THE RAILROAD MARINE
STEAMSHIP LINES UNDER RAILROAD CONTROL--FLEET OF NEW YORK CENTRAL--
TUGS--RAILROAD CONNECTIONS AT NEW YORK HARBOR--HANDLING OF FREIGHT--
FERRY-BOATS--TUNNEL UNDER DETROIT RIVER--CAR-FERRIES AND LAKE ROUTES--
GREAT LAKES STEAMSHIP LINES UNDER RAILROAD OWNERSHIP.
In the beginning land transportation must have looked up in something
resembling fear and awe to water. We can picture the railroad of the
thirties as a slender but resourceful David facing the veritable Goliath
of water carriage. In earlier chapters of this book we have shown how the
canals, representing a distinct phase of water transportation, sought to
throttle the railroads at the beginning. But the modern railroad has no
fear of water rivalries, either upon the coast or inland. Just as the
first railroads were ofttimes timidly built as feeders or complements to
water routes, so to-day almost every inland water route is part of a
railroad--in operating fact if not in actual ownership. The tables have
been turned--the railroad finally dominates. Nine-tenths of all the great
water routes in and aroundabout the United States are more or less
directly owned and controlled by the railroads. They have become, in every
sense, corollaries to land transportation.
This is more distinctly shown in some sections of the land than in others.
For instance, up in New England, where the interests owning the New York,
New Haven & Hartford Railroad have accomplished direct or indirect control
of all but a comparatively few miles of the steam and electric railroads
in five great States, they have also acquired the steamship interests of
that district. The New Haven's original excursion into the steamboat
business was when it absorbed the Old Colony Railroad--almost a score of
years ago--in order to ensure its entrance into Boston. The Old Colony
owned a well-famed and highly prosperous steamboat line from Fall River,
Massachusetts, to New York City, part of its through New York-Boston
route. Eventually the New Haven acquired all the brisk and busy steamboat
lines which ran up the Sound from New York to several Connecticut
ports--Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, New London, and Stonington. Any
one of these lines was not, perhaps, so much of an acquisition in itself,
but all of them were potentials in a future rate situation that might
arise. It was good executive management to have these potentials under
firm control, and so the New Haven established water routes as a
recognized factor of its business--under the separate corporation title of
the New England Navigation Company. Once when a new company, under the
mellifluous title of the Joy Line, sought to injure its coastwise business
by establishing cut-rates from Providence to New York, the New Haven
placed two of its older boats in a rival and lower-priced service, and, by
means of its great resources, was able to bring the Joy Line into its
fold. Later, when the Enterprise Line tried a like programme, the New
Haven followed the same aggressive tactics and brought the Enterprise Line
to bankruptcy. These things are mentioned here in no spirit of criticism.
But they are the facts that make it impossible for really independent
lines of steamboats to run between New York and Providence for any great
length of time, despite ample docking facilities and a great free port at
each of these cities.
The Metropolitan Line tried to maintain an independent line between New
York and Boston with the two finest steamers ever placed in coastwise
service--the _Yale_ and the _Harvard_. One of these boats left each city
at five o'clock in the afternoon and performed the ocean voyage of 330
miles over the "outside route" in just fifteen hours--and with amazing
regularity. But the New Haven Railroad found it to its interest to control
the coasting lines around about New England, and so the _Yale_ and
_Harvard_ were last winter banished to the Pacific coast.
This is all part of the business of managing great railroad systems. For
similar reasons the Pennsylvania Railroad found it advisable to bring a
group of steamboat lines plying on Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries
under its control, the Harriman lines to reach out and establish ownership
of the lines plying up and down several thousand miles along the Pacific
coast--these are but a few instances out of many. As yet no large American
railroad has essayed to control a transatlantic line, although both the
Hill and the Harriman properties are interested in the transpacific
carrying business. The Canadian Pacific, however, has already
well-established lines across both of the great oceans--making a
continuous route under one management from Liverpool, England, to Hong
Kong, China. Moreover, it is now building four great steamships which are
to be finished simultaneously with the Panama Canal and which will ply
through it from New York direct to Hong Kong. The Canadian Northern has
also recently embarked in the transatlantic carrying business. The
Canadian Pacific and several of the large railroads of the northern part
of the United States maintain lines of sizable gross tonnage on the Great
Lakes--but of these, more in a little while.
