Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 15

The train--the small locomotive and from ten to fifteen of the little cars--would start down the line from the main terminal, where it connected with the standard steam railroad. At each farm-house there would be a simple switch or siding. At each of these, one at least of the little cars would be set. Such would be the early morning process of operation. Toward night the train would come back, in as many trips as were found necessary, and gather up the little cars, now filled with the farmer's produce. They would be taken to the steam railroad and there unloaded into the railroad's big box-cars for shipment down into the cities.

It would, of course, be possible to vary this plan by making the little railroad double-track, at a considerably increased expense--and using upon it gasolene motor-trucks, whose f.l.a.n.g.ed wheels for track service could quickly be slipped into place. This strikes me, however, as being unnecessary costliness. Under such a plan, for fifteen car-loads of merchandise there would be in reality fifteen locomotives, each requiring a separate engineer. How much better to have one locomotive with one engineer--and possibly a fireman, too--haul these fifteen car-loads of merchandise! The locomotive easily might be a gasolene or kerosene internal-combustion unit or it might be a steam locomotive burning either coal or oil. That is a matter for experimentation and careful decision.

And that is not the point.

The point is that the average little farmer cannot well afford to tie up money in a motor-truck which probably will stand idle all too many hours out of the twenty-four, or else tear itself to pieces upon the rough roads of his fields. Even the tractor used in slow hauls to town and back is a doubtful economic benefit. But the type of car such as is suggested could have its f.l.a.n.g.e wheels exchanged for regular iron-tired wheels in five minutes--probably the smart farmer's son could do the job in three--while either the tractor or the team of horses or mules could draw it down into the fields where it would receive its produce.

Such a railroad--how I should like to hear it called the Bates County Farmers' Railroad or something of that sort!--would carry coal and merchandise out from the standard railroad to the farm-houses. Its chief utility, however, would be the inward movement of produce. The relief to the highroad, in case the highroad happens to be the typical narrow, light pavement so often used in this country, would be obvious, while in the cases of the all but unspeakable dirt and sand roads the relief to the farmer's horses or trucks, to say nothing of his nerves, would be vast indeed.

Sometimes when I contemplate the vastness of the possibilities of rail transport in these United States I am staggered with their enormity. We sometimes say that we now have developed a complete railroad system in this country. Such a statement is a joke. We have not even scotched the surface of transport possibilities here. We have tackled the obvious and neglected the possibilities not so obvious. But they do exist nevertheless and await the coming of the right intelligence and imagination to make the proper use of them. This brings us at once to the possibilities of the freight-container for the American railroad--not only for the railroad but for all those other forms of transport which we have said should be allied with it and which eventually, I believe, will be correlated and allied with it--the motor-truck, the ca.n.a.l-barge, the outbound steamship. For all of these forms of transportation the container is the veritable keystone of the arch. It is more. It links them together. It is not merely the keystone but the binding mortar itself of the transport arch.

I spoke but a moment ago of the transfer of freight from this imaginary farmers' railroad--based upon the French models--to the steam railroad at the point of connection between the two. Transfer, at the best, is expensive. At the worst, it is both c.u.mbersome and filled with delay. The container reduces freight transfer to an absolute minimum.

Yet because it has so many varied and fascinating phases I shall not enter upon its discussion within the pages of this chapter but shall give it a chapter of its own. It really deserves a book.

CHAPTER XII

SPEEDING UP THE FREIGHT TERMINALS

For years past, old-time railroaders have emphasized the point that the ordinary freight-car did not make money until it had hauled its goods at least forty miles; the newer generation places this figure at nearer eighty miles. And when you ask the whys and the wherefores of this, the answer comes in but two words: "terminal expense." To reduce drastically this expense, particularly in freight haulage, is to accomplish to-day one of the largest single economies in the operation of the American railroad, while as we have seen, and as we shall again see, further operating economies are apparently its one salvation, no matter who may a.s.sume the difficult task of their direction.

