THE RAILROAD AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
The Secretary of the Navy met a high officer of the telephone company in
Washington some months ago.
"I have noticed a great deal about your new transcontinental telephone
line," said he. "I wonder if you could tell me how long it would take us,
in a national crisis, to get in telephone communication with each navy
yard in the United States and what the cost would be."
The telephone man stepped to the nearest of his contraptions. In a moment
he was back.
"Not more than five minutes," he said quietly, "and in such a crisis there
would be no charge to the government."
* * * * *
The telephone, the telegraph, and the railroad are the three great avenues
of national communication. In time of peace they throb with its traffic
and beat in consonance with the heartbeats of its commerce. In time of war
their value to the nation multiplies, almost incredibly. It is then of
vital necessity that they be preserved in their entirety. It is of almost
equal military necessity that they be kept close to the armies that are
afield.
Of the telephone we have just spoken. The services of the telephone at the
time of the Civil War are too well remembered today for it to be ignored
in any future national crisis. But it is of the railroad that we are
talking in this book--the railroad that brings the food to your larder,
even the milk to your doorstep; that keeps the coal upon your hearthstone
and the clothing upon the backs of you and yours; that carries you to and
fro over the face of the land. It is the railroad, that living, breathing
thing that girdles the whole land and sends its tentacles into even the
smallest town, that, as you already know, is your servant in times of
peace. How can it be made to serve you in time of war?
* * * * *
When the last great war was fought in the United States, our railroads had
barely attained their majority. In the days of the Civil War there were no
railroad systems, as we know them today. Instead there was a motley of
small individualistic railroads, poorly coordinated. They were, for the
most part, poorly built and insufficiently equipped. Nothing was
standardized. Even the track-gauges varied and passengers or freight going
a considerable distance found it necessary to change cars at intersecting
points.
Nevertheless, the railroad played a tremendous part in the War of the
Rebellion. Because of it Sherman made his conquering march from Atlanta to
the sea. He was something of a railroader himself, that doughty general.
And upon his immediate staff were expert railroaders. Over the crude
railroads of the Georgia of that day, with the aid of their war-racked
cars and locomotives, they supplied the commissary of the Sherman army as
it made its way across a devastated land.
[Illustration: THE RAILROAD IN THE CIVIL WAR
This picture of a section of Alexandria, Virginia, was taken in 1864 and
shows the cars and engines of the United States Military Railroad of that
day.]
In the North the military railroad, reaching down from the very portal of
the Long Bridge at Washington, its railheads almost always touching the
Union lines, was an almost indispensable factor to the Army of the
Potomac. The Baltimore and Ohio was hardly a less important factor. It
paid a high price for the accident of location. One of Stonewall Jackson's
earliest and most brilliant achievements was the seizure of eight
locomotives from its roundhouse at Martinsburg and their movement, some
forty miles, over a dirt road to Winchester, Virginia, where they found
the tracks of a part of the railroad system of the Confederacy. Later on
Jackson returned to Martinsburg and helped himself to twelve more B. and
O. locomotives, also moving these over the turnpike to Winchester. He knew
and Lee knew that even a clumsy balloon-topped, wood-burning locomotive
was worth 500 horses in transport service. And the South was none too
plentifully supplied with locomotives even before the war began.
The most of the work of the railroads in the Civil War was not dramatic.
But it was thorough--the carrying of men between the cities of the Middle
West and the Army of the Cumberland. At first it was chaotic, but it
became well systematized. The direct line between New York and
Washington--although then composed of four separate railroads--was
recognized as a route of vast strategic value. The men who handled troops
and supplies over it, in doing so qualified themselves to assume the
mastery of the great railroad systems that were to spring into being at
the close of the war--as a result of both construction and consolidation.
* * * * *
In 1898, when the country was again plunged into war, preparation of the
railroad lines of the land had grown to maturity. Unfortunately, however,
the theater of the war was close to the corner of the land which was then
most poorly equipped with railroads. But the standardization of the
operating conditions had been largely accomplished. One could run a car or
locomotive upon practically every important line in the land without
changing the gauge of its wheels. This last, of itself, was important. It
meant that the equipment of larger and stronger roads to the North could
be sent down to the Plant System and the Florida Central and
Peninsular--barely equipped for ordinary purposes--which were suddenly
called upon to handle an extraordinary traffic. This, of itself, was a
mixed blessing. For the borrowed locomotives were often too heavy for the
light rails and long bridges over the Florida marshes. Derailments were
frequent and the delays they entailed, protracted.
The men who went to Tampa in that hot summer of 1898 have not forgotten
the Florida Central and Peninsular nor the Plant System, even though those
two railroads have now passed into history. Nor has the War Department
forgotten them. On one memorable occasion, the Quartermaster started a
special trainload of emergency army supplies south from Philadelphia to
Tampa. In order to make sure that the train should go through promptly, he
placed one of his own representatives upon it, with orders to push it
through. The train disappeared. After three weeks, the Quartermaster's
Department found it on a siding at a place called Turkey Creek, a good
eighteen miles from Tampa--held there because of the hopelessly congested
terminal at the waterside. And they never yet have found the special
representative who was to put it through.
These abominable conditions, the conditions that made it necessary to take
from four to six days from the great mobilization camp at Chattanooga to
Port Tampa, a journey which should have been done in from one-half to
one-third of this time, were not to be charged to the poor men who were
struggling to operate those inadequate railroads. They were doing the best
they could, without plan and without facilities. And it is interesting to
note in this connection, that in that same memorable summer, an appeal
came to Washington not to put more than 500 troops a day through the
Jersey City gateway for fear of congesting the terminals there!
