by the General Electric Company
for terminal service of the New York Central at the Grand Central Station

Even if a railroad is not engaged in the steamship business, as such, even to the extent of one or two small steamboats on inland waters, it may still possess a considerable harbor fleet,—wharves, and slips—that, taken together, make a sizable aggregate. Every railroad that has any sort of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will protect itself by having its own wharves and landing-stages—even grain elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet—ferries, scows, lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. It means that the railroad must pay attention to marine laws and marine customs.

When a railroad boasts of a terminal in such a city as Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco, its fleet of harbor craft is apt to be quite a sizable navy. Take, for instance, the New York Central’s fleet in and around New York harbor. It consists of 269 vessels, divided into the following classes: 9 ferry-boats, 22 tugs, 7 steam-lighters, 50 car-floats, 10 steam-hoist barges, 25 open barges, 6 scow barges, 105 covered barges, and 35 grain-boats. And out of all these barges, 10 are further equipped for refrigerator use.

In such a fleet, eliminating of course the ferry-boats which have their own peculiar uses, the tugs are almost the sole motive power. There is a bit of poetry about them, too, even if they are short and stubby, ofttimes poking their cushioned noses impertinently up against larger and far more stately craft. But no captain, even though he walk the bridge of an eight-hundred foot steamship, sneers at a tug. It takes eighteen of them to place the new giant Olympic in her wharf on the North River, and no crack company of horsemen ever moved in more precise drill or better coöperation than these noisy, punting, helping-hands of the harbor of New York. For ocean ports are different from those along the lakes. A captain sailing a five-thousand ton ship on fresh water would be ashamed to use a tug at Detroit, or any other of the Great Lake ports, even where the current runs almost like a mill-race, unless he was turning in a channel whose width was but a wee bit more than the length of his ship. But Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and Chicago do not have the tides—and it is the tide that makes harbor navigation a finely specialized science at the big ocean ports.

All of the big Atlantic ports save New York have abundant track facilities alongside the piers, where berth the ships from half the world over. In New York, the same geographical conditions that have gone to make her so superb a port and given her so generous a harbor-frontage have blocked the railroads in their efforts to reach all her piers with unbroken rails. So the railroads entering that harbor have found it necessary to provide themselves with such fleets as we have noticed as belonging to the New York Central. For inland shippers seem to have a preference for sending their east-bound export merchandise through New York, because of the frequency of sailings from her wharves to half the recognized ports of the world.

If you are a manufacturer—at Utica, N. Y., let us say—and you wished to send a carload of your product to London, Eng., you would find that the railroad definitely agrees to do certain things for you. On your minimum basis of a carload lot it will place that carload at any pier in the harbor of New York. Indeed, it would do a little more. If some of that carload lot that starts down out of Utica is going to London, some more on a different ship to Calcutta, and still some more on a tropic-bound liner to South America, the railroad would make free delivery of your consignment to the piers of these three ships. It limits, however, the delivery of a carload lot to three different piers.

This sounds simple, perhaps, and, in reality, is not. For in a single day of twenty-four hours there may arrive at Weehawken and Sixtieth Street, Manhattan—the two great freight terminals of the rails of the New York Central system at New York—from four to six hundred, eight hundred cars, perhaps, filled with merchandise bound for half a hundred different piers, along from forty to sixty miles of water-front.

Now you see the use of all this army of lighters and barges—stubby-nosed craft, awkward craft, boats that have not even a single stanza of the poetry of the sea written upon their contents. By night, by day, when an imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter, when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot’s path is fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. The eight or ten great railroads that terminate in New York are pouring export merchandise to all of her piers, while from those long sprawling structures they are drawing up imported goods to go forward to every corner of the land. And in addition to this there is the vast local commerce of the City of New York, which, as we saw when we were considering the freight terminals, back in Chapter VII, is no slight matter of itself. But this traffic, as well as much of that of the great interchange between the railroads terminating at New York, is handled most effectively by the car-floats on each of which twelve to sixteen standard box-cars may be loaded with great expedition.