I have said already that the maximum profitable haul of the motor-truck upon the highway is from fifty to eighty miles. Now put this figure against the minimum profitable haul of the freight-car and see if we are not driving toward a solution of the freight terminal problem. I think that we are. And a single practical and concrete ill.u.s.tration ought to show the reason for making this statement.

Here is Jones, out near Pa.s.saic, New Jersey, tanning leather, and Smith, who has a shoe-factory of modest size at Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts, using it. In other days the leather used to go through from New Jersey to the Bay State in car-load lots. But in the last few years this method has proved entirely too slow, even with the slowly returning strength and freight efficiency of our railroads. It takes at least three roads to accomplish the distance between Pa.s.saic and Lynn, with both New York and Boston, through which the cars will probably pa.s.s, in any brisk season transfer points of fearful and constant congestion--and with both Jones and Smith then swearing and recriminating at one another.

To-day the leather is leaving Jones's tannery each afternoon at just 3:15 and is rolling up to the Smith factory in Lynn well before noon the next day with an almost clock-like precision. Even in the days that the freight was moving in heavy volume this precision was steadily maintained.

Motor-haul all the way? Oh, bless you, no! Two hundred and fifty miles to be covered, and--as this is being written, in the dead of winter--not only to be covered promptly but at a cost considerably less than express, and not so far in advance of first-cla.s.s freight charges. That eliminates the possibility of the motor-truck doing the job--all the way through at least. But it does not eliminate the fact that it is the motor-truck that has made the transformation possible. Now see what really is done.

Each evening at a quarter after seven a fast-freight train of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad leaves the Mott Haven terminal of that system, in the upper section of New York, for Boston. With selected equipment, it makes good time on the 229-mile run to Boston and pulls in there shortly before six o'clock in the morning. A hard-headed and long-visioned motor-truck concern in New York fills three to a dozen box-cars in that train each night. Into that Mott Haven terminal it operates its own fleet of motor-trucks, not only from all freight-giving points in the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queensborough, and Bronx districts of greater New York, but from the many industrial towns in the vicinage roundabout, up to a radius of from thirty to forty miles. Out of the Boston terminal of the New Haven it operates a similar fleet, and so makes the journey of a package of hides from Pa.s.saic to Lynn but a single rail-haul, in addition to the pick-up and the delivery motor-run.

Simplicity and efficiency. And efficiency and economy.

In theory there would seemingly be nothing to prevent the single big express company (into which all of the old-time companies were combined, as a war-time measure) from doing this same thing. In practice, however, their contracts with the railroads forbid this very simple and efficient method of working. Those contracts compel the express company to load its freight into railroad baggage-cars, for no matter how short the haul. If the American Railway Express takes two rolls of carpet from Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, New York, to Yonkers, on the very edge of the big town and hardly a dozen miles distant from the carpet-store, it must lug them to its big terminal on the west side of Manhattan Island and there put them in a baggage-car of the New York Central for the haul to its station in Yonkers, from which, of course, there is the second delivery run. There is nothing in the theory--or in its simple practice--to keep the express company's truck which picked up the rolls of carpets at the Fifth Avenue shop continuing north to the very door of the house in Park Hill or any other section of Yonkers to which they are consigned. In a similar way express freight that is destined from Manhattan Island to a point as near as Newark--seven or eight miles of rail-haul--must all go by baggage-car, which, in its way, is quite as absurd as sending stuff all the way from New York to Chicago by motor-truck.

The big railroaders have not been quick to see the practical possibilities of the motor-truck. Gradually however these are being forced upon their attention. Take Cincinnati. Perhaps you are not a shipper and so are not familiar with the freight situation there. If so, let me tell you that in the days before Uncle Sam attempted consolidation of all his railroads and the old-time competing systems used points of individual attractiveness to gain traffic, the bright young men who sought out preference-freight for their individual lines used, as the strongest of their talking points, to promise the elimination of Cincinnati for any shipment bound north or south or east or west through its vicinage. The late J. J. Hill used to say that it took as long and cost as much for a box-car to go through the Chicago terminals--about twenty-two miles--as from Chicago to the Twin Cities--nearly five hundred miles. Applying a similar test to the Cincinnati terminals one might say that a journey on from the Queen City by the Ohio through to El Paso would be an equally fair comparison.