* * * * *
More recently the railroads of the South have been called upon again to
handle troops and munitions and commissary. Of course the problems that
have confronted them upon the Mexican border are hardly comparable with
those of the Civil War or the Spanish-American War. Yet on the very
morning that the entire country was shocked by Villa's audacious raid
upon Columbus, New Mexico, the heads of the great railroad systems that
come together at El Paso were alert and ready for any orders that the War
Department might give. At 6:45 P.M. that evening a telegraphic request for
trains came from Washington to the general headquarters of the Southern
Pacific lines at Houston. Five thousand troops were to be moved from the
camps at Galveston and near-by Texas City, and as quickly as possible.
Early in the morning the trains began moving. The railroad had made a full
night of it. Throughout the night they had brought their extra equipment
into Galveston from San Antonio, from New Orleans, from Shreveport--every
important operating center within twelve hours' run. The trains were ready
as quickly as the troops. And they made the long run of 881 miles up over
the long single-track to El Paso in an average of thirty-six hours--under
the conditions, a really remarkable performance.
[Illustration: THE RAILROAD "DOING ITS BIT"
Hauling a trainload of army trucks and supplies from Chicago to Gen.
Pershing's expedition "somewhere in Mexico."]
The Santa Fé and the Rock Island operate direct lines from Chicago to El
Paso. They were called upon during many months of the past year to carry
munitions south to the border--particularly motor trucks--and were not
found wanting. The Rock Island with its complementary line, the El Paso
and Southwestern, carried 170 motor trucks and water wagons from Chicago
to El Paso, 1,446 miles, on a fifty-hour schedule. The "limited" with all
of its reputation for fast running and its high-speed equipment only makes
this distance in forty-three hours and a half, while the ordinary
schedule for freight--which is the equipment upon which it was necessary
to handle the motor trucks and the water wagons--is 129 hours and 50
minutes from one city to the other. But Pershing needed the automobiles.
They were vital for his expedition. And it was a part of the day's work
for the railroad to carry them down to the border in record time.[14]
* * * * *
The job of handling the troops on the Texas line has hardly been more than
part of the day's work. The railroaders down there will tell you that. The
real job of the railroad recently has been laid overseas in the nations
that are fighting so bitterly for mastery. The German military use of
railroads is most interesting because it is the best. American travelers
for years past have noticed upon the trucks of each separate piece of
rolling stock in the Empire, its military destination, as well as
cabalistic figures to denote its carrying capacity in men and horses and
pounds of freight. Yet these were but the surface indications of a great
plan--whose formulas had been worked out and rested on the shelves of the
war headquarters in Berlin. How well the plan has worked we all know now.
For the first time in its history the railroad has become an active
fighting factor--not merely to be content with the bringing of powder and
shell and food and equipment up to the bases of the fighting lines; not
merely to assemble troops, in a comparatively leisurely fashion, or to
take tired and sick and wounded men back to their homes; but to be a
striking arm, if you please, moving whole brigades and even armies with
all the tensity and speed and resource at its command. In other days you
might laugh at the peaceful little German passenger train, making its
leisurely way in all the pomp and circumstance that only an Empire may
show. But you cannot laugh at the German military train, black with
troopers, darting its way across the Kaiserland with a speed and
definiteness that is all but human.
It has been stated that the real reason why the Germans failed to reach
Paris in their memorable drive of September, 1914, was that even their
remarkable system of military railroads failed in this supreme crisis. If
this be so, it must be that the task placed upon them was superhuman. For
it was just such military trains as we have just seen, multiplied in
dozens and in hundreds, that moved whole brigades to southern Galicia
during the first two weeks of April, 1915--a distance, roughly speaking,
equal to that from Boston to Detroit. It was the military plan for the
railroads of Germany that brought the regiments out of the trenches in
Arras in the last week in June of that same year and on the Fourth of July
had them hammering at the might of Warsaw. And Warsaw is 800 miles from
the low fields of Arras. Not until the war is over will the whole military
workings of the German railroads be known. But examples such as these show
that they did work. And it may be remembered that when the German army
began flowing in a tidal fashion up over the Russian steppes they came to
von Hindenburg and reminded him of Napoleon and the retreat from Moscow.
And von Hindenburg showed his great teeth and remarked that Napoleon had
had no railroads.
"The bread which our soldiers eat today in Windau was baked yesterday in
Breslau," he added. And it takes only a single glance at the map to see
that Windau is approximately 500 miles distant from Breslau. "We drink
German mineral water and we eat fresh meat direct from Berlin. If
necessary, we can build fifty miles of railroad in two days. Therefore it
is nonsense to speak now of the times and the strategy of Napoleon."
* * * * *
Here, then, is another of the great practical lessons that these three
fateful years are teaching America. Consider now how she may avail herself
of this particular lesson--the coordination of her great systems of more
than a quarter of a million miles of standard steam railroads with an
orderly and intelligent military plan, against any invasion. Other nations
have had to build railroads with a particular relation to military
strategy. Keen-minded Belgians and Frenchmen long ago noted the tendency
of Germany to build double-track railroads to comparatively unimportant
points upon her western front--since then they have had the opportunity to
see the wartime efficiency of these lines, suddenly turned in an August
from practical stagnation into busy, flowing currents of military traffic.
