GETTING THE CITY OUT INTO THE COUNTRY
COMMUTERS' TRAINS IN MANY TOWNS--RAPID INCREASE IN THE VOLUME OF
SUBURBAN TRAVEL--ELECTRIFICATION OF THE LINES--LONG ISLAND RAILROAD
ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY SUBURBAN--VARIED DISTANCES OF SUBURBAN HOMES FROM
THE CITIES--CLUB-CARS FOR COMMUTERS--STATEROOMS IN THE SUBURBAN
CARS--SPECIAL TRANSFER COMMUTERS.
When the Commuter slams his desk shut at the close of a busy day, he is
fully aware that he is a superior being. Other mortals condemned to hard
labor in the city may squeeze within the ill-ventilated confines of
trolley-car, elevated or subway train, may find their way to stuffy
apartments, which, if their fronts were to be suddenly removed, would look
for all the world like shoe-boxes stuck tier upon tier in a shop. The
Commuter thrusts out his chest. Not for him. His is a different life. He
even feels justified in thinking that his is the only life. There is
nothing narrow about the Commuter; the open breath of the country has
tended to widen him.
He finds his way to the showy railroad terminal, down the crowded
concourse with a human stream of other Commuters to the 5:37. That train
is part of his regular calendar of life. It has been such ever since he
took flight to the country, a dozen years ago. If the 5:37 should ever be
stricken from the time-card the Commuter would feel as if the light had
been extinguished. Once, when some meddler violently assumed to change it
into a 5:31, the Commuter was one of a committee who visited a terrified
general passenger agent and had the course of time set right again. There
is only one other train which must approach the 5:37 in regularity; that
is the 7:52, on which the Commuter slinks sorrowfully into the dirty town
each morning. Other trains may be jumped about on the time-card, the
Commuter is oblivious of their fate. But let his 7:52 be ten minutes late
into the big terminal three mornings in succession, and the Commuter
begins to write letters to the papers and to the officers of the railroad.
Once aboard the 5:37 the Commuter trails his way into the smoker. Jim, the
brakeman, who is the source of all trustworthy information about the
railroad, and who can even foreshadow the resignation of the president,
has stored away the table and the cards. They are produced for the daily
consideration of a dime and a game that runs week in and week out is ready
to begin. Smith, of the Standard Oil crowd, drops into his seat; Higgins,
the lawyer, into his; the others are quickly filled; packages--foodstuffs
from the cheaper city markets and hurried purchases made at noon from
handy shops--go into the racks, and the Commuter is oblivious until, as if
by instinct, a familiar red barn goes flying backwards. The game is off
again until to-morrow morning; he is sorting his own packages out of the
rack. The train halts for a single nervous moment, and he is on the
platform. The cars roll past him; the party are at a three-handed game
now.
The Commuter finds his way up a steep road to his home on the hillside,
his very own home. It looks as sweet, set in there among the bushes and
the trees, as it did the day he bought it; and that day it looked to him
as Paradise. When night comes, there comes a peace and quiet, a peculiar
country coolness in the air. The city is steaming from the hot day, and
through the night the pavements and the roofs still emit heat. The
Commuter has forgotten the city. He sleeps as he slept as a boy on a farm,
where a city was but a hazy dream in his mind. When he awakes he is
refreshed, invigorated. The country has repaid him for the trouble that he
has taken to reach it. He goes into town again on that blessed 7:52,
twice as good a workingman as the man who has the next desk to his, the
poor chap who had to sit on the apartment steps until after midnight in
order to get even a miserable degree of comfort.
That is why the city goes out into the country.
* * * * *
The Commuter is apt to settle his thoughts upon himself, to forget that he
is but an infinitely small part of a mighty home-going army that nightly
calls all the passenger resources of the railroad into play. There are
more than 100,000 of him alone in the metropolitan district around New
York. The busy Long Island Railroad takes a host of him nightly off to the
garden spots of that wonderful land from which it takes its name; the
Central Railroad reaches off into the lowlands, and the Erie and the
Lackawanna into the highlands of New Jersey; the New York Central and the
New Haven tap the picturesque shores of the Hudson and the Sound.
Boston repeats New York in this human tide that ebbs and flows daily
through her gates. From both her North and South stations mighty armies of
Commuters come and go until one wonders sometimes if any one really lives
in Boston itself. There are more than 60,000 of this army at the Hub. In
Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and the Reading handle from their terminals
an army of equal size each night; another finds its way from the smoky,
dirty heart of Pittsburgh out into the attractive towns that perch the
hills in her vicinage.
