SPEEDING UP THE FREIGHT TERMINALS
For years past, old-time railroaders have emphasized the point that the
ordinary freight-car did not make money until it had hauled its goods at
least forty miles; the newer generation places this figure at nearer
eighty miles. And when you ask the whys and the wherefores of this, the
answer comes in but two words: "terminal expense." To reduce drastically
this expense, particularly in freight haulage, is to accomplish to-day one
of the largest single economies in the operation of the American railroad,
while as we have seen, and as we shall again see, further operating
economies are apparently its one salvation, no matter who may assume the
difficult task of their direction.
I have said already that the maximum profitable haul of the motor-truck
upon the highway is from fifty to eighty miles. Now put this figure
against the minimum profitable haul of the freight-car and see if we are
not driving toward a solution of the freight terminal problem. I think
that we are. And a single practical and concrete illustration ought to
show the reason for making this statement.
Here is Jones, out near Passaic, New Jersey, tanning leather, and Smith,
who has a shoe-factory of modest size at Lynn, Massachusetts, using it. In
other days the leather used to go through from New Jersey to the Bay State
in car-load lots. But in the last few years this method has proved
entirely too slow, even with the slowly returning strength and freight
efficiency of our railroads. It takes at least three roads to accomplish
the distance between Passaic and Lynn, with both New York and Boston,
through which the cars will probably pass, in any brisk season transfer
points of fearful and constant congestion--and with both Jones and Smith
then swearing and recriminating at one another.
To-day the leather is leaving Jones's tannery each afternoon at just 3:15
and is rolling up to the Smith factory in Lynn well before noon the next
day with an almost clock-like precision. Even in the days that the freight
was moving in heavy volume this precision was steadily maintained.
Motor-haul all the way? Oh, bless you, no! Two hundred and fifty miles to
be covered, and--as this is being written, in the dead of winter--not only
to be covered promptly but at a cost considerably less than express, and
not so far in advance of first-class freight charges. That eliminates the
possibility of the motor-truck doing the job--all the way through at
least. But it does not eliminate the fact that it is the motor-truck that
has made the transformation possible. Now see what really is done.
Each evening at a quarter after seven a fast-freight train of the New
York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad leaves the Mott Haven terminal of
that system, in the upper section of New York, for Boston. With selected
equipment, it makes good time on the 229-mile run to Boston and pulls in
there shortly before six o'clock in the morning. A hard-headed and
long-visioned motor-truck concern in New York fills three to a dozen
box-cars in that train each night. Into that Mott Haven terminal it
operates its own fleet of motor-trucks, not only from all freight-giving
points in the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queensborough, and Bronx districts of
greater New York, but from the many industrial towns in the vicinage
roundabout, up to a radius of from thirty to forty miles. Out of the
Boston terminal of the New Haven it operates a similar fleet, and so makes
the journey of a package of hides from Passaic to Lynn but a single
rail-haul, in addition to the pick-up and the delivery motor-run.
Simplicity and efficiency. And efficiency and economy.
In theory there would seemingly be nothing to prevent the single big
express company (into which all of the old-time companies were combined,
as a war-time measure) from doing this same thing. In practice, however,
their contracts with the railroads forbid this very simple and efficient
method of working. Those contracts compel the express company to load its
freight into railroad baggage-cars, for no matter how short the haul. If
the American Railway Express takes two rolls of carpet from Fifth Avenue
and Forty-seventh Street, New York, to Yonkers, on the very edge of the
big town and hardly a dozen miles distant from the carpet-store, it must
lug them to its big terminal on the west side of Manhattan Island and
there put them in a baggage-car of the New York Central for the haul to
its station in Yonkers, from which, of course, there is the second
delivery run. There is nothing in the theory--or in its simple
practice--to keep the express company's truck which picked up the rolls of
carpets at the Fifth Avenue shop continuing north to the very door of the
house in Park Hill or any other section of Yonkers to which they are
consigned. In a similar way express freight that is destined from
Manhattan Island to a point as near as Newark--seven or eight miles of
rail-haul--must all go by baggage-car, which, in its way, is quite as
absurd as sending stuff all the way from New York to Chicago by
motor-truck.
* * * * *
The big railroaders have not been quick to see the practical possibilities
of the motor-truck. Gradually however these are being forced upon their
attention. Take Cincinnati. Perhaps you are not a shipper and so are not
familiar with the freight situation there. If so, let me tell you that in
the days before Uncle Sam attempted consolidation of all his railroads and
the old-time competing systems used points of individual attractiveness to
gain traffic, the bright young men who sought out preference-freight for
their individual lines used, as the strongest of their talking points, to
promise the elimination of Cincinnati for any shipment bound north or
south or east or west through its vicinage. The late J. J. Hill used to
say that it took as long and cost as much for a box-car to go through the
Chicago terminals--about twenty-two miles--as from Chicago to the Twin
Cities--nearly five hundred miles. Applying a similar test to the
Cincinnati terminals one might say that a journey on from the Queen City
by the Ohio through to El Paso would be an equally fair comparison.
