THE DRAMA OF THE FREIGHT
FAST TRAINS FOR PRECIOUS AND PERISHABLE GOODS--CARS INVENTED FOR
FRUITS AND FOR FISH--MILK TRAINS--SYSTEMATIC HANDLING OF THE
CANS--AUCTIONING GARDEN-TRUCK AT MIDNIGHT--A HISTORIC CITY
FREIGHT-HOUSE.
Perhaps you have seen a gay Limited in green and gold start forth with
much ado from some big city station, and have concluded that the romance
of the railroad rests with it; that the long lines of murky-red freight
cars have little of the dramatic about them. If you have thought that, you
have thought wrong.
Romance and drama reach high climax sometimes in the transportation of
commodities. Fast trains, running upon the express schedules of the finest
Limiteds, sometimes bring silk, $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 worth to the
train, across the continent. A special may be hired by some impatient
manufacturer to send a shipment through half a dozen States. There are
notable speed records in the handling of fast freight, records of notable
trains that are as well known among the traffic specialists as the
Limiteds are known to the outside world.
There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for
it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city's
larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for
the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for
gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal
facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes
it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets,
building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the
constant replenishing of the city's larder.
That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that
are the pride of the railroad's traffic head, go so quickly over the rails
to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly
lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb
aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of
the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight
conductor thumbing his "Sartor Resartus," and discussing Carlyle as a
stylist.
"Yes, we do bring some food up to town," he admits. "I've got enough grub
aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We've two
refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago.
The Chicago car has been iced twice--at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other
cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago.
Soon we'll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing.
"The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut
down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he'll be fretting
about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He's got a lake
tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we've got a branch
running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during
the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a
lake for its refrigerating stations. It's just one of the many little
kinks in running a road."
We express a desire to see the big preference train, and--the block being
still set against her--we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the
train boss's arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a
string of white and yellow box-cars.
"California fruit," he says; "they don't think anything of sending it all
the way across the continent. You might have thought those ranchers over
there on the Pacific coast would have been discouraged when they were told
that there were a dozen icing stations between the two oceans, and that
the icing cost was prohibitive. They weren't a bit. They just sat down and
did some tall thinking, and after a while they developed this type of car.
We call it pre-cooled. The car is cleaned and brought to a chill before
loading. After that the temperature is not allowed to rise while the fruit
is being piled away inside. It is closed and sealed, while still ice-cold,
and icy-cold she comes bumping her way east over three or four thousand
miles of track. It may be scorching down there along the S. P.; they may
be just gasping for air in the Missouri bottoms; but that pre-cooled car
comes right along, keeping its cargo fresh and cool and pure. We can
deliver her anywhere here on the Atlantic seaboard, and no risk of
spoiling the stuff."
We slip along another half-dozen cars. The conductor halts again and
fumbles with his way-bills.
"There's the boy," he laughs. "He's halibut. There's half a dozen halibuts
along here in a string."
We do not like to show an utter ignorance of the food question and we
venture an assertion.
"Halibut comes from Newfoundland?" we ask. "How do you get it around
here?"
The freighter grins sympathetically at our lack of knowledge.
"Bless you," he says. "That little fishing pond up there on the Banks
isn't big enough for a land which has 27,000,000 folks gathered in its
cities. These cars have come in from big Yem Hill's road--all the way from
Tacoma up on Puget Sound--State of Washington. Some of those people who
live in Boston might have a fit if they knew that their beloved halibut
was born and raised in the Pacific Ocean; but that's the truth of the
matter.
"This fish (and some of it's going straight to Boston to be sold in the
very shade of Faneuil Hall), has come 7,000 miles to be eaten on the very
shores of the Atlantic. When the fishing ship that caught this cargo was
fifty miles off the docks, she began calling Tacoma with her wireless. The
yardmaster of the Northern Pacific was ready there for the news from that
rat-a-tap. He had a string of refrigerator cars ready; they were ready and
set out along the wharf by the time the ship was made fast.
"Five minutes later the fish were being loaded into the cars. They had a
gang of stevedores working there clock-like, as those fellows work around
the big tents of a three-ring circus. First there went in a layer of ice,
then a layer of fish, then another of ice. In thirty minutes the job was
done. In forty-five minutes that string of fish-cars was coming east on an
express-train schedule. It was knocked apart at St. Paul and again at
Chicago. Here's our share of the spoils, and we're not loafing here on the
old main line.