But the clumsy barges and the lighters and the still clumsier car-floats are of little use without the tugs, and these last are the quick couriers of the harbor. Twenty of that New York Central fleet are kept in constant use in the North and East Rivers, and along the harbor shores to Jersey City, Bayonne, and the southern parts of Brooklyn. They do not lie idle, save when they are finally forced to “lay up” for a little time for repairs. And then a reserve tug is in service without delay.

Here is the modern economy of railroad equipment—even though this be the part of the railroad that is afloat. A tug pulls up to a dock, its crews are off almost before their “relief” is standing at its station, and making sure that the craft is in as good order as they left it. While the “relief” is finding its tired way toward home the tug is off again. Its work is constant. Its work is not easy. It does not seem to be systematic and yet it is—wonderfully systematic.

For here and there about the harbor the captains of these N. Y. C. tugs get their orders—just as conductors of the trains upon the steel highways get their clearance cards and yellow tissues. A half-dozen stations give orders, and these are but the speaking stations of a single man who sits before a telephone switchboard close by a narrow street of down-town Manhattan and directs tug movements through the crowded harbor, just as easily as a despatcher moves extra freights over a crowded stretch of single-track line.

The traffic runs flood-high and the station men gossip of the whispered complaints of the tug-crews, but the man at the switchboard only smiles. A traffic solicitor who plies his heartbreaking work on the floor of the near-by Produce Exchange comes over to him and says:

“I’ve promised Smith & Russell delivery of ten cars of flour at Pier 32, East River, at seven o’clock to-morrow morning. We can’t go back on them.”

The man at the switchboard does not lose that smooth-set smile, even though the loudly ticking clock, just above the plugs and cords, shows him that it is already six o’clock of the evening of a day when the harbor freight has run flood-high.

“All right,” he laughs, “Smith & Russell can count upon us.”

And the next moment he is ordering Tug Twenty-seven to go from the Sixtieth Street pier over to Weehawken to get that small mountain-range of flour-bags that the “huskies” have already begun to build on a pier-floor, alongside of a string of dusty, grimy cars that have bumped their way east from Minneapolis.

Perhaps you are interested in the personality of Tug Twenty-seven. Take yourself away from the cool-witted despatcher and look down upon this craft—the queen of a railroad pet marine. She is as resplendent in her green and gold as any gentleman’s yacht, and her crew even more proud of her. She stands in the water, a mere 110 feet long and 24½ feet beam, but those wonderful shining engines in her heart can develop 1,200 horse-power—as much as many steamboats of three times her size. Her watertube boilers can withstand a locomotive pressure of 185 pounds to the square inch, she has all the accoutrements of coast liners—steam steering gears and electric lights among them. No wonder that her captain waxes eloquent about her.

Now ask him about what she can do. That he takes as personal achievement, and these harbor men are a bashful lot. Still, you can worm it out of him, and after a while you find that Tug Twenty-seven has just brought a punt-nosed car-float, with sixteen loaded cars upon her rails, around from Corlears Hook, through the press of shipping, and around the Battery where cross-tides battle against one another and against craft of all sorts, up to Weehawken “bridge” in forty minutes—which is not so very bad for a ten-mile run through a congested harbor.

“Time counts,” adds the captain. “If they had given me another twelve or fifteen minutes I could have brought around two of the floats—put together ‘V’ fashion and the Twenty-seven with her nose stuck up into the ‘V’.”

In the harbor of New York is a great cluster of ferry-boats operated to overcome her barrier rivers by the several trunk-line railroads whose systems terminate at a long water-jump from the congested Island of Manhattan. To compete with railroads boasting terminals on Manhattan Island itself, these lines have been compelled to equip and operate extensive ferry fleets across both the East and the North Rivers. Across the first of these streams operates the navy of the Long Island Railroad, while across the Hudson ply in an intricate interlacing more than a dozen ferry routes of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, and the West Shore Railroads. The recent completion of the New York-Jersey City-Newark routes of the Hudson tunnels, as well as the inauguration of passenger traffic through both North and East River tunnels to the new Pennsylvania terminal in Manhattan, has caused the abandonment of two ferry routes and curtailment of service upon several others. Tunnel-diggers and bridge-builders make havoc with ferry routes, which must always remain liable to many delays because of fog, floating ice, and such other adverse weather conditions.