Of the strategic value of double-track routes, much more in a moment. For
this moment consider the location of the principal rail lines of the
United States--particularly in their reference to the defense of the
nation.
The "vital area" of the country, so called, is the coast territory between
Portland, Maine, and Washington, District of Columbia, and resting east of
the sharp ridges of the Alleghenies. Here is a great part of the wealth,
the population, and the banking of the United States. Fortunately,
however, this is the district best supplied with efficient railroads,
double-tracked, triple-tracked, quadruple-tracked. And a reference to the
map will quickly show that these lines are particularly well adapted to
coast defense. From the extreme northeastern tip of Maine down to Key West
and around the white and curving shore of the Gulf to Brownsville and the
mouth of the Rio Grande there is hardly a strategical point that is not
well served by existing railroads. North of Boston, the Boston and Maine
and the Maine Central systems run, not alone parallel to the coast, but by
means of a network of other lines intersecting their coast lines, are
prepared to serve them from the inland country every few miles. The
importance of this last fact comes to mind when one realizes the
possibility of an invading force eluding our naval patrols and cutting our
coast line railroads. With a network of adequate line behind the one
actually closest to the shore, important communication would not be
interrupted for any considerable time.
Boston is linked with New York by three distinct routes of the New Haven
system; with Chicago by the Boston and Albany, in practical effect a
branch stem of the New York Central system. Nor are these three stems the
only protection that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad
extends to New England. The exposed and bended arm of Cape Cod is a weak
point in the nation's "vital area." The New Haven holds and controls the
one-time Old Colony Railroad which reaches the old whaling ports of
Plymouth, New Bedford, and Provincetown--a railroad which might at any
time become of vast strategic importance and which should be at once
double-tracked, by the Federal government, if necessary, for the same
reason that Germany double-tracked her lines leading to her French and
Belgian border. And only second in importance to the Old Colony in case of
an attempted invasion from across the Atlantic is the Long Island
Railroad, stretching straight out of the city of New York to the very tip
of the island. Between the Rockaways and Montauk there are many points on
the south edge of Long Island that offer possibilities to landing parties.
And it is essential that the railroad that serves this peculiarly barren
bit of coast within two hours' rail run of the largest city upon the
American continent be prepared to serve it well in the case of military
necessity. Fortunately the Long Island Railroad has been vastly
improved--its double-track increased--within the past ten years. It is no
longer barred by the East River from actual track connections with the
other railroads of the country. The great Pennsylvania tunnels already
make it possible in a military emergency to pour filled train and empty,
on short headway, into Long Island. The strategic value to the nation of
these tunnels will soon be supplemented by the Hell Gate Bridge over the
East River which will bind the Pennsylvania and the Long Island railroads
with the main lines of the New Haven and the New York Central. This bridge
cannot be completed too quickly. It is of immediate strategic necessity.
* * * * *
From New York south the same main-stem railroad that served the North so
well in the days of the Civil War still stands. It has, however, ceased to
be a chain of railroads, with ferriage at Havre de Grace and heartrending
transfers by horse cars across Philadelphia and Baltimore, as it was in
the days when New England and the York State and the Jersey regiments went
down to Washington and over across the Potomac. From Baltimore north, this
ancient stem is now the Pennsylvania Railroad, four-tracked or
double-tracked the entire distance, rich in surplus locomotives and cars,
and halted no longer by either the Delaware or the Susquehanna rivers.
Since the close of the Civil War the Pennsylvania has builded its own line
from Baltimore to Washington, while the Baltimore and Ohio, which owned
that section of the ancient stem, has thrust its own line up into
Philadelphia, coming from that point to Jersey City over the main-line
rails of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Central Railroad of New
Jersey systems. This means that there are today between these parallel
railroad systems eight main-line tracks from New York to Philadelphia and
from four to six from Philadelphia through Baltimore to Washington. It is
a combined railroad trunk of which a nation might well be proud. And this
nation may yet be profoundly grateful that it has such a railroad trunk,
through the heart of its "vital area."
Consider again this "vital area"--the great metropolitan districts of
Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore--almost a continuous
city, in fact, all the way along the Atlantic coast from the south tip of
Maine to the Potomac. It stretches west to the Alleghenies, in fact we may
say a little beyond them, to include such vigorous communities as
Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo. Here in this "vital area" of the
nation are more than eighty per cent of its munition-making plants, its
largest hard coal and soft coal deposits, its steel-making plants, its
greatest shipyards and its three most important navy yards. Major General
Leonard Wood has said that 1,500,000 men would be necessary to properly
defend the coast-line from Portland, Maine, to Washington. Therefore the
railroad main stem that connects these cities and the many larger cities
between them is the most important military base line upon this continent.
It needs all the resources of two- and four- and even six-tracked
railroads, for General Wood has gone on record as saying that in a
national crisis it might be necessary to move half a million men on this
great base line within the course of ten short hours. On a conservative
estimate these would require 500 trains--trains which, stood end to end,
would reach all the way from New York to Washington or to Utica. Such a
train movement would stagger even the imagination of a passenger-traffic
manager accustomed to figure the "business" in and out of a national
inauguration or a big football game at Princeton or New Haven or
Cambridge.
A railroader whose pencil has a quick aptitude for figures has estimated
that Germany has seven and a half locomotives for every ten miles of
track. We have one-third that proportion. Yet the preponderance of what
our railroad men like to call "motive power" lies east of the Mississippi
River and north of the Ohio. The same thing is true of cars--cars of every
sort and variety. That is not the problem. Here it is.
