THE EXPRESS SERVICE AND THE RAILROAD MAIL
DEVELOPMENT OF EXPRESS BUSINESS--RAILROAD CONDUCTORS THE FIRST MAIL
AND EXPRESS MESSENGERS--WILLIAM F. HARNDEN'S EXPRESS SERVICE--POSTAGE
RATES--ESTABLISHMENT AND ORGANIZATION OF GREAT EXPRESS COMPANIES--
COLLECTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF EXPRESS MATTER--RELATION BETWEEN
EXPRESS COMPANIES AND RAILROADS--BEGINNINGS OF POST-OFFICE
DEPARTMENT--STATISTICS--RAILROAD MAIL SERVICE--NEWSPAPER DELIVERY--
HANDLING OF MAIL MATTER--GROWTH OF THE SERVICE.
While the great transportation functions of the railroad are devoted to
the comparatively simple problems of soliciting and carrying both
passengers and freight in ordinary channels, there are, nevertheless,
special functions of the carrier that demand some slight attention in
passing. These functions might quite properly be known as the by-products
of transportation. The most important of them are the carrying of small
packages of rather greater value than that the railroad ordinarily gives
to the goods that it handles in its own cars, and the carrying of letters
and periodicals. These last two are handled as a monopoly by the Federal
Government, which also competes with a half-dozen big private corporations
in the transportation of merchandise in small individual lots. The
Government calls its service the railroad mail and it is the bone and
sinew of the Post-office Department. The private corporations, creeping in
upon what is also generally a government monopolistic privilege in other
lands, handle what they are pleased to call the express business. Their
business has grown up alongside of that of the United States Government
and the development of the two has run in very similar channels.
* * * * *
The express business, like a good many other big businesses, began in
rather simple fashion. Before the railroad came into being, the citizens
in the different towns of the young and rather sprawling nation along the
Atlantic seaboard found it a difficult problem to communicate with one
another. They used to entrust letters and valuable packages to the drivers
of stage-coaches or to the captains of coasting-vessels. If the drivers or
the captains remembered the letter-packet or the package, it was safely
delivered. If they forgot--! So, when the railroad came and drove the old
stage-lines out of business, the conductors of the trains were asked to
accept this side responsibility as an informal part of their work. As long
as this messenger function remained a slight thing, the railroads paid
little attention to the practice, but after a while, the conductors got to
paying more attention to it than to running the trains and the railroads
finally had to stop it.
In the golden age when the conductor's job was developing this valuable
perquisite, William F. Harnden had charge of a passenger train on the old
Boston & Worcester Railroad--a part of the Boston & Albany, which, in
turn, is a part of the New York Central lines. Harnden had entered
railroad service in 1834, when he was but twenty-two years old. He foresaw
the day when the railroads would have to put a stop to their conductors
acting as messengers for the general public, and so, a few years after he
had gone to work for the Boston & Worcester, he went to the superintendent
of that highly prosperous little line, as well as to the highly prosperous
Boston & Providence, and asked for an exclusive contract for an express
service over it as part of a through route between New York and Boston. So
it came about that in a Boston newspaper of February 23, 1839, the
following advertisement appeared:
"Boston and New York Express Car. William F. Harnden has made
arrangements with the Providence railroad and the New York Boat
company to run a car through from Boston to New York and vice-versa
four times a week commencing Monday, March 4. He will accompany the
car himself, take care of all small packages that may be entrusted to
his care and see them safely delivered. All packages must be sent to
his office, 9 Court street, Boston; or 1 Wall street, New York."
That "car" was a flight of Harnden's imagination, because for several
months a valise sufficed to carry all the packages that were entrusted to
his care. But he progressed, and after a little time he found it necessary
to engage his brother and still another man to act as messengers with him.
The following year he extended his express service to Philadelphia and to
Europe. You may be sure that the success of Harnden's experiment was being
noticed by the thrifty New Englanders. Alvin Adams, who had been in the
grocery commission business up in Vermont, established an express service
of his own in 1840, which in due course of time was to become the Adams
Express Company. It is possible that there might have been to-day a
Harnden Express Company as well, if America's pioneer expressman had not
died six years after establishing his interesting venture.