For while Chicago lies upon a broad flat plain and presents no
topographical problems whatsoever to the railroad engineer, Cincinnati,
crouched under fearful hills there along the river, has always been his
despair. When Collis P. Huntington first conceived the idea of a real
transcontinental railroad system forty or more years ago and sought to
bring his Chesapeake and Ohio, as an integral unit of that plan, into
Cincinnati, he found the roads already there most hostile to his entrance.
They held the town impregnable. Yet Huntington outwitted them by a superb
coup d' etat of engineering in which he thrust a marvelous great bridge
over the Ohio into the heart of the city and the upper levels of its
Central Union Station.
To-day Cincinnati stands as it stood then--seemingly impregnable. Its
railroad terminals forever are clotted and congested. And seemingly they
are incapable of expansion, short of the expenditure of many millions of
dollars. From one of these, the Panhandle freight-house at the east end of
the heart of the city, along the river edge to three or four others close
together, the downtown stations of the Big Four, the Baltimore and Ohio,
the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Queen and Crescent, it is hardly more
than a mile. A direct track along the levee connects all of them, yet the
records show that the average time for a freight car to go from the first
of these freight-houses to any one of the last four for years past has
been two days and fourteen hours. It was because of practical conditions
such as these that a great deal of the transfer work of less-than-car-load
freight from one railroad to another through Cincinnati was performed by a
transfer company through the city streets. The huge wagons of this
concern, each drawn by horses or mules, the driver seated athwart of the
southwest horse or mule, used to be familiar sights in the narrow streets
of the town close to the river. I say "used to be" advisedly. For these
quaint and ancient vehicles have to-day disappeared from the downtown
heart of Cincinnati. In their place the motor-truck has shown its
ubiquitous self. And in place of the 115 horse-drawn open trucks--our
English cousins would call them "lorries"--have come fifteen efficient,
modern, five-ton gasolene trucks. The mules and the horses have been
turned out to pasture. Nor is this all. A good many of the little
switching engines that used to haul the local transfer or "trap-cars" from
one main freight-house to another, or from the sub-stations in various
outlying industrial sections of the Cincinnati district, have been
released for service elsewhere, and a vast saving effected in men and in
money.
Before we came to the detailed method in which these fifteen motor-truck
chasses are being operated, consider for a longer moment the peculiar
topographical layout of Cincinnati: On that narrow shelf of flats or
bottoms between the high hills and the river in which the older portion of
the city is tightly built are situated the greater portion of its
industries. There it is that its business life centers. There it is then
that its railroad terminals have also been centered since first the
locomotive poked his way down to the banks of the Ohio. And since they
have expanded to almost every square inch of available territory. To the
east end of this long and narrow strip come the Panhandle lines of the
Pennsylvania system, the Louisville and Nashville's main-stem and the
Norfolk and Western railroad. At its western end are grouped the Kentucky
Central division of the Louisville and Nashville, the Queen and Crescent
lines of the Southern system, the Baltimore and Ohio reaching east, north,
and west on four important stems, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Big
Four lines of the New York Central.
The volume of traffic which these lines bring into Cincinnati and take out
of her crowded heart is vast indeed, and growing rapidly year by year. Not
only is the local traffic a thing to reckoned in many thousands of tons,
but the fact that there are three railroad bridges there across the Ohio,
each carrying at least one important through route to the South, means a
vast amount of through freight to go through that gateway--and much of it
there to be transferred, which further complicates the situation.
And more than all these things the steady growth of the city has meant a
constant demand for addition to her railroad facilities--addition that
because of the recent difficulties in railroad finance, as well as the
terrible topographical difficulties of the Cincinnati situation, have not
kept pace with the industrial growth of the city. Fortunately a good deal
of this recent growth has been away from her civic heart rather than close
to it. New factories have sprung up in new industrial districts, well to
the north and the northwest of the older portions of the town. And in
order to accommodate the smaller concerns of these sections--Brighton,
Ivorydale, and Norwood chief amongst them--the competing railroads which
threaded them opened up sub-station freight-houses in each of them. These
served concerns not large enough to have their own private sidings, while
in order to give these industries the benefits of the same through-car
service for L. C. L. (less-than-car-load) business that downtown business
houses enjoyed they were served by the downtown freight-houses. The
distances from these sub-stations--three or four to eight or ten
miles--were of course quite out of the question for the horse-drawn
lorries. So it became the practice there, as in other widespread
metropolitan cities, to load package-freight in local box-cars--in the
parlance of the business, "trap-cars"--and send these in the convoy of a
switch-engine to the downtown station where space was required for their
spotting and unloading. And a confounded situation was thus doubly
confounded.
In regular practice these trap-cars with their outbound freight would
leave the outlying sub-station each afternoon soon after their closing
hour--4:30--but they would not reach the downtown stations until early
evening, some hours after the L. C. L. or through package-freight cars
for that day had all been closed and sealed and sent merrily on their way
toward their destinations. At the best the stuff they carried would make
the through outbound cars of the second day. At the worst they might make
the cars the fourth or fifth day, while impatient shippers began to burn
the telegraph wires with all their woes.
