THE MODERN RAILROAD

Ready for the day’s run

THE
MODERN RAILROAD

BY
EDWARD HUNGERFORD
AUTHOR OF “LITTLE CORKY,” “THE MAN WHO STOLE A
RAILROAD,” ETC.

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911

Copyright
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911

Published November, 1911
Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London, England

PRESS OF THE VAIL COMPANY
COSHOCTON, U. S. A.

TO MY FATHER
IN RECOGNITION OF HIS
INTEREST AND APPRECIATION
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED

[Pg vii]

To bring to the great lay mind some slight idea of the intricacy and the involved detail of railroad operation is the purpose of this book. Of the intricacies and involved details of railroad finance and railroad politics; of the quarrels between the railroads, the organizations of their employees, the governmental commissions, or the shippers, it says little or nothing. These difficult and pertinent questions have been and still are being competently discussed by other writers.

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors and publishers of Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Outing in permitting the introduction into this work of portions or entire articles which he has written for them in the past. He would also feel remiss if he did not publish his sincere acknowledgments to “The American Railway,” a compilation from Scribner’s Magazine, published in 1887, Mr. Logan G. McPherson’s “The Workings of the Railroad,” Mr. C. F. Carter’s “When Railroads Were New,” and Mr. Frank H. Spearman’s “The Strategy of Great Railroads.” Out of a sizable reference library of railroad works, these volumes were the most helpful to him in the preparation of certain chapters of this book.

E. H.

Brooklyn, New York,
August 1, 1911.

[Pg viii]

[Pg ix]

CONTENTS

[Pg xv]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg xxi]

The railroad is a monster. His feet are dipped into the navigable seas, and his many arms reach into the uplands. His fingers clutch the treasures of the hills—coal, iron, timber—all the wealth of Mother Earth. His busy hands touch the broad prairies of corn, wheat, fruits—the yearly produce of the land. With ceaseless activity he brings the raw material that it may be made into the finished. He centralizes industry. He fills the ships that sail the seas. He brings the remote town in quick touch with the busy city. He stimulates life. He makes life.

His arms stretch through the towns and over the land. His steel muscles reach across great rivers and deep valleys, his tireless hands have long since burrowed their way through God’s eternal hills. He is here, there, everywhere. His great life is part and parcel of the great life of the nation.

He reaches an arm into an unknown country, and it is known! Great tracts of land that were untraversed become farms; hillsides yield up their mineral treasure; a busy town springs into life where there was no habitation of man a little time before, and the town becomes a city. Commerce is born. The railroad bids death and stagnation begone. It creates. It reaches forth with its life, and life is born.

The railroad is life itself!

[Pg 1]

THE MODERN RAILROAD

THE RAILROADS AND THEIR BEGINNINGS

Fifteen or twenty great railroad systems are the overland carriers of the United States. Measured by corporations, known by a vast variety of differing names, there are many, many more than these. But this great number is reduced, through common ownership or through a common purpose in operation, to less than a score of transportation organisms, each with its own field, its own purposes, and its own ambitions.

The greater number of these railroads reach from east to west, and so follow the natural lines of traffic within the country. Two or three systems—such as the Illinois Central and the Delaware & Hudson—run at variance with this natural trend, and may be classed as cross-country routes. A few properties have no long-reaching routes, but derive their incomes from the transportation business of a comparatively small exclusive territory, as the Boston & Maine in Northern New England, the New Haven in Southern New England, both of them recently brought under a more or less direct single control, and the Long Island. Still other properties find their greatest revenue in bringing[Pg 2] anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania mountains to the seaboard, and among these are the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Philadelphia & Reading systems.

The very great railroads of America are the east and west lines. These break themselves quite naturally into two divisions—one group east of the Mississippi River, the other west of that stream. The easterly group aim to find an eastern terminal in and about New York. Their western arms reach Chicago and St. Louis, where the other group of transcontinentals begin.

Giants among these eastern roads are the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Of lesser size, but still ranking as great railroads within this territory are the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Erie. Several of the anthracite roads enjoy through connections to Chicago and St. Louis, breaking at Buffalo as an interchange point, about half way between New York and Chicago. There are important roads in the South, reaching between Gulf points and New York and taking care of the traffic of the centres of the section, now rapidly increasing its industrial importance.

The western group of transcontinental routes are the giants in point of mileage. The eastern roads, serving a closely-built country, carry an almost incredible tonnage; but the long, gaunt western lines are reaching into a country that has its to-morrow still ahead. Of these, the so-called Harriman lines—the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific—occupy the centre of the country, and reach from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The Santa Fe and the Gould roads share this territory.

To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of railroads, the Burlington, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific, together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther north Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway, another approaching completion in[Pg 3] the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The “Grangers” (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that occupy the eastern end of this western territory,—the St. Paul, the Gould lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island—are just now showing pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade in its infancy. The first two of these have already laid their rails over the great slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building of railroads in the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the present time.

The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great systems, it may be well to go back into the past, to examine the eighty years that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are illuminating. They tell with precise accuracy the development of American transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only a few brief pages, our review of them must be cursory.

When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America firmly established as a nation, the people began to give earnest attention to internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for development; but with an independent nation all was very different. The United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to develop that wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the first that it must depend almost wholly on transportation facilities. To appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at the beginning of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars at Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that seaport from Wheeling; so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar a barrel for the Baltimore market. With a better form of transportation it would cost a dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to Baltimore, making the price[Pg 4] of the commodity at the first of these points under transit facilities four dollars a barrel. It did not take much of that sort of reasoning to make the States appreciate from the very first that a great effort must be made toward development. That effort, having been made, brought its own reward.

The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal works. Canals had already proved their success in England and within Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States established their value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these were built in New England before the Revolution. After the close of that conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the State of New York in planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo—from Atlantic tidewater to the navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises along the entire seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles, and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the outset. Canals were also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the success of the earliest of these ditches was a great encouragement to other investments of the sort, even where there existed far less necessity for their construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a little time.

The invention of the steamboat just a century ago was an incentive indirectly to canal growth but there were other things that halted the minds of farsighted and conservative men. Canals were fearfully expensive things; likewise, they were delicate works, in need of constant and expensive repairs to keep them in order. Moreover, there were many winter months in which they were frozen and useless. It was quite clear to these farsighted men from the outset that the canal was not the real solution of the transportation problem upon which rested the internal development of the United States.

[Pg 5]They turned their attention to roads. But, while roads were comparatively easy to maintain and were possible routes of communication the entire year round, they could not begin to compare with the canals in point of tonnage capacity, because of the limitations of the drawing power of animals. Some visionary souls experimented with sail wagons, but of course with no practical results.

At this time there came distinct rumors from across the sea of a new transportation method in England—the railroad. The English railroads were crude affairs built to handle the products of the collieries in the northeast corner of the country, to bring the coal down to the docks. But there came more rumors—of a young engineer, one Stephenson, who had perfected some sort of a steam wagon that would run on rails—a locomotive he called it,—and there was to be one of these railroads built from Stockton to Darlington to carry passengers and also freight. These reports were of vast interest to the earnest men who were trying to solve this perplexing problem of internal transportation. Some of them, who owned collieries up in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania and who were concerned with the proposition of getting their product to tidewater, were particularly interested. These gentlemen were called the Delaware & Hudson Company, and they had already accomplished much in building a hundred miles of canal from Honesdale, an interior town, across a mountainous land to Kingston on the navigable Hudson River. But the canal, considered a monumental work in its day, solved only a part of the problem. There still remained the stiff ridge of the Moosic Mountain that no canal work might ever possibly climb.

To the Delaware & Hudson Company, then, the railroad proposition was of absorbing interest, of sufficient interest to warrant it in sending Horatio Allen, one of the canal engineers, all the way to England for investigation and report. Allen was filled with the enthusiasm of[Pg 6] youth. He went prepared to look into a new era in transportation.

In the meantime other railroad projects were also under way in the country, short and crude affairs though they were. As early as 1807 Silas Whitney built a short line on Beacon Hill, Boston, which is accredited as being the first American railroad. It was a simple affair with an inclined plane which was used to handle brick; and it is said that it was preceded twelve years by an even more crude tramway, built for the same purpose. Another early short length of railroad was built by Thomas Leiper at his quarry in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It has its chief interest from the fact that it was designed by John Thomson, father of J. Edgar Thomson, who became at a much later day president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and who is known as one of the master minds in American transportation progress. Similar records remain of the existence of a short line near Richmond, Va., built to carry supplies to a powder mill, and other lines at Bear Creek Furnace, Pennsylvania, and at Nashua, N. H. But the only one of these roads that seems to have attained a lasting distinction was one built by Gridley Bryant in 1826 to carry granite for the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries at Quincy, Mass., to the docks four miles distant. This road was built of heavy wooden rails attached in a substantial way to stone sleepers imbedded in the earth. It attained considerable distinction and became of such general interest that a public house was opened alongside its rails to accommodate sightseers from afar who came to see it. This railroad continued in service for more than a quarter of a century.

But the motive power of all these railroads was the horse; and it was patent from the outset that the horse had neither the staying nor the hauling powers to make him a real factor in the railroad situation. So when Horatio Allen returned to New York from England in[Pg 7] January, 1829, with glowing accounts of the success of the English railroads, he found the progressive men of the Delaware & Hudson anxiously awaiting an inspection of the Stourbridge Lion, the first of four locomotives purchased by Allen for importation into the United States. Three of these machines were from the works of Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge; the fourth was the creation of Stephenson’s master hand. The Lion arrived in May of that year, and after having been set up on blocks and fired for the benefit of a group of scientific men in New York it was shipped by river and canal to Honesdale.

Allen placed the Stourbridge Lion—which resembled a giant grasshopper with its mass of exterior valves, and joints—on the crude wooden track of the railroad, which extended over the mountain to Carbondale, seventeen miles distant. A few days later—the ninth of August, to be exact—he ran the Lion, the first turning of an engine wheel upon American soil. Details of that scene have come easily down to to-day. The track was built of heavy hemlock stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quarter inches wide and one-half an inch thick were spiked. The engine weighed seven tons, instead of three tons, as had been expected. It so happened that the rails had become slightly warped just above the terminal of the railroad, where the track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek on a bending trestle. Allen had been warned against this trestle and his only response was to call for passengers upon the initial ride. No one accepted. There was a precious Pennsylvania regard shown for the safety of one’s neck. So, after running the engine up and down the coal dock for a few minutes, Allen waved good-bye to the crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed away from the village around the abrupt curve and over the trembling trestle at a rate of ten miles an hour. The crowd which had expected to see the engine derailed, broke into resounding[Pg 8] cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive in the United States had served to prove its worth.

The career of the Stourbridge Lion was short lived. It hauled coal cars for a little time at Honesdale; but it was too big an engine for so slight a railroad, and it was soon dismantled. Its boiler continued to serve the Delaware & Hudson Company for many years at its shops on the hillside above Carbondale. The fate of the three other imported English locomotives remains a mystery. They were brought to New York and stored, eventually to find their way to the scrap heap in some unknown fashion.

Mr. Allen held no short-lived career. His experiments with the locomotive ranked him as a railroad engineer of the highest class, and before the year 1829 closed he was made chief engineer of what was at first known as the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, and afterwards as the South Carolina Railroad. This was an ambitious project, designed to connect the old Carolina seaport with the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles distant. It achieved its greatest fame as the railroad which first operated a locomotive of American manufacture.

This engine, called the Best Friend of Charleston, was built at the West Point Foundry in New York City and was shipped to Charleston in the Fall of 1830. It was a crude affair, and on its trial trip, on November 2, of that year, it sprung a wheel out of shape and became derailed. Still it was a beginning; and after the wheels had been put in good shape it entered into regular service, which was more than the Stourbridge Lion had ever done. It could haul four or five cars with forty or fifty passengers at a speed of from fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, so the Charleston & Hamburg became the first of our steam railroads with a regular passenger service. A little later, a bigger and better engine, also of[Pg 9] American manufacture and called the West Point, was sent down from New York.

Word of these early railroad experiments travelled across the country as if by some magic predecessor of the telegraph. Other railroad projects found themselves under way. Another colliery railroad, a marvellous thing of planes and gravity descents, was built at Mauch Chunk in the Lehigh Valley, and this stout old road is in use to-day as a passenger-carrier.

But it was already seen that the future of the railroad was not to be limited to quarries or collieries. Up in New England the railroad fever had taken hold with force; and in 1831, construction was begun on the Boston & Lowell Railroad. This line was analogous to the Manchester & Liverpool, which proved itself from the beginning a tremendous money-earner. Boston, a seaport of sixty thousand inhabitants was to be linked with Lowell, then possessing but six thousand inhabitants. Still, even in those days, Lowell had developed to a point that saw fifteen thousand tons of freight and thirty-seven thousand passengers handled between the two cities over the Middlesex Canal in 1829.

Then there developed the first of a new sort of antagonism that the railroad was to face. The owners of the canals were keen-sighted enough to discover a dangerous new antagonist in the railroads. They protested to the Legislature that their charter gave them a monopoly of the carrying privileges between Boston and Lowell, and for two years they were able to strangle the ambitions of the proposed railroad. This fight was a type of other battles that were to follow between the canals and the railroads. The various lines that reached across New York State from Albany to Buffalo, paralleling the Erie Canal, were once prohibited from carrying freight, for fear that the canal’s supremacy as a carrier might be disturbed. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, struggling to[Pg 10] blaze a path toward the West, was for a long time halted by the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which proposed to hold to its monopoly of the valley of the Potomac.

The Boston & Lowell, however, conquered its obstacles and was finally opened to traffic, June 26, 1835. Within a few months similar lines reaching from Boston to Worcester on the west, and Providence on the south had also been opened. By 1839 Boston & Worcester had been extended through to Springfield on the Connecticut River, where it connected with the Western Railroad, extending over the Berkshires to Greenbush, opposite Albany. The Providence Road was rapidly extended through to Stonington, Connecticut. From that point fast steamboats were operated through to New York, and a quick line of communication was established between Boston and New York. Before that time the fastest route between these two cities had been by steamboat to Norwich, then by coach over the post-road up to Boston. Norwich saw the railroad take away its supremacy in the through traffic. Finally it awoke to its necessity, and arranged to build a railroad to reach the existing line at Providence.

Between New York and Philadelphia railroad communication came quickly into being, the first route opened being the Camden & Amboy, which terminated at the end of a long ferry ride from New York. Even after more direct routes had been established and the Delaware crossed at Trenton, it was many years before the trains ran direct from Jersey City into the heart of the Quaker City. The cars from New York used to stop at Tacony, considerably above the city and there was still a steamboat ride down the river.

The railroad route to Baltimore was only a partial one. A steamboat took the traveller to New Castle, Delaware, where a short pioneer railroad crossed to French Town, Maryland. After that there was another long steamboat ride down the flat reaches of the Chesapeake[Pg 11] Bay before Baltimore was finally reached. A little later there developed an all-rail route between Philadelphia and Baltimore although not upon the line of the present most direct route.

From Philadelphia an early double-track railroad extended west to Columbia, upon the Susquehanna River. An early route extended due north from Baltimore to York, and then to Harrisburg; the parent stem of what afterwards became the Northern Central. A branch from this line was extended through to Columbia, and the New Castle and French Town route lost popularity.

But the Columbia and Philadelphia route was destined to more important things than merely affording an all-rail route to Baltimore. At Columbia it connected with the important Pennsylvania State system of internal canals and railroads, affording a direct line of communication with Pittsburgh and the headwaters of the Ohio River.

This was accomplished by use of a canal through to Hollidaysburgh upon the east slope of the Alleghanies, and the well-famed Alleghany Portage Railroad over the summit of those mountains to Johnstown, where another canal reached down into Pittsburgh and enjoyed unexampled prosperity from 1834 to 1854. The Alleghany Portage railroad was a solidly constructed affair and its rails after the fashion of almost all railroads of that day were laid upon stone sleepers, rows of which may still be seen where the long-since abandoned railroad found its path across the mountains. The Portage Railroad was operated by the most elaborate system of inclined planes ever put to service within the United States; one has only to turn to the pages of Dickens’s “American Notes” to read:

The Portage Railroad was the first to surmount the Alleghanies although in course of time its elaborate system of planes disappeared, as they disappeared elsewhere, under the development of the locomotive.

An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route of communication across the Keystone State, which was afterwards to develop into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of the enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was supposedly free to use its rails for the hauling of his produce in his own cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that of an improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in 1834, the horse-teams of private freight haulers alternated upon the tracks between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses hauling a four-wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive fretting along for hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the Philadelphia & Columbia—the name of the road had been reversed—and in 1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly organized Pennsylvania Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route from Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful Horse Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel, through to Pittsburgh; it had created its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany Portage Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies had been organized to control freight-carrying upon the tracks of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People’s line, the other[Pg 13] the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines, which in recent years have become so vexed a problem to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America’s mightiest systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just so much as a passenger carrier.

Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the American built locomotive DeWitt Clinton, when the railroad fever took hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of ’37 was a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was a reality.

[Pg 14]Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of eminent draymen, ’bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city has always stimulated local pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a bitter war to prevent the Lake Shore Railroad from making its gauge uniform through that city and abandoning a time-honored transfer of passengers and freight there.

But there seems to be no stopping of the hand of ultimate destiny in railroading. The little weak roads across the Empire State were first gathered into the powerful New York Central, and after a time they were permitted to carry freight, the privilege denied them a long time because of the power of the Erie Canal. After a little longer time there was a great bridge built across the Hudson River at Albany, and soon after the close of the Civil War shrewd old Commodore Vanderbilt brought the railroad that had been built up the east shore of the Hudson, his pet New York & Harlem, and the merged chain of railroads across the State, into the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, his great lifework. That system spread itself steadily. It built a new short line from Syracuse to Rochester, another from Batavia to Buffalo. It absorbed and it consolidated; gradually it sent its tentacles over the entire imperial strength of New York State.

[Pg 15]

THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD

All the railroad projects already related were timid projects in the beginning, with hardly a thought of ultimate greatness. Yet there were men, even in the earliest days of railroading, whose minds winged to great enterprises, whose dreams were empire-wide. Of such men was the Baltimore & Ohio born.

Baltimore, like Philadelphia, had greedily watched the success of the Erie Canal upon its completion, and noted with alarm its possible effects upon its own wharves. Philadelphia, with the wealth of the great State of Pennsylvania behind, had sought to protect herself by the construction of the long links of canal and railroad to Pittsburgh, of which you have already read. But Baltimore had no great State to call to her support. She must look to herself for strength. Out of her eminent necessity for self-preservation came men of the strength and the fibre to meet the emergency. Baltimore might have retreated from the situation, as some of the New England towns had retreated from it, and become a somnolent reminiscence of a prosperous Colonial seaport. She did nothing of the sort. Instead she made herself the terminal and[Pg 16] inspiration of a great railroad, laid the foundations of a great and lasting growth.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was born February 12, 1827. On the evening of that day, a little group of citizens of the sturdy old Southern metropolis gathered at the house of George Brown. Mr. Brown together with Philip E. Thomas, a distinguished merchant and philanthropist of Baltimore, had been making investigation into the possibilities of railroads. The fact that the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was already well advanced in construction, would have its eastern terminus at the Potomac River, near Washington, brought no comfort to the merchants of Baltimore. Wonder not then, that the stern old traders of that city assembled to consider “the best means of restoring to the city of Baltimore that portion of the western trade which has lately been diverted from it by the introduction of steam navigation and other causes.” From that February day to this the corporate title of the Baltimore & Ohio has been unchanged, despite the career of the most extreme vicissitudes—long years of shadows that were almost complete despair, other years that were brilliant with success.

It was decided at the outset that the commercial supremacy of Baltimore rested on her conquest of the Appalachian Mountains, of her reaching by an easy artificial highway the almost limitless waterways of the West that linked themselves with the navigable Ohio. But for the beginning it was agreed that Cumberland, long an important point on the well-famed National Highway, and even then a centre in the coal traffic, was a far enough distant goal to be worthy of the most ambitious enterprise. Indeed a long cutting through a hill in the first section of the road proved a serious financial obstacle to the directors of the struggling railroad. But these last were men who persevered. They started to lay their track for the thirteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills on July 4, 1828. That occasion was honored by an old-time[Pg 17] celebration in which the chief figure was Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, who laid the first stone of the new line. After his services were finished he said to a friend:

“I consider this among the most important things of my life, second only to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.” Of that act President Hadley, of Yale, has written: “One man’s life formed the connecting link between the political revolution of the one century and the industrial revolution of the other.”

No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the directors found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise was then so unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark. Even the construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first planned to use wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted upon stone sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track was obviously wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the traffic was at all sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden sleepers.

But the track was the least of the company’s problems. It had gone ahead to build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent motive-power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the question for hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance. The Baltimore & Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car which was carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.

Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the[Pg 18] struggling little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from Baltimore. He came to the aid of its directors in their problem of motive-power.

That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a locomotive around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York, bought an engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car—not larger than a hand-car, geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief problem of the B. & O. His little engine—the Tom Thumb—was a primitive enough affair, but it pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who were pinning their entire faith to their railroad project.

Two years after the beginning of the work, “brigades” of horse-cars were in regular service to Ellicott’s Mills; by the first of December, 1831, trains—steam-drawn—ran through to Frederick, Md.; five months later, to a day, they had reached Point of Rocks on the Potomac, seventy miles from Baltimore. At Point of Rocks the road was halted for a long time. The power of the powerful Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which had been great enough to keep State or national grants from struggling railroads, was raised to defend its claim to a monopoly of the Potomac Valley, by right of priority. This right was sustained in the courts, and the railroad held back two years, until it could buy a compromise.

In 1835, a highly profitable branch was opened to Washington, while early in the following year, trains were running through to Harpers Ferry, at the mouth of the Shenandoah.

During that same Summer of 1835, definite steps were taken toward the extension of the railroad to Pittsburgh, as well as Wheeling. But it was three years later before the struggling company was ready to make a surveying reconnaissance of these extensions of the road. All through that time actual construction work was slowly but quite surely progressing westward from Harpers Ferry, [Pg 19]and on November 5, 1842, trains entered Cumberland, the one-time objective point of the enterprise.

An early locomotive built by William Norris for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad

The historic “John Bull” of the Camden & Amboy Railroad—and its train

A heavy-grade type of locomotive built for the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1864. Its flaring
stack was typical of those years

But beyond Cumberland the road gradually left the comfortable valley of the Potomac, and these early railroad builders found themselves confronted with new difficulties. To build a railroad across the range of the Appalachians, with the primitive methods and machinery of those days was no simple task. For nine years the construction work dragged. In 1851 the line had only been finished to Piedmont, twenty-nine miles west of Cumberland, and its builders were well-nigh discouraged. Let us quote from the ancient history of the B. & O., from which we derive these facts, in an exact paragraph:

In October, 1852, it was found that there had been expended for construction west of Cumberland, $7,217,732.51. But the road was going ahead once more. Its Board had dug deep into their pockets and the commercial crisis that hovered over Baltimore was passed. Two years later the road entered Wheeling, and its corporate title was no longer a misnomer.

A little later, a more direct line was built to Parkersburg, West Virginia, and direct connection entered with the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, which reached St. Louis. The railroad was beginning to feel its way out across the land.

War between North and South had been declared before the long delayed extension to Pittsburgh was finished. In that time a real master-hand had come to the Baltimore & Ohio. In its early days the names of Philip E. Thomas, Peter Cooper, Ross Winans, and B. H. Latrobe[Pg 20] were indissolubly linked with this pioneer railroad; in its second era John W. Garrett gave brilliancy to its administration. Even before, as well as throughout the four trying years of the war, when the road’s tracks were being repeatedly torn up and its bridges burned, Mr. Garrett was laying down his masterly policy of expansion. It was a discouraging beginning that confronted him. The two expensive extensions to the Ohio River had been a severe drain on the company’s treasury, traffic was at low ebb, the great financial panic of 1857 had been hard to surmount.

But Mr. Garrett was one of the first of American railroaders to see that a trunk-line should start at the seaboard and end at Chicago or the Mississippi. He pushed his line to Pittsburgh, to Cleveland, to Sandusky, to Chicago. It began to reach new and growing traffic centres. The Baltimore & Ohio entered upon an era of magnificent prosperity.

The first cloud upon that era came in the early seventies, when its powerful rival, the Pennsylvania, secured control of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore, the B. & O.’s connecting link on its immensely profitable through route from New York to Washington. Pennsylvania interests tunnelled for long miles through the rocky foundations of Baltimore, purchased an independent line to Washington—the Baltimore & Potomac—and the B. & O. found itself deprived of its best congested traffic district. For eleven years it was unable to retaliate, though not a soul believed the Baltimore & Ohio to be other than a splendid, conservative property. It owned its own sleeping-car company, its own express company, its own telegraph company. The name of Garrett was behind it. Logan G. McPherson says:

John W. Garrett died in 1884, and was succeeded in the presidency by his son Robert Garrett, who announced himself ready to continue a policy of expansion. The younger Garrett sought to regain an entrance for his traffic to New York. To that end he built a line into Philadelphia and prepared to strike across the State of New Jersey. He failed in that end by the failure of one of his confidential aides; the line that he had counted on for entrance into the American metropolis was snapped up by his greatest rival just as his own fingers were almost upon it. Later the B. & O. was permitted a trackage entrance into Jersey City, but the terms of that entrance were so stringent as to mean a practical surrender upon its part.

If Baltimore & Ohio had won that battle, a different story might have been chronicled. As it was, it stood a loser in a fearfully expensive fight; the English investors in the property became investigators—of a sudden the bottom dropped out of things. The stock went slipping down as only a mob-chased stock in Wall Street can drop; the road that had been the pride of Baltimore became, for the moment, her shame. It was shown, upon investigation, that the road had long gone upon a slender standing: millions of dollars that should actually have been charged to loss had been charged against its capital and included in the surplus. Ten years after Mr. Garrett’s death the road found itself in even more bitter straits. It was a laughing stock and a reproach among railroad men. Its profitable side-properties—the sleeping-car company, the express company, the telegraph company,—the first two of which should never be permitted to go outside of the control of any really great railroad company—had been sold, one after another, in attempts to save the day of reckoning. Just before the Chicago Fair the road reached[Pg 22] low-water mark. Its passenger cars were weather-beaten and ravaged almost beyond hope of paint-shops; it was sometimes necessary to hold outgoing trains in the famous old Camden station at Baltimore, until the lamps and drinking glasses could be secured from some incoming train. In that day of low-water mark it was actually and seriously proposed to abandon the passenger service of the road!

Out of that chaos came the B. & O. of to-day, a substantial and well-managed railroad property. Mr. Garrett was the first of the railroaders to construct a single property from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi; John F. Cowan, L. F. Loree, Oscar G. Murray, and Daniel Willard have been his successors in the revamping of the B. & O., eliminating its costly grades, enlarging yard and terminal facilities, and making the historic road a carrier of the first class.

The history of the Erie Railroad is hardly less dramatic than that of the Baltimore & Ohio; its financial disasters were not owing to the errors that come of crass stupidity. For the Erie did its good part in the making of railroad law. Built and operated in the earliest railroad days as a single enterprise through the southern tier of counties of New York State from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, while the roads to the north that were eventually to be welded by Commodore Vanderbilt into the great New York Central were still quarrelling among themselves, it was wrecked time and time again by unscrupulous schemes of high finance. It was made to wear mill-stones in the shape of outrageous bonded indebtednesses that acted as a fearful handicap for many years and prevented a remarkably well located property from standing to-day as the peer of the Pennsylvania or of the New York Central. The story of these outrages has been told and retold—they are integral parts of the financial history of the country. Suffice it to say here and now that the Erie[Pg 23] has been operated with more or less success by no less than four struggling corporations; that it has never come closer to achieving success than under its present president, F. D. Underwood; and that no one save those who have stood close to Underwood has known or appreciated the heritage of handicap that was given to him to shoulder. For it has been part of our railroad principle in this country—a mighty sad part, too—that no matter how villainously stocks and bonds may have been issued at any time—only to bring failure swiftly and inevitably,—such bogus paper has always been protected in reorganization. A railroad which becomes bankrupt cannot be abandoned. That has been done only in rare cases. Even the Baltimore & Ohio, at the end of its rope less than twenty years ago, was not permitted to abandon its passenger service. It must pull itself up out of the difficulties, and—in America at least—it must pull its trashy paper up too, in order that no holder of such paper may be unprotected. The paper can no more be abandoned than the right-of-way. The result is seen in railroads staggering under vast and questionable capitalization (there is no cleaning of the slate); but the sins of those that have gone before are truly visited upon the third and the fourth generation, as well as upon the poor humans who, under such burdens, are trying to operate a railroad property.

From the beginning the story of Erie has been a story of difficulties. The original scheme of building a New York railroad from Piermont-on-Hudson to Dunkirk on Lake Erie—some 450 miles—seems in the face of the resources of the State at that time and the engineering difficulties to be solved, almost quixotic. But the road was built step by step, section by section, until in May, 1851, a triumphal first train was operated over its entire length. President Fillmore was the guest of honor on the train, but shared attention with Daniel Webster on the trip. Webster, in order that he might see the country, insisted on making the entire tedious journey in a rocking-chair,[Pg 24] which was lashed upon a flat-car. Another flat-car was occupied by a railroad officer who was designated to receive the flags. C. F. Carter, in his interesting sketch on the early days of the Erie, writes:

Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line, built for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of the road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days. It was only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his message like a letter, beginning with “Dear sir” and ending with “Yours truly.” The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast train rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the right-of-way over those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on single-track lines were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a train was waiting for another coming in an opposite direction, and the train came not after an hour, the first train proceeded forward “under flag.” That meant that a man, walking with a flag in his hand preceded the train to protect it. The locomotive and its train of cars necessarily proceeded at snail’s pace.

It was not so very long after that observation-car trip[Pg 25] that Daniel Webster took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie’s superintendent, Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of the road. The train on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound express at Turner’s. After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing the opposing train, Minot was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed up the line fourteen miles to Goshen to hold that west-bound train until he should arrive there. He then ordered his train-crew to proceed. They rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had too much regard for his own precious neck to break the time-card rules, even under the superintendent’s orders. So finally Minot took charge of the engine himself, while Lewis cautiously seated himself in the last seat of the last car and awaited the worst.

It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had received the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it had not arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to reach Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By the use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains by telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early railroads.

At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief that the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, “some two hundred thousand dollars in a year,” and his neighbors laughed at him for his extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months’ operation of the road the receipts—mostly from freight—were $1,755,285.

To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not yet been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of scheming; the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the monumental tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property—a[Pg 26] property with possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The present management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen the future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its lines for the full development of the property as a carrier of goods, rather than of through passengers.

The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the beginning, the different roads—such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, and New York Central—were being pushed west over the Alleghany Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange stock-watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The first railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built in 1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the Sandusky, was the first locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.

The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad—now a part of the Wabash—extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N. J.,—the founders of a famous locomotive works—was landed from a packet-steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard upon the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:

In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the east shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,—afterwards a part of the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the extended New York Central system—was also pushing toward Chicago as a goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted beside the “fly-by-night” schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the single trunk-line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to Cleveland that was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the trunk-line connection east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing completion.

Chicago’s first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the really great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was incorporated in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in laying tracks, for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des Plaines; and its first locomotive, the Pioneer, had been bought second-hand from the Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York State. The rails were second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the Western railroads were already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it was a railroad, and it was with a deal[Pg 28] of pride that John B. Turner, its president, used to ascend to an observatory on the second floor of the old Halsted Street depot to sight with a telescope the smoke of his morning train coming across the prairie. The Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was organized in 1859. For a time it was so desperately poor that it could not pay the interest on its bonds, and there was a time when its officers had to meet the pay-roll out of their own pockets; but it succeeded in absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at the beginning. In another decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting the Far West with the populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed. The Chicago and Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between the Lakes and the eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs. The business that came to it because of that linking was the first strong impulse that led to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.

The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears, construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to effect their escape to the North.

Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while there was still less than a hundred miles of track[Pg 29] in the United States, that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque, Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in its propagation. He organized the People’s Pacific Railroad,—and a part of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan. There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas City by 1856. That particular railroad—the Missouri Pacific—through its western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the coast within the past year.

When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the [Pg 30]seemingly hopeless task of trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm of Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer. The thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham, who had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought that august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war, into making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of ten men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with interest, but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into the high passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would certainly have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he believed so earnestly. He found it—making a route that would save 148 miles and $13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities. When he went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends, Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that pass in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they were sending for the three other capitalists of Sacramento—the Crocker brothers, who had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford, a wholesale grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central Pacific Railroad was organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on the new line at Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California shook with laughter at the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers building a railroad across the crest of the Sierras.

How they built their railroad successfully and amassed[Pg 31] six really great American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a deaf ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that bankers dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring their credit), found their route through the mountains just as Judah had promised, brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand Chinese laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the pines by a single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to the mountains, and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys. “Two thousand feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where eagles were at home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could neither be surmounted nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a bank swallow’s hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight half the battles of the Revolution.”

While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial blot upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the Spring of 1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of subsidy getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles away from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began that has never been approached in the history of railroad building. Twenty-five thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford, who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific[Pg 32] at Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.

After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific, and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into its own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the Northern Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake country straight to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike was driven in the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and so far the only railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Within a year the Western Pacific—the westernmost of the chain of Gould roads—has begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As this volume goes to press finishing touches are being placed upon the Puget Sound extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the last transcontinental to be stretched across these United States for a number of years to come. Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a great city—Prince Rupert—at its western terminal. It should be ready for its through traffic within the next three years.

This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading—an eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. It has been assailed by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of the so-called “pooling agreements,” and it has cut its own strong arms by building foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while the highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud[Pg 33] canals have fallen into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful existence. Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the business; and for the first time the country sees practically every line, large or small, honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all but passed into history.

[Pg 34]

THE BUILDING OF A RAILROAD

The railroad has its beginning in the inspiration and in the imagination of men. Perchance a great tract of country, rich in possibilities, stands undeveloped for lack of transportation facilities. The living arm of the railroad will bring to it both strength and growth. It will bring to it the materials, the men, and the machinery needed for its development. It will take from it its products seeking markets in communities already established.

In that way the first railroads began, reaching their arms carefully in from the Atlantic and the navigable rivers and bays that emptied into it. In the beginning there was hardly any inland country. All the important towns were spread along the sea-coast or along those same navigable tributaries, and it was sorry shrift for any community that did not possess a wharf to which vessels of considerable tonnage might attain. Where such communities did not possess natural water-ways, they sought to obtain artificial ones; and the result was the extraordinary impetus that was given to the building of canals during the first half of the nineteenth century—a page of American industrial history that has been told in another chapter.

It was found quite impossible to handle bulky freight economically by wagon, no matter how romantic the turnpike might be for passenger traffic in the old-time coaches. The canal was so much better as a carrier that it was[Pg 35] hailed with acclaim, and waxed powerful. In the height of its power it laughed at the puny efforts of the railroad, and then, as you have seen, sought by every possible means to throttle the growth of the steel highway. Within eighty years it was powerless, and the railroad was conqueror. There were hundreds of miles of abandoned canal within the country, many of them being converted into roadbeds of railroads; and the water-highway, with its slow transit and its utter helplessness during the frozen months of the year, was not able to exist except where quantities of the coarsest sort of freight were to be moved.

Without railroads, the United States to-day would, in all probability, not be radically different from the United States of a hundred years ago. All the large towns and cities would still be clustered upon the coast and waterways, and back of them would still rest many, many square miles of undeveloped country; the nation would have remained a sprawling, helpless thing, weakened by its very size, and subject both to internal conflict and to attacks of foreign invaders. It has been repeatedly said that if there had been a through railroad development in the South during the fifties, there would have been no Civil War. France for five hundred years before the signing of our Declaration, was a civilized and progressive nation. Yet century after century passed without her inland towns showing material change; and her seaports, lacking the impetus of interior growth, remained quiescent. Such a metropolis as Marseilles is to-day, became possible only when the railroad made this seaport the south gate of a mightily developing nation.

Let us assume that we are about to build a railroad. If we are going to strike our road in from some existing line or some accessible port into virgin country, we may hope for land or money grants from the State, county, town, or city Government. That is a faint hope, however, in[Pg 36] these piping days of the twentieth century. So much scandal once attached itself to these grants that they have become all but obsolete. We shall have to fall back upon the individual enterprise and help of the persons who are to benefit by the coming of the railroad. They may be folk who simply regard our project as a good investment, and place their money in it with hopes of a fair return.

Even if we are not going into virgin territory to give whole townships and counties their first sight of the locomotive, but are going to strike into a community already provided with railroad facilities but seemingly offering fair opportunity for profit in a competitive traffic, we shall find capital ready to stand back of us. A railroad will cost much money, the mere cost of single-track construction generally running far in excess of $35,000 a mile; and it should have resources, particularly in a highly competitive territory, to enable it to carry on a losing fight at the first.

For the money it receives it will issue securities, upon incorporation and legal organization, almost invariably in the form of capital stock and of mortgage-bonds. The stock will probably be held by the men who wish to control the construction and the operation of the line; the bonds will be issued to those persons who invest their money in it, either for profit or as an aid to the community it seeks to enter. The bonds are, in almost all cases, the preferable security. They pay a guaranteed interest at a certain rate, and at the end of a designated term of years they are redeemable at face value, in cash or in the capital stock of the company. There are other forms of loan obligations which the railroad issues—debenture bonds, second-mortgage bonds, short-term notes, and the like. To enter upon a description of these would mean a detour into the devious highways and byways of railroad finance—an excursion which we have no desire to make in this book.

In building our line we will issue as few bonds in proportion to our stock as will make our company fairly stable in organization, and its proposition attractive to investors.[Pg 37] For we shall have to pay our interest coupons upon the bonds from the beginning. We can begin even moderate dividends upon our stock after our enterprise has entered upon fair sailing. The all-important initial problem of financing having been at least partly settled, we will go before the Legislature and secure a charter for our road. In these modern days we shall probably have also to make application to some State railroad or public utility commission. It will consider our case with great care, granting hearings so that we may state our plans, and that folk living in the territory which we are about to tap may urge the necessity of our coming, and that rival railroads or other opponents may state their objections. After the entire evidence has been sifted down and weighed in truly judicial fashion, we may hope for word to “go ahead,” from the official commission, which, though it assumes none of our risk of loss in projecting the line, will gratuitously assume many of the details of its management.

Perhaps the politicians will poke their noses into our plan; they sometimes do. If we have plenty of capital behind us; if it becomes rumored that the P—— or the N—— or the X——, one of the big existing properties, is back of us, or some “big Wall Street fellow” is guiding our bonds, we can almost confidently expect their interference. After that it becomes a matter of diplomacy—and may the best man win!

Let us assume that some of these big obstacles have already been passed, that the politicians have been placed at arm’s length, that the money needed is in sight—we are ready to begin the construction of our line. The location is the thing that next vexes us. A few errors in the placing of our line may spell failure for the whole enterprise. Obviously, these errors will be of the sort that admit of no easy correction.

If our line is to link two important traffic centres and[Pg 38] is to make a specialty of through traffic it will have to be very much of a town that will bend the straightness of our route. If, on the other hand, the line is to pick up its traffic from the territory it traverses we can afford to neglect no place of possibilities. We must make concessions, even if we make many twists and turns and climb steep grades; we cannot afford to pass business by. Perhaps we may even have to worm our way into the hearts of towns already grown and closely built, and this will be expensive work. But it will be worth every cent of that expense to go after competitive business.

We roughly outline our route, and the engineers get their camping duds ready, particularly in these days when new railroads almost invariably go into a new country. Their first trip over the route will be known as the reconnaissance. On it they will make rough plotting of the territory through which the new line is to place its rails. Our engineers are experienced. They survey the country with practised eyes. The line must go on this side of that ridge, because of the prevailing winds and their influence upon snowdrifts (it costs a mint of money to run ploughs through a long winter), and on the other side of the next ridge, because the other side has easily worked loam, and this side heavy rock. There must be passes through hills and through mountains to be selected now and then, and all the while the engineer must bear in mind that the amount of his excavation should very nearly balance the amount of embankment-fill. Bridges are to be avoided and tunnels must come only in case of absolute necessity.

