Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 16

Suppose that this long Big Four flat-car was to run up to Columbus--150 miles or more up the line--with three motor-boxes upon its deck. One might have been filled at the main freight-house of the Big Four, down in the shadow of the big pa.s.senger terminal, another at Brighton, the third, let us say at Norwood. The exact stations are immaterial. The point is that the freight would have but one transfer--at the in-house of the Columbus terminals. There an overhead track-crane would pick the three boxes off the "flat" and place them upon the freight-house deck, where they could be quickly unloaded and their contents placed on trucks or lorries for Columbus distribution. While in turn the motor-boxes would be reloaded for shipment back direct to Cincinnati-Downtown, Cincinnati-Brighton, and Cincinnati-Norwood.

There is nothing impracticable or impossible about such a plan. On the contrary, it is most tremendously practical and tremendously efficient withal. Its installation is neither difficult nor expensive, while the savings are vast. A conservative estimate would place these already at $1000 a day in the Cincinnati district. Carry that ratio all the way across the country and you have a possibility of railroad operating economy in the aggregate not to be sneezed at.

The whole broad national field of railroad operation awaits the coming of the motor-truck and its detachable body into terminal handling. It is to be a great factor in the railroad of to-morrow. Come east, if you will, from Cincinnati into New York. Now we have a teaser of a problem. Far worse, even, than that of the city by the bend of the Ohio. The freight terminal problem of the island of Manhattan alone is to-day the greatest single problem of transport in all this land, if not, indeed, in all the world. Into it constantly is being injected idealism, engineering, politics, common-sense--all of these, apparently to but little avail. An elaborate plan has been formulated lately for the correction and revision of the entire terminal problem of the New York metropolitan district (including not only all the outlying boroughs such as Brooklyn, Richmond, and the Bronx, but Jersey City, Bayonne, Weehawken, Hoboken, Newark, Paterson, Pa.s.saic, and many other closely allied communities). This plan is being engineered by the newly created Port of New York Authority, modeled closely upon a similar body for the port of London. As this is being written, it is being resisted stoutly by the city administration of New York. I shall not go into this phase of the problem however. There are enough others to be considered, and this particular one sooner or later will come to an automatic solution.

For no matter whether the city administration or the Port Authority (created by the States of New York and New Jersey) comes atop, the island of Manhattan will remain the crux and key of the whole problem. For its relief it may be necessary, as has been suggested, to build relief belt-line railroads no nearer than forty miles away from it. That is a matter for the future. For the present consider that disregarding political boundaries--traffic takes little or no thought of them--the commercial center of metropolitan New York (in the sense which I now mean, a well-grouped city of ten million people, even though in two separate States) is and must remain upon Manhattan Island. There is the commerce done. There the freight comes to a clearing-house. Manufacturing may increase and probably will upon the outer rims of the district. But distribution will remain close to its heart.

Consider for a moment, if you will, with me the antiquated freight facilities of the heart of what long since became the second city of the world, and which to-day, commercially, at least, is its first. Upon the long, slender island of Manhattan but one steam railroad has direct rail freight facilities. That road is the New York Central, which many years ago pre-empted most of the western edge of the island for itself and so gained a vast strategic advantage--also a choice a.s.sortment of political quarrels. However, the one thing probably more than offsets the other.

There are nine other important freight railroads, however, entering the New York metropolitan district (not counting the West Sh.o.r.e, which is a subsidiary of the New York Central). These roads, together with the Central and the West Sh.o.r.e, occupy thirty-five vastly valuable piers in the congested sections of the island south of Forty-second Street and so hold the piers from coastwise and from outbound steamship lines which clamor constantly for them.

To these piers the freight-cars of these eleven railroads come on long clumsy car-floats, each accommodating about ten cars. The floats are loaded at the direct water terminals of the railroads across the Hudson and elsewhere and are poked by stout tugs into position alongside the freight-piers. In theory a single standard pier of Manhattan should empty and load, even in this rather clumsy fashion, about eighty cars a day.

This is based upon having four floats at each of them at a single time. In practice they do well if they clear forty cars a day. The berthings between the piers are narrow, there is much congestion in them and in the rivers about Manhattan Island, and delays are not only frequent but constant.

