FREIGHT TRAFFIC
INCOME FROM FREIGHT TRAFFIC GREATER THAN FROM PASSENGER--COMPETITION
IN FREIGHT RATES--AFTERWARDS A STANDARD RATE-SHEET--RATE-WARS
VIRTUALLY ENDED BY THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION CLASSIFICATION
OF FREIGHT INTO GROUPS--DIFFERENTIAL FREIGHT RATES--DEMURRAGE FOR
DELAY IN EMPTYING CARS--COAL TRAFFIC--MODERN METHODS OF HANDLING LARD
AND OTHER FREIGHT.
In England they speak of it as "goods" and regard it as almost a minor
factor in the conduct of their railways. In the United States it is
freight-traffic, and is the thing from which the railroads derive by far
the greater part of their revenues. In England it is represented by
delicious little trails of "goods-wagons," four-wheelers of from five to
eight or nine or ten tons' capacity, the "goods" often left exposed to the
rigors of winter, save for possibly a tarpaulin covering; in the United
States, fast-freights and slow-freights crowd upon one another's heels;
the sixty-ton steel car has long since come into its own.
If you do not realize the importance of the freight traffic, you should
talk to those shrewd old souls in Wall Street who measure a carrier, not
by its ticket sales, but by that fascinating thing that they call
"tonnage"; you should go out upon the line and ask any operating man how
his territory is holding up in traffic. He will answer you in tons, in
freight-cars moved within a single twenty-four hours. If you are still
unconvinced, go to the passenger man you know best. He will tell you that
while he is pleading vainly with the biggest boss of all for some new
Limited, eight or ten passenger cars all told, some shouldering
freight-hustler has been welcomed into the inner sanctum and comes out
with an O. K. for 800 or 1,000 box-cars or gondolas in his fist, a dozen
new freight-pulling locomotives in addition, for good measure. There is
your answer.
The passenger terminals may have all the magnificence in which we have
seen them, but the freight terminals are the real core of a railroad's
entrance into any town. For when you come to even the roughest figures,
you find that in extreme cases--such as the New Haven's, where there is a
congested territory, closely filled with thickly populated cities and
towns--the passenger receipts will hardly do more than approach a balance
with those from freight. In some cases the passenger earnings are hardly
25 per cent of the railroad's entire income; and cases like these are more
common than the New Haven, holding New England as its own principality.
Wonder not that Wall Street looks askance at any new line until it can
prove itself able to develop "train-load"--freight traffic, measured in
thousands of tons.
Your general freight agent, who is a sort of official cousin to the
general passenger agent, is the man who studies tonnage. More likely in
these days of the exaltation of titles, he is the freight traffic-manager,
with a group of subordinates around him and a traffic-skirmishing corps
out on his own road and the other connecting roads, who are making friends
with shippers, just as the young travelling passenger agents round up the
theatrical managers and the brethren from the lodges. The travelling
freight agents hang around sidings and breathe affection for manufacturers
and wholesalers; they welcome to their very arms the business
traffic-managers, who are really glorified shipping clerks for great big
concerns. And while they cultivate the road in detail, their big boss
studies the territory in general. The trade papers and the market
bulletins litter his desk; he can tell you strength or weakness in this
thing or that--why cotton is off, and wheat rushing upwards. Moreover, the
freight traffic-manager, himself, is not above friendships. He will pack
his own evening suit into a bag and go 500 miles willingly to give
shippers his own private explanation of the national rate complication.
Did we say rate complication? That seems almost too simple a name for the
subtle and intricate structure which tells us how much we must pay the
railroad for the transportation of our goods. When we were visiting the
passenger office, we saw something of the work of the rate-clerks there.
We learned that, in fact, the railroad creates various classes of rates in
the first place; local or round-trip tickets, at, say, three cents a mile
for occasional travellers; mileage books for more constant travellers,
which bring a wholesale rate of two cents a mile; a third and lowest rate
of something less than a cent for that urbane soul, the Commuter. For
excursions, where many, many persons were to be moved at one time, perhaps
upon a single train, other very low passenger rates were created. We also
saw how the railroad, trying to base its passenger charges on the number
of miles covered, is compelled to make delicate adjustments on through
charges between competitive points.