Middle West cities, even those of good size, differ from Eastern in the
fact that they are rarely hampered in their growth by natural conditions.
In big towns like Cleveland and Detroit, for instance, the natural and the
artificial electric transit facilities are so good as to bring the
commutation business to a minimum. Not so with Chicago. The Illinois
Central from the south, the Northwestern and the St. Paul from the north,
serve rapidly growing suburban areas that will compare with some of the
best in the East. Then, after the Commuters in the East are safely home,
another army is finding its way across the bay, and off to the north and
the south of San Francisco. These are the big centres of commuting as the
American railroads know it. In smaller measure it exists at every large
city in the country. The familiar monthly card ticket, representing its
cousin, that holy-of-holies--the annual pass, is issued from good-sized
villages and pretentious country seats. The Commuter is already a national
institution.
* * * * *
Conductor John M. Dorsey, who used to run an Erie train out of Jersey City
in the long ago, once showed us what he thought was the first example of a
pure commutation business. It was a list issued to Erie conductors in
1860, and containing the names of 162 persons who travelled daily in and
out of New York by the way of Jersey City. These folk lived in Passaic
(they called it Boiling Springs in those days), and in Paterson, and all
the way up the line to Goshen and Middletown. When a man wanted to commute
then he paid a monthly fee to the railroad and they printed his name on
this official list. Such a scheme would be obviously out of the question
these days.
When New York refused to stop growing, and more and more people began
making the daily trip in and out of Jersey City, the handy method of the
commutation ticket was substituted for the cumbersome printed list, and
the Erie and all the other railroads began to cater to the Commuter with
special short-distance trains. Committees came to railroad officers from
various small towns and aided them in fixing a definite basis of fare,
which remains to-day at something between six-tenths and three-quarters of
a cent a mile. In later years, the real estate business became the science
that it is to-day, and the suburban business began to move forward in long
leaps.
[Illustration: "EVEN IN WINTER THERE IS A HOMELY, HOMEY AIR ABOUT THE
COMMUTER'S STATION"]
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE GREAT FOUR-TRACK OPEN CUT WHICH THE ERIE
HAS BUILT FOR THE COMMUTER'S COMFORT AT JERSEY CITY]
[Illustration: A MODEL WAY-STATION ON THE LINES OF THE BOSTON & ALBANY
RAILROAD]
[Illustration: THE YARDMASTER'S OFFICE--IN AN ABANDONED SWITCH-TOWER]
"It seems incredible," said a railroad officer just the other day "but
this suburban problem is all but overwhelming for us. It does not increase
our revenues at so wonderful a pace, but it does increase in volume from
20 to 25 per cent a year; and think how that keeps us hustling, making
facilities for it. There is not a railroad entering New York to-day that
could not dismiss its passenger terminal problems to-morrow, if it were
not for the Commuter. There is not a railroad coming into New York that
could not handle all its through business in a train-house of from four to
five tracks. Instead of that, what do we see? The Erie with five through
trains requiring a terminal of sixteen tracks; the Lackawanna, with the
same number of through trains, a new terminal of even greater size, the
overwhelming passenger terminal problem being repeated at every corner of
New York, just because of the tremendous annual increase in the suburban
passenger business."
The great reconstruction of the Grand Central terminal facilities in the
heart of New York, and the erection of a new station there, as described
in detail in an earlier chapter, is directly due to the Commuter. When the
new station with its double tier of tracks is finished, there will be
thirty-two platform tracks in the double train-house, an amount far in
excess of that needed for even the great volume of through business that
goes and comes over the lines of the New York Central and the New York,
New Haven, & Hartford, the two systems that use it. And the new station,
involving a tremendous expenditure of money, of brains, and of energy, is
not all.
The New Haven has electrified its four-track main line all the way out to
Stamford, Conn., in order that it may in some measure cope with this
increasing flow of suburban traffic over its already crowded main-line
tracks. It has wrestled with the unanticipated problems of electrification
because it has been facing a situation that left it no time to experiment
elsewhere and approach its main-line problem with deliberation. More and
more folk were settling in the suburban towns in its territory each month,
and deliberation was quite out of their calculations. The Commuter is
rarely deliberate.
