The Railroad Problem Part 7

Piece rates to trainmen should be abolished. The work of trainmen should be cla.s.sified. There should be short hours and correspondingly high pay for men working under great strain. There should be heavy penalties attached for overtime, although it does not follow that the man who puts in the overtime should receive the penalty. Society wants him to protest against overtime, because it may be both dangerous to the public and detrimental to the worker. The worker should not be bribed to encourage it.

It is evident that pay by the hour with penalties for overtime would encourage lighter and faster trains. Lighter and faster trains would increase the roads' capacity as well as car and locomotive mileage.

Capital expenses would drop. The savings made would be available to increase wages and to pay higher bills for material and to pay better dividends.

Beyond this there is little more to be said--at least pending the decision of the highest court in the land. But no matter how the Supreme Court may find in this vexatious matter, the fact remains that the union man in railroad employ will continue to be paid upon this complicated and unfit double method of reckoning--clumsy, totally inadequate (built up through the years by men who preferred compromise) and complicate an intelligent and definite solution of a real problem.

Some day, some railroader is going to solve the question; and, in my own humble opinion, a genuine solution, worked from the human as well as the purely economic angle is going to rank with the bonus and other indications of an advanced interest on the part of railroad executives in the men as a step toward a betterment of the relations between them.

In my opinion such steps as these that I have just outlined not only would go far toward solving the frequent "crises" that arise between the railroads and their employees, but would tend greatly to prevent the depreciation of the human equipment of the road. Remember that this labor problem is one which presses hard not only upon the body politic, but upon the whole human structure of our country. Its solution, as well as the solution of the physical question, must be not only immediate, but economic and financial.

All this is bound to result soon in a very great increase in the railroad's pay-roll. It is an added cost that must be met before the railroad can come into its own once again. It is quickly obvious that the great pay-roll must be equalized, that in these days of steadily mounting cost of living, its unorganized labor--its trackmen, its carmen, its shopmen, its clerks, its station agents--must be given a fairer chance in the division of its wages. It needs to pay better salaries to its minor officers, and it is today handicapped for lack of these.

It is obvious also that it is going to be extremely difficult, to say the least, for the railroad to reduce the wages of its organized labor. Put this statement to the ones that have gone before and you can quickly see the need for very great increases in the railroad's pay-roll in the immediate future. It is going to be compelled to seek a larger share in that great portion of the nation's outgo that goes to pay for its labor of every sort. It can no longer postpone the pressing demands of its unorganized workers.

The failure to increase their portion of the pay-roll, with its consequent tendency toward the depreciation, if you please, of much of the human element in the operation of the railroad, may yet prove to be a problem, larger and more serious than the failure not alone to increase but to prevent the physical depreciation of the railroad.

This physical question--the financial plight of the railroad, its great and growing depreciation account, the consequent deterioration of its lines, particularly its branch lines--we already have discussed. To that plight now add the labor plight. No wonder that the great man of American business lies sick upon his bed. Already we have learned that from a purely material point of view, the railroad is nine years back of 1917 instead of nine years ahead of this date. Its involved, delicate, unsettled labor problem shows that nine years is a small lapse indeed between the tardiness of its labor relations, together with the real understanding of its human problem, and the general understanding of labor and social conditions in other lines of American industry.

Yet it is not too late to mend. And just to show that this is possible, that it is worth while bringing the sick man of American business back to health again, just for the opportunities of development that stand before him, I am going to take your time to show you a few of the larger possibilities of the railroads of the United States.

CHAPTER VIII

THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE RAILROAD

In the past decade the United States has progressed mightily. Have the railroads of the land made equal progress? The past decade of American progress will, in all probability, pale before the coming of the next--particularly if we are cool-headed and smart-headed enough to take critical reckoning of our weaknesses and to use such a reckoning as a stepping-stone toward supplementing our great inherent and potential strength. Will the railroad during the coming decade move forward to its opportunity? And what is the opportunity of the railroad?

These are pertinent questions. They come with added force upon a statement of the present plight of our overland carriers and before one comes to consider the measures of immediate relief that must be granted them. They must be considered too--briefly, but with a due appreciation of their importance. The railroaders of vision--and I have never believed that there was a really big railroader who lacked vision--today are thinking of them.