We speak of these things now, because in a way the passenger tariff
resembles the freight, and yet compares with it as a child's primer with a
Greek lexicon. In an earlier day the thing was very much worse. In fact,
at the very beginning there was no real scientific way in which the
railroad might regulate its charges, and on some of the very earliest of
steel highways the rates were made just half what they had been on the
toll-roads, and without regard to the cost of transportation. Thus the
competitive feature had its way early in the formulation of a rate-sheet;
and there is evidence to assert that in those early days when the railroad
had an opportunity it made its tariff as high as it thought folk would
stand without a riot, and thus the now historic phrase "what the traffic
will bear" came into coinage. As a matter of fact, in those days when
scientific bookkeeping was unknown the railroad had no way of accurately
knowing just how much it cost to operate, and how that cost should be
fairly apportioned between the different classes of its traffic.
The thing went from bad to worse as the great land carriers developed.
Each made its rate-sheet according to its own sweet will; it classified
freight precisely as it pleased, and the man down in New Orleans sending
goods to New Hampshire was puzzled as to the charges that would accrue
upon his shipment when it finally reached the northeastern corner of the
country. The competitive feature grew to be the strongest in the making of
the rate-sheet, unless it was the subtle influence of the railroad's
favored friends, an influence that showed its ugly head oftener in the
practice of rebating than anywhere else. The fierce competition that ruled
between the railroads in the seventies has never been approached at
another time. Ruinous rate-war after rate-war followed upon each other's
heels, and little roads kept dropping into bankruptcy, one after another.
There was a time in 1877 when a man might ship a carload of live-stock
free from Chicago to Pittsburgh, from Chicago away through to New York for
five dollars; and there is hardly a more expensive commodity for the
railroad to handle, than cattle. To appreciate what these wars meant to
the carriers, bear in mind that the week after this particular one was
settled it cost the old rate--$110 a car--to ship cattle from Chicago to
New York.
Out of such guerilla warfare came the one possible thing--coöperation. The
railroads were not then big enough to consolidate their properties, J. P.
Morgan had not then developed his fine art of welding them together. So
they did the next best thing and made secret contracts--pooling. That is,
they established a standard rate-sheet in their mutual territories and
bound themselves to abide by it for a certain length of time. They figured
out their relative percentages of business at the beginning of any
agreement, and took from the combined earnings of the pool, the same
percentages of receipts. The bitter outcry that went up across the land
against pooling still echoes. That practice with another now also
prohibited--rebating--really gave birth to governmental regulation of
railroads.
[Illustration: "THE INSIDE OF ANY FREIGHT-HOUSE IS A BUSY PLACE"]
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S PARK, THE GREAT FREIGHT-HOUSE OF THE NEW YORK
CENTRAL RAILROAD IN DOWN-TOWN NEW YORK]
[Illustration: THE GREAT ORE-DOCKS OF THE WEST SHORE RAILROAD AT BUFFALO]
In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Commission was born, and ruinous
rate-warring practically came to an end. The Commission required the
railroads to file with it copies of all their rate-sheets, both freight
and passenger, and ordered that in almost every case thirty days' notice
should be given of any change in the tariff. This meant that the old
practice of tearing a rate-sheet apart in a single night, so as to jab
vitally into the heart of a competitor, was at an end. And a dignified
rate-war, with the opponents giving thirty days' advance notice of their
strategic intentions, is almost an impossibility.
Now come to the present. The freight-rate system of to-day is intricate,
fearfully intricate, but it is a system. It begins by classifying all
manner of freight into groups, for it must be apparent to any one that to
the railroad the cost of handling different commodities must vary
tremendously. Several factors make for such variation: the value of the
shipment and the degree of risk for its safe transportation that the
railroad must assume; its bulk, its weight, and the cost of handling at
terminals, as well as the cost of any special equipment that may be
necessary to carry it over the rails. No one would expect a railroad to
haul a box-car filled with several hundred thousand dollars' worth of silk
for the same price that it hauled the same car filled with coke. So the
railroad has grouped its freight into six general classes--varying from
the most difficult and expensive to handle down to the easiest and the
cheapest; and the rates for these six different classes also run in a
rough proportion.