To-day the freight from those outlying sub-stations at Brighton,
Ivorydale, Norwood, Oakley, and Sixth Street, Storrs, Covington, and
Newport is leaving them at their closing hours and going out from the main
downtown freight-stations that same evening--almost without a miss. The
shipper smiles. And, as in the case of the L. C. L. freight to be
transferred from one railroad to another at Cincinnati, great time, money,
and temper are saved and efficiency gained. The reason why? Let me hasten
to answer.
The motor-truck has come into railroad terminal service and has there
found a field peculiarly if not exclusively its own.
And because the Cincinnati experiment has passed the stage of mere
experimental trials and doubtings, because there in that fine old town at
the double bend of the Ohio a real progress step in transportation has
been taken that is not only of actual value to it to-day but of potential
value to every other big town in America to-morrow, let us go a little
more closely into its workings. Let us begin by calling to the
witness-chair J. J. Schultz, president and general manager of the
Cincinnati Motor Terminals and himself a railroad operating man of long
experience.
Mr. Schultz tells us quickly how a little more than four and a half years
ago the experiment began in the badly overcrowded downtown freight-station
of the Big Four, just south of and adjoining the equally badly crowded
Central Union (passenger) Station. It was a simple enough plant then--two
motor-truck chasses, bought on credit from a Cleveland concern, and twelve
cage-bodies worked out through the ingenuity of a local blacksmith. These
were placed in service between the main freight-house of the Big Four and
one or two of the outlying sub-stations. The success of the plan was
almost immediate. The two trucks went scurrying back and forth all day
long, picking up and depositing the loaded bodies until the other railroad
men of Cincinnati began to realize that their Vanderbilt competitors had
scored a sort of a beat on them. Then they began to look into the
motor-truck proposition on their own, with the direct result that to-day
every freight-house in Cincinnati except one is equipped for handling
standardized motor-truck bodies on and off standardized motor-trucks.
In transfer freight the scheme, briefly stated, is this. A box-car, filled
with less-than-car-load stuff, all bound for different roads south of the
Ohio, comes rolling down from Pittsburg into the Panhandle freight-house,
there at the east end of the Cincinnati congested district. The
freight-house crews make quick work of unloading it. The package stuff
which it held goes rolling across the deck of the "in-house" and without
rehandling into one of two or three of a row of huge packing-boxes that
stand awaiting it. These look like the small goods-wagons of the French or
the English railways and are in reality the new type of standardized red
and gray motor-bodies of the Motor Terminals Co. One is destined for the
freight-house of the main division of the L. & N., another for the
Kentucky Central division of the same system, a third for the Queen and
Crescent. An average of four and a half tons is stowed away in each of
them, the way-bills are placed in an envelope for the driver, and the box
is then fastened and sealed like the door of a regular box-car in service.
The freight-house boss moves toward his telephone. Presto! A motor-chassis
pulls alongside the Panhandle freight house.
"Ready for the Queen & Crescent," the driver shouts cheerily in.
But before he receives his loaded box and the way-bills there is one to be
delivered. An overhead crane running upon a track grabs the box, swings it
clear of the chassis, and places it upon one side of the freight-house
deck. From the other it picks up the loaded box for the Queen & Crescent
and--almost as quickly as it can be told here--deposits it upon the
emptied chassis. The driver yells a good-by and the truck is off, to be
replaced almost instantly with another, with a transfer load to be
delivered and one to be taken on for one of the other freight-houses.
"Our despatcher allows five minutes to unload a body and to load on
another," says Mr. Schultz. "It's a lot more than sufficient time."
"What despatcher?" we ask Mr. Schultz.
He explains in some detail. The railroads, who keep a careful supervising
oversight of the workings of the plan, have installed at their own expense
a skilled train-despatcher who, at a desk and telephone switchboard in a
quiet downtown corner, directs the exact operations of each of the
terminal company's trucks. Through his direct telephone lines to each
freight-house and sub-station he keeps tab upon the comings and the goings
of the drivers, as well as a complete and permanent record of their work
and can quickly meet emergencies of every sort, instantly adjusting the
service to the needs that are thrust upon it. Time is money. And time
counts.
"We are handling this stuff across town to the Queen and Crescent in just
fourteen minutes to the average," explains Mr. Schultz. "And here is where
the average was two days and fourteen hours--the actual practice often
from eight to ten days. Some percentage of gain."
A seemingly incredible percentage, Mr. Schultz. Yet here are the records
before our eyes that prove the statement. He seems to know exactly what he
is talking about:
"Take that run from the Brighton sub-station down to the main
freight-house of the Big Four in the old days," he adds. "Second night out
from the main station in a through L. C. L. car--in theory only. Do you
know what it took them in average practice with that trap-car? An average
of thirty-six hours; that's according to the records. And our motor-trucks
make that run in thirty minutes. But because they haul an average load of
but 4.37 tons, as against an average load of nine tons in the trap-car,
we must, in order to be entirely fair, take that into consideration in a
comparative reckoning and say that our average haul is one hour and four
minutes, which still compares pretty well with thirty-six hours. Or, to
bring it still further, the average time to haul one ton of
package-freight by motor-truck is seven minutes, as compared with three
hours and fifty-four minutes by trap-car. Our drivers are scheduled to
make ten miles an hour through the city streets, and they make it easily
and without danger or annoyance to any one.
