The Railroad Problem Part 13

At Ogden the Union Pacific divides into three great feeding lines--the main one extending due west to Sacramento and San Francisco, with one to the north reaching Portland and Seattle and another to the south running direct to Los Angeles. While these three lines are nominally separate railroads, they are, in effect, component parts of the Union Pacific System. In any military crisis requiring the rapid transcontinental movement of troops they would become extremely important parts.

The Union Pacific is, of course, supplemented by other transcontinentals.

To the south rests the long main stem of the Santa Fe, which boasts not only that it is the only railroad with its own rails direct from Chicago to California, but that it already has more than fifty per cent of its main line double-tracked. Farther south still is the Southern Pacific, which, although its real eastern terminal is at New Orleans, enjoys a practical Chicago terminal over the lines of the Rock Island. In the north are three American transcontinentals--the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern. While the Milwaukee is the only one of these with its own rails from Chicago to Seattle, its two rivals maintain a brisk compet.i.tion by the use of the Burlington and the North Western systems between Chicago and St. Paul.

By the use of these roads it would be possible to throw a great number of troops and munitions across to almost any section of the Pacific coast and in a very short time. And for more than twenty years there has existed a north and south trunk line, that would make it possible to obtain a flexible use of troops between San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. There are lines close to the coast all the way from Eureka past Coos Bay to Astoria and the Puget Sound country. The main north and south trunk lies anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles inland from the coast all the way from Los Angeles to Seattle. Perhaps it is well that this is so. It is unfortunate only that no more than a comparatively small portion of it is double-tracked and that a large part of it through northern California and Oregon is so threaded through the high mountains as to be very difficult to operate. Military strategy demands that this important trunk line be made possible to operate at highest efficiency.

That can only come through grade correction and a completion of double-track.

I have laid stress and constant repet.i.tion upon this question of double-track, simply because a double-track railroad is almost ten times as efficient as a single-track railroad. That should be apparent to a layman even upon the very face of things.

The other day I sat in the Southern Pacific offices at Houston, Texas, and talked with a genius of a railroad operator in regard to this very thing.

He was telling of the remarkable record made by his road in getting the troops across from Galveston to El Paso. I asked what was the best he could do in a real emergency--an emergency calling for perhaps the movement of 50,000 troops, instead of 5,000.

"Under normal conditions we can put five trainloads a day of troops across Texas, in addition to our regular traffic and keep them moving at a rate of from seventeen to eighteen miles an hour, including stops. We could put on more trains, but this would not accomplish much except to tie up all of them. We have to figure the capacity of our main line very largely by the frequency of the pa.s.sing sidings."

"Suppose a crisis should arise--a crisis which demanded an even quicker movement of troops?" I asked.

He did not hesitate in his reply.

"In such a crisis we would pull all our other traffic off the line and move from ten to twelve trains a day."

Which, translated, would mean at the most from five to six regiments of 2,000 men and their accouterments. And this on a railroad with a tremendously high reputation for efficient operation. Here is the case for single-track.

Now consider double-track. The Union Pacific moves in summertime eight through pa.s.senger trains west-bound out of its ancient transfer station at Council Bluffs, an equal number east-bound. Frequently there are extra sections of these trains, to say nothing of a pretty steady schedule of freights. Yet even this by no means represents the capacity of its low grades and double-track to Ogden. The Pennsylvania Railroad in twenty-four hours has handled 121 trains bound in a single direction out of its great yards at Altoona, which means a train every eleven minutes and a half.

While the main line of the Pennsylvania is four-tracked, that traffic was freight and handled almost entirely upon one of a pair of freight tracks.

If such a performance was possible in the steep hills of the Keystone state, it would hardly be exaggeration to suggest that the Union Pacific could handle a military train bound west from the Missouri at least every thirty minutes. Taking 1,000 men to the train as a moderate estimate, this great road could dispatch nearly 50,000 men a day without in any degree congesting itself. And while its central connecting stem at Ogden--that portion of the Southern Pacific once known as the Central Pacific--is by no means completely double-tracked, in a military necessity it could be made so at once by the simple expedient of using for a one-way movement of the trains, the newly built Western Pacific which parallels it all the way from Ogden to San Francisco.