Some 8,000 articles, ranging from arsenic to step-ladders and from
Christmas trees to locomotives, are grouped into these classes. Into them
has gone about everything that the railroad will handle, save coal and a
few other specialties which are rated as specific commodities and have
special published rates. So a man shipping feather dusters from South
Brooklyn to Ogdensburg, N. Y., would find that they came under Class 1,
and that he would have to pay 44 cents a hundred pounds for the haul. If
he was shipping steel beams between the same points he would find them
under Class 4 and he would find the tariff at 23 cents a hundred. These
six classes have been made standard throughout the country by all the
railroads in coöperation. The roads north of the Ohio River and east of
the Mississippi use the so-called Official Classification; south of the
Ohio and still east of the Mississippi, the Southern Classification; while
all those west of the Mississippi use the Western Classification. So the
shipper is no longer in much doubt in these matters, particularly in view
of the fact that the three classifications are very much the same in all
save minor details.
So much for the classification at this moment. It is quite simple when you
come to place it beside the tariff sheets themselves, the printed form of
an intricate structure, so great as to be almost shadowy in its workings.
You ask a freight traffic-manager about rates. He is a skilled man, a man
skilled in the economics of common carriers, and he tries his best to
explain simply to you the basing charges for the transportation of
commodities.
"Our rates," he says, "are formed by many things. In a general way, by the
competitive territory into which we go, and in specific cases by the
volume of business that comes or goes from a single point. The direction
of the movement, including whether cars must return empty or loaded, is
another factor. Then, of course, there is the great factor to which both
passenger and freight rates must comply--the necessity for the railroad
earning more than it pays out. Acworth, the English economist, says that a
railroad must pay for three things, the expense of maintaining the
organization, that of maintaining the plant, and that of doing the work.
Our revenues, from one source or another, must meet that triple expense."
Ask this big freight-man about charging "what the traffic will bear" and
he looks grieved. He turns about sharply and asks you:
"The earning-sheets of every railroad are public and they will show you
that they are but making expenses, in a few cases paying about half the
dividends that a healthy national bank or trust company or manufacturing
enterprise might be expected to return to its investors. That makes it
look as if we had begun to get some sort of scientific adjustment between
expense and revenue, does it not?"
You dodge the point. You have no desire to quarrel or to delve into high
railroad finance, and so you say you simply want to know about rates.
"It's a little simpler than Sanscrit," says the freight-man. "We begin to
figure on common or basing points--"
You interrupt and inquire as to what a "common point" really is. Then the
traffic expert gets down to primer talk and begins to explain the thing to
your real understanding. It seems that some years ago, when the railroads
first "pooled" they had to find an equitable method of making a
rate-sheet. Everybody made suggestions, and a Pennsylvania freight-clerk,
named James McGraham, made the right one. It was adopted and became the
standard of to-day--which goes to show that good can sometimes come out of
iniquity.
In this arrangement, the rate for each of the six different classes and
all the special commodities, between New York and Chicago was made 100 per
cent. Other towns, both further and less distant from New York than
Chicago were given proportionate percentages, St. Louis being fixed at
117, Pittsburg 60, Cleveland 71, Detroit 78, Indianapolis 93, Peoria 110,
and Grand Rapids at 100--the same as Chicago. At the eastern end of this
particular bit of territory--the Official Classification--a reduction of
two or three cents a hundred was made from the New York rates in favor of
Baltimore and Philadelphia, a corresponding addition of two or three cents
to meet the increased haul to Boston. No matter how you ship freight,
these rates now hold standard, as long as the railroads remain faithful to
their traffic associations. You may ship from Indianapolis to New York by
way of Cleveland and Albany, by Marion and Salamanca, by Columbus and
Pittsburgh, or by Cincinnati and Parkersburg, and although there is quite
a wide variance in mileage between these routes, the rate is the same on
all the different roads that go to form them.