For a beginning take the possibility of the application of electricity as a motive power in the operation of the railroad. Our overland carriers have only begun to sound the vast possibilities of this great agent of energy. To many of the roads, its present attainments both in Europe and in America are still, in large measure, a closed book. They have little realization of what was accomplished in suburban electrification in Paris or in Berlin well before the beginning of the war; hardly greater realization of the marvels wrought in the suburban zones of New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco. And the tremendous accomplishment of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway in transforming nearly 500 miles of its main line over the crest of the Rocky Mountains is still so new and so dazzling as to have given railroad managers in other sections of the land little opportunity to consider its opportunities as applied to their own properties.

Within the past few years the folk of the East have seen several important terminals--terminals really vast in their proportions and their accommodations--developed in the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard.

There have been important pa.s.senger stations erected in other parts of the land--the new Union Station in Kansas City, the Union Station at Minneapolis, and the North Western Terminal at Chicago coming first to mind among these. But the pa.s.senger terminal developments along the Atlantic seaboard have differed from those of the Middle West chiefly in the fact that into their planning and construction has been interwoven the use of electricity as a motive power for the trains which are to use them.

Practically every one of these is so designed as to make its operation by steam power impossible.

The ambitious good taste of many of our cities growing into a real metropolitanism has been gratified in this decade of our national progress by the erection of monumental pa.s.senger stations. These structures invariably are more than merely creditable--they are impressive, majestic, beautiful. Yet the big railroaders do not always see them in this light.

They find themselves, by one means or another, compelled to gratify local civic pride by the expenditure of hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars more than it would cost to build a plain, efficient terminal, large enough to accommodate the traffic of both today and tomorrow. The extra expenditure goes to produce a granite palace, generally ornate and sometimes extravagant to the last degree.

Yet in all this widespread development of the American terminal, one at least has been evolved which is not merely monumental, but an economic solution of its own great cost. I refer to the new Grand Central Terminal in the city of New York.

You may recall the old Grand Central Station. It was no mean terminal.

Commodore Vanderbilt built it himself soon after the close of the Civil War. The pa.s.senger business of the railroads of the land was then beginning to be a considerable thing. Americans were gaining the travel habit. The genus commuter had been born. The first of the railroad Vanderbilts saw all these things. And, because he had the fine gift of vision, he turned his far-seeing toward action. On Forty-second Street--then a struggling crossroad at the back of New York--he erected the greatest railroad terminal in the world. It was indeed a giant structure, and the biggest of our American towns had, in its Grand Central depot, a toy over which it might brag for many and many a day.

New York was in genuine ecstasy about it. Its ornate and graceful train shed spanned thirteen tracks, and even if our fathers did wonder where all the cars could come from to fill so s.p.a.cious an apartment they had to marvel at its beauty. And beyond this creation of the artist was the creation of the engineer--the huge switching yard, black and interlaced with steel tracks. It was a mightily congested railroad yard; upon its tight-set edges the growing city pressed. Skysc.r.a.pers sprang up roundabout and looked down upon the cars and locomotives. The value of that land, given as a switching yard for a pa.s.senger terminal, eventually was reckoned close to $100,000,000. And the yard itself became a black barrier to the development of the heart of metropolitan New York.

In forty years from the day it was opened, the last vestige of the Grand Central depot, a building which, to a considerable portion of the population of this land, had been second in fame only to the Capitol at Washington, was gone. Workmen had torn it stone from stone and brick from brick and carted it off as waste to sc.r.a.p yards. The majesty of that lovely vaulted train shed had been reduced to a pile of rusty and useless iron. It had been outgrown and discarded.

In fact within a dozen years after its christening the wonderful depot was overtaxed. Even Vanderbilt's vision could not grasp the growth that was coming, not only to New York, but to the great territory his railroads served. In a dozen years workmen were clearing a broad s.p.a.ce to the east of the main structure for an annex train shed of a half-dozen tracks, to relieve the pressure upon the original station. Another twelve years and the laborers were again upon the Grand Central, this time adding stories to the original structure and trying to simplify its operation by new baggage and waiting rooms. Within the third dozen years the workmen were busy with air drill and steam shovel digging the great hole in the rock that was the first notice to the old Grand Central that its short lease of busy life was ending. And in the fortieth year of its life they were tearing down the old station--old within the span of two generations--old only because it had been outgrown.

The problem of the new Grand Central was both engineering and architectural. It is the engineering side of the problem which interests us here and now. It was that side which it was necessary to solve first.