There will be several of these reconnaissances and from them the engineers who are to build the line, and the men who are to own and operate it, will finally pick a route close to what will be the permanent way.

Construction engineers blaze their way across the face of new country

The making of an embankment by dump-train

“Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless engines”

Then the real survey-work begins. The engineers divide the line, if it is of any great length, and the several divisions prosecute their work simultaneously. Each [Pg 39]surveying party consists of a front flag-man, who is a captain and commands a brigade of axe-men in their work of cutting away trees and bushes; the transit-man, who makes his record of distances and angles and commands his brigade of chain-men and flag-men; and the leveller, who studies contour all the while, and supervisors, rod-men and more axe-men. Topographers are carried, their big drawing boards being strapped with the camp equipment; and a good cook is a big detail not likely to be overlooked.

In soft and rolling country this is a form of camp life that turns back the scoffer: busy summer days and indolent summer nights around the camp-fire, pipes drawing well and plans being set for the morrow’s work. Another summer all this will be changed. The resistless path of the railroad will be stepped through here, the group of nodding pines will be gone, for a culvert will span the creek at this very point.

Sometimes the work of these parties becomes intense and dramatic. The chief, lowered into a deep and rocky river cañon, is making rough notes and sketches, following the character of the rock formation, and dreaming the great dreams that all great engineers, great architects, great creators must dream perforce. He is dreaming of the day when, a year or two hence, the railroad’s path shall have crowded itself into this impasse, and when the folk who dine luxuriously in the showy cars will fret because of the curve that spills their soup, and who never know of the man who was slipped down over a six-hundred-foot cliff in order that the railroad might find its way.

It is then that the surveying party begins to have its thrills. Perhaps to put that line through the cañon the party will have to descend the river in canoes. If the river be too rough, then there is the alternative of being lowered over the cliffsides. Talk of your dangers of Alpine climbing! The engineers who plan and build railroads through any mountainous country miss not a single one of them. Everywhere the lines must find a foothold.[Pg 40] This is the proposition that admits of but one answer—solution. Sometimes the men who follow the chief in the deep river cañons, the men with heavy instruments to carry and to operate—transits, levels, and the like—must have lines of logs strung together for their precarious foothold as they work. Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope that lowers the engineer down over the cliffside snaps, and the folk in the cheerful dining-room do not know of the graves that are dug beside the railroad’s resistless path.

It is all new and wonderful, blazing this path for civilization; sometimes it is even accidental. An engineer, baffled to find a crossing over the Rockies for a transcontinental route saw an eagle disappear through a cleft in the hills that his eye had not before detected. He followed the course of the eagle; to-day the rails of the transcontinental reach through that cleft, and the time-table shows it as Eagle Pass.

Possibly there are still alternative routes when the surveyers return in the fall and begin to make their finished drawings. Final choices must now be made, and land-maps that show the property that the railroad will have to acquire, prepared. The details, of infinite number, are being worked out with infinite care.

The great problem of all is the problem of grades; in a mountainous stretch of line this is almost the entire problem. Obviously a perfect stretch of railroad would be straight and without grades. The railroad that comes nearest that practically impossible standard comes nearest to perfection. But as it comes near this perfection, the cost of construction multiplies many times. Most new lines must feel their way carefully at the outset. Moreover it is not an impossible thing to reconstruct it after years of affluence—of which more in another chapter.

A three-per-cent grade is almost the extreme limit for[Pg 41] anything like a profitable operation; even a two-per-cent grade is one in which the operating people look forward to reconstruction and elimination. Yet there are short lengths of line up in the mining camps of Colorado, where grades of more than four per cent are operated; and it is a matter of railroad history that away back in 1852, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was being pushed through toward Parkersburg, and the great Kingwood tunnel was being dug, B. H. Latrobe, the chief engineer of the company, built and successfully operated a temporary line over the divide at a grade of ten per cent—528 feet to the mile. A locomotive which weighed 28 tons on its driving-wheels carried a single passenger car, weighing 15 tons, in safety and in regular operation over this stupendous grade for more than six months. The ascent was made by means of zigzag tracks on the so-called switchback principle. That scheme succeeded earlier planes operated by endless chains; an instance of which is the quite famous road of Mauch Chunk, originally operated for coal, and now a side scenic trip for passengers. Other planes of this sort, you will remember, were in operation at Albany and Schenectady on the old Mohawk & Hudson route, now a part of the New York Central lines; but all of them involved a change of passengers and freight to and from their cars, and the zigzag switchback was considered quite an advance in its day. Two of these ancient switchbacks are still in regular use for passengers and freight—one at Honesdale, Pa., and the other at Ithaca, N. Y.

The matter of grades being settled, and with it as a corrollary the question of minor curves, minor details next claim attention. Perhaps the water supply along the new line is defective. Then arrangements must be made for impounding, and perhaps suitable dams and waterworks will be built for this purpose. The water must be soft, to protect the locomotive boilers; if hard, an apparatus[Pg 42] is erected for the softening process. Grade crossings are to be avoided, highway crossings being built, wherever possible, over or under the railroad.

A railroad crossing another railroad at grade is an abomination not to be permitted nowadays. The universal use of the air-brake has permitted a reduction of the “head-room,”—the necessary clearance between the rail and overhead obstruction—from 20 feet to 14 feet. The old “head-room” was necessary to protect the brakeman who worked atop of the box-cars. This reduction of six feet in clearance was a matter of infinite relief to engineers, particularly in the bridging of one railroad over another.

The entire problem of bridges is so intricate a phase of American railroad construction as to demand attention in a subsequent chapter. In actual railroad practice it is apt to demand a separate branch of engineering skill, both in construction and in maintenance. We turn our attention back to the main problem of the building of our railroad.

When all plans are finished, contracts remain to be divided and sub-divided; for it would be a brave contractor, indeed, who in these days would consent to essay himself, any considerable length of railroad line. In fact, in recent work of heavy nature, the price is almost invariably placed at an indefinite figure, a certain definite percentage of profit being allowed the contractor on each cubic yard of rock or soil. In such a case the contractor’s business becomes far less a game of chance; he is, in effect, the railroad’s agent supervising its construction at a certain set stipend.

Let us say that the construction on our railroad begins in the early spring. As a matter of real fact it would not be halted long because of adverse weather conditions. Even up in the frozen and uninhabitable wilds of the Canadian Northwest, work has been prosecuted on the new Grand Trunk Pacific throughout the entire twelve[Pg 43] months. But in summer the construction gangs rejoice. The great proposition of bringing mile after mile of future railroad to sub-grade—the level upon which the cross-ties are to be set—fairly sweeps forward under the genial warmth of the sun. The construction is under the supervision of competent engineers, who are, of course, under the direct supervision of the railroad’s own organization. Every six to twelve or fifteen miles of new line is divided into sections, better known as residencies, for each is under the eye of its own resident engineer. He reports to the construction engineer, who in turn reports to the chief engineer of the railroad, an officer who reports to no less person than the president of the company.

This great force—for each engineer has gathered about him a competent staff of young men as expert with compass, with level, and with transit as were the men who first projected the line—is in the field as quickly as the contractor. They are to see him bring the line to sub-grade; to see him place bridges and culverts, bisect high hills with cuttings, bore tunnels through even higher hills and mountains, span deep valleys with great embankments. To facilitate quick construction the residencies are made numerous; work begins at as many initial points as possible. These points, of course, are situated, where possible, close to water communication or existing railroad lines, in order that material may be brought with the least possible delay and expense.

Of course, if the country has a sharp contour, the ordinary difficulties of line-construction multiply very rapidly. The great cuttings through the hills may have to be carved out of resisting rock, a work that is carried on through many levels, known to the engineers as ledges or as benches. If there are high hills to be notched there will probably be great hollows where the circumstances do not justify carrying the line on bridge or trestle. In these cases come the fills, or embankments. We have already[Pg 44] shown how the locating engineer in the first instance has tried to plan his line so that the earth or rock from his cutting will be as nearly as possible sufficient to form the near-by embankments. Sometimes it is not, and then the resident engineers must locate borrow-pits, where the hungry demand of the railroad for dirt will cause a great hollow to show itself on the face of the earth. The borrow-pit must be carefully located—convenient of access, far enough from the track not to be a danger spot to it. This is one of the infinity of problems that come to the construction engineer.

For these big jobs laborers’ camps will be established close to them; and small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless dummy-engines and forcing their narrow-gauged rails here and there and everywhere, will be busy for long weeks and months. There will not be much hand-cutting in the ledges. Steam shovels, mounted like locomotives upon the rails, and pushing forward all the while, will fairly eat out the hillside. One of these will catch up in a single dip of his giant arm more than a wagon load of soft earth or of rock that has been blasted apart for his coming.

To make the fills the engineers must often build rough wooden trestles out of the permanent level of the line. The dummy-engines, with their trails of dump-cars, coming from the back of the steam shovels in the cutting, or from the nearest borrow-pit, will hardly seem in a single day to make an appreciable effect upon the fill. But the days and weeks together count, and the dumping multiplies until the rough trestle has completely disappeared, and the railroad has a firm and permanent path across the edge of the dizzy embankment. And these embankments can be made truly dizzy. The passenger going west from Omaha on the new Lane cut-off of the Union Pacific finds his path for almost twenty miles through deep cuttings of the crests of the rolling Nebraska hills, across the edge of the long fills over wide valleys. The Lackawanna railroad[Pg 45] building a great cut-off on its main line where it passes through New Jersey has just finished the largest railroad embankment ever built—an earthen structure for two tracks, three miles long and seventy-five to one hundred and ten feet in height.

Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of the high hills

A giant fill—in the making

The finishing touches to the track

This machine can lay a mile of track a day

As the line goes forward, the track follows. The new railroad has probably popularized itself from the outset by hiring the near-by farmers and their teams to grade the line through their localities, particularly where an almost level country makes the grading a slight matter. Sometimes in level country, grading machines, drawn by horses, or by traction engines, have been used to advantage. These machines are equipped with ploughs which loosen the soil and place it on conveyor belts. Material can be deposited twenty-two feet away from the line, and a four-foot excavation can be made by these machines with ease.

But the laying of the track—the line having been finished at sub-grade with a top width of from 14 to 20 feet for each standard gauge track to be laid—the line begins to assume the appearance of a real railroad. Upon the first stretches of completed track, locomotives and cars employed in construction service begin to operate. As the track grows, their field of operation increases. Then comes the day when the track sections begin to be joined; the railroad is beginning to be a real pathway of steel.

To build this pathway is comparatively a simple matter, once the sub-grade is finished. A mile a day is not too much for any confident contractor to expect of his construction gangs. There was that time, back in ’69, when a world’s record of ten miles of track laid in a single day was established on the Central Pacific. For that mile of standard track the contractor will need 3,168 ties—eight carloads; 352 rails—five carloads; and a carload of angle irons, bolts, and spikes, as fasteners.

The track-layers are as proud of their profession as any man might be of his. Their skill is a wondrous thing.[Pg 46] Two men who follow the wake of a wagon roughly place the ties as fast as they are dropped upon the right-of-way. Another man aligns them with a line that has been strung by one of the young engineers, a fourth with a notched board, marks the location of one rail. That rail—the line side—follows close to the location marks. It is roughly banded and lightly fastened in place. The other rail—the gauge side—quickly follows. The wonderfully accurate gauge representing the 4 feet, 8½ inches that is almost the standard of the work, and which is tested every morning by the engineers, is in constant use. The railroad track must be true; there is not room for even the variation of a fraction of an inch in the gauge of the two rails.

In fastening the two long lines of rails, the profession of track-laying rises to almost supreme heights. The men who fasten the rail with angle iron and a single roughly-adjusted bolt in each rail-end are head-strappers and past masters in their art. After them in due season come the back-strappers, finishing that fine work of solidly bolting the rail against the vast strain of a thousand-ton train being shot over it at lightning speed. And after the back-strappers and the men who have spiked the rail to the ties, comes the locomotive itself, bringing more ties, more rails, more angle-bars and bolts, and more spikes to the front. Then sometime later the road-bed is ballasted and the line made ready for heavy operation.

But track-laying is frequently machine systematized these days; and in this, as in so many smaller things, the mechanical device has supplanted the man. A real giant is the track-laying machine. It is mounted upon railroad tracks and is a form of overhead carrier with a tremendous overhang. The carrier is fed with the cross-ties from supply cars just back of the machine and the ties are dropped, each close to its appointed place, as a locomotive slowly pushes the entire apparatus forward. In a smaller way the heavy steel rails are [Pg 47]delivered from under the overhang of the carrier. A gang of men make short work of the fastening of the rail to the cross-ties and the machine moves steadily forward. It has been known to make two miles a day at this work.

Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded.

Life is awakened. The railroad, which is life, has reached forth a new arm, and creation is begun.

[Pg 48]

TUNNELS

Sometimes the construction engineer of the railroad brings his new line face to face with a mountain too steep to be easily mounted. Then he may prepare to pierce it. Tunnels are not pleasant things through which to ride. They are, moreover, expensive to construct, and when once constructed are an unending care, necessitating expensive and constant inspection. But—and that “but” in this case is a very large one—they reduce grades and distances in a wholesale fashion; and when you reduce grades you are pretty sure to be reducing operating expenses. A railroad man will think twice in his opposition to a smoky bore of a tunnel that will cost some three to five million dollars, when his expert advisers tell him that that same smoky bore will save him a hundred thousand tons of coal in the course of a year.

From almost its very beginnings the American railroad has been dependent upon tunnels, and thus has closely followed European precedent. The Alleghany Portage Railroad, to which reference has already been made, passed through what is said to have been the first railroad tunnel in the United States. It pierced a spur in the Alleghany Mountains, and it was 901 feet in length, 20 feet wide, and 19 feet high within the arch, 150 feet at each end being arched with cut stone. The old tunnel, built in 1832, which has not echoed with the panting of the locomotive for more than half a century,[Pg 49] is still to be found not far from Johnstown, Pa. It simply serves the purpose to-day of calling attention to the durable fashion in which the earliest of our railroad-builders worked.

Of the building of the Baltimore & Ohio, tunnel-construction formed an early part, several paths being found across the steep profiles of the Alleghanies. The Kingwood Tunnel, which B. H. Latrobe drove, was nearly a mile long and the chief of these bores. But when the Hoosac Tunnel was first proposed—piercing the rocky heart of one of the greatest of the Berkshires—the country stood aghast. Four miles and a half of tunnel! That seemed ridiculous away back in 1854, when the plan was first broached and folk were not slow to say what they thought of such an absurd plan. For twenty years it looked as though these scoffers were in the right—the work of digging that monumental tunnel was a fearful drain on the treasury of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was lending its aid to the project. But the tunnel-diggers finally conquered—they almost always do—and the Hoosac remains to-day the greatest of all mountain tunnels in America. The system of continuous tunnels, by which the Pennsylvania Railroad recently reached its terminal in New York, stretches from Bergen Hill in New Jersey to Sunnyside, Long Island, a distance of some ten miles. In fact the largest feature of recent tunnel-work in this country has been in connection with terminal and rapid-transit development in the larger cities. For a good many years New York and Baltimore, in particular, have been pierced with these sub-surface railroads; it is a construction feature that increases as our great cities themselves increase. No river is to-day too formidable to be conquered by these underground traffic routes. A river such as the Hudson or the Detroit may sometimes halt the bridge-builders; it has but slight terror for the tunnel engineers.

The tunnel-work is apt to be a separate part of the[Pg 50] work of building a railroad. It calls for its own talent, and that of an exceedingly expert sort. If the tunnel is more than a half or three-quarters of a mile long it will probably be dug from a shaft or shafts as well as from its portals. In this way the work will not only be greatly hastened but the shafts will continue in use after the work is completed as vents for the discharge of engine smoke and gases from the tube. The work must be under the constant and close supervision of resident engineers. The survey lines must be corrected daily, for the tunnel must not go astray. It must drive a true course from heading to heading. In the shafts plumb lines, with heavy bobs, to lessen vibration, will be hung. Sometimes these bobs are immersed in water or in molasses.

From the portals and from the bottoms of the shafts the headings are driven. If the tunnel is to accommodate no more than a single track it will be built from 15 to 16½ feet wide, and from 21 to 22 feet high, inside of its lining; so the general method is first to drive a top heading of about 10 feet in height up under the roof of the bore. The rest of the material is taken out in its own good season on two following benches or levels.

Piercing a granite mountain is no rapid work. When the Pennsylvania Railroad built its second Gallitzin Tunnel in 1903, 13 men, working 4 drills in the top heading, were able to drill 16 holes, each 10 feet deep, in a single day. The engineers there figured that each blast removed twenty-three cubic yards of the rock. At night, when the “hard-rock men” were sleeping and their drills silent, a gang of fourteen “muckers” removed the loosened material.

Slow work that. The Northern Pacific finding its way through the crest of the Cascade Mountains by means of the great Stampede Tunnel, nearly two miles in length, demanded that the contractor work under pressure and make 13½ feet of tunnel a day. The contractor, working under the bonus plan, did better. With his army of[Pg 51] 350 “hard-rock men,” “muckers,” and their helpers, and his tireless battery of 36 drills he sometimes made as high as eighteen feet a day from the two headings. On a three-year job he beat his contract time by seven days. The Northern Pacific paid the price, $118 for each lineal foot of tunnel. That was a high price, occasioned largely by the fact that the work was carried forward in what was then an almost unbroken wilderness. The Wabash finding its way through the great and forbidding hills of Western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh a dozen years later was able to dig its succession of tunnels at an average cost of $4,509 for 100 feet. Of that amount $2,527 went for labor; and $260 was the price of a ton of dynamite.

When the tunnel engineer finds that his bore is not to pierce hard-rock, of whose solidity he is more than reasonably assured, he prepares to use cutting-shields. These shields, proceeding simultaneously from the portals and from the footings of the shafts, are steel rings of a circumference only slightly greater than that of the finished tunnel. With pick and with drill and dynamite, they constantly clear a path for it, whereupon it is pressed forward in that path. Dummy tracks follow the cutting-shield; and dummy locomotives—more likely electric than steam in these days—are used in removing the material. Electricity has been a boon to latter-day tunnel-workers. Its use for light and power keeps the tunnel quite clear of all gases during the work of boring.

In rare cases, the rock through which the shield has been forced is strong enough to support itself; in most works the engineers prefer to line the bore, with brick and concrete, as a rule. This lining is set in the path of the cutting-shield before its protection is entirely withdrawn; and so the heavy roof-timbering which was formerly a trade-mark of the successful tunnel engineer is no longer used.

Tunnel-boring becomes doubly difficult when the [Pg 52]railroad is to be carried under a river or some broad arm of the sea. Men work in an unnatural environment when they work below the surface of great waters, and the record of such work is a record of many tragedies. At any instant firm rock may cease, silt or sand or an underground stream may make its appearance and the helpless workmen find a ready grave. In work where there is even the slightest expectation of such a contingency the air-lock, with its artificial pressure to hold back the soft earth and moisture is brought into use. In another chapter we shall see how the caisson is operated. Suffice it to say now that the necessity of “working under the air,” brings no comfort to any one. It vastly hinders and complicates the work of construction, and adds greatly to the expense. Moreover, it has its own record of tragedies. Still it remains, to the infinite credit of a national persistence, that there is no record in the annals of American engineering where the workers have finally given up a tunnel job. Lives have been sacrificed, good-sized fortunes swept away, but in the end the resistless railroad has always found its underground path.

The tunnel-workers can tell you of the accident when the subway was being driven under the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn, three years ago. The cutting-shield, which was advancing from the Brooklyn side, suddenly slipped out from the rock into the unprotected soft mud of the river bottom. The heavily compressed air shot a geyser straight up to the surface of the river some fifty feet above. A workman shot through the geyser, pirouetted gayly for a fraction of a second above the river, then dropped, to be picked up by the crew of a passing ferryboat. In a week he was back at work again inside the cutting-shield. His fortune was the opposite of that which generally awaits a man caught in a tunnel accident.

“It ain’t as bad as it used to be,” one of them informs you. “When I first got into this profession, they didn’t have the electricity for lights or moving the cars or nothing.[Pg 53] We used to try and get along with safety lamps an’ near choke to death. It was more like hell then than it is now.”

“Sometimes the construction engineer ... brings his line face to face with a mountain”

Finishing the lining of a tunnel

The busiest tunnel point in the world—at the west portals of the Bergen tunnels,
six Erie tracks below, four Lackawanna above

The Hackensack portals of the Pennsylvania’s great tunnels under New York City

But your interest in the man who was blown from the tunnel to the surface of the river and escaped with his life is not entirely satiated, and you ask more questions. What do they do when they strike soft mud like that?

“We get down and pray,” he of the experience in this weird form of construction engineering tells you. “We try to get the boys safely back through the air-lock, and then we quit boring till we can fix things up from outside. If it’s a real bad case we’ve got to make land to bore through. It’s generally done by dumping rock and bags of sand from floats just over where she blows out. It’s a pretty rough way of doctoring her up, but it has to go, and generally it does. All we want is to get it to hold until we can set the rings of the tunnel.

“That ain’t always the worst. I’ve been driving a bore under water this way, when we struck stiff rock overhead and soft mud underneath the edge. That’s something that makes the engineers hump. You can’t rest a cast-iron tunnel like this on mud and you get a wondering if you’ve got to quit after all this work under the durned old river, and let the boss lose his money.

“The last time we struck a snag of that sort, the boss didn’t give up. He wasn’t that kind. He had a chief engineer that was brass tacks from beginning to end. What do you suppose that fellow did? He bored holes in the bottom of the lining and drove steel legs right down to the next ledge of solid rock below. There’s that tunnel to-day, carrying 32,000 people between five and six o’clock every night perched down there seventy feet underground like a big caterpillar sprawled under the wickedest ledge o’ rock you ever see.”

It takes a real genius of an engineer for this sort of work. He who drives his bore into the unknown must be on guard for the unexpected. Emergencies arise upon[Pg 54] the minute, and the tunnel engineer must be ready with his wits and ingenuity to meet them. Finally the day does come when the bores from either shore are hard upon one another. If there has been blasting under the bed of the river it is reduced to a minimum. The drills work at half-speed, the fever of expectancy hangs over the men. Those who are close at the heading catch faint sounds of the workmen on the other side of the thin barrier—the last barrier of the river that was supposed to acknowledge no conqueror.

The first tiny aperture between the two bores is greeted with wild cheers. On the surface far above, the whistles of the shaft-houses carry forth the news to the outer world; it is echoed and reëchoed by the noisy river craft. The aperture grows larger. It is large enough to permit the passage of a man’s body; and a man, enjoying fame for this one moment in his life, crawls through it. The men knock off work and have a rough spread in the tunnel. At night the engineers and contractors banquet in a hotel. “Not so bad,” the chief engineer says quietly. “We were ⅜ of an inch out, in 8,000 feet.” It was not so bad. It spoke wonders for his profession. To carry forth two giant bores from the opposite sides of a broad river, and have them meet within ⅜ of an inch of perfect alignment, was an achievement well worth attention.

After that, the last traces of the rough rock and silt are removed, the iron rings of the tunnel made fast together, the air pressure released, the cutting-shields, that formed so essential a feature of the construction, removed. Then there remains only the work of installing conduits and wiring and laying the tracks before the tunnel is ready for the traffic of the railroad.

The Michigan Central has recently finished a tunnel under the busy Detroit River, at Detroit, which eliminates the use of a car-ferry at that point. The tunnel[Pg 55] was built in a manner entirely new to engineers. The river at Detroit is about three-quarters of a mile wide, and its bed is of soft blue clay, making it difficult to bore a tunnel safely and economically. To meet this obstacle a new fashion of tunnel-building was created.

The tunnel itself consists of two tubes, each made from steel ⅜ of an inch in thickness and reinforced every twelve feet by outer “fins.” The channel was dredged and a foundation bed of concrete laid. The sections of the tunnel, each 250 feet long, were then put in position one at a time. The section-ends were closed at a shore plant with water-tight wooden bulkheads. They were then lashed to four floating cylinders of compressed air and towed out to position. After that it was merely a matter of detail to drop the sections into place, pour in more concrete and make the new section fast. The wooden bulkheads next the completed tube were then removed and the structure was ready for the track-layers. The sub-aqueous portion of the new Detroit Tunnel is 2,600 feet long; it joins on the Detroit side with a land tunnel 2,100 feet long, and on the Canadian side with a land tunnel of 3,192 feet.

It takes more than a river, carrying through its narrow throat the vast and growing traffic of the Great Lakes—a traffic that is comparable with that of the Atlantic itself—to halt the progress of the railroad.

[Pg 56]

BRIDGES

When the habitations of man first began to multiply upon the banks of the water courses, the profession of the bridge-builder was born. The first bridge was probably a felled tree spanning some modest brook. But from that first bridge came a magnificent development. Bridge-building became an art and a science. Men wrought gigantic structures in stone, long-arched viaducts, with which they defied time. Then for two thousand years the profession of the bridge-builder stood absolutely still.

With the coming of the iron and steel age it moved forward again. The development of a fibre of great strength and without the dead weight of granite gave engineers new possibilities. They began in simple fashion, and then they developed once again, with marvellous strides. Steel, the dead thing with a living muscle, could span waterways from which stone shrank. Steel redrew the maps of nations. Proud rivers at which the paths of man had halted, were conquered for the first time. Routes of traffic of every sort were simplified; the railroad made new progress; and economic saving of millions of dollars was made to this gray old world.

[Pg 57]The earliest of the very distinguished list of American bridge-builders erected great timber structures for the highroads and the post-roads. Some of them went back many centuries and came to the stone bridge, in many ways the most wonderful of all the artifices by which man conquers the obstructive power of a running stream. But the building of stone bridges took time and money, and time and money were little known factors in a new land that had begun to expand rapidly.

So at first the railroad followed the course of the highroad and the post-road, and took the timber bridge unto itself. In some cases it actually fastened itself upon the highroad bridge, as at Trenton, N. J., where a faithful wooden structure built by Theodore Burr in 1803 was strengthened and widened in 1848 to take the first through railroad route from New York. It continued its heavy dual work until 1875 when it was superseded by a steel bridge. A dozen years ago the railroad tracks were moved from that structure to a magnificent and permanent stone-arch built near-by. Thus the railroad crossing the Delaware at Trenton has, in this way, typified step by step every stage of the development of American bridge-building.

The timber bridges developed the steel truss bridge, the typically American construction, of to-day. In an earlier day the timber bridges were the glory of the engineer. Sometimes you see one of these old fellows remaining, like the long structure that Mr. Walcott built across the Connecticut River at Springfield, Mass., in 1805, and which still does good service; but the most of them have passed away. Fire has been their most persistent enemy. Within the past two years fire destroyed the staunch toll-bridge at Waterford on the Hudson, just above Troy. The bridge was a faithful carrier for one hundred and four years. In many ways it was typical of those first constructions. It consisted of four clear arch spans—one 154 feet, another 161 feet, the third 176[Pg 58] feet, and the fourth 180 feet in length. It was built of yellow pine, wonderfully hewn and fitted, hung upon solid pegs; and save for the renewal of some of the arch footings, the roof, and the side coverings, it was unchanged through all the years—even though the heavy trolley-cars of a through interurban line were finally turned upon it.

About the same time, the once-famed Permanent Bridge across the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia was built. It had two arches of 150 feet each and one of 195 feet. In its day it was regarded as nothing less than a triumph. A very old publication says:

In after years, the Permanent Bridge was also entrusted with the carrying of a railroad. It has, however, disappeared these many years.

The early railroad builders did not neglect the possibilities of the stone bridge. Two notable early examples of this form of construction still remain—the Starrucca Viaduct upon the Erie Railroad, near Susquehanna, Pa., and an even earlier structure, the stone-arch bridge across the Patapsco River at Relay, Md., which B. H. Latrobe, the most distinguished of all American railroad engineers, built for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in 1833-35. The Thomas Viaduct, as it has been known for three-quarters of a century, was the first stone-arch bridge ever built to carry railroad traffic. It was erected in a day when the railroad was just graduating from the use of teams[Pg 59] of horses as motive-power. In this day, when locomotives have begun to reach practical limits of size and weight, that viaduct is still in use as an integral part of the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio. It is built on a curve, and consists of 8 spans of stone arches, 67 feet 6 inches, centre to centre of piers, which, together with the abutments at each end, make the total length of the structure 612 feet. It is in as good condition to-day as upon the day it was built.

When the Erie Railroad was being constructed across the Southern Tier counties of New York in 1848, its course was halted near the point where the rails first reached the beautiful valley of the Susquehanna. A side-valley, a quarter of a mile in width, stretched itself squarely across the railroad’s path. There was no way it could be avoided, and it could be crossed only at a high level. For a time the projectors of the Erie considered making a solid fill, but the tremendous cost of such an embankment was prohibitive. While they were at their wits’ ends, James P. Kirkwood, a shrewd Scotchman, who had been working as a civil engineer upon the Boston & Albany, appeared. Kirkwood spanned the valley with the Starucca Viaduct, one of the most beautiful bridges ever built in America. He opened quarries close at hand and by indefatigable energy built his stone bridge in a single summer. It has been in use ever since. The increasing weight of its burdens has never been of consequence to it, and to-day it remains an important link in a busy trunk-line railroad. It is 1,200 feet in length and consists of 18 arches of 50 feet clear span apiece.

But stone bridges even then cost money, and so the timber structure still remained the most available. Many men can still remember the tunnels, into whose darkness the railroad cars plunged every time they crossed a stream of any importance whatsoever. They have nearly all gone. The wooden bridge was ill suited to the ravages of weather and of fire—ravages that were quickened by[Pg 60] the railroad, rather than hindered. A substitute material was demanded. It was found—in iron.

The first iron bridge in the United States is believed to be the one erected by Trumbull in 1840 over the Erie Canal at Frankfort, N. Y. Record is also held of one of these bridges being built for the North Adams branch of the Boston & Albany Railroad, in 1846. About a year later, Nathaniel Rider began to build iron bridges for the New York & Harlem, the Erie, and some others of the early railroads. His bridges—of the truss type, of course, that type having been worked out in the timber bridges of the land—were each composed of cast-iron top-chords and post, the remaining part of the structure being fabricated of wrought-iron. The members were bolted together. Still, the failure of a Rider bridge upon the Erie in 1850, followed closely by the failure of a similar structure over the River Dee, in England, influenced officials of that railroad to a conclusion that iron bridges were unpractical, and to order them to be removed and replaced by wooden structures. For a time it looked as if the iron bridge were doomed. That was a dark day for the bridge engineers. A contemporary account says:

Under the influence of the really great Latrobe, an iron span of 124 feet was built in 1852 at Harpers Ferry. In that same year, the B. & O. built its Monongahela River Bridge, a really pretentious structure of 3 spans of 205 feet each, and the first really great iron railroad bridge in all the land. The path was set. The conquest[Pg 61] of iron over wood as a bridge material was merely a problem of good engineering. The iron bridge quickly came into its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad began building cast-iron bridges of from 65 to 110 feet span at its Altoona shops for the many creeks and runs along the western end of its line. The other railroads were following in rapid order. Squire Whipple, Bollman, Pratt—all the others who could design and build iron bridges—were kept more than busy by the work that poured in upon them.

And in the day when the iron bridge was coming into its own, Sir Henry Bessemer, over in England, was bringing the steel age into existence, first making toy cannon models for the lasting joy of Napoleon III, and then making a whole world see that steel—that dead thing with the living muscle—was no longer to be limited for use in tools and cutting surface. Steel was to become the very right-hand of man. And so steel came to the bridge-builders, at first only in the most important wearing points such as pins and rivets, finally to be the whole fabric of the modern bridge. The transition was gradual. The early engineers began using less and less of cast-iron and more and more of wrought, until they had practically eliminated cast-iron as a bridge material. Then there came a quick change; there was another dark day for the railroad bridge engineers of America. In 1876—that very year when the land was so joyously celebrating its Centennial—a passenger train went crashing through a defective bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio. There was a great property loss—thousands and thousands of dollars, and a loss of lives that could never be expressed in dollars. An outraged land asked the bridge-builders if they really knew their business.

Out of that Ashtabula wreck came the scientific testing of bridges and bridge materials, and the abolition of the rule-of-thumb in the cheaper sorts of construction. Out of that miserable wreckage came also the use of steel in[Pg 62] the railroad bridge. Steel had found itself; and how the steel bridges began to spring up across the land! They spanned the Ohio, and they spanned the Mississippi, and they spanned the Missouri; a great structure threw itself over the deep gorge of the Kentucky River. When the day came that fire destroyed the famous wooden viaduct of the Erie over the Genesee River at Portage, N. Y. (you must remember the pictures of that tremendous structure in the early geographies), steel took its place.

All this while the bridge engineer attempted more and more. He built over the deep gorge of the Niagara. He conquered the St. Lawrence in and about Montreal. He laughed at the mighty Hudson and flung a dizzy steel trestle over its bosom at Poughkeepsie. He built at Cairo, at Thebes, and at Memphis, on the Mississippi, and again and again and still again at St. Louis. The East River no longer halted him or compelled him to resort to the alternative of the very expensive types of suspension bridge. He has finally thrown a great cantilever over it, from Manhattan to Long Island. The steel bridge has come into its own.

Let us study for a moment the construction of the different types of railroad bridge. For the tiny creeks—the little things that are mad torrents in spring, and run stark-dry in midsummer—where they cannot be poured through a pipe or a concrete moulded culvert, the simplest of bridge forms will suffice. And the simplest of bridge forms consists of two wooden beams laid from abutment to abutment and holding the ties and rails of the track-structure. As the first development of that simplest idea comes the substitution of steel for wood, giving, as we have already seen, protection against fire and a far greater strength. The steel beam has greater strength than a wooden beam of the same outside dimension and yet in its design it effects for itself a great saving[Pg 63] of material, by cutting out superfluous parts and becoming the structural standard of to-day, the I beam. When the I beam becomes too large to be made in a single pouring or a single rolling, it may be constructed of steel plates and angles firmly riveted together, and thus still remains the possibility of the simplest form of bridge. That single span may be further increased, or the bridge developed into a succession of increased spans by the substitution of the lattice-work girder, effecting further saving in weight without material loss of strength for the solid-plate girder. The track may be laid atop of such girders or—to save clearance in overhead crossing—swung between them at their bases.

The limit in this form of bridge is generally in a 65-foot or a 100-foot span. It is not practical to build the girders up outside of a shop; and the 65-foot length represents the two flat-cars that must be used to transport any one of them to the bridge location. Some railroads have used three cars for the hauling of a single girder, and so increased these spans to 100 feet; but as a rule, over 65 feet, and the truss, the most common form of railroad bridge in this country, comes into use.

The truss is a distinct evolution from those old timber bridges of which we have already spoken. Burr and Latrobe and Bollman and Howe and Squire Whipple—those distinguished engineers of other days—have evolved it, step by step. It is, in one sense, no more than an enlarged form of lattice girder, the work of the different designers having been to accomplish at all times, a maximum of strength with a minimum of weight. It is built of members that stand pulling-strain, and those that stand pressure-strain; and these are respectively known as tension and as compression members. In them rests the real strength of the truss. But in addition to the structure are the bracing-rods, generally placed as diagonals and built to sustain the structure against both lateral and wind-strains. The members that form the trusses are[Pg 64] stoutly riveted together; the rapid rat-a-tap-tap of the riveter is no longer a novelty in any corner of the land. Sometimes certain of the important bearing-points are connected by steel pins instead of rivets—another survival of the old days of the timber bridge.

As a rule, the railroad is carried through the truss—and this is known as the through span. Sometimes it is carried upon the top of the structure, and then the truss becomes known as a deck span. A long bridge may effectively combine both of these types of span. The splendid new double-track truss bridge recently built by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad over the Susquehanna River between Havre-de-Grace and Aiken, Md., to replace a single-track bridge in the same location, is a splendid example of the best type of such structures. At the point of crossing, the river is divided into channels by Watson Island; the width of the west channel being approximately 2,600 feet and that of the east channel being approximately 1,400 feet. The distance across the low-lying island is 2,000 feet—making the length of the entire bridge about 6,000 feet. The bridge, as originally constructed when the line from Baltimore to Philadelphia was built, in 1886, had a steel trestle over Watson Island. In building the new structure, this viaduct was eliminated in favor of a bridge structure of 90-foot girder spans, placed upon concrete piers. Additional piers were placed in the west channel, shortening the deck spans from 480 to 240 feet; the through span over the main channel was kept at the original length—520 feet. In the east channel, the span lengths remained unchanged, with a single slight exception. The changes in the span lengths involved new masonry, and all piers were sunk to solid rock, those in the west channel being carried by caissons to a depth of more than seventy feet beneath low-water. The total amount of new masonry and concrete approximated 62,000 cubic yards. The long span-lengths of the deck span over the east channel and the through span over[Pg 65] the navigable portion of the west channel—each 520 feet in length—occasioned heavy construction. The deck span, for instance, weighed 12,000 pounds to each foot of bridge. The total weight of this very long bridge reaches the enormous figure of 32,000,000 pounds. And yet, even the untechnical observe the extreme simplicity of its lines of construction, and feel that the engineer, A. W. Thompson, has done his work well. The construction of the giant took two years and a half. During that time, the trains of the B. & O. were diverted to the closely adjacent Pennsylvania, so that the bridge-builders might continue with a minimum of delay.

The truss span reaches its limitations at a little over 500 feet in length—we have just seen how the Susquehanna structure had its spans cut in halves in the non-navigable portions of the river. The spans of two great railroad bridges over the Ohio at Cincinnati reached 519 and 550 feet, but they were built in a day when the weights of locomotives and of train-loads had not yet begun to rise. Nowadays the shorter span is the safer and by far the best. The engineer builds plenty of midstream piers, looking out only for a decent width for any navigable channels.

And when because of peculiarities of location he cannot place his pier midstream, then it is time for him to get out his pencils and begin his drawings all over again. He can perhaps build a suspension bridge—a clear span of 1,500 feet will be as nothing to it,—but suspension bridges take a long time to build and are fearfully expensive in the building. It is more than likely, then, that he will turn to the cantilever. In the cantilever, two giant trusses are cunningly balanced upon string supporting towers. They are constructed by being built out from the towers, evenly, so that the balance of weight may never be lost for a single hour. The two projecting arms are finally caught together in mid-air and over the very centre of the span—caught and made fast by[Pg 66] the riveters. The result is a bridge of surpassing strength and fairly low cost, a real triumph for the bridge engineer.

The first of these cantilever bridges built in the United States was of iron. It was designed and constructed by C. Shaler Smith across the deep gorge of the Kentucky River in 1876-77. Mr. Smith also built the second cantilever, the Minnehaha, across the Mississippi, at St. Paul, Minn., in 1879-80. The third and fourth were the Niagara and the Frazer River bridges built in the early eighties. In their trail came many others—one of the most notable among them being the great Poughkeepsie Bridge.

We are going to see something of the construction of one of these great railroad bridges. Let us begin at the beginning, and see the men, as they work upon the foundations of abutments and of piers—many times hundreds of feet under the waters of the very stream that they will eventually conquer. For months this important work of getting a good foothold for the monster will go forth almost unseen by the workaday world—by the aid of the great timber footings, which the engineer calls his caissons. These caissons (they are really nothing more or less than great wooden boxes), are slowly sunk into the sand or soft rock under the tremendous weight of the many courses of masonry. They sink to solid rock—or something that closely approximates solid rock.

We are going down into one of the caissons that form the foothold of a single great pier of a modern railroad bridge; we are going to stand for a very few minutes under air-pressure with the “sand-hogs”—men whom we first came to know when we studied the boring of a tunnel. Air pressure spells danger. It takes a good nerve to work high up on the exposed steel frame of some growing bridge, but the bridge-builders have air and [Pg 67]sunlight in which to pursue their hazardous work. The sand-hog has neither. He toils in a box down in the depths of the unknown, working with pick and shovel under artificial light and under a pressure that becomes all but intolerable. The knowledge that the most precious and vital of all man’s needs—fresh air—is controlled by another, and through delicate and intricate mechanism, cannot add to his peace of mind.