Yet the delays upon the water sides of these piers are as nothing compared with those upon their street sides. Any New York merchant, retail or wholesale, will tell you of these--of trucks standing in line long, weary, expensive hours outside the pier-doors and then wasting more time after they once get inside, before they are loaded and out again. On an average 60 per cent. of a truck's time is so wasted. The average downtown pier is but eighty feet wide, and after a thirty foot roadway has been left down its center there is not much room for the freight. There must be a vast amount of pulling and hauling over the acc.u.mulated merchandise. This all takes time and money.

Concretely, it costs about two dollars a ton for package-freight (known technically as the cla.s.sified) to get itself unloaded upon a Manhattan Island pier. Add to this fifty to sixty cents for the hand-work of unloading upon the pier and a hauling cost through the streets of downtown New York of from eight to ten cents a hundred; and you have a total terminal cost well in excess of four dollars a ton, which is entirely too much.

One of the chief tasks before the engineers of the Port of New York Authority is to bring down this cost. They have proposed a fascinating and elaborate plan by which the freight-cars upon the eight railroads coming into New York from the south and west be unloaded well outside the rail terminal congestion--the essence of the fully-developed Cincinnati plan which we have just seen. Their freight would go into a form of container which would ride into Manhattan upon a miniature underground electric railroad, not dissimilar to that in successful use in Chicago for a number of years past. This road, connecting with the outlying freight interchange points, would dip under the Hudson River at the Battery and continue up under West Street, at the extreme westerly rim of Manhattan Island, to about Thirty-third Street, where it would again tunnel beneath the river and return to New Jersey--a simple and efficient belt-line.

This scheme is most interesting, despite its weakness in ignoring the uptown growth of Manhattan Island by quitting it south of Thirty-fourth Street. Unfortunately it is most expensive, as well. Most such plans are.

Its estimated cost is $259,000,000. A keen and experienced railroader of my acquaintance, taking this into consideration for his overhead and making a sharp a.n.a.lysis of probable operating costs, has not hesitated to give it as his opinion that this underground electric railroad would impose a terminal cost of something over four dollars a ton for cla.s.sified freight entering Manhattan from the west bank of the Hudson River. Add to this your street haul costs of from eight to ten cents a hundred and you begin to get something too dangerously close to six dollars a ton to have much joy in it for the New York merchants.

One of the most important of the eight railroads entering New York from the west, from a freight traffic point of view, at least, is the Erie.

Despite a fearful heritage of financial obligations incurred during its maladministration of half a century ago, it is a remarkably progressive property in its operating methods. Poverty and the consequent need for extreme economy have forced it into many ingenious and highly practical operating kinks. The vast expenditures involved in the elaborate plan of the Port of New York Authority can have little fascination for the energetic F. D. Underwood and the rest of the Erie officers, who know how very hard it is for them to meet their operating and their fixed charges--dividends are not in their hopes.

With this in mind they have sought to meet the New York terminal situation, not with large expenditures but with an adaptation of the tolls close at hand. Already they have entered into a contract with a trucking concern upon Manhattan Island to work out the details of a most ingenious plan which goes after this fashion.

For many years past the Erie has operated two ferry-lines from its historic terminal at Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, to New York--Chambers and Twenty-third streets respectively. To meet the large suburban pa.s.senger necessities of the road it is necessary to operate these upon fairly frequent headways. Yet Pavonia Avenue is not an accepted route for through motoring, either freight or pa.s.senger which means that the Erie ferry-boats have been more crowded in their cabins than upon their team decks. Yet it is obvious that it costs little or no more to operate a well filled ferry-boat than one that is but half-filled. Moreover in Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, the Erie possesses not only ample freight-house facilities but room for a large future expansion of them.

Of course, it was quite out of the question to expect the average merchant of Manhattan Island to go to Jersey City to get his freight, particularly when the Erie's enterprising compet.i.tors were crying their willingness to set it down in the West Street piers. Mohammed would not go to the mountain, but in this instance the mountain would come to Mohammed. The Erie made arrangements with a large trucking concern in the City of New York to take cla.s.sified freight in ten-ton units to the merchants' doors.

These truck-bodies are four-wheeled, their forward wheels being rather light and rather small. There are three of these bodies to one tractor unit, which means of course that while one body is in transit attached to the tractor, the other two are at the respective termini being loaded and unloaded. So is time saved; and so is saved the expensive overhead upon the tractor-unit while the clock goes steadily ticking forward.