[Illustration: A MODERN RAILROAD FREIGHT AND PASSENGER TERMINAL: THE
TERMINAL OF THE WEST SHORE RAILROAD AT WEEHAWKEN, OPPOSITE NEW YORK CITY]
[Illustration: HIGH-SPEED, DIRECT-CURRENT PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY
THE GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY FOR TERMINAL SERVICE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
AT THE GRAND CENTRAL STATION]
Even if a railroad is not engaged in the steamship business, as such, even
to the extent of one or two small steamboats on inland waters, it may
still possess a considerable harbor fleet,--wharves, and slips--that,
taken together, make a sizable aggregate. Every railroad that has any sort
of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or
two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will
protect itself by having its own wharves and landing-stages--even grain
elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic
in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation
routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet--ferries, scows,
lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. It means that the
railroad must pay attention to marine laws and marine customs.
* * * * *
When a railroad boasts of a terminal in such a city as Boston, New York,
Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco, its fleet of harbor craft is apt
to be quite a sizable navy. Take, for instance, the New York Central's
fleet in and around New York harbor. It consists of 269 vessels, divided
into the following classes: 9 ferry-boats, 22 tugs, 7 steam-lighters, 50
car-floats, 10 steam-hoist barges, 25 open barges, 6 scow barges, 105
covered barges, and 35 grain-boats. And out of all these barges, 10 are
further equipped for refrigerator use.
In such a fleet, eliminating of course the ferry-boats which have their
own peculiar uses, the tugs are almost the sole motive power. There is a
bit of poetry about them, too, even if they are short and stubby, ofttimes
poking their cushioned noses impertinently up against larger and far more
stately craft. But no captain, even though he walk the bridge of an
eight-hundred foot steamship, sneers at a tug. It takes eighteen of them
to place the new giant _Olympic_ in her wharf on the North River, and no
crack company of horsemen ever moved in more precise drill or better
coöperation than these noisy, punting, helping-hands of the harbor of New
York. For ocean ports are different from those along the lakes. A captain
sailing a five-thousand ton ship on fresh water would be ashamed to use a
tug at Detroit, or any other of the Great Lake ports, even where the
current runs almost like a mill-race, unless he was turning in a channel
whose width was but a wee bit more than the length of his ship. But
Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and Chicago do not have the tides--and
it is the tide that makes harbor navigation a finely specialized science
at the big ocean ports.
All of the big Atlantic ports save New York have abundant track facilities
alongside the piers, where berth the ships from half the world over. In
New York, the same geographical conditions that have gone to make her so
superb a port and given her so generous a harbor-frontage have blocked the
railroads in their efforts to reach all her piers with unbroken rails. So
the railroads entering that harbor have found it necessary to provide
themselves with such fleets as we have noticed as belonging to the New
York Central. For inland shippers seem to have a preference for sending
their east-bound export merchandise through New York, because of the
frequency of sailings from her wharves to half the recognized ports of the
world.
If you are a manufacturer--at Utica, N. Y., let us say--and you wished to
send a carload of your product to London, Eng., you would find that the
railroad definitely agrees to do certain things for you. On your minimum
basis of a carload lot it will place that carload at any pier in the
harbor of New York. Indeed, it would do a little more. If some of that
carload lot that starts down out of Utica is going to London, some more on
a different ship to Calcutta, and still some more on a tropic-bound liner
to South America, the railroad would make free delivery of your
consignment to the piers of these three ships. It limits, however, the
delivery of a carload lot to three different piers.
This sounds simple, perhaps, and, in reality, is not. For in a single day
of twenty-four hours there may arrive at Weehawken and Sixtieth Street,
Manhattan--the two great freight terminals of the rails of the New York
Central system at New York--from four to six hundred, eight hundred cars,
perhaps, filled with merchandise bound for half a hundred different
piers, along from forty to sixty miles of water-front.
Now you see the use of all this army of lighters and barges--stubby-nosed
craft, awkward craft, boats that have not even a single stanza of the
poetry of the sea written upon their contents. By night, by day, when an
imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it
tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter,
when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive
with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot's path is
fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of
mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. The
eight or ten great railroads that terminate in New York are pouring export
merchandise to all of her piers, while from those long sprawling
structures they are drawing up imported goods to go forward to every
corner of the land. And in addition to this there is the vast local
commerce of the City of New York, which, as we saw when we were
considering the freight terminals, back in Chapter VII, is no slight
matter of itself. But this traffic, as well as much of that of the great
interchange between the railroads terminating at New York, is handled most
effectively by the car-floats on each of which twelve to sixteen standard
box-cars may be loaded with great expedition.