After Alvin Adams, came a host of express services springing up all over
the eastern end of the United States. Henry Wells, who had been the
associate of Harnden in the development of his business, formed a
partnership with one George Pomeroy for a service between Albany and
Buffalo. William G. Fargo, the freight-agent for the one-time Albany and
Syracuse Railroad, was the freight-agent for Pomeroy and Wells at Buffalo
in 1842. Wells and Fargo eventually got together, and in the throbbing
days of the late forties and the fifties, Wells, Fargo & Co. became an
express service of magnitude, a concern not to be lightly reckoned with.
Strangely enough, the express companies came to their first prosperity
through the thing that they are now forbidden to carry--letters. For in
the early forties the United States Post-office Department demanded six
cents for carrying a letter thirty miles, eight cents for sixty miles, ten
cents for one hundred miles--the ratio steadily progressing until
twenty-five cents was charged for 450 miles. Those rates had been in
effect since the department was first established, and the service was
fearfully slow, and untrustworthy into the bargain. The new express
companies took advantage of their opportunity and--to cite a single
instance--they would carry a letter from Buffalo to New York for six
cents, while the Government charged twenty-five cents for a similar, but
an inferior service.
In 1850 the express services were beginning to be merged--Livingston &
Company and Wells & Company had already formed the American Express
Company. Four years later, Adams & Company, Harnden & Company, and some of
the smaller express services united in the formation of the Adams Express
Company,--and in that year the minstrel men began to ask the question:
"For whom was Eve made?" The United States Express Company was also
organized in 1854, and all this while Wells, Fargo & Company were forming
history for themselves in the Far West--carrying mail out to the gold
miners and their precious dust east in return.
[Illustration: A PORTION OF THE GREAT DOUBLE-TRACK SUSQUEHANNA RIVER
BRIDGE OF THE BALTIMORE & OHIO--A GIANT AMONG AMERICAN RAILROAD BRIDGES]
[Illustration: "IN SUMMER THE BRAKEMEN HAVE PLEASANT ENOUGH TIMES OF
RAILROADING"]
[Illustration: A FAMOUS CANTILEVER RAPIDLY DISAPPEARING--THE SUBSTITUTION
OF A NEW KENTUCKY RIVER BRIDGE FOR THE OLD, ON THE QUEEN & CRESCENT
SYSTEM]
By the beginning of the Civil War, there was a well established business,
a business established with admirable foresight. Such men as Adams, Wells
and Fargo, and Benjamin F. Cheney, one of the founders of the American
Express Company, said that the express business should be kept within
narrow limits--so within narrow limits it has been kept, and to-day when
Harnden's suitcase has developed into a business paying luscious
dividends on more than a hundred million dollars of capital stock, there
are five great companies: the American Express Company, the Adams Express
Company, the Wells, Fargo Express Company, the United States Express
Company, and the National Express Company. The interests of these
companies are closely interwoven--for instance: while the National Express
Company is operated as a separate business, it is absolutely controlled by
the American Express Company. In addition to this Big Five, there is a
cluster of smaller companies, such as the Great Northern Express Company,
of J. J. Hill's system, the Southern Express Company, the Long Island
Express Co., and two thriving carriers in the Dominion of Canada. These in
turn are more or less closely affiliated with the larger companies.
The express companies no longer force a man to bring his shipment to their
offices. In every considerable town, there are whole fleets of wagons that
reach to the outermost limits, both for collection and for distribution.
In this service the automobile truck has begun readily to displace the
older type of horse and wagon. The wagon service brings the express
package, no matter how small or how large, to a central distributing
depot, where all are gathered together and sent, in through railroad cars,
to their destinations, being handled very largely as we have seen the L.
C. L. freight handled in the great transfer houses of the railroads. The
express company guarantees the safe delivery of the package that is
entrusted to its care. This package may be of the smallest sort
imaginable, or it may be a consignment of a million dollars in specie. In
either case, the express company still accepts the entire responsibility.