"There is another factor of saving in this service that you must not
forget," continues Mr. Schultz. "By our use of the motor-truck we have
saved the use of twenty-three trap-cars a day in this one freight-house
alone. That not only releases those cars to the Pennsylvania railroad for
line service but, by saving the platform trackage which these cars
demanded, increases in a really great measure the capacity and efficiency
of this freight-house. And you can readily understand the effect upon the
entire Cincinnati terminal situation when I tell you that the motor-truck
service which we already have in effect is releasing a total of 66,000
box-cars a year from Cincinnati terminal service for the line movements of
the various railroads that lead in here."
I think I can understand. A little time ago the wisest and most
conservative of the railroad operating executives who have Cincinnati
among their bailiwicks were wondering how in these days of abnormally low
railroad credit they were going to escape vast and almost immediate
extensions to their terminals there, both freight and passenger. Now they
know that these expenditures will not have to be made--for the freight
terminals at least--for a number of years to come. The trap-car
elimination has released anywhere from 30 to 40 per cent. of valuable
floor-space in each of the present local freight-houses and so of course
has added that much to their working capacity. Count that, if you please,
to the credit of the motor-truck in terminal service.
Nor is the service itself representative of any cost increase. The motor
terminals company is hauling all the transfer and secondary freight at an
average cost of eighty cents a ton, which certainly compares well with
$1.20 which the former transfer service was compelled to charge for its
haul by lorries, or the expense varying from $1.12 to $1.60 a ton which it
costs the railroads to haul their own trap-cars by switch-engines. A
saving this which goes well alongside of that of box-cars and
switch-engines and freight-house space relieved, to say nothing of
individual shipments, through and local, vastly expedited; all of which
can be translated annually into money savings of real dimensions.
Already the motor terminals company is hauling about one thousand tons of
freight through the streets of Cincinnati in nine hours of each business
day. Its trucks, with maximum outside dimensions of seventeen feet six
inches by eight feet, are both shorter and narrower than the lorries of
the old transfer company and infinitely less subject to delays under
conditions of inclement weather. Moreover understand, if you will, that
the transfer company, with all of its 115 lorries, hauled but 38 per cent.
of the through L. C. L. freight between the various terminals of
Cincinnati. To handle all of it would have taken at least 250 horse-drawn
trucks, while if it had attempted the problem of handling the sub-stations
another fleet of at least equal size would have been required.
Yet its motorized successor is now handling every pound of the thousand
tons or more of transfer freight at Cincinnati daily as well as all the
sub-station work, with the slight increase of twenty-four bodies to the
201 already in service and without the increase of a single chassis to its
present operating fleet of fifteen. To perfect and quicken its service the
overhead cranes for loading and unloading the box-bodies are being
equipped with motor-trolleys, in place of the man-power chain
arrangements, which in turn represents a speed of fifty feet a minute as
against but seven under the old order of things. And this of course is
still further efficiency.
So much then for the situation as it stands to-day in Cincinnati. It does
not take very much of a vision to see in the proved success of a terminal
plan, which already has ceased to be an experiment, a great enlargement of
the freight gathering and distributing scheme for the entire city. No
longer will it be necessary or even essential that a freight-house of a
railroad be located either at or near rails. It can come far closer to its
users. In other words railroad sub-stations for the collection and
delivery of package-freight can be established in every industrial section
of Cincinnati, thus shortening the haul for individual patrons and so in
turn perceptibly lessening the congestion in the city streets.
Do you see now where this is leading us? With sub-stations so established,
the principle of standardized interchangeable motor-truck bodies and
chasses working to so definite an end, there remains little or no use for
downtown freight terminals in a city like Cincinnati, save perhaps an
occasional team-track yard for heavy car-load shipments. In the flats at
the edge of the town the railroads can, and in my opinion eventually will,
establish new and generous-sized freight-houses and other terminal
appurtenances. The downtown stations, located in the heart of each
industrial district, will do the rest. The expense of building these last
will be as nothing. The value of their upper floors as lofts for light
manufacturing will far more than offset the cost and upkeep of the
ground-floor motor-freight terminal, while the facility of movement, with
its multitude of resultant economies, will make the expenditure on
outlying main terminals money well spent indeed.
As goes Cincinnati, so must go the land outside. It is from this point of
view that its radically new terminal plan assumes a nation-wide interest
and importance. As I lingered in its various railroad terminals beside the
neat wood and iron motor-body boxes upon the freight-house decks--the
original open cage design has long since been discarded in favor of the
stronger and more permanent form of carrier--I could not help but be
struck again with their resemblance to the small ten-ton goods-wagons of
the French and English railways. And I recalled the tremendous efficiency
of these same small wagons for the work for which they were best adapted,
the hauling of package freight, the sort of things we know in this country
as L. C. L. One of the great disagreeable sources of railroad outgo in
America, and one that has a constant tendency toward increase, is the list
of claims paid for freight damaged in transit. It makes a pretty big
annual bill, of which an astoundingly large proportion is gained through
breakage in the transfer-houses. Remember that right here is where our
French and English cousins can always show us a trick or two. With their
little ten-ton cars there is always enough package-freight to "make" a
full car even to the smallest communities, while once arrived at one of
these, a switching-crew composed of a man and a horse handles the car-load
shipment with great care and no little speed.