So the New Haven, with all the resources of a giant carrier, has found
each new measure of relief swallowed up in the new flood and has turned to
more radical methods. It has been apparent to its managers for some time
past that even the new Grand Central, with its wonderful capacity, would
some day prove inadequate, for the reason that the New York Central--the
actual owners of the property--was also trying to cope with its own great
increase in suburban traffic, and would eventually require more and more
space for its own Commuters. With such a possibility in the future--not a
distant future with the suburban business doubling in volume every four or
five years--the New Haven sought to develop an unimportant freight branch
leading from New Rochelle down to the Harlem River. It has almost finished
the work of transforming this into a great electric carrier, six tracks in
width. Railroad engineers show no hesitancy in saying that eight-track
trunks will be needed out of New York in every direction within a dozen
years. The Harlem River branch of the New Haven, once it is provided with
a suitable terminal, will become a great artery of suburban traffic. It
will give trunk capacity to make possible the development of a great new
area lying just inland from the Sound, and yet within from 40 to 50 miles
of New York City.
A third project in which New Haven capital is known to be interested is
that of a high-speed, four-track suburban electric railroad also to reach
into the Sound territory as far as Port Chester, with an important branch,
diverging to White Plains, the shire-town of Westchester County. This line
will feed into the main line of the New York subway, and so avoid cramping
the terminals still further. The terminals are the crux of the whole
great problem of handling suburban traffic.
The New York Central has also electrified its tracks for a zone of some 40
to 50 miles from its terminal. This work was started primarily by a
distressing accident in its old smoke-filled tunnel, that ran the length
of Park Avenue under Manhattan Island, but New York Central officers are
to-day free to admit that the electrification was close at hand in any
event. The operation of a terminal so closely planned as the new Grand
Central, with its train-sheds and yards built in layers, would have been a
physical impossibility with smoky, dirty, steam locomotives.
The New York Central has been, as we shall see in greater detail in the
chapter on the coming of electricity, the first of the standard steam
railroads entering New York to provide suburban trains of multiple unit
motor-cars, similar to those used in rapid transit subway and elevated
trains. The great advantage of these trains over trains handled by either
steam or electric locomotives is an operating advantage. The train may be
so quickly turned in terminals as to bring the terminal problem down an
appreciable percentage, and so to give a greater hauling capacity to
main-line tracks. The Central, wedged in tightly by the high hills that
lie to the north of the metropolis, has had to pin its faith to plans that
utilize the present tracks to the uttermost capacity.
The railroads crossing New Jersey and reaching the west bank of the Hudson
have not been behind the routes that enter from the north in providing for
the suburban business. The recently opened McAdoo Tunnel, linking the
Jersey terminals of the Erie, the Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania with
both the downtown and the uptown theatre, hotel, and shopping district of
Manhattan, has been a great stimulus to the suburban development across
the Hudson.
The Lackawanna has done its part by boring a second tunnel under the
Bergen Hill, parallel to its original tube, giving a four-track entrance
to its fine new terminal, and relieving the congestion of suburban traffic
night and morning at its worst point, the neck of the bottle. The Erie has
already completed, as a part of its extensive terminal reconstruction-work
in Jersey City, a similar project, a four-track open cut through the stout
backbone of Bergen Hill. The open cut replaces completely the so-called
Bergen Tunnel, which has already become a matter of history.
We have already told of the Pennsylvania terminal in New York. The
Pennsylvania built the new station for through travel rather than for the
Commuter, at the outset. But the Pennsylvania, with the exception of a
brisk traffic out to Newark, is hardly a big suburban road, in the New
York metropolitan district. The great volume of Commuters who will flock
to its station nightly, will be bound east, not west. The Long Island
Railroad, its property stretching less than one hundred miles east from
New York, through what is one of the most attractive residential
localities in the world, is almost exclusively a suburban system. Long
Island is not a manufacturing or agricultural territory of consequence.
There is not a town of 10,000 souls east of the New York City line.
Freight traffic and through traffic, aside from some summer excursion
business, is conspicuous by its absence. Yet the Long Island operates
through its local station at Jamaica (an even dozen miles distant from the
new Pennsylvania terminal), more than 800 trains a day. That, of itself,
represents a volume of traffic, and speaks wonders for the desirability of
the broad and sandy island as an escape from the city to the country.
"We have from 18,000 to 20,000 Commuters all the year round," said a Long
Island official, just the other day; "and this branch of our traffic--our
chief stronghold--is increasing at the rate of 25 per cent annually. We
are trying to increase our facilities to keep pace with the demand made
upon them; that is why we became tenants in the new Pennsylvania Station.
For our share of that work we will pay $65,000,000--some money. But we cut
twenty minutes off every Commuter's trip in each direction every day, and
that is worth while in a day when every road is reaching out for new
business. We do not consider that $65,000,000 to save a man forty minutes
a day is money ill-spent; but I am frank in saying that we also expect our
25 per cent annual increase to remain for several years in order to make
good such an expenditure."