If there are whole brigades of delivery wagons in the cities there are
also whole platoons of special cars owned by the railroads and dedicated
to the express service. This brings us to the crux of the express
question--its relations to the railroad. These are embraced in voluminous
contracts and subcontracts--which are generally placed among the secret
archives of all the companies that subscribe to them. The Interstate
Commerce Commission, at Washington, has had, however, access to most of
these contracts and of them it has said:
"The contract between an express company and a railroad company
usually provides that the express company shall have the exclusive
right to operate upon the lines named for a definite term of years;
that all matter carried on passenger trains, except personal baggage,
corpses, milk cans, dogs, and certain other commodities, shall be
turned over by the railroad company to the express company; that the
railroad company shall transport to and from all points on its lines
all matter in charge of the express company; that special or exclusive
express trains shall be provided by the railroad company when
warranted by the volume of express traffic; that the railroad company
shall furnish the necessary cars, keep them in good repair, furnish
light and heat and carry the messengers of the express company as well
as all necessary equipment; that the railroad company shall furnish
such room in all its depots and stations as may be necessary for the
loading, unloading, and storing of express matter; that the express
company may employ during the pleasure of the railway any of the
agents of the latter as express agents and may employ the train
baggage-men as its messengers.
"The express company, on its part, agrees to pay a fixed per cent of
its gross receipts from handling express matter; to charge no rate at
less than an agreed per cent of the freight rates on the same
commodity--usually one hundred and fifty per cent; to handle, free of
charge, money, bonds, valuables, and ordinary express matter of the
railway."
The railroad mail service is, in many ways, closely analogous to that of
the express service. To it also, are devoted whole platoons and brigades
of especially equipped cars, and it comes under the direction of the
capable traffic officers of a great government department.
The Post-office Department is practically as old as the nation itself. For
it was away back in November, 1776, that Ebenezer Hazard, who had been
appointed Postmaster General to the Continental Congress, filed a
memorandum of gentle complaint because of the long distances he was
compelled to travel to keep pace with the wanderings of the Continental
Army. But it was not until George Washington had become President of the
United States, in April, 1789, that the Post-office Department came into
any real semblance of organization. Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts, was
the man to whom was given the task of making a real business out of what
had once been a haphazard courtesy of the past of stage-drivers and ships'
captains. Some men had made individual businesses out of the management of
stage-routes--in fact, Benjamin Franklin was an early postman. But the
United States Government from the beginning created the mail service as a
monopoly for itself--following the rule of other nations.
In 1789 the Post-office Department was a crude enough affair. The
Postmaster General had but one clerk, there were but 75 post-offices and
1,875 miles of post-roads in the whole country. In the first year of the
department's activities the cost of mail transportation is given as being
$22,081, with the total revenue $37,935. The total expenditures of the
department that year were $32,140, leaving a surplus for the twelvemonth
of $5,795, a somewhat better showing than has been made in some years
since that time.
The report of the Post-office Department for the year ending June 30,
1910, lies before us as we write this chapter. It tells the graphic growth
of a great business in one hundred and twenty years. For in this last
twelvemonth the receipts were $224,128,657--a really vast sum compared
with that modest $37,935 for 1789-90. The expenditures for this year
ending June 30, 1910, were even higher--$229,977,224--leaving a deficit of
$5,848,567. The Postmaster General has asserted, however, that he will
have succeeded in turning that loss into a slight profit for the year
ending June 30, 1911. These figures do not alone show the growth of the
mail service of a great land that has become entirely dependent upon this
great function of its business and social life. Think of the 75
post-offices of 1789, compared with the 59,580 offices of 1910--and that
because of the marvellous development of the rural free delivery during
the past ten or twelve years, a decrease from the high-water mark of
76,688 in 1900. Figures are sometimes impressive and the statistics of the
Post-office Department show that 78,557 postmasters, clerks, and carriers
give the major portion of their time to its service. In addition to these,
those same statistics enumerate 40,997 rural delivery carriers, who bring
the entire post-office force up to the astounding total of 119,554 men and
women.
* * * * *
Without the railroad the Post-office Department could not have come to its
present great development as one of the chief arms of government activity.
The postal service is an interesting adjunct of the railroad; the railroad
is a vital factor in the successful conduct and development of the postal
service. Away back in 1836, Postmaster General Barry, in his annual
report, spoke of the rapid multiplication of railroads in all parts of the
country and asked if it was not worth while to secure the transportation
of mail upon them. He added:
"Already have the railroads between French Town, in Maryland, and New
Castle, in Delaware, and between Camden and South Amboy, in New Jersey,
afforded great and important facilities to the transportation of the great
Eastern Mail."
