The Railroad Problem Part 11

And, even under the most favorable operating conditions of light freight traffic, there is constant danger of congestion.

But to a manufacturer situated on one of the narrow sidestreets of either Manhattan or Brooklyn, the situation was infinitely worse. His problem was to even reach the freight houses along the watersides of the town--a problem to be imperfectly solved by the use of trucks. Fifty trucks in a narrow street, crowding and jostling, mean infinite congestion and loss of time. Add to this the prima-donna-like temperament of the average truck-driver, showing itself in constant and protracted strikes, and you can see why the manufacturers have flocked not only to that great industrial city in South Brooklyn, but to others like it which have begun to spring up in and around metropolitan New York. Not only is the trucking expense entirely eliminated--the freight cars are waiting in the great community shipping rooms in the ground floor of the very factory--but heat and light and power are alike brought to a fixed and reasonable cost. And the newest of these manufacturing buildings are fabricated so strongly that it is both possible and practicable to raise a loaded box car to any of their floors--to the manufacturer's individual shipping room, if you please.

Here is an idea instantly adaptable to the freight terminal of any railroad. A remarkably progressive small railroad--the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh--has recently built a freight terminal of this very sort at Rochester. And there is hardly an important city reached by an important railroad that does not offer many opportunities for the development of freight terminals of this sort, terminals which, like the Grand Central station, would bring direct revenue to the railroad which built them. In this hour when the cost of foodstuffs is occupying so large a portion of public attention, when a large part of the problem lies in the marketing and storage facilities, or the lack of them, it might be possible to develop the freight terminal as both a cold-storage plant and a market.

And all of this would tend to bring additional revenue to the railroad, as well as to simplify greatly, if not to solve entirely, some of the great transportation and terminal problems which are today troubling our cities and our larger towns and which are making their food costs mount rapidly to heights which the imagination has heretofore failed to grasp.

Already the residents of these communities are taking definite steps toward relief. In the city of New York, Commissioner John J. Dillon of the state Department of Food and Markets has proposed that the state erect a public wholesale market house for the private sale or auctions of foodstuffs of every sort and in every quant.i.ty. This market would be open, on equal terms and without favor or prejudice to buyers of every sort. It is believed that it would, in every way, tend to simplify the terminal handling of foodstuffs and in just such measure help to reduce food costs to the ultimate consumer.

Commissioner Dillon estimates the cost of such a market house at from $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. Owing to a recent wave of stringent economy, upon certain lines, at Albany, this suggestion of his has not been looked upon with great favor by the executive branch of the state government. Yet it is probable that in the long run a state which has not turned a hair at a recently voted appropriation of $10,000,000 for a necessary addition to its park lands will halt at a necessary appropriation of $4,000,000 to reduce food costs in its largest city, even more to provide similar food stations in its other large communities. We soon shall see how it has voted $150,000,000 for a ca.n.a.l of little or no practical value. The suggested expenditure for market houses is as nothing compared with that.

But before such market houses can be planned and erected comes the opportunity of the railroads whose lines reach New York. If they can build such terminals, or even adapt, temporarily at least, their present plants to meet such a public and general need they will be proving themselves, in truth, public servants.

If I may be permitted here and now to enter a _sotto-voce_ remark, it would be that an absence of some such definite, modern, constructive methods as these--not alone in regard to food transportation, terminal handling, storage, and marketing, but as to speculation itself--is going to bring the United States closer to a practical and nation-wide experiment in socialism than the disturbed railroad situation has ever brought it. It seems as if the Railroad's older brother, the steward and purveyor of our great estate, was about to fall ill. I think that I can see that tremulous, but stern nurse, Regulation, turning her attention toward him. And I am quite sure that if he does break down at this time he is going to know Regulation as the Railroad never has known her.

All these things are more or less intimately related to the question of terminals--more rather than less. And they are all most intimately related to the question of the freight-traffic development of the railroad.

"Get the terminals," were James J. Hill's repeated orders to his lieutenants in the creative period of his railroads. Hill knew the value of terminals, freight terminals in particular; he knew that it took a freight car bound from east to west or west to east as long to go through the city of Chicago as from Chicago to St. Paul--400 miles--and that is why he set out to get his terminals in growing cities while the land was cheap and the getting was good. Hill had vision. He was also tremendously practical. It was the combination of these qualities that made him the master railroader of his generation.

