Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 11

We have the courage. We have the money. And we have the opportunity. And lest any reader of this book should begin to fancy that I have studied the problem of the Northeast alone and neglected the equally fascinating ones of the rest of the land, the many, many places where electric power can and should be brought to the aid of the heavy-traction railroad, permit me in turn to direct attention to the possibilities of several typically congested American communities, in other portions of the land. Yet before we come to these to tarry a moment in metropolitan New York, where the largest installation of electric traction for suburban services in the world has been in use for so many years now that New Yorkers have long since ceased even to comment upon it. It is now considerably more than a decade since the huge Grand Central and Pennsylvania terminals were virtually completed and the steam locomotives absolutely abolished from their stately apartments. Upon the near-by lines of the four chief railroads running into these two stations, the New York Central, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, the Pennsylvania, and the Long Island, electric traction for pa.s.senger trains has been universally installed for a radius of about thirty miles outside of the heart of Manhattan Island.

Freight trains of these roads hauled by steam locomotives still penetrate into New York City, but never into these two pa.s.senger terminals; while the through pa.s.senger-trains of these four roads, as well as of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh Valley, which use the Pennsylvania Station, interchange their steam locomotives at the edge of the electric zone with electric motive-power. The suburban trains are, of course, made up of multiple-unit cars, like those of the subways or the elevated railroads, and dispense altogether with locomotives of any sort.

To the terminals of the Erie and the Lackawanna railroads, which are situated upon the west bank of the Hudson River directly across from the lower portions of Manhattan Island, the Hudson and Manhattan tubes, built by the vision and daring of one William G. McAdoo, whom already we have encountered in these pages, give access. The tubes also reach the old pa.s.senger-station of the Pennsylvania in Jersey City, which is still used to a moderate extent, and continue west to the main line of the Pennsylvania at Manhattan Transfer and into the heart of Newark, eight miles distant. Already they are overcrowded, particularly in rush hours; and it does not take a very great deal of vision to perceive that eventually they will have to be extended at least two miles as a subway under Broad Street, Newark, from the present rather unsatisfactory terminal at the Military Park, in that city.

The facilities are not good for reaching the trains of the Erie and the Lackawanna from those of the tubes; particularly is this true in the case of the ancient Erie terminal, where there is a long and, at times, overcrowded pa.s.sageway to be traversed afoot between the platforms of the two railroads. In the concluding chapters of this book I am to indicate the regrouping of the railroads that eventually must come about, in one form or another. I may antic.i.p.ate by saying that in almost any regrouping the financially strong Lackawanna will be linked to the financially weak Erie. Therefore I may be permitted to a.s.sume that the lines of these two systems, with an elaborate network of suburban branches in northeastern New Jersey, may yet be joined together somewhere just west of the Bergen tunnels in Hoboken where they now cross at an acute angle. This being done, the rest is easy. One set of tunnels would be a.s.signed for east-bound movement, the other for west-bound; which arrangement gives four tracks in _each_ direction--enough for a really vast pa.s.senger traffic movement. Somewhere close to their eastern portals these tunnels would be depressed and continued under the Hudson River to Manhattan Island. Here they would be far apart, perhaps as much as a mile apart.

Between them and running north and south upon Manhattan would be a connecting tunnel link ten or twelve or fourteen tracks in width and with long continuous platforms between these tracks. It is easy to surmise that two or three trains could easily lie back of one another at any one of these tenuous underground platforms in the Manhattan terminal. This great sub-service pa.s.senger-station would lie somewhere just west of the Seventh Avenue extension and barely north of Ca.n.a.l Street, in Manhattan. It is a district that has not gone ahead with the rest of New York. A huge pa.s.senger terminal within it would be of tremendous help in raising its depressed realty values, while the proximity of the station to the main trunk of the West Side subway of the Interborough and the extended Ca.n.a.l Street line of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit would render it wonderfully accessible to every portion of the incorporated City of New York.

