THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS
CONVENIENCE OF HAVING FREIGHT STATIONS AT SEVERAL POINTS IN A
CITY--THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD'S SCHEME AT NEW YORK AS AN
EXAMPLE--COAL HANDLED APART FROM OTHER FREIGHT--ASSORTING THE
CARS--THE TRANSFER HOUSE--CHARGES FOR THE USE OF CARS NOT PROMPTLY
RETURNED TO THEIR HOME ROADS--THE HARD WORK OF THE YARDMASTER.
All the folk who come and go upon the railroad know the passenger
stations. Few of them know the freight terminals. Yet it is from this last
source that the railroad will derive the greater part of its revenue. The
freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for
varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a
single structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all
its passengers, even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so
to concentrate this part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal.
With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of
trucking is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in
order to eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the
stimulus of competition, will establish freight stations at each point
where any considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These
stations will consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight
(your traffic expert calls this "LCL," meaning "less than carload"), and
wagon yards for carload lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses,
one for inbound, the other for outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have
to be ample for the accommodation of a host of trucks and drays as well
as for the long rows of freight-cars.
In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be
a freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its
shipping-rooms and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American
city there may be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So
much for the general commodity freight. Then there are the special
commodities.
Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in
the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets
and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a
hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see,
after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each
opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line
gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic
burden that increases yearly.
It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to
accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates
there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and
the handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal
scheme. It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic;
and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of
every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves,
elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.
So you see the railroad's freight terminal in any large city is like the
fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive
centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside
from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together
somewhere; and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city
the railroad creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and
outgoing--100 trains a day, perhaps--is gathered together and sorted with
system and regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and
the mail packages.
To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme,
let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by
which the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the
metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.
The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a
great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through
Eastern New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island,
Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in
addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth,
lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a
tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and
east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many
piers and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the
smoky, busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight
terminal. There are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight
station at Jersey City (the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and
another much larger plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper
harbor, almost behind the Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now
awaiting its greatest development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its
ownership control of the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling
line, 4 and 6 tracks wide, around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger
terminal yards at Long Island City. This encircling line--the New York
Connecting Railroad it is called--will be continued by a splendid bridge
over the East River to an actual connection with the New Haven system
reaching up into New England. When this is done, one of the bugaboos of
the freightmen--the slow and ofttimes dangerous movement of barges and
car-floats through the East River, past the entire length of Manhattan
Island--will be ended. Greenville will become the distributing point for
the bulk of New England freight that comes and goes from the south and the
west through New York.
Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable
magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that
reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey
meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank well
to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and
Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.
Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the
neck of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main
line from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that
carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark,
united to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a
gateway by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in
reality. A big assorting or classification yard was built there for
outgoing freight, and another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added
and one of the great transfer houses of the country--but of that, more in
a moment.
The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of
Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o'clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the
railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are
closed and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy
floats are being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville.
There is not much loafing at either of those points along about
supper-time. Switching crews show feverish activity in snatching the cars
from the floats, and yardmasters bend themselves nervously toward forming
the long trains that are to go rumbling toward the west throughout the
night.
Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a
wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city
at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and
only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that
busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago
train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard
without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a
dozen switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no
longer. They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals,
cars that are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting
begins. The night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser
officers in the field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns
in hand, they are running along the trains (these are pulling in from the
waterfront every five minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping
and revamping the freight traffic of the night.
This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for
Pittsburgh, the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the
points diverging therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has
been in progress for more than an hour at one end of the classification
tracks, there are long trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some
large city or important distributing point. After that it is a simple
enough matter to bring engines and cabooses and start the trains through.
Then the sorting of the cars is begun again and continues until the
freight receiving points and the freight interchange points in the
metropolitan district have been swept clean for the night.
The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller
scale, for it handles package freight--"less than carload." It is a long
structure, stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long
sidings and unloading sheds. It takes the "LCL" stuff coming by night
from the connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses,
and a little after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great
mass of matter, from 200 to 500 carloads a day.
Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a
gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is
hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of
the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by
day and by night.