"We're preference freight, if you please, and no old bumpety-bump with
coal and ore taking the low-grade tracks. They sandwich us in among the
all-Pullmans, even when we're on the four-track divisions, for food is
quick; food won't keep forever; and those folks down in the city are
getting hungry."
He starts to say more, but the engine call halts him. The block is clear
once again. The conductor catches a car step, the "preference" starts
forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight
train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half
a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us--more
market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which
houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train
follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession,
these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part.
To-night again, the food is going up to the city.
The scene changes. Now we are off in the rolling country of
up-State--dairy country, if you please. The railroad that stretches its
thick black trail the length of the valley is no four-track line, with
heavy trains coursing over it every three or four or five or ten minutes.
This is but a single-track branch; in the parlance of the railroaders it
is a "jerkwater"; and the coming of its two passenger trains and that of
the way-freight each day are events in the little towns that line it.
Still, even this little branch is doing its part in the filling of the
city's larder. This branch has the filling of the city babies' milk
bottles as its own particular problem.
At early dawn, the muddy brown roads that lead to the little depot there
at the flour mills are alive. The farmer boys are bringing the milk to the
railroad. Down the track a few hundred yards beyond the depot is the
slick, clean, new milk-station. Over across the brook is the
cheese-factory, deserted and given over to the gentle fingers of decay.
Those two buildings tell the story of changing times; in their mute way
they tell the growth of the American city.
In other days this township made cheese. To-day they drive the milk to the
depot. Each morning finds a big refrigerator car, built in the fashion of
passenger equipment, so that it may be handled on passenger trains, at the
milk station. The farmer boys are prompt with their milk, it is checked
and weighed and placed in the car, in cans and in bottles. Hardly has the
last big ten-gallon can gone clattering into the car before the whistle of
the warning local is heard up the line, just beyond the curve at the
water-tank. While the train is at the depot, in all the bustle of the
comings and goings at a country station, the engine makes quick drill
movement and picks up the milk-car.
Farther down the line that same train picks up more milk-cars. By the time
it reaches the junction where it intersects the main line it is a
considerable train for a branch line. Indeed at the junction there are
more milk-cars, from other branches that ramble off into the real
back-country. There are enough of them now to make a train through to the
city. The trainmaster has a good engine ready for every afternoon, and the
milk express goes scurrying into town with passenger rights and on
passenger schedules. You cannot hurry the babies' milk through to town any
too quickly.
This is all first-day milk. You can take a compass, place the pin-leg
squarely in the heart of the busy town--a place of brick and asphalt, of
steel and concrete, without ever a hint of growing things--and with the
pencil-leg trace a segment of a circle--the outer line some 200 miles
distant from the centre. Afterwards you can draw a second circle segment,
its outer line some 350 miles from the same town centre. From within the
inner circle comes the first-day milk, delivered to the railroad during
the early part of a day and on the householder's table in the big city the
next morning. From without this inner circle and within the outer, comes
the second-day milk which has another twenty-four hours in its transit to
town. The whole thing, once rather badly handled by itinerant single
dealers, has been reduced to scientific business by skilful coöperation
between the big milk-dealers of the present day and the railroads.
* * * * *
It is night.
The last of the office lights in the towering buildings has been snuffed
out. Downtown is quiet--quiet for a little time, for soon after sun-up it
will be a vortex once again; these narrow, deep-canyoned streets will be
astir and human-filled once again. But at nine o'clock in the evening the
policeman's footfall on the pavement echoes in lonely streets. A tired
bookkeeper scurrying home after a vexatious hunt for his balances gets
sharp scrutiny from the policeman. Downtown is asleep.
Then, from around the turn of a sharp corner comes a night train of
wagons, drawn by a small brigade of horses. These are not filled with
market-truck; market-truck will not reach the town till midnight at the
earliest. These are great high-boxed vans, painted white, a bit gaudy in
lettering. They make you think of those long-ago days when you used to go
down to the depot to see the circus come in, for the big wagons are
precisely like those that used to shroud mystery as they rolled from the
trains down to the show-lot. We follow this procession of half a dozen
great vans, follow it through the twisting, narrow streets of downtown,
across a famous old ferry, straight up to the long sheds of a railroad
terminal.
