THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE RAILROAD
In the past decade the United States has progressed mightily. Have the
railroads of the land made equal progress? The past decade of American
progress will, in all probability, pale before the coming of the
next--particularly if we are cool-headed and smart-headed enough to take
critical reckoning of our weaknesses and to use such a reckoning as a
stepping-stone toward supplementing our great inherent and potential
strength. Will the railroad during the coming decade move forward to its
opportunity? And what is the opportunity of the railroad?
These are pertinent questions. They come with added force upon a statement
of the present plight of our overland carriers and before one comes to
consider the measures of immediate relief that must be granted them. They
must be considered too--briefly, but with a due appreciation of their
importance. The railroaders of vision--and I have never believed that
there was a really big railroader who lacked vision--today are thinking of
them.
* * * * *
For a beginning take the possibility of the application of electricity as
a motive power in the operation of the railroad. Our overland carriers
have only begun to sound the vast possibilities of this great agent of
energy. To many of the roads, its present attainments both in Europe and
in America are still, in large measure, a closed book. They have little
realization of what was accomplished in suburban electrification in Paris
or in Berlin well before the beginning of the war; hardly greater
realization of the marvels wrought in the suburban zones of New York,
Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco. And the tremendous
accomplishment of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway in
transforming nearly 500 miles of its main line over the crest of the Rocky
Mountains is still so new and so dazzling as to have given railroad
managers in other sections of the land little opportunity to consider its
opportunities as applied to their own properties.
* * * * *
Within the past few years the folk of the East have seen several important
terminals--terminals really vast in their proportions and their
accommodations--developed in the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard.
There have been important passenger stations erected in other parts of the
land--the new Union Station in Kansas City, the Union Station at
Minneapolis, and the North Western Terminal at Chicago coming first to
mind among these. But the passenger terminal developments along the
Atlantic seaboard have differed from those of the Middle West chiefly in
the fact that into their planning and construction has been interwoven the
use of electricity as a motive power for the trains which are to use them.
Practically every one of these is so designed as to make its operation by
steam power impossible.
The ambitious good taste of many of our cities growing into a real
metropolitanism has been gratified in this decade of our national progress
by the erection of monumental passenger stations. These structures
invariably are more than merely creditable--they are impressive, majestic,
beautiful. Yet the big railroaders do not always see them in this light.
They find themselves, by one means or another, compelled to gratify local
civic pride by the expenditure of hundreds of thousands and even millions
of dollars more than it would cost to build a plain, efficient terminal,
large enough to accommodate the traffic of both today and tomorrow. The
extra expenditure goes to produce a granite palace, generally ornate and
sometimes extravagant to the last degree.
Yet in all this widespread development of the American terminal, one at
least has been evolved which is not merely monumental, but an economic
solution of its own great cost. I refer to the new Grand Central Terminal
in the city of New York.
You may recall the old Grand Central Station. It was no mean terminal.
Commodore Vanderbilt built it himself soon after the close of the Civil
War. The passenger business of the railroads of the land was then
beginning to be a considerable thing. Americans were gaining the travel
habit. The genus commuter had been born. The first of the railroad
Vanderbilts saw all these things. And, because he had the fine gift of
vision, he turned his far-seeing toward action. On Forty-second
Street--then a struggling crossroad at the back of New York--he erected
the greatest railroad terminal in the world. It was indeed a giant
structure, and the biggest of our American towns had, in its Grand Central
depot, a toy over which it might brag for many and many a day.
New York was in genuine ecstasy about it. Its ornate and graceful train
shed spanned thirteen tracks, and even if our fathers did wonder where all
the cars could come from to fill so spacious an apartment they had to
marvel at its beauty. And beyond this creation of the artist was the
creation of the engineer--the huge switching yard, black and interlaced
with steel tracks. It was a mightily congested railroad yard; upon its
tight-set edges the growing city pressed. Skyscrapers sprang up roundabout
and looked down upon the cars and locomotives. The value of that land,
given as a switching yard for a passenger terminal, eventually was
reckoned close to $100,000,000. And the yard itself became a black barrier
to the development of the heart of metropolitan New York.