As General Barry wrote, the Baltimore & Ohio was spinning its extension
lines from Baltimore to Washington, and he expressed an opinion that with
that line a through mail service from New York to Washington might be
accomplished in sixteen hours. That service is now made between those
cities in five hours. General Barry's appeal must have brought fruit, for
Congress, on July 7, 1838, passed an act approving every railroad in the
United States as a post-route.
The railroads accepted this responsibility with alacrity. The Baltimore &
Ohio equipped compartments in baggage-cars running between Baltimore and
Washington, which were kept tightly locked and to which only the
postmasters of those two cities had access. Still the early methods of
handling merchandise of every sort were crude and it was not until the
days of the Civil War that the railroad mail service began to attain
anything like its present precision and dispatch. Most great organisms are
apt to trace their development to the brilliancy or the inspiration of one
man or a group of men, and the railroad mail service has been no exception
to that rule.
W. A. Davis, a clerk in the post-office at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1862,
conceived the idea that railroad mail could be assorted on the cars before
it reached St. Joseph. In those days, St. Joseph was a pretty important
sort of a place. The overland mail started west from there, and Davis
thought that if it could be at least partly assorted before it reached St.
Joseph, there would be no delay in starting overland. The Post-office
Department encouraged him and he began what was destined to become the
most important and interesting function of the railroad mail service.
In the same years that Davis was studying out postal problems at St.
Joseph, Col. G. B. Armstrong was assistant postmaster at Chicago. He was
asked by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, of President Lincoln's
Cabinet, to undertake the development of the railroad mail service. He
accepted the task August 31, 1864, and a little later was made General
Railway Mail Superintendent, a position which he held until 1871, when he
was compelled to retire because of ill health. Col. George S. Bangs, of
Illinois, succeeded him, and to Col. Bangs was given the opportunity of
the third great development in the railroad mail service. In his report
for the year 1874 he discussed the possibilities of establishing a fast
and exclusive mail train between the two great postal centres of the
land--New York and Chicago. To quote from Colonel Bangs' report:
"This train is to be under the control of the department so far as it
is necessary for the purpose designed, and to run the distance in
about twenty-four hours. It is conceded by railroad officials that
this can be done. The importance of a line like this cannot be
overestimated. It would reduce the actual time of mail between the
East and the West from twelve to twenty-four hours. As it would
necessarily be established on one or more of the trunk lines having an
extended system of connections, its benefit would be in no case
confined, but extended through all parts of the country alike."
Postmaster General Jewell liked Col. Bangs' idea and told him to arrange
with the Lake Shore Railroad and the New York Central & Hudson River
Railroad for a fast mail train to leave New York at four o'clock in the
morning and make Chicago in twenty-four hours. But the Post-office
Department, while it might grandly order fast mail trains into service,
had no appropriation from which to pay for them. Nevertheless, Col. Bangs
appealed to the older Vanderbilt, owner of both the New York Central and
Lake Shore Railroads. Commodore Vanderbilt was not a sentimentalist. He
had little use for men who came to him with risky propositions and empty
pocketbooks. Nevertheless, the mail train idea appealed to the old
railroader, and he turned to his son, William H. Vanderbilt, and asked him
what he thought of the idea. The younger Vanderbilt suggested building the
special cars needed for this service and placing the train in operation,
with hopes of remuneration by the following Congress. He felt that the new
trains would instantly become so popular as to compel Congress to provide
for their up-keep.
"If you want to do this, go ahead," said Commodore Vanderbilt, "but I know
the Post-office Department, and you will, too, within a year."
William H. Vanderbilt went ahead. He constructed and placed in service
such trains--of glittering white and gold--as the railroad had never seen.
Nightly they made their spectacular run between New York and Chicago with
clock-work regularity. They never missed connections. The Pennsylvania
Railroad quickly followed the example of its traditional rival. Within a
half-year the United States had such a mail service as it had never
dreamed of possessing, a mail service a quarter of a century ahead of any
other nation in the world.