But the clumsy barges and the lighters and the still clumsier car-floats
are of little use without the tugs, and these last are the quick couriers
of the harbor. Twenty of that New York Central fleet are kept in constant
use in the North and East Rivers, and along the harbor shores to Jersey
City, Bayonne, and the southern parts of Brooklyn. They do not lie idle,
save when they are finally forced to "lay up" for a little time for
repairs. And then a reserve tug is in service without delay.
Here is the modern economy of railroad equipment--even though this be the
part of the railroad that is afloat. A tug pulls up to a dock, its crews
are off almost before their "relief" is standing at its station, and
making sure that the craft is in as good order as they left it. While the
"relief" is finding its tired way toward home the tug is off again. Its
work is constant. Its work is not easy. It does not seem to be systematic
and yet it is--wonderfully systematic.
For here and there about the harbor the captains of these N. Y. C. tugs
get their orders--just as conductors of the trains upon the steel highways
get their clearance cards and yellow tissues. A half-dozen stations give
orders, and these are but the speaking stations of a single man who sits
before a telephone switchboard close by a narrow street of down-town
Manhattan and directs tug movements through the crowded harbor, just as
easily as a despatcher moves extra freights over a crowded stretch of
single-track line.
The traffic runs flood-high and the station men gossip of the whispered
complaints of the tug-crews, but the man at the switchboard only smiles. A
traffic solicitor who plies his heartbreaking work on the floor of the
near-by Produce Exchange comes over to him and says:
"I've promised Smith & Russell delivery of ten cars of flour at Pier 32,
East River, at seven o'clock to-morrow morning. We can't go back on them."
The man at the switchboard does not lose that smooth-set smile, even
though the loudly ticking clock, just above the plugs and cords, shows him
that it is already six o'clock of the evening of a day when the harbor
freight has run flood-high.
"All right," he laughs, "Smith & Russell can count upon us."
And the next moment he is ordering Tug Twenty-seven to go from the
Sixtieth Street pier over to Weehawken to get that small mountain-range of
flour-bags that the "huskies" have already begun to build on a
pier-floor, alongside of a string of dusty, grimy cars that have bumped
their way east from Minneapolis.
Perhaps you are interested in the personality of Tug Twenty-seven. Take
yourself away from the cool-witted despatcher and look down upon this
craft--the queen of a railroad pet marine. She is as resplendent in her
green and gold as any gentleman's yacht, and her crew even more proud of
her. She stands in the water, a mere 110 feet long and 24-1/2 feet beam,
but those wonderful shining engines in her heart can develop 1,200
horse-power--as much as many steamboats of three times her size. Her
watertube boilers can withstand a locomotive pressure of 185 pounds to the
square inch, she has all the accoutrements of coast liners--steam steering
gears and electric lights among them. No wonder that her captain waxes
eloquent about her.
Now ask him about what she can do. That he takes as personal achievement,
and these harbor men are a bashful lot. Still, you can worm it out of him,
and after a while you find that Tug Twenty-seven has just brought a
punt-nosed car-float, with sixteen loaded cars upon her rails, around from
Corlears Hook, through the press of shipping, and around the Battery where
cross-tides battle against one another and against craft of all sorts, up
to Weehawken "bridge" in forty minutes--which is not so very bad for a
ten-mile run through a congested harbor.
"Time counts," adds the captain. "If they had given me another twelve or
fifteen minutes I could have brought around two of the floats--put
together 'V' fashion and the Twenty-seven with her nose stuck up into the
'V'."
* * * * *
In the harbor of New York is a great cluster of ferry-boats operated to
overcome her barrier rivers by the several trunk-line railroads whose
systems terminate at a long water-jump from the congested Island of
Manhattan. To compete with railroads boasting terminals on Manhattan
Island itself, these lines have been compelled to equip and operate
extensive ferry fleets across both the East and the North Rivers. Across
the first of these streams operates the navy of the Long Island Railroad,
while across the Hudson ply in an intricate interlacing more than a dozen
ferry routes of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania,
Erie, Lackawanna, and the West Shore Railroads. The recent completion of
the New York-Jersey City-Newark routes of the Hudson tunnels, as well as
the inauguration of passenger traffic through both North and East River
tunnels to the new Pennsylvania terminal in Manhattan, has caused the
abandonment of two ferry routes and curtailment of service upon several
others. Tunnel-diggers and bridge-builders make havoc with ferry routes,
which must always remain liable to many delays because of fog, floating
ice, and such other adverse weather conditions.