Here, then, is the answer, here the way that in a military crisis we may also gain a double-track transcontinental route across the north edge of the country. We simply need to take two out of the three single-track lines there--the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern--and by keeping the traffic moving in a single direction, we gain at once a practical and effective double-track railroad. This method can be repeated in the South from Chicago to El Paso and thence across to Los Angeles, by a similar operating combination of the Santa Fe, the Rock Island, the El Paso and Southwestern, and the Southern Pacific. The map itself will suggest numerous other combinations of the same sort.

Physically, the railroads of the United States are today wonderfully well adapted to any military crisis that they might be asked to meet. And the constant raising of their efficiency during the past decade, because of the growing tendency of expenses to overlap income, has done nothing to impair their military value. Potentially, they are fit and ready. Ready, they are actually; fit and ready is an entirely different matter. Let us come to it, here and now.

Suppose that tomorrow the "cry of war" were to resound from one end of this country to the other, that an army of at least 1,000,000 men were to spring into being as quickly and as easily as all these pacificists aver.

Immediately the railroads would be called to their superhuman tasks of transporting men and horses, and motor trucks, munitions, and materials of every sort. And somewhere this great problem of military rail transport would have to center. Today, in times of peace, it centers in the Quartermaster's Department of the War Department, which contracts with the railroads for the carrying of troops and supplies just as any private organization might arrange. The existing study of the War Department provides that in the declaration of war the railroads shall be operated by the Board of Engineers. Yet to a large extent this earlier study has been superseded by President Wilson in the appointment of a Council of National Defense to take over the industrial, commercial, and social mobilization of the United States in case of a great crisis. As a member of this council Mr. Wilson has appointed Daniel Willard, of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in direct charge of the transportation and communication, in such a crisis. Of this, much more will be said in a moment.

It is conceded that in any great national crisis the government would immediately take over the operation of the railroads. The advocates of government ownership point to this as a clinching argument for their proposition. As a matter of fact it argues nothing of the sort. The United States government, by act of Congress early in the Civil War, took over the operation of all the railroads, although it actually took control of those roads only in the theater of the war. It also took over Thomas A.

Scott, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a remarkable railroader, and placed him in charge of the military roads--which, in itself, is significant. Under Scott's brilliant leadership were such men as David Craig McCallum and Herman Haupt, the last of these a man whose combined knowledge of army organization and railroad operation made him almost invaluable to the government. And the real success of the Federal military railroads in the Civil War was due to the fact that the government officers who operated them were expert railroaders borrowed for the nonce from civil life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROCK ISLAND GOVERNMENT BRIDGE

Built and owned jointly by the United States Government and the Rock Island Railroad, it crosses the Mississippi, connects Rock Island and Davenport, and is a point of military importance.]

It would be hardly less than a calamity for the army to attempt to operate the railroads of the United States or any considerable part of them. The army officers know that. Leonard Wood knows it. The War College down at Washington knows it and has prepared a new study of the new problem recognizing the necessity of keeping the railroads in any crisis operated by railroad men. An army man is no more competent to operate a railroad than a railroader is to command a brigade upon the field of battle.

There is a railroad executive up in New England who well remembers the days of the Spanish war. At that time he was trainmaster of the Southern Railway at Asheville, North Carolina. His division ran from Knoxville, Tennessee, down to the main line at Salisbury--242 miles. It threaded the Blue Ridge Mountains and did it with difficulty. It was a hard road to operate at the best. And in 1898 Fate called upon it to handle a considerable number of troops from the concentration camp at Chattanooga down toward the embarkation stations at Norfolk and Newport News. That was the difficult problem, with the high grades, the many curves, and the few pa.s.sing sidings. To accomplish it meant careful planning. The division staff made such a plan. Each meeting point for the regular trains and the extra was carefully designated and a time allowance for meals at Asheville was arranged; forty minutes, no more, no less.