Suppose, if you will, that an enemy finding an entrance to America on the
sandy south shore of Long Island--to choose the spot most in the favor of
the writers of the lurid fiction of an imaginary war between some European
nation and the United States--has actually succeeded in capturing the city
of New York. The great military base line of America is broken at its most
important point. How are Major General Wood and the rest of the men who
are puzzling the great problem out with him, going to move a half-million
men--a half or a quarter of that number from New England over into
Pennsylvania or down toward the defense lines around the national capital?
Take a look at your railroad map. Look sharply! You will need to look
sharply to see the second line of communication between New England and
the rest of the nation. There it is--a thin and wavering railroad line,
stretching from New Haven up through the Connecticut hills, spanning the
Hudson on the slender tracery of the Poughkeepsie bridge and threading
still more hills until it reaches Trenton, New Jersey, and the main base
line once again. The nation may yet thank a gentleman named Charles S.
Mellen for that second line of communication. For while the much
discussed ex-president of the New Haven did not build the Poughkeepsie
bridge or the New England lines leading to it, he at least caused both of
them to be double-tracked, curves and grades ironed out until one heavily
laden coal train could follow close upon the heels of another.
[Illustration: AMERICA'S "VITAL AREA"
The workshops and the coalbins of the United States, together with the
principal railroads which must protect them. This bird's-eye map made as
though viewed from an aeroplane at a point five hundred miles off of Cape
Cod.]
That was Mellen's motive in making a large part of this second line of
communication into first-class railroad--the perfecting of New England's
long, lean arm down into the Pennsylvania coal bin. But no matter what his
motive--he has never pretended to be altruistic--his coal line is of great
strategic value. Not alone does it circle around metropolitan New York at
a reasonably safe distance, but it intersects the great trunk lines
running west from the seaboard--routes that would be of unspeakable
strategic value in the case of the seizure of our largest city. For these
would be the lines that would have to feed our army--not with mere food,
but with men and guns and shells and all that with these go. At
Poughkeepsie this second line of communication intersects the main stem of
the New York Central, in turn the main stem of the Vanderbilt system
reaching almost every important city west of the Alleghenies and east of
the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. At Goshen it intersects the Erie
Railroad, come in these recent years from being a reproach and a byword
into one of the most efficiently operated railroads in the entire land.
Farther south it intersects the Lackawanna and the Lehigh Valley--roads
rich in money and in resources.
Suppose now the second line of communication is gone--the graceful span
of the Poughkeepsie bridge a mass of twisted steel in the channel of the
Hudson. What is the third line of communication? It consists of the
aristocratic old Boston and Albany leading due west out of Boston, and
threading Worcester and Springfield and Pittsfield--each of these a
manufacturing center of no mean importance--and finally coming to Albany,
and of the Delaware and Hudson, which, bending southwest from Albany,
finds its way through the anthracite hills of Pennsylvania and eventually
by way of Harrisburg to the main base at Philadelphia or Baltimore. This
line also intersects the east and west trunk lines.
The fourth line of communication? Alas, we must believe that the capture
of these three widely separated lines is almost humanly impossible. When
they are gone the New England head is fastened to the body of the nation
only by a thin artery indeed. For the fourth line of communication is a
wavering, roundabout railroad, practically all single-track, which follows
close to the Canadian border. It is of conceivable military importance
only in the unthinkable event of a quarrel with our cousins to the north.
In such a catastrophe this line, of potential military value, could be
made of actual value only by double-tracking and by almost complete
reconstruction.
* * * * *
Enough now of the possibilities of the cutting of the main military base
of the nation. Go south with me for a moment from Washington and see the
strategic position of our railroads along the more southerly portions of
the Atlantic coast. Cross the Potomac on the nameless steel structure that
superseded the historic Long Bridge more than a decade ago and yet is of
hardly less military importance. For the trains of every railroad running
south from Washington must cross upon its tracks. Of these railroads,
three are the trunk stems that, while running many miles back from the
actual coast, still serve it. They are the Southern Railway, the Seaboard
Air Line, and the Atlantic Coast Line. These three railroads and their
direct connections reach from Washington to Norfolk, to Charleston, to
Savannah, to Mobile, and to New Orleans--the most important of the
southeasterly ports. One of their most interesting connections crosses the
keys of Florida and does not stop on its overseas trip until it reaches
the last of them--Key West, which is almost within scent of the cigar
fumes of Havana. If we ever had to send another army into Cuba, Tampa
would be completely out of it.
There is hardly any comparison between these trunk railroads of the
Southeast and the lines that struggled so hard to handle the armies at the
time of the Spanish-American War. They have been double-tracked for long
distances, more generously supplied with locomotives and cars, although
they are still quite a way behind their northern brethren in this regard.
Still it would not be a very difficult matter in a national crisis to move
great fleets of rolling stock from one corner of the land to another. By
careful advance planning and a study of rail weights and bridges this
would become a comparatively simple matter.
Ignore, for the moment, the strategic value of the many railroads in the
center of the land; forget the possibility of an army striking us upon our
Atlantic coast. Let us turn our faces toward the west coast, toward the
great stretch of barren and unprotected Pacific shore from British
Columbia down to San Diego. And before we begin tracing strategic routes
upon the map let us close our eyes and go back into history.
Do you recall that inspiring picture in the old geographies of the
completion of the Union Pacific Railroad--the two doughty locomotives, one
facing west, the other east, with their cowcatchers gently touching, while
a motley of distinguished guests are indulging in oratory and other
things? Do you happen to recall why the Union Pacific was builded, why the
national credit was placed behind its construction?