Still the railroad ferries round about New York derive no small income from the trucking service of a metropolitan city which has had to struggle for many years against great intersecting rivers, and so they will probably continue to be for many years interesting and picturesque features of New York harbor.

But perhaps the most interesting of all the ferry routes of New York harbor is the attenuated line from the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad’s waterside terminal at Port Morris in the Bronx, for ten miles through the East River, Hell Gate, around the sharp turn and tides of Corlears Hook and again of the Battery, and across the Hudson River to the old terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City. Over this route goes through traffic—freight and passenger—from New England to the South and the Southwest. The freight-traffic is handled largely by car-floats in charge of the busy puffing tugs, while the passenger traffic goes in ferry-boats different from the others that ply in New York harbor.

For these ferry-boats are really nothing more than a bettered type of car-float—a type equipped with powerful engines for self-propulsion. Through passenger trains run each day and each night between Boston and Baltimore and Washington, and these trains are handled between Port Morris and Jersey City upon them. The familiar Maryland, which is operated jointly by the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems upon this route, will receive an entire passenger train of ordinary length, excepting, of course, the locomotive, upon her great deck, which is, in reality, a miniature railroad yard, equipped with two long parallel tracks that can be quickly attached to the ferry-bridges at Port Morris and Jersey City. The trip, with the loading and unloading of the train, is accomplished, under favorable weather conditions, in about an hour.

It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down a broad ship’s deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. This ferry is also finally threatened by the bridge-builders. As this is written, workmen are already preparing the pier foundations for a great railroad bridge that is to span the East River not far from Hell Gate, and which is to give an unbroken line of rails from the New Haven’s terminal at Port Morris, through Long Island City, to the Pennsylvania’s tunnels and terminal in Manhattan Island.

So, also, have the tunnel-builders contrived to rob the through traveller on the Michigan Central of the more or less thrilling water transfer from Canada to the United States at Detroit. The Detroit River tunnel has superseded one of the most important car-ferries in the country, but it has given to the operating heads of the Michigan Central one of the very shortest through routes from New York to Chicago and robbed them of one of the fearful handicaps of their main line—the possibilities for constant and exasperating delays to their through trains while being ferried across the Detroit River.

Do not underestimate the possibilities of those delays. Within the past ten years, the transport Michigan, plying from Detroit to Windsor, the Canadian town directly opposite, and carrying a Chicago-Montreal flyer, was stuck for ten hours in the ice, so near the slip that a long plank would have almost reached from her deck to the wharf. That, in the lesser form, has been the history of winter after winter at the Detroit ferry. Shipbuilders have done their best to meet the obstacle by building car-ferries of tremendous power, sometimes even equipping them with both side-wheels and screws. But the real problem of possible delay can only be solved there by tunnels, and it is expected that the Grand Trunk, the Canadian Pacific, and the Wabash—which still use the car-ferries across the Detroit River—will sooner or later either tunnel beneath it or acquire trackage rights through the Michigan Central tubes.

The Detroit River is a narrow but important part of the tremendously important water highway up the Great Lakes, and at every part of the whole length of that highway the railroads have tried to break their way across. It has not been found impossible to bridge the St. Lawrence or the Niagara Rivers or the wide straits at Sault Ste. Marie, but there are other points, even besides Detroit, that have as yet baffled the genius of the bridge-builder. One of the most important of these is where Lake Michigan forces its outlet into Lake Huron through the two peninsulas of the great State that bears its name. To make the two parts of Michigan physically one with unbroken rail will probably not be accomplished in many years. In the meantime the stout and tremendously powerful ferry Algomah—built so as to literally crush the ice down under her tremendous bows—plies between Mackinac City, the Island of Mackinac, situated midstream, and St. Ignace, on the north shore of the broad strait. Despite the fearful severity of the winters in northern Michigan the Algomah keeps that important path open the year round—not only for herself but for the great car-floats that follow in her wake.

What is possible at the Straits of Mackinac is also possible across the widest part of any one of the Great Lakes—excepting always the emotionless Superior. At least that is the way the railroad traffic men have argued for many years, and so for these many years car-ferries have plied successfully across the very hearts of three of the lakes. Of all the chain, Lake Michigan offers the greatest natural obstruction to the natural traffic movements of the land—its great length, stretching north and south, forming an obstacle to through rail movements, and contributing not a little to the railroad importance and the wealth of Chicago.