Then as I stood there upon the big and orderly decks of the Cincinnati
freight-houses--orderly upon the coming of the motor-truck into terminal
service, and for the first time in many years--it kept coming to me, why
could not these stoutly built boxes go through to Dayton or to Columbus or
Indianapolis, or for that matter anywhere within reach of the American
freight-car? Two of them would go quite easily upon the deck of a
flat-car; it ought not to be difficult to find "flats" to accommodate
three of the seventeen-foot motor-bodies upon their platforms. But even
with but two, there would be nine tons of package-freight, which is fully
as much if not more than the average package-freight box-car is carrying
to-day across the land. While thirteen tons--three well filled
motor-boxes-runs well ahead of that average.
Suppose that this long Big Four flat-car was to run up to Columbus--150
miles or more up the line--with three motor-boxes upon its deck. One might
have been filled at the main freight-house of the Big Four, down in the
shadow of the big passenger terminal, another at Brighton, the third, let
us say at Norwood. The exact stations are immaterial. The point is that
the freight would have but one transfer--at the in-house of the Columbus
terminals. There an overhead track-crane would pick the three boxes off
the "flat" and place them upon the freight-house deck, where they could be
quickly unloaded and their contents placed on trucks or lorries for
Columbus distribution. While in turn the motor-boxes would be reloaded for
shipment back direct to Cincinnati-Downtown, Cincinnati-Brighton, and
Cincinnati-Norwood.
There is nothing impracticable or impossible about such a plan. On the
contrary, it is most tremendously practical and tremendously efficient
withal. Its installation is neither difficult nor expensive, while the
savings are vast. A conservative estimate would place these already at
$1000 a day in the Cincinnati district. Carry that ratio all the way
across the country and you have a possibility of railroad operating
economy in the aggregate not to be sneezed at.
* * * * *
The whole broad national field of railroad operation awaits the coming of
the motor-truck and its detachable body into terminal handling. It is to
be a great factor in the railroad of to-morrow. Come east, if you will,
from Cincinnati into New York. Now we have a teaser of a problem. Far
worse, even, than that of the city by the bend of the Ohio. The freight
terminal problem of the island of Manhattan alone is to-day the greatest
single problem of transport in all this land, if not, indeed, in all the
world. Into it constantly is being injected idealism, engineering,
politics, common-sense--all of these, apparently to but little avail. An
elaborate plan has been formulated lately for the correction and revision
of the entire terminal problem of the New York metropolitan district
(including not only all the outlying boroughs such as Brooklyn, Richmond,
and the Bronx, but Jersey City, Bayonne, Weehawken, Hoboken, Newark,
Paterson, Passaic, and many other closely allied communities). This plan
is being engineered by the newly created Port of New York Authority,
modeled closely upon a similar body for the port of London. As this is
being written, it is being resisted stoutly by the city administration of
New York. I shall not go into this phase of the problem however. There are
enough others to be considered, and this particular one sooner or later
will come to an automatic solution.
For no matter whether the city administration or the Port Authority
(created by the States of New York and New Jersey) comes atop, the island
of Manhattan will remain the crux and key of the whole problem. For its
relief it may be necessary, as has been suggested, to build relief
belt-line railroads no nearer than forty miles away from it. That is a
matter for the future. For the present consider that disregarding
political boundaries--traffic takes little or no thought of them--the
commercial center of metropolitan New York (in the sense which I now mean,
a well-grouped city of ten million people, even though in two separate
States) is and must remain upon Manhattan Island. There is the commerce
done. There the freight comes to a clearing-house. Manufacturing may
increase and probably will upon the outer rims of the district. But
distribution will remain close to its heart.
Consider for a moment, if you will, with me the antiquated freight
facilities of the heart of what long since became the second city of the
world, and which to-day, commercially, at least, is its first. Upon the
long, slender island of Manhattan but one steam railroad has direct rail
freight facilities. That road is the New York Central, which many years
ago pre-empted most of the western edge of the island for itself and so
gained a vast strategic advantage--also a choice assortment of political
quarrels. However, the one thing probably more than offsets the other.
There are nine other important freight railroads, however, entering the
New York metropolitan district (not counting the West Shore, which is a
subsidiary of the New York Central). These roads, together with the
Central and the West Shore, occupy thirty-five vastly valuable piers in
the congested sections of the island south of Forty-second Street and so
hold the piers from coastwise and from outbound steamship lines which
clamor constantly for them.
To these piers the freight-cars of these eleven railroads come on long
clumsy car-floats, each accommodating about ten cars. The floats are
loaded at the direct water terminals of the railroads across the Hudson
and elsewhere and are poked by stout tugs into position alongside the
freight-piers. In theory a single standard pier of Manhattan should empty
and load, even in this rather clumsy fashion, about eighty cars a day.
This is based upon having four floats at each of them at a single time. In
practice they do well if they clear forty cars a day. The berthings
between the piers are narrow, there is much congestion in them and in the
rivers about Manhattan Island, and delays are not only frequent but
constant.