For while Chicago lies upon a broad flat plain and presents no topographical problems whatsoever to the railroad engineer, Cincinnati, crouched under fearful hills there along the river, has always been his despair. When Collis P. Huntington first conceived the idea of a real transcontinental railroad system forty or more years ago and sought to bring his Chesapeake and Ohio, as an integral unit of that plan, into Cincinnati, he found the roads already there most hostile to his entrance.

They held the town impregnable. Yet Huntington outwitted them by a superb coup d' etat of engineering in which he thrust a marvelous great bridge over the Ohio into the heart of the city and the upper levels of its Central Union Station.

To-day Cincinnati stands as it stood then--seemingly impregnable. Its railroad terminals forever are clotted and congested. And seemingly they are incapable of expansion, short of the expenditure of many millions of dollars. From one of these, the Panhandle freight-house at the east end of the heart of the city, along the river edge to three or four others close together, the downtown stations of the Big Four, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Queen and Crescent, it is hardly more than a mile. A direct track along the levee connects all of them, yet the records show that the average time for a freight car to go from the first of these freight-houses to any one of the last four for years past has been two days and fourteen hours. It was because of practical conditions such as these that a great deal of the transfer work of less-than-car-load freight from one railroad to another through Cincinnati was performed by a transfer company through the city streets. The huge wagons of this concern, each drawn by horses or mules, the driver seated athwart of the southwest horse or mule, used to be familiar sights in the narrow streets of the town close to the river. I say "used to be" advisedly. For these quaint and ancient vehicles have to-day disappeared from the downtown heart of Cincinnati. In their place the motor-truck has shown its ubiquitous self. And in place of the 115 horse-drawn open trucks--our English cousins would call them "lorries"--have come fifteen efficient, modern, five-ton gasolene trucks. The mules and the horses have been turned out to pasture. Nor is this all. A good many of the little switching engines that used to haul the local transfer or "trap-cars" from one main freight-house to another, or from the sub-stations in various outlying industrial sections of the Cincinnati district, have been released for service elsewhere, and a vast saving effected in men and in money.

Before we came to the detailed method in which these fifteen motor-truck cha.s.ses are being operated, consider for a longer moment the peculiar topographical layout of Cincinnati: On that narrow shelf of flats or bottoms between the high hills and the river in which the older portion of the city is tightly built are situated the greater portion of its industries. There it is that its business life centers. There it is then that its railroad terminals have also been centered since first the locomotive poked his way down to the banks of the Ohio. And since they have expanded to almost every square inch of available territory. To the east end of this long and narrow strip come the Panhandle lines of the Pennsylvania system, the Louisville and Nashville's main-stem and the Norfolk and Western railroad. At its western end are grouped the Kentucky Central division of the Louisville and Nashville, the Queen and Crescent lines of the Southern system, the Baltimore and Ohio reaching east, north, and west on four important stems, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Big Four lines of the New York Central.

The volume of traffic which these lines bring into Cincinnati and take out of her crowded heart is vast indeed, and growing rapidly year by year. Not only is the local traffic a thing to reckoned in many thousands of tons, but the fact that there are three railroad bridges there across the Ohio, each carrying at least one important through route to the South, means a vast amount of through freight to go through that gateway--and much of it there to be transferred, which further complicates the situation.

And more than all these things the steady growth of the city has meant a constant demand for addition to her railroad facilities--addition that because of the recent difficulties in railroad finance, as well as the terrible topographical difficulties of the Cincinnati situation, have not kept pace with the industrial growth of the city. Fortunately a good deal of this recent growth has been away from her civic heart rather than close to it. New factories have sprung up in new industrial districts, well to the north and the northwest of the older portions of the town. And in order to accommodate the smaller concerns of these sections--Brighton, Ivorydale, and Norwood chief amongst them--the competing railroads which threaded them opened up sub-station freight-houses in each of them. These served concerns not large enough to have their own private sidings, while in order to give these industries the benefits of the same through-car service for L. C. L. (less-than-car-load) business that downtown business houses enjoyed they were served by the downtown freight-houses. The distances from these sub-stations--three or four to eight or ten miles--were of course quite out of the question for the horse-drawn lorries. So it became the practice there, as in other widespread metropolitan cities, to load package-freight in local box-cars--in the parlance of the business, "trap-cars"--and send these in the convoy of a switch-engine to the downtown station where s.p.a.ce was required for their spotting and unloading. And a confounded situation was thus doubly confounded.