* * * * *
In forty years from the day it was opened, the last vestige of the Grand
Central depot, a building which, to a considerable portion of the
population of this land, had been second in fame only to the Capitol at
Washington, was gone. Workmen had torn it stone from stone and brick from
brick and carted it off as waste to scrap yards. The majesty of that
lovely vaulted train shed had been reduced to a pile of rusty and useless
iron. It had been outgrown and discarded.
In fact within a dozen years after its christening the wonderful depot was
overtaxed. Even Vanderbilt's vision could not grasp the growth that was
coming, not only to New York, but to the great territory his railroads
served. In a dozen years workmen were clearing a broad space to the east
of the main structure for an annex train shed of a half-dozen tracks, to
relieve the pressure upon the original station. Another twelve years and
the laborers were again upon the Grand Central, this time adding stories
to the original structure and trying to simplify its operation by new
baggage and waiting rooms. Within the third dozen years the workmen were
busy with air drill and steam shovel digging the great hole in the rock
that was the first notice to the old Grand Central that its short lease of
busy life was ending. And in the fortieth year of its life they were
tearing down the old station--old within the span of two generations--old
only because it had been outgrown.
* * * * *
The problem of the new Grand Central was both engineering and
architectural. It is the engineering side of the problem which interests
us here and now. It was that side which it was necessary to solve first.
To solve it meant that the passenger traffic into New York from the north
and east for another fifty or a hundred years must be discounted--not an
easy matter when in the case of a single famous trunk-line railroad it has
been found that the passenger traffic has doubled each ten years for the
past three decades. When the statisticians put down their pencils the
engineers whistled. To fashion a station for the traffic of 1960, even
for that of 1935, meant such a passenger station as no railroad head, no
engineer, no architect had ever before dreamed of building. At a low
estimate, it meant that there would have to be some forty or fifty
stub-tracks in the train shed. In the great train shed of the Union
Station of St. Louis, there are thirty-two of these stub-tracks and the
span of that shed is 606 feet. That would have meant in the case of the
new Grand Central a train house with a width of nearly a thousand feet.
The engineers shook their heads. They knew their limitations--with the
Grand Central hedged in by the most expensive real estate in the city of
New York. To buy any large quantity of adjoining land for the new station
was quite out of the question.
Fortunately there was a way out. There generally is. The electric
locomotive had begun to come into its own. For the operation of this
station, including the congested four-track tunnel under Park Avenue, from
the very throat of the train-shed yard up to Harlem, four miles distant,
it represented an almost ideal form of traction, largely because of its
cleanliness and freedom from smoke. For the engineers who were giving
their wits to the planning of a new terminal it was the solution of their
hardest problem.
They would cut their train shed of fifty tracks about in half--and then
place one of these halves directly above the other. This would make a
fairly logical division between the through and the suburban traffic of
the terminal. In that way the new Grand Central was planned. And that one
thing represented its first important demarkation from the other great
passenger stations of the land. It also is the thing that pointed the way
to the most wonderful development of America's most wonderful terminal,
the thing that is infinitely greater than the station itself.
Recall once again, if you will, that dirty smoke-filled yard at the
portals of the old station. It was rather an impressive place; by night,
with its flashing signals of red and green and yellow, its glare of
dominant headlights and the constant unspoken orders of swinging lamps; by
day, a seeming chaos of locomotives and of cars, turning this way or that,
slipping into the dark cool train shed under grinding brakes, or else
starting from that giant cavern with gathering speed, to roll halfway
across the continent before the final halt. To the layman it was
fascinating, because he knew that the chaos was really ordered, on a
scientific and tremendous scale, that the alert little man who stood at
the levers of the inconspicuous tower mid-yard, was the clear-minded human
who was directing the working of a great terminal by the working of his
brain. But to the thinking railroader that railroad yard, like every
railroad yard in the heart of the great city, was a waste that was hardly
less than criminal.
The coming of the electric locomotive has spelled the way by which that
waste in the hearts of our American cities may be ended. Concretely, in
the case of the new Grand Central, it made a splendid solution of one of
the greatest of the growth problems in the largest city of our continent.