So it was that car-ferries were established many years ago across Lake Michigan and are operated throughout the lake to-day—from Manitowoc, Kewaunee, Milwaukee, Menominee, and Manistique on the west shore of the lake, to Frankfort, Ludington, Northport, Grand Haven, St. Joseph, and Benton Harbor upon the east shore. These vessels are of different construction from the ferries that cross the narrow Detroit River. They lack the low freeboard and the other typical ferry construction, and are, instead, deep-gulled vessels, generally built of steel and always of great structural strength.

“Like the river ferries,” says James C. Mills, “they are ice-crushers, but of greater size and power. During two or three of the winter months the lakes are frozen in a solid sheet of ice for twenty and thirty miles from the shores, and in extremely severe winters the ice-fields meet in mid-lake. To keep a channel open in the depth of winter even for daily passages back and forth, is a hazardous undertaking for the hardy mariners. The frequent gales which sweep the lakes break up the fields into ice-floes which, driven one way or another with great force, pile up in huge banks, often in the direct course of the transports and as high as their upper decks. At such times they free themselves only after repeated buckings of the shifting mass of ice, sometimes miles in extent, by running their stout prows up on the edge of the mass, breaking it down by their sheer weight, and ploughing through the ragged, grinding blocks of ice thus formed.”[1]

Four tracks, running the full length of the ship, generally fill the main deck of these trans-lake ships. The loading of the cars on to these tracks is accomplished at the stern, the bow being built high and, as we have just seen, somewhat after the fashion of an overhanging prow. The main deck is completely roofed over with cabins and deck-houses, so that, viewed from the rear, the ship seems to be an itinerant pair of railroad tunnels, dark and gloomy. The upper decks are gay with the resources of the marine architect—for the greater part of these boats offer accommodations for passengers as well as for from eighteen to thirty freight cars. These great ferries form valuable feeders to the Grand Trunk, the Pere Marquette, the Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids & Indiana, and some minor routes crossing Michigan.

Similarly, car-ferries crossing Lake Erie from Cleveland to Port Stanley are considerable factors both in general merchandise and in the coal trade. Another Lake Erie route of heavy tonnage extends from Ashtabula, Ohio, to Port Burwell, Ontario. Within the last few years a car-ferry has been established across Lake Ontario, from Charlotte—which is the port of Rochester, N. Y.—to Coburg on the Canadian side, which has already developed for itself a considerable traffic.

But the car-ferries, extensive as they are, form but a small portion of the railroad interests upon the waters of the Great Lakes. Almost all of the great lines through those much-travelled waters are the property of some railroad system whose rails touch one or more of their terminals. Thus the Northern Steamship Company, running from Buffalo to Chicago and Duluth, touches the rails of its parent company, the Great Northern Railroad, at this last port. The Erie & Western Transportation Company—popularly known as the Anchor Line—also running from Buffalo to Duluth, is a Pennsylvania property. Both of these lines are operated for passenger service, as well as freight. The New York Central and the Erie cover the same territory with exclusively freight routes. The Rutland Railroad has a line all the way from its western terminal at Ogdensburg, on the St. Lawrence River, to Chicago. The Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk operate important lines through Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. Even a small road, like the Algomah Central, has its own freight and passenger steamboats running south from the Soo as far as Cleveland, Ohio. It is a pretty poor line with Great Lakes terminals that cannot boast some sort of steamship service of its own.

In the development of the coastwise and the inland waterways of the United States, the railroad may be doing the nation a far greater service than it imagines. For the general trend of railroad expansion in the country to-day seems to be toward a development of the auxiliary water-routes rather than toward their curtailment. The railroad has finally realized that some coarse commodities can be carried far more economically by water than by rail. It is to-day seeking to avail itself of that acquired knowledge. If competing and feeding trolley lines are good things for railroads to own—and the present-day judgment seems to be that they are—the same rule holds doubly good in regard to both competing and feeding water-routes.

CHAPTER XXVI