In regular practice these trap-cars with their outbound freight would leave the outlying sub-station each afternoon soon after their closing hour--4:30--but they would not reach the downtown stations until early evening, some hours after the L. C. L. or through package-freight cars for that day had all been closed and sealed and sent merrily on their way toward their destinations. At the best the stuff they carried would make the through outbound cars of the second day. At the worst they might make the cars the fourth or fifth day, while impatient shippers began to burn the telegraph wires with all their woes.

To-day the freight from those outlying sub-stations at Brighton, Ivorydale, Norwood, Oakley, and Sixth Street, Storrs, Covington, and Newport is leaving them at their closing hours and going out from the main downtown freight-stations that same evening--almost without a miss. The shipper smiles. And, as in the case of the L. C. L. freight to be transferred from one railroad to another at Cincinnati, great time, money, and temper are saved and efficiency gained. The reason why? Let me hasten to answer.

The motor-truck has come into railroad terminal service and has there found a field peculiarly if not exclusively its own.

And because the Cincinnati experiment has pa.s.sed the stage of mere experimental trials and doubtings, because there in that fine old town at the double bend of the Ohio a real progress step in transportation has been taken that is not only of actual value to it to-day but of potential value to every other big town in America to-morrow, let us go a little more closely into its workings. Let us begin by calling to the witness-chair J. J. Schultz, president and general manager of the Cincinnati Motor Terminals and himself a railroad operating man of long experience.

Mr. Schultz tells us quickly how a little more than four and a half years ago the experiment began in the badly overcrowded downtown freight-station of the Big Four, just south of and adjoining the equally badly crowded Central Union (pa.s.senger) Station. It was a simple enough plant then--two motor-truck cha.s.ses, bought on credit from a Cleveland concern, and twelve cage-bodies worked out through the ingenuity of a local blacksmith. These were placed in service between the main freight-house of the Big Four and one or two of the outlying sub-stations. The success of the plan was almost immediate. The two trucks went scurrying back and forth all day long, picking up and depositing the loaded bodies until the other railroad men of Cincinnati began to realize that their Vanderbilt compet.i.tors had scored a sort of a beat on them. Then they began to look into the motor-truck proposition on their own, with the direct result that to-day every freight-house in Cincinnati except one is equipped for handling standardized motor-truck bodies on and off standardized motor-trucks.

In transfer freight the scheme, briefly stated, is this. A box-car, filled with less-than-car-load stuff, all bound for different roads south of the Ohio, comes rolling down from Pittsburg into the Panhandle freight-house, there at the east end of the Cincinnati congested district. The freight-house crews make quick work of unloading it. The package stuff which it held goes rolling across the deck of the "in-house" and without rehandling into one of two or three of a row of huge packing-boxes that stand awaiting it. These look like the small goods-wagons of the French or the English railways and are in reality the new type of standardized red and gray motor-bodies of the Motor Terminals Co. One is destined for the freight-house of the main division of the L. & N., another for the Kentucky Central division of the same system, a third for the Queen and Crescent. An average of four and a half tons is stowed away in each of them, the way-bills are placed in an envelope for the driver, and the box is then fastened and sealed like the door of a regular box-car in service.

The freight-house boss moves toward his telephone. Presto! A motor-cha.s.sis pulls alongside the Panhandle freight house.

"Ready for the Queen & Crescent," the driver shouts cheerily in.