No wonder, then, that it is the highest paid of all merely manual work. The sand-hog working 50 feet below datum is paid $3.50 for an eight-hour day. But 50 feet is but the beginning to these human worms, who burrow deep into the earth. Below it they first begin to divide their day into two working periods. The air begins to count, and men with steel muscled arms must rest. As they approach 80 feet below datum—the engineers’ phrase for sea level,—they are working two periods each day of one hour and a half apiece, while their daily pay has risen to $4. There is your rough arithmetical law of sand-hogs. As your caisson goes down so does the length of your working-day decrease; inversely, their air pressures and the pay of the men increase. The cost? The cost leaps forward in geometrical progression. It is the owner’s turn to groan this time.

One hundred feet is the limit. At 100 feet the air pressure is more than 50 pounds to the square inch—three additional atmospheres—and the limit of human endurance is reached. The men work two shifts of forty minutes each as a daily portion and the law steps in to say that they must rest four hours between the shifts. They are paid $4.50 for that day’s work—which means something more than $4 an hour for the time that they are actually at work in the caisson.

You have expressed your interest in the sand-hog, given vent to a desire to go down into their underworld. You wonder what three pressures is going to feel like. [Pg 68]Permission is given and a physician begins examining you. You cannot go into the caisson unless you are sound of heart and stout of body. This is no joking matter. The sand-hogs’ rules read like the training instructions for a college football team. No drink, regular hours, simple diet, the donning of heavy clothes after they leave the pressure, constant reëxamination—these rules are inflexible when the caissons go to far depths. By their observance the difficult foundation construction of this new bridge has been kept free from accident—there have been few cases of the “bends” brought to the specially constructed hospital in the bottom of the cavity.

The “bends” sounds complicated, and is, in reality, almost the simplest of human ailments in its diagnosis. A “bubble” of high pressure air works its way into the human structure while a man is in the caisson. When he comes out into the normal atmosphere the bubble is caught and remains. If it is caught near any vital organ that bubble is apt to spell death. Generally the bubbles are caught in the joints—frequently the elbow or the knee—where they cause excruciating pain. Then the specially constructed hospital crowded on the narrow platform formed by the top of the pier, comes into full play. Its sick room is incased in an air-tight cylinder. The man suffering from the “bends,” together with physicians and nurses, is put under a pressure that gradually increases until it reaches that of the caisson. After that it is a comparatively simple matter to relieve the bubble and bring the air in the hospital back to a normal pressure.

The path is clear for us to go down into the caisson. A party of sand-hogs, hot and exhausted after forty minutes of work within, come out of the little manhole at the top of the air-lock. We step through the little manhole and into a tiny steel bucket that rests within the air-lock there at the top of the shaft. A word of command—farewell to the bright blue sky overhead—the black manhole cover is replaced. It is suddenly very [Pg 69]dark. A single faint incandescent gives a dim glow in the tiny place.

Concrete affords wonderful opportunities for the bridge-builders

The Lackawanna is building the largest concrete bridge in the world
across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa.

The bridge-builder lays out an assemblying-yard for gathering together
the different parts of his new construction

The new Brandywine Viaduct of the Baltimore & Ohio, at Wilmington, Del.

You are not thinking of that. They are putting the pressure on. You can feel it. Your eardrums feel as if they would break; they vibrate. You must show your distress.

“Pinch your nose and swallow hard,” says the man who stands beside you in the bucket.

He stands so close to you that you can fairly feel the pulsation of his heart, but his voice sounds miles away. You swallow hard, the hardest you have ever swallowed, and you pinch your nose. You feel better. The far-away voice speaks again in your ear. “Three atmospheres,” is all it says. The caisson shaft is no place for extended conversation. You descend in an express elevator car; in that bucket you just drop. You have all the eerie sensations that a Coney Island “novelty ride” might give you. There is a row of dim incandescents all the way down the smooth side of the shaft, and when you look you forget that this is vertical traction and think of an uptown subway tube as you see it recede from the rear of an express. A final manhole, the gate at the foot of the shaft and you stop abruptly. It seems as if you had almost bumped against the under side of China.

“This is it,” says the far-away voice.

A timbered room, not larger than a parlor in a city flat and not near so high. A close and murky place, filled with a little company of men—shadowy humans of a real underworld there under the dull electric glow.

“They’re finding the footing for the shaft,” says the voice. “We’re on rock at last at 94 feet.”

When the footings are finished and the caisson’s edges have ceased to cut its path straight downward, that timbered construction will rest here far below the city for long ages. The sand-hogs will come out of their working chamber for the last time—it will be poured full[Pg 70] of concrete, more solid than rock itself. The air pressure will be withdrawn—there is no longer mud or shifting sand for it to withhold. Then, section by section, the steel lining of the caisson shaft will be withdrawn, while concrete, tramped into place, makes the shaft a hidden monolith 100 feet or so in length. Upon the tops of all these monoliths a close grillage of steel beams will be laid; upon that grillage will be riveted the steel plates and columns of the bridge tower. The great structure is to have sure footing; these giant feet bind and clasp themselves throughout the years against the mighty river that has been conquered and humbled by the work of man.

“You should have been down in one of the boxes when they had to burn torches, before they got the electric light,” says one of the bridge engineers. “I worked in one of those that we left under a stone tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. Now we’re almost in clover. They even cool and dry the compressed air before we breathe it.”

An order goes aloft over an electric wire, the engineer who sits smoking his pipe on the sun-baked platform of the traveller derrick pulls a lever, and we go slipping up the shaft toward fresh air and freedom only a little less rapidly than we descended it. We do not reach it too quickly. There is a long wait in the air-lock after the lower manhole has closed, while the pressure is being reduced. You begin to worry and you ask your guide as to the delay. Nothing wrong?

He smiles at your timorous question and explains. It would be dangerous to come out from the caisson pressure quickly. He does not want to have to send you to that air-tight hospital with a bad case of the “bends.”

“How long in the air-lock?” you ask.

“Fifty minutes,” he answers.

[Pg 71]Then he explains in more detail. You have been under a pressure of 50 pounds to the square inch—that’s your three atmospheres, and under the rules you must spend fifty minutes in the tiny air-lock. Up to a pressure of 36 pounds you must spend two minutes there for every three pounds of pressure. When you get above that “law of 36” it is a minute to the pound.

When that manhole cover overhead finally slides open you feel blinded by the light, even though the sun is hidden behind a passing cloud. The air-lock tender reaches down with his arms and gives you a lift up onto his narrow perch.

“Want to be a sand-hog?” he smiles.

“Not yet a while,” you answer, in all truth. “Not until every other job is gone.”

You are standing aloft, balancing yourself upon tiny planks at the steadily advancing end of the bridge, as it forces itself over a stream of formidable width. Overhead, a gigantic, ungainly traveller, equipped with steel derricks at every corner, is advancing foot by foot as the bridge advances foot by foot. Underneath, through the thin network of planks, of girder and of supporting false work, you can see the surface of the river a full hundred feet below. A steamboat is passing directly beneath you. From your perch she looks like a great yellow bird. Those fine black specks upon her back are the humans who are gathered upon her upper deck.

Whistles call and the derricks groan as they swing the thousands of bridge-members, that are flying together at the beck of the engineer, into their final resting-places. There is the deafening racket of the riveters, here and there and everywhere. There are crude railroad tracks upon the temporary flooring of the bridge deck, and the calls of the dummy locomotives add to the racket. The railroad tracks lead to the shore, to temporary yards[Pg 72] where the bridge materials are assembled as fast as they come from the shops in a city three hundred miles distant.

For, remember that while the sand-hogs were burrowing under the surface of the river to find footholds for this monster, other men were burrowing into the hillsides to find the precious ore for the welding of his muscles. A hundred thousand picks must have fought in his behalf, furnaces blazed for miles before the crude ore became the finished, perfect steel. Of the forging and the rolling of the steel a whole book might be written. It is enough now to say that of the 50,000,000 pounds of steel, every pound was made on honor. The railroad had its inspectors everywhere, but the rolling-mill men held to their formulas for perfect steel, and perfect steel was the result. A slight flaw in the metal, and possibly at some unexpected day, a great catastrophe. The safety of human life was upon the men who forged the steel, and they forged honor into every great girder, into every rod and bolt and plate. This conqueror of the river was a warrior built in honor.

The safety of human life depends upon the men who build this bridge. Study carefully the face of this man who stands beside you, the man who evolved this bridge as a season’s work of his restless mind. His face is the face of a man who has high regard for human safety; that factor creeps to the fore as he talks to you. He is telling of the method of constructing the upper works of a bridge of this size.

“We’re getting ahead all the time,” he laughs, “and we’re moving rather forward in our construction methods. In an older day we did this work with derricks of a rather simple sort, operated them by small portable steam engines. You can’t handle bridge-members—units that are only held down by the clearances of tunnels and the transporting powers of the railroads—that way to-day. We’ve nearly half a million dollars tied up here in constructing-appliances. These steel-boom derricks, travellers,[Pg 73] and steel-wire hoists, the compressing engines for handling the riveters, cost big money.

“Our method? That’s a simple enough affair as a rule. We set up this spindly tower on rails, that we call the ‘traveller’ and it moves backwards and forwards over the trusses and the timber falsework that we build before the steel really begins to be set up. When the steel—the trusses—is up and riveted, then away with the falsework. Our bridge stands by itself. You can put up a 500-foot span in no time at all by using the falsework.”

You make bold to ask what the engineer does when the river is too deep to admit of falsework. He is quick to answer.

“We generally fall back on a cantilever,” he says, without hesitation. Then he begins to tell you about one of the latest of American problems—the new bridge of the Idaho & Washington Northern Railroad, just now being built over the Pend Oreille River, Washington. They could span that narrow cleft only on the cantilever principle, and when they began to balance their cantilever, there was not enough room for the back arm. But the engineers only chewed off fresh cigars and began forcing their great span out mid-air. They made the balance by placing 600 tons of steel rails on the back-arm. For every foot the span reached out anew over a so-called “bottomless” they added a few more rails. You can generally trust an engineer in such a time as that.

Look closely now upon the workmen who are fabricating this giant bridge. Look closely upon them. They are different from those whom we saw toiling in the caissons below. Scandinavians may and do toil as sand-hogs at the bottom of the stream; Lithuanians may mine the ore, and Hungarians roll it into steel; Americans build upon their toil and erect this bridge. These builders speak no unfamiliar tongue. They are the product of Ohio, the Middle West, the South, the Pacific Coast,[Pg 74] New England; they rise immeasurably superior to every other class of labor employed upon the work. Some of them have been sailors, and their talk has the savor of the sea. All of them are men, clear-headed, cool-headed, true-headed men.

If you come upon them at the noon-hour, sprawled along the narrow ledge of a single plank you may be impressed by two things—their Americanism and their cosmopolitanism. The first of these is writ upon each man as you look at him; the second is evident in talk with him. This big fellow must have been a sheriff out in Montana, and he must have been a sheriff for bad men to dodge; his neighbor is talking about his last job, a sky-high cantilever down in Peru. The two side-partners over by the tool-box are just back from India. American bridge-building talent encircles the world. Here is a boss who got his first training down on the Nile; his assistant has done some mighty big work on the Trans-Siberian.

These are the men who are building the bridge. In a little time there will be no advancing ends, finding their path from pier-top to pier-top. There will be, instead, a long and slender path for the railroad; the bridgemen will have done their work well; a great river will have once again been conquered.

The bridge problem is always different, it constantly has the fascination of variety. That variety will come into play at unexpected turns. Once, down in a deep Colorado cañon, whose walls rose precipitously for a thousand-odd feet, and which was all but filled by a deep and rapid river, the engineers of the Rio Grande & Western found absolutely no ledge whatsoever upon which they might rest their rails. They puzzled upon the problem for a little while, and then they swung a girder bridge parallel with the river. The bridge was supported by braced girders, that fastened their feet in the walls of the cañon, hardly wider there than a narrow city house. The[Pg 75] railroad has been running over that construction for more than thirty years; it is one of the scenic wonders of the land, and a triumph for the engineer that built it. In constructing the expensive West Shore Railroad up the Hudson River, similar difficulties were experienced south of West Point, and truss bridges were built parallel with the steep river banks to carry the tracks from ledge to ledge. It is not an unusual matter for the construction engineer to spend a quarter of a million dollars to span some deep, waterless gully in the mountains, which could not be filled for more than twice that sum.

Many times, in these days of increasing weight of equipment, it becomes necessary to replace a bridge, without interrupting the traffic. The construction engineer never fails to meet the problem. Years ago, he took Roebling’s famous suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, removed the stone towers and replaced them with towers of steel, without delaying a single train; and a little later he took that bridge itself, and substituted a heavy cantilever for it, while all the time a heavy traffic poured itself over the structure. The rebuilder of bridges works like the original builder—with plentiful falsework. He timbers in and around his structure, and then step by step and with exceeding caution removes the old and substitutes the new. An old girder is taken out between trains; before another train of cars shall roll over the structure a new one is ready, temporarily bolted until the riveters can make it fast. It sounds complicated, but it is remarkably simple, under the careful plans of a patient engineer, who has that infinite thing that we call genius.

Sometimes a bold engineer strikes out into a new method, quicker and less expensive than these piecemeal efforts. Of such was the job at Steubenville, O., where a 205-foot double-track span was erected on heavy falsework alongside the old bridge. In a carefully chosen interval between a service of frequent trains, both the old and the new spans—together weighing 1,300 [Pg 76]tons—were fastened together and drawn sideways a distance of twenty-five feet in one minute and forty seconds. The new span was then in place, and the old one—ready to be dismantled—stood on falsework at the side. The entire job had been accomplished in an interval of seventeen minutes between trains.

That is not unusual. The floating method is sometimes adopted with remarkable success—especially in the case of draw-bridge spans. There the problem complicates itself exceedingly, for both the water and the land highways must be kept open for traffic; yet it is a matter of record that the Pennsylvania Railroad, operating a fearfully heavy suburban service in and out of Jersey City, recently substituted one draw for another on its Hackensack River Bridge without delaying a single train.

But even in this high noon of the day of steel, the stone bridge holds its own. The big chiefs of railroad construction look upon it with favor. Higher priced than a steel bridge of equal capacity it requires initial outlay. But forever after, it represents a saving—a saving chiefly in that very important figure, maintenance. A steel bridge requires constant attention and constant expense. A stone bridge requires little of either; and therein lies its strength in its old age. Engineers point to such structures as the Thomas Viaduct down at Relay, or to the wonderful stone bridges that have stood through the centuries in older lands; they bear in mind the constant battle that a steel bridge must make against the ravages of weather and against the sinister thefts of corrosion, and ofttimes they rule in favor of the oldest type of sizable bridge.

Two things are all-important in the choice between the steel bridge and the arch bridge of stone or concrete. The first is the accessibility of the quarries. If they are not very near the solid bridge will cost four times that of one of steel and the average American railroad is not able to spend money in that fashion, even in the hopes of future[Pg 77] economies in maintenance. If the quarries are close at hand, as they were years ago when Kirkwood built the Starucca Viaduct for the Erie, the cost of a masonry bridge will hardly exceed that of steel trusses, and the concrete structure may cost a little less. Then there comes into play the second consideration. The stone or concrete bridge has tremendous weight, no ordinary foundation work will serve it. If the river bed and banks be of sand or poor earth, the engineer had best give up his hopes of the Roman form of structure. He can build steel towers and trusses on piles of caissons—hardly solid stone piers and abutments and aides.

All these things considered, the stone bridge is still more than holding its own in modern railroad construction. The Boston & Albany Railroad began building these splendidly permanent structures along its lines through the Berkshires more than twenty years ago. More recently both the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio have been looking with favor upon this type of bridge. The Baltimore & Ohio has just finished building its massive Brandywine Viaduct, near Wilmington, a splendid double-track structure, 764 feet in length, and composed of two 80-foot, two 90-foot, and three 100-foot arches.

The three great stone bridges that the Pennsylvania has built upon its main line are all four-tracked. Two splendid examples of these span the Raritan River at New Brunswick, and the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. The third, spanning the Susquehanna at Rockville, Pa., just north of Harrisburg, is the largest stone bridge in the world. It is over a mile in length, and is composed of 48 arches; 220,000 tons of masonry was employed in its construction.

Concrete viaducts were first employed in interurban electric railroad construction, and latterly they have been brought more to the service of the steam railroad. A splendid example of this very new form of construction exists in the extension of the Florida East Coast Railroad[Pg 78] over the keys and shallow waters of Southern Florida, for seventy-five miles between Homestead and Key West. A considerable portion of the line is over the sea.

The Florida keys are like a series of stepping-stones, leading into the ocean from the tip of the peninsula to Key West. They lie in the form of a curve, the channels separating the islands varying from a few hundred feet to several miles in width. Nearly thirty of these islands were used in the construction of the new railroad. More than fifty miles of rock and earthen embankment have been built where the intervening waters are shallow, but where the water is deeper and the openings are exposed to storms by breaks in the outer reef, concrete arch viaducts have been used. These viaducts consist of 50-foot reinforced concrete arch spans and piers, with here and there a 60-foot span.

There are four of these arch viaducts aggregating 5.78 miles in length. The longest is between Long Key and Grassy Key, 2.7 miles, and is called the Long Key Viaduct; across Knight’s Key Channel, 7,300 feet; across Moser’s Channel, 7,800 feet, and across Bahia Honda Channel, 4,950 feet. The material of these islands is coralline limestone. In many places the embankment for the roadway is 8 or 9 feet in height, and the roadbed is ballasted with the same material. The result is one of the finest and safest railway roadbeds in the world.

Across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa., the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad is building the largest concrete bridge in the world, a few feet longer than the great structure by which the Illinois Central crosses the Big Muddy River and just 100 feet longer than the Connecticut Avenue Bridge, at Washington, D. C. The Lackawanna’s bridge is 1,450 feet long, with five arches of 150-foot span, and a number of shorter arches. The track is carried at an elevation of 75 feet above highwater; and to find living-rock as a solid foundation for a structure of so great a weight, the abutments and piers[Pg 79] were carried about 61 feet below the surface of the ground.

With the bridge-builder at his elbow, the railroad constructing engineer hesitates at no river, no arm of the sea, no deep valley, no wild ravine, no cleft in the mountain-side. He calls to his aid the magic of the men who have made this branch of American practical science famous: a feathery trestle appears, as if by magic. Across its narrow edge the steel rails follow their resistless path.

[Pg 80]

THE PASSENGER STATIONS

The railroad terminal is the city gate. Without, it rises in the superior arrogance of white granite, as an architectural something. It has broad portals, and through these portals a host of folk both come and go. Within, this city gate is a thing of stupendous apartments and monumental dimensions, a thing not to be grasped in a moment. In a single great apartment—a vaulted room so great as to have its dimensions run into distant vistas—are the steam caravans that come and go. It is a busy place, a place of an infinite variety of business.

In the early morning the train-shed gives the first sign of the new-born day. Before the dawn is well upon the city, the great arcs that run into those distant vistas in wonderful symmetry are hissing and alight, and the first of 500 incoming trains is finding its way into the gloom of the shed. Some few trains have started out with the early mails and the morning papers. The great rush into town is yet to begin.

Even before dawn, a thousand little homes without the city have been awake and fretful. The gray fogs of the night lie low, and lights begin to twinkle, lines of shuffling figures to find their way to the nearest suburban station. It is very early morning when these begin to[Pg 81] pass through the city gate. The earliest suburban trains slip in from the yards and come to a slow, grinding stop beneath the shed. Before the wheels have ceased turning, the first of the workers is off the cars and running down the platform. In fifteen seconds, the platform is black with men.

There are many more of these trains, a great multiplication of men within a little time. Before seven o’clock, the trains begin to increase; to follow more and more closely upon one another’s heels. After seven, they come still oftener; two or three of them may stop simultaneously on different tracks under the great vault of the shed; they are heavy with people. There is a constant clatter of engines, stamping and puffing, dragging their heavily laden trains and snapping them quickly out of the way of others to follow. The electric lights under the shed go out with a protesting sputter, and you realize that the day is at hand. This mighty army of those who live without the city walls is flocking in, in an unceasing current now. There is an endless procession from the track platforms; a stream of humans finding its way to the day’s work.

Do you want figures so that you may see the might of this army? Binghamton, N. Y., is a city; a little less than fifty thousand persons live there. If the whole population of Binghamton—every man, woman, and child—were poured through the portals of this terminal on any one of six mornings of the week, it would be about equal to this suburban traffic. In a single hour—from seven to eight—45 trains have arrived under the roof of this shed and discharged their human freight; in the following hour, 64 trains empty another great brigade of the army from without the city walls.

The city gate is indeed a busy place. Its concourse or head platform echoes all day long with the unending tread of shuffling feet; beyond the fence, with its bulletins and ticket-examiners, is the vault of the train-shed, a[Pg 82] thing of great shadows, even in midday. Its echoes are also unending. There seems to be no end of pushing and shoving and hauling among the engines; there must be an infinite stock of trains somewhere without. The human stream flows all the while.

The marvel of all this is that the terminal, which seems so intricate, so baffling, is under the control of one man—a man to whom it is as simple as the ten fingers of his hands. This man is keeper of the city gate. His watch-house is situated just without the big and squatty train-shed. It is long and narrow, glass-lined and sun-filled. Through its windows he keeps track of those who come and go.

“There’s Second Seventeen, with them school teachers coming back from the convention out at Kansas City. Put her in on Twenty-one so’s to give the baggage folks a chance. Them women travel with lots of duds.”

These are orders to his assistants and orders in that watch tower are rarely repeated. The assistants are in shirt-sleeves like their chief, for the sun-filled tower is broiling hot. They nod to one another, click small levers, and Second Seventeen—a long train of sleeping-cars coming into the city in the hot moisture of the early June morning—is sent easily and carefully in upon track Twenty-one in the train-shed of the terminal. There you have the explanation of that order that was meaningless to you but a moment ago. Track Twenty-one is nearest the in-baggage room of the station. With two cars, piled roof-high with heavy trunks, the thoughtfulness of the towerman in sending the special upon track Twenty-one will be appreciated by the baggage handlers. A vast amount of manual labor will be saved; and that counts, even upon a cool day.

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The Northwestern’s monumental new terminal on the West Side of Chicago

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The Union Station at Washington

This keeper of the city gate represents the survival of the fittest, the very cream of his profession. The chances are that he began his railroading off in some lonely way station on a branch line, developed qualities that brought [Pg 83]him to the quick and favorable attention of his chiefs, then advanced steadily along the rapid lines of promotion that railroading holds for some men. He is one of three men, who, for certain hours, hold the keeping of the complicated city gate within their own well-drilled minds. The tower is the mind, the brain centre, the ganglion, of that city gate; but the tower is only wondrously mechanical, after all; the mind of the careful towerman is the mind that controls all the mechanism.

To the average traveller, the city gate is a thing that impresses itself upon his mind by its exterior and interior beauty, or its convenience of arrangement. He notes the broad concourses, the ample entrances and exits, the compelling magnificence of the public rooms, the great sweep of the train-shed roof, but beyond that train-shed roof is a tangle of tracks and signals about which he does not worry his busy head. Those tracks and signals represent more truly the station than the mere architectural magnificence of its outer shell. They are a tangle and a maze, apparently, but a tangle and maze that must represent skill and ease in their tremendous operation. They are neither tangle nor maze to the shirt-sleeved men in the tower. They must know each track, each switch-point, each signal as intimately and familiarly as they know the fingers of their hands.

Every mechanical device is employed to simplify the tangle for the comfort of the busy minds that must constantly employ themselves in solving it. In the big watch-tower—the “control” of the terminal—there is a map that is more than map. It depicts in miniature all the tracks and switches and signals that lie without and roundabout the tower; but this map shows switches and signals changing as the switches and signals of the train-yard change. It brings the distant corners of the terminal in closer touch with the towermen. In fog or blinding storm, this track model is invaluable—a veritable compass set within the brain of the terminal.

[Pg 84]This illuminated map sets upon the best piece of mechanism that has yet been devised for the operation of the terminal yard. It is a long boxed affair, not entirely unlike the box of the old-fashioned square piano, but in this case (the terminal we are watching being of unusual capacity) more than thirty feet in length. This box is the very brains of the terminal. It represents the acme of mechanical condensation. Reduced to its earliest and simplest equivalent—the separate hand operation of a gigantic cluster of switches in a great terminal yard—it would cover a vast area and result in the employment of an army of switchmen. Carelessness on the part of any one member of this army might cause a serious accident. The margin of safety would be very low in such a case.

The first schemes of automatic switch systems eliminated the necessity of employing an army of switchmen. A cluster of levers, in a tower of commanding location, was connected by steel rods with the switches and the signals which protected them. A man in the tower operated this group of levers. In this way, the control of the yard was simplified, and responsibility was placed upon a better paid and better trained man than the average hand switchman. The margin of safety was considerably broadened.

Then came an amendment to that first system. Some genius of a mechanic built an interlocking switch machine, a thing of cogs and clutches, by which a collision in a railroad yard became almost a physical impossibility. In these mechanical interlocking devices the tower levers are so controlled, one by another, that signals cannot be given for trains to proceed until all switches in the route governed are first properly set and locked; and conversely, so that the switches of a route governed by signal cannot be moved during the display of a signal giving the right of way over them. By installation of the interlocking, some of the responsibility is taken by mechanical device from human brain and the margin of safety broadened still further.

This “piano box” represents still further condensation[Pg 85] of the switch and signal control and interlocking devices. The men who designed this particular city gate designed it to accommodate more than a thousand outgoing and incoming passenger trains each twenty-four hours; they had found that the condensations given by earlier systems were not sufficient for their purpose. After bringing several switches, designed to act in concert, upon a single lever, they found that they would have a row of 360 levers. Set closely together these would require a tower about 160 feet long. It is roughly figured that it is not desirable to assign more than twenty of these heavy levers to a single towerman and that meant eighteen men, working at a shift. Moreover, the throwing of a heavy switch half a mile distant from the tower is not a slight manual exercise.

Then the “piano box”—electro-pneumatic—was installed; 150 feet of levers was reduced to 30 feet of small handles hardly larger than faucet handles and quite as easily turned. The control of a great terminal was brought down to three towermen, acting under the direction of their chief, the shirt-sleeved keeper of the city gate.

“We’ve got to keep them hustling,” he tells you. “There’s the morning express in from New York. She’s heavy this morning. That train over there, coming across the swing-bridge, is the millionaire’s special. She’s all club-cars, comes in every mornin’ from the seaside. Her wheels’ll stop on the same nick as the express. Watch them both, carefully.”

“Isn’t it quite a trick handling those trains simultaneously?”

“Not much,” a smile fixed itself upon the chief towerman’s features, as he fingered his greasy timetable. “Here’s four trains pulling out here simultaneously at 5:40. On top of that we get a Forest Hills local in at 5:39, a Hudson Upper local at 5:40, an Ogontz at 5:42, a Readville at 5:43, all incoming, and pull out two more at 5:43. Ten trains in just four minutes isn’t bad, and[Pg 86] we haven’t begun to feel the capacity of this terminal yet.

“That isn’t all of it. We get the whole thing criss-crossed on us sometimes; and perhaps they’ll put on an extra getting out of here at 5:40, and that’ll bother us a little, for we have regular tracks assigned for all our scheduled trains. If they don’t run in the extras on us, or we don’t get a breakdown anywhere, it’s pretty plain sailing. Ring off your 10:10, Jimmy.”

Jimmy, the assistant at the far end of the tower, touched one of the little handles, a blade on a signal bridge opposite the end of the train-shed dropped, a big locomotive caught the rails instantly and cautiously led a long train of heavy cars out through the intricacy of tracks and switches until it was past the tower, over the “throat” of the yard, and, striking on the main line, was gaining speed once more.

“It’s as easy for him as unbroken rail off in the country,” said the chief towerman to me, as he waved salutation at the engineer passing below him.

Then he fell into a detailed and wondrous explanation of the intricacies of the “piano-box” mechanism. On the lower floor of the tower were air condensers, and through the medium of electricity and compressed air heavy switches and signals a half-mile off are worked almost by finger touch. Each switch is guarded by at least one signal, possibly two—home and distant—and these blades show an open or a closed path to the engineer. They are so arranged that normally they stand at danger and in case of breakdown they return by gravity to danger. At night the blades, which in various positions show safety and danger and caution, are replaced by lights—red for danger, yellow for caution, green for safety—according to the present standard rules.

This physiology of the passenger terminal has dwelt so far upon its brain and its nerve structure; the anatomy is[Pg 87] hardly less interesting. Almost every great passenger terminal in America is built upon the head-house plan. In this scheme trains arrive and depart upon a series of parallel tracks terminating within some sort of train-shed. It is the ideal scheme from the standpoint of the passenger, for no stairs or bridges or subways are necessary to reach any track. The tracks are generally laid in pairs, and between each pair a broad platform is built, which is in reality a long-armed extension of a common distributing platform or concourse extending across the head of the tracks. Sometimes these extension platforms are laid on both sides of a single track for greater facility in handling baggage and for the quick unloading of heavy trains.

But in case any number of trains are to be operated through the terminal, the head-house scheme becomes impracticable and an abomination to the operating department. It makes necessary all manner of backing and turning trains and a tremendous amount of energy and time is spent in so doing. So we find the head-house stations—the real terminals of America—for the most part along the seaboard or at the termination of really important railroad routes. They are an expensive luxury at any other point.

At the outer end of the train-shed, its tracks begin to converge. They are in rough similarity to the sticks of an open fan and at the handle they are reduced to anywhere from two to eight main tracks, the connections with the through tracks that serve the station. The point of convergence is known to the towerman and all the other workers as the “throat” of the yard. It is by far the most important point of the terminal, and is the usual location of the control tower, with its authority over several hundred switches and signals.

Upon the number of main tracks in this “throat” depends the capacity of the terminal, quite as much as the number of tracks in the train-shed or the size of any other of its facilities. If there are as many as eight tracks in[Pg 88] this “throat”—an unusual number—the signals and switches will probably be arranged so that in the morning five tracks may be used for the rush of incoming business, and three tracks for outgoing business, while in the late afternoon conditions are exactly reversed, five tracks being used for hurrying the suburbanites homeward, three for the lesser business incoming to the terminal. With four tracks in the “throat”—a usual number—three may be used in the direction of the volume of greatest business. Each of these tracks is like a separate entrance to the terminal, and when five are open from the train-shed simultaneously, as in this first case, five outgoing trains may be started simultaneously from as many tracks.

In this connection, a comparative table of the capacity of several of the largest American passenger terminals may not be without interest:

But the approach and train-shed tracks are only a part of the yards that are necessary at every large passenger terminal. Certain provisions are necessary for mail and express service (freight of every sort is handled as far as possible in separate yards and terminals), and extensive provision for the storage and care of cars and motive power. In the last case, it becomes advisable to have the roundhouse, or roundhouses, for locomotive storage within short striking distance of the terminal station. These are vast structures, their very form requiring large tracts of land. The American plan of radiating engine-storage tracks from a common centre, occupied by a turntable,[Pg 89] has never prevailed in England. Some few attempts have been made in this country to build parallel storage tracks, with the transfer table for an operating arm, but almost every attempt of this sort has been induced by a necessity for unusual economy in land-space. We shall need the turntables as long as we continue to use steam as a motive power, and the early method of grouping storage tracks and radii from the table has never lost its favor with operating officers.

A full-size roundhouse, with a diameter approximating 300 feet, has as its necessary accessories, facilities for coaling the locomotives—several at a time—as well as supplying them with water, sand, and other necessities. Possibly the terminal will be big enough to demand shop facilities for trifling repairs and maintenance of both cars and motive power. A big passenger terminal is a much bigger thing than that gaudy waiting-room in which you sit, whilst your train is being made ready to take you out from the city.

Great as the room assigned to locomotives, greater must be yard-room for car-storage, in rough proportions, as the length of the locomotive to the average train length. It takes something approaching a genius to lay out the car-yards, particularly in the case of passenger terminals, which are almost invariably in the heart of great cities where land values are fabulously high. These yards, in order to earn the appreciation of the men who must operate them, must be easy of access and be of sufficient size to meet the heavy demands that are to be put upon them. To appreciate them, let us consider them in daily use.

The heavy express which has discharged its baggage and passengers in the train-shed is hauled out to the yards by one of the sturdy little switch-engines that are eternally poking their way about the yards. The engine that has pulled it in from the road backs itself down to the roundhouse, without another thought of the train. Its responsibility ended as soon as the run ended in the train-shed.[Pg 90] The engineer simply has to see that his locomotive is carefully put away in the roundhouse; and, on some roads, that his fireman cleans its upper parts before the next run out upon the line. The roundhouse crew is then supposed to take care of the rest of the engine.

In the meantime, the stout little switching-engine has hauled the cars out to the yards, separating the Pullman equipment and placing day-coaches, baggage cars, and the like in a position by themselves. An effort is made to keep the equipment for the heavy through trains reserved, allowance being made for occasional changes for repair and maintenance. In the case of the local and suburban trains, their varying traffic requires varying lengths; and it is possible that two or three of the train-shed tracks contain a supply of extra coaches in order that emergencies of sudden and unexpected traffic may be met.

The yards must afford full facilities for storing and cleaning cars. This last is a thorough operation, compressed air being used in many cases and to great advantage. Within, seats are thoroughly dusted, floors swept, woodwork wiped, while the railroad’s pride in the outer appearance of its equipment is shown by the scrupulous care with which a small army of cleaners, ladders in hand, wash down the varnished sides of the coaches. In addition, both coaches and Pullmans must be stocked with linen and ice-water, lighting tanks filled and trucks inspected while in storage yards. Most elaborate provisions are made for the stocking of dining and buffet cars.

Through equipment will rest in the yards from six to twenty-four hours, as an average. The local and suburban trains have a programme of their own, slightly different. The engine that is to make the run will get its train in the first place from the storage yard. It is only a big express run, where the locomotive is privileged to back into the station, to find its train made ready there for it by some fag of a switch-engine. The engine that hauls the local backs its own train into the station, makes its run out upon[Pg 91] the line, 15, 25, 50 miles, whatever the case may be, and brings the train back into the station. It kicks the cars out, just beyond the cover of the train-shed and while it is hurrying to the turntable the cars are being hastily swept and dusted. An hour will be allowed the engineer to turn his engine and get his coal and water supply, and then he will start out again on his local run. This performance will be repeated one or more times, before the coaches are sent to the yard for thorough cleaning and stocking, and the locomotive housed for a little rest in the programme.

This is not the universal programme, but it is typical. It seems simple; but with the multiplicity of local trains in service, the demands of the regular through traffic, and the special demands that come unexpectedly day after day, that car storage yard has got to be arranged for an economy of operation, as well as with the economy of space in view. Each storage track must be of convenient access and the chances are that a separate tower and interlocking may be set aside for the quick, convenient, and safe operation of the storage yard. In any event, it must be so built as to be worked without interference of any sort on the main line tracks of the terminal.

So much for the terminal, in reference to its operation; now let us consider it for a moment from the standpoint of the passenger. The first point to be considered by the engineers who design it is the point that we have just considered—safety and convenience in operation. A terminal might be, and sometimes is, an architectural triumph and a thing of monumental beauty, but a curse and an extravagance as an operating proposition. The architects, the mural painters, the furniture designers and the like are called in last. It is their province to make the setting for the thing the engineers have already created.

So in considering the terminal station as a building, we must still give ear to the engineer. He must plan for the future, anticipate the number of persons who are to pass through this city’s gate fifty years hence, and plan[Pg 92] his concourse, so many square inches for each one of those future users of the terminal. Exits and entrances to the trains must be built in order that incoming and outgoing streams of persons shall not conflict. All these points require careful study. It is possible to design a baggage-room so bad as to make the station all but a failure; a stuffy ticket-office that is almost an impossibility to use under pressure conditions. The good engineer thinks two or three thousand times before he begins the design of a passenger terminal.

The concourse, or head platform, that joins all the different track platforms is the main feature of the terminal building. Upon it some persons congregate preparatory to going through the gates to their trains, and other persons congregate awaiting the arrival of trains—a matter which is carefully bulletined for their convenience. Arriving and departing passengers, with a percentage of idlers, must be accommodated upon it. It must be capacious. Exits to the street should be provided, without the necessity of passing through the station building, and the carriage stand should be close at hand.

The waiting-room will be the monumental and artistic expression of the terminal. It may or may not be a portion of the entrance to the concourse and train-shed, but it is essential that it be conveniently located, that smoking-rooms, women’s waiting-rooms, parcel-check, telephone, telegraph, news-stand, and restaurant facilities be close at hand. It is hardly less desirable that the ticket-offices adjoin the waiting-room yet the architect who so places his ticket-offices that the belated traveller has unnecessary delay in purchasing his tickets, will bring down unnumbered curses upon his defenceless head.

The modern station will make provision for numerous railroad offices—be a complete modern office-building in fact, although not emblazoning that in its architectural design—and will have lunch-stand and restaurant facilities, with their necessary addenda of store-rooms, refrigerators[Pg 93] and kitchens, as complete as those of the largest hotels.

The baggage accommodations deserve a paragraph by themselves. Americans, due to the liberal baggage provisions of our railroads, travel each year with increased impedimenta. Each year the task of the baggage-handlers multiplies. Making room for trunks has come to be an important terminal provision. In the large terminals, this traffic is divided, an in-baggage room receiving from incoming trains and distributing to various forms of city baggage delivery and an out-baggage room receiving and checking baggage for outgoing trains. The in-baggage room is always much the largest, because of the delays that almost invariably hold trunks for a time—short or long—upon their arrival at a terminal.

It is desirable that baggage be handled with as little inconvenience as possible to passengers; and for this reason almost all terminals have subways extending from the “in” and “out” rooms beneath all train-shed platforms and connected with each of these by elevators, large enough to receive a full-sized baggage-truck. In this way annoyance and delay to passengers is minimized. In the case of heavy through trains, where baggage runs unusually heavy, the baggage-cars are frequently detached and switched in upon special tracks that run alongside the baggage rooms.

The passenger terminal must also provide mail and express facilities among these structures, but these, as has already been intimated, are generally apart and quite separate from the passenger facilities. A power plant is another necessity. The buildings must be heated, cars warmed in freezing weather long before the locomotives are attached, ice-machines operated for the station restaurant, power supplied to elevators, dynamos, and lesser mechanisms about the terminal. This is a feature that is not radically different from that of other large commercial structures.

[Pg 94]The capacity of a modern railroad is measured by the capacity of its terminals rather than by that of its main line tracks. The railroads were not quick to realize nor to appreciate this fact at the first. It was finally forced upon their attention, and in that way became one of the fundamental principles of American railroad construction and operation.

The terminal became recognized as one of the most efficient possible solutions of the congestion problem, a little more than a quarter of a century ago. It was then that the double-tracking and four-tracking devices were found to measure all out of cost with the relief that was to be derived from them. It was then that the engineers were told to meet the situation with a relief that should be measurably low in cost.

The result of their work has been to put America foremost with her railroad terminals. The engineers have worked against great odds in many cases. The railroads in the beginning took little or no forethought for their terminals. They neglected rare opportunities to buy land for these facilities in the beginning, when the cities were small and the land cheap. They have paid in millions of dollars for this neglect. In some cases, the early railroads had little money to expend upon this city real estate; but in few cases did any of their managers have the gift of prophecy that made them foresee the great cities of to-day or the great tides of traffic they would be called upon to move.

Nor has this phase of the situation improved within recent years. A great railroad rebuilt its passenger terminal in an important city ten years ago and blindly imagined that the increase in facilities would carry it a quarter of a century at the least. To-day it is carrying off the remnants of that station improvement to the scrap-heap and trying to see far enough into the future to build a station that shall last it fifty years at least.

There is not an engineer employed by that railroad[Pg 95] who will assert himself as possessed of the absolute belief that the new station will be adequate for the traffic of a half century hence, if indeed the great spreading palace of steel and marble be in existence at all at that time. All that they will tell you is to point to the fact that another one of America’s greatest passenger carriers has doubled its traffic within the past ten years.

“How can we gamble with an unknown future of such dimensions?” they ask you in return.

When the Park Square Station of the Boston & Providence Railroad in Boston and the Grand Central Station in New York were built, in the early seventies, they were the first railroad passenger terminals of size that the country had seen. It was thought that they would stand a hundred years as monuments to the genius of the men who designed them. To-day they are both gone, each supplanted by a station that both together might be packed within.