For, while the new Grand Central, service and approach yards considered
even as a single level--some sixty acres all told--are larger than the
older yard, they apparently have disappeared. In that thing alone a great
obstacle to the constant uptown growth of New York has been removed.
Sixteen precious city blocks have been given back to the city for its
development. And already a group of buildings possessing rare
architectural unity and beauty have begun to rise upon this tract.
There are other American cities where this experiment--no longer an
experiment, if you please--might well be effected today. Of these, more in
a moment. For, before we leave the question of the Grand Central consider
one other thing: the economic value of its design to the railroad company
which has erected it. It was only a moment ago that we were speaking of
the utter extravagance shown in the designing and building of the
monumental passenger stations in so many of our metropolitan cities. The
New York Central, for reasons of its own, has been reticent in stating
both the cost of the new Grand Central and the income which it derives not
only from the rentals of the privileges in the station itself--restaurants,
news stands, barber shops, checking stands, and the like--but also from
the ground rental of the great group of huge buildings which it has
permitted to spring up over its electrified station yards. It is known,
however, that this income is not only sufficient to pay the interest upon
the investment of the new terminal, to provide slowly but surely a sinking
fund for the retirement of the bonds which have been issued for the
building of the terminal, but also to go a considerable distance toward
the actual operating expenses of the terminal.
Here, then, is the first of our giant opportunities for the railroader of
tomorrow. There is, of course, no novelty in rentals from ordinary station
privileges. The Pennsylvania Railroad, by the development of the electric
locomotive, was enabled to tunnel both the Hudson and the East rivers and
thus to realize its dream of long years--a terminal situated in the heart
of Manhattan Island; a passenger terminal so situated as to place the
great railroad of the red cars in a real competitive position with the
railroad of the Vanderbilts, which so long had held exclusive terminal
facilities within the congested island of Manhattan. The Pennsylvania did
not do the thing by halves--it rarely does; it built what is beyond the
shadow of a doubt the most beautiful railroad station in America, if not
in the entire world. The majesty of its waiting room is such as to make it
perhaps the loveliest apartment in all these United States.
But even the Pennsylvania lacked the opportunity for economic return that
was gained out of the new Grand Central station, hardly a mile distant.
That it was not asleep to the possibilities is shown by the double row of
high-rental shops which line the arcade entrance to that waiting room. A
central post-office, a clearing house for the great mail of New York, was
erected spanning the maze of tracks at one end of the station. And
recently the railroad has begun the erection of a huge hotel spanning the
tracks at the other end In this it is following the example of the New
York Central, which some time ago devised a group of hotels as a part of
the development of the Grand Central property. One of these hotels is
completed and immensely popular; the other has just been begun. The New
York Central will not only derive a generous ground rent from these
taverns--it places itself in a splendid strategic position to receive the
traffic of their patrons. It is a somewhat singular thing--an instance
perhaps, of the lack of vision of railroaders of an earlier
generation--that modern hotels were not long ago made an integral part of
our larger passenger terminals at least. Our English cousins have not
overlooked this opportunity. The great hotels builded into their terminals
have long since enjoyed a world-wide reputation for their excellence. Upon
our own continent both the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk railroads
have not been slow to take advantage of similar opportunities. And to a
considerable degree, at least, their example has been followed by certain
roads right in the United States--the Santa Fé and the Delaware and Hudson
are the first to come to my mind. The hotels of these railroads may not
be, in themselves, directly profitable. But there is no question but that
they are distinct factors in the development of passenger traffic, and so,
in the long run, distinctly profitable.