Still the railroad ferries round about New York derive no small income
from the trucking service of a metropolitan city which has had to struggle
for many years against great intersecting rivers, and so they will
probably continue to be for many years interesting and picturesque
features of New York harbor.
But perhaps the most interesting of all the ferry routes of New York
harbor is the attenuated line from the New York, New Haven & Hartford
Railroad's waterside terminal at Port Morris in the Bronx, for ten miles
through the East River, Hell Gate, around the sharp turn and tides of
Corlears Hook and again of the Battery, and across the Hudson River to the
old terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City. Over this route
goes through traffic--freight and passenger--from New England to the South
and the Southwest. The freight-traffic is handled largely by car-floats in
charge of the busy puffing tugs, while the passenger traffic goes in
ferry-boats different from the others that ply in New York harbor.
For these ferry-boats are really nothing more than a bettered type of
car-float--a type equipped with powerful engines for self-propulsion.
Through passenger trains run each day and each night between Boston and
Baltimore and Washington, and these trains are handled between Port Morris
and Jersey City upon them. The familiar _Maryland_, which is operated
jointly by the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems upon this route,
will receive an entire passenger train of ordinary length, excepting, of
course, the locomotive, upon her great deck, which is, in reality, a
miniature railroad yard, equipped with two long parallel tracks that can
be quickly attached to the ferry-bridges at Port Morris and Jersey City.
The trip, with the loading and unloading of the train, is accomplished,
under favorable weather conditions, in about an hour.
It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England
to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down
a broad ship's deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New
York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the
run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to
seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two
greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. This
ferry is also finally threatened by the bridge-builders. As this is
written, workmen are already preparing the pier foundations for a great
railroad bridge that is to span the East River not far from Hell Gate, and
which is to give an unbroken line of rails from the New Haven's terminal
at Port Morris, through Long Island City, to the Pennsylvania's tunnels
and terminal in Manhattan Island.
So, also, have the tunnel-builders contrived to rob the through traveller
on the Michigan Central of the more or less thrilling water transfer from
Canada to the United States at Detroit. The Detroit River tunnel has
superseded one of the most important car-ferries in the country, but it
has given to the operating heads of the Michigan Central one of the very
shortest through routes from New York to Chicago and robbed them of one of
the fearful handicaps of their main line--the possibilities for constant
and exasperating delays to their through trains while being ferried across
the Detroit River.
Do not underestimate the possibilities of those delays. Within the past
ten years, the transport _Michigan_, plying from Detroit to Windsor, the
Canadian town directly opposite, and carrying a Chicago-Montreal flyer,
was stuck for ten hours in the ice, so near the slip that a long plank
would have almost reached from her deck to the wharf. That, in the lesser
form, has been the history of winter after winter at the Detroit ferry.
Shipbuilders have done their best to meet the obstacle by building
car-ferries of tremendous power, sometimes even equipping them with both
side-wheels and screws. But the real problem of possible delay can only be
solved there by tunnels, and it is expected that the Grand Trunk, the
Canadian Pacific, and the Wabash--which still use the car-ferries across
the Detroit River--will sooner or later either tunnel beneath it or
acquire trackage rights through the Michigan Central tubes.
The Detroit River is a narrow but important part of the tremendously
important water highway up the Great Lakes, and at every part of the whole
length of that highway the railroads have tried to break their way across.
It has not been found impossible to bridge the St. Lawrence or the Niagara
Rivers or the wide straits at Sault Ste. Marie, but there are other
points, even besides Detroit, that have as yet baffled the genius of the
bridge-builder. One of the most important of these is where Lake Michigan
forces its outlet into Lake Huron through the two peninsulas of the great
State that bears its name. To make the two parts of Michigan physically
one with unbroken rail will probably not be accomplished in many years.
In the meantime the stout and tremendously powerful ferry _Algomah_--built
so as to literally crush the ice down under her tremendous bows--plies
between Mackinac City, the Island of Mackinac, situated midstream, and St.
Ignace, on the north shore of the broad strait. Despite the fearful
severity of the winters in northern Michigan the _Algomah_ keeps that
important path open the year round--not only for herself but for the great
car-floats that follow in her wake.