Being well planned, the operation went along smoothly--that is, until the road was forced to break away from its own scheme. The trainmaster was about to dispatch one of the troop trains from Asheville, its forty-minute meal period having nearly expired, when an a.s.sistant informed him that the officers of the regiment it carried were not aboard. The trainmaster hurried downstairs. The officers were having their after-dinner coffee and their cigars and showed no disposition whatsoever to hurry out to the cars. He made up his mind quickly. He knew that if this train was delayed ten minutes the whole operating plan would go to pieces and the entire division become almost hopelessly congested. He went to the commanding officer and quickly explained this to him.

The colonel of the volunteers quickly waved him to one side.

"This train'll start when I'm good and ready to have it start," he said huskily.

The trainmaster stood his ground.

"I'll have to send it on in three minutes," he said politely, "and you gentlemen will have to take your chance in getting on another section."

The army man (volunteer) swore a great big oath, and added:

"You make a move to start this train before I give the word and I will make you a military prisoner."

The railroader capitulated, although today he is sorry that he did not stick it out and go to prison. And the operating schedule of his division went to pot. Stalled trains piled up for miles along its main line and its sidings. Incredible delays were the immediate result of one man's tinkering with the delicate operating structure of the railroad.

But given even a fairly free hand, a measure of authority, and some opportunity for preparation, the railroader will be able to give a good account of himself in the military handling of troops. He has shown that during the past year when he has been called upon to hurriedly move our army toward the south border of the nation. I have told already of the records made on that occasion--how long trains, filled with troops and provisions and munitions of war, were sent down to the border in double-quick time. One thing I have not yet told--the provisions for housing and feeding these troops while they are on the road.

It now is definitely understood that troop movements of the regular army, volunteers and militia as well, are to be made with sleeping equipment, particularly on long-distance runs. The practice is to use the so-called standard Pullmans for the officers, the tourist-sleepers for the men--three to the section. Obviously it is out of the question to feed a regiment, or even a portion of it, in dining cars. Sometimes it is difficult to make last-minute arrangements at eating-houses along the line, even if the regiment wished to spare the time to detrain for a meal.

The Pullman Company has solved the problem for at least the ordinary movements of the army by the construction of kitchen-cars. These are long, fourteen-section tourist-sleepers, with an unusually capacious kitchen at one end. This kitchen can easily feed not only the car in which it is located, but the occupants of an entire train of average length. It is not difficult for it to give three square meals a day to 300 hungry men.

Here is a bit of practical efficiency that is worthy of pa.s.sing notice.

Of course no one expects that in a time of great military urgency the troops would ride in Pullmans. They would be lucky to get day coaches, and in the final stress of things, it would probably be found necessary to quickly cut windows in the sides of freight cars and hurriedly equip them with seats. A Yankee box car so equipped would be a good deal better than a good many of the small cars in which the German army has been so quickly and so efficiently transferred from one side of that kingdom to the other.

It is the flexibility of the standard equipment of the American railroads that today offers perhaps the largest opportunity for its successful military use. A single instance will prove this. A man--his name is L. W.

Luellen--has devised a scheme for mounting heavy rapid-fire ordnance upon steel flat cars. Obviously it would be quite impossible to fire even a miniature "big Bertha" from anything so unstable as a railroad car. But Mr. Luellen has met this difficulty by arranging to have built at intervals not exceeding thirty miles along the entire Atlantic coast, short sidings flanked by heavy concrete bases.

He, too, has studied his railroad map, as a little while ago we were studying it. He has found that a comparatively small number of guns with a fifteen-mile shooting radius, could by means of these permanent bases at thirty-mile intervals protect the entire Atlantic coast, a good portion of the Pacific as well. The method of their operation is simple. The guns would be sent to any section they were needed on fast pa.s.senger schedule.

It would be a matter of minutes rather than hours, for the flat cars to be run in between the permanent concrete bases and by jacks transferred to them from the cars.