Do you wonder then that railroad operator and engineer alike stand appalled at the tremendous terminal problem that our great cities, growing awesome overnight, are constantly presenting to them?

In the beginning, there were no passenger or freight terminals, nor, indeed, a traffic that demanded them. The passenger cars were apt to be hauled by horses from some downtown depot through the centre of the street to an “outer depot” at the edge of the town where the locomotive replaced the horses. When the cars became heavier, the trains longer and more frequent, the railroads were gradually forced in most cities to remove their rails from the streets and the use of horses was generally abandoned. Still, passengers crossing Baltimore, for some years after the war on their way from the North to Washington, noticed that the trains were broken into cars and drawn one by one by horses across the city, through crowded streets, from one outer railroad station to the[Pg 96] other. A venerable white horse was the switching-engine in the Rochester depot until the beginning of the eighties.

When the passenger traffic on the railroads had become a business of extent—about the middle of the past century—the construction of sizable railroad stations began. The Fitchburg Railroad built its stone fortress at Boston, which still stands and was for many years regarded as a marvel of its sort. Down in Baltimore, the Susquehanna Railroad—afterwards the Northern Central—built Calvert Station, and stanch old Calvert is still a busy passenger gateway of the Monumental City. A few years later the Baltimore & Ohio built Camden Station there and Camden Station was regarded as something rather unusually fine for a number of years.

In the sixties, the railroad terminals grew in size, and the old custom of having separate stations at the far sides of important towns was disappearing, as the American began to see and to demand the advantages of through traffic. So Cleveland built at the close of the war a stone Union Station, of such size that Cleveland folks bragged of it for many years. The stone Union Station at Cleveland is still in use, but the folk of that town do not brag of it nowadays. Cleveland has grown a good deal since they built the Union Station there.

The first real passenger terminals of importance in the country were the Park Square in Boston, and the Grand Central in New York, to which reference has already been made. These presented architectural pretensions such as the railroads of the country had not before offered to the cities they served. They also served as models for bigger things that were to follow. In Boston, the Lowell Road planned and built a large new station, and the era of the passenger terminal was begun.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad built Broad Street Station, at Philadelphia, it built a terminal a little finer than anything accomplished up to that time. Even to-day, with the dignity of years creeping upon it, Broad[Pg 97] Street is still one of the foremost American stations. The policy of its owners has been to keep it abreast of the demands of the day, and only recently it has been greatly enlarged again, its protecting, interlocking, and signal system being made second to none in the world. To the traveller, the ivory-white waiting-room, where Philadelphians delight to congregate, is an unending source of admiration; engineers find interest in the intricate system of tunnels and bridges by which a number of trunk-line divisions are brought into the station without crossing at level. Broad Street Station shows a yearly increase in its passenger traffic of about five per cent. It has a daily movement of more than 600 loaded trains in and out, in addition to a heavy switching movement. But because of the steady increase of its traffic the Pennsylvania has already planned to relieve it by building a new main for express trains out at West Philadelphia. When that is done Broad Street will be used exclusively for suburban traffic. A short distance away stands the Market Street Station, of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a terminal rivalling Broad Street in beauty, and only slightly inferior in capacity. Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.

But the first big station terminals—in our American sense that a thing big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world—were those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention.

The Boston terminal—South Station—was preceded by a giant structure erected along the bank of the Charles River to receive a multitude of through and suburban railroad lines entering from the north. This [Pg 98]terminal—North Station—embraced the structure of the Boston & Lowell Railroad and superseded those of the Boston & Maine and Fitchburg railroads. The merging of these and other interests into the present Boston & Maine made the North Station a possibility. It is not a structure of particular distinction, from either an architectural or an engineering standpoint, but it has proved itself a mighty convenience to a travelling public, using a multiplicity of busy lines.

The convenience of it made the South Station a possibility. Boston, like Philadelphia, spreads out well beyond its actual boundaries and measures itself as a vast community, including many near-by cities and villages. With the consolidation of a number of railroads in Southern New England into the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, and the popularity of the North Station so close at hand, the South Station came as a matter of course. It replaced the stations of the New York & New England—whose site forms part of its site—the Old Colony, the Boston & Albany, and the Park Square Station. To accommodate the vast traffic of all these railroads, a great terminal was designed and built, a thing whose bigness is hardly realized by the passenger coming and going through it and who knows it only as a thing of some thousands of shuffling feet, giant shadows, and long distances.

In addition to the 28 sub-tracks in the train-shed, South Station is, in effect, a through station for electric suburban traffic. This service has not yet been installed, but the tracks are ready for use upon short notice, when the facilities of the main train-shed shall become overtaxed. This through station has been ingeniously devised underneath the train-shed and waiting-rooms of the terminal. It is served by two tracks leading from the main entrance tracks to the station—guarded by separate interlocking and tower controls, and consists of two extensive loops.[Pg 99] For suburban service, with no baggage to be handled, these loops will some day afford a great accommodation. Three or four electric trains may be stood upon each. The time and necessity of reversing the trains is entirely obviated, and upon the two tracks of this sub-station a short-haul traffic can be handled almost equal in numbers to that of the train-shed overhead.

What such a statement means can be better realized by a recourse to bold statistics. South Station handled 31,831,390 passengers in 1909, who travelled two and fro in some 800 trains daily. It has handled more than 900 trains in a single day. Its baggage men take care of more than 2,500,000 trunks in a twelvemonth. The statistics of a city gate like South Station are, in themselves, sizable.

St. Louis has one passenger station to serve as city gate for the traffic that comes and goes at that important railroad centre. That gate is the chief through passenger traffic point of the world. From its train-shed one may take through trains to every corner of the United States and a few distant corners of Mexico and Canada. St. Louis, like most Western cities has no volume of suburban traffic as New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, but it is a consequential point for through passengers. The better to serve the needs of the 22 different railroad systems entering that city, the Union Station was built a dozen years ago. It was thought to be big enough to last St. Louis many years. Before the World’s Fair of 1904 opened in that city the Union Station was already judged inadequate, and an elaborate plan was consummated for its enlargement.

When the Union Station was originally planned, St. Louis demanded a gate that would be worthy of her size and dignity. No type of through station would do, the head-house terminal was demanded and built, even though in actual practice it necessitated backing each arriving[Pg 100] train into the shed. A station of giant size with the largest train-shed in the world was built and hailed with a glad acclaim by the Western town.

When the station was found inadequate, the engineers found their plans for enlarging it would have to be adapted to a very confined area, proscribed by immovable railroad properties to the south, highway viaducts to the east and west, and a granite head-house, costing several million dollars, to the north. Within that confined area, they were to correct the evils of insufficient capacity—a train-shed with a single 4-track throat and some standing tracks of but 3 cars’ length, inadequate baggage arrangements, and lesser evils. Within two years, they had substituted, without increasing the area of the Union Station property, a 10-car capacity for each of the 32 tracks of the train-shed, a double throat with 6 tracks, increased concourses and distributing platforms for passengers, and a complete subway system for the handling of baggage. The prosecution of that work, while the station was in constant and busy use, ranks as one of the marvels of latter-day practical engineering.

From the standpoint of the architect, no other station has yet been built in the United States that can compare with the new Union Station at Washington. For years, the overcrowded railroad stations at that city have been but wretched gateways to the national capitol. Now the city that is fast becoming the Mecca of all Americans has an entrance worthy of her dignity, and in keeping with the increasing magnificence of her architectural works.

The Washington Station is in full accord with the wonderful architectural development of that city, and has a setting in the creation of a great facing plaza, in which 100,000 troops may be gathered in review. Some day the plaza is to be surrounded by a group of public buildings but even in that day the white marble station, exceeding in size all other Washington buildings save the[Pg 101] Capitol itself, will remain the dominating feature of that facing plaza. It has been created in simple classic outline, a vaulted train-shed being purposely omitted, in order that the station should not overshadow the proportions of the near-by Capitol.

Similarly, the vaulted train-shed has been omitted in the splendid new white granite terminal which the Chicago and Northwestern Railway has just completed on the West Side of Chicago. That new terminal is a real addition to a town which has long boasted two model stations—one in La Salle Street and the other upon the Lake Front. The Northwestern terminal is one of the fine architectural features of Chicago—a structure of classic design, the dominating feature of which is a colonnaded portico, monumental in type and towering to a height of 120 feet above the main street entrance.

This new terminal has a possible capacity of a quarter of a million passengers each day. It has some novel features for the comfort of passengers. A great many travellers cross Chicago in the course of twenty-four hours; in many cases this is the single break in a weary and dirty journey. For these, the new terminal not only provides the customary lounging rooms and barber shops, but also private baths. There is a series of rooms where invalids, women with children, or other persons seeking privacy, may go directly by private elevator where they may rest while waiting for connecting trains. For women there are tea-rooms and hospital rooms, with trained nurses in attendance. That is almost the last note in comfort for the traveller. There are, in addition to all these, private rooms where the suburbanite may change into his evening clothes and proceed in his various social duties, changing back again before he catches his late train out into the country.

New York City is still in the process of rebuilding and readjusting her gateways. Two magnificent terminals in[Pg 102] her metropolitan district have already been finished; the third is still under construction. The first of these terminals is a real water-gate, built for the Lackawanna Railroad and situated in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from the corporate New York. It is a handsome architectural creation in steel and concrete. Its tall clock-tower dominates the river front by night and day and those who come and go through its portals find themselves in a succession of white and vaulted hallways and concourses that suggest a library or museum more than the mere commercial structure of a railroad corporation.

An interesting feature of the Hoboken Station is the abandonment of the high train-shed such as has come to be a distinguishing feature of some of the world’s great terminals. Engine smoke and gases work havoc with the structural steel work of such sheds, and the engineers of the Hoboken Station fashioned a low-lying roof, slotted to receive the locomotive stacks. The result is a clean train-house, yet admirably protected from the stress of weather. It is a novel note in terminal engineering.

The Pennsylvania Station, opened in November, 1910, has already become one of the notable landmarks of New York. Beneath it disappeared the biggest hole ever excavated at one time in the metropolitan city; for the great station is not so famed either for its architectural beauty or for the completeness of its details (although it is in the foreguard of the world’s great terminals in both of these regards), as for the stupendous engineering project that was found necessary to connect it with the trunk-line railroads that it serves. To the west, this takes form in two parallel tunnels underneath the city, the Hudson River, and the Jersey Heights; to the east a still heavier traffic, composed of empty trains in Pennsylvania service and a great army of Long Island commuters, is carried under the very heart of Manhattan Island and under the East River in four parallel tunnels. Trains run for six miles under the greatest city of the continent, with its [Pg 103]flanking rivers and environs, without ever seeing more than a momentary flash of daylight. The terminal has no train-shed or other of the familiar external appearances of the usual railroad station in a large city.

A model American railroad station—the Union Station of the New York Central,
Boston & Albany, Delaware & Hudson, and West Shore railroads at Albany

The classic portal of the Pennsylvania’s new station in New York

The beautiful concourse of the new Pennsylvania Station, in New York

“The waiting-room is the monumental and artistic expression of the
station,”—the waiting-room of the Union Depot at Troy, New York

The Pennsylvania terminal also departs radically from the other great terminals in its track arrangements. The twenty-one parallel station tracks, with their platforms, are placed in a basement forty feet below street level. In fact, the great building is divided into three levels. At the street level are the broad entrances, the chief of these forming itself into a broad arcade, lined with shops that cater particularly to the demands of the traveller. On this floor are also the railroad’s commodious restaurant and lunch-room.

On the intermediate plane, or level, the real business of the passenger prefatory to his journey is transacted. The concourse, the great general waiting-room, with its subsidiary rooms for men and women, the ticket offices, and the telegraph offices are there gathered. From the roomy concourse, covered in steel and glass after the fashion of the famous train-sheds in Frankfort and Dresden, Germany, individual stairs and elevators lead to each of the track platforms. A sub-concourse, hung directly underneath the main structure, is reserved for exit purposes only, and serves to separate the streams of incoming and outgoing passengers. The north side of the station is separated and reserved for the use of the Long Island passengers, chiefly commuters.

The theory of operation of the station is simplicity itself. A Pennsylvania through train from the West, after discharging its passengers and baggage, will not be backed out of the train-house, but will continue on through the station, under more tunnels and another river, to the storage yards just outside of Long Island City. Similarly, trains made ready for a long trip at the yards will proceed empty under the East River tunnels to the big station, where they will receive their outbound load.[Pg 104] This is the theory of the station, an operating theory which makes it in part like a giant way-station and saves much terminal congestion. The Long Island trains and a few short-line Pennsylvania express trains will be turned in the station. These are the exception.

Of interest fully equal to that of the new Pennsylvania Station, is the construction of a new Grand Central Station upon the site of and during the use of the old. The Grand Central Station, used by both the New York Central and the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroads, has been for many years New York’s great gateway to the east as well as the north and west. It has developed a great suburban and a great through traffic since the construction of the first station—away back in 1871. Temporary relief was gained in the early eighties by the construction of an annex to the east of the original station. Still further improvement was gained ten years ago by tearing out a series of ill-arranged public rooms and substituting for them the single beautiful waiting-room that has proved so great a delight to travellers. Now that waiting-room is about to be demolished in the face of plans for the newer and greater Grand Central.

The building of the new station has offered tremendous problems to the engineers, for it has demanded a complete reconstruction within extremely limited area, while not placing hindrances in the way of the constant operation of one of the world’s greatest terminals. Coincident with the rebuilding of the new station has come the substitution of electricity for steam on the terminal lines of its two tenants, the New York, New Haven, & Hartford, and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroads. In order to work the three-mile tunnel through Park Avenue and the sole entrance for trains to the station at greatest capacity, it was found necessary to extend the yards of the new station far north of those of the old. This work, alone, has necessitated the acquisition of whole city blocks of tremendously valuable real estate and the[Pg 105] excavation of several million cubic yards of rock and earth.

To accomplish the work of reconstruction and still enable the station to handle its great traffic without serious interruption, serious forethought and definite plans of action were found necessary. The plan was developed by constructing a temporary building of brick and plaster covering a vacant city block in Madison Avenue, at the west of the station. Into this temporary structure a branch post office, an important adjunct of the Grand Central, was moved from the extreme eastern side of the terminal. Excavation for the new terminal began at its eastern edge and at that edge the first portions of the new structure have been completed. A waiting-room was then established in temporary quarters, the last vestiges of the old Grand Central removed, and the main front and centre of the new station fabricated. Similarly, as the excavation has progressed from the east to the west side of the terminal, the great bulk of the traffic has been gradually shifted from the old high-level to the new low-level.

The new Grand Central complete will have its main train-shed devoted to through traffic. A second train-shed of similar arrangement and of slightly smaller dimensions will be constructed underneath the main shed for suburban traffic, and a single head-house will serve both floors. The head-house will have as its chief architectural feature, a concourse of mammoth proportions. The lesser features of the new Grand Central will contribute to make the new terminal, built upon the site of the historic old, one of the world’s greatest gateways. The fact that steam locomotives are absolutely prohibited from entering either of the two new stations on Manhattan Island makes these the cleanest railroad terminals yet built.

So not only have our railroads begun to build great stations; they are to-day building really beautiful stations.[Pg 106] An age in which the American demands the exquisite and the monumental in his architecture, palatial homes, palatial shops, palatial hotels, demands that the railroad station be something more than the mere expression of a commercial utility. Stone, the sturdy and durable building material of all the ages, has become the expression of these buildings from without. Within, they are gay with rare marbles and mural paintings. There is nothing too fine for the railroad passenger terminal of to-day in the United States.

When the master fancy of the architect, Richardson, designed the splendid stations at Worcester and Springfield, as well as a host of smaller attractive stations along the line of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the beginnings were made. More recently this rising American desire for beauty and good taste has shown itself in such elaborate and artistic structures as the stations at Albany and Scranton. The last step has come in the designing of the palatial terminals in Chicago, in Washington, and in New York City. It would take a bold prophet to anticipate what the next step might be.

[Pg 107]

THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS

All the folk who come and go upon the railroad know the passenger stations. Few of them know the freight terminals. Yet it is from this last source that the railroad will derive the greater part of its revenue. The freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a single structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all its passengers, even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so to concentrate this part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal.

With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of trucking is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in order to eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the stimulus of competition, will establish freight stations at each point where any considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These stations will consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight (your traffic expert calls this “LCL,” meaning “less than carload”), and wagon yards for carload lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses, one for inbound, the other for outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have to be ample for the accommodation of a[Pg 108] host of trucks and drays as well as for the long rows of freight-cars.

In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be a freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its shipping-rooms and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American city there may be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So much for the general commodity freight. Then there are the special commodities.

Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see, after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic burden that increases yearly.

It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and the handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal scheme. It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic; and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves, elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.

So you see the railroad’s freight terminal in any large city is like the fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together somewhere; and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city the railroad creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and [Pg 109]outgoing—100 trains a day, perhaps—is gathered together and sorted with system and regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and the mail packages.

To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme, let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by which the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.

The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through Eastern New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth, lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many piers and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the smoky, busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight terminal. There are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight station at Jersey City (the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and another much larger plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper harbor, almost behind the Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now awaiting its greatest development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its ownership control of the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling line, 4 and 6 tracks wide, around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger terminal yards at Long Island City. This encircling line—the New York Connecting Railroad it is called—will be continued by a splendid bridge over the East River to an actual connection with the New Haven system reaching up into New England. When this is done, one of the bugaboos of the freightmen—the slow and ofttimes[Pg 110] dangerous movement of barges and car-floats through the East River, past the entire length of Manhattan Island—will be ended. Greenville will become the distributing point for the bulk of New England freight that comes and goes from the south and the west through New York.

Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank well to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.

Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the neck of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main line from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark, united to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a gateway by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in reality. A big assorting or classification yard was built there for outgoing freight, and another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added and one of the great transfer houses of the country—but of that, more in a moment.

The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are closed and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy floats are being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville. There is not much loafing at either of those points along about supper-time. Switching crews show feverish activity in snatching the cars from the floats, and yardmasters bend themselves nervously toward forming the long trains that are to go rumbling toward the west throughout the night.

[Pg 111]Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a dozen switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no longer. They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals, cars that are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting begins. The night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser officers in the field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns in hand, they are running along the trains (these are pulling in from the waterfront every five minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping and revamping the freight traffic of the night.

This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for Pittsburgh, the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the points diverging therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has been in progress for more than an hour at one end of the classification tracks, there are long trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some large city or important distributing point. After that it is a simple enough matter to bring engines and cabooses and start the trains through. Then the sorting of the cars is begun again and continues until the freight receiving points and the freight interchange points in the metropolitan district have been swept clean for the night.

The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller scale, for it handles package freight—“less than carload.” It is a long structure, stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long sidings[Pg 112] and unloading sheds. It takes the “LCL” stuff coming by night from the connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses, and a little after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great mass of matter, from 200 to 500 carloads a day.

Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day and by night.

You ship a box—sixty pounds to one hundred pounds—from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.; a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, ad infinitum. You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a problem in freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail service. Ten thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising here and there and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to destination, make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts have finished their difficult work.

If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the problem would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds weight, or less, perhaps—“LCL” anyway. From its destination it goes with other boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house the car in which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track, seals are broken, doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The transfer-house is roomy and systematic. If it were anything less it would resemble chaos.

But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting points have regular stands, upon which[Pg 113] nightly are placed cars bound for these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house), each transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite that number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is mail-sorting on a Titanic scale.

Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one of the switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to replace it. Beyond that, the yardmaster’s superiors are all the time demanding that he show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.

When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects forfeits from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not expedite its passage; this the railroaders know as “per diem.” The great trick in operating is to keep per diem down; and so the “foreign” cars, so called, must be promptly returned to their home roads.

“We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern from Chicago every day,” the man who has this yard in charge explains. “It’s up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I can’t, I do the best I can.” He scratches his head. “Perhaps I’ll use a Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not, something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out beyond Washington there’d be trouble, and I’ve got to dig out something empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell.[Pg 114] Mos’ generally, though, when we’ve got a turn of Western stuff, I’ve got my ‘empty’ tracks stuffed full o’ them New England cars.”

We mention something about the transfer-house being a mighty good thing.

“It’s a necessary evil,” says our guide, correcting us.

He starts to explain. “See here. The X——, over in its Jersey City transfer-house, got near a carload of that fancy porcelain brick through from Haverstraw las’ week, and that young whelp of a college boy that’s hangin’ round there learnin’ the railroad business gets it into his noodle that it’s somethin’ awful, awful for that stuff to be goin’ through to Middle Ohio in a Maine Central box, an ‘LCL’ at that. So out he dumps it into a system car right here an’ now, and saves his road about one dollar and fifty cents per diem. Of course they pay about one hundred and thirty-five dollars for damages to that brick in the transferrin’. But the boy’s all right in the transfer-house. If he was out on the engine he might blow up the biler.”

Here is another great railroad yard—this almost filling a mighty crevice between God’s eternal hills. This is within the mountain country, and the gossip that you get around the roundhouse is all of grades. You hear how Smith and the 2,999 pulled seven Pullmans around the Saddleback without a pusher; how some of the big preference freights take four engines to mount the summit; the tales of daring are tales of pushers and of trains breaking apart on the fearful mountain stretches.

Randall is yardmaster here, and Randall is the opposite of the layman’s picture of a yardmaster—a slovenly, worn, profane sort of fellow. Randall does not swear; he rarely even gets excited; his system of administration is so perfectly devised that even in a stress he rarely has to turn to work with his own hands. With him [Pg 115]railroading is a fine, practical science. He will tell you of the methods at Collinwood, at Altoona, at Buffalo, at Chicago—wherein they differ. He is cool, calculating, clever, a capital railroader in addition to all these.

Something over a million dollars’ worth of passenger cars
are constantly stored in this yard

A scene in the great freight-yards that surround Chicago

The intricacy of tracks and the “throat” of a modern terminal yard:
South Station, Boston, and its approaches

You speak of his yard as being overwhelmingly big. He answers in his deliberate way:

“We’ve more than 200 miles of track in this yard; something more than 2,000 switches operate it.”

Then he takes you down from his office, elevated in an abandoned switch-tower, and looking down upon his domain. He explains with great care that, his yard being a main-line division point and not a point with many intersecting branches or “foreign roads,” its transfer-house is inconsequential. The same process that goes forward with the package-freight in the transfer-houses, Randall carries on in this yard with cars. These operations are separated for east-bound and west-bound freight and each is given an entirely separate yard, easily reached from the group of roundhouses that hold the freight motive power of that part of the system. Randall’s, being an unusually large yard, further divides these activities into separate yards for loaded and empty cars on the west-bound side. No east-bound “empties” are handled over his road.

We follow him to the nearest operating point, the west-bound classification yard for loaded cars. In the old days this was a broad flat reach of about 20 parallel tracks, terminating at each end in approaches of lead of “ladder” track. Upon each set of 3 or 4 tracks a switch-engine is busy in the eternal classification process. In these more modern days you may see the “hump” or gravity-yard, although you will still find skilled railroaders who are prejudiced against its use. In the hump-yard half of the work of the switch-engines is done by gravity. This new type of railroad facility has an artificial hill, just above the termination of the parallel tracks where they cluster together, and upon this hump one[Pg 116] switch-engine with a trained crew does the work of six engines and crews in the old type of yard.

A preference freight rolls into the receiving yard for the west-bound classification. Its engine uncouples and steams off for a well-earned rest in the smoky roundhouse. A switch-engine uncouples the caboose that has been tacked on behind over the division, and it is shunted off to the near-by caboose track, where its crew will have close oversight of it—perhaps sleep in it—until it is ready to accompany some east-bound freight a few hours hence.

Blue flags (blue lights at night) are fastened at each end of the dismantled cars, and the inspectors have a quarter of an hour to make sure if the equipment is in good order. If the car is found with broken running-gear it is marked, and soon after drilled out from its fellows, sent to the transfer-house to have its contents removed, to the shops for repairs, or the “cripple” track for junk, if its case is well-nigh hopeless.

With the “O. K.” of the car inspectors finally pronounced, the train that was comes up to the hump, and the expert crew that operates there makes short work of sorting out the cars—this track for “stuff” southwest of Pittsburgh, this next for Cleveland and Chicago, the third for transcontinental; and so it goes. Two lines of cars are drilled at the same time, for just ahead of the switch-engine is an open-platform car, known as the “pole-car,” and by means of heavy timbers the “pole-man” guides two rows of heavy cars down the slight grades to their resting-places.

The cars do not rest long upon the classification-yard tracks. From the far end of each of these they are being gathered in solid trains, one for Pittsburgh, another for Cleveland and Chicago, the third transcontinental, and so on. Engines of the next division are being hitched to them, pet “hacks” brought from the caboose tracks, and the long strings of loaded box-cars are off toward the West in incredibly short time.

[Pg 117]Of course there are some trains that never go upon the “classification” at Randall’s yard. There are solid coal trains bound in and out of New York, of Philadelphia, and of Boston, that pass him empty and filled, and only change engines and cabooses at his command. There are through freights, bound from one seaboard to the other, from the Far East to the Far West, that do likewise. But the majority of the freight movement has the sorting out within his domain, his four humps are busy day and night with an ordinary run of traffic, and you shudder to think what must be the condition when business begins to run at high tide.

“We get it a-humming every once in a while,” he finally confesses. “We had one day, a little time ago, when we received 121 east-bound trains in twenty-four hours, more than 3,200 cars all told. That meant, on an average, a train every 11½ minutes. That same day we got 78 west-bound freights, with more than 3,600 cars. That meant nearly 7,000 cars handled on the in-freight in twenty-four hours, or a train coming in to me every 7½ minutes during day and night. They don’t do much better than that on some of the subway and elevated railroads in the big cities; and I haven’t said a word about the trains and cars we despatched—just about as much again, of course.”

Through yards such as these there are incoming streams of merchandise, equal at least to the outgoing, passing through classification yards in carload lots and the great transfer-houses in “LCL.” These streams must be kept separate and from clogging one another or themselves. Cars must carry loads whenever they are moved—“empties” are the bogy-men of the superintendents of transportation—and cars from “foreign” systems must be quickly returned to their home roads. The yardmaster at a busy freight point has his own worries. His puzzle is unending. To it he must bend the bigness of a big mind, he must be prepared to handle the unequal[Pg 118] volumes of traffic that pass through his domain with an equal skill: in dull times he must seek to keep his plant working under conditions of rare economy; when the freight rises to flood tide, he must fight in harness to prevent the freight from congesting. The word “failure” has been stricken out of his vocabulary by his superiors.

It takes a high grade of railroader to serve as yardmaster.

[Pg 119]

THE LOCOMOTIVES AND THE CARS

From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. We have already told of the honor that is forged in the building of the bridge; honor of no less degree has gone into the forging of the most vital and most human thing upon the railroad, outside of man himself. That man has ever been able to create and build the locomotive, a giant creature of some 200 tons, perhaps, built together with infinite care of some 5,000 to 7,000 parts, and these parts acting with the delicacy of the hair-spring of a watch, almost passes ordinary belief. The wonder becomes even greater when it is realized that this monster creature, set upon two slender rails, is capable of pulling a 4,000 ton train, through every stress of weather and over considerable grades.

To tell in detail of the locomotive in one chapter is short allowance to a subject that fairly demands for itself a whole book, a technical mind for the telling, and at least a fairly technical mind for the understanding; a subject that in its history goes hand in hand with that of the railroad itself. Yet the limitations of this book forbid a more lengthy description.

We have already told of a very few of the earliest and most famous American locomotives; the Stourbridge Lion, which Horatio Allen brought to the Delaware & Hudson[Pg 120] Company; the Best Friend, which was built in New York City, and which went to Charleston, South Carolina, to be the first American locomotive to run in the United States, the De Witt Clinton, which awoke the echoes of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in a single day; and the Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, which induced the directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to change their motive power from horses to steam, and so opened a great new development for their property.

A little while after Cooper’s Tom Thumb had achieved the astounding feat of beating a team of horses in hauling a railroad coach, the directors of the B. & O. offered a prize of $4,000 “for the most approved engine that shall be delivered for trial upon the road on or before June 1, 1831; and $3,500 for the engine which shall be adjudged the next best.” It was determined in this prospectus that “the engine, when in operation must not exceed three and one-half tons weight and must, on a level road, be capable of drawing day by day fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of wagons, fifteen miles an hour.”

Three locomotives answered this generous offer. Of them but one, the York, oftener called the Arabian, built at York, Pa., by Davis & Gartner, and hauled to Baltimore by horses over the turnpikes, was of practical service. Phineas Davis was a watch and clock maker, but he succeeded in devising a locomotive that was the forerunner of the famous Grasshopper upon the Baltimore & Ohio. Better name was never given to a locomotive, the rude and ungainly angles formed by rods and levers giving a distinct resemblance to the long-legged bugs. Yet the Grasshoppers served their purpose. In the late eighties, the Arabian was still in service in the Mount Clare yards at Baltimore. With a single exception, it never had an accident or even left the rails. That exception was just before the completion of the Washington branch, and Davis was a passenger upon the engine. It was going at a fair rate of speed when suddenly it rolled[Pg 121] over upon its side in the ditch. No one was hurt, save Davis, who was instantly killed. It seemed a strange caprice of Fate, for although careful examination was immediately made, both of the engine and of the track, no reason could ever be assigned for the accident.

In that same year, 1831, the John Bull, which was built by George & Robert Stephenson & Company, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England, was received in Philadelphia for the Camden & Amboy Railroad. As long as the locomotive continues to serve the railroad the name of George Stephenson, its inventor, must be indissolubly linked with it. The John Bull was easily the most famous Stephenson engine ever sent to the United States. It has been shown at all our great expositions, and now occupies a position of honor in the great Smithsonian institution at Washington. Of these early engines, which it was found necessary to bring from England, a volume once issued by the Rogers Locomotive Works, of Paterson, N. J., has said:

As a matter of fact, the English engines, built for use on long straight stretches of line would never have served on the early roads in this country with their steep and curving routes through the mountains. So, in the latter part of the year 1831, John B. Jervis invented what he called “a new plan of frame, with a bearing-carriage for a locomotive engine” for the use of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, in which he introduced the forward truck[Pg 122] which is to-day a distinctive feature of American engines. Its effectiveness was at once recognized, and its almost general adoption immediately followed. Five years later, Henry R. Campbell, of Philadelphia, had patented his system of two driving-wheels and a truck, and the distinctive type of American locomotive was born.

In the development of that peculiarly successful type, great names have been written into the history of American locomotive-building—the names of such men as Rogers and Winans and Hinckley and Mason and Brooks and Matthias Baldwin and William Norris; the last two both of Philadelphia. Norris, after some interesting smaller engines, built the George Washington in 1835. This engine was not one whit less than a triumph. It ascended the steep plane of the Columbia Railroad in Philadelphia, a grade of 7½ per cent, carrying two passenger cars in which were seated 53 persons. It came to a stop on that grade and started up again by its own efforts. After reaching the summit, the engine was turned around and came down, stopping once in its descent.

That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane, and the performance of the George Washington has not been attempted in all these years save in the case of Latrobe’s temporary line at Kingwood Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment, pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170 others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony. William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for the growing nation across the Atlantic.

Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the beginning of his life. He lived long[Pg 123] enough to lay the foundation of one of the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm that has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and kept it alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin’s first locomotive was built in 1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad; and that it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed twenty years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built two years later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg Company. After that his works were regularly established, their head to give his patience and untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive. The history of Baldwin locomotives is, in an important sense, the history of the industry in the United States.

It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the Governor Paine for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in 1848, and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a pair of driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back of the fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin must have given full value, for it is related that the engine could be started from a state of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ordered three of the same sort, and one of these once hauled a special train carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty miles an hour. In weight, the locomotive was steadily increasing. In the beginning, these engines weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late forties engines of twenty-five tons each were being built for the Reading Road, and these were regarded as monsters.

Year by year the locomotive was being perfected in all its details. The cab made its appearance and was first opposed by the engineers, who imagined that they[Pg 124] would be badly penned in, in case of accident. The Erie contributed the bell-rope signal from the train; we have already heard of that first whistle on the locomotive of the Sandusky and Mad River Railroad. The Boston & Worcester devised the headlight, so that time might be saved by handling freight at night. More important than these were the experiments by Ross Winans and by S. M. Felton that led to the substitution of coal for wood as a fuel, and the development by Rogers at his Paterson works of the link device, so necessary in stopping, starting, and reversing the locomotive.

Gradually the size of the locomotive increased to 28 and 30 tons in the late fifties. Finally James Milholland, engineer of machinery for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, built in 1863 a pusher engine for coal trains that weighed something over 50 tons. When folk saw that engine they almost gasped, and wondered what the railroads were coming to. But the wiser men kept silent. They knew that as long as bridges and roadbeds and fine steel rails were increased in strength, the limit of size of the locomotive had not been reached. The greater grip the locomotive has upon the rail, the greater its pulling power, the greater its efficiency. Sheer weight, and weight alone, gives that grip. It certainly takes a weight of seven tons to give a grip of one ton upon a dry rail; in the case of wet rails this ratio becomes ten to one.

Then wonder not that the locomotive steadily increased in size, that the Moguls with six driving-wheels, and the Consolidations with eight, came into vogue a few years after the close of the war, and that these kept increasing in weight all the while. Height and width were and still are rigidly limited by the clearance of the line. The locomotive must stand no more than fourteen or sixteen feet high and from nine to eleven feet wide; in length the problem only meets the genius of the designer.

But it is altogether possible that the limit of the size[Pg 125] of the locomotive would have been reached long ago if it had not been for the coming of the air-brake. This most important assurance of the safety of the railroad passenger came into its being in 1869, when George Westinghouse, its inventor, was permitted to try it on a Panhandle train. From the beginning of railroads the necessity for brakes was apparent, and in 1833 Robert Stephenson patented a steam brake for the driving-wheels. That same brake, with compressed air substituted for steam, is essentially the Westinghouse device of to-day. But Westinghouse made the air do the work of steam. After he had developed the idea he offered it to leading Eastern railroads, but they one and all declined it.

Finally, he was permitted to place it on a Panhandle train, full assurance having been given to the railroad officials that he would be personally responsible for any injury done to their equipment. Four cars and an engine were fitted with the new device and the train started forth from Pittsburgh to Steubenville. On the way its progress was halted by a farm wagon which was caught in the rail at a highway crossing. The engineer whistled for the handbrakes in the good old-fashioned way but he knew that he was too late. Then he thought of the air-brake. He had little faith in the contraption, but he gave its handle a wrench and the train stopped ten feet from the wagon. Several lives were saved and the air-brake was proven. From that day forth it was simply a question of developing the device to its fullest possibility, and Mr. Westinghouse has proved himself able to do that very thing.

The air-brake was a fact. Steel had come into use for axles, driving-wheel tires, frames, and every other vital or bearing part of the locomotive; and the designers were again increasing its size. They passed the Consolidation and built the Mastodon. These were freighters—each with ten drivers—drivers with tremendous gripping force. They went through what M. N. Forney has[Pg 126] called a “period of adolescence in railroad progress,” and in that period they experimented with huge driving-wheels only to discard them once again. Then they built bigger engines than even the Mastodon; the Decapod, with twelve driving-wheels; the El Gobernador which was built by the Southern Pacific at its Sacramento shops in 1884, weighing, with engine and tender fully equipped, 113 tons.

Still the locomotive grows and its progenitors talk of the 500-ton machine. They have recently built the Mallet articulated compound, which because of its very great weight has splendid gripping force and is especially adapted for pushing-service on heavy grades. The Baltimore & Ohio, the Erie, the New York Central, the Great Northern, and the Santa Fe have already become committed to this type of engine. The American locomotive Company has just completed for the Delaware & Hudson several Mallet articulated compounds that are among the most powerful locomotives yet constructed. They were designed for pusher service, on heavy grades, north from Carbondale on the main line of the D. & H., which average from .81 to 1.36 per cent. Up to recently the heavy northbound coal traffic up these grades has been handled by the use of two heavy pusher engines. A single one of the new Mallets will do the work of the two pushers, and therein lies the economy in their use.

These new giants are, in operation, two 8-wheel engines, with individual cylinders, steam chests and supplies from a single boiler and fire-box. The gripping power of 16 driving-wheels under the enormous weight of 223 tons can be imagined; the designers estimate it at the high figure of forty-three tons. The exceptional length of these monster engines—a fraction over ninety feet—is carried around the curves of mountainous lines by an ingenious joint in their solid steel frames. This then is only the latest of American engines; but not quite the biggest, for the Topeka shops of the Santa Fe Railroad [Pg 127]claim that honor with their new Mallets, each 121 feet long and weighing complete 810,000 pounds. The 500-ton locomotive does not seem so very far away when one comes to consider the Santa Fe giants. These engines, which are operated in pushing freights over the heavy grades in the Southwest, were built from two of the Santa Fe’s heaviest freight engines. They operate with equal facility in either direction as there is not a turntable in the land which would come anywhere near accommodating them.

Larger Image

One of the “diamond-stack” locomotives used on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early seventies

Prairie type passenger locomotive of the Lake Shore

Pacific type passenger locomotive of the New York Central

Atlantic type passenger locomotive, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad at its Altoona Shops

Larger Image

One of the great Mallet pushing engines of the Delaware & Hudson Company

A ten-wheeled switching locomotive of the Lake Shore

Suburban passenger locomotive of the New York Central

Consolidation freight locomotive of the Pennsylvania

In recent years, the rather graceful custom of giving names to the classification of locomotives has been extended to the passenger motive-power. In 1895, the Baldwins created the Atlantic type of four-driver locomotive for high-speed service both on the Atlantic Coast Line and on the Atlantic City Railroad, from Camden to the ocean—and the name has stuck. The Brooks plant of the American Locomotive Company at Dunkirk similarly developed the Pacific type for passenger locomotives with six drivers instead of four. The Prairie type was appropriately enough sponsored by the Burlington system. It is like the Pacific type save that the forward or lead truck (the Englishman would blandly call it the “bogey”) has but two instead of the conventional four wheels.

Your locomotive-builder is apt to be more systematic about these types of engine, and he falls back on what is generally known as Whyte’s classification. The basis of this simple system is in the number of wheels of the engine itself. Each type is described by a series of three numbers, the first of these being the number of wheels in front of the drivers, the second the number of drivers, and the third the number of wheels to the rear of these. The eight-wheel American type, the simplest for illustration here, would thus be described as “4-4-0.”

The trailer, which is described by the third number in this series, is a recent addition to the locomotive family[Pg 128] in this country. It came from the constant lengthening of the fire-box, due to the necessity of providing greater steam-power for engines of increasing weight and cylinder capacity. When the fire-box began to overhang too far, the trailer-wheels were introduced, and a device was affixed to the locomotive by which they might receive its weight for hill-climbing purposes. This last device has not proved particularly successful. But the trailer itself has become a fixed device in locomotive construction. When the third figure in Whyte’s classification is a cypher it simply means that there are no trailers. Similarly the first figure a cypher, indicates the absence of a forward truck or even wheels, which is common in some forms of switch-engines, where the weight is entirely concentrated on the drivers for better gripping power upon the rail.

Such, in brief, is the development of the locomotive. It has been development rather than change, for while some designers have fretted about whether the engine’s cab should be in the middle of the boiler or at its end and others have recently developed the Walsheart gears upon the outside of the engine frame, where it is of easier access than the old-style links, the general design of the iron-horse remains practically the same as that given it by our grand-daddies. They planned carefully and they planned for the long years. The essential features of their designs have not been questioned. It has simply been a problem of growth.

From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. If you would better understand the iron horse, find your way to any of the great plants in which he is being built. Begin at the beginning in a factory, which seems, with dozens of shops and great yards, to be almost a miniature city. Begin at the draughting-rooms where each locomotive is given a whole ledger page—sometimes two or three—for specifications. From those specifications, the young draughtsmen take their instructions. They[Pg 129] work out their charts and elevations, their detailed plans; and the ink is hardly dry upon their drawings before they are being whisked away to the blueprint rooms. The blueprints are still damp, when in turn they are hurried to the different construction shops of the plant.

