The Railroad Problem Part 12

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RAILROAD IN THE CIVIL WAR

This picture of a section of Alexandria, Virginia, was taken in 1864 and shows the cars and engines of the United States Military Railroad of that day.]

In the North the military railroad, reaching down from the very portal of the Long Bridge at Washington, its railheads almost always touching the Union lines, was an almost indispensable factor to the Army of the Potomac. The Baltimore and Ohio was hardly a less important factor. It paid a high price for the accident of location. One of Stonewall Jackson's earliest and most brilliant achievements was the seizure of eight locomotives from its roundhouse at Martinsburg and their movement, some forty miles, over a dirt road to Winchester, Virginia, where they found the tracks of a part of the railroad system of the Confederacy. Later on Jackson returned to Martinsburg and helped himself to twelve more B. and O. locomotives, also moving these over the turnpike to Winchester. He knew and Lee knew that even a clumsy balloon-topped, wood-burning locomotive was worth 500 horses in transport service. And the South was none too plentifully supplied with locomotives even before the war began.

The most of the work of the railroads in the Civil War was not dramatic.

But it was thorough--the carrying of men between the cities of the Middle West and the Army of the c.u.mberland. At first it was chaotic, but it became well systematized. The direct line between New York and Washington--although then composed of four separate railroads--was recognized as a route of vast strategic value. The men who handled troops and supplies over it, in doing so qualified themselves to a.s.sume the mastery of the great railroad systems that were to spring into being at the close of the war--as a result of both construction and consolidation.

In 1898, when the country was again plunged into war, preparation of the railroad lines of the land had grown to maturity. Unfortunately, however, the theater of the war was close to the corner of the land which was then most poorly equipped with railroads. But the standardization of the operating conditions had been largely accomplished. One could run a car or locomotive upon practically every important line in the land without changing the gauge of its wheels. This last, of itself, was important. It meant that the equipment of larger and stronger roads to the North could be sent down to the Plant System and the Florida Central and Peninsular--barely equipped for ordinary purposes--which were suddenly called upon to handle an extraordinary traffic. This, of itself, was a mixed blessing. For the borrowed locomotives were often too heavy for the light rails and long bridges over the Florida marshes. Derailments were frequent and the delays they entailed, protracted.

The men who went to Tampa in that hot summer of 1898 have not forgotten the Florida Central and Peninsular nor the Plant System, even though those two railroads have now pa.s.sed into history. Nor has the War Department forgotten them. On one memorable occasion, the Quartermaster started a special trainload of emergency army supplies south from Philadelphia to Tampa. In order to make sure that the train should go through promptly, he placed one of his own representatives upon it, with orders to push it through. The train disappeared. After three weeks, the Quartermaster's Department found it on a siding at a place called Turkey Creek, a good eighteen miles from Tampa--held there because of the hopelessly congested terminal at the waterside. And they never yet have found the special representative who was to put it through.

These abominable conditions, the conditions that made it necessary to take from four to six days from the great mobilization camp at Chattanooga to Port Tampa, a journey which should have been done in from one-half to one-third of this time, were not to be charged to the poor men who were struggling to operate those inadequate railroads. They were doing the best they could, without plan and without facilities. And it is interesting to note in this connection, that in that same memorable summer, an appeal came to Washington not to put more than 500 troops a day through the Jersey City gateway for fear of congesting the terminals there!

More recently the railroads of the South have been called upon again to handle troops and munitions and commissary. Of course the problems that have confronted them upon the Mexican border are hardly comparable with those of the Civil War or the Spanish-American War. Yet on the very morning that the entire country was shocked by Villa's audacious raid upon Columbus, New Mexico, the heads of the great railroad systems that come together at El Paso were alert and ready for any orders that the War Department might give. At 6:45 P.M. that evening a telegraphic request for trains came from Washington to the general headquarters of the Southern Pacific lines at Houston. Five thousand troops were to be moved from the camps at Galveston and near-by Texas City, and as quickly as possible.