There is another form of transportation whose development always has been and always will be directly connected with the development of the railroads. I am referring to the use of the inland waterways of the country--not merely the Great Lakes which today bear the most highly developed commerce of any fresh-waterways in the world, but our rivers and our ca.n.a.ls. With the notable exception of the Great Lakes, which we have just cited, we are decades behind Europe in the use of these waterways.

And to make a bad matter worse Federal legislation has sought to penalize the enterprise of the railroads in any attempts to develop the use of the waterways in their own interest. Just how this came about is a matter of plainly recorded history; a story of the attempts of certain ill-advised carriers to purchase and to strangle water lines, because of the compet.i.tion which they offered. But the railroads which operated the huge grain and coal fleets on the Great Lakes were not throttling--they were developing. And the success of their example was slowly but surely having its effect on their fellows elsewhere across the land.

Fortunately the same hands that make a law may repeal it. And the odious anti-railroad provisions of the navigation law that accompanied the opening of the Panama Ca.n.a.l should be revoked at once. The railroads should be aided and encouraged in the development, through their capital and the use of their connecting land lines as well as their advantageous waterfront terminals in almost all our cities, in developing a waterborne traffic. Such a traffic, devoting itself chiefly, if not exclusively, to the lower, coa.r.s.er, and slower moving grades of freight would be a tremendous relief to their rails; in the long run probably saving them huge capital expenditures for the construction of third and fourth tracks to relieve their overburdened double-tracks. Congestion on our railroads is not always a question of overcrowded terminals.

Take that great, elaborate, and all but economically useless ditch which the state of New York is just completing from the Hudson River at Troy to the foot of Lake Erie at Buffalo--the outgrowth of the once-famous Erie Ca.n.a.l. As a piece of engineering the new Barge Ca.n.a.l is a marvel. Its locks are comparatively few, roomy, marvels of operating mechanism, its fairway is generous--together these give a water pathway large enough for a barge of 2,000 tons burden. Two thousand tons is roughly equal to forty modern freight cars--a fair length train. Two of these barges would have the tonnage equivalent of a full-length modern freight train. Fifty of them would be a genuine relief to the crowded rails of the New York Central's six tracks from Albany to Buffalo.

But the New York Central is not permitted to operate barges through the new Erie Ca.n.a.l from Troy to Buffalo. Oh, no! and for that matter, not from New York up the waters of the Hudson to Troy. The Federal regulation takes care of the waters of the Hudson--and keeps them freight-desolate--the sovereign state of New York prevents their pa.s.sing through the sacred portals of its new $150,000,000 ca.n.a.l. For, truth to tell, the new ca.n.a.l was designed for but two or three real purposes; to keep the port of Buffalo from falling into decay, to find jobs for numerous deserving feeders at the public trough and keep down the local freight rates of the New York Central, which it parallels for its entire length. If it succeeds in these things--and it probably will--the men who control the present destinies of the state government will probably lose no time in worrying over the fact that the ca.n.a.l is practically completed, yet no boats of the modern type for which it was builded have been launched--or even planned. For a traffic not one one-thousandth of that at Panama, a ca.n.a.l of half the size and half the cost has been constructed.

Seneca Falls has been made a port, and so has Rome and so has Holley--and if the citizens of these sleepy towns doubt this they may go down and see the wharves and warehouses, the docks and levees which a benevolent state has wished upon them. And even if there are no boats to patronize these wonderful establishments they are kept atrim, and throughout all the watches of the night brilliantly alight. Perhaps the argosy is yet to plow the waters of the Erie! One thing I know. I traveled on a night train on the Delaware and Hudson not so long ago and chanced to see the great locks of the Champlain Ca.n.a.l--twin sister to the new Erie--all the distance ablaze with cl.u.s.ters of arc lamps. Traffic? Not a bit of it. There is no traffic upon the Champlain Ca.n.a.l. And the G.o.ds in the high heavens must laugh aloud as they read of "America Efficient" and night after night gaze down upon the brilliancy of those glaring lights upon the unused lengths of the ca.n.a.ls of the state of New York.

"One hundred and fifty millions of dollars," groans the practical engineer, "and the state of New York might have had instead of 350 miles of ca.n.a.ls, 1,000 miles of railroads, every mile of the needed improved highways she has been building, many more beside. The overhead that the freight will have to pay going through the expensive and extravagant new ca.n.a.l is far greater than that of the best of railroads."

