MORE ABOUT ELECTRIC MOTIVE-POWER
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 passenger 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 passenger terminals; while
the through passenger-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
passenger-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 passageway 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 anticipate 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 assume 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 assigned for
east-bound movement, the other for west-bound; which arrangement gives
four tracks in _each_ direction--enough for a really vast passenger
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 passenger-station would lie somewhere just west of the Seventh
Avenue extension and barely north of Canal Street, in Manhattan. It is a
district that has not gone ahead with the rest of New York. A huge
passenger 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 Canal
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
passenger 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 anticipation 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
Washington, 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 Washington--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 reassembled into trains drawn by B. & O. locomotives, and went
scurrying off to Washington, the West, and the South generally.
Such a clumsy arrangement could not last forever. About fifty years ago it
ended in a first-class row between the two chief parties to it. The P. W.
& B. had passed 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 shore 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 pass 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 competition 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
Washington 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-Washington business, while the link of
the Northern Central between Baltimore and its main line at Harrisburg
gave it a chance to get competitive business between both Washington 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
competition 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 competition 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
passenger-station in New York there is no moral reason why it cannot use
the Pennsylvania passenger-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 Washington, which already they use jointly.
Now we have a first-class pair of rails left nearly free all the way from
Mount Royal Station, Baltimore, to the Union Station, Washington, 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 Washington--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 Washington 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 Washington, to be
built at a minimum of cost. An installation such as this awaits only the
abandonment of the rather silly show of competition between the railroads,
which as we shall see in our own good time in this book is no competition
at all, while the opportunities offered for the development of both
Washington 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 passenger 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 passenger service is given as was
given to but 166,000. True it is that since then the country has passed
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 passenger 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 Shore, 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 passenger 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 passenger-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 passenger 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 passenger-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 passenger-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 passenger
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 passenger 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 mass 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 Canal has left the pathway of the
abandoned Erie Canal 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
illustrate.
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 passenger-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.