One would hardly have expected the virtually bankrupt Erie to accomplish much with the electrification of its lines. As a matter of actual fact, some years ago it accomplished a very successful feat of this sort from Rochester to Mount Morris, New York, a distance of thirty-four miles. The enormously wealthy Lackawanna has done absolutely nothing at all. It has spent money lavishly--and with extreme good sense, as well--in the improvement of its property, nowhere more so than in the New Jersey suburban section close to New York. It has raised or lowered its lines, it has doubled and tripled its main-line trackage, it has built superb pa.s.senger and freight-stations at every corner. But it has not tinkered with electric motive-power. Very recently it has moved so far as to plan an electrification of its main line through a mountainous district for about forty miles east and west of Scranton, Pennsylvania. But apparently it has made no plans whatever for its New York suburban territory. It is hardly likely, with the present management of the road, to say nothing of its interests, direct or indirect, in the large anthracite coal mining properties in northwestern Pennsylvania, to act in antic.i.p.ation of the coming of the super-power plan and its probable compulsory mandates upon the railroads of its territory.

The super-power plan as we have seen also embraces Baltimore. And Was.h.i.+ngton, as well. Between these two cities, as well as between Baltimore and Philadelphia, there are two parallel double-tracked railroads. One would serve all real needs, with the possible addition of some stretches of third or even fourth tracks. The other road is quite superfluous.

Years ago there was but one railroad from Philadelphia to Was.h.i.+ngton--a combination of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore and the Baltimore and Ohio which the Civil War made historic. These two roads connected at Baltimore. The only track connection between them was through Light Street in the commercial heart of that city. Trains arriving at Baltimore on the P. W. & B. had their locomotives detached at Canton Station at the east side of the city, while their cars were drawn one by one by horses across the town to Camden Station upon the west side, where they were rea.s.sembled into trains drawn by B. & O. locomotives, and went scurrying off to Was.h.i.+ngton, the West, and the South generally.

Such a clumsy arrangement could not last forever. About fifty years ago it ended in a first-cla.s.s row between the two chief parties to it. The P. W.

& B. had pa.s.sed into the hands of the Pennsylvania, which also acquired control of the Northern Central, leading from Baltimore straight north through York and Harrisburg and Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to Elmira, New York, and so on to the south sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario. The Northern Central and the P. W. & B. began picking quarrels with the Baltimore & Ohio, which had some very obdurate habits of its own. Things went from bad to worse. For a time the trains of the former connecting roads took a keen delight in missing their connections at Baltimore City (to use the old name of the town), and it all finally came to pa.s.s that the roads ceased issuing through tickets over each other's rails--a method of reprisal wherein the traveler paid the bill.

Out of this melee there grew a phase of compet.i.tion which developed rapidly into the construction of parallel railroads. The Pennsylvania cut an enormously expensive series of tunnels under Baltimore and built the Union Station out on Charles Street in the newer portion of the town--recently superseded by the present station of that name. From that station it built the Baltimore and Potomac on to its own new terminal in Was.h.i.+ngton City (also old-style) where it enjoyed valuable exclusive connections with the important railroads leading south from the Potomac.

After which it was free and independent of the Baltimore and Ohio for its all-important New York-Philadelphia-Was.h.i.+ngton business, while the link of the Northern Central between Baltimore and its main line at Harrisburg gave it a chance to get compet.i.tive business between both Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore and the West.

To this sharp blow the Baltimore and Ohio retaliated, though slowly. It never was able to finance itself quite as readily as its larger adversary.

Gradually it too tunneled under Baltimore--went far ahead of the Pennsylvania, in fact, in that premier electric installation to which I already have referred--and opened its handsome Mount Royal Station within a few blocks of the Union Station. It extended its line on from Mount Royal for ninety-five miles to Philadelphia, paralleling and in sharp compet.i.tion with the P. W. & B. property of the Pennsylvania. It obtained an advantageous terminal site in Philadelphia and would have put down its own rails all the way to Jersey City had it not been for a most tragic incident--which has no place in this book. It is enough here to say that eventually it obtained trackage rights from Philadelphia to Jersey City over a combination of certain lines of the Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Recently, as we have seen, these were so extended as to bring it into the Pennsylvania Station. Railroad compet.i.tion to-day in a good many parts of the land is not a very serious thing--save, possibly, for publicity purposes.

I have broken my rule and delved into railroad history in this instance for a single purpose, to show how admirably a certain portion of this parallel and largely superfluous railroad construction could be brought to a rapid transit electric installation. For some years past there has been a plan to rid Baltimore of the pressure of through freight traffic through her heart by the construction of a freight cut-off just north of the city, to be used jointly by both the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio.