This standard, simple as things go in freight-rates, was not adopted in a
moment. Bitter contentions on the part of cities and of shippers had to be
settled before it ruled. After it ruled, it was easy for each road to
build its own tariff upon it. Together these form a vast structure, one
that is constantly changing, as one road or another changes its tariff
under the pressure of shippers or of civic bodies, or possibly a desire to
establish more equitable schedules; and the work these changes make can be
imagined when it is stated that a single one of them in the Official
Classification territory causes more than eight thousand changes in the
rate-sheets of the railroads.
The choosing of Chicago as the "one hundred per cent" city in the
northeastern territory of the United States repeated the compliment to her
prowess as a traffic city, that the great yards which hedge her in for
miles have paid her for many years. She is one of the very greatest basing
points, where multiple rates or percentages are built from the single.
Most of the very important commercial cities share this distinction, which
is further shared sometimes by comparatively unimportant points that
happen to be the terminals of rather important railroads. Thus we find
Cincinnati and Henderson, Louisville and Evansville, St. Louis and
Davenport, Chicago and Peoria, Omaha and Sioux City, Kansas City and
Leavenworth, all possessing this railroad distinction.
So much for the standard rates. Just as certain railroad lines running
from New York to Chicago are permitted to charge two dollars less for
tickets than other "standard lines," because of slower running time, so
does the same factor make a "differential" in freight rates. Big roads
boast that they can haul the first-class freight--the "preference
freights"--from one city to the other in sixty hours. Others take a longer
time, and are permitted by their larger competitors to make their prices a
shade lower because of slower running time in freight service. Such a
"differential" is the Grand Trunk, handling New York-Chicago freight by a
roundabout route, from New York by water to New London, Conn., and thence
over the Central Vermont up into Canada and the Grand Trunk's main line.
Obviously such a longer route adds to the running-time and would be at a
keen disadvantage in securing travel, without a lower rate as bait for the
shipper. We have used New York-Chicago differentials simply as
illustrative cases. The differentials are apt to be found in any corner of
the country where there are long hauls and a number of railroads fighting
to secure them.
But the Grand Trunk as a factor in Chicago traffic to and from Boston
brought one of the earliest and most interesting decisions from the
Interstate Commerce Commission. St. Albans, Vt., complained to that board
that its local freight rate by Boston & Maine and Central Vermont from
Boston was higher than the through rate from Boston to Chicago. On the
face of it, it seemed as if justice must have rested with St. Albans, but
the railroad was able to prove its case and win a decision. It showed that
it could not live on shipments between Boston and St. Albans and other
local non-competitive points, or on the business interchanged between
these points. To earn its bread and butter it must fight for the rich
Chicago traffic; and to be in a position to fight for that traffic,
despite some disadvantage of location, it must make very low rates.
It proved that these low rates were possible for business that went
through in solid trains, like Boston-Chicago traffic, and that each of
these trains earned its proportion of the railroad's profit. For when you
come to handle freight at St. Albans, more particularly the case in still
smaller towns, you bring on a new traffic expense, and because of this
expense we get what is known as "back haul."
On the "back haul" small towns suffer and must probably continue to suffer
until a still more equitable system of railroad rates can be devised.
Sometimes it may come about in such a case at the St. Albans one just
cited; in other times because of water competition, as in the famous
Spokane case, to which we shall again refer; and sometimes it is merely an
arbitrary charge laid by the railroad. In such cases the railroad reasons
that it would cost, in time and train delay ten dollars for every dollar's
worth of freight switched off and delivered at certain small towns; and so
it figures upon hauling to the nearest large division point with large
yards, and sending it back from there on a way-train. When such a small
town is nearer the division yard at the far end of the route the back haul
charge develops, and the small town must grin and bear it. If the small
towns and the small cities, with their vigorous organizations, begin to
complain too bitterly of the present system, the traffic experts will turn
to them and say:
"Devise a better system. Perhaps you would like the Australian system,
where the charges diminish per mile, for each additional mile covered by a
consignment?"
That may look good to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, who has
come down to headquarters with wrath in his eyes; it looks absolutely
equitable to every one; and he nods yes. The traffic-manager gleams with
joy. His quarry has stepped into the trap. He turns upon him.