What is possible at the Straits of Mackinac is also possible across the
widest part of any one of the Great Lakes--excepting always the
emotionless Superior. At least that is the way the railroad traffic men
have argued for many years, and so for these many years car-ferries have
plied successfully across the very hearts of three of the lakes. Of all
the chain, Lake Michigan offers the greatest natural obstruction to the
natural traffic movements of the land--its great length, stretching north
and south, forming an obstacle to through rail movements, and contributing
not a little to the railroad importance and the wealth of Chicago.
So it was that car-ferries were established many years ago across Lake
Michigan and are operated throughout the lake to-day--from Manitowoc,
Kewaunee, Milwaukee, Menominee, and Manistique on the west shore of the
lake, to Frankfort, Ludington, Northport, Grand Haven, St. Joseph, and
Benton Harbor upon the east shore. These vessels are of different
construction from the ferries that cross the narrow Detroit River. They
lack the low freeboard and the other typical ferry construction, and are,
instead, deep-gulled vessels, generally built of steel and always of great
structural strength.
"Like the river ferries," says James C. Mills, "they are ice-crushers, but
of greater size and power. During two or three of the winter months the
lakes are frozen in a solid sheet of ice for twenty and thirty miles from
the shores, and in extremely severe winters the ice-fields meet in
mid-lake. To keep a channel open in the depth of winter even for daily
passages back and forth, is a hazardous undertaking for the hardy
mariners. The frequent gales which sweep the lakes break up the fields
into ice-floes which, driven one way or another with great force, pile up
in huge banks, often in the direct course of the transports and as high as
their upper decks. At such times they free themselves only after repeated
buckings of the shifting mass of ice, sometimes miles in extent, by
running their stout prows up on the edge of the mass, breaking it down by
their sheer weight, and ploughing through the ragged, grinding blocks of
ice thus formed."[1]
[1] "Our Inland Seas," by James C. Mills, 1910.
Four tracks, running the full length of the ship, generally fill the main
deck of these trans-lake ships. The loading of the cars on to these tracks
is accomplished at the stern, the bow being built high and, as we have
just seen, somewhat after the fashion of an overhanging prow. The main
deck is completely roofed over with cabins and deck-houses, so that,
viewed from the rear, the ship seems to be an itinerant pair of railroad
tunnels, dark and gloomy. The upper decks are gay with the resources of
the marine architect--for the greater part of these boats offer
accommodations for passengers as well as for from eighteen to thirty
freight cars. These great ferries form valuable feeders to the Grand
Trunk, the Pere Marquette, the Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids & Indiana, and
some minor routes crossing Michigan.
Similarly, car-ferries crossing Lake Erie from Cleveland to Port Stanley
are considerable factors both in general merchandise and in the coal
trade. Another Lake Erie route of heavy tonnage extends from Ashtabula,
Ohio, to Port Burwell, Ontario. Within the last few years a car-ferry has
been established across Lake Ontario, from Charlotte--which is the port of
Rochester, N. Y.--to Coburg on the Canadian side, which has already
developed for itself a considerable traffic.
But the car-ferries, extensive as they are, form but a small portion of
the railroad interests upon the waters of the Great Lakes. Almost all of
the great lines through those much-travelled waters are the property of
some railroad system whose rails touch one or more of their terminals.
Thus the Northern Steamship Company, running from Buffalo to Chicago and
Duluth, touches the rails of its parent company, the Great Northern
Railroad, at this last port. The Erie & Western Transportation
Company--popularly known as the Anchor Line--also running from Buffalo to
Duluth, is a Pennsylvania property. Both of these lines are operated for
passenger service, as well as freight. The New York Central and the Erie
cover the same territory with exclusively freight routes. The Rutland
Railroad has a line all the way from its western terminal at Ogdensburg,
on the St. Lawrence River, to Chicago. The Canadian Pacific and the Grand
Trunk operate important lines through Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. Even
a small road, like the Algomah Central, has its own freight and passenger
steamboats running south from the Soo as far as Cleveland, Ohio. It is a
pretty poor line with Great Lakes terminals that cannot boast some sort of
steamship service of its own.
In the development of the coastwise and the inland waterways of the United
States, the railroad may be doing the nation a far greater service than it
imagines. For the general trend of railroad expansion in the country
to-day seems to be toward a development of the auxiliary water-routes
rather than toward their curtailment. The railroad has finally realized
that some coarse commodities can be carried far more economically by water
than by rail. It is to-day seeking to avail itself of that acquired
knowledge. If competing and feeding trolley lines are good things for
railroads to own--and the present-day judgment seems to be that they
are--the same rule holds doubly good in regard to both competing and
feeding water-routes.