Early in the morning the trains began moving. The railroad had made a full night of it. Throughout the night they had brought their extra equipment into Galveston from San Antonio, from New Orleans, from Shreveport--every important operating center within twelve hours' run. The trains were ready as quickly as the troops. And they made the long run of 881 miles up over the long single-track to El Paso in an average of thirty-six hours--under the conditions, a really remarkable performance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RAILROAD "DOING ITS BIT"

Hauling a trainload of army trucks and supplies from Chicago to Gen.

Pershing's expedition "somewhere in Mexico."]

The Santa Fe and the Rock Island operate direct lines from Chicago to El Paso. They were called upon during many months of the past year to carry munitions south to the border--particularly motor trucks--and were not found wanting. The Rock Island with its complementary line, the El Paso and Southwestern, carried 170 motor trucks and water wagons from Chicago to El Paso, 1,446 miles, on a fifty-hour schedule. The "limited" with all of its reputation for fast running and its high-speed equipment only makes this distance in forty-three hours and a half, while the ordinary schedule for freight--which is the equipment upon which it was necessary to handle the motor trucks and the water wagons--is 129 hours and 50 minutes from one city to the other. But Pershing needed the automobiles.

They were vital for his expedition. And it was a part of the day's work for the railroad to carry them down to the border in record time.[14]

The job of handling the troops on the Texas line has hardly been more than part of the day's work. The railroaders down there will tell you that. The real job of the railroad recently has been laid overseas in the nations that are fighting so bitterly for mastery. The German military use of railroads is most interesting because it is the best. American travelers for years past have noticed upon the trucks of each separate piece of rolling stock in the Empire, its military destination, as well as cabalistic figures to denote its carrying capacity in men and horses and pounds of freight. Yet these were but the surface indications of a great plan--whose formulas had been worked out and rested on the shelves of the war headquarters in Berlin. How well the plan has worked we all know now.

For the first time in its history the railroad has become an active fighting factor--not merely to be content with the bringing of powder and sh.e.l.l and food and equipment up to the bases of the fighting lines; not merely to a.s.semble troops, in a comparatively leisurely fashion, or to take tired and sick and wounded men back to their homes; but to be a striking arm, if you please, moving whole brigades and even armies with all the tensity and speed and resource at its command. In other days you might laugh at the peaceful little German pa.s.senger train, making its leisurely way in all the pomp and circ.u.mstance that only an Empire may show. But you cannot laugh at the German military train, black with troopers, darting its way across the Kaiserland with a speed and definiteness that is all but human.

It has been stated that the real reason why the Germans failed to reach Paris in their memorable drive of September, 1914, was that even their remarkable system of military railroads failed in this supreme crisis. If this be so, it must be that the task placed upon them was superhuman. For it was just such military trains as we have just seen, multiplied in dozens and in hundreds, that moved whole brigades to southern Galicia during the first two weeks of April, 1915--a distance, roughly speaking, equal to that from Boston to Detroit. It was the military plan for the railroads of Germany that brought the regiments out of the trenches in Arras in the last week in June of that same year and on the Fourth of July had them hammering at the might of Warsaw. And Warsaw is 800 miles from the low fields of Arras. Not until the war is over will the whole military workings of the German railroads be known. But examples such as these show that they did work. And it may be remembered that when the German army began flowing in a tidal fashion up over the Russian steppes they came to von Hindenburg and reminded him of Napoleon and the retreat from Moscow.

And von Hindenburg showed his great teeth and remarked that Napoleon had had no railroads.

"The bread which our soldiers eat today in Windau was baked yesterday in Breslau," he added. And it takes only a single glance at the map to see that Windau is approximately 500 miles distant from Breslau. "We drink German mineral water and we eat fresh meat direct from Berlin. If necessary, we can build fifty miles of railroad in two days. Therefore it is nonsense to speak now of the times and the strategy of Napoleon."