Eighteen of these truck and tractor combinations go upon a single ferry-boat. The ferry-boat headway is seven and one-half minutes, which means that working at full speed 1760 tons--a fair-sized train-load, for cla.s.sified freight--can be handled each hour. And if you wish more figures still, please understand that the terminal cost of trucking to the merchant of Manhattan has been lowered by this method from eight to ten cents a hundred to but five or six.

Economies? Sometimes I think we of America do not know, even yet, the real meaning of the word.

Yet this is but the beginning of the Erie's work at its New York terminals. Its big job, upon which it is just now embarking, is bringing into play the container in its most real sense not merely as a detachable truck-body but as a steel-box which can be loaded and then handled in almost any conceivable form of transport.

The idea is simplicity itself, nor is it a particularly new one. For many years past the express companies have used it for the transport of their comparatively small and valuable packages, placing these in large iron-bound wooden trunks for safety in carriage. It is more than a dozen years ago that a professor in one of the New England colleges--Amherst, I think--wrote an article in which he advocated the scheme for all package-freight and sent the article to a technical publication, which promptly refused it, saying that it was entirely too visionary an idea.

Yet here we are, fairly come to it in these days. The Erie plan in its last refinements proposes to unload the package-freight for New York at its yards at Croxton, New Jersey, just west of the Bergen tunnels, and then after rea.s.sortment to reload it into steel container-boxes, seventeen and one-half feet by eight and one-half, and with a working capacity of five tons. Two of these containers will fill the platform of an average flat-car.

The rea.s.sortment or transfer work at Croxton will be not only into containers for the Erie's various sole and joint freight-stations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queensborough, but also to individual business houses, where the volume of the freight justifies such a step.

Great retail stores, such as Macy's or Wanamaker's or Altman's, easily would receive one or more of these containers each day. So would the important wholesalers, and all other considerable distributing concerns of the City of New York.

The containers placed upon the flat-cars at Croxton will quickly traverse the three or four brief miles to the water-side of Weehawken, just across from West Fortieth Street, Manhattan. Here they will go upon the huge floats originally built for the terminal movement of loaded box-cars but each easily adapted for the carrying of sixty of the five-ton containers.

All the elaborate plans that have been made for the extension and development of the port of New York predicate the sc.r.a.pping of this great harbor fleet of car-floats--some eight million dollars' worth all told. In this book I am aiming to show possible railroad economies, not expenditures. It is easy enough to depict elaborate plans which involve vast capital expenditure. We have had rather too many of these in this country in recent years. It seems to me that by far the best plans are those that give large operating economies with a minimum of actual expense. These are the sort that I am trying to show within these pages.

If the Erie plans will bring to each of its water-side piers in lower Manhattan some 7200 tons of a.s.sorted merchandise a day, against about 400 tons as at present accomplished by the old-fashioned and rather awkward device of ferrying the loaded cars themselves across the Hudson River, it would seem to be both a real efficiency, as well as a mere economy.

Carried out by other roads using the harbor-side of West Street, Manhattan, it would quickly become a vast efficiency--the storage of freight upon the crowded pier floors ended; motor-trucks coming in, receiving in a time always to be measured in seconds, rather than in minutes, the steel containers upon their stout cha.s.ses, and then departing in a quick and orderly fashion. J. J. Mantell, the New York manager of the Erie, who has created this new plan and now has its execution in charge, estimates that carried out upon the lines of his compet.i.tors it would mean that the railroads coming into New York from the west would need but seven piers instead of the thirty-five that they now occupy. Twenty-eight piers would be released for steamship service and the necessity of extensive, and expensive, harbor improvements deferred, for a number of years at least.

The container idea, having once come into the public eye here in the United States, has steadily and rather rapidly gained in favor. A gentleman in St. Louis has apparently gone the Cincinnati method one better by devising a steel container which is interchangeable not only between motor-trucks and railroad freight-cars, but from these cha.s.ses to barge or flat-cars, or into the hold of a steamboat. His scheme already is in actual use, although not in perfected form, in the Federal barge service established three years ago upon the Warrior River. Twenty of the big steel boxes were purchased for use there, and there they are still in use.