Oddly enough the city itself has opposed this plan. Baltimore has a particularly delightful suburban section extending for many miles north of her actual civic limits. It would be quite impossible to build the proposed freight cut-off without intersecting this section. Baltimore is a conservative town. That a bit of her comfort or beauty should be sacrificed to commercial necessity is, in her eyes, unthinkable.

Yet some day that cut-off will be built, if for no other reason than simply because it is a commercial necessity, and the traffic upon the twin sets of tunnels in her heart will be lessened very appreciably.

Now consider those tunnels consolidated--conducted in cooperation and not in rivalry. If the Baltimore and Ohio can use the Pennsylvania pa.s.senger-station in New York there is no moral reason why it cannot use the Pennsylvania pa.s.senger-station in Baltimore and make a real operating saving. Baltimore, far more than New York, presents opportunities for the physical connection of the railroads at each side of the city. As a matter of fact there is a connection already at the eastern edge, and none is needed at the western edge. For the scheme that I contemplate would continue the Baltimore and Ohio's through trains over the Pennsylvania tracks to the Union Station in Was.h.i.+ngton, which already they use jointly.

Now we have a first-cla.s.s pair of rails left nearly free all the way from Mount Royal Station, Baltimore, to the Union Station, Was.h.i.+ngton, forty miles distant. The third-rail electric installation of this line which to-day extends for three or four miles of its length through Baltimore could easily be extended to Was.h.i.+ngton--not only into the Union Station but well beyond it. It would take a lower level of the station, on the side opposite from that occupied by the depressed tracks of the railroads that lead out from and under the station toward the south, and continue as a subway through the heart of Was.h.i.+ngton to Georgetown and Chevy Chase.

Similarly in Baltimore it probably would continue north from Mount Royal, through to Roland Park or even beyond, while between the two cities there has been for many years upon the line of the Baltimore and Ohio an almost unbroken succession of villages, suburban and semi-suburban.

Here then is an ideal opportunity for a dual-city rapid transit development--and, aside from the suggested subway under Was.h.i.+ngton, to be built at a minimum of cost. An installation such as this awaits only the abandonment of the rather silly show of compet.i.tion between the railroads, which as we shall see in our own good time in this book is no compet.i.tion at all, while the opportunities offered for the development of both Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore are too multifold to be set down within many pages.

A similar opportunity is offered through and between the bustling Great Lake cities of Toledo and Detroit, where the pa.s.senger service of the steam railroads that connect them has not been changed or improved in more than forty years. Forty years ago these were small cities; their total population hardly exceeded 166,000 persons. To-day Toledo alone has 250,000 people and Detroit very close to a million. To a population of 1,250,000 people the same steam railroad pa.s.senger service is given as was given to but 166,000. True it is that since then the country has pa.s.sed through the age of the interurban trolley as well as that of the automobile. The traffic by both of these agents of transport between Toledo and Detroit is vast. Yet each is subject to great delays in the streets of these huge and steadily growing cities.

The railroads that render the most direct pa.s.senger service between Toledo and Detroit--sixty miles apart--are the single-tracked branches of the Michigan Central and the New York Central running for the most of the way almost side by side. Yet until a very few years ago, no one came along with the sagacity to operate these two single-tracked roads as one double-tracked one, by the simple process of using one line in one direction and the other in the reverse one. The Michigan Central was always a conservative property, and so was the Lake Sh.o.r.e, which preceded the New York Central in this territory.

Yet conservatism, valuable as it is in many ways, should never be permitted to impede progress. And real progress long ago would have dictated the electrification of this intensive stretch of railroad; particularly so in view of the fact that the Michigan Central, a New York Central property, was going ahead with a rather extensive electric installation in connection with the new tunnel that it was boring under the Detroit River and with its elaborate new pa.s.senger terminal in that city. For many years the Michigan Central, like the other railroads that essayed to cross into Canada at Detroit, was compelled to ferry its cars and trains across a swift and rather narrow river. At the best this was a tedious time-taking process. At the worst it was a battle against floating ice and zero weather and all that follows in their trails.

The tunnel obviated this. That much was in its favor. It also obviated the Michigan Central's long-established pa.s.senger-station at the river-front in downtown Detroit and--in order to avoid a reverse movement of fast through trains--made it necessary to build the handsome new station in a rather inaccessible part of the town. That much was against the new tunnel.