You see these shops, one by one, in care of an expert guide. You see the wooden patterns going to the blast furnaces at the foundries and to the sullen tappings of the trip-hammers. You leave the blacksmiths and stand for a moment—not long—under the terrific din of the boiler-makers. The boiler, the great trunk of the locomotive, is built of steel plate—plate that is the very pride of the rolling-mills. In some foreign lands, copper fire-boxes are demanded; but the real American locomotive has these also of steel.

The steel plates are rolled to form the boiler itself, flanged by angle-workers into the square fire-box. Finally the boiler and the fire-box are riveted together, section by section—made as fast by steel thread as man’s ingenuity can make them. Together they form a unit. Another unit is being formed in an adjacent shop, the solidly welded steel frame in which the boiler shall yet set, and to which truck and drivers will be firmly fastened. Forward on this frame will sit the cylinders; in another corner of this shop they are being made ready. Cast-iron still remains the best material for the cylinders and the steam-chests. These are cast in one piece and the rule holds good where there are two cylinders, as in the case of the compounds. The cylinders, and steam-chest for one side and half the “saddle” of the locomotive, upon which the forward end of the boiler rests, are nowadays generally made in a single casting. After that it is a simple enough matter to smooth down the outer surface, bore the cylinders to perfect surfacing, and line the steam-chests with a bushing that can be readily removed once it is worn out.

The driving-wheels are an important detail of the [Pg 130]construction of the locomotive. They are made in rough castings—of steel for fast passenger engines, and of iron for other forms of motive power—and are then made true in giant lathes. The steel tires are shrunk on the wheels, a work of astounding nicety; and in turn the wheels themselves are heated and shrunk upon the axles—of the best steel that man can forge. To place these wheels upon the axles is hair-line work. A 9-inch hub receives an axle just 8.973 inches—no more, no less—in diameter. It is keyed and then under the slight expansion of a gentle heat it is rammed upon the axle-end. It goes on to stay, and stay it must.

From all these shops, a busy industrial railroad brings the different parts to the great and busy hall of the erecting-shop, a vast place of vast distances and filled always with the noisy clatter of great industry. Here the different parts, which have been carefully built by skilled artisans, are assembled into the finished whole. The cylinders and saddle-halves are placed and firmly riveted together. Into the collar of that saddle a giant overhead crane carefully sets the boiler and the fire-box. They are quickly riveted to the upper flange of the saddle: the locomotive is coming into a semblance of itself.

The cab is fastened into position; then the boiler-makers descend upon the unfinished engine and place the 200 or more flue-tubes that run from fire-box to smoke-box, just underneath the stack. They make every tube and joint fast—put into the growing locomotive all the energy and all the skill of good workmanship. When they are gone the giant crane again comes noiselessly down along the ceiling. It reaches down, grasps the engine-trunk, and swings it high aloft.

Down there, resting on real railroad tracks, are the driving-wheels and the lead truck, carefully spaced in anticipation. The crane, lifting the fifty tons of boiler and frame with no apparent effort whatsoever, places its load[Pg 131] squarely upon the wheels that are to carry it. Again the mechanics are busy; the engine is growing into a solid unit. Upon their heels follow testers, men who must look for steam or water leaks. They work under a test of air, carrying lighted candles into every nook and cranny of the giant. If the candle flutters, air is escaping, and the leak must be found.

Finally comes the report “O. K.” from the testing crew. The stacks, the steam and sand domes, and the air-brakes are being made fast. The engine is hurried off to the paint-shop. There it may find its companion in life, the humble useful tender already awaiting it. It came direct from the tender shop; for the appendage of the locomotive is no longer a specially rigged flat-car but a solid steel plate construction built to carry some 9,000 gallons of water and about 16 tons of coal. Only a little time ago, a New Yorker, scion of a wealthy and famous family of railroaders, proved himself worth his oats by designing a tender of great practicability and of great economy of construction.

When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and refulgent—brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it must be partly dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the road which has purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled through a freight train—never coupled together—in charge of an inspector from the locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never leave his charges until they have been receipted for. After that the locomotive begins to bend to the work for which he was created. Unless he is of a very unusual sort or was built for some very especial purpose, he soon loses his identity. The days are gone when locomotives were christened after the fashion of ships. There are too many of them. Each is given the cold informality of a number, marshalled for service in a mighty company.

[Pg 132]Cars came as corollary to the locomotive. In the beginning the passenger coaches were nothing more or less than old-time stage-coaches which had been set upon wheels so flanged as to enable them to stay upon the rail. So it was that the first cars built for the railroad followed stage-coach models. It was a practical necessity from the first to draw more than one small coach at a time, so the couplings and the bumper devices came as a matter of development. Then came the day when an aspiring inventor grouped several stage-coaches together on a single rigid frame and he had really developed a form of railroad coach—a form which our English and continental cousins still cling fondly to, in despite of its most apparent disadvantages.

Four wheels quickly gave way to eight. In the early thirties, Ross Winans developed a double-truck car for use on the Baltimore & Ohio. Compared with anything that had gone before it was certainly a pretentious vehicle. It was thirty feet in length, four-wheel trucks being attached at the ends, very much after the present fashion. There were seats on the flat roof, which were reached by a ladder in the corner, and the car itself was divided into three compartments. A little later Winans tore out the cross partitions in the car and introduced the end doors and the centre aisle, thus establishing the American passenger coach of to-day. The Baltimore & Ohio manufactured a number of these coaches at its famous Mount Clare shops. They were known for years as the “Washington cars,” probably because they were the first run on the Washington branch.

If Winans had been able to establish his patent rights to the double-truck car he might have reaped a fortune from its royalties alone. But when he went to assert his right as an inventor, it was discovered that the idea was not absolutely new. Gridley Bryant, in his old Quincy Granite Railroad, just south of Boston, had used the device in crude form. The four-wheeled flat cars which he had[Pg 133] employed in bringing stone from the quarries down to the dock were not long enough for granite slabs. He had met that emergency by fastening two of them together with coupling-rings, and thus in a way had created the eight-wheel car. So Winans lost his patent although credit is given him for having really developed the passenger car of to-day.

The form, once set, came quickly into vogue. In a few of the Southern States, old-fashioned gentlemen followed the early English fashion of having their private carriages attached to flat freight-cars whenever they went on railroad trips, but even this was a passing fad. At that time carriages were no novelty, and railroad cars were. They were stuffy little affairs compared with the coaches of to-day, miserably lighted and heated and ventilated, but Americans were very proud of them. The fashion that made early locomotives gay with color, with brass and burnished metals of other sorts, found full scope upon the passenger cars, both inside and out. They were pannelled and striped, ornamented and lettered to the limit of the skill of gifted painters. A coach, named the Morris Run, on the old Tioga Railroad, which began running south from Elmira about 1840, was decorated in red and green and yellow and blue and gilt and several other colors. It would have made a modern circus band wagon inconspicuous. But the day came when the brass stars and the red stack-bands began to disappear with the names from the locomotives and in that day the railroad cars became subdued in colorings. Some of the gay frescoes of the interiors, typical of the taste of an earlier day, were in use within the present generation.

While the “Washington cars” set a type, there was much yet to be accomplished in the development both of the passenger coach and of the freight car, and this much was chiefly in the line of the development of safety devices. The old-time passenger rode in a very decent fear of his life. Sometimes a loosened end of one of the “strap rails”[Pg 134] would come plunging up through the flimsy floor of the coach and impale some unfortunate passenger upon its end against the ceiling; other times the cars would go rolling off the banks and crashing into kindling-wood against one another. They were lightly built contrivances, incapable of standing any sort of shock or collision.

But improvements came one by one—better devices for coupling them together, culminating in the modern automatic “jaw coupler,” better framing, better platforms, better trucks, improved hand-brakes; and after them the now universal air-brakes made life safer both for the traveller and the railroad employee. Finally came the steel-end vestibule; and where cars have been equipped with this very comfortable device, telescoping in collision, a very common and disastrous accident in which one car-shell enveloped another, has been rendered impossible.

The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An early railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting on an inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave, surmounted by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: “Sacred to the memory of a man who stood upon a platform.” The railroad used every method to keep its passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they began to encourage it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse between the cars.

The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use necessitated passengers going the length of the train, a movement which, in itself, was facilitated by the main design of American cars, as differentiated from those of English railroads. When the English roads began the universal use of dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan of their car construction and produce what are still known across the Atlantic as “corridor trains.”

To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman,[Pg 135] the sleeping-car man, set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut, rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after three or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform enclosure of folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his vestibule that did more than merely protect passengers from the stress of weather; these, of course, then served as effective anti-telescoping devices. The Pennsylvania Railroad began the use of these vestibules in 1886 and they were soon universally adopted by American railroads on their fast through trains.

After that a better vestibule was devised by Col. W. D. Mann, one that extended the full width of the car. In fact the platform of the car had practically ceased to exist, the structure being full-framed to include its entrances at both ends.

After the vestibule came the steel car, introduced within the past ten years for freight service, and within the past five or six for passenger equipment. It has everything to commend it, save a slightly increased original cost, which is more than compensated by economy of maintenance, to say nothing of the intangible but certain raised factor of safety. It is to become universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American railroads almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to the scrap-heap.

Of the forms and varieties of railroad passenger coaches there are many, and these will be described when we come to consider in a later chapter the luxury of modern railroad travel. But the variety of passenger equipment quite pales before that of the freight service. Flat-cars, coal-cars, box-cars, grain-cars, live-stock cars—the list runs on into catalogue form. There are refrigerator cars that are kept filled with salt and ice or ice alone, precooled cars[Pg 136] that are merely kept air-tight, and ventilator cars employing a distinct reverse of that method; and up in northern climates there are heater-cars which are kept warm by lamps or by stoves and which are used for the transportation of fresh fruit and vegetables in winter just as the refrigerator-cars and the precooled cars are used for that same purpose in summer.

Almost all the safety devices that have been added to the running-gear of the passenger equipment have been added to the freight equipment also, to the great safety and peace of mind of the railroad employee. The car itself remains the simple essential of the very beginnings of the railroad. Its change has been a change in size, in weight, and in strength.

The first freight cars of the very old railroad at Mauch Chunk weighed 1,600 pounds each, and were permitted to carry a weight or “burden” of only 3,200 pounds. When the Boston & Albany first began using freight cars 30 feet long, it was so confused that it gave each end of the car a separate number for convenience in billing and designating consignments. Nowadays 40 tons is the right load for an efficient car, although they go as high as 55 and 60 tons’ capacity; the car itself may weigh approximately half that figure.

Freight cars by hundreds of thousands go bumping all over the different railroads of the land, and all the while they are getting bumped and broken in accidents—large and small. In such cases they are hauled to the nearest shop of the railroad upon which they are travelling and there repaired at the cost of the road that owns them. In earlier days, the job of master mechanic was no sinecure, for each road built its cars upon its own plans and no two of these plans were alike. A simple broken part necessitated the manufacture of a new part. It was a matter of great confusion and expensive to every line.

The organization of the Master Car Builders, in 1867, solved that problem. This organization, through [Pg 137]committee, made first the freight car standard and then the passenger standard. Axles, bolts, king-pins—every one of the intricate car-parts—were brought to standard and numbered sizes. After that all that a master mechanic had to do was to keep an assortment of standard car parts in his store-room, and he could make reasonable repairs to any car that travelled rails. The standardization has gone steadily forward year by year; it has included a variety of things, even such details as systematic numbering and lettering of cars. It is one of the evidences of the constant bettering of the American railroad, the steady effort to bring it to an economical and scientific basis.

Recently some of the railroads have made intelligent experiments, seeking to devise a vehicle that should be both locomotive and car, and that should be especially adapted for small side-lines, where traffic runs exceedingly light. Some success has been found in the use of a passenger coach, into which a gasolene engine has been introduced, and several of these cars are in regular use in the West. Two or three of them have been employed for three or four years on Union Pacific branches in and around Denver. They render a possible solution for one railroad problem—the problem of providing sufficient service for some branch where local traffic is slight. The gasolene car requires but two men, as against a minimum crew of five men for even the smallest steam passenger train. It can be quickly handled, will make many successive stops readily, and generally provides an efficient addition to the regular passenger equipment. A few years ago it would have given the standard steam railroads an excellent weapon against the constant encroachments of paralleling electric roads through their good passenger traffic districts; even to-day it offers a possible solution of the difficult problem of the very small branch side-lines.

[Pg 138]

REBUILDING A RAILROAD

To the operating heads of the great railroad systems, rebuilding a line is to-day a far more important problem than the building of new routes. The country has grown—grown in wealth, among other things. The causes that demanded the very greatest economy in the building of early railroad lines no longer exist. The hill that the early engineer carefully rounded with his line is now pierced without a second thought. Grades that were once deemed slight are now classed as impossible. The almost infinite development in the operation of the railroad has seen the grade or the curve, not as a slight matter, but as a matter which, however slight in a single instance, becomes in the course of constant operation a heavy operating expense. To-day the operating folk of the big railroads are counting the pennies where they countlessly multiply in these fashions; it is one of the greatest factors in the grinding operation competition between the great railroad systems of the country.

It is all quite as it should be. The early builders did the best that they might do with the opportunities that were theirs. They got the railroad through. It developed wealth for itself, as well as for the territory it served; and with that wealth it is enabled in these piping days of peace and plenty to correct the alignment errors of the early builders. Moreover, there are frequent cases where the steady increase of traffic has rendered it necessary[Pg 139] for a railroad to parallel its trunks with new lines, quite aside from the consideration of grade and curve.

As far back as the early fifties this great work of rebuilding the trunk-line railroads was begun. Certain serious errors in the original alignment of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad between Baltimore and the Potomac River were corrected, even though at a considerable expense. As time went on, other railroads continued this correction work. It is still being prosecuted east and west of the Mississippi. Ten million dollars, fifty million dollars, looks like a lot of money to the stockholders of any company, when their president tells them that this is to be the cost of this new relief line, this reconstruction, that cut-off; but what is $1,000,000 when it is going to save more than $100,000 a year in the operation of your railroad? It is the big sight of the big situation that the railroads make nowadays at this reconstruction work.

Mr. Harriman, with his transcontinentals from the Mississippi watersheds west, was almost the pioneer in this work of wholesale reconstruction. The wholesale operating benefits that have resulted from it in the case of his group of Pacifics have been largely responsible for his preëminence in the railroad world. And yet, once his method was tried, it all seemed simpler than A, B, C.

Take the case of the Lucin cut-off on his Southern Pacific. When the Union Pacific was being pushed across the plains and threaded over the Rockies and the Sierras, the Great Salt Lake of Utah lay directly in its path. The railroad did the obvious thing and carefully made a detour around the lake. When Mr. Harriman took over the Union Pacific, then in a state of physical decadence, and linked it with his Southern Pacific, and surveyed the situation carefully, he decreed that the Great Salt Lake should no longer cause a trunk-line railroad to double in its path. He caused a line to be surveyed direct across the marshy lake from Ogden to Lucin and when that was done he had a line—on paper—103[Pg 140] miles long as against 147 miles by the old line. The engineer hesitated, but Harriman urged and they courageously began the construction of miles and miles of embankment and of trestle. Then new difficulties arose. Sink-holes developed. In a few minutes structures that had been the work of long months silently disappeared. The engineers in charge came to Harriman.

“It is not possible,” they told him.

“You must carry it through whether it is possible or not,” Harriman replied.

Eventually they carried it through.

When it was done, the Union Pacific had not only shortened its transcontinental line 44 miles, but it had eliminated more than 1,500 feet of heavy grade and 3,919 degrees of curvature. An operating economy of between $900,000 and $1,000,000 a year had been effected and the stockholders of the company had a good investment for the $10,000,000 that the Lucin cut-off had cost them.

Nor was that all on the Union Pacific. On other sections of its main line similar reconstruction work has added to the economy of operation by millions of dollars each year. For twenty miles west from Omaha, where the old historic transcontinental formerly dipped south to avoid a series of undulating hills, the new Lane cut-off cuts squarely across them—20 miles of deep cuts and heavy fills—“heavy railroad,” as the engineers like to put it. And again, where the old line twisted and wound itself over the Black Hills, and wobbled unsteadily through Wyoming, the reconstruction engineers pressed their work.

Where Harriman stretched the Southern Pacific in a
straight line across the Great Salt Lake

Line revision on the New York Central—tunnelling through the bases of these
jutting peaks along the Hudson River does away with sharp and dangerous curves

Impressive grade revision on the Union Pacific in the Black Hills of Wyoming.
The discarded line may be seen at the right

It is not generally understood that the summit of the Union Pacific is in the Black Hills, which are the first foothill range of the Rockies, rather than in the mountain crest beyond. The Black Hills have always been a baffling proposition, with their short, steep slopes. The engineers wrinkled their brows at the thought of correcting [Pg 141]the old line through there, but Harriman simply said that they must, that the board—which meant E. H. Harriman himself—had directed that 247 feet be cut from the road’s crest there; and 247 feet, almost to the inch, was cut. It took giant fills and embankments and an army of men but the grades were brought to a minimum for a Rocky Mountain stretch. Wooden trestles, old and affording a constant fire-risk, were swallowed up in embankments; a single slice through a hill-top, a quarter of a mile long and eighty feet deep, did its part in reducing the grades; antiquated cars disappeared before equipment of the modern class; dilapidated shanties were supplanted by fine, permanent railroad stations. The new Union Pacific is a monument to the reconstruction engineer—and to E. H. Harriman.

The Canadian Pacific Railway, while traversing but one small northeastern corner of the United States, is essentially an American railroad, both in equipment and in operation. It forms an important half of that all-British Red Line encircling the globe, of which any Englishman is so very proud. When the Canadian Pacific Railway was completing its last link in this unbroken line of rails from St. John, N. B., and Montreal, to Vancouver, the question of grades was indeed a secondary one. The vital thing was to cut the line through, and to that end great sacrifices of grade efficiency were made. So that when the line was through, and the first Imperial Limited was making its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific over a single railroad system, it was indeed a line with structural defects. At one point—the famous Big Hill, near Field, Alta.—in order to overcome the steep Rocky Mountain climbs, it was necessary to use from four to six engines for comparatively light freight and passenger trains. And at that, it was difficult to attain a speed of more than four or five miles an hour.

Within the last three years, this fearful grade has been corrected by the very first spiral tunnels ever built upon[Pg 142] the American continent. Spiral tunnel construction of this kind is not new. It has been used with remarkable success by the railroads of Continental Europe, in piercing the High-Alpine boundaries between France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.

Coming from the east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train first enters the spiral tunnel—they call it the “corkscrew” out in Alberta—under Cathedral Mountain. This first bore is some 3,200 feet in length. Emerging from it, the train runs back east across the Kicking Horse River, then enters the eastern spiral tunnel, and after describing an elliptic curve, emerges, and again crosses the Kicking Horse westward. This whole thing is a perfect maze—the railroad doubling back upon itself twice, tunnelling under two mountains, and crossing the river twice in order to cut down the grade. The work cost $1,500,000. The mere cost of the explosives came to over $250,000. It was one of the really great tunnel jobs of the world. Yet despite the complicated work caused by the spiral shape of the tunnels, they met exactly. The worth of the thing to the Canadian Pacific is shown in the fact that those same trains that formerly required four to six engines, are now handled easily over this Big-Hill grade with but two engines, and at a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour.

Other railroads by the dozen, whose lines traverse mountainous or even hilly country, are engaged in this proposition of lowering their grades. F. D. Underwood, president of the Erie, and known as one of the ablest operating heads in this country, has been engaged in cutting off some of the heavy hill-climbs on that old-time route from the seaboard to the lakes. Underwood has already seen Erie’s hopes of success in developing the property as essentially a freighter and for the immediate improvement of that portion of its facilities he has built three new relief lines, a small stretch near Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and then through the upper Genesee[Pg 143] Valley, the third and most important eastward from a point near Port Jervis and piercing the summit of the Shawangunk Mountains.

The line through the Genesee Valley extends from Hunts, on the Buffalo division, about 20 miles west of Hornell, to Hinsdale on the main line, and is 33 miles long. It cuts off a heavy grade between Hornell and Hinsdale on the main line—a little over one per cent—for both east-bound and west-bound freight. At that particular point, Erie’s west-bound freight approximates 75 per cent of the east-bound, and so the new line recognizes that fact by establishing the west-bound maximum grade at 3-10 of one per cent, as against a maximum of 2-10 of one per cent in the other direction. Brought to a plain understanding, a single locomotive has no difficulty in handling 80 cars, each bearing 40 tons of coal, over this new low-grade line. To take one-half that load over the old main line required a pusher.

On the east end of the line, where Erie’s engineers built their greatest low-grade cut-off, the coal rolls down to the seaboard in such quantities as to make the west-bound tonnage only a quarter of the east-bound; so the reconstruction engineers were satisfied with a maximum west-bound grade at 6-10 of one per cent as against the maximum of 2-10 east-bound, in the direction of the heavy traffic. The cut-off, which is double-tracked and is 42½ miles long, increases the distance from New York to Chicago 8 miles; but this is not an essential fact, for, like the Genesee Valley Road it is built exclusively for freight service, and not only almost triples the hauling capacity of a locomotive but actually permits of faster running time for the freight trains between Jersey City and Port Jervis. To build the cut-off required a really great expenditure, for like all these new lines it was “heavy work,” embracing a tunnel nearly a mile long under the crest of the Shawangunk Ridge, and a steel trestle over the Moodna Valley, 3,200 feet in length and 190 feet high. Still[Pg 144] President Underwood can contemplate his locomotives hauling three times their old loads over it. The economy of such a proposition becomes apparent upon the face of it.

The Baltimore & Ohio, the Southern, and the Norfolk & Western have recently lowered their grades and straightened their curves in similar fashion; the Lehigh Valley, by the erection of a great new bridge at Towanda, Pa., has taken a bad link out of its main line; the Chicago & Alton, when the engineers told it that it must abandon miles upon miles of its main line (for long years its pride) and build anew, told those engineers to go ahead. Stretch by stretch the old road was revamped to meet in every way modern conditions. A steel bridge across the Missouri, which was the first steel bridge built in America, and which cost $500,000, was sent to the scrap-heap while the old-timers groaned. “That which yesterday was a railroad marvel becomes a curiosity to-morrow,” observes Frank H. Spearman, in speaking of this very thing.

The rebuilding of the Chicago & Alton was a clean-cut affair. The 70-pound rails were torn from the main line and sent to sidings and branch lines in favor of the 80-pound rails; for while men were tearing at the tracks, the shops were working overtime; 55-ton freight engines that could haul 30 cars were to give way to 165-ton motive power, capable of picking up and carrying a hundred cars with ease. That was why the old bridge had to go in favor of one which cost an even million dollars. And when the Alton built heavy new bridges at dozens of other points besides the Missouri, it built them after the new fashion, with solid rock ballast floor, affording additional comfort and safety to its patrons.

In a flat State like Illinois there were no very serious grade defects to be corrected, but through the gentle undulations of rolling country the line twisted and turned like a lazy brook. The rebuilders stopped that. When they were done there was a single section of 40 miles,[Pg 145] straight as the arrow flies, and many tangents of from 15 to 29 miles. In some cases when the trains were transferred to the completed line, the old, spindly, wobbly affair could be seen for miles in roadbed, to the one side or the other of the new. In some cases, this abandoned right-of-way was sold to interurban electric railroads; in one particular case one of the abandoned bridges was included in the sale.

The Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western is one of the old time Eastern Roads that have waxed immensely prosperous with the years. Originally built as an anthracite coal carrier from the Eastern Pennsylvania Mountains to the seaboard, it has developed into a through freight and passenger carrier of importance. The old-time engineer knew how to plan good railroads; the Pennsylvania to-day is building its new low-grade freight line on the very surveys made by its pioneer surveyors three-quarters of a century ago; but, as we have already intimated, those railroads were financially weak. Early annual reports of the Pennsylvania tell how its stock was peddled in Philadelphia from house to house—up one street and down another—and how sometimes two houses joined together to buy a single share. Money was not plentiful in the middle of the last century.

So the Lackawanna engineers were compelled to build their road in semi-mountainous districts, along the lines of least resistance, rather than by the most direct routes. As it came east from Scranton over the Pocono Mountains it found its way in a roundabout course to the middle of Northern New Jersey. The road wound south and then wound north again, its grades were steep, some of its curves were short, and it dipped through two tunnels—one at Oxford Furnace, the other at Manunka Chunk.

To iron out those time-taking dips, the sharp curves, the grades, and the tunnel, the Lackawanna cut-off—the “heaviest” bit of railroad in the world—was begun[Pg 146] three years ago. A new route 28½ miles long was surveyed diagonally across from Port Morris on the main line in New Jersey to the main line again at the Delaware Water Gap. Despite the fact that it must cross the watersheds diagonally—the watersheds formed by deep valleys and high rocky ridges—the line as surveyed and built is only three miles longer than an absolute air-line. It shortens the Lackawanna’s main stem from New York to Buffalo—already the shortest route between these two cities—by 15 miles, and brings that busy lake port a trifle within 400 miles from the seaboard.

To cross those watersheds at a sharp diagonal meant “heavy work”; and the engineers, to run their straight-cut, low-grade line, found that they would have to make tremendous cuts and fills—these last alone totalling 14,600,00 cubic yards. The Lackawanna’s engineers will give you a faint idea of the stupendous size of these embankments. To build them up of stone and earth at the rate of a cartload a minute for each working-day of the year would require 81 years for the job. To do it in less than three years has meant the employment of whole trains of dump-cars, the purchase of 600-acre farms for single borrow-pits, the energy and administration of real engineers.

There have been cuts through solid rock, 65 bridges and culverts to be wrought of concrete, a single embankment (at the Pequest River) three miles in length, 110 feet high, and 300 feet wide at its base. The traveller who rides over the completed double-track road will have but a faint idea of the human labor and the human energy that have gone to construct it.

The great railroad that traverses the State of Pennsylvania is another monument to the engineer. The Pennsylvania Railroad was no wobbly affair at any time. Its grades and curves, considering the character of the country through which its trunk rests, are not excessive. It has[Pg 147] been a good standard railroad for a good many years past. But in 1902, the Pennsylvania found that its troubles rested in the volume of traffic that was being offered it. Over its middle division from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh it was handling as much tonnage as J. J. Hill’s entire Great Northern system. The heavy tonnage business began to clog the road’s fast passenger traffic (its especial pride) and the fast freight traffic (the mainstay of its shippers), and appeal was made to the reconstruction engineers.

It was no slight appeal at that. Pittsburgh, handling 400,000 freight cars a month, was clogged, congested with such streams as had never before tried to crowd through that narrow neck of the Pennsylvania’s bottle and the orders that went forth for relief were emphatic. Vice-presidents, general managers, superintendents and general superintendents, and engineers of every sort crowded into the president’s office in Broad Street Station, and out of that conference the plans for an exclusively low-grade freight line from New York to Pittsburgh and for the traffic relief of Pittsburgh itself were born.

Every large city has become, in a sense, a bottle-neck for the important railroads that pierce it. In some cases like Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City or Indianapolis, the situation has been solved by the creation of belt-line freight railroads partly or entirely encircling the town. At Buffalo, the New York Central lines have built a connecting line to enable through traffic to escape the congestion of city yards and terminals, while at New Haven, the road of the same name has recently spent several million dollars in enlarging its narrow throat in the middle of the town.

But nowhere else did the situation approach that at Pittsburgh. Through the Pennsylvania’s passenger station there poured not only an abnormally heavy passenger traffic, owing to a heavy suburban service, but every pound of freight bound between the parent company and its two great subsidiaries, the Panhandle and the Fort[Pg 148] Wayne. There were further complications right at the station, owing to the proximity of two of the very worst grade-crossings in America, where Penn and Liberty Avenues swept their busy tides of city traffic all day long over the Fort Wayne’s main line tracks. It was a problem that called for the best in engineering skill—and received it.

The Pennsylvania dug deep into its pocket-book and solved the problem magnificently. It began by going back to the vicinity of its great Pitcairn freight-yards at the east of the city, and from them building two connecting laterals (the one to the south and across the Monongahela River to connect with the Panhandle tracks, the other to the north—known as the Brilliant cut-off) across the Alleghany and connecting with the tracks of the West Penn Railroad, which in turn connected with those of the Fort Wayne in the one-time city of Allegheny. That sounds simple, but it was in reality a fearfully expensive undertaking. The mile of Brilliant cut-off, “heavy work” every inch of it, cost $5,500,000, and is to-day the most expensive mile of railroad track in the world.

But the gripping hand was off the traffic throat of Pittsburgh and commercial Pittsburgh breathed more easily once again. The Union Station and its approach tracks were restored to passenger uses; and in the course of things the Pennsylvania tore down the old station, built a new one, and wiped out the two wicked city crossings, as with the stroke of an Aladdin’s hand.

So much for Pittsburgh. Now consider the great new freight line leading to the east from there. Not all of that railroad has yet been built, but the greater part of it is already completed, and every part of the old road that was under tension because of freight congestion has already been relieved.

To build this new double-track railroad across 350 miles of a mountainous State, the engineers studied two[Pg 149] points—grade and curvature. Distance was no object, for speed is the very last attainment of heavy tonnage movement. The new route consisted in part of the enlargement of the old routes, and in part of the construction of brand new line. It started east from Pittsburgh, where the great Brilliant cut-off had been built to relieve the tremendous terminal freight congestion, and followed up the valley of the Alleghany River on the route of the West Penn Road, a Pennsylvania property. The main line of the Pennsylvania comes east from Pittsburgh up the valley of the Monongahela for a distance, and then across country to Blairsville Intersection, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, where it is intercepted by the low-grade freight route.

From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the Pennsylvania’s engineers were ordered to four-track the original double-track through that narrow defile in God’s great world, they shook their heads dubiously; then—after the fashion of engineers—they went ahead and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same narrow pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast out a shelf on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the low-grade line.

Just beyond Gallitzin, where the Pennsylvania pierces with two great tunnels the very summit of the Alleghanies, the low-grade line takes its own course once more, breaking farther and farther away from the main line, and for long sections following the trail of the long-since abandoned Portage Railroad. The day is coming when Gallitzin Tunnels are to be left high in the air. The Pennsylvania’s officers tell you that frankly.

“We have plans for a six-mile tunnel, to be handled by electric motive-power already made,” said one of them, just the other day, “and every year we wait, that[Pg 150] tunnel grows longer, the approaching grades less and less. It will cost money—money into millions of dollars—and it will earn 10 per cent on the investment.”

From Gallitzin, the low-grade line delves far south to Hollidaysburgh and then follows the tracks of a former branch line up to Petersburg on the main line, which it parallels to the Susquehanna. Where the main line crosses the Susquehanna at Rockville, the low-grade freight route diverges once again and follows the west bank of the river for a number of miles, completely avoiding in that way Harrisburg and the steel-making towns to the south of it with all of their conditions of congestion. The freight route crosses the broad Susquehanna at Shock’s Mills, eight miles north of Columbia, and follows the east bank of the river for twenty miles to Shenks Ferry, where it turns abruptly eastward through the rugged hills of Lancaster County to a connection with the main line at Parkesburg. From thence it follows the main line nearly all the way to Glen Loch, crossing and re-crossing it but at all times retaining its nominal grades. At Glen Loch it makes a wide detour around Philadelphia and its suburbs and reaches with a long straight “short cut” over to the main line at Morrisville near Trenton.

So much for the location of this great line of reconstruction. In grades and in curvatures it has achieved real triumphs. The great tonnage here is also always east-bound—coal and iron coming to the seaboard. Its grades also are chiefly consequential then to the east-bound movement. To that movement the heavy grades are again at the almost incredible figure of 3-10 of one per cent—some seventeen feet to the mile. That will mean more when it is understood that that figure is equal to the pull that is required of an engine to start a heavy freight train upon an absolutely level track. With such a pull, grades become as nothing, and the Pennsylvania’s operating department is enabled to run 75 trains an hour[Pg 151] over this low-grade line; hour after hour upon a 15 minutes’ interval.

Ask a Pennsylvania officer what he would do with such traffic on his old main line to-day, and he will tell you that he would rather resign than tackle the proposition. The same thing is true on the New York Central lines. Like the Pennsylvania, that railroad thought a little time ago that with its four tracks it might move all civilization. Its acquisition of the bankrupt West Shore Railroad in the eighties gave it two extra tracks across New York State that for a long time were carried on the company’s books as deadwood. Now they are filled with freight operation and bringing in a healthy return to their owners. The growing land is always catching up to its new railroad facilities, no matter how rapidly they may be constructed.

To-morrow?

The railroad operator does not like to think of that. He meets to-day and he plans as best he may against that to-morrow. To meet the great unknown he bids the engineers—those who construct and those who reconstruct—to him, and begs that they exercise their best wits to help him to see a little way into the dim and shadowy future.

[Pg 152]

THE RAILROAD AND ITS PRESIDENT

All the widely divergent lines of human activity in the organization of the railroad converge in the office of its president. He is the focal point of the entire system. More than that, he is its head and front. If he is anything less, the sooner he is out of his job the better for both the railroad and himself; for, although there is a great variety of departments in the organization of steam railroad transportation and each department will have still greater varieties of activities, there is but a single activity delegated to the office that bears only the modest word “president” in gilt letters upon its door. The function of that office is to supervise. To understand that supervision better, consider for a moment the rough structure of the railroad.

Its activities are grouped into classes. The activity of soliciting business, both freight and passenger, forms the traffic department, in many ways the most important of all; for from it comes nearly all the vast revenue needed for the maintenance of the organism. The legal department looks after the railroad’s rights—its franchises, its charters, the law fabric of its almost innumerable relations with the various railroad commissions, legislatures,[Pg 153] city councils, and town and country boards. If the road be really sizable—with 8,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 miles of track—it will probably organize into separate departments the buying of its great quantities of supplies, the keeping of its intricate books, and the handling of its money. The business of building its lines and structures will need special talent for an engineering department. The department that will employ the great rank and file of the railroad’s army of employees is the operating department, called by some big roads the transportation department.

There are two other great factors of conducting a railroad; maintaining its lines—the tracks, bridges, tunnels and other features of the permanent way; and keeping both cars and engines fit for service. This last work, organized as the mechanical department, will probably rank next to operating in the number of its employees, and the value of its equipment is one of the greatest assets of the railroad. It is generally expressed in great shops located here and there and everywhere, at convenient points upon the system.

Generally the maintenance-of-way department comes under operating—it is only fair that a general manager should supervise the condition of the line over which he is expected to operate his trains at high speed and in absolute safety. The same argument should hold true as to the equipment. But right here is the great rock upon which the principle of American railroad organization splits in twain.

From the president’s office downward, the system of organization may be divisional or departmental. In the former case, the division superintendent is the real unit of railroad operation: under his guidance and responsibility come not only the operation of the trains but the maintenance both of the line and of the rolling-stock. In the case of departmental organization that superintendent—and also, above him, the general superintendent—exercises[Pg 154] no authority over the engineers of maintenance-of-way or the master mechanics of the shops along the system. Those lines of railroad activity do not converge with that of train operation below the office of the general manager. The greatest outside power that is given to a division superintendent on a purely departmental road is a sort of coöperation with the master mechanic in the matter of the men who handle the road’s motive power. This coöperation is many times intricate and involved. If the master mechanic and the division superintendent are not harmoniously inclined toward one another, and things very naturally go wrong with the motive-power, it is a difficult matter to locate responsibility.

The Pennsylvania system, which is one of the most perfectly organized in the world, is strongly organized upon the divisional system. The division superintendent upon the Pennsylvania is indeed a prince above his principality, and he is well trained for his rulership. Pennsylvania men go through the mill. It takes a pretty capable man to combine the ability for handling trains and handling men with the intricate knowledge for command over an engineering corps devoted to maintenance-of-way, as well as command over a machine-shop which may employ a thousand skilled workmen. In order to give its division heads that tremendous training, the Pennsylvania sends its men through its own West Point, the great shops at Altoona. The men who have sat in the big, roomy office in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, and who have been addressed as president, have been proud of the days when they were up in the hills of the Keystone State, standing their trick in overalls at the lathe, or carrying chain and rod over long stretches of track. To-day every Pennsylvania superintendent, possibly with a single exception or two, is a civil or mechanical engineer.

The old and the new on the Great Northern—the “William Crooks,” the first
engine of the Hill system, and one of the newest Mallets

The Southern Pacific finds direct entrance into San Francisco for one
of its branch lines by tunnels piercing the heart of the suburbs

Portal of the abandoned tunnel of the Alleghany Portage Railroad near
Johnstown, Pa., the first railroad tunnel in the United States

On the other hand, the New York Central has also [Pg 155]been brought into a high state of organization, and stands firmly on the departmental plan.

“We believe that our superintendents should specialize in train operation,” says one of the high officers of that road. “In other words, we do not believe that a man, to get his traffic through over a stretch of line, should necessarily know to a fraction of an inch the best wheel-base for an engine of a given type or the precise construction of a truss bridge. Such requirements take away from the special training that is to-day needed for every high-class railroader. A railroader is made better by sticking to one thing and sticking to it faithfully; and our departmental method, by which the maintenance of line and rolling-stock comes under the sole supervision of men expert in those specialties, we think the best. Sometimes we develop a very wizard in traffic handling, who has never had a chance at a technical education.”

And there you have the very essence of the other side of the proposition. Between these two sides there are various shadings and gradings, but the question has never been definitely solved. It has reduced the vast complexity in the organization of the modern railroad of the larger size. That has become so very complex it fairly cried for expert relief. One man has recently spent a busy term of years in simplifying the organization of the Harriman lines. To cut the intricate lines of red-tape in a big railroad office, to reduce to a minimum the vast needless correspondence between departments and between branches of a single department, is a problem that calls for genius—and offers for its solution no small reward.

In other days—and we refer to no ancient history, for the electric light was proved and the hundred-ton locomotive already increasing the average tonnage of the American freight train—the presidents of the biggest roads were content to worry along with one or two assistants. But two decades ago, the railroads were still[Pg 156] simple matters; there did not exist the intimate relations between one and the others of them, as shown by stockholdings in competing and feeding lines to-day—the constant waiting of their executives upon the sessions of the different railroad commissions. These complications of American railroading have also further complicated the organizations of the different systems, and have brought a demand for executives of the keenest type. It is no slight strain that a man works under when he becomes the head of a ten-thousand-mile railroad.

So to-day the president of the railroad has fortified himself in the only possible way—by creating vice-presidencies. Each ranking department to-day is apt to be recognized in council by a vice-president; and these heads form a cabinet as informal as that of the Federal Government and, in its way, quite as important. Legal traffic, and engineering traffic each demands a vice-president at that cabinet-board, and gets him. The general manager usually is the vice-president representing operation. One big road has eight vice-presidents. It is indeed a poor property that cannot show three or four men that are the fittest to hold this title.

There is another cabinet where the president must sit, which is formal and recognized; it is the board of directors. Between it and the lesser cabinet the president must take good care that he is not ground as between millstones. The cabinet of his department heads will tell him how he can spend his money; but he must get it from the upper cabinet. It is not always harmonious pulling in the upper cabinet. Imagine for a moment the troubles that sometimes arise in the lower.

You are sitting in the office of a big railroad president, talking straight to that big-shouldered soul himself. Outside is the shadowy roof of the train-shed of a terminal, which is filled with long lines of cars that come and go, of platforms that are black with humans one instant and quite deserted the next. The room has the quiet[Pg 157] elegance of a comfortable home library. There are long rows of books upon the shelves; a great table is set squarely in the centre. But it is business—for a ticker is slowly spelling the fate of that railroad and every other railroad, upon the endless tape; a huge map of the system—many thousands of miles of high-class railroad—lies under the glass that covers the table top.

“They don’t always pull together,” the president of the railroad admits, when you ask him about the lower cabinet. “Sometimes they pull apart when they have honestly different ideas as to policy, and other times—there’s to be a big college football game up at G—— next Saturday. We have only two private cars for our four vice-presidents, every single blessed one of whom wants to go. I don’t want to go myself, and I’ve contributed my car, but we’re one short then, and the man that’s left is going around like a boy who’s had a chip knocked off his shoulder. He’s just been in here, and I’ve settled the matter by hiring a car for his party from the Pullman folks and footing the bill myself. I sent him out ashamed of himself.