The scheme is so simple that it seems absurd. But the War Department experts say that it is remarkably practical. And Mr. Luellen, who seems to know what he is talking about, says that it would not cost more than $10,000,000 to install it--guns, cars, and permanent bases, along the North Atlantic seaboard. Here is a form of railroad preparedness that would seem worth the careful attention of the national legislature.

Already the American army has what is known as the Medical Reserve Corps, made up of physicians and surgeons all the way across the land. The great national organizations of civil engineers are beginning to plan a similar reserve in the ranks of their own profession. In the American Railway a.s.sociation, the railroads of this country have a common meeting ground and an organization that can quickly take definite steps toward meeting the Federal authorities in planning the military use of the transportation routes of the country. There is no mistaking the patriotism of the railroaders. Some of them have smarted in recent years under what they have believed to be an unwarranted intrusion by the Federal authorities into the affairs of their properties, but at heart every man of them is loyally American. And every man of them is not merely loyal in a pa.s.sive sense, but is both willing and able to aid the government with all the resources at his command.

Take the critical situation which broke upon the country early in the present year when diplomatic relations with Germany suddenly were broken and the possibility of war loomed high. President Wilson, acting under the authority which Congress had vested in him immediately appointed a committee of seven prominent Americans--a Council of National Defense. As a member of this Council and in immediate charge of the nation's transportation and communication in case of emergency Mr. Wilson chose Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. He chose wisely. Of the dominant quality of Mr. Willard's Americanism as well as of his great railroad ability and executive fitness for so important a post there can be no question.

Within seven days after he had accepted this billet, Willard was at work for the government. He bespoke for it at once the interest and cooperation of the heads of the other great railroads of America. He knew that in any national crisis the interest and the patriotism of these men was never to be doubted. And so he sought their cooperation and not in vain. A full dozen of the biggest railroad executives in the United States closed their desks and at Willard's suggestion came hurrying to Washington. When their conference was done, a definite plan for the service of the railroads in a time of great national stress had been begun--a program which the railroad executives then returned to study in detail. At the conference they were told of the great defense and offense plans of the War College for the part which the railroad must play in a national emergency. Some of the railroad presidents learned for the first time the designated mobilization centers all the way across the land, the equipment necessary for each, the movement and direction of troop and munition trains, from every one of them.

It is gratifying to know that these railroad executives already are giving much time and thought to the use of our railroads in national defense. So is Major Charles Hine, who, like Herman Haupt, came out of West Point, perfected himself in military training and organization and gave his time after leaving the army to railroad training and organization. Hine started as a brakeman on the Erie Railroad, in order that he might study railroad operation from the bottom up--that he might eventually bring to the railroad some of the really good points of the army. He has since held high executive positions in many of the great railroad systems of the land--studying the problems of each until he knows the railroad map of this country as you and I know the fingers of our hands. The value of such a man to America in an emergency is not to be figured in dollars and cents.

But to my own mind, the value of such a military reserve corps among the railroaders will be comparatively slight if its membership be confined merely to railroad executives. The qualities of patriotism and good Americanism are by no means confined to the higher-paid railroad men. Take a purely suppositious case--yet an entirely typical one:

Down in the offices of the old c.u.mberland Valley Railroad at Chambersburg, we will say, there is a boy who is a.s.sistant trainmaster or a.s.sistant superintendent. He is a smart boy, who has climbed rapidly in railroad ranks because of his abilities. He reads the papers. He is keenly interested in this whole idea of national defense. He reads the newspapers and the magazines and he wonders what his own part would be if Washington were taken by an enemy invader. Being a good railroader he does not have to spend much time in doubts. He knows that his little railroad--ever an important cross-country traffic link from Harrisburg down to Martinsburg and Winchester, will suddenly become part of the military base line north and south along the Atlantic coast. Over its stout rails will come the tidal overflow that ordinarily moves over the four busy tracks of the two railroad systems between Baltimore and Philadelphia. That means that his railroad, his own division, himself, if you please, will be called upon to handle a great traffic from Harrisburg south to the upreached arms of the Norfolk and Western and the Baltimore and Ohio lines.