Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

He turned immediately to the work in hand. There was plenty of it to be done. The great city around about the terminal was on the edge of panic. There was a fuel famine and no promise of relief. New York at last was paying the penalty of her medieval, not to say archaic, system of distribution. At last the war was very real and very close at hand. They were saying that many of the schools would have to close, that there was a possibility the theaters would have to shut down each Monday night. Poor New York! She did not then know that the worst was yet to come!

All this occurred with 300,000 tons of coal upon the Jersey side of the Hudson River opposite the city, while in the midst of a winter of almost unprecedented bitterness an ancient lighterage system struggled with ice hardly less thick than that which once sufficed for a footpath for Henry Ward Beecher from New York to Brooklyn, and could bring less than 30,000 tons of coal a day across the river. Nor was this all—no, not even a reference now to the freight upon the Jersey meadows. Know now that the greater part of that accumulated 300,000 tons of coal was in cars and that production at the mines actually was being slowed down by the delay in the return of these cars.

“Open the Pennsylvania tubes to the coal trains!” shrieked the radicals of Manhattan. “Give us fuel trains and food trains instead of Florida Limiteds! Put them through at the rate of fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty a day, if needful!”

Some of these lost their heads. Smith did not lose his. Neither did he impose any more humiliation upon the head of his great competitor. He does not do business that way. Instead he gave careful heed to the terminal possibilities of the Pennsylvania, the traditional and very real rival of the road he himself headed.

“We may possibly make a freight use of the tubes,” he said quietly, “but it will be a moderate use. I shall limit the length of the trains to thirty-six or thirty-seven cars, which really is no train at all. For I do not want to see one of those fifty-ton battle-ship coal gondolas jumping the track in a tube which was not designed for it, and so completely blocking the line. I am going to be in a position to hand the terminal back to the Pennsylvania in quite as good condition as I found it.”

Then he made further explanations. After all the Pennsylvania tubes, thrusting themselves across the island of Manhattan, are even in an emergency of little or no freight use to it. They are too deep to be of freight service to the heart of metropolitan New York. To Brooklyn, with a population almost equal to that of Manhattan, to Queens, and to the Bronx they eventually were made of some slight service.

This was not the big part of Smith’s job, however. He made a quick survey of the entire situation in his big district; trains and cars cluttered here and there and everywhere. For the final thirty days of private operation the situation steadily had been growing worse. In the districts roundabout Pittsburg and Philadelphia and New York it had become intolerable. Take, if you will, the industries in those vast manufacturing districts and consider them multiplied tenfold, their influx of fuel and of raw material increased in like proportion, and so with their output. Add these industries one to another and see them in units of tens of dozens of trains, of hundreds and thousands of coal-cars and flat-cars and box-cars. And on the other hand, see all of these poured upon railroads that had been steadily growing weaker for eight or ten years—more rapidly weakened, however, in the last four months than in the entire three years that preceded them. Bear in mind their tremendous loss of man-power through the draft, consider the gradual wearing down of engines and cars and tracks and terminals toward the breaking point, and wonder not then that we had congestion and much worse east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio.

Throughout that autumn of 1917 we watched the bending of the rod of the railroad just as we had watched it bend and then recover again through the two hard winter seasons that have preceded this one. It bent further this winter than ever before—the traffic was so much greater, and the facilities with which to meet it so much weaker. No wonder that freight moved slowly, more slowly, most slowly, and in many cases finally ceased to move at all; that upon the Jersey meadows outside of New York were 30,000 car-loads of merchandise that could not be moved up to that port and to the ships waiting to carry it overseas. At one time 150 ships stood waiting for coal alone in New York Harbor. And overseas was a great war in its critical stages. No wonder, though, that coal began coming in dribblings to hearthstones that were whining for tons of it, that finally it ceased coming at all for whole days, while great and ordinarily comfortable American cities shivered and watched their death rates mount higher than they had mounted in many a year.

It was a man-sized job that confronted A. H. Smith. Like a real railroad man he handled it. He went in at once upon it. He began to do things. He issued immediate embargoes against shipment into the New York district of anything save food, news-print paper, live stock, perishable freight, and freight consigned to the Government. He did more. With a great map of metropolitan New York and its railroad terminals spread before him he began ordering freight concentrated west of Buffalo and Pittsburg and south of Washington into the trunk-lines which variously best serve the great group of cities that constitute the metropolitan district of New York. The Baltimore and Ohio for instance has exclusive terminal facilities upon Staten Island, which with its many shipyards and wharves is an important freight consignment point. In ordinary times, when the situation was dominated by competitive conditions, a car-load of freight offered the New York Central at Toledo or Detroit would be carried on its lines to New York and then floated to Staten Island by car-ferry. In this non-competitive war situation, in this hour when the temporary continental railroad system of the United States was being born, such a car would be taken by the New York Central from Toledo or Detroit to the Baltimore and Ohio at some point west of Pittsburg, and then over it to Staten Island by the shortest possible route.

What Smith was doing in New York his fellow regional directors in Atlanta and in Chicago also were doing. Order was being worked out of chaos. The great railroads of the United States, even temporarily and very hastily welded into a single national system, showed good results of efficiency and economy, just as some of their far-sighted private operators had predicted more than two decades ago. Released from the shackles of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law—Congress had refused such a release to the Railroad War Board but quickly granted it to McAdoo—and from the conflicting regulatory commissions all the way across the land, they were able to simplify and unify their facilities—even though many times at public cost and inconvenience—in a way that enabled them not only to handle the pressure of war traffic and in an admirable fashion but also to show great economies upon their cost-sheets.