“That’s Pete every time. Flares up quick, and every time he flares up I can remember when we were working the day-and-night tricks in a God-forsaken junction out on a prairie stretch of the Great West. He’s like a boy in some ways—awfully fussy about the rights and prerogatives of his department; and he’ll go all to pieces over some little thing if he thinks another man has stepped over on to his side of the line. But let a big situation arise—a flood that sets a whole division of our lines awash; a wicked congestion of traffic in midwinter blizzards; a nasty accident that takes away our nerve—and you ought to see Pete! He’ll be handling the thing as if he were putting a ball up on the links, and he’ll never lose his confident smile. That man in one such emergency is worth the hire of a dozen Pullmans.”

You ask about the upper cabinet, and the president[Pg 158] lowers his voice. The board is no matter for light conversation. He steps to the window and points down into the concourse of the train-shed.

“I happen to know that young fellow over there by the mailbox,” he answers. “He’s one of our travelling freight-agents. He’s lucky. He works for one boss, and is responsible to him; I work for a whole regiment of bosses, and am held responsible by a group of pretty keen old citizens who gather around this table and put me on the rack.

“There are many interests in this property, and some of them are too big to sleep in the same bed. I have three directors who never speak to one another outside of this room, and rarely ever in it. There is another who represents the holdings of a road that fights this at every turn, and he hurts the property worse than any good husky plague. A big estate, with a bitter aversion to spending money for any purpose whatsoever, has another director here; and a banking interest presents a director who seconds him in every move, fool or good. That is the crowd I have got to work with when I want ten or fifteen millions to hold our own against some other fellow who is crowding us hard for business in our competitive territory or threatening to run a line into one of our own private melon-patches. That boy down there is lucky. He has only got to get out and land a couple of hundred carloads from a shipper who hates corporations worse than politics, and who has just had a claim for spoiled goods turned down by this particular corporation. That boy has the cinch job.”

This imaginary railroad president has told you of one of the vital points in the business of the railroad, the necessity for constant teamwork. A railroad head may have the genius of a Napoleon, the stubborn persistence of a Grant, or the marvellous executive ability of a Pierpont Morgan, and be worthless if his board is not working[Pg 159] enthusiastically with and for him. It is not all pie and preserves by any means. The board may set its sweet will straight against his, and he may be forced to execute a policy of which in his own mind he has no trust. It is only once in a generation that a man like Harriman, who can bend a whole mighty directorate to his absolute will, arises. Harriman was a railroad president in the fullest sense of the word.

He rode in his car north from Ogden one day, toward the great National Park of the Yellowstone. At that time the only direct rail entrance to that splendid reserve was by the rival Hill lines. Harriman had called for a report upon the opportunities for the Southern Pacific to strike its own line into the west edge of the Park. That report was being explained to him in great detail as he rode north from Ogden. His chiefs had a hundred practical reasons against building the line. Harriman listened faithfully to the explanation, as was his way. Then he turned to one of the signers of the report, a high officer of his property.

“You have never been in the Yellowstone?” he asked.

The officer admitted that he had not.

“I have,” said Harriman triumphantly, “and I am going to build that road.”

That road was built and became successful from its beginning; but Harriman was a railroader with the intuitive sense that gives genius to a great statesman or to a great general. The average railroad president does not hold a controlling interest himself and he must be guided pretty carefully by the judgment of his department heads; he must win the coöperation of his board by tact and subtlety rather than by the display of an iron will; and where he leads he must take the responsibility.

The Pennsylvania Railroad, as has already been told in an earlier chapter, recently forced its entrance into New York City and marked its terminal there with a monumental station. That move was a strategy of the[Pg 160] highest order, and was made that the road might place itself upon an even fighting basis for traffic with its chief competitor. But it cost. Two mighty rivers had to be crossed, whole blocks of high-priced real estate secured, a busy city threaded, the opposition of local authorities (who stood with palms outstretched) honestly downed. That all cost. That would have been a mighty expenditure for the Federal Government; for a private corporation it was all but staggering.

When the station was finished, a rarely beautiful thing with its classic public rooms, its long vistas, and its vast dimensions, that private corporation built, within a niche of the great waiting-room, a bronze figure of its former president, the late A. J. Cassatt, where all hurrying humanity might see it. But, though a thousand nervous travellers see that statue in the passing of a single hour, not a hundred of them will know the splendid tragedy it represents; for many of the high officers of that railroad—some of the men who caused the bronze to be erected—to this day believe that the production of that great station was the cause of the death of their chief. He had dreamed of that terminal for years; his engineer had deemed it all but impossible, and he had sent overseas for other engineers. One of these, who had conquered the busy Thames, said that he could tunnel the two great rivers. He was asked the cost, and he gave it. His first figures were staggering, but the railroad president did not abandon his hope. He summoned his board and put the problem to them.

There was pulling power between that president and his board, and the pulling was all in a single direction. Their system—a railroad that acknowledged no superior—could not keep in the very front rank without its terminal in the heart of the seaboard city, eliminating forever the delays and the inconveniences of a ferry service; the road could not afford to drop into second rank, and so it assumed the great undertaking.

[Pg 161]That meant many things more than laymen understand; the selling of securities in delicate markets, home and foreign, which fluctuate wildly on the promulgation of anticorporation talk; the evading of untiring competitors; the appeasing of hungry politicians, only too anxious to feed at the hands of a wealthy corporation. In this case, it meant more than all these things, for the two rivers were quite as treacherous as the American engineers had pronounced them. They would sound in their tunnel bearings and find rock which seemed soft, and their dynamite charges would be sufficient. Then it would prove hard, and their blast as inefficient as that of a child’s toy cannon. Again, the rock would drill as hard as the hardest gneiss—the very backbone of Mother Earth herself, and the hard-rock men would prepare a heavy charge of dynamite. Then the stuff was as soft as gravel, and their heavy charge would have torn off the roofs of half a dozen houses. When they were under one of the rivers they found its bed—the roof of their tunnel—as soft as mud. There came a day when the little foaming swirls of water above their headings became a geyser: the river-bed had blown entirely out.

After that, some of the younger engineers felt like throwing themselves into the wicked river, but the biggest engineer of all never lost his faith. He sent upstream and brought down a whole Spanish Armada of clumsy scows, each heaped high with sticky clay. That clay—in thousands of cubic yards—made a new river-bottom and the tunnel shields went forward.

There were other obstacles and discouragements, almost an infinite array of them, to be surmounted, but this railroad president had steeled his mind to the accomplishment of that terminal. In the making of it he gave his life. When the day came for the drafts upon the railroad’s treasury, mounting higher and higher, he was cheer; when bad news came from the burrowing engineers, he was courage; when timid stockholders and directors began to[Pg 162] worry, he was comfort. He gave of his vitality to the organization, to the making of the terminal, until the day came when he gave too much—and his life went out while he was still like a mighty king in battle. He did not live to see the classic lines of the great station building. As he stands in the waiting-room, he stands in bronze. Those bronze eyes are powerless to see the splendid fruition of his endeavors.

That sort of thing—heroic courage and death-bringing devotion to an enterprise—repeats itself now and then among the executives of the railroads. When the panic of 1907 reached high tide, there was a certain railroad president who, like his fellows, viewed it with no little alarm. He had lunched with a big steel man, the kind the newspapers like to call a magnate, and the steel man had scared him. The company for which the former labored was going to close half a dozen of its plants—was going to throw some thousands of poorly provided men out of work.

The railroad president took that bad news back to his comfortable office; at night it travelled with him in his automobile to his big and showy house. It would hit his company hard in its heavy tonnage district, but that was only a single phase of the situation. He thought of things becoming more disjointed when the news became public—before that week had run its course. That night the president made up his mind to take a big step. It was risky business, but he thought it worth the risk.

He sent for the steel man in the morning and asked him what was the best price he could make for his product. The steel man cut his regular profit in half, but the president was not satisfied.

“You’ll have to show me a better margin than that,” he said.

“We’ll eliminate profits,” said the steel man, “and give you the stuff at cost, to save shutting down our plant.”

“Is that the best you can do?” persisted the president.

[Pg 163]Before he was done, the steel man had also eliminated depreciation on plants and half a dozen minor expenses. He agreed to deliver at the mere cost of raw material and labor. Then he received an order that would have broken some records in prosperous times. The road was committed to some big building projects and it needed whole trainloads of girders and columns; bridges by the dozen. The railroad president went further, and helped out the steel man’s car-building plant. He ordered 3,000 steel freight cars, and every day he was getting reports from his general manager of a further falling of traffic tides. They had motive-power rusting on sidings, and they were dumping freight cars in the ditches along the right-of-way because they did not have storage-room for them. That took courage of a certain high-grade sort. When those freshly-painted new steel cars began to be delivered in daily batches of sixty, some of his directors asked him where he was going to find room to store them. He did not answer, for he did not know; but in the long run he won out. His company had a new equipment for the returning flood-tide of traffic which had cost it 25 per cent less than that of its competitors. When the time came to build its big improvement it had the steel all stored and ready. The president was able to tell his directors then that he had saved them $1,700,000 on that close bargain that he had driven in panicky times.

Sometimes a little thing makes a railroad president big.

The head of a busy road in the Middle West was hurrying to Chicago one day to attend a mighty important conference of railroad chiefs. His special was halted at a division point for an engine-change, and the president was enjoying a three-minute breathing spell walking up and down beside his car. An Italian track laborer tried to make his way to him. The president’s secretary, who was on the job, after the manner of presidents’ secretaries, stopped the man. The signal was given that the train was[Pg 164] ready, but the president saw that the track-hand was crying. He ordered his train held and went over to him. The story was quickly told. The track-hand’s little boy had been playing in the yards and had hidden in an open box-car; so his small companions had reported. Afterwards the car had been closed and sealed by a yardmaster’s employee. Somewhere it was bumping its weary way in a lazy freight train, while a small boy, hungry and scared, was vainly calling to be let out.

Perhaps that president had a boy of the same size—they always do in stories; and perhaps—this being reality—he did not. But he stopped there for three precious hours, at that busy division point, while he sent orders broadcast to find the boy, orders that went with big authority because they came from the high boss himself. He was late at the conference, because that search was taking his mind and his attention. He hung for hours at a long-distance telephone, personally directing the boy-hunt with his marvellously fertile and resourceful mind. When action came entirely too slowly he ordered the men out of the shops and all interchange freight halted, until every one of 12,000 or 14,000 box cars had been opened and searched. Finally, from one of these they drew forth the limp and almost lifeless body of a small boy.

The railroad chief died a little while ago and was buried in a city 500 miles away from the line that he had controlled. The track-hands of his line, with that delicate sensibility that is part and parcel of the Italian, dug deep into their scanty savings and hired a special train, that they might march in a body at his funeral.

It sometimes takes a big man to do a little thing in a big way.

Here is Underwood, the railroad president who took hold of the Erie when the property was a byword and a joke, who began pouring money into it to give it real improvements and possibilities for economical handling,[Pg 165] and made it a practical and a profitable freighter, a freighter of no mean importance at that. He once issued an order that any car on the road (no matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel should be immediately cut out of the train. The order was posted in every yardmaster’s office up and down that system.

Some time after it went into effect, Underwood was hurrying east in his private car. It was essential that he should reach Jersey City in the early morning, for he had a big day’s grist awaiting him at his office. A real railroad president, working 18 hours a day, can brook few delays. But when the president awoke, his car was not in motion; the foot of his bunk was higher than the head. He looked out and found himself in a railroad yard three or four hundred miles from his office. When he got up and out he saw why his bed had been aslant. The observation end of his car was jacked up and the car-repairers were slipping a new pair of wheels underneath it. A car-tinker bossed the job and Underwood addressed him.

“Who gave you authority to cut out my car?” he asked.

“If you will walk over to my coop,” said the car-tinker, politely, “you will find my authority in orders from headquarters to cut out any car (no matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel.”

When the new wheels were in place the president of the road put his hand upon the shoulder of the car-tinker and marched him uptown. The man obeyed, not knowing what was coming to him. Underwood walked him straight into a jeweller’s shop, picked out the best gold watch in the case and handed it to the car-tinker.

“You keep right on obeying orders,” he said.

The relations between a railroad president at the head of the organization, and some man who struggles ahead in the army of which the president is general, would make a whole book. They still tell a story in Broad Street[Pg 166] Station, Philadelphia, of Mr. Cassatt, the Pennsylvania’s great president, and the brakeman.

It seems that one of the suburban locals that took Cassatt to his country home up the main line was halted one night by an unfriendly signal. The president, mildly wondering at the delay, found his way to the rear platform. On the lower step of that platform, in plain violation of the company’s rule, sat the rear brakeman. Cassatt was never a man who was quick with words, but he said in a low voice:

“Young man, isn’t there a rule on this road that a brakeman shall go a certain distance to the rear of a stalled train to protect it by danger signal?”

The brakeman spat upon the right-of-way and, without lifting his eyes from it, said:

“If there is, it’s none of your damn business.”

Cassatt—the man who could strike an arm of Pennsylvania into the heart of metropolitan New York at a cost of many millions of dollars—was much embarrassed.

“Oh, certainly it isn’t,” he said with an attempt at a smile. “I was merely asking for information.”

The next morning the president of the Pennsylvania summoned the trainmaster of that suburban division to his desk and reported the matter. The trainmaster turned three colors. It was lèse-majesté of the most heinous sort. He proposed the immediate dismissal of the offending brakeman. Cassatt ruled against that. He was too big a man to be seeking to rob any brakeman of his job.

“Just tell him,” he said to the trainmaster, with a suggestion of a smile about his lips, “that he cussed the president, and that, as a personal favor, I should like him to be more polite to passengers in the future.”

No two railroad presidents come up to their problem in quite the same way. Take the two members of the Western railroad world—one gone now—Hill and Harriman. In J. J. Hill’s domain the personality of the man counts for everything. He picks his men, advances them,[Pg 167] rejects or dismisses them, by a rare intuitive sense, with which he judges character. A high chief in his ranks once asked for a vacation in which to take his family to Europe. Hill granted it. When the man came back from Europe another was at his desk. Hill did not approve of long vacations, and that was his method of showing it. The department head should have known better.

On the other hand, Harriman measured his men impersonally—as if in a master scale. He measured them by results. A man might personally be somewhat repugnant to him, but if he accomplished results for the road, he held his place, at least until some one came along who could do even better.

W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, and James McCrea, of the Pennsylvania, are the heads of two railroads great in mileage and in volume of traffic; yet their methods are in many essentials radically different. McCrea is the essence of Pennsylvania policy—coldly impersonal. It is easier to gain an audience with the president of the United States than with the president of the Pennsylvania. No Pennsylvania man from president down to the lowest ranking officer, grants an interview to a newspaper reporter. It would be risky business for any officer of the Pennsylvania to have his photograph published or himself glorified by reason of his connection with the company. The company is the corporation.

When it speaks, it speaks impersonally through its press agent, a clever young man with clever assistants, who both answers newspaper questions and advances newspaper information. His function is a new one of the American railroad, and allies itself directly with the office of the president.

W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, probably stands preëminent to-day among American railroad executives. He has shouldered himself up from the ranks of the railroad army, and only good wishes have gone to him as he has stepped from one high post to a still higher[Pg 168] one. He has come, as nine out of ten successful executives have come, from the operating end of the railroad.

Brown is particularly accessible to newspaper reporters. He talks with them, carefully and painstakingly, and sees to it that they are correctly informed as to each of the great railroad problems of the day. He believes sincerely that the head of a railroad should be personality and that the personality should stand forth directly in the guidance of the property. In his own case, at least, he has demonstrated the value of his theory.

For all this work and all this strain, the railroad president demands that he be adequately paid. He has a good many perquisites—chief among them a comfortable private car at his beck and call; but perquisites are not salary. The head and front of the American railroad to-day receives anywhere from $15,000 to $75,000; an astonishingly large percentage of railroad presidents are receiving at least $50,000 annually. But they work for their pay—sometimes with their life-devotion, as in the case of the big man who built the big terminal; other times with the hard sense of the president who bought his steel girders and cars in the time of panic. Here is a case in point.

A road in the Middle West, which was so compact as to make it quite local in character, had a big traffic proposition to handle and was handling it in a miserable fashion. One local celebrity after another tackled it, until the directors were laying side bets with one another as to the precise day when the receiver should walk into the office. Finally, Eastern capital, which was heavily interested in the property, revolted at the local offerings, and sent out an operating man with a big reputation to take hold of it.

The directors received him with a certain veiled distrust as coming from another land, but in the end they hired him. The matter of salary came up last of all.

“Fifty thousand,” said the New Yorker in a low voice.

One of the local directors spoke up.

[Pg 169]“Fifteen thousand!” said he. “It’s out of the question. We’ve never paid more than twelve.”

“So I should imagine,” was the dry response. “But I said fifty, not fifteen.”

The consternation that followed may be imagined! In the end the New Yorker carried his point. At the end of just twelve months he had, through his acquaintance in Wall Street, and his keen insight into the big channels of finance, cut that little road’s interest charges just $800,000 a year. The receiver has not come yet. The road has accomplished a miracle and has begun to pay dividends. There is another miracle to relate. Last spring, the directors of the road voted an increase in salary to their president—and he courteously refused it!

“I think the presidency of this road is worth $50,000 a year,” he said, frankly, “and not one cent more.”

That is the way a president should stand above and with his board.

Only a little time ago, another president, who had no easier proposition to set upon its feet, was criticised by a querulous old director for his lavish use of private cars and special trains. That president was having his own troubles—his job had no soft places; but he said nothing when the testy old fellow lectured him as he might have lectured a sin-filled schoolboy. When the director was done, the president spoke in a low voice.

“Gentlemen, my resignation is on the table,” was his reply to the censure.

The next moment there was consternation in that board. The president slipped out of the room and left them to consider the matter. When he returned, the chairman of the board, who had nodded in half approval at the censure, was at the door to greet him.

“We refuse to accept your resignation,” he said; “but the board does feel that you ought to have a new car—the present one’s getting shabby, Phil.”

And in that moment the president felt that his work had gained one little ounce of appreciation.

[Pg 170]

THE LEGAL AND FINANCIAL DEPARTMENTS

At the very elbow of the railroad president stands the general counsel. He is shrewd, resourceful, diplomatic. He has quick perception and action, the faith and the loyalty of a friend. In many cases he is a personal officer of the president—in the highest sense. If there is a change of administration of the railroad, there is apt to be a change in the office of the general counsel. If B——, who has been guiding the destinies of the T. & S., goes to Transcontinental, he is apt to take Y——, his general counsel along with him. For except in the case of some exquisitely organized roads like the Pennsylvania, for instance, the general counsel is in every sense personal to the president. He advises him privately, urges him to this step, cautions him from that.

On the other hand, the general attorney is more apt to be the legal officer of the railroad. Like the general counsel he has an old-fashioned pride in his profession that makes him hesitate at accepting a vice-presidency; he likes the ring of “general attorney” or “general counsel” in his own ears. Railroad history and tradition both go to prove that. He will hardly drop those titles for anything less than that of president.

The general attorney, unlike the general counsel, in most[Pg 171] cases will make his offices in the railroad’s headquarters. He will handle its litigation, and if in half a dozen years he can bring down its verdict costs from $1,250,000 to $750,000 for an average twelve month, as one man did, he will be well worth the large salary that he demands and gets. And his salary will be only one of many of the heavy expenses of the legal department. When that functionary asks for money he gets it and without many questionings. The operating department, the traffic department, the engineers, may have to give sharp account for their appropriations; the legal end of the railroad is trusted to accomplish accurate results, without detailed accounting. In some cases it might prove embarrassing.

You want to know the value of the shrewd and perceptive legal mind to a big railroad? Here is a case that proves his worth:

A certain transportation company in the East had a legal vice-president who many people supposed was a political heritage to the road, a man for whom it was supposed a berth had been made by the owner of the property, who was something of a politician himself. A quick turning of the wheel of fortune had thrown one political party out of business at the capital, and another in. The man was given a place in the railroad offices, and a little later was made a vice-president. It so happened that the vice-president knew more than supposers might even imagine; but he was a quiet man, and sometimes some of his own clerks wondered why he drew his big salary. After he had been at his desk a dozen years they found the reason.

In gathering up a number of railroad properties to make the parent company—after the fashion of modern railroad practice—one of the most important of these old-time units was found to be in woefully shabby physical form. It was a valuable road in the consolidation. The new parent was willing to guarantee an annual rental[Pg 172] of 10 per cent on its stock; but as a railroad it fairly shook at the knees. It stood in dire need of reconstruction, and the men who were offering it a high rental made that a provision of the deal. The old road finally agreed to spend $12,000,000 in revising its line and in buying new locomotives, cars, and bridges. With much ado it accomplished its revision, and brought itself up closer to modern standards of railroading.

A decade later when the governmental supervision of the railroads had come into the full flush of its authority, the quiet vice-president had an armful of State commission reports and vouchers brought to his desk. He locked himself in his room, and in a week he had made from them a 20,000-word abstract in long hand. Then he took his report in to the president of the road.

The acute mind of that general counsel—you see that he was vice-president in this particular case—searching here and there and everywhere, had discovered a mouse-hole. The old-time road had not fulfilled its part of the contract. It had found that it could revise its lines at a cost of a little less than $9,000,000 and had quietly pocketed the change. The big rent-paying consolidation went into the courts, after its cool, impassive way. The case went to a referee and the referee took four years to hear the case and decide it. There were 5,000 exhibits offered in evidence and 8,000 closely written pages of evidence, making a case nearly equal to that of the receivership of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New York City, which fills twenty pudgy volumes of some 800 pages each.

The referee decided in favor of the parent company, and rendered a verdict close to $6,000,000, principal and interest. The case was appealed, and sustained. That vice-president had proved his worth. The president of the defendant road came to him.

“We simply can’t pay,” he pleaded. “We’ve no reserve fund.”

[Pg 173]“Then we will take it out of your rental,” was the emotionless reply of the quiet vice-president.

That type of man stands forth as a possibility to every one of the dozens and dozens of young men who make the main staff of the railroad’s legal department. Those fellows come to the railroad fresh from the law schools. Their salaries are small but their experience and their opportunities are enormous. It is a far better career at the beginning than a briefless existence in one’s own office, even though one’s own name is emblazoned in brilliant gilt letters upon the door. A young man coming into the legal department of a large railroad has a diversity of work offered him. He draws up the simplest of papers at first, acts as assistant to a trial lawyer, then finally comes to the time when he will alone fight the railroad’s case in some minor cause in a small court. After that the causes get bigger, the courts more important, he begins to delve into law libraries and to write briefs. Gradually he emerges into a full-fledged lawyer. He may eventually become general attorney or general counsel, and he may find himself welcome to the partnership of some really important law firm. He has knowledge that may be of value in fighting the railroad; whether he will use that knowledge in afterwards fighting his employer is a matter for his own conscience to determine.

There are special departments under the main heading of the law department. Counsel, the ablest of counsel, is retained at each important point reached by the railroad, and these counsel must act in conjunction and coöperation with headquarters. Special tax counsel have an important office by themselves, for the railroad sometimes finds itself in a difficult position. In its pride it may announce to the world, through the newspapers, that the new Bingtown depot has cost $400,000, but when the Bingtown appraisers come around, possessing in their bosoms no inherent love for the railroad, those newspaper clippings in their hands, the tax counsel begins to earn his salary.

[Pg 174]In these days of Federal and State supervision and regulation of railroad management, with now and then an aldermanic chamber or a county board of supervisors trying its hand at the game, there is sure to be special counsel, generally known as the commerce or commission counsel, assigned to the complaints and hearings. For intricate, involved, or unusual cases the road may go outside of its own ranks and hire special counsel—lawyers who are specialists in the very thing involved.

Just as the big and tactful attorney stands back of the railroad’s president, so there crouches at his feet the claim-agent of the company, who is its watch-dog and its scenting hound. Back of this claim-agent, who must have achieved a reputation for keen-sightedness and marked ability before receiving his position, is a busy company of claim agents, at headquarters and every division headquarters upon the system. Together, these form a militant organization that stands with the legal department to defend the railroad’s treasury against indiscriminate raiding.

Sometimes, because the work dovetails in many ways closely with that of the operating department, these claim-agents work under the order of the general manager and the division superintendents. A sly old fellow who once headed a big road in the Middle West once explained the reason why—in the case of his property—without even a trace of a smile.

“John says,” he was speaking of his own general counsel, “that a claim-agent can’t be yanked up before any of these touchy bar associations and charged with unprofessional practices if we can show cases—that they’re just railroad men and not lawyers, at all.”

That was an exaggerated case. As a rule, the young claim-agent has abundant need to be upon his mettle. The public, with an inborn itching against the corporation, keeps him upon that mettle. The man who has had a slight bump upon a railroad train—to make an [Pg 175]instance—hunts out the claim office at headquarters. He gets quick treatment and mighty courteous treatment. If he can prove himself in any way entitled to a reimbursement, he gets it—in cash upon the spot. Likewise he signs a release—a most ponderous and impressive document. When his “John Smith” goes upon that document he has, in its own magnificent phrasing “in consideration of money received” released the railroad company from all obligation to him from the beginning of the world, the fall of man and the decline of the Roman Empire up to the very moment of the signing.

He goes home, pretty well satisfied with himself. It was only a little bump at that. A twenty-five cent bottle of arnica had made him physically himself once again; and as for his suit, well, that was pretty well worn, anyway, and three dollars to a tailor would make it a good “second best” for next winter. He feels that the ten dollars that the railroad gave him was pretty abundant compensation.

But wait until he sees his neighbor. The neighbor almost froths at the mouth when he hears of the transaction—of the impressively worded release that was signed.

“You’re a chump,” he says. “You could have gone to bed, stayed there a week and they would have been glad to give you a hundred.”

After which the man looks upon his ten dollars with contempt and a feeling of injury, and becomes a corporation hater. Or perhaps he was really hurt and had some sort of a bill from his doctor and his druggist, lost time to be compensated at his job. The railroad has figured these together and paid him the sum, with the signing of the release as a necessary feature of the transaction. The thing was not very serious, we will say, in this instance also, and the hundred dollars that he received was really a fair compensation. Now watch the neighbor, who it happens is a pretty shrewd attorney:

“Let me take the case, even now,” he urges slyly.[Pg 176] “I’ll get a verdict of five thousand for you, if you are wise, and we will divide the proceeds.”

“But I’ve signed their release,” groans the other.

The shyster laughs in his face.

“You were drugged,” he whispers, “drugged, and we will prove it.”

That is not an exaggerated case. It is the sort of thing that the railroad’s claim-agents are combating every day of the year; and then wonder not, that some of them finally lose the fine sense of honor, themselves.

And beyond this class of folk, is another—nothing less than criminal. There are men and women in this broad land who make a business of feigning injury, and make it a pretty astute business, too, so that they may dig deep into the strong-boxes of the railroad. The most dramatic of this particular brand of “nature fakirs” has been Edward Pape, the man with the broken neck. Pape has a most remarkable deformity and has not been slow to avail himself of it as a money-making device far beyond the figures that might be quoted for him by circus side-shows or dime museums. Pape makes a specialty of the trolley companies. He can so alight from a car, coming slowly to a stop, that he will fall and go rolling into the gutter. Instantly there is excitement and a group of men to pick up the prostrate form. He is found to be badly injured and is hurried to a hospital. There the internes discover that he has a broken neck. A marvellous set of X-ray photographs are made, and the railroad is usually willing to settle a large cash sum rather than stand suit. Within a week he will probably be away and practising his trick on some unsuspecting railroad.

“There was a time over in Philadelphia that was hell,” Pape once told the writer. “I’d just finished my fancy fall, and they got me into the sickhouse and rigged out most to kill. They put hip-boots on me there in bed, with their soles fastened to the foot-board and a rubber bandage under my chin and over my head. They put seventy-five[Pg 177] pounds in weights on a cord and a pulley-jigger to that bandage and it nearly killed me all day long. At night I used to wait until it was dark and then I’d haul up the weights and put them under the blanket with me. Otherwise, I don’t know how I’d ’a’ got my sleep.”

The freight department of the modern railroad requires a veritable army of clerks

The farmer who sued the railroad for permanent injuries—as
the detectives with their cameras found him

Little things like the discomfort of hospital treatment and searching examinations by railroad surgeons do not seem to discourage these criminals. They take these as necessary hardships that go with their profession. Inga Hanson, the woman who impersonated deafness, dumbness, blindness and paralysis to win a heavy verdict from the Chicago City Railway Company, and who was afterwards convicted of perjury, was wheeled daily into the court-room in a chair apparently nothing more than a living, inert, shapeless mass of humanity, exquisitely trained to enact her role of deception.

Sometimes the claim-agents, working in conjunction with the railroad’s secret service, have used the camera to great advantage. A farmer who lives in New Jersey drove into a seaboard city with a load of produce. At a grade crossing, a switch-engine overturned his craft, about as gently as such an accident could be accomplished. The farmer was lucky in that he was bruised, rather than seriously hurt. Then he saw a lawyer and learned that he was incapacitated for life by severe internal injuries. He entered suit for $25,000 against the railroad.

There was a case for the secret-service bureau of the railroad, and it took little time to find the right detectives, husky enough to get out into the fields and work for four long weeks as farmhands. When the Jersey farmer began haying that August, he found less trouble than he had ever before experienced in hiring low-priced help. He was able to get two big lads, who were hard workers.

It was a big hay year and the farmer was not averse to turning in to do his part of the work. He liked to be with the boys he had hired and one of them had a camera[Pg 178] that he could take “great” pictures with. He showed him some of the pictures that he took those August days on the Jersey farm. The farmer liked them immensely.

He liked them rather less when his attorney came down from the city one day, with prints of the same pictures that had been sent him by the law department of the railroad. The farmer was given a chance to withdraw from the limelight or else stand a criminal trial for perjury, with the penitentiary’s gray walls looming up behind. He took the chance. Few of the dishonest claimants will proceed after such evidence has been put before them. As for the railroad, it usually works better through getting signed confessions of guilt than by going through the somewhat intense workings of a criminal trial.

The secret service stands just back of the claim-agents. It has greater or less recognition in the case of different railroads but its work is generally much the same. It is police. Sometimes it is organized like the police department of a small city, with captains and inspectors at various division headquarters, and at other times its very existence is denied by the railroad heads. But its work is much the same. Its men, generally chosen for fitness from city police or detective staffs, sometimes root out tramps or small thieves along the line and in the freight-yards, sometimes in gay uniform patrol the platforms of crowded passenger terminals, sometimes work with greatest secrecy in “plain clothes”—which in this case may be jeans or overalls—to detect theft or treason among employees, and sometimes they receive their greatest laurels in connection with the “fake” suits that are brought against the railroad.

The secret-service works night and day. Its members, with the claim-agents, are at the scene of a serious accident as quickly as the wrecking-train itself. Together with the railroad’s own corps of surgeons, retained in every important town, and chosen for absolute honesty and [Pg 179]integrity, they form an important adjunct of the personal injury claim service.

The financial officer of the railroad is, of course, the treasurer. It is he who receives its earnings—running possibly into a hundred millions dollars in the course of a twelvemonth—and disburses them for supplies and for wages, for taxes and for bond coupons, and, it is to be hoped, for dividends. He works through appointed banks; and the bank president who can go out and capture one or two good railroad accounts for his institution has earned his salary for several years to come. The selection of the banks is one of the dramatic phases of the inside politics of railroading; it is a cause of constant wire-pullings and heartburnings.

“Do you see that whited sepulchre down there?” a big railroad head laughs to you as he points to a white marble skyscraper closing the vista of a city canyon. “This road built that temple of business. Our account is its backbone. Sometimes we deposit a million dollars a day and it is no uncommon thing for our balance there, approaching coupon or dividend times to reach sixteen or seventeen million dollars.”

He laughs again, then grows confidential.

“We’re in a bit of a hole,” he admits. “Some of the big manufacturers downtown are organizing a bank, and it looks as if it was going to be a pretty solid sort of institution. They want a big account from us, and our traffic people are urging their cause. In the long run they’ll get the account.”

Then he explains to you that the railroad endeavors to hold down its bank accounts, although it must have them in a large number of different cities, to avoid the long shipments of large quantities of money. The agents and the conductors will, following a carefully arranged system, send their receipts to the nearest designated banks, mailing memorandum slips of the deposit both to the treasurer[Pg 180] and to the comptroller. The bank in its turn, sends receipt slips to both of these officers, so the deposit transaction is hedged about with a sufficient degree of formality and detail.

When it comes to pay out its money, the railroad has no lessened degree of formality and detail. For the wages of its employees—generally the greatest of all expenditures—the railroad has proper system and order. The paymaster makes out the voluminous pay-rolls, they are each properly attested by the heads of departments; and for his pay-roll totals, the necessary vouchers are issued to him by the treasurer. He may pay the railroad army by check or he may send his deputies out over the system in the pay-cars.

The pay-car is one of the pleasantest of the surviving old-time railroad customs. The shriek of the whistle of the engine that hauls it is the pleasantest melody that can come to the ears of the man out upon the line. To shuffle in a long line up to its platform window where the railroad’s money is being paid out in tiny envelopes, as each man signs the impressive roll, is one of the greatest joys that anticipation can hold out. As the car makes its routine trip over the line each month or each fortnight, it draws its money from the various repository banks, or else the cash is forwarded to it at division points from headquarters.

But, like many old customs, the pay-car is disappearing. The railroads are more and more paying their men by check. It is a better system in many ways. It avoids the handling of large sums of money, and many of the men prefer not to have a roll of bills thrust into their hands. The old prejudice among them against checks is practically over. The checks are constant incentives toward saving, the small banks in the little town are shrewdly reaching for the accounts of the thrifty railroaders. There may not be much for the bank in just one of these accounts, but they can quickly multiply into considerable sums.

[Pg 181]We have already spoken of the comptroller; he is called the auditor upon some of our railroads. The comptroller is the most passionless and unemotional of all railroad officials. He measures the worth of his fellows by cold mathematical rules, by addition, by subtraction, by multiplication, by division. Even as big a man as the president may shudder at the result of such coldly accurate measurings.

No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval of the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise, men fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight.

His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule, an auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight receipts report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of sharp-eyed young men, each also having an almighty respect for mathematical accuracy, will be up and down the line for him, catching up careless agents on the one hand, and on the other gently showing them how to keep their accounts better, and conform more carefully to the company’s established standards. Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the mileage of the company’s cars travelling over other roads, and the equipment of other roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the comptroller, oftener, however, directly to the operating department. All these make a considerable office—an office which usually treads its monotonous path and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well considered in the organization of the railroad.

The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels—as we have already indicated—passenger receipts, freight receipts and disbursements, and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the accounting has, of[Pg 182] course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash fare collections made by conductors upon the trains. This would be simple enough bookkeeping if a good many years ago the interline or coupon ticket, entitling the bearer to ride upon several different roads, had not come into popularity. To apportion the revenue of a ticket between the half-dozen different lines upon which it has been used requires almost no end of system and accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting with its fellows, with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The coupons themselves are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single road—because of the freight as well as the passenger business—may be kept standing in the treasuries of several hundred other roads. It is a system quite as intricate, in itself, as the relations between city and country banking and yet it is only a single small phase of the conduct of the railroad.

The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization, make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors at the end of each day’s run. He must see to it that the conductor is neither careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will bring the matter quickly to the attention of the operating department.

In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad passenger traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones across the country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles’ riding at a saving over local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has complied with its provisions within the year’s life of the book, he will be paid $5 rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding at two cents a mile. Sometimes these books take the form of “scrip” which is silent upon[Pg 183] mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent portions, sold at wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five cents each.

In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where there is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have to be very careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage books. The law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to passenger receipts, for the law seems to point to even finer lines than the comptroller. He cannot even subtract the $5 which will probably return to the purchaser, and charge the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales must be credited to a separate account, and only transferred to the main receipts of the railroad as the strip is turned in for passage, a few miles at a time.

Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle that comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone will sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office, will involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the railroads.

And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation and settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the railroad. There is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an overcharge claim, the routine is comparatively simple. The audit office should have information at hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle it immediately. But if the claim is for lost or damaged freight, the thing complicates. Before the freight claim department will draw a voucher against the treasurer, it will have to assure its own[Pg 184] conscience that the claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.

From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills—pays its men, as we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and its fire insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the twelve months of the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between receipts and expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and attested vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed the very best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt stating the precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid.

In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the mileage of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement. Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores, and the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these the comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive performances—so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then he will show the average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon, for the railroad never forgets the cost.

It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost and revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics [Pg 185]become graphic, and the comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office, prepares charts, in which statistics become “curves of averages” or jotted and wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning.

“Government by draughting-board,” sniffs the old-time railroader as he sees these great “cross-hatched” sheets with their crazy lines of intelligence spun across them, but it is “government by draughting-board” that has made the old-time railroader—well, the old-time railroader. The new-time railroader gives heed to those charts—the pulse readings of the creature that he is directing—guides his course in no small way by them. They are veritable charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.

Branching, as a rule, direct from the president’s office and occasionally from the general manager’s, are the purchasing agent and the store-keeper, many times one and the same, or the former acting as superior to the latter. The purchasing agent has no easy role. If he is not above sharp practices—the gift of a bit of furniture or a theatre box, in the least instances—he will fulfil only part of the reputation of his office; and if he is—as many, many of them are—absolutely honest down to the keenest degree of an acute conscience, he will probably still be under the suspicion of some querulous minds. His opportunities for deceit and guile are many, so much the more must he be an honest man in every full sense of that word.

He brings the modern railroad’s passion for standardization down to the purchase of its every sort of supplies; for his office goes out into the market for anything, from a box of matches to a locomotive. The very fact that his department is a non-revenue department, save for an occasional sale of scrap-iron or discarded materials, only serves to put him the more upon his guard. He must not yield to the wiles of crafty salesmen. He must measure their wares by a single standard—economy, as expressed in selling-price, in durability, and in cost of [Pg 186]maintenance; and upon that standard he must decide between them, as impartially as a justice upon the bench.

He must be guided by standard. If it be typewriters, he must struggle against the preference of this department or that for some particular machine, and bring all to the test of his three-headed economy. The successful machine will then be adopted for the system and brought as such. No small responsibility rests upon his accuracy of judgment.

His store-keeper must see to it that there is no waste of supplies. He must see to it, for instance, that the engineers are as careful in their use of oils as the clerk in that of stationery.

“We use $4,000 worth of lead pencils alone in the course of a single year,” says one of them; “and if we didn’t keep hammering at the boys, that figure would jump to $5,000 or $6,000 without realizing it.”

He keeps check on the supplies that he issues. His stock of blank forms, alone, would do credit to a wholesale stationery house in a sizable city; for the railroad is a liberal user of printer’s ink in its own devices. He must be thrifty and he must be economical; he must look to it that the railroad’s money is not wasted in the purchase and use of its supplies.

Together with the general counsel, the general attorney, the claim-agent, the treasurer, and the comptroller, the purchasing agent and the store-keeper stand as guardians of the railroad’s strong-box.

[Pg 187]

THE GENERAL MANAGER

The general manager operating the railroad is held strictly responsible for the economical movement of the trains and the maintenance of the property. To the greatest portion of the railroad army (nine-tenths of it employed in the operating department) he is an uncrowned king. The superintendent, as we shall presently see, is the unit of the operation of the road, just as the division over which he is head is one of the physical units that go to make up some thousands of miles of first-class railroad track. The division superintendent deals in men; the general manager deals in division superintendents; and right there is the radical difference between the two.

The superintendent must see to it that his men get a square deal. If he does not see to it in the first instance they will see to it in the last, and woe to him if such be the case. For the men who work on the steam railroad are well-paid, well-read, keenly sensitive as to their privileges and their rights. And from these men have come the division superintendents, as different each from the other as men can be grown. It is the general manager’s chief duty to bring these very different men into harmonious action. That is absolutely essential to the successful operation of the railroad. The general manager must have absolute firmness with his superintendents. He can appoint or discharge them as they can appoint or discharge their trainmen—more quickly in[Pg 188] fact, for up to the present time there is no brotherhood of railroad superintendents.