On the one side of the terminal, the passenger trains are coming and going
at all hours. By day this shed at which the big vans back, each into its
own carefully marked place, is a general freight-house; by night it is
given over to the stocking of the city babies' milk bottles. The ferried
vans are hardly emptied of their empty cans and cases before the first of
the milk trains comes backing in at the other side of the long covered
platform. Hissing arcs up under that slimsy roof throw high lights and
deep shadows here and there and everywhere. They show the platform-men
tugging at the car fastenings before the brakes are fairly released. In
another minute, the big side-doors are thrown open, almost simultaneously,
in still another, the place is alive with the rattle of trucks. The
milk--tons upon tons of it--in ten-gallon cans and in cases of individual
bottles, is being loaded within those circus-like cans. A second
milk-train comes bumping in at a far platform. There is another brigade of
vans waiting for it there. A third train is due to arrive in another
half-hour. The vans that it will fill are already beginning to back into
place and unload their cans and cases upon the platforms.
Here are almost 200 great four-horse trucks being filled simultaneously,
and all working with the almost rhythmic harmony of organization. You want
to know how they do it? Ask that man over there, he in a short rough
coat, who carries a lantern on his arm and with it peers interestedly into
every one of the cars. That man's word is law on this platform, for he is
its boss. He has been filling the babies' milk bottles from this
particular terminal for almost a quarter of a century now. His railroad
was the first to bring milk into a large city.
"We get it over," he will tell you, "by the experience of some little
time, and by planning. You saw the numbers on the team side of this milk
platform. That's only half the problem. There are a dozen different
milk-handling concerns doing business at this shed, and their stuff comes
together on this one train. Yet we get the thing out by having each
concern--each truck--come up to its own position at the team side. The
other half of the problem we solve by having a certain position for each
milk-car.
"Here is the Hygienic Milk Company up on the Heights. You have seen their
fancy dairies all over town. Well, the Hygienic has a station up at
Bottger's, on our Lancaster & Essex division, that fills two cars at that
station every blessed day. Their two cars stand in beyond this No. 14
pillar every night; so we know just where to direct their trucks. That's
business--just system. We spot the cars every night."
"Spot the cars?" you interrupt. He smiles a bit at your ignorance.
"This train is made up in just the same fashion every night," he explains.
"These two Hygienic cars are always the fifth and sixth. If they were the
eighth and ninth some nifty evening--if some smart Aleck of a yardmaster
up the line would take to shuffling up these cars as you shuffle a deck of
cards--we would have a near riot here, and I couldn't get these platforms
cleared of the milkmen for that market-truck train that backs in here from
the south every night at 11:55.
[Illustration: INSIDE THE WEST ALBANY SHOPS OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL:
PICKING UP A LOCOMOTIVE WITH THE TRAVELLING CRANE]
[Illustration: A LOCOMOTIVE UPON THE TESTING-TABLE AT THE ALTOONA SHOPS OF
THE PENNSYLVANIA]
[Illustration: "THE ROUNDHOUSE IS A SPRAWLING THING"]
[Illustration: DENIZENS OF THE ROUNDHOUSE]
"So they keep closely to the formation of our trains, and that of
itself is no terminal problem. Away up the line 90
miles--150,--250,--everywhere that we have a big junction yard, the yard
boss has his positive instructions about these milk trains. By the time
this fellow has cleared out of P---- J----, 90 miles up the road and our
nearest road yard outside of the metropolitan district, it's always in
just the shape you see it to-night. After that there's nothing to be done
here except cut off the road engine at our terminal yard and pick out a
switcher to back her into position at this shed. It's nice work, and night
after night that engineer of the switcher does not vary four inches in the
locations of these car-doors."
He lifts his lantern, and we peek into the interior of one of these cool
milk-cars. This has the bottled milk in cases. The cases are packed four
tiers high--never higher--and your guide explains to you that four cases
is the limit of a hand-truck. All these things make for simplicity in
handling. You peer into another car. The ten-gallon cans are in long
diagonal rows, covering the entire floor of the car. They form a regular
tessellated pattern, like the marble tiling of old-fashioned hotels and
banks.
"Those little farmer boys," says the platform boss, "sure do that trick
well. That speaks pretty neat for Sullivanville. They all used to put the
cans in straight rows, running lengthwise of the car. One day one of the
smartest of those Sullivanville boys discovered that by putting the cans
in diagonal rows, this-wise, he would gain a hundred cans in the loading.
That added a thousand gallons to the capacity of the car. The Super gave
him a good job, and some day you'll see he'll be running a railroad of his
own."
* * * * *
Midnight.
Downtown is still more deserted, if that is possible, than when we first
saw it three hours ago. The stillness of the deep night is hard upon the
city; yet here on this broad quay street which runs its stone-paved
length up and down past the wharves of the harbor-front, all is alive.