But before he receives his loaded box and the way-bills there is one to be delivered. An overhead crane running upon a track grabs the box, swings it clear of the cha.s.sis, and places it upon one side of the freight-house deck. From the other it picks up the loaded box for the Queen & Crescent and--almost as quickly as it can be told here--deposits it upon the emptied cha.s.sis. The driver yells a good-by and the truck is off, to be replaced almost instantly with another, with a transfer load to be delivered and one to be taken on for one of the other freight-houses.

"Our despatcher allows five minutes to unload a body and to load on another," says Mr. Schultz. "It's a lot more than sufficient time."

"What despatcher?" we ask Mr. Schultz.

He explains in some detail. The railroads, who keep a careful supervising oversight of the workings of the plan, have installed at their own expense a skilled train-despatcher who, at a desk and telephone switchboard in a quiet downtown corner, directs the exact operations of each of the terminal company's trucks. Through his direct telephone lines to each freight-house and sub-station he keeps tab upon the comings and the goings of the drivers, as well as a complete and permanent record of their work and can quickly meet emergencies of every sort, instantly adjusting the service to the needs that are thrust upon it. Time is money. And time counts.

"We are handling this stuff across town to the Queen and Crescent in just fourteen minutes to the average," explains Mr. Schultz. "And here is where the average was two days and fourteen hours--the actual practice often from eight to ten days. Some percentage of gain."

A seemingly incredible percentage, Mr. Schultz. Yet here are the records before our eyes that prove the statement. He seems to know exactly what he is talking about:

"Take that run from the Brighton sub-station down to the main freight-house of the Big Four in the old days," he adds. "Second night out from the main station in a through L. C. L. car--in theory only. Do you know what it took them in average practice with that trap-car? An average of thirty-six hours; that's according to the records. And our motor-trucks make that run in thirty minutes. But because they haul an average load of but 4.37 tons, as against an average load of nine tons in the trap-car, we must, in order to be entirely fair, take that into consideration in a comparative reckoning and say that our average haul is one hour and four minutes, which still compares pretty well with thirty-six hours. Or, to bring it still further, the average time to haul one ton of package-freight by motor-truck is seven minutes, as compared with three hours and fifty-four minutes by trap-car. Our drivers are scheduled to make ten miles an hour through the city streets, and they make it easily and without danger or annoyance to any one.

"There is another factor of saving in this service that you must not forget," continues Mr. Schultz. "By our use of the motor-truck we have saved the use of twenty-three trap-cars a day in this one freight-house alone. That not only releases those cars to the Pennsylvania railroad for line service but, by saving the platform trackage which these cars demanded, increases in a really great measure the capacity and efficiency of this freight-house. And you can readily understand the effect upon the entire Cincinnati terminal situation when I tell you that the motor-truck service which we already have in effect is releasing a total of 66,000 box-cars a year from Cincinnati terminal service for the line movements of the various railroads that lead in here."

I think I can understand. A little time ago the wisest and most conservative of the railroad operating executives who have Cincinnati among their bailiwicks were wondering how in these days of abnormally low railroad credit they were going to escape vast and almost immediate extensions to their terminals there, both freight and pa.s.senger. Now they know that these expenditures will not have to be made--for the freight terminals at least--for a number of years to come. The trap-car elimination has released anywhere from 30 to 40 per cent. of valuable floor-s.p.a.ce in each of the present local freight-houses and so of course has added that much to their working capacity. Count that, if you please, to the credit of the motor-truck in terminal service.

Nor is the service itself representative of any cost increase. The motor terminals company is hauling all the transfer and secondary freight at an average cost of eighty cents a ton, which certainly compares well with $1.20 which the former transfer service was compelled to charge for its haul by lorries, or the expense varying from $1.12 to $1.60 a ton which it costs the railroads to haul their own trap-cars by switch-engines. A saving this which goes well alongside of that of box-cars and switch-engines and freight-house s.p.a.ce relieved, to say nothing of individual shipments, through and local, vastly expedited; all of which can be translated annually into money savings of real dimensions.