All of which is perfectly true. But, in the words of an economist of another generation, it is a condition and not a theory which confronts us.

The ca.n.a.ls have been built--but no vessels have been builded for them. The waterways cannot remain unused. The state has two ways by which it may force their use. It may build, equip, and operate its own barges and so bring at once a widespread experiment in government transportation that seems almost foredoomed to complete failure, or it may take steps to induce, not only the New York Central, but the other railroads which link New York and Buffalo, to build and operate barges upon the ca.n.a.ls.

Remember that these railroads are more than merely links; local freight-carriers between New York and Buffalo. And Buffalo, as you probably know, is one of the larger of the terminals at the base of the Great Lakes.

Each year millions of bushels of grain--other coa.r.s.e freight as well--find their way to its docks for rail transshipment to New York or Boston, where in turn they may go into the holds of vessels for transportation overseas.

The Erie Ca.n.a.l is as much a link as any of these railroads. And, despite the fact that the state of New York has been foolish enough to build and maintain it exclusively from its own treasury, the fact remains that it is a water avenue of national communication. A glance at your atlas will satisfy you as to that.

Of one thing the state of New York may be certain. Private capital is not going to build traffic upon the Erie and the Champlain ca.n.a.ls--particularly in view of the legislation which tends to discourage, if not actually to prevent, a company of any real size or influence operating upon the ca.n.a.l.

The tendency of today is entirely toward centralization and consolidation.

And the small independent transportation company, deprived of feeding traffic and adequate joint or independent terminals has a hard shift for existence.

I have dilated upon the New York ca.n.a.ls because they are typical of the river opportunities that await the railroad throughout the rest of the country. You think of the old-time river boat--you still can see a few of them rubbing their blunt noses against the levees at New Orleans or Memphis or St. Louis or Pittsburgh--and you laugh at me. I might reply by calling your attention to the fact that the tonnage of the port of Pittsburgh, which moves entirely on the muddy rivers that serve it, is in excess of the tonnage of many of the greatest and most famous seaports in the world--Liverpool to make a shining comparison. And as for the river steamboat--it is capable of infinite development, of transformation from the gaudy and inefficient carrier of ante-bellum days into a mighty freight-hauler of today. The Great Lakes have witnessed a complete transformation of the type of freight vessel upon their waters. The genius that effected the revolution of their naval architecture is available for the development of the river craft of the United States.

Need more be said? The opportunity awaits. Preceded by the necessary repeal legislation, to which I have already referred, it is, at the least, among the very largest of the opportunities that today await the sick man of American business.

Perhaps by this time you are beginning to be genuinely interested in the opportunity for the development of the freight traffic of the railroad. It is not entirely an opportunity of the operating or the engineering departments. Indeed, at the present time the greatest activities of the traffic-soliciting forces of the railroad are given to its larger customers--patrons whose shipments run in carload, if not in trainload lots. The undeveloped field of freight opportunity for the railroad is the smaller patron--the man who ships "less than carload," but whose traffic fostered and increased would mean trainloads by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands. The railroads, through their industrial departments already have begun to accomplish much along these lines. One big road--the Baltimore and Ohio--has begun, on a very large scale, to make an intensive study of the resources of the territory which it occupies. It sends a corps of its investigators--college-trained men, all of them, into a single small city and keeps them there for one or two or three weeks. When they are done with both this field work and the review of it back at headquarters, the road has in its archives at Baltimore a book of 100 pages or more which is a complete record of that city, not alone industrially, but socially and historically as well. And if the town is clamorous for a new depot--most towns are--a study of this book will do much toward giving the answer. It may show that it finally is ent.i.tled to a new pa.s.senger gateway; and it may show also that it is careless about its pavements and its lawns, about the upkeep of the public buildings which it already has--in which case the railroad has a fairly good reason for refusing a new station.

Other railroads are following these methods--most of our roads are quickly imitative at least, even when they are unwilling to break precedent and take a definite lead. Yet, in my own humble opinion, they have not begun to even scratch the surface possibilities of traffic development.

The experience of the express companies is illuminating in this regard.

Confronted with the establishment of the parcel post and threatened for a season at least with the loss of much of their small-parcel traffic to it, they began to look about to find where they might develop a tonnage with which to fill their cars and wagons. At that moment the cost of living was making one of its periodic ascents. The express companies took advantage of the situation and began the development of a food-products service direct to the consumer. The idea was popular. It met with instant approval and tided the express companies over the hardest period of their history.