Yet if the Michigan Central had been possessed of a real vision it might easily have made a complete triumph of the change. Let me show you how it could have been done.

Suppose, if you will, a loop created by the taking over of the Brush Street pa.s.senger terminal and approach tracks of the Grand Trunk--so long used by the Detroit branch of the New York Central--and then the Grand Trunk, along with the Canadian Pacific and the Wabash, invited and urged to use the Michigan Central tunnel and pa.s.senger-station, at a fair compensation, of course. Then suppose a short length of rapid transit railroad--it probably would be an elevated structure--built along the water-front from the old Michigan Station to the Brush Street Station.

Ergo! A complete standard railroad loop has been created threading upon its way the new pa.s.senger-station, now transformed into a real union station for all the standard railroads entering Detroit.

Now turn your atlas quickly to the map of Toledo. A similar possibility exists there. The parallel railroads of the Vanderbilts coming in from Detroit sweep around two sides of the town. There is abundant trackage upon the other two sides. A loop has been created, a double-tracked loop, if you please, with an excellent double-tracked link (easily capable of further multiple-tracking) connecting them. The old New York Central Station at Toledo is nearly as badly located in reference to the town as the new Michigan Central one in Detroit. Yet with this double loop that I have so roughly indicated there could be a constant and high-speed operation of electric multiple-unit rapid transit trains, free from all street traffic interruptions. A man coming into the main pa.s.senger terminal of either town from New York or Chicago or any other outlying city, by a swift and easy platform change of cars, could be set down in a few more minutes in virtually any section that he wished to reach.

Electrification! Intensive pa.s.senger operation! We have not as yet even scratched the surface of their possibilities. All the way across the country lie development opportunities such as these. There is a rare one in St. Louis--the transformation of the ancient and dirty Eads Bridge over the Mississippi, with the far more dirty tunnel that threads the very heart of the city on the way to the huge Union Station, by changing from the steam locomotive to the electric one, or the multiple-unit train. This done, a rapid transit railroad is established automatically, into two States, from the easternmost part of East St. Louis, across the Eads Bridge, as we have just seen, and through the heart of the town in the tunnel that has threaded it for more than fifty years--what a splendid chance for a big downtown station at Broadway and another under the old post-office!--then out from the tunnel again transversely through the train-shed of the Union Station, out Mill Creek valley along the Wabash right-of-way to the smart West End of St. Louis, through Forest Park and Delmar and branching perhaps off to University City and even far St.

Charles. It all is almost as easy and as simple as the nose on your face.

While the result on the street traffic of congested downtown St. Louis would be appreciable from the beginning.

The rapid multiplication of the motor-car in the large American city seemingly has brought no larger problem in its wake than this very one of street traffic. In truth the streets of New Yorks, our St. Louises, our Chicagos, our Philadelphias, and our Bostons were never designed for the operations of fleets of vehicles, each bringing but one or two or three or four persons through them. Two or three years ago I rode through the streets of Detroit with a motor-car manufacturer of international reputation. We were speaking of the grave difficulties, political and economic, with which the local traction company was then laboring.

"We won't see these yellow cars in our Detroit streets eighteen or twenty years hence," he proclaimed quite grandly, with a wave of his hand at them.

I disagreed with him.

"In no city that two decades hence proclaims itself as truly metropolitan," I argued, "can people come to and go from their work in its business heart in their own automobiles--none save the comparative few who can afford the luxury of a chauffeur. Adequate downtown garage facilities for an American city of a million people or more are almost out of the question. For these cities transportation must continue in ma.s.s rather than singly. It is not only possible but probable that in many of them the building of subways or the extension of existing ones will yet render possible the cleaning of the surfaces of downtown streets for motor-car traffic exclusively. In which case the trolley merely becomes a sub-surface unit, and continues purely as a civic necessity."

If there were no other argument at all for the development of electric rapid transit installation in the metropolitan areas of our largest cities, this alone would be one well worthy of the considerate ear. The huge interurban trolley-car, so very valuable at one stage of our national progress and development, to-day is an interloper in the streets of even our good-sized towns. Nowhere has this been recognized more keenly than in two important up-state cities of New York--Rochester and Syracuse--where the completion of the new Barge Ca.n.a.l has left the pathway of the abandoned Erie Ca.n.a.l a desolate streak of muck and mud through their very hearts. Each of these York State towns is to-day a real hub of interurban trolley traffic, to an extent that adds greatly to their existing street congestion. It is now proposed that the old bed of the Erie be adapted and used as a sub-surface terminal and approaches for these heavy interurban cars--a suggestion that now seems quite certain of being put into effect.