Part of that $65,000,000 is yet to be spent on the electrification of the
Long Island suburban lines, within a zone of from 30 to 40 miles out from
the new terminal. The through trains running to the far eastern points of
the island will run direct from the Pennsylvania Station as far as Jamaica
by electricity, heavy motors hauling the standard equipment. At Jamaica,
in a million-dollar transfer station that is part of the big improvement
scheme, the steam locomotives will take up their part of the work.
Electricity for long stretches of standard railroad where the traffic is
comparatively slight is still an economic impossibility.
So much for New York, where the lead has been taken in providing suburban
service on the railroads operated by electricity. The problem is being
approached in Boston--who, like her larger sister, refuses to stay "put."
South Station and North Station, on opposite sides of the city, are of the
largest size, but they are beginning to feel the strain of traffic, which
forges ahead every year. The Metropolitan Improvements Commission of that
city has already made a careful study of the problem. It plans to relieve
the situation by constructing a four-track tunnel from one station to the
other, and operating both of them--as far as suburban traffic is
concerned--as through stations rather than as terminals. In a word, Boston
& Maine local trains entering North Station would not end their runs
there as at present, but would continue through the proposed tunnel to a
second stop at South Station, where they would become outgoing New York,
New Haven, & Hartford suburban locals. The same operation would be
continued in a reverse direction. A more complicated adaptation of the
scheme from a construction standpoint would still use the connecting
tunnel and provide car-yards for the Boston & Maine trains outside of
South Station, with a similar yard for the New Haven locals just beyond
North Station. The main gain made by such a plan is the elimination of
switching--the same point at which the New York Central and the Long
Island have aimed in making their suburban trains of multiple units. With
the hauling in and out of empty trains to and from a terminal eliminated,
the capacity may be almost doubled. Another gain is the convenience to
passengers who under such a plan would be enabled to reach either side of
the city without changing cars, and a recourse to street transit
facilities. The Boston plan, of course, embodies a change from steam to
electricity as a motive power. It is one of the most comprehensive plans
yet submitted for the solving of the great problem of getting the city out
into the country.
In Philadelphia, they are feeling the pressure of the Commuter at both the
big downtown terminals, the Pennsylvania and the Reading, while the first
of these roads is already planning to electrify its suburban lines and to
give Broad Street Station exclusively to this class of traffic.
Philadelphia is such a wide-spreading and sprawling town that the trolley
lines have afforded little real rapid transit to the outlying sections,
while relief by subways and elevated lines has so far been meagre. As a
result, a great burden of interurban as well as suburban traffic has been
laid upon the railroads there, and they have been compelled repeatedly to
enlarge both track and station facilities.
The Illinois Central, carrying a heavy traffic south of Chicago, has
prepared plans for the electrification of 325 miles of its suburban lines,
and radical enlargement of terminal facilities. The Illinois Central has
been very progressive in its methods of handling the Commuter traffic. Its
side-door cars, permitting quick loading and unloading, have long marked a
progressive step in equipment. The Chicago and Northwestern, in its
splendid new white marble terminal on the West Side of Chicago, will give
its chief use toward the upbuilding of a suburban traffic, already strong
and well developed.
The Commuter covers a varied zone. His station may be less than a mile
from the terminal and his home still within the crowded confines of the
town, or he may be the last passenger of the train as it reaches the far
end of its suburban run. The average commutation district runs about 30
miles out, with by far the heavier part of the traffic in the first 15
miles of this. Most of the railroads that cluster in at New York, however,
issue commutation tickets out over a 70 or 80-mile radius. One man for
many years held the record as a long-distance Commuter. He preferred to
sleep nights within the quiet confines of Philadelphia and his 90-mile
trip to New York, with a 90-mile return at the end of every day became a
mere incident in his life. His record was beaten this year. A man arrives
and departs from the Grand Central Station five days out of the week, who
travels 320 miles on every one of them. He catches a fast train from his
home town at seven o'clock in the morning, breakfasts on the train, and is
at his New York office at 11:30 o'clock. He leaves his desk at 3:30
o'clock, dines on the returning express, and is home by eight. His daily
trip, with all incidental expenses, aggregates more than $12.00; so he
deserves to rank as the Champion Commuter.