Military necessity is the answer. The men who went before the Congress of
the fifties and the sixties and who argued ably and well for the building
of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States laid great
stress upon this question of military necessity.
"Only by the building of such a railroad as this," they argued, "can the
Union be held absolutely indissoluble."
So came the name of the road.
Today one looks at the military necessity of the Union Pacific Railroad
from another point of view. Now open your eyes. Look at your map and see
that military value of this first great transcontinental railroad. Its
chief eastern terminal is at Council Bluffs, on the bank of the Missouri
River and but an overnight ride from Chicago, with which it is connected
by six excellent railroads--most of them double-tracked. Its northerly
main stem is double-tracked practically the entire distance to Ogden,
Utah, an even thousand miles distant from the Missouri. A twin main stem
runs from Cheyenne down to Denver and east to Kansas City, where it enjoys
direct connections to St. Louis, Memphis, and the entire South. The North
and East feed the road chiefly through its Council Bluffs gateway.
At Ogden the Union Pacific divides into three great feeding lines--the
main one extending due west to Sacramento and San Francisco, with one to
the north reaching Portland and Seattle and another to the south running
direct to Los Angeles. While these three lines are nominally separate
railroads, they are, in effect, component parts of the Union Pacific
System. In any military crisis requiring the rapid transcontinental
movement of troops they would become extremely important parts.
The Union Pacific is, of course, supplemented by other transcontinentals.
To the south rests the long main stem of the Santa Fé, which boasts not
only that it is the only railroad with its own rails direct from Chicago
to California, but that it already has more than fifty per cent of its
main line double-tracked. Farther south still is the Southern Pacific,
which, although its real eastern terminal is at New Orleans, enjoys a
practical Chicago terminal over the lines of the Rock Island. In the north
are three American transcontinentals--the Milwaukee, the Northern
Pacific, and the Great Northern. While the Milwaukee is the only one of
these with its own rails from Chicago to Seattle, its two rivals maintain
a brisk competition by the use of the Burlington and the North Western
systems between Chicago and St. Paul.
By the use of these roads it would be possible to throw a great number of
troops and munitions across to almost any section of the Pacific coast and
in a very short time. And for more than twenty years there has existed a
north and south trunk line, that would make it possible to obtain a
flexible use of troops between San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Portland, and Seattle. There are lines close to the coast all the way from
Eureka past Coos Bay to Astoria and the Puget Sound country. The main
north and south trunk lies anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles inland
from the coast all the way from Los Angeles to Seattle. Perhaps it is well
that this is so. It is unfortunate only that no more than a comparatively
small portion of it is double-tracked and that a large part of it through
northern California and Oregon is so threaded through the high mountains
as to be very difficult to operate. Military strategy demands that this
important trunk line be made possible to operate at highest efficiency.
That can only come through grade correction and a completion of
double-track.
* * * * *
I have laid stress and constant repetition upon this question of
double-track, simply because a double-track railroad is almost ten times
as efficient as a single-track railroad. That should be apparent to a
layman even upon the very face of things.
The other day I sat in the Southern Pacific offices at Houston, Texas, and
talked with a genius of a railroad operator in regard to this very thing.
He was telling of the remarkable record made by his road in getting the
troops across from Galveston to El Paso. I asked what was the best he
could do in a real emergency--an emergency calling for perhaps the
movement of 50,000 troops, instead of 5,000.
"Under normal conditions we can put five trainloads a day of troops across
Texas, in addition to our regular traffic and keep them moving at a rate
of from seventeen to eighteen miles an hour, including stops. We could put
on more trains, but this would not accomplish much except to tie up all of
them. We have to figure the capacity of our main line very largely by the
frequency of the passing sidings."
"Suppose a crisis should arise--a crisis which demanded an even quicker
movement of troops?" I asked.
He did not hesitate in his reply.
"In such a crisis we would pull all our other traffic off the line and
move from ten to twelve trains a day."
Which, translated, would mean at the most from five to six regiments of
2,000 men and their accouterments. And this on a railroad with a
tremendously high reputation for efficient operation. Here is the case for
single-track.
Now consider double-track. The Union Pacific moves in summertime eight
through passenger trains west-bound out of its ancient transfer station at
Council Bluffs, an equal number east-bound. Frequently there are extra
sections of these trains, to say nothing of a pretty steady schedule of
freights. Yet even this by no means represents the capacity of its low
grades and double-track to Ogden. The Pennsylvania Railroad in twenty-four
hours has handled 121 trains bound in a single direction out of its great
yards at Altoona, which means a train every eleven minutes and a half.
While the main line of the Pennsylvania is four-tracked, that traffic was
freight and handled almost entirely upon one of a pair of freight tracks.
If such a performance was possible in the steep hills of the Keystone
state, it would hardly be exaggeration to suggest that the Union Pacific
could handle a military train bound west from the Missouri at least every
thirty minutes. Taking 1,000 men to the train as a moderate estimate, this
great road could dispatch nearly 50,000 men a day without in any degree
congesting itself. And while its central connecting stem at Ogden--that
portion of the Southern Pacific once known as the Central Pacific--is by
no means completely double-tracked, in a military necessity it could be
made so at once by the simple expedient of using for a one-way movement of
the trains, the newly built Western Pacific which parallels it all the way
from Ogden to San Francisco.