This is the midnight market. Under the very noses of the steamships that
have brought this garden-truck up from the south, it is being auctioned
off to a hundred or so keen-nosed, keener-witted wholesalers. They wander
about under long awning roofs erected in the centre of the street, through
the gaunt open shadowy spaces of the piers, poking into the tops of
barrels, pinching, tasting, critically examining all the while that they
are dickering in prices. When the day is fully born and downtown alive
once again, there will be other wholesale markets, more sedate-looking
affairs in rooms that have been built for the purpose by the traffic
departments of the railroads. In these rooms, with the seats arranged in
tiers and each seat having a broad writing arm like a college classroom,
fruit and vegetables will be sold in carload lots. There will be records
of prices--quotations. The thing will approach the dignity of those
bourses where cotton and coffee and metals and securities are sold.
But the midnight market scorns such formalities, such dignities. It clings
to its own hubbub--its own unsystematic way of accomplishing a great
business. It prefers to sell as the stuff is unloaded; that has been its
method for three-quarters of a century and any method that has stood 75
years is at least entitled to a measure of consideration. But not all its
offerings have come by these big coasting steamships, whose outlines show
vague at their piers in the darkness of the night. For, grinding against
the piles of these same wharves, as the unseen tide changes, are groups of
car-floats that have been ferried from the great railroad terminals across
the river. Each car-float has two trackfuls of refrigerator cars--12 or 14
or 16 in all--lined against a long roofed platform running just above
keel. When the pert and busy little tugs have pushed and pulled and bunted
the floats all into position, the platforms are quickly connected by
gangways, canvas-covered against the stress of hard weather. A great
freight-house, almost Venetian in type, floats upon the surface of the
silent river and becomes part and parcel of the pier itself. After that it
is quick work to open each of the cars--to wheel out sample barrels of
potatoes, of cabbage, of celery, of lettuce, of cauliflower--all the
growing things of country farms that go to feed the hungry city.
The trading here is over in an hour, or two hours at the longest when the
shipments are heavy; and then the wholesalers are wheeling their wagons
into place to cart away their purchases to their own stores and
warehouses. From these the retailers--the men who carry on their
businesses in stalls in the public market-houses and those that have their
own little shops on the street corners--make their selections. If you are
a city man, you may now know that your grocer at the corner is up betimes,
when the sun is just showing himself on lazy September mornings. He has
been poking his way with his own horse and wagon down to the wholesalers,
buying his day's stock and getting it placed just before the earliest of
the housewives begins her marketing.
You demand a concrete example of a city freight-house; and here it is--the
historic St. John's Park of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad
in New York. Up over the lines of the Central, back for hundreds of weary
miles, you may hear the railroaders speak of "the Park," you may see long
strings of cars, bearing merchandise tagged through to it. At Sixtieth
Street, where the big freights of the New York Central come to a final
halt, you see the cars sent south in long strings, each hauled by a red
dummy locomotive and preceded by a boy astride a horse and holding a red
flag, a familiar sight to all New Yorkers who reside upon the far west
side of the town.
St. John's Park handles a very large percentage of all the perishable
food that comes into New York each day. It is the dingy freight-house that
fills the double block between Hudson and Varick and Beach and Laight
Streets; and when you ask, "Where is the park?" they will tell you that
there was a day when the entire site of this freight-house--possibly the
most congested in the world--was a gentle tree-filled square that faced
old St. John's Church. There is never a trace of the park nowadays. The
old church now faces a narrow street wherein truckmen shove and elbow and
disappear in the gates of the freight station.
On the Hudson Street side of the structure six pairs of railroad tracks
curve into it; and far above on the cornice of the structure one can see
the benign figure of the old Commodore--a heroic bronze surrounded by
replicas of the trains and the steamships that he loved so well. The
building of the large freight station on the site of St. John's Park away
back in 1868 was a real accomplishment to the first of the house of
Vanderbilt. Think of it: that freight-house could hold 100 cars. There was
nothing else in all the broad land quite like that!
Into St. John's Park at dawn come trainloads of produce. Even before the
doors of the freight-house have opened, at six, a string of "coolers" has
stopped in Hudson Street and the commission men are carting out the
poultry. As soon as the station gets down to real business, butter and
eggs and cheese pour in through it in carload lots.
"It doesn't bother us much," the foreman tells you. "Still, on the Monday
before Christmas we had a fairly brisk day. We had 155 cars of turkeys
alone that morning."