* * * * *
Consider for an instant, if you will, the possibilities of the electrified
passenger terminal as applied to some others of our metropolitan American
cities. Take Boston, for instance. In that fine old town the
electrification of its two great passenger terminals some time ago
approached the dignity of becoming a real issue. Oddly enough the two
railroads which would develop the situation in the larger of its two
terminals--the South Station--are the New Haven and the New York Central,
the lessee of the Boston and Albany. Though both of these systems
participate in the joint operation of the new Grand Central Terminal of
New York, neither of them has leaped at the possibility in Boston. The
tremendous financial difficulties through which the New Haven property has
been struggling for the last six or eight years and from which it has not
yet emerged, are undoubtedly the cause of this. The Boston and Maine
Railroad, which owns and operates the North Station, is in even worse
financial plight. And it is hard for an outsider to see any immediate
possibility of the application of electric power to the great North
Station and the vast network of through and suburban lines which radiate
from it. Nor is the North Station so situated as to render it possible
today to give it an economic development even approximating that of the
Grand Central.
[Illustration: THE P. R. R.'S ELECTRIC SUBURBAN ZONE
The block system operated automatically by electricity. The signal over
the right hand track reads, "Stop." Picture taken near Bryn Mawr, Pa.]
[Illustration: ELECTRICITY INTO ITS OWN
Electric suburban train on the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad
between Philadelphia and Paoli.]
The Boston and Albany is a co-tenant with the New Haven in the huge and
murky South Station. It has always been a rich railroad. Twenty-five years
ago it was building superb stone bridges and stations, structures of real
architectural worth--a full quarter of a century it was in advance of
almost every other railroad in America. In those days the Boston and
Albany probably did not dream that the time would come when its chief
asset would be the value of its right of way across the newer and the
finer portion of Boston. "The Albany Road," as the older Bostonians like
to term the B. and A., has the extreme possibilities of cost for the
electric transformation of its lines all the way from Worcester east, not
only met but many times multiplied in the development possibilities of the
Back Bay district which it now traverses with its through track and
interrupts with its somewhat ungainly storage yards. These yards, now used
for the holding of empty passengers coaches, occupy tremendously valuable
acres on Boylston Street within a block of Copley Square--the artistic and
literary center of the Hub. They are essential, perhaps, to the economical
operation of the road's terminal, but when you come to consider the growth
of the city, a tremendous waste. They have stood--a noisy, dirty, open
space--stretching squarely across the path of Boston's finest possible
development. If these were marshlands, like those that used to abound
along the Charles River, Boston long ago would have filled them in and
added many valuable building sites to its taxable area. For remember that
the development of the Grand Central Terminal has proceeded far enough
already to show that in these days of heavy steel and concrete
construction, and with the absolute cleanliness of electric railroad
operation, it is possible to build a hotel over a big railroad yard
without one guest in a thousand ever knowing that a train is being handled
underneath his feet every thirty seconds or thereabouts. Indeed, in the
Grand Central scheme provision is being made already for the construction
of an opera house right over the station approach tracks; the
congregation of St. Bartholomew's is building over the same railroad yards
one of the finest church structures in America.
Here, then, is a golden opportunity for the Boston and Albany--by the
substitution of electric power for steam and the roofing of its yards--to
develop those tremendously valuable vacant acres back of Copley Square;
and the man who goes to Boston ten years hence probably will not see a
smoky gash cut diagonally through the heart of one of the handsomest
cities in America in order to permit a busy railroad to deliver its
passenger and freight at a convenient downtown point. It is hard to
estimate the financial benefits which eventually will result to the Boston
and Albany of cellarless city squares over its Boylston Street yards. The
benefit to Boston, like the benefit to New York through the development of
the Grand Central and Pennsylvania terminals, is hardly to be expressed in
dollars and cents.
* * * * *
In Chicago the question of terminal electrification has taken a less
definite form than in Boston, although the Chicagoans are making fearful
outcry against the filth that is poured out over their city from thousands
of soft-coal locomotives. The Illinois Central has been ranked as the
chief offender because of its commanding location--blocking as it does the
lovely lake front for so many miles. Chicago has ambitious plans for that
lake front. You may see them, hanging upon the walls of her Art Institute.
These plans, of necessity, embrace the transformation not only of the
terminal but of the railroad tracks within her heart from steam to
electric operation.