It so happens that the Warrior River barges have no deck-houses, merely open holds into which the coal from the Alabama hills can easily be poured or unloaded. To make "return load"--always that valuable factor in transportation, either water or rail-merchandise freight must be garnered in New Orleans. And an open-hold barge is hardly comparable to a box-car; not at least in the mind of a shipper, who has some lurking desire to have his goods arrive in fair condition at the far end of the run.

So the steel container, which H. W. Kirchner of St. Louis has designed, came into play. It carries merchandise not only from New Orleans to Birmingport (just below Birmingham) but, atop of the coal, back to New Orleans again. The inventor has had no joy whatever in this very informal trial of his device. He would prefer to have his containers handled and placed in a more orderly and systematic fashion. Yet the fact remains that a beginning has been made in the actual use of the only practical binding force yet brought forward which looks to a physical linking of the several different arms of freight transport. Any firm believer not only in the theory of correlated transportation but also in the high values to be achieved by its practical application in this country cannot help having a joy in this Warrior River experiment, an experiment which sooner or later is to be extended to the similar barge service which the United States Government has now succeeded in establishing upon the Mississippi. It already has been shown on the Warrior River line that the container can, and does, cut labor costs at terminals all the way from sixty-five cents to four cents a ton--the time for unloading from twelve to twenty-four hours down to but one or two, at the most.

There is coming to-day in this country--slowly, but very surely--a reversal of the old-time tradition that the inland waterway is _per se_ a compet.i.tor of the railroad. Many years ago the railroads themselves showed how small a figure a river or ca.n.a.l, always more or less subject to seasonal or weather influences, was to the steel highway as a compet.i.tor, while the attempts that have been made since then--and generally at large capital expenditure--to bring about the resurrection of the inland waterway as a compet.i.tor of the railroad have so far proved abortive.

But to regard the inland waterway as supplementary to the railroad, or the railroad as supplementary to the inland waterway--it is merely a choice of phrasings--is a very different story indeed. True it is that the statute laws to-day p.r.o.nounce sternly against such a sensible, economic solution of a large phase of our American transport problem. True it is that a good many other keen business men still can see the waterway in no other light than as a club over the railroad. True it is that a good many otherwise sagacious railroad executives can see the waterway as nothing but an obsolete agent of transport or as a foolish dream of visionary idealists. Yet the fact remains that the waterway does have its place in transport. The railroad has a place, and in intelligent a.n.a.lysis these places dovetail somehow, somewhere. They do not conflict. And the sooner realization is made of this, the better--for all of us.

Some day we shall have to change our statute laws and then, instead of barring our railroads from our waterways, we shall invite, urge, implore, and if necessary compel them to use these great natural arteries of inland transport, chiefly for the relief of their overcrowded rails, particularly the rail terminals. And how overcrowded these are yet to be, it is hard to realize in this present moment of industrial slump.

In that day the container is to be, as I have said already, the binding agent between these different avenues of transport. Its flexibility, its adaptability, its obvious economy are going to bring it into its own.

In the meantime great progress is being made in its development. A. H.

Smith, the big, energetic president of the New York Central, with his usual verve and enthusiasm has taken hold of the idea and seems bound to put it over. Already he has had built ten steel units of containers four for pa.s.senger service and holding ten boxes each, and six for freight service and holding but six boxes apiece. The pa.s.senger service units are being tried out in the United States mail service; the freight-service ones are in experimentation by the American Railway Express. Just what will be the final development in operation of these units Smith himself does not know. He believes that the possibilities are almost too great for instant grasp. That is why he has his road and himself back of the new idea. He has watched it carefully, almost apprehensively. Because of a certain indefinite fear that one of the great steel boxes might some fine day be hurtled from the platform of a car running at high speed and into some group of waiting people by the side of the railroad, he has caused extraordinary care to be taken to have them firmly fastened not merely upon, but into, the platform-cars. A long steel girder-side of the car does the trick, while in these days of bandits and rumors of bandits along the line the fact that there is no possible process of opening the steel door of the container-box once it is set into its place upon the car gives an a.s.surance of protection to the merchandise that no other form of carrier can offer.

Here again the motor-truck correlates. In the first experimental trials by the New York Central of this forward-looking device, they have come into quick and easy terminal service; the big olive-green trucks of the United States Mail service and the deep-blue ones of the American Railway Express.