Here, then, is the answer, here the way that in a military crisis we may
also gain a double-track transcontinental route across the north edge of
the country. We simply need to take two out of the three single-track
lines there--the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Great
Northern--and by keeping the traffic moving in a single direction, we
gain at once a practical and effective double-track railroad. This method
can be repeated in the South from Chicago to El Paso and thence across to
Los Angeles, by a similar operating combination of the Santa Fé, the Rock
Island, the El Paso and Southwestern, and the Southern Pacific. The map
itself will suggest numerous other combinations of the same sort.
Physically, the railroads of the United States are today wonderfully well
adapted to any military crisis that they might be asked to meet. And the
constant raising of their efficiency during the past decade, because of
the growing tendency of expenses to overlap income, has done nothing to
impair their military value. Potentially, they are fit and ready. Ready,
they are actually; fit and ready is an entirely different matter. Let us
come to it, here and now.
* * * * *
Suppose that tomorrow the "cry of war" were to resound from one end of
this country to the other, that an army of at least 1,000,000 men were to
spring into being as quickly and as easily as all these pacificists aver.
Immediately the railroads would be called to their superhuman tasks of
transporting men and horses, and motor trucks, munitions, and materials of
every sort. And somewhere this great problem of military rail transport
would have to center. Today, in times of peace, it centers in the
Quartermaster's Department of the War Department, which contracts with the
railroads for the carrying of troops and supplies just as any private
organization might arrange. The existing study of the War Department
provides that in the declaration of war the railroads shall be operated by
the Board of Engineers. Yet to a large extent this earlier study has been
superseded by President Wilson in the appointment of a Council of National
Defense to take over the industrial, commercial, and social mobilization
of the United States in case of a great crisis. As a member of this
council Mr. Wilson has appointed Daniel Willard, of the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad, in direct charge of the transportation and communication, in
such a crisis. Of this, much more will be said in a moment.
It is conceded that in any great national crisis the government would
immediately take over the operation of the railroads. The advocates of
government ownership point to this as a clinching argument for their
proposition. As a matter of fact it argues nothing of the sort. The United
States government, by act of Congress early in the Civil War, took over
the operation of all the railroads, although it actually took control of
those roads only in the theater of the war. It also took over Thomas A.
Scott, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a remarkable
railroader, and placed him in charge of the military roads--which, in
itself, is significant. Under Scott's brilliant leadership were such men
as David Craig McCallum and Herman Haupt, the last of these a man whose
combined knowledge of army organization and railroad operation made him
almost invaluable to the government. And the real success of the Federal
military railroads in the Civil War was due to the fact that the
government officers who operated them were expert railroaders borrowed for
the nonce from civil life.
[Illustration: ROCK ISLAND GOVERNMENT BRIDGE
Built and owned jointly by the United States Government and the Rock
Island Railroad, it crosses the Mississippi, connects Rock Island and
Davenport, and is a point of military importance.]
It would be hardly less than a calamity for the army to attempt to operate
the railroads of the United States or any considerable part of them. The
army officers know that. Leonard Wood knows it. The War College down at
Washington knows it and has prepared a new study of the new problem
recognizing the necessity of keeping the railroads in any crisis operated
by railroad men. An army man is no more competent to operate a railroad
than a railroader is to command a brigade upon the field of battle.
There is a railroad executive up in New England who well remembers the
days of the Spanish war. At that time he was trainmaster of the Southern
Railway at Asheville, North Carolina. His division ran from Knoxville,
Tennessee, down to the main line at Salisbury--242 miles. It threaded the
Blue Ridge Mountains and did it with difficulty. It was a hard road to
operate at the best. And in 1898 Fate called upon it to handle a
considerable number of troops from the concentration camp at Chattanooga
down toward the embarkation stations at Norfolk and Newport News. That was
the difficult problem, with the high grades, the many curves, and the few
passing sidings. To accomplish it meant careful planning. The division
staff made such a plan. Each meeting point for the regular trains and the
extra was carefully designated and a time allowance for meals at Asheville
was arranged; forty minutes, no more, no less.
Being well planned, the operation went along smoothly--that is, until the
road was forced to break away from its own scheme. The trainmaster was
about to dispatch one of the troop trains from Asheville, its forty-minute
meal period having nearly expired, when an assistant informed him that the
officers of the regiment it carried were not aboard. The trainmaster
hurried downstairs. The officers were having their after-dinner coffee and
their cigars and showed no disposition whatsoever to hurry out to the
cars. He made up his mind quickly. He knew that if this train was delayed
ten minutes the whole operating plan would go to pieces and the entire
division become almost hopelessly congested. He went to the commanding
officer and quickly explained this to him.
The colonel of the volunteers quickly waved him to one side.
"This train'll start when I'm good and ready to have it start," he said
huskily.
The trainmaster stood his ground.
"I'll have to send it on in three minutes," he said politely, "and you
gentlemen will have to take your chance in getting on another section."
The army man (volunteer) swore a great big oath, and added:
"You make a move to start this train before I give the word and I will
make you a military prisoner."
The railroader capitulated, although today he is sorry that he did not
stick it out and go to prison. And the operating schedule of his division
went to pot. Stalled trains piled up for miles along its main line and its
sidings. Incredible delays were the immediate result of one man's
tinkering with the delicate operating structure of the railroad.