Yet the delays upon the water sides of these piers are as nothing compared
with those upon their street sides. Any New York merchant, retail or
wholesale, will tell you of these--of trucks standing in line long, weary,
expensive hours outside the pier-doors and then wasting more time after
they once get inside, before they are loaded and out again. On an average
60 per cent. of a truck's time is so wasted. The average downtown pier is
but eighty feet wide, and after a thirty foot roadway has been left down
its center there is not much room for the freight. There must be a vast
amount of pulling and hauling over the accumulated merchandise. This all
takes time and money.
Concretely, it costs about two dollars a ton for package-freight (known
technically as the classified) to get itself unloaded upon a Manhattan
Island pier. Add to this fifty to sixty cents for the hand-work of
unloading upon the pier and a hauling cost through the streets of downtown
New York of from eight to ten cents a hundred; and you have a total
terminal cost well in excess of four dollars a ton, which is entirely too
much.
One of the chief tasks before the engineers of the Port of New York
Authority is to bring down this cost. They have proposed a fascinating and
elaborate plan by which the freight-cars upon the eight railroads coming
into New York from the south and west be unloaded well outside the rail
terminal congestion--the essence of the fully-developed Cincinnati plan
which we have just seen. Their freight would go into a form of container
which would ride into Manhattan upon a miniature underground electric
railroad, not dissimilar to that in successful use in Chicago for a number
of years past. This road, connecting with the outlying freight interchange
points, would dip under the Hudson River at the Battery and continue up
under West Street, at the extreme westerly rim of Manhattan Island, to
about Thirty-third Street, where it would again tunnel beneath the river
and return to New Jersey--a simple and efficient belt-line.
This scheme is most interesting, despite its weakness in ignoring the
uptown growth of Manhattan Island by quitting it south of Thirty-fourth
Street. Unfortunately it is most expensive, as well. Most such plans are.
Its estimated cost is $259,000,000. A keen and experienced railroader of
my acquaintance, taking this into consideration for his overhead and
making a sharp analysis of probable operating costs, has not hesitated to
give it as his opinion that this underground electric railroad would
impose a terminal cost of something over four dollars a ton for classified
freight entering Manhattan from the west bank of the Hudson River. Add to
this your street haul costs of from eight to ten cents a hundred and you
begin to get something too dangerously close to six dollars a ton to have
much joy in it for the New York merchants.
One of the most important of the eight railroads entering New York from
the west, from a freight traffic point of view, at least, is the Erie.
Despite a fearful heritage of financial obligations incurred during its
maladministration of half a century ago, it is a remarkably progressive
property in its operating methods. Poverty and the consequent need for
extreme economy have forced it into many ingenious and highly practical
operating kinks. The vast expenditures involved in the elaborate plan of
the Port of New York Authority can have little fascination for the
energetic F. D. Underwood and the rest of the Erie officers, who know how
very hard it is for them to meet their operating and their fixed
charges--dividends are not in their hopes.
With this in mind they have sought to meet the New York terminal
situation, not with large expenditures but with an adaptation of the tolls
close at hand. Already they have entered into a contract with a trucking
concern upon Manhattan Island to work out the details of a most ingenious
plan which goes after this fashion.
For many years past the Erie has operated two ferry-lines from its
historic terminal at Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, to New York--Chambers
and Twenty-third streets respectively. To meet the large suburban
passenger necessities of the road it is necessary to operate these upon
fairly frequent headways. Yet Pavonia Avenue is not an accepted route for
through motoring, either freight or passenger which means that the Erie
ferry-boats have been more crowded in their cabins than upon their team
decks. Yet it is obvious that it costs little or no more to operate a well
filled ferry-boat than one that is but half-filled. Moreover in Pavonia
Avenue, Jersey City, the Erie possesses not only ample freight-house
facilities but room for a large future expansion of them.
Of course, it was quite out of the question to expect the average merchant
of Manhattan Island to go to Jersey City to get his freight, particularly
when the Erie's enterprising competitors were crying their willingness to
set it down in the West Street piers. Mohammed would not go to the
mountain, but in this instance the mountain would come to Mohammed. The
Erie made arrangements with a large trucking concern in the City of New
York to take classified freight in ten-ton units to the merchants' doors.
These truck-bodies are four-wheeled, their forward wheels being rather
light and rather small. There are three of these bodies to one tractor
unit, which means of course that while one body is in transit attached to
the tractor, the other two are at the respective termini being loaded and
unloaded. So is time saved; and so is saved the expensive overhead upon
the tractor-unit while the clock goes steadily ticking forward.
Eighteen of these truck and tractor combinations go upon a single
ferry-boat. The ferry-boat headway is seven and one-half minutes, which
means that working at full speed 1760 tons--a fair-sized train-load, for
classified freight--can be handled each hour. And if you wish more figures
still, please understand that the terminal cost of trucking to the
merchant of Manhattan has been lowered by this method from eight to ten
cents a hundred to but five or six.
Economies? Sometimes I think we of America do not know, even yet, the real
meaning of the word.
