We have the vision. We have the money. We simply need the correlating force that shall join the two in the immediate relief of our sadly wobbling railroad situation. Such a force would be big business in the truest and the finest sense of the word. It would be something more; it would be statesmanship, railroad statesmanship if you please, railroad statesmanship of the sort that we stand so sorely in need of to-day.
CHAPTER IX
MORE ABOUT ELECTRIC MOTIVE-POWER
We have the courage. We have the money. And we have the opportunity. And lest any reader of this book should begin to fancy that I have studied the problem of the Northeast alone and neglected the equally fascinating ones of the rest of the land, the many, many places where electric power can and should be brought to the aid of the heavy-traction railroad, permit me in turn to direct attention to the possibilities of several typically congested American communities, in other portions of the land. Yet before we come to these to tarry a moment in metropolitan New York, where the largest installation of electric traction for suburban services in the world has been in use for so many years now that New Yorkers have long since ceased even to comment upon it. It is now considerably more than a decade since the huge Grand Central and Pennsylvania terminals were virtually completed and the steam locomotives absolutely abolished from their stately apartments. Upon the near-by lines of the four chief railroads running into these two stations, the New York Central, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, the Pennsylvania, and the Long Island, electric traction for passenger trains has been universally installed for a radius of about thirty miles outside of the heart of Manhattan Island. Freight trains of these roads hauled by steam locomotives still penetrate into New York City, but never into these two passenger terminals; while the through passenger-trains of these four roads, as well as of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh Valley, which use the Pennsylvania Station, interchange their steam locomotives at the edge of the electric zone with electric motive-power. The suburban trains are, of course, made up of multiple-unit cars, like those of the subways or the elevated railroads, and dispense altogether with locomotives of any sort.
To the terminals of the Erie and the Lackawanna railroads, which are situated upon the west bank of the Hudson River directly across from the lower portions of Manhattan Island, the Hudson and Manhattan tubes, built by the vision and daring of one William G. McAdoo, whom already we have encountered in these pages, give access. The tubes also reach the old passenger-station of the Pennsylvania in Jersey City, which is still used to a moderate extent, and continue west to the main line of the Pennsylvania at Manhattan Transfer and into the heart of Newark, eight miles distant. Already they are overcrowded, particularly in rush hours; and it does not take a very great deal of vision to perceive that eventually they will have to be extended at least two miles as a subway under Broad Street, Newark, from the present rather unsatisfactory terminal at the Military Park, in that city.
The facilities are not good for reaching the trains of the Erie and the Lackawanna from those of the tubes; particularly is this true in the case of the ancient Erie terminal, where there is a long and, at times, overcrowded passageway to be traversed afoot between the platforms of the two railroads. In the concluding chapters of this book I am to indicate the regrouping of the railroads that eventually must come about, in one form or another. I may anticipate by saying that in almost any regrouping the financially strong Lackawanna will be linked to the financially weak Erie. Therefore I may be permitted to assume that the lines of these two systems, with an elaborate network of suburban branches in northeastern New Jersey, may yet be joined together somewhere just west of the Bergen tunnels in Hoboken where they now cross at an acute angle. This being done, the rest is easy. One set of tunnels would be assigned for east-bound movement, the other for west-bound; which arrangement gives four tracks in each direction—enough for a really vast passenger traffic movement. Somewhere close to their eastern portals these tunnels would be depressed and continued under the Hudson River to Manhattan Island. Here they would be far apart, perhaps as much as a mile apart. Between them and running north and south upon Manhattan would be a connecting tunnel link ten or twelve or fourteen tracks in width and with long continuous platforms between these tracks. It is easy to surmise that two or three trains could easily lie back of one another at any one of these tenuous underground platforms in the Manhattan terminal. This great sub-service passenger-station would lie somewhere just west of the Seventh Avenue extension and barely north of Canal Street, in Manhattan. It is a district that has not gone ahead with the rest of New York. A huge passenger terminal within it would be of tremendous help in raising its depressed realty values, while the proximity of the station to the main trunk of the West Side subway of the Interborough and the extended Canal Street line of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit would render it wonderfully accessible to every portion of the incorporated City of New York.
One would hardly have expected the virtually bankrupt Erie to accomplish much with the electrification of its lines. As a matter of actual fact, some years ago it accomplished a very successful feat of this sort from Rochester to Mount Morris, New York, a distance of thirty-four miles. The enormously wealthy Lackawanna has done absolutely nothing at all. It has spent money lavishly—and with extreme good sense, as well—in the improvement of its property, nowhere more so than in the New Jersey suburban section close to New York. It has raised or lowered its lines, it has doubled and tripled its main-line trackage, it has built superb passenger and freight-stations at every corner. But it has not tinkered with electric motive-power. Very recently it has moved so far as to plan an electrification of its main line through a mountainous district for about forty miles east and west of Scranton, Pennsylvania. But apparently it has made no plans whatever for its New York suburban territory. It is hardly likely, with the present management of the road, to say nothing of its interests, direct or indirect, in the large anthracite coal mining properties in northwestern Pennsylvania, to act in anticipation of the coming of the super-power plan and its probable compulsory mandates upon the railroads of its territory.