Perhaps Chicago's plans are more definite than those of the railroads that
serve her. It is significant that the great North Western Terminal, still
very new, was builded with a slotted train-shed roof in order to release
the smoke and foul gases from the many steam locomotives which are
constantly using it. It is equally significant that the new Union Station,
which is being built to accommodate four others of her largest railroads
is also being equipped with a slotted train-shed roof, and for the same
reason. On the other hand, it is gratifying to notice that the tentative
plans for the new Illinois Central terminal contemplate the erection of a
double-decked station, very similar in type to the new Grand Central--a
station which, from the very nature of its design, must, of necessity, use
electric traction. Doubly gratifying this is to Chicagoans: for as we have
already said, the Illinois Central, which, through its occupation of the
lake front by its maze of steam-operated tracks, has so long hampered the
really artistic development of Chicago's greatest natural asset--the edge
of its lovely lake. For some years past the Illinois Central has been
particularly slow to make the best uses of its great suburban zone south
of Chicago; slow to realize its even larger opportunities of a development
even greater than that of today. This has come home with peculiar force to
the many, many thousands of commuters who use its suburban trains each
day. Now they know why the road has been so loath to retire its antique
cars and locomotives in this service. The filing of the primary plans for
its new terminal on the lake front at Twelfth Street and Michigan Avenue
shows that the road is at last planning to do the big thing in a really
big way. And it is not fair to suppose that it has overlooked a single
economic possibility of the electric development of its immensely valuable
terminal. The result of this development upon the other railroads with
their steam-operated terminals in the heart of Chicago, will be awaited
with interest.[8]
* * * * *
Philadelphia stands next to New York among eastern cities in the electric
development of its terminals, although it is interesting to note here and
now that for twenty years past the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has handled
both freight and passenger trains with electric power through its double
terminal and long tunnel in the heart of that city and has handled them
both economically and efficiently. The wonder only is that its chief
competitors should have retained steam power so long as a motive power in
their long tunnels underneath Baltimore. Yet it is one of these
competitors which is making the real progress in the Philadelphia
situation. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which owns and operates Broad Street
Station, probably one of the best-located passenger terminals in any of
the very large cities of America, has already begun to use electricity to
bring a large number of its suburban trains in and out of that station.
After much patient experimentation it has evolved a comparatively
inexpensive method of carrying the current to the overhead trolleys of
these suburban trains. And the system has already proved itself so
economical and so successful as to render its extension to other portions
of the system a question of only a comparatively short time.
Electricity should spell opportunity to steam railroads. Yet until
recently it seemingly has failed to do this very thing. It has looked as
if the steam railroaders of a past generation were not thoroughly awakened
to the opportunities it offered; were not willing, at any rate, to strive
to find a way toward taking advantage of it. To understand this better let
us go back for a moment and consider the one-time but short-lived rivalry
between the trolley and the steam locomotive. As soon as the electric
railroads--which were, for the most part, developments of the
old-fashioned horse-car lines in city streets--began to reach out into the
country from the sharp confines of the towns the smarter of the steam
railroad men began to show interest in the new motive power. It would have
been far better for some of them if they had taken a sharper interest at
the beginning; if at that time they had begun to consider earnestly the
practical adaptation of electricity to the service of the long-established
steam railroad.
In many cases the short suburban railroads, just outside of the larger
cities, which had been operated by small dummy locomotives, were the first
to be electrified; in some of these cases they became extensions of city
trolley lines. People no longer were obliged to come into town upon a poky
little dummy train of uncertain schedule and decidedly uncertain habits
and then transfer at the edge of the crowded portion of the city to horse
cars. They could come flying from the outer country to the heart of the
town in half an hour--and, as you know, the business of building and
booming suburbs was born. After these suburban lines had been developed
the steam railroad men of some of the so-called standard lines, began to
study the situation. As far back as 1895 the Nantasket branch of the
present New Haven system was made into an electric line. A little steam
road, which wandered off into the hills of Columbia County from Hudson,
New York, and led a precarious existence, extended its rails a few miles
and became the third-rail electric line from Hudson to Albany and a
powerful competitor for passenger traffic with a large trunk-line
railroad. The New Haven system found the electric third rail a good agent
between Hartford and New Britain and the overhead trolley a good
substitute for the locomotive on a small branch that ran for a few miles
north from its main line at Stamford, Connecticut.