* * * * *
But given even a fairly free hand, a measure of authority, and some
opportunity for preparation, the railroader will be able to give a good
account of himself in the military handling of troops. He has shown that
during the past year when he has been called upon to hurriedly move our
army toward the south border of the nation. I have told already of the
records made on that occasion--how long trains, filled with troops and
provisions and munitions of war, were sent down to the border in
double-quick time. One thing I have not yet told--the provisions for
housing and feeding these troops while they are on the road.
It now is definitely understood that troop movements of the regular army,
volunteers and militia as well, are to be made with sleeping equipment,
particularly on long-distance runs. The practice is to use the so-called
standard Pullmans for the officers, the tourist-sleepers for the
men--three to the section. Obviously it is out of the question to feed a
regiment, or even a portion of it, in dining cars. Sometimes it is
difficult to make last-minute arrangements at eating-houses along the
line, even if the regiment wished to spare the time to detrain for a meal.
The Pullman Company has solved the problem for at least the ordinary
movements of the army by the construction of kitchen-cars. These are long,
fourteen-section tourist-sleepers, with an unusually capacious kitchen at
one end. This kitchen can easily feed not only the car in which it is
located, but the occupants of an entire train of average length. It is
not difficult for it to give three square meals a day to 300 hungry men.
Here is a bit of practical efficiency that is worthy of passing notice.
Of course no one expects that in a time of great military urgency the
troops would ride in Pullmans. They would be lucky to get day coaches, and
in the final stress of things, it would probably be found necessary to
quickly cut windows in the sides of freight cars and hurriedly equip them
with seats. A Yankee box car so equipped would be a good deal better than
a good many of the small cars in which the German army has been so quickly
and so efficiently transferred from one side of that kingdom to the other.
It is the flexibility of the standard equipment of the American railroads
that today offers perhaps the largest opportunity for its successful
military use. A single instance will prove this. A man--his name is L. W.
Luellen--has devised a scheme for mounting heavy rapid-fire ordnance upon
steel flat cars. Obviously it would be quite impossible to fire even a
miniature "big Bertha" from anything so unstable as a railroad car. But
Mr. Luellen has met this difficulty by arranging to have built at
intervals not exceeding thirty miles along the entire Atlantic coast,
short sidings flanked by heavy concrete bases.
He, too, has studied his railroad map, as a little while ago we were
studying it. He has found that a comparatively small number of guns with a
fifteen-mile shooting radius, could by means of these permanent bases at
thirty-mile intervals protect the entire Atlantic coast, a good portion
of the Pacific as well. The method of their operation is simple. The guns
would be sent to any section they were needed on fast passenger schedule.
It would be a matter of minutes rather than hours, for the flat cars to be
run in between the permanent concrete bases and by jacks transferred to
them from the cars.
The scheme is so simple that it seems absurd. But the War Department
experts say that it is remarkably practical. And Mr. Luellen, who seems to
know what he is talking about, says that it would not cost more than
$10,000,000 to install it--guns, cars, and permanent bases, along the
North Atlantic seaboard. Here is a form of railroad preparedness that
would seem worth the careful attention of the national legislature.
* * * * *
Already the American army has what is known as the Medical Reserve Corps,
made up of physicians and surgeons all the way across the land. The great
national organizations of civil engineers are beginning to plan a similar
reserve in the ranks of their own profession. In the American Railway
Association, the railroads of this country have a common meeting ground
and an organization that can quickly take definite steps toward meeting
the Federal authorities in planning the military use of the transportation
routes of the country. There is no mistaking the patriotism of the
railroaders. Some of them have smarted in recent years under what they
have believed to be an unwarranted intrusion by the Federal authorities
into the affairs of their properties, but at heart every man of them is
loyally American. And every man of them is not merely loyal in a passive
sense, but is both willing and able to aid the government with all the
resources at his command.
Take the critical situation which broke upon the country early in the
present year when diplomatic relations with Germany suddenly were broken
and the possibility of war loomed high. President Wilson, acting under the
authority which Congress had vested in him immediately appointed a
committee of seven prominent Americans--a Council of National Defense. As
a member of this Council and in immediate charge of the nation's
transportation and communication in case of emergency Mr. Wilson chose
Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. He chose
wisely. Of the dominant quality of Mr. Willard's Americanism as well as of
his great railroad ability and executive fitness for so important a post
there can be no question.
Within seven days after he had accepted this billet, Willard was at work
for the government. He bespoke for it at once the interest and cooperation
of the heads of the other great railroads of America. He knew that in any
national crisis the interest and the patriotism of these men was never to
be doubted. And so he sought their cooperation and not in vain. A full
dozen of the biggest railroad executives in the United States closed their
desks and at Willard's suggestion came hurrying to Washington. When their
conference was done, a definite plan for the service of the railroads in
a time of great national stress had been begun--a program which the
railroad executives then returned to study in detail. At the conference
they were told of the great defense and offense plans of the War College
for the part which the railroad must play in a national emergency. Some of
the railroad presidents learned for the first time the designated
mobilization centers all the way across the land, the equipment necessary
for each, the movement and direction of troop and munition trains, from
every one of them.
It is gratifying to know that these railroad executives already are giving
much time and thought to the use of our railroads in national defense. So
is Major Charles Hine, who, like Herman Haupt, came out of West Point,
perfected himself in military training and organization and gave his time
after leaving the army to railroad training and organization. Hine started
as a brakeman on the Erie Railroad, in order that he might study railroad
operation from the bottom up--that he might eventually bring to the
railroad some of the really good points of the army. He has since held
high executive positions in many of the great railroad systems of the
land--studying the problems of each until he knows the railroad map of
this country as you and I know the fingers of our hands. The value of such
a man to America in an emergency is not to be figured in dollars and
cents.
