Economy is indeed a watchword for this plan. I shall not attempt to take your time or dull your interest in its details by giving you too many of them. A very few single but rather typical examples of the savings to be made, were it ever to be placed in effect, will be illustrative. Here for instance is that so-called Southern Tier of New York—the long row of counties which lies for nearly two hundred miles against its Pennsylvania line. Many years ago the historic Erie pushed its rails through the Southern Tier. From its main line—originally built from Piermont-on-Hudson to Dunkirk, New York—it gradually shot branches north into the heart of the Empire State to Canandaigua, to Rochester, and to Buffalo. Eventually it made an interlacing of these branches, and in those days—when men hardly dared dream of the motor-car or the improved highway—the branches generally were profitable.
The Rochester branch, about one hundred miles in length, was typical of many of its fellows. It diverged from the main line at Painted Post, just west of Corning, and for the next forty miles threaded a very rich and prosperous valley situated between deep hills. It was a small railroad but essential, and for many years it prospered, to a moderate degree at least.
Then in the early eighties there came a competitor through that narrow valley. The rich Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western, ambitious for a line of its own into the growing Buffalo gateway, in 1882 and 1883 laid down its rails alongside the Erie—along the main line all the way from Great Bend, Pennsylvania, just a few miles east of Binghamton, New York, to Painted Post, and along the Rochester branch as far as Wayland. The new railroad was a main-stem; double-tracked it gave frequent and swift service. The little Rochester branch line of the Erie shriveled up and all but died.
In the regional organization that you have just seen me outline, I have brought together the rich Lackawanna and the poverty-stricken Erie, along with the Lehigh Valley, the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg, the southerly divisions of the Delaware and Hudson, and the Ulster and Delaware railroads. It takes no large amount of imagination to forsee that such a combination—and most railroad executives and broad-visioned bankers will agree that it is a logical one—can greatly simplify operation in southern and western New York and abandon miles of railroad that should have been abandoned many years since.
In effect, this Erie-Lackawanna system would have at least two separate main lines from its combined terminals at New York (how effectively these might be combined we discovered when we saw the possibilities of the electrification applied to the suburban traffic of the New York metropolitan district) all the way to Binghamton, a little more than two hundred miles distant. From that point west to the brisk small city of Corning the traffic could be consolidated upon one of these main lines, possibly three-tracked or four-tracked, and the other abandoned—a quick and easy solution of some perplexing grade-crossing problems in the communities that it would thread. Similarly the old antiquated Rochester branch of the Erie could be abandoned all the way from Painted Post to Wayland. The parallel double-track would render it of no further use.
I could take the atlas maps of western New York and show you many, many more miles of railroad which could be abandoned profitably to-day, not to the hindrance but to the positive benefit of the communities which they are supposed to serve yet no longer serve, efficiently at least. But let us turn our attention from trackage to terminals and for the moment consider the chief city of western New York—the chief in size at any rate, Buffalo. Twelve steam railroads to-day enter Buffalo and share four main passenger-stations there. The Lackawanna has a handsome new terminal at the harbor-front, into which enter not only its trains but those of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg and the Nickel Plate lines. The Lehigh Valley has an almost equally new and handsome station, which it shares with the Grand Trunk. The Erie plays the lone hand in a very ancient building, while the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Michigan Central, and one or two other roads are housed in the Exchange Street Station, which is fairly antediluvian in its antiquity and its inefficiency.
For some years Buffalo dreamed her dreams of a real union station, which would rise majestically from the lake-front in the neighborhood of the historic court-house and jail where Czolgosz, the assassin of William McKinley, met his trial and his just fate. Travelers who have had to pass through Buffalo and who have been compelled to change from one railroad to another there shared these dreams of a station into which all the trains should pass. But the city authorities and those of the railroads came to an absolute impasse in the matter. The New York Central, for instance, did not want to continue backing its through New York-Chicago passenger trains into the Buffalo station. It proposed as a compromise a union station somewhere east of Clinton Street. But “somewhere east of Clinton Street” is déclassé to Buffalo, and the big lake-front town would have nothing of that.
So while mayors and general managers and high-priced engineers and all the other bigwigs stormed and argued the Lackawanna people and the Lehigh Valley people went right ahead and built their own passenger stations. It is not conceivable that these large handsome stations would now be abandoned. In the creation of the regional plan it is not necessary. It becomes obvious from the beginning that the many trains of the Erie-Lackawanna would easily fill the Lackawanna Station to repletion and permit of the final abandonment of the ancient Erie passenger-house with one of its most exasperating rail grade-crossing problems in the land as a perplexity always attendant upon its operation.
The Lehigh Valley Station, but slightly enlarged in its head-house accommodations, can easily be brought to meet the necessity of the other regional systems entering Buffalo—those of the New York Central, the Michigan Central, and the Pennsylvania. For it so happens that the present train-shed of the new Lehigh Valley passenger terminal lies parallel with and immediately adjacent to the tracks and platforms of the old Exchange Street Station of the New York Central. To make the head-house (the passenger, baggage, mail, and other facilities) of the Lehigh Valley Station accommodate the trains that now enter Exchange Street would hardly involve more than a rearrangement of these last groups of tracks and platforms, at an astonishingly low cost and with an astounding degree of operating saving—this last a factor which seemingly enters but little if at all into the calculations of the men who design our dazzling new American railroad stations.