To solve it meant that the pa.s.senger traffic into New York from the north and east for another fifty or a hundred years must be discounted--not an easy matter when in the case of a single famous trunk-line railroad it has been found that the pa.s.senger traffic has doubled each ten years for the past three decades. When the statisticians put down their pencils the engineers whistled. To fashion a station for the traffic of 1960, even for that of 1935, meant such a pa.s.senger station as no railroad head, no engineer, no architect had ever before dreamed of building. At a low estimate, it meant that there would have to be some forty or fifty stub-tracks in the train shed. In the great train shed of the Union Station of St. Louis, there are thirty-two of these stub-tracks and the span of that shed is 606 feet. That would have meant in the case of the new Grand Central a train house with a width of nearly a thousand feet.

The engineers shook their heads. They knew their limitations--with the Grand Central hedged in by the most expensive real estate in the city of New York. To buy any large quant.i.ty of adjoining land for the new station was quite out of the question.

Fortunately there was a way out. There generally is. The electric locomotive had begun to come into its own. For the operation of this station, including the congested four-track tunnel under Park Avenue, from the very throat of the train-shed yard up to Harlem, four miles distant, it represented an almost ideal form of traction, largely because of its cleanliness and freedom from smoke. For the engineers who were giving their wits to the planning of a new terminal it was the solution of their hardest problem.

They would cut their train shed of fifty tracks about in half--and then place one of these halves directly above the other. This would make a fairly logical division between the through and the suburban traffic of the terminal. In that way the new Grand Central was planned. And that one thing represented its first important demarkation from the other great pa.s.senger stations of the land. It also is the thing that pointed the way to the most wonderful development of America's most wonderful terminal, the thing that is infinitely greater than the station itself.

Recall once again, if you will, that dirty smoke-filled yard at the portals of the old station. It was rather an impressive place; by night, with its flashing signals of red and green and yellow, its glare of dominant headlights and the constant unspoken orders of swinging lamps; by day, a seeming chaos of locomotives and of cars, turning this way or that, slipping into the dark cool train shed under grinding brakes, or else starting from that giant cavern with gathering speed, to roll halfway across the continent before the final halt. To the layman it was fascinating, because he knew that the chaos was really ordered, on a scientific and tremendous scale, that the alert little man who stood at the levers of the inconspicuous tower mid-yard, was the clear-minded human who was directing the working of a great terminal by the working of his brain. But to the thinking railroader that railroad yard, like every railroad yard in the heart of the great city, was a waste that was hardly less than criminal.

The coming of the electric locomotive has spelled the way by which that waste in the hearts of our American cities may be ended. Concretely, in the case of the new Grand Central, it made a splendid solution of one of the greatest of the growth problems in the largest city of our continent.

For, while the new Grand Central, service and approach yards considered even as a single level--some sixty acres all told--are larger than the older yard, they apparently have disappeared. In that thing alone a great obstacle to the constant uptown growth of New York has been removed.

Sixteen precious city blocks have been given back to the city for its development. And already a group of buildings possessing rare architectural unity and beauty have begun to rise upon this tract.

There are other American cities where this experiment--no longer an experiment, if you please--might well be effected today. Of these, more in a moment. For, before we leave the question of the Grand Central consider one other thing: the economic value of its design to the railroad company which has erected it. It was only a moment ago that we were speaking of the utter extravagance shown in the designing and building of the monumental pa.s.senger stations in so many of our metropolitan cities. The New York Central, for reasons of its own, has been reticent in stating both the cost of the new Grand Central and the income which it derives not only from the rentals of the privileges in the station itself--restaurants, news stands, barber shops, checking stands, and the like--but also from the ground rental of the great group of huge buildings which it has permitted to spring up over its electrified station yards. It is known, however, that this income is not only sufficient to pay the interest upon the investment of the new terminal, to provide slowly but surely a sinking fund for the retirement of the bonds which have been issued for the building of the terminal, but also to go a considerable distance toward the actual operating expenses of the terminal.

Here, then, is the first of our giant opportunities for the railroader of tomorrow. There is, of course, no novelty in rentals from ordinary station privileges. The Pennsylvania Railroad, by the development of the electric locomotive, was enabled to tunnel both the Hudson and the East rivers and thus to realize its dream of long years--a terminal situated in the heart of Manhattan Island; a pa.s.senger terminal so situated as to place the great railroad of the red cars in a real compet.i.tive position with the railroad of the Vanderbilts, which so long had held exclusive terminal facilities within the congested island of Manhattan. The Pennsylvania did not do the thing by halves--it rarely does; it built what is beyond the shadow of a doubt the most beautiful railroad station in America, if not in the entire world. The majesty of its waiting room is such as to make it perhaps the loveliest apartment in all these United States.