A certain division superintendent in the East had 150 miles of busy double-track trunk line under his direction. At his headquarters were a big classification yard and a coaling-station for the engine of the two divisions that intersected there. In the course of gradually increasing business, the coaling-station, which stood in a narrow ledge beside the main-line tracks and under the breast of a steep mountain-side, had to be enlarged. In so small a place, that was a difficult engineering problem. It was necessary to build much bigger coal-pockets and while the engineers were removing the old and building the new station, temporary coaling facilities had to be provided for the busy engine point. That part of the problem—more operating than engineering—was finally solved by going across the main-line tracks and locating a temporary coaling-station there. That made a bad situation—with the heavy main-line traffic constantly intersecting with engines drilling back and forth to their coal supply, and the general manager was quick to realize it. He went up there and warned his superintendent.

“This is a danger place,” he said, “and a mighty bad one at that. That tower’s too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two flagmen here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard every engine that crosses these main-line tracks.”

Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility for that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The division superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed. The requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of the system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn’t tell a coal-pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered that he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll—and the requisition went into the waste-basket. The division superintendent did not[Pg 189] try to get another requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing and told the towerman in the cabin—almost half a mile away—to keep as good a watch as possible of the cross-over.

The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were half a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager’s office.

“I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special signalmen,” that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so cleared himself of the responsibility.

And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase, it offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the man who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them are far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek to remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.

Here is the yardmaster at a great interior railroad centre—we call it Somerset for the sake of convenience. His is one of the biggest yards in all this land, and he is a man whose judgment should be solidly respected. There are four improvements in his yards that he deems absolutely necessary in the face of a rapidly increasing traffic, and for a portion of the property that depreciates rapidly under hard usage. His is a most important position; and yet as he cannot spend a cent himself for the use of the railroad, not even to buy matches, he embodies his four requests for necessities into a requisition and forwards it to headquarters—at a seaboard city. His superior officer[Pg 190] thinks that Somerset is asking a good deal, and he cuts the request down to three items. The next link in the chain is a man—an auditor, perhaps—who happens to be imbued with a strong streak of economy at that time. Middle division has had its appropriation cut thirty-three per cent, so off comes another item from Somerset yard. After a time, the yardmaster is lucky to get one single item through—and that is sure not to be the essential item that he needed most of all. Good, plucky, valiant railroader that he is, he is sure to think the whole outfit in the general offices a set of arrant fools. Perhaps the big accident comes, and then perhaps he has full opportunity to set himself straight. It is more likely that he does not, and that he is made the target for Grand Jury indictment and a lot of other fireworks.

That is an instance of the complications of the modern railroad—the vast intricacy of organization. Wonder not, then, that many a general manager of to-day must think twice before he remembers that some particular inland town is one of the obscure branches of his property.

The superintendent deals with men; the general manager, with superintendents. That statement is open to a slight modification. The superintendent deals with the operating army in individual cases; the general manager deals with them collectively. Somewhere in rank between the division superintendent and the general manager stands the general superintendent, but in the rapidly changing structure of American railroad operation, his office is fast losing its individuality, is to-day in real danger of utter extinction. On some railroads he is hardly more than a chief clerk to the general manager, a rubber-stamp whose signature goes mechanically upon papers bound upwards from division superintendent to general manager. At the most he is to-day an outside man, getting up and down the line and making constant reports to his boss, the general manager.

Larger Image

Oil-burning locomotive on the Southern Pacific system

The steel passenger coach, such as has become standard upon the American railroad

Electric car, generating its own power by a gasoline engine

Both locomotive and train—gasoline motor car designed for branch line service

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The biggest locomotive in the world: built by the Santa Fe Railroad at its Topeka shops

[Pg 191]For the general manager is really king of the entire situation. Just now his reign is threatened from a new quarter, and you find him receiving the opposition with both distrust and anger. This is the fine figure of a fine man. He has come up the ladder, rung by rung—station assistant, telegraph operator, despatcher, train-master, assistant superintendent, superintendent, general superintendent, general manager; he knows railroading, stick and wheel. His own railroad he knows as he might know the fingers of his hand.

When we come into his office, the last of a committee of well-dressed citizens is slipping out of his door; they are citizens from a prosperous town in an adjoining State, and he may tell us of their errand.

“K—— is a good town,” he will say, “and gives us a good and growing traffic. We’ve a lot of nasty grade-crossings there, for the two of our big lines that right-angle into there seem to get over about every street in the place at level. They want us to elevate or depress our tracks through there, and it should be done. This road wants it as much as K—— wants it; for it’s one of the worst bottle-necks on our main line, and Lord only knows how many thousands of dollars it’s cost us in delayed traffic.”

This king of the railroad points to a sheaf of blueprints upon his desk.

“That tells the story,” he says simply, “and the end of the chapter is a bill for nine millions of dollars to get rid of those crossings. According to law, K—— will have to stand about half of the cost of the work, and K——, like most progressive American towns, has been running pretty close to her debt limit. She is staggered at the thought of having to dig out three or four millions of perfectly good dollars, and so her mayor has made the naive suggestion that we advance the money and let them pay back their share in the shape of refunded taxes and annual payments.

[Pg 192]“We advance that money—and the big boss has to slip over to France and try to sell our securities for mere necessities. The truth of the matter is that we haven’t the money to advance. We’re grubbing to get enough cash to buy locomotives and cars to keep pace with our business, not running a loan business for upstart towns that have run through their capital.”

In comes a second delegation, this one another group of commuters. They have been asking for an additional train in on the Valley branch. The general manager has said that the road cannot afford it, for the train would have to be operated at a loss. He proves his statement.

“But,” urges the spokesman of the party, “you will make traffic by it, and eventually the train will pay.”

“Eventually isn’t to-day,” said the G. M. stanchly, “and it is on to-day that we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a train in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your office, and when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon your ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent.”

“But this one train?” protests the spokesman.

“Violates that very principle,” replies the general manager. “Not another car that does not pay its way.”

And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering sundry threats about going to the commission, the general manager stretches his leg over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a big map, in colors, of his system—miles and miles and miles of first-class railroad.

“They come to me—towns like K—— and tell me of their troubles,” he says, “as if I already did not know of them. I’ve a reconstruction plan for every ten miles of our main-line.” His finger traces upon the map to a great division point. “Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some yard, as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a good-sized side-line[Pg 193] division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of a superintendent.

“You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would think it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and Chicago. It isn’t. It isn’t really big enough to handle our decent share of that traffic to-day. We’re trying to pour the business through it to-day, and are succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It’s a weak valve in our biggest artery, and some day it’s going to clog.

“It won’t be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of freight through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder. They got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate east-bound and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I’d been fairly down on my knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that thing. I always am; that’s part of the job of general manager.

“I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to, at this point and at that. Here’s where a couple of our biggest feeders from the north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly haulers dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where we pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and we’ve got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled. Don’t think I don’t know every bit of that. I can see necessary improvements all the way up our main line; but every one of them takes money, and just now the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and raise the money. But when we know and can’t improve—that’s railroading.”

A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite frankly at us.

[Pg 194]“Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh,” he announces. “They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they’re entitled to a new one, costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give them every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend $100,000 because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural wonder in Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to go Stenton one better.”

“You’ve got a lot of these delegations?” we venture.

“I lose track of them,” says the general manager. “It’s all a part of the day’s work; it’s railroading.”

We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight the fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before he was there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days before that he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen hours a day. That’s railroading, too.

The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems. His biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills; and these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe its area. The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight for his road—running in strongly competitive territory—comes to this terminal. Three hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for different points, and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find any one of those cars without an instant’s delay. And still the narrow physical limitations of that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a big man.

And sometimes the big man must stoop to examine carefully into the little things. When McCrea, the present president of the Pennsylvania, was a general manager off on the western end of that system, his car was halted in the middle of the night by a bad wreck on a single-track[Pg 195] side-line. He might have remained in his comfortable bed, but that would not have been McCrea. He got up and dressed, went outside and offered his services to the wrecking-boss. The wrecking-boss was competent and he knew it.

“There’s nothing you can do, boss,” he said.

“Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing that I can do—with a road blocked on both sides with wreckage and stalled trains and track to be laid?” said McCrea. “Well, let me tell you that there are ties down there in the ditch that will have to be placed before another train goes over here, and we might as well be beginning.”

And with that General Manager McCrea suited action to word. He went down into the ditch, picked up a heavy tie, put it over his shoulder, and brought it up into position. In an instant he was in the ranks, working to bring order out of chaos. That was the way a big man could do a little thing in a big way.

It takes a really big man for that very sort of thing. And the big man, general manager of several thousand miles of railroad, must understand the smaller men beneath him—any one of whom is apt in some future day to supersede him. Here is a man who has been known as one of the best general managers in the whole land. Soon after he was made operating head of a really big road, a certain train on which he was travelling was much delayed. The new G. M. inquired the exact reason for the trouble. He was not so much concerned for his own convenience as he was curious to know why one of the road’s best through trains should have halted until assistance should come from the nearest roundhouse.

“The fireman lost his rake,” was the somewhat perfunctory report that the G. M.’s secretary returned to him. But if that young man thought that his boss was going to be satisfied with that report, he was mistaken, decidedly.

“Bring the fireman to me,” commanded the chief.

[Pg 196]That fireman was not of the sort that is easily feazed. He stood stockily and in a low voice gave a very circumstantial explanation of the whole occurrence. It seemed that he had missed the rake that morning when they had started out from the yard roundhouse to take the Limited down over the division. He was just going back for another, when they were called to lend a hand at a small yard wreck. When they were done shoving and bunting there, they had no time to run back to the roundhouse and get a rake. They had barely enough time to get to the passenger station for the engine change. That was a good story, with a deal of explanation, and the fireman thought that the G. M. must be impressed with it.

The G. M. was not in the least impressed. He looked the coal shover up and down, from head to feet, then said:

“How about those seven freights that you passed laid out on sidings? You could have forced any one of those engineers to lend you his rake rather than lay out this train.”

The effect of that slight observation from the G. M.’s car was not lost on a man on the system. The new man made good. From that time forward word went out to the far corners of his road that the “new boss” knew railroading; that he had four eyes in his head and that you had to be pretty careful what sort of a story you put up to him. Calculate, if you can, in dollars and cents the moral effect of such a stand upon the rank and file of the king’s army. The general manager, as we have already said, must know men.

You are back with your first general manager again. He is tired of all these problems, and yet he is now turning to another. This is formally entitled the Situation. It is placed upon his big desk every morning. It is a morning paper, if you please, prepared for a single reader. The general manager is “Old Subscriber,” in good measure;[Pg 197] and if the paper lacks both editorials and advertising, it is none the less interesting to its star reader. Its news is as exclusive as its reader, and exclusively the news of his system.

By it he knows first of the traffic that has been handled in twenty-four hours, by cars and by trains. He knows by it the reserve forces of the railroad, in cars and in locomotives, and just where they are located. By the Situation, he can discover the over-massing of equipment upon one division, the shortage upon another. After that he can begin to give orders to his general superintendents and his superintendents of transportation—these last the men who are directly responsible for car movement—toward bringing a better balance between traffic and equipment. The Situation is on his desk at ten o’clock in the morning. By eleven, whole brigades of locomotives may be under way, moving from their stalls in some giant roundhouse out toward another division whose superintendent is fairly shrieking for power.

But the Situation tells more than merely this. It goes into history, and in its own cold-blooded fashion tells what the road is doing by comparison. It gives weather conditions and traffic for the corresponding day, one year, two years, three years, five years before; and the general manager will do well if he avoids giving mere cursory examination of such tables. The Situation not only notes weather conditions, it brings to the eyes of the man whom we have called king in railroad operation the more important train delays and the reasons that have caused them. Every fact or incident that may affect the traffic or the operation of the road is noted in its fine-filled pages. It is in every way a guide and a barometer of the condition of a great property up to the very hour that the general manager comes to his desk.

But the Situation does not tell the entire story. Out in the nearest passenger yard is a big private-car, almost as handsome and as well equipped as that of the president[Pg 198] of the road, and that car is in service as many days as it stands idle there upon the siding. This man has 4,000 miles of railroad empire in his domain; there are nearly 70,000 faithful privates for his army. To cover that territory means constant travel. There are side-lines of less importance that sometimes do not see him for six months at a time.

Of less importance, did we say? We had better not let him hear us breathe that, for there are men in his employ who remember the first council of the operating department staff after this G. M. came to the road. They were gathered there for the time-table meeting—a general superintendent, a whole round dozen of division superintendents, serious traffic-minded folk from the passenger department, an auxiliary corps of chief clerks and stenographers. Division by division, the passenger time-table problem was adjusted. This superintendent asked a little more running time, for they were putting in a cluster of new bridges, which made slow orders necessary; another was thereupon forced to shorten his schedule, for the total running time between main-line terminals of a road in hot competitive territory could not be increased a single sixty seconds. Finally, after a vast amount of argument, the main-line divisions were settled, and attention was given to the side-lines. The first of these ran through a section purely rural, but there was not a busier 500 miles of single track in the East.

The general superintendent called attention to it, with a laugh.

“We’ll now tackle the hoejack,” said he.

It was an old joke, and the division heads began to laugh. They stopped laughing the next instant. The new general manager was on his feet and pounding thunderously upon his table top. His face was crimson, as he demanded attention.

“Gentlemen,” said he, scathingly, “the great railroad from which I have had the honor to come has prided[Pg 199] itself upon being a standard railroad. Its standard is universal wherever its cars and engines run, and its jurisdiction extends. Some of its lines are the busiest traffic-haulers in the land. The four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough for the great volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that press upon their rails. There are some side-lines, with but two or three trains a day—side-lines that reach the main-line only through other branches. But there are no hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters upon that system. Hereafter there are to be none upon this. The man who is hauling a train on the most remote corner of this railroad is doing its work quite as much as the biggest trainmaster here at the terminal. I trust you follow me?”

They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the railroads of the land.

But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular side-line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us quite aside he tells it to us:

“The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute on the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. ‘Are you the general manager of this ’ere road?’ he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle bucolic soul, and he says ‘yes,’ and offers him a real cigar. But the gentle bucolic doesn’t smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up and says, ‘Well, General, here’s somethin’ fer ye,’ and shoves a paper with a big red seal into the boss’s hand.

“It seems that up in that neck o’ woods they get grade crossings removed as a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the constable served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight for a[Pg 200] hearing on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in West Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn’t enough traffic over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we never had an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in use. And at that the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way they rubbed it into him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a decent way—first sent a committee down to the division superintendent to request that flagman.

“He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing was right ‘in the heart of the community,’ as they put it themselves, and the big citizens’ houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our right-of-way. Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town Hall, the boss starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in the morning before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with their rods and sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front lawns. And the next thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the flower-beds. There hadn’t been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook since the last time Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk hustled down to the depot. The agent didn’t ease their minds. The boss wasn’t working hand in glove with him.

“When the night came for the big time at the Town Hall, it was a regular ‘standing-room only’ business. The boss kept in the background while the great minds of the township did their best. When it came his turn he clamped across the platform like an avenging angel. He is a big fellow, and that night he looked seven-foot-six, as he stuck his long fingers out over that intelligent body politic and asked what it meant by trying to cow the only first-class railroad that had ever had enough[Pg 201] energy to put its rails down in that township. Then he calls up an engineer from our construction department.

“‘Mr. Blinkins,’ he says, in a voice that you could have heard across the public square, ‘this railroad has decided to temporize no longer in this highway crossing situation on its lines. How much will it cost to put a subway under our track at this crossing?’

“The engineer dove into his drawings and said: ‘It’ll be quite a big job, and we’ll have to cut quite a way into some of the front yards to get the foundations for our abutments. My estimate of the cost of the proposed improvement is $160,000.’

“Then it was the boss’s turn again. ‘Under the state law, work on abolishing a grade crossing begins by the railroad expressing its willingness,’ he told them. ‘The cost is divided—half being borne by the railroad, the other half being divided between the township and the State. West Lyndonbrook’s share will reach $40,000.’ Forty thousand dollars—why $40,000 would have built either the new union school or the waterworks that that burg had been hankering for and thought it couldn’t afford. When the boss breathed about that $40,000 it started the old feuds between the waterworks crowd and the school crowd. They forgot all about the crossing and our sin-filled railroad, and got to hammering anew on the old issue. We slinked out while they were still at it—had the car hooked on to the rear of thirty-eight and got started while the oratory was taking a fresh turn.

“The boss? The boss is a diplomat. That’s how he keeps his job.”

[Pg 202]

THE SUPERINTENDENT

If the general manager is king in modern railroad operation, the division superintendent is not less than prince. His principality is no mean state. It may consist of some 500 miles of what he modestly admits is the “best sort of railroad in all this land”; or it may be a little stretch of 100 miles, or even less, losing its way back among the hills; but it is a principality, and his rule is undisputed. If ever it be questioned, it will then be high time for him to abdicate.

Just as the division is the physical unit of railroad operation, so is its superintendent the human unit. By him the transportation organism stands or falls. If it stands, he is able to go forward; the path from his door leads to the general manager’s office. If it falls—Well, there is to-day in Central Illinois a gray-haired station-agent who once held his own principality—4,000 men to take his orders.

“We only discharge for disobedience or dishonesty,” said the president of that railroad at the time he signed the order reducing the prince to the ranks. “When we fail to get the real measure of a man, it is our fault, not his. We never turn out a man who has done his level best for us.”

This man is superintendent of one of the most prosperous[Pg 203] of the trunk-line railroads that reach the metropolis by stretching their rails across New Jersey. His is a “terminal division,” so called, and he has assumed command of one of the busiest city gates in all America. His railroad day begins almost as soon as he is awake. There is a telegraph outfit in the corner of his bedroom, and as he dresses and shaves he listens mechanically to its scoldings—to the gossip of the division. It comes as casually to his ear as the prattle of his children; the key began to be music to him long before he left the little yellow depot where he first began to be a railroader.

“They’re in pretty good shape this morning, John,” laughs his wife. She, too, has been listening half unconsciously to the gossip of the wire. Years ago she “stood her trick” with her husband back in that little yellow depot.

“Got a coal train in the ditch up the other side of Greyport,” is his reply. “We’ll rip out that nasty cross-over up there some day, when the big boss wakes up to the cash we’ve put out in wrecks at GP.”

“Going up there?”

“Not this morning, Maggie,” he laughs. “I’ve a committee from the firemen coming in to see me. They’re nagging for a raise.” He lowers his voice, as if he almost thought that the walls had ears. “It’s beginning to grind the boys, too—butter 48 cents, eggs 45, and all their hungry kiddies. But the big boss—whew!”

He whistles, goes to his key, cuts in, and begins to give orders to the wrecking-boss up at Greyport.

“Steady, Jim,” he says, in a low voice. “You’ve got all day on that job if you need it, only watch out for the number two track with your crane. We can’t risk a side-swipe on one of our pretty trains. We’re detouring the east-bound passengers over the Central. How’s Hinckley?”

He closes the circuit softly.

[Pg 204]“Poor Hinckley,” he says gently. “Do you remember, Maggie? He was married the same summer we were.”

Through with his breakfast, he hurries down to the station, and before he slips aboard the suburban train that is to carry him in to his Jersey City office, he has had the wire again into Greyport. They are getting things cleaned up there a bit; a baggage-car has been sent up with a special engine for Hinckley. The superintendent turns from these. One of the little trains that come out from town in the dusk of early dawn has brought a leather bag filled with mail. He runs through it as his train slips across the meadows. By the time he is in his roomy office it is ready to be answered, a pencilled memorandum on each is sufficient guide for his chief clerk.

Throughout the morning his calendar is a crowded thing. There is a constant line of restless men sitting on the long bench just without the guarded rail of the outside office. One by one these are called; they disappear behind swinging baize doors to stand in front of the superintendent.

For the first of these there is a smile—the caller is a big shipper, big enough to go to the head of the line and have instant access to the boss. This shipper is the sort who gives the railroad tonnage in trainload lots. He is hot. He cannot get cars. He will begin to route over the Triple B——, even though his siding facilities are wrong for it. They’ll dig him out the cars he needs, they have folks over there who make it their business to find cars. And while he is on the subject it seems pretty bad to have stuff coming twelve and fourteen days through from Chicago. Perhaps he’d better be getting after the Commission. The shipper is very hot. He expatiates upon his wrongs, hammers upon the superintendent’s desk, grows scarlet in his heavy face.

The superintendent’s smile never wavers. He gives close attention, does not grow excited. A few orders[Pg 205] over the telephone, a word of explanation, the shipper smiles now. Down in his heart he begins to be sorry that he made these threats about the Triple B——.

That is getting traffic, you say, and the superintendent is an operating man. You are a bit wrong there. The superintendent is a railroad man and that means that any part of the railroad business is his business. There is a man, by name A. H. Smith, who is to-day operating vice-president of the New York Central system, who held to that idea from the beginning. In the beginning, Smith was the superintendent of a little side-tracked division of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern which centred in at Hillsdale, Michigan. It was a strong competitive territory, and Smith found that the traffic that came to his road was so slight that it did not take a great deal of his time to move it. The superintendents before him had had a lot of time to speed their fast horses and fuss around their gardens. Not so with Smith. He went into the business of making traffic. It was a decade that took keen delight in singing societies, and Smith’s robust voice allied itself to every choir of importance in three counties. He sang himself into personal popularity, he sang traffic into coming over the Michigan Southern. After a while, the folks over in the general offices at Cleveland began to take notice. The traffic folks were the first to notice, after that—well, a long story’s short when you know that Smith found himself on a short cut to his present job.

The superintendent’s smile remains while a solemn-faced delegation of commuters files into his room. These grave folk have been coming into town on the 8:52 almost since the road first laid its rails. It is part of their lives, and they fondly imagine that it is a big part of the road’s—that the twenty-hour train over the mountains to Chicago is a matter of considerably less importance than the 8:52. The superintendent broadens his bland smile and rings for his train sheets. There are other[Pg 206] trains than the 8:52 coming into that terminal—almost a train a minute from a little before eight o’clock until half-past nine. The superintendent’s finger runs for corroboration over the train sheets. Twenty-five days this month when 94 per cent of his suburban trains come under the protection of the big shed of the terminal right on the scheduled moment—how was that for consistency of operation?

The commuters’ committee seem a little dazed. Individually, the men are expert on a good many things—printing, indictments, breakfast foods, patents, wholesale feathers; but consistency of train operation and train sheets are a bit confusing.

“The 8:52 has been late a whole lot recently,” doggedly affirms the chairman. “Last Thursday we were pretty near fifteen minutes late.”

A gleam of triumph comes into the superintendent’s eye. He fumbles anew among the flimsy train sheets. His forefinger alights upon a line of the typewritten copy.

“Last Thursday,” he comments, “you can see that we were all laid out by the Hackensack River draw. A schooner filled with brick got caught by the ebb tide and laid down on us in the open draw. What you want to see, gentlemen, is the Treasury departments down at Washington. It is outrageous that the antiquated navigation laws should be allowed to hold up business in that way.”

The committee confer among themselves and decide to make the life of the Secretary of the Treasury uncomfortable for a while.

“You cannot hope for anything better with that Hackensack Bridge,” urges the superintendent almost malevolently.

He does not tell them, but the boys out on the line know his own experience with the Hackensack River bridge. Last December and just in the evening rush-hours they found that the cabin that stands perched at[Pg 207] the top of the trussed draw was afire. The trains bringing home the tired suburbanites were beginning to line up back of the fire for solid miles. The tired suburbanites were saying things about this particular railroad. It chanced that this superintendent was a passenger on one of the trains. He went forward to the blaze. The towerman had beat a retreat. The superintendent started to climb up the ice-covered ladder tower toward the burning cabin. The towerman halted him. The wiry superintendent turned upon him with a look of infinite scorn:

“We’ve got to hand signal those trains across here—there’s thousands of folks out here in the meadows that we can’t let miss their supper—”

“I’ve got a family—” began the towerman.

“That’s all right. I’ll signal these across.”

“That ain’t it, boss. Back o’ th’ cabin’s the gasolene tanks, the stuff for openin’ th’ draw.”

The superintendent gave a low whistle.

“That settles it,” he said. “We’ve got to put this fire out. I can’t risk cutting this draw out of service.”

It is a matter of record on that railroad that he climbed alone to the top of the draw and began to put out the fire with his own stout endeavors. He was not alone for long. Inspired by him, the men that gathered there—engineers, firemen, trainmen, and conductors, crawled up upon that freezing cold draw and lent him their efforts. In a half-hour the fire was out, and the stalled trains were moving again.

This, then, is the measure of the man who sits across the wide office table from you. The mollified commuters are marching out.

“You don’t encourage kicking?” you ask.

“We don’t discourage it,” he replied. He is reminded of a story and tells it to you.

“When they made Blank superintendent over there at Broad Street, in Philadelphia, he went in to make a clean[Pg 208] record. He called his chief clerk to him. ‘Mind you, if you hear kicks, don’t let them get in one ear and out the other. You bring them in here and we’ll investigate.’ In three days the chief clerk was busy. ‘Lots of trouble with the suburban traffic to-day,’ he would say. ‘Wilmington train laid out at Grey’s Ferry; third day that’s happened.’ ‘Ugly trainman on the main line wouldn’t close the rear doors. That fellow’s unpopular.’ ‘Not enough equipment on the Central division.’ ‘No fire in the stove at Lenden Road,’—a long string of commuter troubles. After Blank had heard this for a week he began to get nervous. He called his chief clerk to him. ‘See here,’ he demanded, ‘what’s the matter with our service? Where are all these kicks coming in from?’ The chief clerk looked at him—never a snicker. ‘You said you wanted the kicks,’ he replied. ‘Well, I’ve been letting the head barber downstairs shave me after he was done with the commuters. He gets every one of the howls.’”

Sometimes the kicks represent a serious side of the superintendent’s problem. A while ago a man came to a railroad superintendent in Boston and demanded that a certain ticket-examiner in the passenger terminal be dismissed. There had been some sort of dispute and the man insisted that the ticket-examiner be discharged, nothing less. The ticket-examiner, on his part, told a pretty fair sort of story. Moreover, he said that if in the heat of the dispute he had transgressed on good manners he was frankly sorry and that it would not happen again. Back of all that he had a good record: no complaints had ever before been registered against him. The superintendent then wrote a letter to the man who had complained and stated that the offending ticket-examiner had been reprimanded and that the offence would probably not be repeated.

The conductor is a high type of railroad employee

The engineer—oil-can in hand—is
forever fussing at his machine

Railroad responsibility does not end
even with the track walker

The fireman has a hard job and a steady one

That did not satisfy the man who complained. He was of the sort that are supposed to have a “pull,” and [Pg 209]he threatened to use his pull if the ticket-examiner were not discharged. He refused to accept apologies or explanations. He said he was hot. So was the superintendent. He keenly resented anything that approached interference with his discipline, and he refused to discharge his employee. Pressure was exerted, the pull was doing its fine work. The superintendent was—like every other railroad superintendent in this land—a fine diplomat. He took the man from the train gate in the terminal and gave him an equally good job in a city a hundred miles distant from Boston. He flattered himself that he had seen the last of the man with the pull.

Not a bit of it. That brisk soul chanced to pass through the distant town, and gasped at sight of the former ticket-examiner still drawing pay from the railroad. He hastened into the superintendent’s office in Boston and demanded that the subterfuge end—that the man be actually discharged from the road’s employ. The superintendent looked at him coolly, not speaking. The man again threatened his pull. The railroad boss looked at him through slitted eyes. It was a real crisis for him. His diplomatic smile was ready. He pointed with his lean forefinger toward the door.

“The case is closed. Good-morning,” was all he said.

After that he began wondering what road would have him after that pull was exerted. He wondered for a day, for a week, then a month. Then he forgot the occurrence. The pull, like many other sorts of threats, was thin air.

Of a different sort was the problem that confronted a superintendent in Chicago. On a certain suburban train for many years the conductor had remained with an unchanged run. Gossip had come into the super’s office that this conductor was systematically stealing from the company. The boss started a quiet investigation. The conductor with apparently no other income than his $3 a day, had purchased a neat home in the suburbs, had[Pg 210] sent his boy to Yale, his girl to Vassar. That was Thrift, with a capital T. The superintendent took the case sharply in hand and summoned the conductor before him. He was one of the older sort, gray-haired, kind-faced.

“Johnson,” said the boss, “you’ve been with the road a long time and never had a vacation. I want you to lay off a month and run over to either coast. I’ll get the transportation for you.”

Johnson protested. He belonged to a generation of railroaders that was not educated to vacations. The superintendent insisted and had his way, as superintendents generally do. Johnson started on his vacation, and a substitute, knowing nothing of the real situation, replaced him. The returns from that daily run doubled, and the superintendent knew that he was right.

Nowadays when a railroad finds that a conductor is stealing, it invokes the majesty of the Interstate Commerce Law and prepares to hurry him off toward a Federal prison. In that day they were content to fire Johnson; that was sufficient disgrace to the old man. The railroad could not begin to get back the money that had been trickling out throughout the long years.

But Johnson showed fight. His was an important train in the Chicago suburban service, and his passengers were important merchants and manufacturers—big shippers. They got together, under Johnson’s supervision, and made the hair on the heads of the traffic men turn gray. Those fellows were Johnson’s friends, and they were not going to see the N—— turn out a faithful employee. Johnson said that he had not stolen, and Johnson was not the sort to lie. It might do the N—— good to send some tonnage over to the M——. The traffic department and the operating locked horns, as ofttimes they do on roads, both big and little. Traffic won. The superintendent lost, Johnson went back to his job, and the road put on a checking system that made its conductors wonder if they had held convict records.

[Pg 211]That case was an exception. There are not many superintendents who are compelled to back water, mighty few Johnsons among the thousands of conductors across the land.

We are still in that superintendent’s office in Jersey City. The boss’s smile is gone. A big railroader just in from the line, his jeans covered with engine grease, shuffles into the place and stands before the super, hat in hand, like a naughty boy ready to be whipped. The superintendent speaks in a few low sentences to him, makes a notation on an envelope. The big man trembles in front of the little. A bit of a smile comes to the lips of the boss.

“You think of the wife and the kiddies first next time,” he says. “Good-bye and good luck to you. I’m not much for lecturings,” he adds, after the man has gone. A little later he begins to explain. “That big fellow had to be disciplined. There was no two ways about it for either of us. He’s an engine-man, got a good train, too; but he’s been running signals. We’ve caught him twice on test. We can’t stand for that. Suppose we have a nasty smash and the coroner’s jury begins to ask nosey questions? I had to put black on his envelope.”

He goes into further detail. In other days he would have been forced, in order to uphold his discipline, to suspend the engineer for from five days to two weeks—the punishment preceding discharge. There was a possibility—disagreeable to the superintendent—that the engineer’s family might have been crowded for sufficient food for a fortnight. Some of those fellows live pretty close to the proposition all the while. Nowadays the offender is demerited—once again like the schoolboy. That is what the superintendent meant by that reference to the envelope, the road’s record of the man’s service with it.

Sixty demerits—dismissed. That’s the rule of one big road. But the record does not always continue to[Pg 212] be negative. Its positive side rests in the fact that for every month a man keeps his envelope clear five demerits are taken from the black side of his envelope. A trainman might have forty-five demerits against him, be on the narrow edge of discharge, and in eleven months, after turning the new leaf, have as clean a sheet as the best man on the division. This is as it should be. The demerit plan—often called the “Brown system”—represents the triumph of modern railroad operation over the old.

The superintendent may have all the advantages of a time-tried disciple and a modern record system; have the prestige and the reputation that come from the operation of 500 miles of railroad, and still have a hard row to hoe. Out in the Middle West there was, until recently, a stretch of what was known as “booze railroad.” It was a division where reputations and records alike counted for naught, where discipline was a mockery. Train-crews went from their runs direct to saloons and, what was a deal worse, began their day’s work within them. The wreck record of that division that went forward to the State Commission was appalling—and half the wrecks were not reported. Yardmasters were busy day after day stowing away damaged equipment far from the curious eyes of passengers—the wrecking crews were hammering for big over-time pay. It was a thoroughly demoralized stretch of railroad.

The distressed president of the system sent East for a superintendent who had a reputation. He thought he had his man. The new broom was a book-of-rules man. He had a quarter of his operating force laid off all the time, to go before him. He was a man fond of words, and he lectured those old fellows as if they had been school children. He might have done quite as well with his division if he had been operating it from Kamchatka. The men began to call their rule-books the “Joe Millers.”

The superintendent got mad and was lost—hopelessly.[Pg 213] He began discharging right and left, and the wrath of the gods and of the brotherhoods (the great labor unions of the railroads), was upon him. The road was threatened with a big strike at the very time that it could least afford it. He avoided that strike only by acceding to the demand of the brotherhood chiefs that the superintendent’s head be given to them on a silver platter. After that the “Man Without a Country” was in a more enviable position. There was not a railroad in the country that dared employ him, despite his excellent technical training. He drifted up into Canada, got a job running a state-operated line. He held that job less than a year. He was murdered of a winter’s night in a shadowy railroad yard, shot down by a discharged train hand.

The grim situation on the “booze division” grew much worse. The president of that system gave the matter his keen personal attention; he began scouring the entire width of the land for material, without much success. When he was thoroughly discouraged, a raw-boned trainmaster from a far corner of the demoralized division applied for the job of superintendent; he reckoned he could handle the situation. He had caught the president unawares standing outside of his private car. The president told him that he was superintendent.

“There was something in Matt’s eye that took me,” he confessed afterwards. “You do see something in a man’s eye now and then that beats a whole barrel of references.”

So Matt Jones (that is nothing like his real name), took up the nastiest operating proposition in the country. He did not lecture nor discharge, not he; but the men knew that there was a boss behind the super’s desk. The fellows who began trifling with the new broom were down in his office the next morning. Jones selected the leading spirit; he had the advantage of knowing him.

“Pete,” he said in a quiet way, “you’ve been drinking.[Pg 214] It doesn’t go. I’m not going to discharge you,”—he gave grim thought to the fate of his predecessor—“but in thirty days you are going to send in your resignation voluntarily and leave our service.”

The man protested. He had not been drinking; and Matt Jones had better not try that game anyway. The superintendent wished him a pleasant good-morning and bowed him out of the office.

In five days the engineer was back, uncalled. The superintendent saw him, even though he had no more to say than he had not been drinking; that is, he had quit drinking long ago. In ten days he was back again. This time he admitted that he had been drinking up to the day that Matt Jones took office. The superintendent said nothing. He bowed the engineer out again. A month is a short thing at the best. At the end of the twenty-second day, the engineer again found his way to the superintendent’s office. He seemed like a man who had been through a sickness. Big human that he was, he began crying at the sight of the man who was a real boss.

“For God’s sake, Matt, don’t forget the old days up on the branch. I can’t get out from the old road,” he said.

“I gave you thirty days’ chance to get on another road,” was all the satisfaction that he got.

But on the thirtieth day the engineer went to work with a clean envelope and the new superintendent had an ally of no mean strength. The patient grinding won; complete victory was only a question of time; the president five hundred miles away began to notice. You may say what you want, railroad executives are born, not made. This reads like romance, but it is truth. Matt Jones is to-day general manager of that system, and a little while ago a New York paper said he was going to take charge of one of the big transcontinental that needs a firm hand at its reins.

[Pg 215]This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a clean stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling it. The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local reporters each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the metropolitan district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of railroaders; up here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real to the folk of half a dozen populous counties than is the president of the road, a stuffy gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen years to the dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the townspeople to thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M. running through their “lovely little city.”

You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be entirely disappointed.

“I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the wire,” he tells you quietly. “We’ve organization on this stretch of line.” He says this with a bit of pride. “We have men and we have system. My train-masters are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected to organize beneath them.”

Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on the line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards. After that he talks over the long-distance ’phone with the G. M., four hundred miles away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters, just as the summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions and at terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the ’phone is rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made Congress[Pg 216] pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That bill promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit by it.

The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and speaks to his chief clerk.

“W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get rattled,” he says.

That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his three hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this superintendent’s heart. If it were Europe—the troops would be drawn out, all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of the royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But it is not Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because it so excessively differs from Europe.

Only the military aides of the President lament upon the informality of his travel. Some time since a great executive was making the familiar loop throughout the West. The superintendent of a division of line the far side of the Missouri was a worrier, and was personally watching the progress. In order to facilitate rear platform oratory the President’s cars were placed at the rear of a train that hardly ranked as express. Between towns the delays grew frequent and a stuffy little aide in uniform protested to the superintendent.

“Look a’ here, sir,” he said stiffly, “why don’t you let these other trains up the line wait?” The division was single-track. “You know this is the President’s train.”

A twinkle came into the super’s eye.

“You’re wrong,” he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. “This is not the President’s special. This is train number 67 of the B—— main line, and she hasn’t many more rights on the time-card than a gravel limited. Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon Limited—there’s some train, sir. They[Pg 217] wouldn’t lay her out. She’s double-extra first-class all the way through to the coast.”

The point of that was not lost.

An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr. Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch of line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection engine.

“Dee-lighted,” said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the big cab. The superintendent wondered what he’d think of that nifty stretch of track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as he was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution” out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way from Utica to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along thereafter without that superintendent’s vote.

All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of the best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King. When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee—the men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster’s office—to talk in whispers.

Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world—it is near kingdom in itself—miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For years there reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a great railroad system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word to be called superintendent. They called him “the lion” and did not misuse that word either. He was a lion, guardian of a[Pg 218] great railroad gate, a stern old lion whose word and whose law were unquestioned.

But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer office began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder who the new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable—one an assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other holding similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to assume greater honor, to sit in command at the lion’s great desk.

That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the whisperings of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of them would creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone there, head in hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents gained courage; they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At other times they locked horns.

They locked horns over one great question. It was not operation that set them at odds, not a vexing practical question of how some congested yard might be lanced so that traffic should flow the more freely, or a main line section be aided to give a greater daily tonnage. Nothing of that sort for the two ambitious assistants.

A new pony inspection engine, with an observation room built forward over the boiler—just the sort that Col. Roosevelt had once used as a reading-room—was to be built for the division, and each assistant thought that he needed that engine for the dignity of his job. Each in turn went before the lion and stated his claims for the possession of the pretty toy. The old man listened with grave dignity. A week later he sent down to the master mechanic at the big Depew shops and had him deliver a brand new hand-car, with his compliments, to each.

The pony-engine went into the roundhouse until the real Prince should come. Then he sat long hours alone at his desk once more.

Finally they brought a man to him, a fine, upstanding[Pg 219] man. The lion rose from his comfy old chair and gave greeting to the newcomer.

“I’m glad to see you,” was all he said; but to the general manager, who had come up from New York, his eyes seemed to ask: “You’ve brought the right man here at last?” He turned to the stranger.

“Would you like a pony engine to get over the division?” was his question.

“I’m willing to go to hell, and go in a caboose,” laughed the stranger.

The old superintendent grasped him by the hand.

“Thank God, they’ve sent a real man to be superintendent at Buffalo,” was all he said. That was the only recognition that he gave to one who since has become one of the master railroaders of America, but in that moment the act of succession had been consummated.

[Pg 220]

OPERATING THE RAILROAD

The administration of the division runs quite naturally into several channels. The routine of the work, the making and filing of records and reports, the handling of the mass of correspondence that must constantly arise, is usually in the hands of a chief clerk, who has control over the office force at division headquarters. If there is an assistant superintendent, the chief clerk will divide responsibility with him, the theory at all times being to cut off the detail wherever possible. This office work is not radically different from the office management of any other large business. Its clerks are about the only unorganized force in railroad employ.

If the management of the road is of the divisional type, the superintendent of course is a more important executive than if it is of the departmental type. In either of these cases, as we have seen, he will probably have at least partial authority over the engineer of maintenance of way, whose force keeps the line and track structures in full repair, and also looks after ordinary construction work along the division. In the road of divisional type, he will also have partial authority over the master mechanic, in charge of the shops and roundhouses and the locomotives of the division. These last are regarded by the [Pg 221]railroad as part of its machinery, like the planers and drills in the shops themselves; and for the care and operation of the locomotives the engineers and firemen are held responsible to the mechanical department. This is the case even upon those railroads where, under the departmental system, the superintendent has no direct authority over the master mechanic upon his division. For the conduct of the trains which their locomotives pull, both engineers and firemen are directly responsible to the operating department. The master mechanic simply sees to it that the railroad’s property is maintained to a certain degree of efficiency and that the man who operates the locomotives is capable from every point of view. A reasonable amount of deterioration is expected, and each locomotive is expected to turn in to the shops for inspection, overhauling and repairs, at certain stated intervals.