The problems of electric traction for regular railroads were complicated,
however, and the big steam roads avoided them until they were forced upon
their attention. The interurban roads spread their rails--rather too
rapidly in many cases--making themselves frequently the opportunities for
such precarious financing as once distinguished the history of steam
roads, and also frequently making havoc with thickly settled branch lines
and main stems of the steam railroads. In a good many cases the steam
roads have had to dig deep into their pockets and buy at good stiff prices
interurban roads--a situation that they might have anticipated with just a
little forethought.
Such a condition was reached in a populous state along the Atlantic
seaboard just a few years ago. A big steam road, plethoric in wealth and
importance, had a branch line about 100 miles in length, which tapped a
dozen towns, each ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 in population. The branch
line carried no through business, nor was its local freight traffic of
importance, but it was able to operate profitably eleven local passenger
trains in each direction daily. These trains were well filled, as a rule,
and the branch returned at least its equitable share toward the dividend
account of the entire property. As long as it did that no one at
headquarters paid any particular attention to it.
There was no physical reason why that branch should not have been made
into an interurban electric railroad a dozen years ago--the road that
owned it has never found it difficult to sell bonds for the improvement of
its property. Though no one paid particular attention to it at
headquarters, a roving young engineer with a genius for making money,
looked at it enviously--at the dozen prosperous towns it aimed to serve. A
fortnight's visit to the locality convinced him. He went down to a big
city where capital was just hungry to be invested profitably and organized
an electric railroad to thread each of those towns. Before the
headquarters of the steam road was really awake to the situation cars were
running on its electric competitor. And the people of the dozen towns
seemed to enjoy riding in the electric cars mightily--they were big and
fast and clean. The steam road made a brave show of maintaining its
service. It hauled long strings of empty coaches rather than surrender its
pride; but such pride was almost as empty as the coaches.
Sooner or later any business organization must swallow false pride; and
so it came to pass that an emissary of the steam road met the roving young
engineer and asked him to put a price on his property. He smiled, totaled
his construction and equipment costs, added a quarter of a million dollars
to the total, and tossed the figures across the table. The emissary did
not smile. He reported to his headquarters and the steam railroad began to
fight--it was going to starve out the resources of its trolley competitor
by cutting passenger rates to a cent a mile. When the trolley company met
that, the railroad would cut the rate in two again--it could afford to pay
people to ride on its cars rather than suffer defeat; but they would not
ride on its cars, even at a lower rate. And once again the steam road's
emissary went up the branch. He sought out the trolley engineer. The
trolley man was indifferent.
"Well," said the steam-road man, "we're seeing you." And at that he threw
down a certified check for the exact amount that had been agreed upon at
their previous conference.
The trolley man did not touch the paper. He smiled what lady novelists are
sometimes pleased to call an inscrutable smile, then shook his head
slowly.
"What!" gasped the emissary from the steam road. "Wasn't that your
figure?"
"It was--but isn't now!" said the engineer. "It's up a quarter of a
million now."
"Why?"
"Just to teach you folks politeness and a little common decency," was the
reply. And the lesson must have taken hold--for the steam railroad paid
the price. The result was that it again held the territory and could
regulate the transportation tolls, but what a price had been paid! Two
railroads occupied the territory that was a good living for but one. The
trolley line, now that it has begun to depreciate and to require constant
maintenance repairs, vies with the desolate branch of the steam road,
which runs but two half-filled passenger trains a day upon its rails. A
tax is laid upon the steam-road property--a greater tax upon the residents
of the valley--for operating man after operating man is going to "skin"
the service in a desperate attempt to make an extravagant excess of
facilities pay its way. The trolley line has already raised many of its
five-cent fares to an inconvenient six cents--the steam branch is held
fast by the provisions of its charter and the watchfulness of a state
regulating commission.
And in the beginning the entire situation could have been solved easily
and efficiently by the comparatively modest expenditures required to
electrify the steam railroad's branch.
