Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

The super-power plan as we have seen also embraces Baltimore. And Washington, as well. Between these two cities, as well as between Baltimore and Philadelphia, there are two parallel double-tracked railroads. One would serve all real needs, with the possible addition of some stretches of third or even fourth tracks. The other road is quite superfluous.

Years ago there was but one railroad from Philadelphia to Washington—a combination of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore and the Baltimore and Ohio which the Civil War made historic. These two roads connected at Baltimore. The only track connection between them was through Light Street in the commercial heart of that city. Trains arriving at Baltimore on the P. W. & B. had their locomotives detached at Canton Station at the east side of the city, while their cars were drawn one by one by horses across the town to Camden Station upon the west side, where they were reassembled into trains drawn by B. & O. locomotives, and went scurrying off to Washington, the West, and the South generally.

Such a clumsy arrangement could not last forever. About fifty years ago it ended in a first-class row between the two chief parties to it. The P. W. & B. had passed into the hands of the Pennsylvania, which also acquired control of the Northern Central, leading from Baltimore straight north through York and Harrisburg and Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to Elmira, New York, and so on to the south shore of Lake Ontario. The Northern Central and the P. W. & B. began picking quarrels with the Baltimore & Ohio, which had some very obdurate habits of its own. Things went from bad to worse. For a time the trains of the former connecting roads took a keen delight in missing their connections at Baltimore City (to use the old name of the town), and it all finally came to pass that the roads ceased issuing through tickets over each other’s rails—a method of reprisal wherein the traveler paid the bill.

Out of this mêlée there grew a phase of competition which developed rapidly into the construction of parallel railroads. The Pennsylvania cut an enormously expensive series of tunnels under Baltimore and built the Union Station out on Charles Street in the newer portion of the town—recently superseded by the present station of that name. From that station it built the Baltimore and Potomac on to its own new terminal in Washington City (also old-style) where it enjoyed valuable exclusive connections with the important railroads leading south from the Potomac. After which it was free and independent of the Baltimore and Ohio for its all-important New York-Philadelphia-Washington business, while the link of the Northern Central between Baltimore and its main line at Harrisburg gave it a chance to get competitive business between both Washington and Baltimore and the West.

To this sharp blow the Baltimore and Ohio retaliated, though slowly. It never was able to finance itself quite as readily as its larger adversary. Gradually it too tunneled under Baltimore—went far ahead of the Pennsylvania, in fact, in that premier electric installation to which I already have referred—and opened its handsome Mount Royal Station within a few blocks of the Union Station. It extended its line on from Mount Royal for ninety-five miles to Philadelphia, paralleling and in sharp competition with the P. W. & B. property of the Pennsylvania. It obtained an advantageous terminal site in Philadelphia and would have put down its own rails all the way to Jersey City had it not been for a most tragic incident—which has no place in this book. It is enough here to say that eventually it obtained trackage rights from Philadelphia to Jersey City over a combination of certain lines of the Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Recently, as we have seen, these were so extended as to bring it into the Pennsylvania Station. Railroad competition to-day in a good many parts of the land is not a very serious thing—save, possibly, for publicity purposes.

I have broken my rule and delved into railroad history in this instance for a single purpose, to show how admirably a certain portion of this parallel and largely superfluous railroad construction could be brought to a rapid transit electric installation. For some years past there has been a plan to rid Baltimore of the pressure of through freight traffic through her heart by the construction of a freight cut-off just north of the city, to be used jointly by both the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio. Oddly enough the city itself has opposed this plan. Baltimore has a particularly delightful suburban section extending for many miles north of her actual civic limits. It would be quite impossible to build the proposed freight cut-off without intersecting this section. Baltimore is a conservative town. That a bit of her comfort or beauty should be sacrificed to commercial necessity is, in her eyes, unthinkable.

Yet some day that cut-off will be built, if for no other reason than simply because it is a commercial necessity, and the traffic upon the twin sets of tunnels in her heart will be lessened very appreciably.

Now consider those tunnels consolidated—conducted in coöperation and not in rivalry. If the Baltimore and Ohio can use the Pennsylvania passenger-station in New York there is no moral reason why it cannot use the Pennsylvania passenger-station in Baltimore and make a real operating saving. Baltimore, far more than New York, presents opportunities for the physical connection of the railroads at each side of the city. As a matter of fact there is a connection already at the eastern edge, and none is needed at the western edge. For the scheme that I contemplate would continue the Baltimore and Ohio’s through trains over the Pennsylvania tracks to the Union Station in Washington, which already they use jointly.

Now we have a first-class pair of rails left nearly free all the way from Mount Royal Station, Baltimore, to the Union Station, Washington, forty miles distant. The third-rail electric installation of this line which to-day extends for three or four miles of its length through Baltimore could easily be extended to Washington—not only into the Union Station but well beyond it. It would take a lower level of the station, on the side opposite from that occupied by the depressed tracks of the railroads that lead out from and under the station toward the south, and continue as a subway through the heart of Washington to Georgetown and Chevy Chase. Similarly in Baltimore it probably would continue north from Mount Royal, through to Roland Park or even beyond, while between the two cities there has been for many years upon the line of the Baltimore and Ohio an almost unbroken succession of villages, suburban and semi-suburban.

Here then is an ideal opportunity for a dual-city rapid transit development—and, aside from the suggested subway under Washington, to be built at a minimum of cost. An installation such as this awaits only the abandonment of the rather silly show of competition between the railroads, which as we shall see in our own good time in this book is no competition at all, while the opportunities offered for the development of both Washington and Baltimore are too multifold to be set down within many pages.