The superintendent has absolute authority over the two officials who are chiefly interested in the conduct of the trains over the division—the train-master and the train-despatcher. The first of these two officers, who must dove-tail their work both night and day, has the assignment of the train crews. His opinion will be called for whenever the vexed questions of seniority and promotion arise, and he will be asked to help to plan all extra or special freight and passenger trains. To show how this is done brings us close to the question of schedules, and we may pause for a moment to consider how this important phase of the railroad’s operating is builded together.

That time-table that you have just pulled from the folder rack seems at first glance an interminable mass of meaningless figures; yet when you come to find your journey upon it, it quickly simplifies itself, and you begin to marvel at the relation the figures bear to one another, how easily you may pick your course through the long columns of numerals. The more extensive time-tables that the railroad employees carry are quite as simple, and yet they are great feats of typographical composition. In[Pg 222] reality, both these forms of printed time-tables are but transcripts of the real time-table of the division, which is kept set out upon a great board.

This board is ruled in two directions. The regularly spaced intervals in one direction are marked as time, and represent time—one entire day of twenty-four hours. In the other direction of the board the stations are spaced in proportion to their actual spacing upon the line.

The reproduction of a portion of such a board for an imaginary division of a railroad will illustrate. This line runs from Somerset to Rockville, 120 miles; and portions of it are double-tracked, the rest single-track, as shown at the top of the diagram. On the double-track, trains going in the same direction may pass one another only at the vertical lines, which represent station passing sidings, and on the single-track sections this rule holds, with the additional one, of course, that trains running in opposite directions may also pass one another at the vertical station lines. For economy of room only the seven hours from six o’clock in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon are shown here. Following an old-time practice, odd numbers will represent up-bound trains, from Somerset to Rockville; even numbers, the down trains.

So we have an early morning accommodation passenger train, No. 1, leaving Rockville at 6:10 o’clock and proceeding at a leisurely rate of about twenty miles an hour (which makes allowances for local stops) all the way to Somerset at the far end of the division, which it is due to reach at 11:45 A. M. It is halted for any length of time only at Honeytown, where upbound No. 8—local accommodation—and upbound No. 6—fast express—will pass it. At 6:20 o’clock an upbound local accommodation of the same nature as No. 1, and hence known as No. 2, leaves Somerset and, halting only at Robbins’s Corners to permit the fast upbound No. 6 to overhaul and pass it, reaches Rockville at 1 P. M. Train No. 31, which follows No. 1 out of Rockville forty minutes later, is a [Pg 223]milk train, and so must have a liberal allowance for stops. It proceeds only as far as Stoneville, where the dairy country ends, stops there long enough to turn and to water the engine, and then returns to Rockville as No. 32. Train No. 117 is a way-freight, and still slower. So it follows the milk-train. It is known as a “low-class” train by the railroaders. It must wait everywhere for better class trains to pass it. Train No. 118 is the same class of train, proceeding in the opposing direction. Train No. 5 is a down express.

How the real time table of the division looks—the one used in headquarters

Sometimes unforeseen demands of traffic necessitate the running of extra trains, and these may be strung across the board. This board, in reality, has all its trains placed upon it by strings and pins, to admit of the constant changes that the schedules are always undergoing, and the addition of a new train is a quick proceeding. As a matter of fact, a skilled train-master or despatcher will rarely take the time actually to string an extra train. He carries the schedule too completely in his head to admit of such a necessity.

But the extra train is best placed following, as a second section, some good passenger train, as indicated on the diagram. The regular train will then carry signals showing that it is followed on this particular day. While the train orders protect its movement in any event, as will be shown in a moment, the billing of the extra train as a second section is less of an upset to the regular operation of the division. Practised operating men found years ago that the fewer deviations made from the regular programme of the day, the higher the proportion of safety arose.

Now you begin to see the use of the train-despatcher. If the unforeseen never came to pass upon the railroad, instead of coming to pass nearly every hour, there might be no need of that officer. Each engineer, each conductor, each station agent would have his complete time-tables, and the road would run every day in full accordance with them.[Pg 224] That was the very earliest and the most primitive way of operating railroads. Almost as early the need arose of having a special direction over the operation of the trains. Emergencies arose daily. Trains were often late; storms beat down upon the line; the snow covered its rails; what might have been, according to the time-card, an orderly operation of line, became chaos. If a train was ordered by schedule to meet a train bound in the opposite direction at P——, it might wait there for long hours, not knowing that the other engine was broken down at A——.

The invention of the telegraph and its almost instant application to the railroad service made such special direction possible. So now we find the explicit directions of the schedule supplemented by even more explicit directions from the train-despatcher at the head of the train movements upon each division. Briefly stated, it may be said that the engineer and the conductor in charge of a train are first guided by the schedule, which, after many revisions, has been compiled with great care, and in reference to connecting lines, branches, and adjoining divisions. This schedule acts in conjunction with certain simple fundamental rules of operation, the A, B, C of every railroader. By one of these, trains of the same class bound north or east are given precedence, all other things being equal, over trains bound south or west. This rule is sometimes superseded by one giving right-of-way to trains bound up the line—or the reverse.

High-class trains, like the fastest limited expresses, have precedence over trains of graduated lower classes—down to the slow-moving heavy freights. When any sort of train loses a certain length of time—usually half an hour or more—it loses all rights that it might ever have had, and everything else on the line has precedence over it. A train may lose time if it has to, but there are never any circumstances that will justify it in running ahead of time.

All this is the part of railroad operation which governs the relation of one train to another. There are even[Pg 225] simpler but not less vital rules that control its own operation. In order that the engineer who is guiding the train, and the conductor who shares the responsibility, may keep in touch with one another, the device was adopted many years ago of having a cord run through the cars of passenger trains to a bell signal in the cab of the engine. This bell signal during recent years has given way to an improved form of locomotive signal, sounded by means of compressed air in tubes throughout the train, and operated in connection with the air-brake equipment.

The air-whistle, or bell cord-code of signals, is standard upon all American railroads, and is as follows:

When the train is standing:

When the train is in motion:

There also arises a necessity for communication between men who stand outside the train and who seek to guide the movement of the locomotive. This necessity has given rise to still another code, transmitted by the hands—holding a flag, if possible—by day, and a lighted lantern at night. This signal code follows:

By use of his locomotive whistle, the engineer is enabled to acknowledge these signals, as well as to signal upon his own initiative. His code is also a standard in railroading. It follows:

A succession of short blasts is an alarm for persons on the track and calls the attention of trainmen to danger ahead.

[Pg 227]These signal codes operate fundamentally in connection with the essential rules of schedule that we have already shown.

Suppose now that we consider the workings of all this system as it comes down to actual practice in a single concrete instance. We are finding our way to a big terminal yard in all the murkiness and cloudiness of very early morning, and once again we hunt out that urbane soul, the yardmaster. He holds in his hand the yellow tissue of an order from the despatcher of the division. In the conciseness of telegraphy it tells him to start a third section of train 118—through freight—at 6:15 o’clock. Just back of his little grimy box of an office is the big sprawling roundhouse—a dozen freighters with banked fires standing in the stalls, awaiting summons to work. The twelve engines are divided into several classifications according to pulling strength and speed, but the despatcher has designated the particular engine he wishes for third-118, and he gets it—a big lanky puller—1847. She is chosen chiefly because she has had the longest roundhouse rest, having brought in a through freight from up the line, and having been received with engineer’s report showing her to be in good running order, at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. Before the 1847 slipped from the turntable into the waiting stall, the hostlers and the wipers were at her. The hostlers had taken her over the cinder-pit and cleaned out the fire-box. Then they went over her, cleaning her, inch by inch, a mechanical inspector in their wake, testing and sounding and checking every item in the engineer’s report which showed 1847 to be in good order at the end of his run with her. There was not much chance left for any shirking of responsibility, no matter what might arise upon the 1847 on any coming day.

We turn and watch the yardmaster once again. He has the roundhouse foreman send one of the bright young boys who hang around his office night and day, and who dream of that coming hour when they will handle an 1847[Pg 228] for themselves, to call the engineer and fireman, whose names are posted “first out.” Or perhaps the telephone has come into play—in these days in the smaller towns there is hardly a house too humble to have receiver and transmitter hanging somewhere upon its walls. In any event the engine-crew are supposed to stay home when off duty, unless especially excused, and to live within reasonable distance—say a mile—of the roundhouse.

The caller tells the engineer and fireman to report at the roundhouse at 5:45 A. M. At that hour the hostlers have made the 1847 fit for service. Her tender has been filled with coal, her tanks with water, even her sand is packed aboard the box that stands upon the boiler and is ready to help on slippery rail and upgrade. The engineer makes keen inspection of the 1847 before he moves her a single inch, makes sure with his keen and practised eye that she is quite fit for service, pokes here and there and everywhere with his long-spouted oil-can. At a minute or two after shop whistles have shrieked “six o’clock” he pulls the 1847 out from the shadows of the roundhouse. He gets an open signal and switch to the main yard and finds waiting on a siding in that great place, the trail of freight cars and the caboose that are going with him to make Third-118.

Now come back for a moment in your thought. While we were still scurrying down to the grimy yard, the despatcher was creating Third-118. On his desk were car reports, showing what had been received and sent out, and there was enough accumulation of stuff in the yards last night to justify a Third-118. Because good railroading means yard-sidings cleared, and standing cars and freight, like passengers, kept constantly moving, he did not hesitate at ordering her out. He found that there would be 32 cars between tender and caboose, weighing approximately some 1200 tons, and so he ordered from the roundhouse an engine of a class which the mechanical department[Pg 229] guaranteed capable of pulling from 1,000 to 1,500 tons, gross weight.

Courtesy of the “Railroad Age Gazette”

The electro-pneumatic signal-box in the control tower of a modern terminal

The responsible men who stand at the switch-tower of a
modern terminal: a large tower of the “manual” type

“When winter comes upon the lines the superintendent
will have full use for every one of his wits”

Watchful signals guarding the main line of a busy railroad

The yardmaster had given the numbers of the cars that were to make Third-118, just as he received them from one of the despatcher’s assistants, to a switching foreman, who arranged them, with the quick facility that comes from long practice, into an order that would permit them to be set off at various points up the line, with the least possible amount of switching. That practical sequence worked out in pencil and paper, a stubby switch-engine effected in reality. The cars and the caboose, in proper order, were ready, with the crew, and inspected when the 1847 backed to them and Third-118 came into her being.

A yard caller had summoned the train-crew while the roundhouse caller was rounding up the two men of the engine-crew. Collins, the conductor, and his brakemen had reported at the yard-office, and were assigned to Third-118. Collins found the cars and caboose waiting just a few minutes before the 1847 had been coupled to them, with little ado and no formality whatsoever, beyond the testing of the air-brakes. Into his train-book he had entered the number of each car and the initials of the road owning it, its destination, its empty or tare weight; the weight of its load, and the sum of these or its gross weight. He sees to it that each box-car is firmly seal-locked. If not, he refuses to accept it from the yardmaster until it has been resealed, and makes a note of the occurrence. Like the engineer and the hostlers in the roundhouse, he takes no chances, no responsibilities that do not fairly belong to him.

With both conductor and engineer ready, Third-118 starts upon her day’s run. The yard operator has telegraphed the despatcher’s office that 3-118 is awaiting instructions. In that despatch he has given the locomotive number, the number and total weight of the cars it hauls, the name of both engineer and conductor. The [Pg 230]train-despatcher enters these details of train and crew at the head of a column of his train register. On that register there are spaces for the entries of arriving and leaving times of the train as telegraphed him by the operators at each telegraph station on the division.

The train once so entered by a despatcher’s clerk, the despatcher sends a clearance card to the telegraph operator at the little yard office who repeats it back for accuracy. Then the yard operator presents that clearance order to the engineer and conductor, who read it aloud to him—also for accuracy, of course—and then sign that they have read and understood the order. The signatures are then reported to the despatcher’s office, which wires “Complete.” “Complete” goes in writing upon the copies of the order made in manifold, which go to engineer, to conductor, and to the operator’s own files. The engineer reads his order to the fireman, who repeats it back to him; the conductor follows the same routine with his brakemen. That all sounds complicated, but quickly becomes mechanical and rapid; the danger is that it may become so mechanical and rapid as to permit of serious errors passing unchecked through the routine. But the railroad has done its part. It has, for itself, taken every possible precaution against error and resulting accident.

We are privileged, and we climb into the caboose of Third-118. We hold credentials to Collins, her conductor, and they are unimpeachable. We can see that from his face as he holds his lantern over them: he would not even let us into his caboose until his own mind was set. After that there was barely time to jump aboard. The 1847 is beginning to clear the yard before we have had time for a good look at the inside of the little caboose.

“You won’t find our hack any fancy place,” says Collins. “But we’ve had it nine years now, and it seems kind of homelike to us after all this time.”

The “we” consists of Collins and his rear brakeman. The forward brakeman, who is held responsible for the[Pg 231] front half of the train, has his headquarters in the cab of the 1847. The caboose is a home-like place, snugly warmed by a red-hot stove placed in its corner and lined with bunks made into beds, Pullman fashion; only never was there a Pullman sleeper that gave you less sense of the impressive and a greater sense of a snug cabin. Squarely placed in its centre is a sort of wooden pyramid and the steps up this lead to the lookout from where the long snaky train can be watched.

“Kind o’ ol’-fashioned, that,” apologizes Collins. “Th’ las’ time I had th’ cabin into the shops for over-haulin’, they offered to take it out an’ put in th’ ladders; but I says ‘no’; an’ this is why.”

One by one he lifts its hinged steps. This is a pyramid built of lockers, a regular treasure house of railroad necessities. There are all sorts of ropes and jacks and wrenches, extra parts against every emergency. There is a food closet, and another locker filled with neat stacks of stationery.

“They give us more forms to fill out now than th’ super’s office got twenty years ago,” he laughs. “I spend more than half my time at that desk.”

The clerical work on Third-118 is considerable. Collins has to keep all the way-bills of his train—32 cars, almost $100,000 worth of merchandise, and if he makes a serious error it is apt to cost him his job. He writes a neat hand, and his records, like his caboose, are kept in ship-shape fashion. He is a careful student of the ethics and the practices of railroad management and operation. He has his own ideas on each of these, and when you get to them they are good ideas. Of such as he railroad executives are every year made in America.

We slip up the line, slowly threading our passage through the mass of passenger trains, fast and slow, that all times have the right-of-way over the third sections of rather ordinary freights. Collins sometimes thrusts his[Pg 232] orders into our hands in order that we may see something of the great detail of this branch of operating. Each is wonderfully specific, and we know by that “complete” on the corner that it has been given in detail.

“No. 1 Engine 2236 will wait at Morris Level until 10:00 A. M. for 3-118, Engine 1847.”

The signature is that of the initials of the division superintendent, the numerals have been spelled out. It would seem as if the railroad had taken every possible precaution for safety. And yet again, remember that great accidents have happened upon American railroads just because men’s minds have perversely refused to read what eyes and ears have read. And yet there seems to be nothing to be done, more thorough than is already being done.

“Are all these freights upon schedule?” you may ask Collins, after you meet a few dozen of them within the limits of a single-track division. He is decent enough not to laugh at your ignorance.

“Schedule?” he repeats. “It’s a joke. They give our first section a time to get out on, in the time-card and then one o’ them bright office-boys gets a figger out o’ his head an’ puts it down for an arrivin’ time. He never hits it an’ he never expects to. So more an’ more they’re gettin’ to move this freight on special orders. They can better regulate it then, ’cordin’ to volume of business. Mos’ of the men carry the schedules of the fas’ an’ th’ way-freights in their domes. Th’ coarse tonnage stuff doesn’t even get special orders. When they get enough of it, down on th’ main line, they get an engine out o’ th’ roundhouse, give the train th’ engine number, and start off. Railroad traffic along the freight end follows business conditions mighty close.”

It is still daylight when we halt at a junction, across a frozen river from a city. The city is set upon a steep hillside, and its houses rise from the river in even terraces. At the top a great domed structure—the State House—crowns it. It is a still winter’s morning, and the[Pg 233] smoke from all the chimney-pots extends straight heavenward. We wait patiently upon a long siding until everything else has been moved—through fast expresses heavily laden with opulent-looking Pullmans, jerky little suburban trains, long draughts of empty coaches, being drawn by consequential switch-engines in and out of the train-shed of the passenger station. Finally a certain semaphore blade drops, we cross over to the important main line and begin pulling on a sharp curve, across the river, clear of the station with its confusion, through and past the city to a busy division yard.

In a very little time, for this is their home town, Collins and his crew are registering at the yardmaster’s office. The engineer of the 1847, and his fireman, turn in their time-slips and proceed with the locomotive to the roundhouse where they make a report upon its condition. Their names are posted on the “in” list or register, and they are off duty until they are summoned by the callers at this end of the division. The despatcher has, of course, been apprised of the safe ending of the run of Third-118.

In the despatcher we have a high type of railroad official who works almost unknown to the great travelling public, and yet accepts a very great measure of the responsibility for the safe operation of the lines. His orders, sent by telegraph and bearing that cabalistic initial signature of his superintendent, are the products of his own mind. There can be no mistake in these, and he knows it. Each message that he sends may produce disaster, and he knows that.

He is an executive of a type that is not to be passed by lightly. He has risen from the ranks of the telegraphers, most likely from some lonely country station or forlorn signal-tower, and his knowledge of railroad operation, both theoretical and practical, must approach perfection. On sunny, serene days he proceeds with the theoretical railroading; when storms or unexpected influxes of traffic come[Pg 234] to harass the division, he will need every bit of his practical knowledge. Handling a number of special trains—freight or passenger—is a strain, and that strain is most felt at the despatcher’s desk.

Now and then your morning paper tells of a railroad wreck, and laconically adds, “The despatcher was at fault.” The stories of the wrecks that were forestalled by the sheer genius of the men who sit night and day at the telegraph instruments at headquarters are the stories that are for the most part untold, and that far surpass in thrill and interest the stories of the failures.

The despatcher must also be the full measure of a man. He is, like the silent figure upon the bridge of a great ship, of unquestioned authority as he sits at his desk. He may or may not have a map of the line before him as he sits there, but you may be certain that he knows where every moving train on the division is at the moment you see him, just as clearly as if it were all visible there to the naked eye in some sort of picture map. No trains proceed without his express orders. He has “reliefs” and there is no hour of day or night when one of these is not at the despatcher’s desk, having the work of the line under his exact supervision.

The order that any train receives from the despatcher by means of the telegraph will, as we saw in Collins’s case, direct it to proceed to a certain point on the line, and will specify every train, regular or extra, that it will meet, and the meeting point. When the train has proceeded to the end of its orders there will be more orders from the train-despatcher to be receipted for, and so it will proceed to the end of the route. It is quite possible that at any stage of the journey orders will come from headquarters nullifying those already issued, in part or entirely; and these must be accounted for in the same thorough and accurate fashion. Some of this seems “red tape” to the men on the line, and there come times when they are a bit disposed to rebel at what seems to them useless formality.[Pg 235] There also come times when trains crash into one another; and at those times the railroad, with its infinite system of recording its orders, is generally apt to be able to place the blame pretty accurately. Those are the times when the system of train orders justifies its worth.

Recently the telephone has come into something more than an experimental use in despatching trains upon American railroads. Various causes have contributed to this. For one thing, the use of the telephone enables the average road to make good use of its veterans, men who would indignantly refuse to become pensioners, and yet who have come to a time in their lives when they must set their pace in gentler key. A trusted old employee, a man crippled perhaps in loyalty to the company’s service, a keen-witted responsible woman, any one of these can competently handle train orders over a telephone, without having to have the education and the wonderful expertness that comes only from long experience in telegraphy; and they all become available in the despatching service. Still another cause has contributed to the change, which is being reported each week from some fresh corner of the country—the telegraphers, themselves. Within the past few years they were able to induce Congress to reduce their day’s work to eight hours. Translated, this meant that the average way-station which had been manned by one or two operators would correspondingly need two or three operators. The telegraphers, by reason of the expert training needed in their business, kept their wage-scale up, and the railroads felt that eight-hour bill keenly in their treasuries. So there may have been the least bit of retribution in their seeking the telephone as a relief. The change has certainly been made in the keen hope of effecting economy. No railroad operator would feel ashamed to admit that fine impeachment.

Modern railroading simply makes the same demand of the telephone that it makes of the telegraph—that it keep the probability of safety high. It makes the same [Pg 236]demand of the men who maintain the signals, the track, the bridges, and other portions of the right-of-way. Let us consider them in the passing of an instant.

You know the signals along the line of the railroad—those gaunt, uncanny things that spell danger or safety to the men in the engine-cabs. A little while ago, we stood beside a man in the sun-filled tower of a great railroad terminal and watched him operate the most complicated switch and signal system in the land, watched him with the crooking of a finger upon the lever of an electric machine raise this blade, lower that, as he made new paths for the many trains, coming and going.

A plant of that sort is known as the interlocking. In its simplest form, it will guard a junction between two single tracks. The mast of the signal will rise, according to standard custom, at the right of the track in the direction of travel, and there will probably be two semaphore blades, the upper of which guards and signals the straight main-line or “superior” track, the lower, the diverging branch, known as the “inferior” track. The blade raised—automatically showing a red light—indicates that the main line is closed to the engineer. “Stop!” “Danger!” are the words it tells him. The blade lowered, a green light is automatically displayed, and the engineer knows that he can go ahead at full speed on the main line. The road is clear for him. The lower blade gives similar indications for the branch diverging line. Normally, both blades stand at “stop” and “danger,” and the one guarding the line for which the train is destined, is dropped only on the approach of the train, itself. In fact, to facilitate the movement of trains, these guarding signals—known to the signal experts as “home signals”—are generally interlocked with “distant signals” several hundred feet down the line, on which blades indicating the diverging tracks forecast the story that the “home signal” is to tell the engineer. The blade raised—by night displaying a white or safety signal—on the “distant signal” [Pg 237]indicates that the line it guards is blocked at the “home signal,” and that the engineer must be prepared to bring his train to a full stop. Dropped—showing the green safety light—that particular line is open and ready, and the engineer can be prepared to pass the junction without a very great diminution of speed.

That is the fundamental rule of the signal. Some roads have experimented with other forms of indicators—disks of one sort or another, semaphore blades that turn upwards rather than drop. The devices are numerous, but the principle is the same. When the tracks begin to multiply, and the signals begin to multiply in even greater proportion, they are generally carried over the tracks on a light bridge construction—our English cousins call it a “gantry”—and a series of small semaphore masts built up from the bridge. One of these masts, or “dolls,” will be assigned to each track; and if there chances to be an unsignalled siding-track of little importance passing under the bridge, it will have its own “doll” rising from the bridge although quite devoid of semaphore blades. So it is all quite as clear as print to the engineer, even when forty or fifty lights blink at him from a single bridge. The signals tell their story to him quite as simply as to the man in the tower, who is setting their blades in accordance with his carefully arranged plans.

Where signals are not of this interlocking type, guarding some junction, railroad grade crossing, draw-bridge or other point of possible danger, they are likely to resolve themselves into the block system. This system, in a rather crude form, with the use of operators at each block-tower or way-station, has been in development for something less than thirty years upon the American railroad. In brief, it divides a line—usually double-tracked, but sometimes used by the so-called “staff” method upon a single-track road—into sections, or blocks, of from three to five miles each. On double-track under this system, no two trains, even though travelling in the same direction are permitted[Pg 238] in the same block. At the entrance to each block stands a tall mast with two of the conventional signal blades. The upper of these raised denotes that a train is still in the block, and an engineer must stop his train and wait till it drops, before he can proceed. The lower blade, when raised, indicates that a train is in the second block ahead, and the engineer must proceed only with caution and expecting to find that block closed against him. It is all quite simple; and if the engineers followed the signals absolutely, there never could be any rear-end collisions on lines protected by block signals. As a matter of fact, there rarely ever are, although the engineers do take chances time and time again.

“Why should I stop for that thing,” said a veteran engineer on a fast express train as we went whirring by one of those upper blades raised and commanding us in a blood-red point of light to stop, “when I can look down this straight stretch and see they’re clear? Like as not something’s got into the mechanism of it and let her flop that way.”

Do not insult the intelligence of that engineer. A little while before, he had told us, with a deal of pride, that the rolling stock of “his road” placed end to end would reach from New York to Omaha, a distance of some 1300 miles. Keenest of the keen, he had a sort of contempt for a rule-book in such a case as that.

“Isn’t it sort of positive?” we began. “Good excuse anyway—”

“It is,” he shouted back, “but somehow it don’t go if you fall behind on your running time. We’re here to use ordinary good sense—and bring our trains in on time.”

And yet the railroad has a sharp way of insisting upon compliance with that book of rules by making, once in a great while, surprise tests. A signal is set at danger, without any more apparent reason than in the case just cited; a secret watch is kept, and judgment and discipline[Pg 239] are visited upon the heads of the engineers who permit themselves to run past it.

To operate the signals calls for one body of men, and to maintain them for faithful service against all manner and stress of wear and weather, another; just as there must be a working corps to keep the right-of-way in working order. This last is a mighty brigade of the railroad’s army; for one man in every four who works for it is employed in keeping the track in order. One dollar in every six that the railroad spends goes for that purpose.

Maintenance of way on each division divides itself into a superintendent of bridges and buildings, who sees to the upkeep of those facilities; and a roadmaster, who specializes upon the track itself. This last officer, almost invariably one who has begun to shoulder himself up in the ranks of the railroad army from the very beginning, has his territory divided into sections from two to five miles in length on double-track, from four to ten on single. In command of each section a faithful hand-car and a group of more or less faithful section-hands, figured on an allowance of one to each mile of track, is a section-boss. The section-boss is a wry and a wise soul, or should be. He may not know as much about the formulas for compensating curves as that bright boy who has just come out of a “tech” school to stand his turn at a transit, but he has a marvellous sort of intuitive sense in keeping his little stretch of track in order. He can sight his rail and discover flaws in alignment as a blind man can find surface flaws with the developed tips of his fingers, and all the while he may be growling at the railroad management for adding to the weight of its rolling-stock and “pounding the elevations out of his track.”

In summer he is expert with the “track jacks” and constantly putting in bits of ballast here and there; and in the winter, when the frost and snow have made it [Pg 240]impossible to touch the ballast, he keeps his elevations by means of “shims.” A “shim” is a piece of wood, from shingle thickness to the width of two ties piled one upon the other, and is wedged between the tie and the rail till summer comes and the line can be corrected by ballasting.

The section-boss must keep pace with a job that is no sinecure. If his gang, in eagerness to be on dress parade, almost throws dirt on the rear steps of the boss’s private car as it goes whizzing down the line, he must also see to it that they keep plugging at it where there is not even a locomotive whistle within sound. He must be thrifty, economical. He must remember that the humble cross-tie which once cost a quarter now costs almost a dollar, and that for one of these to be found neglected in the ditch is almost a capital crime. He must have an eye for loose spikes and angle-plates, for the big boss has hinted at the annual loss to the road in these simple factors.

At his call and that of the superintendent of bridges and buildings is a work-train, made up of a few flat-cars and discarded coaches, doing boarding-house Pullman service in their declining years, which looks after work too sizable for the section-boss and his little gang, and yet not large enough for the attention of the dignified gentlemen who are known as the reconstruction engineers. Yet some of the feats of these work-train gangs have the crackle of engineering genius. It takes brains to rip out a little timber span and replace it in the interval between two trains spaced a couple of hours apart, and in the railroad, brain work often comes from the shabby workman, from the man who graduates from the command of his own battered hand-car.

All this elaborate system of railroad operation has been built up through many years of practice. Experience has been more than a teacher in the business, which becomes yearly more and more nearly a developed science; she has been a whole faculty and a curriculum, too. Methods that[Pg 241] promised well at the outset have been found faulty after trial, and rejected. Committees of trained experts have pondered and reported voluminously; the standard railroad codes of every sort have been born because of them. The operation of the railroad has been brought close to science. It would seem as if the entire field had been completely covered.

And yet new situations constantly arise, the like of which have never before presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves in unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track stretches through the Middle West that starve through eleven months of the year, and for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a double-track trunk-line in the East. Obviously such lines cannot be double-tracked for thirty days of business; quite as obviously the overtaxed division, its equipment, and its men must rise to every necessity of the floodtide of business. There are fat years and there are lean years. There come years of bumper crops, years when the factory lights burn from sunset to dawn, and wheels turn unceasingly, and then the superintendent wonders how his equipment and men are going to stand the strain. Engines are kept from the shops and in service; nothing that is even a semblance of a car is kept out of service; the demand for men is keen; prosperity strains the resources of the railroad.

In the lean years, engines are sometimes kept from the shops because the railroad feels that it must hold down its running expenses to keep pace with reduced revenues, and such a course it can stoutly defend as nothing else than good business. Equipment begins to stand idle. Engines are tucked away on empty sidings, boarded and forlorn; and if the year be very lean indeed, the superintendent may find it necessary to send out a wrecking crane and begin lifting empty cars off the rails and leaving them in the ditch at the side of the right-of-way, until the golden times come again. At such seasons his ingenuity is tested quite[Pg 242] as much as in the times of floodtide. Orders come to cut expenses, and his big expense is the pay-roll. When he begins to blue-pencil that pay-roll, some one is going to be hungry. The superintendent knows that. He must move with great care in such emergencies.

[Pg 243]

THE FELLOWS OUT UPON THE LINE

One man in every twelve in the United States is on the pay-roll of a railroad. No wonder that that great organism comes so close to human life throughout the nation, that we seem to touch it at every turn.

This one out of twelve is the great army of industrial America. Composed of nearly 1,500,000 men, it is an army that inspires loyalty and coöperation within its own ranks, and confidence and admiration from without. To a nation whose creed is work, it stands as the uniformed host stands to a fighting nation like England or France or Germany. The army of industrial America inspires not one whit less affection than those great crops of paid fighters in Europe.

Ninety-six per cent of this army of railroaders are engaged in the business of maintaining and operating the great avenues of transportation, an overwhelming proportion in the last phase of the business. The operating department is, to the average mind, the railroad. Its members are the men with whom the public come oftenest in contact; they are the men who are oftenest called upon to hazard life and limb in the pursuit of their callings. The romance of the railroad—a romance that is told in unending prose and verse—hovers over the men who operate it. The men who labor in the shops and keep engines and cars safe and fit for the most efficient service[Pg 244] have no small responsibilities. Moreover, their work, forging and finishing great masses of metal, is not without its own hazards. The men who give their time and talents to the maintenance of the track and the structure of the railroad have equal responsibilities. It is not doubted for an instant that both of these are important functions in the conduct of railroad transportation, and each in turn will have full attention given to it.

In a previous chapter we have considered the men who control the actual operation of the railroad, the safe conduct of its trains up and down the line. How about the privates in the ranks of this industrial army, the men, who by their loyalty and ability form the very foundations of successful operation, who also form the material from which executives are chosen every day?

There are no common laborers in this phase of railroad work. A man with stout muscles and less than the average amount of brains can ofttimes shovel ballast out with the track-gangs; there are many, many opportunities for crude labor in the heavy metal work of the railroad’s shops; there are none within the scientific activity that gives itself to the running of the trains. The humblest of these folk must have a particular talent, a talent so peculiar that it might almost be described as “latent Americanism.” The lowest-priced man in the train-service must understand the entire complicated theories of railroad operation to a T. He may be the man on whom responsibility—the responsibility for the safety of not one but many human lives—may suddenly be thrust. A gate-tender at a highway crossing has not ordinarily a place of gravest responsibility; yet in some least expected hour this humblest employee of the operating department may hold the fate of human life in the balancing of his steady hands.

Americans run the American railroads. For this great service men must possess not only the mental capacity for understanding the technique of operation, but the physical strength to meet the stress of hard labor, and of every[Pg 245] sort of weather, and of long hours spent upon moving trains. Moreover, there is a requirement of morals—that a man must fully know and quite as fully accept the responsibility for human life that is placed in his hands. These things combined make that “latent Americanism” of which we have just spoken; and the railroad that digs deep into this mine of “latent Americanism” finds its material, not in the great cities with their vast colonies of foreigners, but on the farms of a broad, broad land. The boy standing in the pasture sees the express train go skimming past him from an unknown great world into another unknown great world, and straightway he has the railroad fever. He drives to the depot with the milk cans, and there he comes in contact with the personnel of that link of steel that stretches across the farm where he was born. It is only a little time after that before he is applying for work as a railroad man.

So it is that the railroad finds fine timber for its service. It picks and chooses. For its choice it has the pick of American timber, the ironwood of our national forests of humanity. It gathers its army of men, inspects them carefully for physical, mental and moral requirements and then it impresses upon them the necessity of good living, the absolute necessity of deference to an established and rigid system of discipline as a requirement in the successful handling of the different transportation business.

Thus we have the railroad men as the best workers of the nation. If you want proof of that, ask any of the great mail-order concerns which class of business they prefer and they will tell you without hesitation that it is the railroad man. Come closer home and ask the merchants of any community the same question. Their answer will be the same. Rigid conditions, out-of-door life, sober habits make desirable citizens out of this class of workers. There are none better anywhere.

In the train service, the ordinary route of promotion is through the freight service to the passenger. Thus, for[Pg 246] the farmer’s boy who hankers to sit in the cab of the locomotive that hauls the Limited there is a long hard path. Chances are that at the beginning the road foreman of engines will start him at odd chores, calling crews, wiping engines, and the like, around some one of the big roundhouses. He will work hard, but here he will begin to absorb the romance of the line, the romance that, like fog and engine smoke, lies around the engine house, thick enough to cut. Perhaps after a while they will give him a little authority and make him a hostler. The “hostler” and the “stalls” in the roundhouses are quaint survivals of the most primitive railroad days, when horses were really motive power.

At odd times, night times perhaps, the boy will ride in engine cabs and gradually acquire a knowledge of one of these great machines such as no text-book would ever give him. Then comes his first big opportunity. There is a vacancy among the engine crews; the road foreman of engines gives him a good report, and he begins to have dealing with the train-master. He is made a fireman, and he travels the division end to end, day in and day out.

Now he knows why the railroad requires physical tests as well as tests of eyesight and of hearing. Even after he has taken another step in advance and been promoted to the passenger service (we will assume that ours is a bright, ambitious boy), he will only find that his labors in the engine-cab have been increased. It is no slight task, firing a heavy locomotive over 100 or more miles of grade-climbing, curve-rounding railroad. It is a task that fairly calls for human arms of steel; for some firemen handle some 17 tons of coal in a single run. The appetite of that firebox is seemingly insatiable. There is hardly a moment during the run that it is not clamoring to be fed, and that the fireman is not hard at it there on the rocking floor of the swaying tender, reaching from tender coal to firebox door.

But the day does come, if he sticks hard at it, when he[Pg 247] becomes an engineer. He has learned the line well, during his countless trips over it as fireman. He has come to know every signal, every bridge, every station, every curve, every grade, every place for slow, careful running, every place for speeding, as thoroughly as ever river pilot learned his course. There have been many times when he has had to assume temporary charge of the engine. He is a qualified man at least to sit in the right hand of the cab, to have command over reverse lever and over throttle.

His work is of a different sort already. The hard physical labor is a thing of the past, most of the time he sits at his work. But responsibility replaces physical stress, and the farmer boy now realizes which of the two is more wearing. Upon his judgment—instant judgment time and time and time again—the fate of that heavy train depends. After he has been promoted from freight engineer to passenger engineer he has a train filled with humanity, and he knows the difference. By day the inclination of a single blade, by night the friendly welcome or the harsh command of changeable lights must never escape him. One slip, and after that—

The engineer prefers not to think of that. He prefers to think of a safe trip, terminal to terminal, to think of the long line covered, once again in safety, to think of the station at the far end of the division, where a relief engine and engineer will be in waiting to take the train another stage in its long journey across the land, to think of the home and family awaiting him. He is a big passenger man now. When he gets to the end of the run, there will be a crew to take his locomotive away to the roundhouse. He will have a bit of a wash and in a few minutes he will be bound through the station waiting-room, well dressed, smoking a good fifteen-cent cigar, quite as fine a type of American citizen as you might wish to see anywhere. You would hardly recognize in this well-dressed man of affairs, the keen-eyed, sound-bodied man in[Pg 248] blue jeans who stood beside his engine, oil-can in hand, at the far end of the division.

The same type holds true through the man in care of the other parts of the trains. Take the brakeman—they call him trainman nowadays in the passenger service. In the old days this was a slouchy, somewhat slovenly dressed individual of a self-acknowledged independence. Time has changed him in thirty years. An increased respect for the service has taken away from him his slouchiness; a feeling that good work and hard work will take him through the ranks, through a service as conductor, perhaps to train-master, to superintendent, goodness knows how much further, has replaced that bumptious independence.

He began as brakeman on a freight. There were two, possibly three, of these men to the train, under command of the conductor, back there in the caboose, and they were supposed to distribute themselves pretty equally over the top of the train. The forward brakeman would work from the cab backward, the rear brakeman from the caboose (he also probably calls it a “hack”), forward, the remaining man when a third was assigned to the train, having the middle. It was thought and confidently predicted that with the universal use of the air-brake to freight equipment the days of clambering over the tops of the cars to man the brakes were over. Brakemen twenty years ago were dreaming of the day when they might sit in a cab or caboose and have the difficult work of slacking or the stopping of a 1,500-ton train accomplished, through the genius of mechanism, by a hand-turn of the engineer upon an air-brake throttle. But what looked so well in theory has not worked quite so well in practice. The railroads have found the wear and tear on the air-brake equipment, particularly with the steep grade lines and heavy equipment, a tremendous expense. For the sake of that and for the sake of still greater safety—following the railroad rule to use each possible safety measure, one [Pg 249]upon the other—the brakemen are still compelled to keep to the top of the cars.

“When the train comes to a water station the fireman gets out and fills the tank”

A freight-crew and its “hack”

A view through the span of a modern truss bridge
gives an idea of its strength and solidity

The New York Central is adopting the
new form of “upper quadrant” signal

On a pleasant day this is a task that can give the average brakeman a sort of supreme contempt for the man whose work houses him within four walls. If the road lies through a lovely country, if it pierces mountain ranges, or follows the twisting course of a broad river, he may feel a contempt, too, for the passenger who observes the lovely scenes only through the narrow confines of a car window. To him there is a broad horizon, and he would be a poor sort of man indeed if he did not rise to the inspiration of this environment.

There is quite another side of this in the winter. Let wind and rain and then freezing weather come, and that icy footpath over the top of the snaky train becomes the most dangerous way in all Christendom. It consists of only three narrow planks laid lengthwise of the train, and between the cars there is a two-foot interval to be jumped. Hand-rails of any sort are an impossibility, and the brakeman now and then will receive a sharp slap in the face that is not the slap of wind or of sleet, and he will fall flat upon the car-roof or dodge to the ladders that run up between the cars. That slap was the slap of the “tickler,” that gallows-like affair that stands guard before tunnels and low bridges and gives crude warning to the man working upon the train roofs of a worse slap yet to come.

There are other dangers, not the least of these the possibility of open battle at any time of day or night with one or more “hobos,” tramps, or “yeggmen,” who seem to regard freight trains as complimentary transportation extended to them as a right, and train-crews as their natural enemies. The list of railroad men who have lost their lives because of these thugs is not a short one. It is one of the many records of railroad heroism.

Still the brakeman has a far easier time of it than his prototype of a generation or more back. The air-brake is a big help. When a train breaks in two or three parts[Pg 250] on a grade, the pulling out of the air-couplings automatically sets the brakes on every part, and if you do not know what that means ask one of the old-timers. In the old days of the hand-brakes the very worst of all freight accidents came when a section of a freight train without any one aboard to set its brakes, broke loose and came crashing down a hill into some helpless train. Ask the old-timer about the hand-couplings and the terrific record of maimed arms and bodies that they left. The modern automatic couplings have been worth far more than their cost to the railroads.