"Where would your dandy little town of 35,000 contented folks be under the
Australian system?" he demands. "The Australian system would concentrate
all business at water traffic points, along the seaboard and the great
lakes and rivers; it would concentrate all manufacturing at the points
from which comes the raw material. Where would the seven wholesalers of
your town that we are all so proud of be located under the Australian
plan? If the railroads were to adopt it, it would save millions of dollars
in bookkeeping alone, but there would not be an interior distributing
point in the entire country."
The Secretary of the C. of C. is flustered. He was a young newspaper
reporter before he reached his present high estate. He flounders. The
traffic man is a man of ready wit and even readier figures. Still the
young Secretary feels that he must show a few grains of wisdom, and so he
gently makes inquiry about the Spokane case.
That Spokane case, also a famous decision of the Interstate Commerce
Commission, shows another factor in railroad rate-making, the serious
influence of water competition. Indirectly it also includes the principle
of the back haul. Spokane, which is much nearer Chicago than Seattle, was,
like St. Albans, paying a higher rate for the "short haul" than Seattle
was paying for a much longer haul. But Seattle is a prosperous port, and
if the railroad did not make a very low rate to it, all the slow freight
would go to it by water, where much lower transportation expense
invariably makes much lower rates, and the railroad, to save its own skin,
as it were, must make a low through rate there, charging a back haul or
higher rate to Spokane from the large eastern points. If it charged
Spokane a proportionate rate of the one to Seattle, which would then be
lower, all the other inland towns would demand the same privilege, and the
railroad would then be hauling property at a loss--a business which can
have but one inevitable result.
"You see how complicated it all is," the traffic manager tells the young
Secretary, "and how we must use judgment all the while. We've got to
figure individual cost for certain distances and localities and directions
of traffic, figure in the varying cost of handling different sorts of
freight, and then put in a percentage of the general cost of the business,
just as the restaurant-keeper makes each patron pay proportionately for
the cost of bread and butter, heat, light, service and rent, no matter how
large or how small his check may be on any one occasion.
"We must use judgment, and we must make rates to keep the goods moving all
the while. Suppose that both nails and crowbars are made in Pittsburgh and
only nails are made at Williamsport. Suppose then that the rate from
Pittsburgh to New York for both crowbars and nails is fifty cents a
hundred, but that the rate from Williamsport to New York was but 38 cents.
What chance would the nail manufacturer in Pittsburgh have against his
competitor in Williamsport, when both men are making annually nails in
tens of thousands of tons? It is to help the Pittsburgh man that we make a
special 38-cent rate on nails from his town to New York; and when we keep
filing these commodity rates at Washington, your shippers ask why we can't
have a standard rate-sheet, or the Australian system. The next time some
one of them finds that he cannot sell plough shares in Texas because a man
down in Fort Wayne has him beaten on standard rates, you watch him hurry
here and ask for a special one.
"It is out of this clamor and contention of almost myriad interests, the
ambitions of just such thriving little cities as your own, out of the
skilled arguments of brainy men that the rate-sheet is born and kept
living in a state of perpetual healthy change."
We are tired of rates and the factors that go to make them, and inquire
what is the A, B, C of a freight transaction between the railroad and a
shipper. The traffic-man makes it quite clear to us.
"When one of our agents receives a consignment of freight," he says, "he
immediately issues a bill of lading to the shipper, or consignor, as a
receipt and as a contract for the shipment. From his duplicate of this
bill of lading he makes out a way-bill, or manifest, which will accompany
the car until the freight reaches its destination. This way-bill describes
the shipment and the car into which it has been loaded, specifies the
shipping point and the destination, the consignor and the consignee, the
rate and whether or not the charges have been paid in advance or are to be
collected at destination. A copy of this way-bill is given to the
freight-conductor, who gives the station agent a receipt for the
consignment. At that place of destination a freight-bill, containing a
description of the shipment similar to that of the way-bill, and showing
in addition the total charge collected or to be paid, is rendered to the
consignee, and his receipt is taken for the shipment when it is
delivered."
"It seems quite simple," you breathe softly.