I began this chapter with the motor-truck. With the motor-truck I shall close it. It is the object of great dreams of transport. Yet these are not, after all, mere dreams. They are, as we have seen just now, the carefully developed plans of engineers long since become expert in transportation. I could have carried you much further into these plans--into their application for the relief of Philadelphia, whose great water-front along the Delaware is only reached by the box-car after miles of tedious switching through congested trackage, and where the motor-truck offers an almost immediate and a comparatively inexpensive solution of the freight terminal problem; into Chicago where the situation is nearly as bad; and into Boston, where it is considerably worse, and where again the motor-truck plus the container in terminal service is a veritable key to the problem. Further still could I have carried you in this discursion--to Baltimore, to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, to Detroit, elsewhere still. I have hesitated to weary you with too much detail. You have had enough to prove my points, while only s.p.a.ce prevents the discussion of the financial phases of this service, sometimes known as store-door delivery.

I shall admit that store-door delivery has no attractive sound to the practical operating railroad executive. He is gun-shy, tremendously gun-shy of it. And yet I do not wonder at that. Your railroader feels that sooner or later--and probably much sooner than later--the charges for this service would be tacked upon his shoulders flatly included within his transportation rate. Aside from that I think that he would welcome it distinctly. It would greatly simplify the traffic problems in and around his freight-terminals to say nothing of making vast savings in the use of his equipment.

Moreover the day is coming when he will be compelled to welcome it w.i.l.l.y-nilly. For, in my opinion, the motor-truck will occupy a place in the railroads' necessities to-morrow only second to that of the locomotive itself. It represents the railroad's newest field of development, by far its largest field of possibilities. Remember that the pictures which you have just seen in some detail of the Cincinnati and the New York terminal situations are but two out of many of these possibilities. The others are so vast and so many as to be termed limitless. They represent progress--progress in the field of American transport as definite and as distinct as that which marked the coming of the locomotive. The years pa.s.s by. In them we do move. We do progress. And transport enterprise consists in translating vision to practical operation, along lines such as we just have seen. So shall our railroad of to-morrow be upbuilt.

CHAPTER XIII

THE TWILIGHT OF COMPEt.i.tION

The distinguished Boston jurist who not so many years ago astounded and startled the entire nation by saying that he could save a million dollars a day in the operation of its railroads was quite right, even though not exactly along the lines that he then suggested. Mr. Justice Brandeis at that time proposed to accomplish his great savings--then roughly estimated at 2 per cent. a year upon the property valuation of the railroads of the United States--by radical operating economies. That these might be accomplished and in a large measure, I do not now doubt. In fact for several chapters past I have been trying to show some of the larger opportunities to be accomplished along these lines; economies that to-day might be effected upon our carriers were they possessed at this moment with the proper imagination and vision, aided by an Interstate Commerce Commission possessed of the same qualities. We have seen how, in a test long enough to be definite, the motorized terminals in the city of Cincinnati have saved the railroads there something more than a thousand dollars a day. This was just one typical congested American city. I have tried also to show how that plan, in the main at least, could be extended to other congested American cities. It would not take very many such terminal savings to make a fair fraction of the national economy once proposed by our distinguished jurist of the Supreme Court bench.

Similarly I have tried to show the economies to be accomplished in the most neglected field of our rail transport system, the branch line and local service: the electrification of lines, the introduction of the gasolene-motor unit, both upon the rails and off, the steady refinement of the locomotive, the development of the all-important container. Yet even these by no means represent the limits of operating economies yet to be attained upon the American railroad. There are many other operating savings that might be made and that are not being made to-day. For instance the field of a more scientific train movement through better signaling is of itself a most fascinating one. The second important function of a railroad signal--second only to its all-important one of safety to human life and to property--is to keep trains moving. It is a poor business man indeed who does not recognize the high value of keeping all of his moving equipment as nearly as possible in constant motion and in this way holding down the cost of his overhead.

There are two ways to direct the movement of trains. The first is the one still most commonly in use upon the railroad of the United States, by the written instructions of the train-order; the other is by the indications of the fixed signal--upon the open line, generally the automatic block.

For train-order instructions the moving train must either slow down or stop completely, but with signal indications it may keep moving ahead at a good pace. In the one case time is lost, in the other it is gained.