And yet Congress did the very thing that the sagacious old Commodore
Vanderbilt had predicted. It absolutely refused to pay for the fast mail
trains, and they were taken out of service. There was another factor in
the situation, however, and that always a lively factor--the public. When
the man out in Sioux City found that his mail was again taking eighteen
additional hours to reach him from New York, he rose up in all the fulness
of upstrung wrath and let his Congressman hear from him. And he was only
one of tens of thousands whose business comfort had been heightened, quite
imperceptibly, by the new trains, and upset very perceptibly by their
withdrawal. They were returned to service in 1877, and have since become
so recognized and useful a function of the mail service that it would be a
brash Congress or Postmaster General who would even attempt to tinker with
them.
* * * * *
Sometimes you brush elbows with the railroad mail service. You notice
perhaps, the big heavy car up forward in the long train, with its open
door and its gallows-like crane for snatching mail-bags, at cross-road
stations, where the through train does not even deign to slacken speed. If
you have had an important and delayed letter to post, you may have
breathed your little prayer of thanks to the railroad mail because you are
able to drop it into the slot of a car that stood, that was halted for an
impatient minute or two in its race overland. But these are hardly more
than superficialities of the service. If you wish to come closer to its
heart, present yourself sometimes just before dawn at one of the great
railroad terminals of a really metropolitan city. You had better present
yourself in spirit and not in flesh, because this busy time--when most
honest men are asleep--is not a time when visitors are welcomed. The
Government is singularly diffident about showing the inner workings of its
Post-office Department.
But these inner workings are alive and alert at three o'clock of the
morning that you come to the platform sheds of the big terminal--you can
see the shadowy outline of the darkened building itself rising up behind
you. Most of its platforms which by day are constant and brisk little
highways, are also darkened. The long files of empty coaches that line
these platforms reflect in their many windows the signal lights of the
outer yard. Now and again you catch the flicker of a pointed yellow light
against the background of blackness--the bobbing of a watchman's lantern
as he sees that all is well in the few hours of comparative quiet that
come to this great terminal.
This one train platform is alert and alive--brilliant under the
incandescence of electricity. A brigade of shirt-sleeved men line it,
while to its outer edge one great wagon after another--each showing the
red, white, and blue of government service under the reflections of the
arcs--comes rolling up, with a fearful clatter over the rough pavement of
the station yard. From the cavernous recesses of these great wagons their
stores are poured forth--dozens and dozens of mail sacks of leather and
canvas, each tagged and directed with absolute accuracy.
The grimy granite bulk of the general post-office is a scarce half-dozen
blocks away from this terminal--an easy span for each of the great
mail-wagons. Into that general post-office the mail--letters, newspapers,
packages, all of inconceivable variety--has been pouring at flood-tide
ever since the close of business nine hours before. The carriers with
their heavy pouches began this tide; wagons bringing their contribution
greatly swelled it. From the nearer stations the mail came, silent and
unseen, through the giant pneumatic tubes that reach out from the general
post-office, under city streets, like great arteries. Underneath the
ghastly green mercury lamps of the distributing floor of the general
post-office, the first steps were taken toward separating the flood.
Expert mail-clerks, working under tremendous tension, made a rough
classification of all that come under their trained fingers--sometimes by
counties, again by States, or even a group of States. One great
subdivision was transcontinental and transpacific. This train with its
close connections on the Western lines will reach San Francisco just in
time to catch there a big, red-funnelled steamship about to depart for
Yokohama and Hong Kong. At Hong Kong the red-funnelled boat will connect
with a P. & O. steamer whose screws will hardly cease revolving until she
reaches Calcutta. The railroad mail service is a thing that reaches much
farther than the rights-of-way of the railroads themselves.
There are seven cars in this train--five cars for the postal service and
two chartered by the morning newspapers. There are no coaches. Now and
then one of these flyers will deign to carry a single sleeper, but such is
the exception. The fast mail does not stop to quibble with such trifles as
passengers. It even turns its shoulders upon the express companies--they
have their own fast special trains across the continent.
The last of the mail-wagons has delivered its valuable load to the cars.
The final newspaper wagon comes dashing up to the platform--its horses
a-froth and its driver on the edge of profanity.
"Here's the firsts," he yells. "Big fire down the water-front and they
wanted to make the edition with it. We were three minutes late."