A good many railroads have taken forethought. The New York Central found
some of its profitable lines in western New York undergoing just such
electric interurban competition and a few years ago it installed the
electric third rail on its West Shore property from Utica to Syracuse,
forty-four miles.
The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading.
Built in the early eighties from Weehawken, opposite the city of New York,
to Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely
the New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some
of the fine business it had held for many years. After a bitter rate war
the New York Central, with all the resources and the abilities of the
Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively and bought its new rival for a song;
but a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been practically
useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a relief line
for the overflow of through freight.
So the West Shore tracks, adapted for high-class, high-speed through
electric service from Utica to Syracuse, represented a happy thought.
Under steam conditions only two passenger trains were run over that
somewhat moribund property in each direction daily, while the two trains
of sleeping cars passing over the tracks at night were of practically no
use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions there
is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains leaving each
terminal hourly, making but a few stops and the run of over forty-four
miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local
service and the line has become immensely popular. By laying stretches of
third and fourth tracks at various points the movement of the New York
Central's overflow through freight has not been seriously incommoded. The
electric passenger service is not operated by the New York Central but by
the Oneida Railways Company, in which the controlling interests of the
steam road have large blocks of stock.
Similarly the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system,
running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street-railroad
system, though reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of
Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system and now
operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch.
Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas and
decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger
service than to rent again its branches to outside companies--and perhaps
because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of
suburban lines in the metropolitan district around New York and wished to
test electric traction to its own satisfaction--but ten years ago it
changed the suburban service lines from the south up into Rochester from
steam to electric. More recently it has tried a third method--by
organizing an entirely separate trolley company to build an overhead
trolley road paralleling its main line from Waverly, New York, to Corning,
New York. In some stretches this new trolley road is built on the right of
way of the Erie's main line.
The Erie people have preferred to conduct their electrification
experiments in outlying lines of comparatively slight traffic rather than
to commit themselves to a great electrification problem in their congested
territory round New York and make some blunder that could be rectified
only at a cost of many millions of dollars. That seems good sense, and the
Pennsylvania followed the same plan. While its great new station in New
York was still a matter of engineer's blueprints, it began practical
experiments with electric traction in the flat southern portion of New
Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally situated in every respect for
such experiments--its original and rather indirect route from Camden to
Atlantic City, which had since been more or less superseded by a shorter
"air-line" route. The third rail was installed and the new line became at
once popular for suburban traffic in and out of Philadelphia and for the
great press of local traffic between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Of
the success of that move on the part of the Pennsylvania there has never
been the slightest question. Regular trains have been operated for several
years over this route at a high rate of speed, and not the slightest
difficulty has been found in maintaining the schedules.
In the Far West the Southern Pacific has made notable progress in the
application of electricity as a motive power for branch-line traffic.
Practically all of its many suburban lines in and around Portland and
Oakland (just across the bay from San Francisco) are today being operated
in this way--which enables modern steel passenger trains of two or three
coaches to be operated at very frequent intervals, thus providing a
branch-line service practically impossible to obtain in any other way.
When, in the next chapter, we come to consider the automobile as a factor
in railroad transportation, we shall consider this entire question of
branch-line operation in far greater detail. I always have considered it
one of the great neglected opportunities of the average American railroad.
But to take advantage of it means a more intense study of its details and
its problems. Our railroads, as you know already, have been woefully under
officered. It is chiefly because of this serious defect in their
organization that the branch lines, their problems and their
possibilities, have so long been neglected.
* * * * *
One thing more before we are entirely away from this entire question of
the electric operation of the standard railroad: The use of this silent,
all-powerful motive force is by no means to be confined to suburban or to
branch lines. The New Haven management is steadily engaged in lengthening
and extending its New York suburban zone. In the beginning, while it still
was in a decidedly experimental state, this zone extended only from the
Grand Central Terminal to Stamford, Connecticut--some thirty-four miles
all told. Now it has been extended and completed through to New Haven,
practically twice the original distance. In a little while it is probable
that the New Haven will have completed another link in this great electric
chain which slowly but surely it is weaving for itself. And there are
traffic experts in New England who do not hesitate to express their belief
that in another ten years, perhaps in half that time, all through traffic
between New York and Boston--235 miles--will move behind electric
locomotives.