"It is not," is his reply, "for it has its complications. I'll show you
one of them."
We step through swinging doors of green baize and for a moment from a
traffic into an operating department, but an operating department that for
the telling in a work of this sort is best allied with the story of the
freight traffic. The traffic-manager points to a man sitting at a square
and littered desk, his thoughts with sturdy intent upon the mass of
correspondence which he is quickly sifting.
"He is the best car-service man in the country," says our guide; and you
recall when you were in the auditor's office, that an accounting was being
kept between the lines for the use of one another's cars that went on
through runs off upon strange or "foreign" lines. The traffic-man
continues: "Ours is not a big road, as some roads go. Yet we receive about
40,000 cars a month and, of course, deliver something like the same number
in the same thirty days. Yet there is not an hour of any day of the month
that this man cannot tell where any one of these cars is, just how long it
has been upon our tracks, just how much free time the consignee has for
unloading it, or just how much he will have to pay the railroad for his
delay in emptying it, so it can get back into service once again."
That waiting charge, the traffic-man explains, is known in the parlance of
his business as "demurrage"; and it is another keen example of the
constant use to which a railroad puts its equipment, of the tremendous
economy that is beginning to be practised in the modern science of
railroading. You are introduced to the car-service man, bend low over his
desk as he explains a bit of his work to you. Here, for example, is a car
filled with automobiles bound from Detroit to a dealer in Worcester, Mass.
This car, in a train of some 60 others, leaves Detroit east-bound over the
Michigan Central Railroad. At Buffalo it is switched to the tracks of the
New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. On the evening of the second day
it arrives at Rensselaer, across the Hudson River from Albany, and is
given over to the Boston & Albany Railroad. To make a concrete instance,
let us see how the B. & A. handles the thing through its car-service
department.
That department swings into quick action automatically, as soon as the car
strikes B. & A. rails at Rensselaer. The freight agent there makes a note
of the car and its contents from the way-bill which accompanies it; makes
special note, perhaps, of the fact that it is a car designed particularly
for the transportation of automobiles. Now let us presume that this big
box-car is owned by the Michigan Central. The Boston & Albany will pay
that owner railroad 35 cents a day rental--"_per diem_," in the
phraseology of the railroads--for the time it is upon B. & A. rails. There
are at that very time perhaps hundreds of B. & A. cars on the Michigan
Central, and at the end of 30 days these accounts and many, many others
are sent to the auditor's department, where they are balanced between the
roads with the general freight and passenger accounts.
This movement of freight cars makes a valuable barometer of the general
condition of business. The daily papers have a custom of making national
compilations of car-service reports part of their most interesting market
news. In dull seasons the cars come home from long service on other roads.
But in very busy seasons all roads have little compunction about borrowing
"foreign" cars for use in their local service. With shippers begging cars
from every quarter and threatening all manner of dire things, 35 cents
daily is a small rental to pay for the use of a roomy car. Besides, the
other fellows are all doing the same thing, and no one road can hope to
get all its cars back even with the use of a vigilant corps of young men
who search "foreign" yards. But in the dull seasons they come trundling
home, like lost cattle finding the big barn once again. In the business
depression of 1907, a Western car-service man received cars that had been
absent from the home road for seven years.
We turn from the car-service men back into a department that is strictly
traffic. Coal service is one of the principal sources of income for this
particular railroad. It stretches some of its branches into bituminous
fields, and others through the anthracite fields that Nature, in some
freakish mood, implanted in just a few counties of Northeastern
Pennsylvania. That entire country is comparable to a cut of beef, the coal
veins resembling streaks of fat that run hither and thither. As in beef,
the lean predominates. The fat streaks are the valuable coal veins, the
lean the earth, slate and rock in which the coal was planted during some
great convulsion of Nature in the process of the creation of the world.
How it got into this particular spot science cannot tell. What it is,
further than the fact that it is mostly carbon, science only guesses. It
guesses that it was originally bituminous coal and that by some process of
intense squeezing in an upheaval of Nature, the oil and tar and gas of the
bituminous coal was squeezed out and the much more valuable anthracite
deposits created.