Three minutes late! Seventeen minutes ago the last of the smoking-hot
forms came from that newspaper's stereotyping rooms and here are the first
ten thousand copies of the morning's run--fresh and damp smelling of the
forest. Before the driver began his hurried explanation of delay, the
copies were being thrown into the last car. He had hardly finished before
a big bell, high-hung somewhere in the invisible blackness, speaks its one
brief note of authority; lanterns are raised alongside the full length of
the train--the seven big cars are softly getting into motion. And before
this train is fully in motion the newspaper's messengers are busy with the
papers that have been thrown in at the open door; before it has bumped its
way over the wide-spreading "throat" at the entrance of the terminal, they
are bringing the first semblance of order out of the miniature mountain of
newspapers piled high on the car floor.
Chaos, did we say? Well, hardly that. The circulation manager of the
metropolitan morning newspaper has been called a "field marshal of the
empire of print," and field marshals incline to order rather than to
chaos. It is less than seventeen minutes from the first of that torrent of
newspapers pouring from the hopper of the grinding press, yet here they
are, each in an accurate bundle of not more than two hundred and fifty
copies, and accurately tagged. The label of each bundle bears in big clear
letters the news company or dealer to whom it is consigned, the town, the
railroad and its connections. There is not much chance for errors here.
As the newspaper messengers begin to arrange their stock--the papers for
the nearest towns on top so that they may be most easily reached, to be
thrown off while it is still dusk, so that Mr. Early Riser may read his
favorite metropolitan journal as he sips his breakfast coffee--so are the
mail-clerks in the cars ahead bending to their tasks. Roundabout them are
rows of pouches held in iron frames, with their hungry throats held wide
open, and infinite racks of small pigeon-holes--the same kind that you
remember in the up-country post-offices. When the pouches first come into
the car they are opened and their contents "dumped-up," to use the
parlance of the service, upon the shelf-like tables that run the length of
the place. The next process is "facing-up"--bringing addressed sides of
all the matter uppermost for facility in distribution. And after that the
distribution itself--no easy matter when all the world is constantly
writing to all the world, and the criss-cross currents are all but
innumerable.
So come all classes of mail to these swift-flying cars--letters,
newspapers, packages, the specially protected registered mail,--and for
all of these classes the apparently endless sorting goes steadily forward,
while the train rounds sharp curves and sends the ordinarily sure-footed
clerks clutching handrails for balance, under the dead glow of acetylene,
holding each separate mail-piece for a fraction of a second--sometimes
longer if it be a "sticker" in the chirography or the detail of its
address--and then shooting it into the proper pigeon-hole or open-mouthed
pouch. Some of these cars are destined for cities or States or groups of
States--the wheels under one of them are not going to cease revolving for
any length of time until it stands on the long Mole, opposite San
Francisco, and the through pouches, with the British coat-of-arms and the
meaningful "G. R." stamped upon them, are being shipped aboard the
red-funnelled steamship which is to carry them on the last leg of their
long journey over two seas and a broad continent, from London to Hong
Kong.
These trains are no longer novel on the modern railroad. They are
established features of the train service. From New York City goes forward
one-sixth of all the mail matter originating in the United States. The
aggregate circulation of all the New York morning newspapers is somewhat
larger than the aggregate circulation of the morning newspapers of the
other cities of the country, so from New York there goes forth between
midnight and dawn a flotilla of special mail and newspaper trains. Two of
the fastest of these start from the Grand Central Station. The "Boston
Special" of the New York, New Haven & Hartford leaves that spacious
terminal at just 2:10 A. M., no matter what desperate excuses may be
telephoned at the last moment by some circulation manager who is
confronted by a disabled press, or some such disaster. It slips through
the suburban territory without halting--the nearby commuters are served
with their papers and their mail by the early morning locals. Bridgeport,
at 3:31 A. M., is the first halt; New Haven, at 3:52, the second. At New
Haven, the papers for Hartford, Springfield, and the whole Connecticut
valley country are thrown off. At New London, which is reached at 4:53 A.
M., go the papers for Norwich, Worcester, Newport, and New Bedford. One
more halt, at Providence, and the train, running as fast as the fastest of
New Haven flyers, is at the South Station, Boston--at just 7:20 o'clock. A
Boston & Maine flyer, taking mail and newspapers away up the coast through
three States, leaves the North Station at 8:01 A. M., and so there follows
a quick transfer of mail and newspapers through the twisting streets of
the Hub.