These things are interesting in the abstract. In the concrete they may yet spell the very salvation of the railroad. Two things are necessary, however, to transform them from the abstract to the concrete--brains and money.

I think that I have shown you enough already to convince you that brains is not lacking in the conduct of the railroad, despite the extreme difficulty which it is having today in gaining recruits from the best type of young men who come trooping out from the preparatory schools, the technical schools, and the colleges of the land. True it is that we have not yet raised master railroaders to take the places of James J. Hill or E. H. Harriman. Yet it is by no means certain that such master railroaders may not be in the making today on our great overland carriers. Take such men as Daniel Willard, the hard-headed, far-seeing president of the Baltimore and Ohio, Hale Holden, the diplomatic and statesmanlike head of the historic Burlington, Charles H. Markham of the Illinois Central, James H. Hustis of the Boston and Maine, Howard Elliott of the New Haven, William T. Noonan of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh, or Carl R.

Gray of the Western Maryland--these are men to whom the future development of our railroads may safely be trusted.

Bricks cannot be made without straw. And these men cannot bring the great sick man of American business back to health without our help--without the help and cooperation of every thinking man and woman in the United States.

That cooperation must come without delay, not only to relieve the plight of the railroad with which we already are familiar, but also to make it possible for him to take advantage of the great opportunities which await him. The average railroader--feeling that the cards were all against him, that his credit at the bank was nearly nil, and that he must spend the greater part of his time on the defensive, fighting legislation that he believed to be grossly unfair--has not given much attention to these great new ideas, vastly radical in their conception and requiring in their execution much overturning of well-established methods and precedents. Yet this is not to be interpreted as showing that he lacks vision.

For remember that the sick man of American business is not too ill to realize his opportunity. But he knows that first he must regain his feet once more before he can begin important creative work. He knows that the lines along which he has been working for a long time have been cramped and restricted--conservative, to put it mildly. But he also knows that before he can begin on extensive creative work he must have several things--money and, more than money, public aid and sympathy.

And of these things--the present necessity of our railroads--we shall soon treat. But before we come to them we shall come to a consideration of a railroad problem of recent compelling attention--a problem that is both opportunity and necessity, and so deserves to be considered between them.

CHAPTER XI

THE RAILROAD AND NATIONAL DEFENSE

The Secretary of the Navy met a high officer of the telephone company in Washington some months ago.

"I have noticed a great deal about your new transcontinental telephone line," said he. "I wonder if you could tell me how long it would take us, in a national crisis, to get in telephone communication with each navy yard in the United States and what the cost would be."

The telephone man stepped to the nearest of his contraptions. In a moment he was back.

"Not more than five minutes," he said quietly, "and in such a crisis there would be no charge to the government."

The telephone, the telegraph, and the railroad are the three great avenues of national communication. In time of peace they throb with its traffic and beat in consonance with the heartbeats of its commerce. In time of war their value to the nation multiplies, almost incredibly. It is then of vital necessity that they be preserved in their entirety. It is of almost equal military necessity that they be kept close to the armies that are afield.

Of the telephone we have just spoken. The services of the telephone at the time of the Civil War are too well remembered today for it to be ignored in any future national crisis. But it is of the railroad that we are talking in this book--the railroad that brings the food to your larder, even the milk to your doorstep; that keeps the coal upon your hearthstone and the clothing upon the backs of you and yours; that carries you to and fro over the face of the land. It is the railroad, that living, breathing thing that girdles the whole land and sends its tentacles into even the smallest town, that, as you already know, is your servant in times of peace. How can it be made to serve you in time of war?

When the last great war was fought in the United States, our railroads had barely attained their majority. In the days of the Civil War there were no railroad systems, as we know them today. Instead there was a motley of small individualistic railroads, poorly coordinated. They were, for the most part, poorly built and insufficiently equipped. Nothing was standardized. Even the track-gauges varied and pa.s.sengers or freight going a considerable distance found it necessary to change cars at intersecting points.

Nevertheless, the railroad played a tremendous part in the War of the Rebellion. Because of it Sherman made his conquering march from Atlanta to the sea. He was something of a railroader himself, that doughty general.

And upon his immediate staff were expert railroaders. Over the crude railroads of the Georgia of that day, with the aid of their war-racked cars and locomotives, they supplied the commissary of the Sherman army as it made its way across a devastated land.