Mining consists in getting the streaks of fat anthracite out of the bulk
of lean earth and rock. The veins run well down into the mountains, and,
as do the little streaks of fat, lose themselves in the rock, or lean, to
continue the simile. Some of the veins are but a few feet in thickness,
while some run to as high as twenty and thirty feet, and, as a rule, the
farther down into the earth they go the better the coal; and the farther
down you go the more difficult and expensive is the mining.
Now, here is a traffic that demands and receives special attention. In
other days the mining of anthracite coal was, itself, merely a department
of operating for the half-dozen systems that stretched their rails into
that valuable Pennsylvania corner. That work has now been removed into the
control of separate mining companies; but the handling of coal is a great
function of not only these roads, but of the systems that reach their
tendrils into the valuable bituminous fields here and there about the
country.
[Illustration: THE GREAT BRIDGE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL AT WATKINS GLEN]
[Illustration: BUILDING THE WONDERFUL BRIDGE OF THE IDAHO & WASHINGTON
NORTHERN OVER THE PEND OREILLE RIVER, WASHINGTON]
To fill the coal-bins of New York City alone, requires some 10,500,000
tons of anthracite yearly. Now you cease to wonder why this road has a
coal traffic expert, a man of surpassingly good salary. He keeps keen
oversight over the operating department in its handling of this giant
traffic, sees to it that the trains come over the mountains and into the
great terminals at Jersey City in good order, and that the railroad's
marine department is ready with tugs and scows and lighters to handle the
product as it comes in, in thousands of tons every twenty-four hours.
This would all be quite simple if the trains and the boats were always
running on schedule. But the unexpected constantly comes to pass in
railroading, and so the railroads provide against emergencies by
establishing great coal storage plants outside of New York and other large
cities--communities that would be in dire distress if their coal supply
were cut short even for twenty-four hours. Sometimes about 500,000 tons
will be kept in a single one of these storage piles--a black mountain
running lengthwise between sidings and served with giant cranes.
We are back in the traffic-manager's comfortable office for a final word
with him. He is fumbling with his own correspondence. It seems that a
lawyer down in Washington has been saying that he could save the railroads
of the land a million dollars a day in the economical operation of their
property, and the railroader is exceedingly wroth at that assertion.
"He speaks of pig iron, and says that we should teach our laborers the
minimum movements necessary to put a single pig in a car--just as masons
have been taught to handle brick with minimum effort and a maximum economy
in work accomplished has been effected." The traffic-man laughs, rather
harshly. "The lawyer is all right, except for two things; and his anecdote
about the brick is certainly well told. Only it just happens that the
railroad does not load or unload freight by the carload--that is the duty
of the consignor and the consignee--and it also happens that pig iron
rarely is handled "L.C.L." In carload lots it is not loaded or unloaded by
hand, but by big magnets on a crane which picks up a ton of the bars at a
time and thinks nothing of it."
The freight traffic-manager has made his point once again, and he is
satisfied. He tells a little of the modern methods in freight handling,
one of them how an ingenious packing-house expert in Chicago saved
thousands of dollars annually in the handling of lard. In other days lard
was rolled aboard box-cars, a barrel to a hand-truck, a rather slow and a
rather costly process. The Chicago man devised a method of melting lard
and, while it was fluid, pouring it, like petroleum, into a tank-car. When
it reached its destination at some big terminal, the lard was again melted
to fluid and poured out from the tank. That is the science of big freight
handling to-day. Not alone do cranes, with magnet-bars handle pig-iron and
castings by the ton, but great hoists at Cleveland and Conneaut and the
other big lake towns close to the Pittsburgh district reach deep into the
hearts of giant ships, bring from them the ore of Lake Superior's shores,
and fill the whole waiting trains within fifteen or twenty minutes. Into
the empty holds of the ships they pour bituminous coal from Western
Pennsylvania and West Virginia, a carload at a time. The hoist-crane
reaches down to the dock siding for a gondola, snaps the car-body off from
the trucks, lifts it aloft over the open hatch of the waiting vessel, and
turns it upside down. In less time than it takes to tell it, the coal is
in the ship, and the car-body is being slipped back again upon its
trucks.