Already the motor terminals company is hauling about one thousand tons of freight through the streets of Cincinnati in nine hours of each business day. Its trucks, with maximum outside dimensions of seventeen feet six inches by eight feet, are both shorter and narrower than the lorries of the old transfer company and infinitely less subject to delays under conditions of inclement weather. Moreover understand, if you will, that the transfer company, with all of its 115 lorries, hauled but 38 per cent.

of the through L. C. L. freight between the various terminals of Cincinnati. To handle all of it would have taken at least 250 horse-drawn trucks, while if it had attempted the problem of handling the sub-stations another fleet of at least equal size would have been required.

Yet its motorized successor is now handling every pound of the thousand tons or more of transfer freight at Cincinnati daily as well as all the sub-station work, with the slight increase of twenty-four bodies to the 201 already in service and without the increase of a single cha.s.sis to its present operating fleet of fifteen. To perfect and quicken its service the overhead cranes for loading and unloading the box-bodies are being equipped with motor-trolleys, in place of the man-power chain arrangements, which in turn represents a speed of fifty feet a minute as against but seven under the old order of things. And this of course is still further efficiency.

So much then for the situation as it stands to-day in Cincinnati. It does not take very much of a vision to see in the proved success of a terminal plan, which already has ceased to be an experiment, a great enlargement of the freight gathering and distributing scheme for the entire city. No longer will it be necessary or even essential that a freight-house of a railroad be located either at or near rails. It can come far closer to its users. In other words railroad sub-stations for the collection and delivery of package-freight can be established in every industrial section of Cincinnati, thus shortening the haul for individual patrons and so in turn perceptibly lessening the congestion in the city streets.

Do you see now where this is leading us? With sub-stations so established, the principle of standardized interchangeable motor-truck bodies and cha.s.ses working to so definite an end, there remains little or no use for downtown freight terminals in a city like Cincinnati, save perhaps an occasional team-track yard for heavy car-load shipments. In the flats at the edge of the town the railroads can, and in my opinion eventually will, establish new and generous-sized freight-houses and other terminal appurtenances. The downtown stations, located in the heart of each industrial district, will do the rest. The expense of building these last will be as nothing. The value of their upper floors as lofts for light manufacturing will far more than offset the cost and upkeep of the ground-floor motor-freight terminal, while the facility of movement, with its mult.i.tude of resultant economies, will make the expenditure on outlying main terminals money well spent indeed.

As goes Cincinnati, so must go the land outside. It is from this point of view that its radically new terminal plan a.s.sumes a nation-wide interest and importance. As I lingered in its various railroad terminals beside the neat wood and iron motor-body boxes upon the freight-house decks--the original open cage design has long since been discarded in favor of the stronger and more permanent form of carrier--I could not help but be struck again with their resemblance to the small ten-ton goods-wagons of the French and English railways. And I recalled the tremendous efficiency of these same small wagons for the work for which they were best adapted, the hauling of package freight, the sort of things we know in this country as L. C. L. One of the great disagreeable sources of railroad outgo in America, and one that has a constant tendency toward increase, is the list of claims paid for freight damaged in transit. It makes a pretty big annual bill, of which an astoundingly large proportion is gained through breakage in the transfer-houses. Remember that right here is where our French and English cousins can always show us a trick or two. With their little ten-ton cars there is always enough package-freight to "make" a full car even to the smallest communities, while once arrived at one of these, a switching-crew composed of a man and a horse handles the car-load shipment with great care and no little speed.

Then as I stood there upon the big and orderly decks of the Cincinnati freight-houses--orderly upon the coming of the motor-truck into terminal service, and for the first time in many years--it kept coming to me, why could not these stoutly built boxes go through to Dayton or to Columbus or Indianapolis, or for that matter anywhere within reach of the American freight-car? Two of them would go quite easily upon the deck of a flat-car; it ought not to be difficult to find "flats" to accommodate three of the seventeen-foot motor-bodies upon their platforms. But even with but two, there would be nine tons of package-freight, which is fully as much if not more than the average package-freight box-car is carrying to-day across the land. While thirteen tons--three well filled motor-boxes-runs well ahead of that average.