Here, then, is another of the great practical lessons that these three fateful years are teaching America. Consider now how she may avail herself of this particular lesson--the coordination of her great systems of more than a quarter of a million miles of standard steam railroads with an orderly and intelligent military plan, against any invasion. Other nations have had to build railroads with a particular relation to military strategy. Keen-minded Belgians and Frenchmen long ago noted the tendency of Germany to build double-track railroads to comparatively unimportant points upon her western front--since then they have had the opportunity to see the wartime efficiency of these lines, suddenly turned in an August from practical stagnation into busy, flowing currents of military traffic.

Of the strategic value of double-track routes, much more in a moment. For this moment consider the location of the princ.i.p.al rail lines of the United States--particularly in their reference to the defense of the nation.

The "vital area" of the country, so called, is the coast territory between Portland, Maine, and Washington, District of Columbia, and resting east of the sharp ridges of the Alleghenies. Here is a great part of the wealth, the population, and the banking of the United States. Fortunately, however, this is the district best supplied with efficient railroads, double-tracked, triple-tracked, quadruple-tracked. And a reference to the map will quickly show that these lines are particularly well adapted to coast defense. From the extreme northeastern tip of Maine down to Key West and around the white and curving sh.o.r.e of the Gulf to Brownsville and the mouth of the Rio Grande there is hardly a strategical point that is not well served by existing railroads. North of Boston, the Boston and Maine and the Maine Central systems run, not alone parallel to the coast, but by means of a network of other lines intersecting their coast lines, are prepared to serve them from the inland country every few miles. The importance of this last fact comes to mind when one realizes the possibility of an invading force eluding our naval patrols and cutting our coast line railroads. With a network of adequate line behind the one actually closest to the sh.o.r.e, important communication would not be interrupted for any considerable time.

Boston is linked with New York by three distinct routes of the New Haven system; with Chicago by the Boston and Albany, in practical effect a branch stem of the New York Central system. Nor are these three stems the only protection that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad extends to New England. The exposed and bended arm of Cape Cod is a weak point in the nation's "vital area." The New Haven holds and controls the one-time Old Colony Railroad which reaches the old whaling ports of Plymouth, New Bedford, and Provincetown--a railroad which might at any time become of vast strategic importance and which should be at once double-tracked, by the Federal government, if necessary, for the same reason that Germany double-tracked her lines leading to her French and Belgian border. And only second in importance to the Old Colony in case of an attempted invasion from across the Atlantic is the Long Island Railroad, stretching straight out of the city of New York to the very tip of the island. Between the Rockaways and Montauk there are many points on the south edge of Long Island that offer possibilities to landing parties.

And it is essential that the railroad that serves this peculiarly barren bit of coast within two hours' rail run of the largest city upon the American continent be prepared to serve it well in the case of military necessity. Fortunately the Long Island Railroad has been vastly improved--its double-track increased--within the past ten years. It is no longer barred by the East River from actual track connections with the other railroads of the country. The great Pennsylvania tunnels already make it possible in a military emergency to pour filled train and empty, on short headway, into Long Island. The strategic value to the nation of these tunnels will soon be supplemented by the h.e.l.l Gate Bridge over the East River which will bind the Pennsylvania and the Long Island railroads with the main lines of the New Haven and the New York Central. This bridge cannot be completed too quickly. It is of immediate strategic necessity.

From New York south the same main-stem railroad that served the North so well in the days of the Civil War still stands. It has, however, ceased to be a chain of railroads, with ferriage at Havre de Grace and heartrending transfers by horse cars across Philadelphia and Baltimore, as it was in the days when New England and the York State and the Jersey regiments went down to Washington and over across the Potomac. From Baltimore north, this ancient stem is now the Pennsylvania Railroad, four-tracked or double-tracked the entire distance, rich in surplus locomotives and cars, and halted no longer by either the Delaware or the Susquehanna rivers.

Since the close of the Civil War the Pennsylvania has builded its own line from Baltimore to Washington, while the Baltimore and Ohio, which owned that section of the ancient stem, has thrust its own line up into Philadelphia, coming from that point to Jersey City over the main-line rails of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey systems. This means that there are today between these parallel railroad systems eight main-line tracks from New York to Philadelphia and from four to six from Philadelphia through Baltimore to Washington. It is a combined railroad trunk of which a nation might well be proud. And this nation may yet be profoundly grateful that it has such a railroad trunk, through the heart of its "vital area."