But even the Pennsylvania lacked the opportunity for economic return that was gained out of the new Grand Central station, hardly a mile distant.

That it was not asleep to the possibilities is shown by the double row of high-rental shops which line the arcade entrance to that waiting room. A central post-office, a clearing house for the great mail of New York, was erected spanning the maze of tracks at one end of the station. And recently the railroad has begun the erection of a huge hotel spanning the tracks at the other end In this it is following the example of the New York Central, which some time ago devised a group of hotels as a part of the development of the Grand Central property. One of these hotels is completed and immensely popular; the other has just been begun. The New York Central will not only derive a generous ground rent from these taverns--it places itself in a splendid strategic position to receive the traffic of their patrons. It is a somewhat singular thing--an instance perhaps, of the lack of vision of railroaders of an earlier generation--that modern hotels were not long ago made an integral part of our larger pa.s.senger terminals at least. Our English cousins have not overlooked this opportunity. The great hotels builded into their terminals have long since enjoyed a world-wide reputation for their excellence. Upon our own continent both the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk railroads have not been slow to take advantage of similar opportunities. And to a considerable degree, at least, their example has been followed by certain roads right in the United States--the Santa Fe and the Delaware and Hudson are the first to come to my mind. The hotels of these railroads may not be, in themselves, directly profitable. But there is no question but that they are distinct factors in the development of pa.s.senger traffic, and so, in the long run, distinctly profitable.

Consider for an instant, if you will, the possibilities of the electrified pa.s.senger terminal as applied to some others of our metropolitan American cities. Take Boston, for instance. In that fine old town the electrification of its two great pa.s.senger terminals some time ago approached the dignity of becoming a real issue. Oddly enough the two railroads which would develop the situation in the larger of its two terminals--the South Station--are the New Haven and the New York Central, the lessee of the Boston and Albany. Though both of these systems partic.i.p.ate in the joint operation of the new Grand Central Terminal of New York, neither of them has leaped at the possibility in Boston. The tremendous financial difficulties through which the New Haven property has been struggling for the last six or eight years and from which it has not yet emerged, are undoubtedly the cause of this. The Boston and Maine Railroad, which owns and operates the North Station, is in even worse financial plight. And it is hard for an outsider to see any immediate possibility of the application of electric power to the great North Station and the vast network of through and suburban lines which radiate from it. Nor is the North Station so situated as to render it possible today to give it an economic development even approximating that of the Grand Central.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE P. R. R.'S ELECTRIC SUBURBAN ZONE

The block system operated automatically by electricity. The signal over the right hand track reads, "Stop." Picture taken near Bryn Mawr, Pa.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELECTRICITY INTO ITS OWN

Electric suburban train on the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Philadelphia and Paoli.]

The Boston and Albany is a co-tenant with the New Haven in the huge and murky South Station. It has always been a rich railroad. Twenty-five years ago it was building superb stone bridges and stations, structures of real architectural worth--a full quarter of a century it was in advance of almost every other railroad in America. In those days the Boston and Albany probably did not dream that the time would come when its chief a.s.set would be the value of its right of way across the newer and the finer portion of Boston. "The Albany Road," as the older Bostonians like to term the B. and A., has the extreme possibilities of cost for the electric transformation of its lines all the way from Worcester east, not only met but many times multiplied in the development possibilities of the Back Bay district which it now traverses with its through track and interrupts with its somewhat ungainly storage yards. These yards, now used for the holding of empty pa.s.sengers coaches, occupy tremendously valuable acres on Boylston Street within a block of Copley Square--the artistic and literary center of the Hub. They are essential, perhaps, to the economical operation of the road's terminal, but when you come to consider the growth of the city, a tremendous waste. They have stood--a noisy, dirty, open s.p.a.ce--stretching squarely across the path of Boston's finest possible development. If these were marshlands, like those that used to abound along the Charles River, Boston long ago would have filled them in and added many valuable building sites to its taxable area. For remember that the development of the Grand Central Terminal has proceeded far enough already to show that in these days of heavy steel and concrete construction, and with the absolute cleanliness of electric railroad operation, it is possible to build a hotel over a big railroad yard without one guest in a thousand ever knowing that a train is being handled underneath his feet every thirty seconds or thereabouts. Indeed, in the Grand Central scheme provision is being made already for the construction of an opera house right over the station approach tracks; the congregation of St. Bartholomew's is building over the same railroad yards one of the finest church structures in America.