You ship a box--sixty pounds to one hundred pounds--from Wilkes-Barre,
Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to
Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.;
a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, _ad
infinitum_. You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a
problem in freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail
service. Ten thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising
here and there and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to
destination, make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts
have finished their difficult work.
If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the
problem would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds
weight, or less, perhaps--"LCL" anyway. From its destination it goes with
other boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house
the car in which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track,
seals are broken, doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The
transfer-house is roomy and systematic. If it were anything less it would
resemble chaos.
But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting
points have regular stands, upon which nightly are placed cars bound for
these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house),
each transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite
that number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a
checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its
proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is
mail-sorting on a Titanic scale.
Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through
car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the
transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than
enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one
of the switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to
replace it. Beyond that, the yardmaster's superiors are all the time
demanding that he show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.
When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects
forfeits from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not
expedite its passage; this the railroaders know as "_per diem_." The great
trick in operating is to keep _per diem_ down; and so the "foreign" cars,
so called, must be promptly returned to their home roads.
"We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern
from Chicago every day," the man who has this yard in charge explains.
"It's up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I
can't, I do the best I can." He scratches his head. "Perhaps I'll use a
Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not,
something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car
over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out
beyond Washington there'd be trouble, and I've got to dig out something
empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell. Mos'
generally, though, when we've got a turn of Western stuff, I've got my
'empty' tracks stuffed full o' them New England cars."
We mention something about the transfer-house being a mighty good thing.
"It's a necessary evil," says our guide, correcting us.
He starts to explain. "See here. The X----, over in its Jersey City
transfer-house, got near a carload of that fancy porcelain brick through
from Haverstraw las' week, and that young whelp of a college boy that's
hangin' round there learnin' the railroad business gets it into his noodle
that it's somethin' awful, awful for that stuff to be goin' through to
Middle Ohio in a Maine Central box, an 'LCL' at that. So out he dumps it
into a system car right here an' now, and saves his road about one dollar
and fifty cents _per diem_. Of course they pay about one hundred and
thirty-five dollars for damages to that brick in the transferrin'. But the
boy's all right in the transfer-house. If he was out on the engine he
might blow up the biler."
* * * * *
Here is another great railroad yard--this almost filling a mighty crevice
between God's eternal hills. This is within the mountain country, and the
gossip that you get around the roundhouse is all of grades. You hear how
Smith and the 2,999 pulled seven Pullmans around the Saddleback without a
pusher; how some of the big preference freights take four engines to mount
the summit; the tales of daring are tales of pushers and of trains
breaking apart on the fearful mountain stretches.
Randall is yardmaster here, and Randall is the opposite of the layman's
picture of a yardmaster--a slovenly, worn, profane sort of fellow. Randall
does not swear; he rarely even gets excited; his system of administration
is so perfectly devised that even in a stress he rarely has to turn to
work with his own hands. With him railroading is a fine, practical
science. He will tell you of the methods at Collinwood, at Altoona, at
Buffalo, at Chicago--wherein they differ. He is cool, calculating, clever,
a capital railroader in addition to all these.
[Illustration: SOMETHING OVER A MILLION DOLLARS' WORTH OF PASSENGER CARS
ARE CONSTANTLY STORED IN THIS YARD]
[Illustration: A SCENE IN THE GREAT FREIGHT-YARDS THAT SURROUND CHICAGO]
[Illustration: THE INTRICACY OF TRACKS AND THE "THROAT" OF A MODERN
TERMINAL YARD: SOUTH STATION, BOSTON, AND ITS APPROACHES]
You speak of his yard as being overwhelmingly big. He answers in his
deliberate way:
"We've more than 200 miles of track in this yard; something more than
2,000 switches operate it."
Then he takes you down from his office, elevated in an abandoned
switch-tower, and looking down upon his domain. He explains with great
care that, his yard being a main-line division point and not a point with
many intersecting branches or "foreign roads," its transfer-house is
inconsequential. The same process that goes forward with the
package-freight in the transfer-houses, Randall carries on in this yard
with cars. These operations are separated for east-bound and west-bound
freight and each is given an entirely separate yard, easily reached from
the group of roundhouses that hold the freight motive power of that part
of the system. Randall's, being an unusually large yard, further divides
these activities into separate yards for loaded and empty cars on the
west-bound side. No east-bound "empties" are handled over his road.