Consider again this "vital area"--the great metropolitan districts of Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore--almost a continuous city, in fact, all the way along the Atlantic coast from the south tip of Maine to the Potomac. It stretches west to the Alleghenies, in fact we may say a little beyond them, to include such vigorous communities as Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo. Here in this "vital area" of the nation are more than eighty per cent of its munition-making plants, its largest hard coal and soft coal deposits, its steel-making plants, its greatest shipyards and its three most important navy yards. Major General Leonard Wood has said that 1,500,000 men would be necessary to properly defend the coast-line from Portland, Maine, to Washington. Therefore the railroad main stem that connects these cities and the many larger cities between them is the most important military base line upon this continent.

It needs all the resources of two- and four- and even six-tracked railroads, for General Wood has gone on record as saying that in a national crisis it might be necessary to move half a million men on this great base line within the course of ten short hours. On a conservative estimate these would require 500 trains--trains which, stood end to end, would reach all the way from New York to Washington or to Utica. Such a train movement would stagger even the imagination of a pa.s.senger-traffic manager accustomed to figure the "business" in and out of a national inauguration or a big football game at Princeton or New Haven or Cambridge.

A railroader whose pencil has a quick apt.i.tude for figures has estimated that Germany has seven and a half locomotives for every ten miles of track. We have one-third that proportion. Yet the preponderance of what our railroad men like to call "motive power" lies east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio. The same thing is true of cars--cars of every sort and variety. That is not the problem. Here it is.

Suppose, if you will, that an enemy finding an entrance to America on the sandy south sh.o.r.e of Long Island--to choose the spot most in the favor of the writers of the lurid fiction of an imaginary war between some European nation and the United States--has actually succeeded in capturing the city of New York. The great military base line of America is broken at its most important point. How are Major General Wood and the rest of the men who are puzzling the great problem out with him, going to move a half-million men--a half or a quarter of that number from New England over into Pennsylvania or down toward the defense lines around the national capital?

Take a look at your railroad map. Look sharply! You will need to look sharply to see the second line of communication between New England and the rest of the nation. There it is--a thin and wavering railroad line, stretching from New Haven up through the Connecticut hills, spanning the Hudson on the slender tracery of the Poughkeepsie bridge and threading still more hills until it reaches Trenton, New Jersey, and the main base line once again. The nation may yet thank a gentleman named Charles S.

Mellen for that second line of communication. For while the much discussed ex-president of the New Haven did not build the Poughkeepsie bridge or the New England lines leading to it, he at least caused both of them to be double-tracked, curves and grades ironed out until one heavily laden coal train could follow close upon the heels of another.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AMERICA'S "VITAL AREA"

The workshops and the coalbins of the United States, together with the princ.i.p.al railroads which must protect them. This bird's-eye map made as though viewed from an aeroplane at a point five hundred miles off of Cape Cod.]

That was Mellen's motive in making a large part of this second line of communication into first-cla.s.s railroad--the perfecting of New England's long, lean arm down into the Pennsylvania coal bin. But no matter what his motive--he has never pretended to be altruistic--his coal line is of great strategic value. Not alone does it circle around metropolitan New York at a reasonably safe distance, but it intersects the great trunk lines running west from the seaboard--routes that would be of unspeakable strategic value in the case of the seizure of our largest city. For these would be the lines that would have to feed our army--not with mere food, but with men and guns and sh.e.l.ls and all that with these go. At Poughkeepsie this second line of communication intersects the main stem of the New York Central, in turn the main stem of the Vanderbilt system reaching almost every important city west of the Alleghenies and east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. At Goshen it intersects the Erie Railroad, come in these recent years from being a reproach and a byword into one of the most efficiently operated railroads in the entire land.

Farther south it intersects the Lackawanna and the Lehigh Valley--roads rich in money and in resources.