If few Commuters can approach the mileage record of this man there are
many who do not hesitate at extra expenditures for their comfort. About
all of the best suburban expresses that come into New York carry some sort
of club or private-parlor cars. The club car is one of the most elaborate
developments of the entire Commuter idea. It is a comfortable coach, which
is rented to a group of responsible men coming either from a single point
or a chain of contiguous points. The railroad charges from $250 to $300 a
month for the use of this car in addition to the commutation fares, and
the "club" arranges dues to cover this cost and the cost of such
attendants and supplies as it may elect to place on its roving house. It
must guarantee a certain number of riders to the railroad every trip, so
the membership of the "club" is kept high enough to allow for a reasonable
percentage failing to use the car daily. Some railroads go at the thing in
another way. They supply the car and its attendants and make a monthly
extra charge, in addition to commutation. The car is entirely filled with
regular riders, so it is in a sense a club car.
Such a car has been running for some years on one of the suburban trains
of the Harlem road. It is unique in some ways, and in these an outgrowth
of early customs. The first of these began years ago, when the Oldest
Commuter began his habit of riding to and from town in the baggage-car.
There is something about a baggage-car that fascinates the ordinary man
traveller. Perhaps it is the solemn rule of the railroad that attempts to
prevent him from riding in this form of conveyance. At any rate in this
particular case the Oldest Commuter gradually picks up an acquaintance
with the baggageman; and, presuming upon that acquaintance gradually
appropriates the baggageman's old chair for his own use. The baggageman
was good-natured, for the Oldest Commuter was a generous fellow and never
forgot Christmas-times and the like. He got another old chair from
somewhere, and all was well until the Next Oldest Commuter absorbed the
baggageman's chair, and the baggageman had to bring a third into his car.
The Next to the Next Oldest Commuter swallowed that up, and after a time
there was a row of comfy old-fashioned chairs all around the edge of the
dingy baggage-car, and an atmosphere of smoke and good stories that warmed
the cockles of the baggageman's heart. You could have raised $100,000,000
for an enterprise from the crowd of men who rode regularly in that little
car, but the baggageman neither knew nor cared about that. He simply knew
that there was a good crowd of Commuters who rode with him daily.
After another little time the railroad took cognizance of that particular
baggage-car. The general passenger agent, who was a fellow both wise and
solemn, talked with the general manager, and one day that little club of
Commuters had a surprise. Instead of their baggage-car, the down train
hauled a bright new car all fitted with fancy things--curtains and carpets
and big stuffed chairs, and the baggageman was rigged out in a fine new
uniform as an attendant. The general passenger agent fondly imagined that
he had made the one really happy stroke of his existence.
He had not. His was a colossal mistake. The "club" called for its
baggage-car back again. Its members were men who were surfeited with
mahoganies and impressive stuffed chairs and thick carpets. They demanded
their old dingy car, with its four little windows, its rough board floor
and the wooden armchairs. They got it back. The big, new, showy car was
sent off upon another route; and the baggage-car--itself a club to which
many a soul enviously craves for admission--makes its run six times a week
on one of the fastest expresses on the line.
Groups of men have staterooms regularly reserved for them in the parlor
cars of the finest suburban expresses, and there is never a word said of
what goes on behind those closed doors. There come whispers of "antes"
that are as high as a church steeple, but the railroad does not concern
itself with the morals of its passengers to the point of breaking in upon
closed doors. The porters may know, but the porters are traditionally wise
and more than traditionally close-mouthed. One big New York editor hired
a stateroom for his daily ride in and out to his suburban home. His
secretary and his stenographer are closeted in it with him, and on the
50-minute ride twice each day he dictates the daily editorial utterances
that delight a great congregation of his readers.
Special trains for Commuters are no particular novelty. Almost every big
system has some daily suburban trains that are on its working time-tables
and not upon the schedules that are given out to the public. A group of
aristocratic Commuters living north of Boston in the district around
Manchester have their private special into the North Station every summer
morning. It is an all-parlor-car train, the most luxurious suburban on the
line, yet not one Commuter in a thousand knows a thing about it. A similar
train arrives and departs daily at the South Station. Others are in
service out of New York. You can buy both exclusiveness and elegance from
the railroad.
The Commuter is not more concerned about that 5:37 than is the railroad.
It makes train and Commuter both its concern, because that is the way it
seeks to build up its profitable suburban traffic.
"We are getting more of the city out into the country each year," says a
big suburban passenger agent; "and with the wide increase in the use of
electricity as a motive power for the standard railroads this business is
bound for increases that we can hardly foresee to-day. I think that I am
quite safe in predicting that another decade will see the belt of from 30
to 50 miles outside of New York terminals as thickly settled as the belt
from 10 to 30 miles is to-day settled. The railroaders have done their
part by expensive increase in terminal and track facilities; they have
helped the real-estate men in their broad advertising of the possibilities
of suburban life: the harvest is all that now remains to be reaped."