We follow him to the nearest operating point, the west-bound
classification yard for loaded cars. In the old days this was a broad flat
reach of about 20 parallel tracks, terminating at each end in approaches
of lead of "ladder" track. Upon each set of 3 or 4 tracks a switch-engine
is busy in the eternal classification process. In these more modern days
you may see the "hump" or gravity-yard, although you will still find
skilled railroaders who are prejudiced against its use. In the hump-yard
half of the work of the switch-engines is done by gravity. This new type
of railroad facility has an artificial hill, just above the termination of
the parallel tracks where they cluster together, and upon this hump one
switch-engine with a trained crew does the work of six engines and crews
in the old type of yard.
A preference freight rolls into the receiving yard for the west-bound
classification. Its engine uncouples and steams off for a well-earned rest
in the smoky roundhouse. A switch-engine uncouples the caboose that has
been tacked on behind over the division, and it is shunted off to the
near-by caboose track, where its crew will have close oversight of
it--perhaps sleep in it--until it is ready to accompany some east-bound
freight a few hours hence.
Blue flags (blue lights at night) are fastened at each end of the
dismantled cars, and the inspectors have a quarter of an hour to make sure
if the equipment is in good order. If the car is found with broken
running-gear it is marked, and soon after drilled out from its fellows,
sent to the transfer-house to have its contents removed, to the shops for
repairs, or the "cripple" track for junk, if its case is well-nigh
hopeless.
With the "O. K." of the car inspectors finally pronounced, the train that
was comes up to the hump, and the expert crew that operates there makes
short work of sorting out the cars--this track for "stuff" southwest of
Pittsburgh, this next for Cleveland and Chicago, the third for
transcontinental; and so it goes. Two lines of cars are drilled at the
same time, for just ahead of the switch-engine is an open-platform car,
known as the "pole-car," and by means of heavy timbers the "pole-man"
guides two rows of heavy cars down the slight grades to their
resting-places.
The cars do not rest long upon the classification-yard tracks. From the
far end of each of these they are being gathered in solid trains, one for
Pittsburgh, another for Cleveland and Chicago, the third transcontinental,
and so on. Engines of the next division are being hitched to them, pet
"hacks" brought from the caboose tracks, and the long strings of loaded
box-cars are off toward the West in incredibly short time.
Of course there are some trains that never go upon the "classification" at
Randall's yard. There are solid coal trains bound in and out of New York,
of Philadelphia, and of Boston, that pass him empty and filled, and only
change engines and cabooses at his command. There are through freights,
bound from one seaboard to the other, from the Far East to the Far West,
that do likewise. But the majority of the freight movement has the sorting
out within his domain, his four humps are busy day and night with an
ordinary run of traffic, and you shudder to think what must be the
condition when business begins to run at high tide.
"We get it a-humming every once in a while," he finally confesses. "We had
one day, a little time ago, when we received 121 east-bound trains in
twenty-four hours, more than 3,200 cars all told. That meant, on an
average, a train every 11-1/2 minutes. That same day we got 78 west-bound
freights, with more than 3,600 cars. That meant nearly 7,000 cars handled
on the in-freight in twenty-four hours, or a train coming in to me every
7-1/2 minutes during day and night. They don't do much better than that on
some of the subway and elevated railroads in the big cities; and I haven't
said a word about the trains and cars we despatched--just about as much
again, of course."
Through yards such as these there are incoming streams of merchandise,
equal at least to the outgoing, passing through classification yards in
carload lots and the great transfer-houses in "LCL." These streams must be
kept separate and from clogging one another or themselves. Cars must carry
loads whenever they are moved--"empties" are the bogy-men of the
superintendents of transportation--and cars from "foreign" systems must be
quickly returned to their home roads. The yardmaster at a busy freight
point has his own worries. His puzzle is unending. To it he must bend the
bigness of a big mind, he must be prepared to handle the unequal volumes
of traffic that pass through his domain with an equal skill: in dull times
he must seek to keep his plant working under conditions of rare economy;
when the freight rises to flood tide, he must fight in harness to prevent
the freight from congesting. The word "failure" has been stricken out of
his vocabulary by his superiors.
It takes a high grade of railroader to serve as yardmaster.