Suppose now the second line of communication is gone--the graceful span of the Poughkeepsie bridge a ma.s.s of twisted steel in the channel of the Hudson. What is the third line of communication? It consists of the aristocratic old Boston and Albany leading due west out of Boston, and threading Worcester and Springfield and Pittsfield--each of these a manufacturing center of no mean importance--and finally coming to Albany, and of the Delaware and Hudson, which, bending southwest from Albany, finds its way through the anthracite hills of Pennsylvania and eventually by way of Harrisburg to the main base at Philadelphia or Baltimore. This line also intersects the east and west trunk lines.

The fourth line of communication? Alas, we must believe that the capture of these three widely separated lines is almost humanly impossible. When they are gone the New England head is fastened to the body of the nation only by a thin artery indeed. For the fourth line of communication is a wavering, roundabout railroad, practically all single-track, which follows close to the Canadian border. It is of conceivable military importance only in the unthinkable event of a quarrel with our cousins to the north.

In such a catastrophe this line, of potential military value, could be made of actual value only by double-tracking and by almost complete reconstruction.

Enough now of the possibilities of the cutting of the main military base of the nation. Go south with me for a moment from Washington and see the strategic position of our railroads along the more southerly portions of the Atlantic coast. Cross the Potomac on the nameless steel structure that superseded the historic Long Bridge more than a decade ago and yet is of hardly less military importance. For the trains of every railroad running south from Washington must cross upon its tracks. Of these railroads, three are the trunk stems that, while running many miles back from the actual coast, still serve it. They are the Southern Railway, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Atlantic Coast Line. These three railroads and their direct connections reach from Washington to Norfolk, to Charleston, to Savannah, to Mobile, and to New Orleans--the most important of the southeasterly ports. One of their most interesting connections crosses the keys of Florida and does not stop on its overseas trip until it reaches the last of them--Key West, which is almost within scent of the cigar fumes of Havana. If we ever had to send another army into Cuba, Tampa would be completely out of it.

There is hardly any comparison between these trunk railroads of the Southeast and the lines that struggled so hard to handle the armies at the time of the Spanish-American War. They have been double-tracked for long distances, more generously supplied with locomotives and cars, although they are still quite a way behind their northern brethren in this regard.

Still it would not be a very difficult matter in a national crisis to move great fleets of rolling stock from one corner of the land to another. By careful advance planning and a study of rail weights and bridges this would become a comparatively simple matter.

Ignore, for the moment, the strategic value of the many railroads in the center of the land; forget the possibility of an army striking us upon our Atlantic coast. Let us turn our faces toward the west coast, toward the great stretch of barren and unprotected Pacific sh.o.r.e from British Columbia down to San Diego. And before we begin tracing strategic routes upon the map let us close our eyes and go back into history.

Do you recall that inspiring picture in the old geographies of the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad--the two doughty locomotives, one facing west, the other east, with their cowcatchers gently touching, while a motley of distinguished guests are indulging in oratory and other things? Do you happen to recall why the Union Pacific was builded, why the national credit was placed behind its construction?

Military necessity is the answer. The men who went before the Congress of the fifties and the sixties and who argued ably and well for the building of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States laid great stress upon this question of military necessity.

"Only by the building of such a railroad as this," they argued, "can the Union be held absolutely indissoluble."

So came the name of the road.

Today one looks at the military necessity of the Union Pacific Railroad from another point of view. Now open your eyes. Look at your map and see that military value of this first great transcontinental railroad. Its chief eastern terminal is at Council Bluffs, on the bank of the Missouri River and but an overnight ride from Chicago, with which it is connected by six excellent railroads--most of them double-tracked. Its northerly main stem is double-tracked practically the entire distance to Ogden, Utah, an even thousand miles distant from the Missouri. A twin main stem runs from Cheyenne down to Denver and east to Kansas City, where it enjoys direct connections to St. Louis, Memphis, and the entire South. The North and East feed the road chiefly through its Council Bluffs gateway.