Yet this is but the beginning of the Erie's work at its New York
terminals. Its big job, upon which it is just now embarking, is bringing
into play the container in its most real sense not merely as a detachable
truck-body but as a steel-box which can be loaded and then handled in
almost any conceivable form of transport.
The idea is simplicity itself, nor is it a particularly new one. For many
years past the express companies have used it for the transport of their
comparatively small and valuable packages, placing these in large
iron-bound wooden trunks for safety in carriage. It is more than a dozen
years ago that a professor in one of the New England colleges--Amherst, I
think--wrote an article in which he advocated the scheme for all
package-freight and sent the article to a technical publication, which
promptly refused it, saying that it was entirely too visionary an idea.
Yet here we are, fairly come to it in these days. The Erie plan in its
last refinements proposes to unload the package-freight for New York at
its yards at Croxton, New Jersey, just west of the Bergen tunnels, and
then after reassortment to reload it into steel container-boxes,
seventeen and one-half feet by eight and one-half, and with a working
capacity of five tons. Two of these containers will fill the platform of
an average flat-car.
The reassortment or transfer work at Croxton will be not only into
containers for the Erie's various sole and joint freight-stations in
Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queensborough, but also to individual
business houses, where the volume of the freight justifies such a step.
Great retail stores, such as Macy's or Wanamaker's or Altman's, easily
would receive one or more of these containers each day. So would the
important wholesalers, and all other considerable distributing concerns of
the City of New York.
The containers placed upon the flat-cars at Croxton will quickly traverse
the three or four brief miles to the water-side of Weehawken, just across
from West Fortieth Street, Manhattan. Here they will go upon the huge
floats originally built for the terminal movement of loaded box-cars but
each easily adapted for the carrying of sixty of the five-ton containers.
All the elaborate plans that have been made for the extension and
development of the port of New York predicate the scrapping of this great
harbor fleet of car-floats--some eight million dollars' worth all told. In
this book I am aiming to show possible railroad economies, not
expenditures. It is easy enough to depict elaborate plans which involve
vast capital expenditure. We have had rather too many of these in this
country in recent years. It seems to me that by far the best plans are
those that give large operating economies with a minimum of actual
expense. These are the sort that I am trying to show within these pages.
If the Erie plans will bring to each of its water-side piers in lower
Manhattan some 7200 tons of assorted merchandise a day, against about 400
tons as at present accomplished by the old-fashioned and rather awkward
device of ferrying the loaded cars themselves across the Hudson River, it
would seem to be both a real efficiency, as well as a mere economy.
Carried out by other roads using the harbor-side of West Street,
Manhattan, it would quickly become a vast efficiency--the storage of
freight upon the crowded pier floors ended; motor-trucks coming in,
receiving in a time always to be measured in seconds, rather than in
minutes, the steel containers upon their stout chasses, and then departing
in a quick and orderly fashion. J. J. Mantell, the New York manager of the
Erie, who has created this new plan and now has its execution in charge,
estimates that carried out upon the lines of his competitors it would mean
that the railroads coming into New York from the west would need but seven
piers instead of the thirty-five that they now occupy. Twenty-eight piers
would be released for steamship service and the necessity of extensive,
and expensive, harbor improvements deferred, for a number of years at
least.
The container idea, having once come into the public eye here in the
United States, has steadily and rather rapidly gained in favor. A
gentleman in St. Louis has apparently gone the Cincinnati method one
better by devising a steel container which is interchangeable not only
between motor-trucks and railroad freight-cars, but from these chasses to
barge or flat-cars, or into the hold of a steamboat. His scheme already is
in actual use, although not in perfected form, in the Federal barge
service established three years ago upon the Warrior River. Twenty of the
big steel boxes were purchased for use there, and there they are still in
use.
It so happens that the Warrior River barges have no deck-houses, merely
open holds into which the coal from the Alabama hills can easily be poured
or unloaded. To make "return load"--always that valuable factor in
transportation, either water or rail-merchandise freight must be garnered
in New Orleans. And an open-hold barge is hardly comparable to a box-car;
not at least in the mind of a shipper, who has some lurking desire to have
his goods arrive in fair condition at the far end of the run.
So the steel container, which H. W. Kirchner of St. Louis has designed,
came into play. It carries merchandise not only from New Orleans to
Birmingport (just below Birmingham) but, atop of the coal, back to New
Orleans again. The inventor has had no joy whatever in this very informal
trial of his device. He would prefer to have his containers handled and
placed in a more orderly and systematic fashion. Yet the fact remains that
a beginning has been made in the actual use of the only practical binding
force yet brought forward which looks to a physical linking of the several
different arms of freight transport. Any firm believer not only in the
theory of correlated transportation but also in the high values to be
achieved by its practical application in this country cannot help having a
joy in this Warrior River experiment, an experiment which sooner or later
is to be extended to the similar barge service which the United States
Government has now succeeded in establishing upon the Mississippi. It
already has been shown on the Warrior River line that the container can,
and does, cut labor costs at terminals all the way from sixty-five cents
to four cents a ton--the time for unloading from twelve to twenty-four
hours down to but one or two, at the most.