The other early morning flyer leaves the Grand Central at 3:05 o'clock,
and it makes its course over the main stem of the New York Central Lines.
It reaches Albany at 6:30 o'clock and not only distributes there for
Western Massachusetts and Vermont, the upper Hudson Valley and the Lake
Champlain territory north to Montreal, but overhauls a passenger train
that left New York a little after midnight. It continues its course
through the heart of the Empire State--reaching Syracuse at 10:05 A. M.
and Rochester at 11:47 A. M. At Buffalo, which is reached at 1:20 P. M.,
there are important connections for the West and Southwest, and the
Chicago letters in that grimy train are going out on the first delivery
from the Chicago post-office the next morning.
The Pennsylvania hauls two great trains--built up of mail sections from
its new terminal on Manhattan Island, which has a great post-office in
process of growth, built over a portion of its platform tracks, and
newspaper sections from the old Jersey terminal, which is still most
convenient to a majority of the metropolitan papers. The first of these
trains is bound for the South and the Southwest. It leaves New York at
2:20 A. M., passes Philadelphia at 4:25, and steams into Baltimore at 6:40
A. M. Another hour sees it in Washington and transferring its load to the
mail-trains that are about to start for the long journey to Atlanta and
New Orleans. A New Yorker sojourning for a part of the winter at Palm
Beach, Florida, can be sure of having his favorite Sunday paper not later
than Tuesday morning.
The second Pennsylvania train leaves thirty minutes later and follows the
main line of that much-travelled highway all the way to Pittsburgh, which
it reaches just at noon. Other railroads out of New York start fast
newspaper and mail trains just before dawn and combine regular passenger
facilities with them--the Lehigh Valley despatching a flyer at 2:00
o'clock from the old Pennsylvania terminal in Jersey City for the populous
northeastern corner of Pennsylvania and the so-called Southern Tier of New
York State. The Lackawanna reaches a somewhat similar territory by its
fast express, which leaves Hoboken at 2:30 o'clock.
A similar cluster of mail and newspaper flyers starts out of Chicago early
each morning--east over the Lake Shore, the Michigan Central, and the
Pennsylvania, south over the Monon and the Illinois Central, and west and
northwest over the Northwestern, the Rock Island, and the Santa Fe. Other
great cities follow the same programme in lesser scale--there are many
important fast-mail trains that make their departures from initial
terminals throughout all the daylight hours and late into the evening. A
regiment of mail-cars make their way over the face of the land on fast
through expresses of every sort. The postal service is a business of
magnitude within itself.
The Postmaster General's report for the year ending June 30, 1910, gives a
clear conception of its magnitude. He showed then that there were 176 full
railroad post-office lines, manned by 1,736 crews of 8,332 clerks. There
were also 1,392 compartment railroad post-office lines--lines in which a
portion of a baggage or smoking-car is partitioned for the sole use of the
postal service--manned by 4,085 crews of 5,407 clerks, 18 electric car
lines with 20 crews and 22 clerks, and 55 steamboat lines with 98 crews
and 86 clerks. Of the cars built for the exclusive use of the railroad
mail service, 1,114 were in use and 206 held in reserve, while 3,208 of
the compartment cars were in use, 559 of these being held in reserve. In
addition, the Post-office Department operates 25 trolley mail-cars.
Great progress has been made in the substitution of steel mail-cars for
wooden ones--a real step forward when one pauses to consider the dangerous
position in which the mail-cars are placed in most trains. The records of
the Post-office Department are filled with stories of heroism on the part
of mail-clerks in saving, both the extremely valuable merchandise that is
given to their care, and vastly more valuable human lives. The list of the
post-office employees who have met death while on duty in the railroad
mail service is not a short one.
But the railroads are coöperating with the Government in giving the
finest type of steel cars to its mail service,--sixty of these are already
in use on the Pennsylvania system,--for, as we stated at the outset of
this chapter, the transportation of Uncle Sam's mail is no slight function
of the modern railroad. The big operating men across the land are
constantly bending their heads with those of the post-office officials
toward the betterment of that transportation.