There is nothing particularly visionary in this. Last year I rode a longer
distance than that on a standard express train--the Olympian, one of the
finest trains upon the North American continent, which means, of course,
in the whole world. And the electrification of the main line of the
Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway, whose boast it is that it owns
and operates the Olympian, was then but half complete. To be even more
exact, only one-half of the first unit of installation, from Harlowton,
Montana, to Avery, Idaho, had been installed. Workmen were still busy west
of Deer Lodge, rigging, stretching the wires, finishing the substations
and making the busy line ready for electric locomotives all the way
through to Avery. And it was announced that when Avery was reached and the
first contract-section completed--440 miles, about equal to the distance
between New York and Buffalo--work would be started on another great link
to the west; this one to reach the heart of Spokane itself. And in a
little longer time electric locomotives would be hauling the yellow trains
of the Milwaukee right down to tidewater at Seattle--a span of trollified
line equaling roughly about one-half the entire run from Chicago to Puget
Sound.[9]
[Illustration: THE OLYMPIAN
The crack train of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, drawn by an
Electric Motor.]
[Illustration: ORE TRAINS HAULED BY ELECTRICITY
Where the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul and the Butte, Anaconda, &
Pacific Railways cross near Butte, Montana.]
Now here is an undertaking--the harnessing of the mountain streams of
Montana and Idaho and Washington toward the pulling of the freight and the
passenger traffic of the newest and best constructed of our
transcontinentals for half their run. Translated into the comfort of the
passenger, it means that for a long night and two days that are all too
short, the trail of the Olympian is dustless, smokeless, odorless; it
means that the abrupt stops and jerking starts of even the best of
passenger engineers are entirely eliminated. The electric locomotive
starts and stops imperceptibly. It is one of the very strongest points in
its favor.
And when you come to freight traffic--the earning backbone of the greater
part of our railroad mileage in the United States--the operating
advantages of the electric locomotive over its older brother of the steam
persuasion are but multiplied. The electric locomotives of the Milwaukee,
being the newest and the largest yet constructed, have missed none of
these advantages. As the greatest of all these, take the single tremendous
question of regenerative braking.
Up to this time no one has ever thought of transforming the gravity pull
of a heavy train going downgrade into motive energy for another train
coming uphill. Talk about visions! How is this for one? Yet this is the
very thing that the Milwaukee is doing today--upon each of its heavily
laden trains as they cross and recross the backbone of the continent. Its
great new locomotives take all the power they need for the steady pull as
they climb the long hills; but when they descend those selfsame hills
they return the greater part of that power--sixty-eight per cent, if you
insist upon the exact figure.
Perhaps you drive an automobile. If so you probably have learned to come
down the steeper hills by use of compression--by a reversal of the
energies of your motor, until it is actually working against the
compelling force of gravity. Your brakes are held only for emergency. That
is the only part which the brakes on a Milwaukee electric train play
today. The electric locomotive in a large sense is its own brake. In other
words, a turn of the engineer's hand transforms its great motors into
dynamos; gravity pulls the trains and forces the dynamos to turn--back
goes the sixty-eight per cent of current into the copper trolley-wire
overhead; over on the other side of the mountain somewhere a train
ascending toward the summit feels instantly the influx of new energy and
quickens its speed.
Here is the railroading of tomorrow thrusting itself into the very door of
today. You certainly cannot accuse the management of the Milwaukee of any
lack of vision. And perhaps it is only the highest form of tribute to it
to mention the fact that the Great Northern, the strongest of the
competitors in the Northwest, has been watching with keen interest the
tremendous operating economies that electricity has brought to the road of
the yellow cars and has already announced its intention of transforming at
once its main line between Seattle and Spokane--200 miles--from a steam
into an electrically operated line. The Great Northern, as everyone
should know by this time, is the first and the largest of the great group
of Hill roads. And no one has ever accused James J. Hill, or the men who
followed after him, of any lack of real transportation vision.