* * * * *
There is coming to-day in this country--slowly, but very surely--a
reversal of the old-time tradition that the inland waterway is _per se_ a
competitor of the railroad. Many years ago the railroads themselves showed
how small a figure a river or canal, always more or less subject to
seasonal or weather influences, was to the steel highway as a competitor,
while the attempts that have been made since then--and generally at large
capital expenditure--to bring about the resurrection of the inland
waterway as a competitor of the railroad have so far proved abortive.
But to regard the inland waterway as supplementary to the railroad, or the
railroad as supplementary to the inland waterway--it is merely a choice of
phrasings--is a very different story indeed. True it is that the statute
laws to-day pronounce sternly against such a sensible, economic solution
of a large phase of our American transport problem. True it is that a
good many other keen business men still can see the waterway in no other
light than as a club over the railroad. True it is that a good many
otherwise sagacious railroad executives can see the waterway as nothing
but an obsolete agent of transport or as a foolish dream of visionary
idealists. Yet the fact remains that the waterway does have its place in
transport. The railroad has a place, and in intelligent analysis these
places dovetail somehow, somewhere. They do not conflict. And the sooner
realization is made of this, the better--for all of us.
Some day we shall have to change our statute laws and then, instead of
barring our railroads from our waterways, we shall invite, urge, implore,
and if necessary compel them to use these great natural arteries of inland
transport, chiefly for the relief of their overcrowded rails, particularly
the rail terminals. And how overcrowded these are yet to be, it is hard to
realize in this present moment of industrial slump.
In that day the container is to be, as I have said already, the binding
agent between these different avenues of transport. Its flexibility, its
adaptability, its obvious economy are going to bring it into its own.
* * * * *
In the meantime great progress is being made in its development. A. H.
Smith, the big, energetic president of the New York Central, with his
usual verve and enthusiasm has taken hold of the idea and seems bound to
put it over. Already he has had built ten steel units of containers four
for passenger service and holding ten boxes each, and six for freight
service and holding but six boxes apiece. The passenger service units are
being tried out in the United States mail service; the freight-service
ones are in experimentation by the American Railway Express. Just what
will be the final development in operation of these units Smith himself
does not know. He believes that the possibilities are almost too great for
instant grasp. That is why he has his road and himself back of the new
idea. He has watched it carefully, almost apprehensively. Because of a
certain indefinite fear that one of the great steel boxes might some fine
day be hurtled from the platform of a car running at high speed and into
some group of waiting people by the side of the railroad, he has caused
extraordinary care to be taken to have them firmly fastened not merely
upon, but into, the platform-cars. A long steel girder-side of the car
does the trick, while in these days of bandits and rumors of bandits along
the line the fact that there is no possible process of opening the steel
door of the container-box once it is set into its place upon the car gives
an assurance of protection to the merchandise that no other form of
carrier can offer.
Here again the motor-truck correlates. In the first experimental trials by
the New York Central of this forward-looking device, they have come into
quick and easy terminal service; the big olive-green trucks of the United
States Mail service and the deep-blue ones of the American Railway
Express.
* * * * *
I began this chapter with the motor-truck. With the motor-truck I shall
close it. It is the object of great dreams of transport. Yet these are
not, after all, mere dreams. They are, as we have seen just now, the
carefully developed plans of engineers long since become expert in
transportation. I could have carried you much further into these
plans--into their application for the relief of Philadelphia, whose great
water-front along the Delaware is only reached by the box-car after miles
of tedious switching through congested trackage, and where the motor-truck
offers an almost immediate and a comparatively inexpensive solution of the
freight terminal problem; into Chicago where the situation is nearly as
bad; and into Boston, where it is considerably worse, and where again the
motor-truck plus the container in terminal service is a veritable key to
the problem. Further still could I have carried you in this discursion--to
Baltimore, to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, to Detroit, elsewhere still. I have
hesitated to weary you with too much detail. You have had enough to prove
my points, while only space prevents the discussion of the financial
phases of this service, sometimes known as store-door delivery.
I shall admit that store-door delivery has no attractive sound to the
practical operating railroad executive. He is gun-shy, tremendously
gun-shy of it. And yet I do not wonder at that. Your railroader feels that
sooner or later--and probably much sooner than later--the charges for this
service would be tacked upon his shoulders flatly included within his
transportation rate. Aside from that I think that he would welcome it
distinctly. It would greatly simplify the traffic problems in and around
his freight-terminals to say nothing of making vast savings in the use of
his equipment.
Moreover the day is coming when he will be compelled to welcome it
willy-nilly. For, in my opinion, the motor-truck will occupy a place in
the railroads' necessities to-morrow only second to that of the locomotive
itself. It represents the railroad's newest field of development, by far
its largest field of possibilities. Remember that the pictures which you
have just seen in some detail of the Cincinnati and the New York terminal
situations are but two out of many of these possibilities. The others are
so vast and so many as to be termed limitless. They represent
progress--progress in the field of American transport as definite and as
distinct as that which marked the coming of the locomotive. The years pass
by. In them we do move. We do progress. And transport enterprise consists
in translating vision to practical operation, along lines such as we just
have seen. So shall our railroad of to-morrow be upbuilt.