But to my own mind, the value of such a military reserve corps among the
railroaders will be comparatively slight if its membership be confined
merely to railroad executives. The qualities of patriotism and good
Americanism are by no means confined to the higher-paid railroad men. Take
a purely suppositious case--yet an entirely typical one:
Down in the offices of the old Cumberland Valley Railroad at Chambersburg,
we will say, there is a boy who is assistant trainmaster or assistant
superintendent. He is a smart boy, who has climbed rapidly in railroad
ranks because of his abilities. He reads the papers. He is keenly
interested in this whole idea of national defense. He reads the newspapers
and the magazines and he wonders what his own part would be if Washington
were taken by an enemy invader. Being a good railroader he does not have
to spend much time in doubts. He knows that his little railroad--ever an
important cross-country traffic link from Harrisburg down to Martinsburg
and Winchester, will suddenly become part of the military base line north
and south along the Atlantic coast. Over its stout rails will come the
tidal overflow that ordinarily moves over the four busy tracks of the two
railroad systems between Baltimore and Philadelphia. That means that his
railroad, his own division, himself, if you please, will be called upon to
handle a great traffic from Harrisburg south to the upreached arms of the
Norfolk and Western and the Baltimore and Ohio lines.
That young man in the Chambersburg railroad office should be under a
course of instruction today, as to the emergency use of his railroad, his
division. The division is the operating unit of the railroad in America.
Therefore a scheme for the military use of the railroad should begin with
its head, the superintendent. In the superintendent's office of every
railroad division that may have possible military value, there should be a
member of the army reserve corps, making the plan for the possible
military use of his division. In the general superintendent's office there
should be another reserve officer studying the schemes of the several
divisions that center there. Similarly the process should be repeated in
the general manager's and the president's offices, where authority
converges still further. This is important work, vital training, if you
please. It is hardly the sort of detail work to be placed upon the
shoulders of a railroad executive, already burdened with a vast amount of
other detail.
* * * * *
The best army training is that which simulates, as far as possible, the
actual conditions that might arise in the case of real war. That is why
the maneuvers that were held in the East at various times during the past
decade have been of tremendous value. They should be repeated and the
railroads should be asked to play their part at a moment's notice. To play
that part well at so short a notice means planning in advance. The New
Haven railroad recently, on the occasion of the Harvard-Yale game and the
inauguration of Yale Bowl, brought sixty-five trains carrying 33,409
passengers into New Haven between 9:26 A.M. and 2:00 P.M.--the record
passenger movement in the history of American railroading. Not one of
those trains was late, not even to the fraction of a minute. In the very
first hour of the afternoon, 22 trains, 221 passenger coaches all told,
arrived at an interval of slightly over two minutes--226 passengers to the
minute. And the detraining and entraining of these passengers was
accomplished with military precision.
But the New Haven's remarkable performance was the result of
planning--planning to the last detail. No wonder that John A. Droege, its
general superintendent, is qualified to speak of the military
possibilities of the railroad. But Droege knows that advance plans are of
vital necessity. Of course, our railroads have met difficult situations
when it has become absolutely necessary. The Ohio floods of three years
ago proved their ability to meet a great emergency in a great manner. In a
few hours many miles of their tracks were completely washed away, hundreds
of bridges destroyed, their lines thrown into apparently hopeless
confusion. Yet the railroaders never lost their heads. They arranged to
reroute their through trains. Then and there it was that the Lake Shore
railroad--running from Buffalo to Chicago--showed its resources. For it
took upon its broad shoulders the trains from all these completely blocked
lines--the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Erie--and for
long days tripled its ordinary traffic without apparently feeling the
great overload.
Yet this traffic was in some sense routine and it was moving over one of
the most generously equipped railroads in America. The military plan, as
we have already seen, may have to make large strategic use of railroad
lines of comparatively unimportant strength. It is here that the definite
plan--from the superintendent's office upward--counts. It is gratifying
to know that the military bill provides an opportunity for the
construction of such a plan, gratifying to know that the War College at
Washington has succeeded in its detailed study of the use of our railroads
in time of war.
[Illustration: _An outline map of the United States showing the railroad
routes of greatest strategic military importance._]
It is upon such a study that Mr. Willard was enabled to give the railroad
presidents whom he summoned to the Federal Capital such a lucid statement
of the parts that each of them and their railroads would be expected to
fulfill. Further than this, they are yet to evolve recommendations for
terminal yards and double trackings which in an emergency would probably
prove of tremendous military value but for which there is no commercial
justification whatsoever. It is expected that the United States government
will pay for construction work of this sort. It is entirely fit that it
should. There hardly can be two sides to this question. The only question
comes as to how rapidly these needed improvements can be made,
particularly the emergency terminals. It will be unfortunate, to say the
least, to attempt to move an army of any real size into a seaport
important in a military or naval sense, but inadequately equipped with
terminal sidings. It takes, roughly speaking, one mile of railroad train
to handle one thousand troops and their accoutrements. To bring an army of
fifty thousand men--a very moderate army, indeed--into a smaller city
would require the prompt handling and unloading of fifty miles of train.
These are the military railroad necessities which must be planned and
built by the Federal government--without delay.
All these things are going to cost time and thought--and money. And it is
because of this last factor that I have placed this entire question of the
military development of our railroads at the end of opportunity and at the
beginning of necessity--the immediate needs of the railroad, which we are
now going to consider.