Both Rochester and Syracuse for a considerable time past have been fretted and perplexed by the amount of room these cars have taken in their streets. Their problem is one that is shared by many and many another ambitious city across the land.

There is a phase of American railroad operation that already I have touched upon and to which I shall again refer--the problem of the small branch line. In a following chapter when we shall discuss at some length the possibilities of the gasolene motor-car as applied to this small but always intensive transport problem, we shall go into the possibilities of this arm of the railroad--to-day its most neglected arm and, in consequence, shriveling terribly. There are many places where the withered arm can be made healthy and strong once more by electric treatment. Let me ill.u.s.trate.

Here in one of our Northeastern States (yet out of the super-power area) is a line that runs from S---- through W----, a small city of considerable importance as a local metropolis, on to C----, a railroad center, and then up to B----, in the heart of the mountainous forest. For the first twenty-eight miles of its distance, from S---- to C----, this road runs through a fairly closely built industrial territory, where the intermediate towns all but touch one another. Forty years ago this line had four pa.s.senger-trains a day in each direction; to-day it has but four once again. There was a little time when it had five or six. The motor-car, privately operated, and the motor-bus, publicly operated, brought it back to four. And even these four are not well filled.

The people in its territory do not particularly like the motor-bus. They use it chiefly because of its frequency of service and the fact that it makes frequent intermediate stops along the line. Both of these factors are possible to that railroad with the installation of a light unit, traveling at frequent intervals. From one end to the other of this sixty-mile line there is abundant water-power. A good engineer of my acquaintance tells me that the whole route could easily be operated on 5,000 horse-power. Ergo, once again. The big and generally well-operated railroad system that owns and operates that little half-hidden branch is missing a good bet--for one reason for being so far removed in real headquarters from the line itself, of which much more in good time. The point is, here and now, the bet is being missed and a fair income opportunity lost. An aggregate of these small fair income opportunities would make a considerable dividend upon the stock even of a 12,000-mile railroad.

Across the land there are hundreds of lines such as this, hundreds of such fair income opportunities. We are coming presently to the possibilities of the gasolene motor-car unit in regard to them; yet here and now may I not suggest that if ever we as a nation should come to a serious shortage of our crude-oil supply, upon which such super-demands are being made these days, we shall retain our water-power? This is a point in favor of the electric unit, as opposed to the gasolene or kerosene one, that we hardly can afford to overlook.

CHAPTER X

A CASE FOR THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE

But a moment ago we were calling the steam locomotive upon the American railroad a "laggard." Yet we were reserving a reb.u.t.tal to place his case upon the minutes of this record. In all this wild to-do about the possibilities of electricity in heavy rail transport he is forgotten. Such ever must be the fate of a laggard. Yet truth to tell, the steam locomotive does have a case. He can make a real reb.u.t.tal. He may be a laggard to-day; but to-morrow--Did you ever chance to know of a boy or a girl in school who was a laggard, and a brilliant success in after life? I myself have known of several.

Moreover it is hardly conceivable even now that all of the mileage of all our railroads ever will be run by electricity. Even the remarkable vision of McAdoo, which viewed the thing with marked friendliness, only predicated its use upon about one fifth of the railroad mileage in the United States. The great inland sections of the country, the plains and the prairies and the broad valleys of the Mississippi and the Missouri and the most of their tributaries, are comparatively limited in available water-power facilities. And this despite such great works as the Keokuk dam and others of the same sort, while the huge distances there militate against the economies of central steam-power stations for the generation of electric current.

So let us temper the wildest fancies with the thought that we probably shall have the steam locomotive with us for some time yet, say for one or two hundred years more. We shall have to put up with him. And having to put up with him, what shall we do with him? How shall we make him most effective for the future necessities of our American railroad structure?

There are more than 67,000 of him upon our railroads to-day. He is a factor in their progress that cannot be ignored. They can ill afford to have him remain a laggard, no matter how brisk may be the inroads of his compet.i.tor, the electric locomotive.