A similar opportunity is offered through and between the bustling Great Lake cities of Toledo and Detroit, where the passenger service of the steam railroads that connect them has not been changed or improved in more than forty years. Forty years ago these were small cities; their total population hardly exceeded 166,000 persons. To-day Toledo alone has 250,000 people and Detroit very close to a million. To a population of 1,250,000 people the same steam railroad passenger service is given as was given to but 166,000. True it is that since then the country has passed through the age of the interurban trolley as well as that of the automobile. The traffic by both of these agents of transport between Toledo and Detroit is vast. Yet each is subject to great delays in the streets of these huge and steadily growing cities.
The railroads that render the most direct passenger service between Toledo and Detroit—sixty miles apart—are the single-tracked branches of the Michigan Central and the New York Central running for the most of the way almost side by side. Yet until a very few years ago, no one came along with the sagacity to operate these two single-tracked roads as one double-tracked one, by the simple process of using one line in one direction and the other in the reverse one. The Michigan Central was always a conservative property, and so was the Lake Shore, which preceded the New York Central in this territory.
Yet conservatism, valuable as it is in many ways, should never be permitted to impede progress. And real progress long ago would have dictated the electrification of this intensive stretch of railroad; particularly so in view of the fact that the Michigan Central, a New York Central property, was going ahead with a rather extensive electric installation in connection with the new tunnel that it was boring under the Detroit River and with its elaborate new passenger terminal in that city. For many years the Michigan Central, like the other railroads that essayed to cross into Canada at Detroit, was compelled to ferry its cars and trains across a swift and rather narrow river. At the best this was a tedious time-taking process. At the worst it was a battle against floating ice and zero weather and all that follows in their trails.
The tunnel obviated this. That much was in its favor. It also obviated the Michigan Central’s long-established passenger-station at the river-front in downtown Detroit and—in order to avoid a reverse movement of fast through trains—made it necessary to build the handsome new station in a rather inaccessible part of the town. That much was against the new tunnel.
Yet if the Michigan Central had been possessed of a real vision it might easily have made a complete triumph of the change. Let me show you how it could have been done.
Suppose, if you will, a loop created by the taking over of the Brush Street passenger terminal and approach tracks of the Grand Trunk—so long used by the Detroit branch of the New York Central—and then the Grand Trunk, along with the Canadian Pacific and the Wabash, invited and urged to use the Michigan Central tunnel and passenger-station, at a fair compensation, of course. Then suppose a short length of rapid transit railroad—it probably would be an elevated structure—built along the water-front from the old Michigan Station to the Brush Street Station. Ergo! A complete standard railroad loop has been created threading upon its way the new passenger-station, now transformed into a real union station for all the standard railroads entering Detroit.
Now turn your atlas quickly to the map of Toledo. A similar possibility exists there. The parallel railroads of the Vanderbilts coming in from Detroit sweep around two sides of the town. There is abundant trackage upon the other two sides. A loop has been created, a double-tracked loop, if you please, with an excellent double-tracked link (easily capable of further multiple-tracking) connecting them. The old New York Central Station at Toledo is nearly as badly located in reference to the town as the new Michigan Central one in Detroit. Yet with this double loop that I have so roughly indicated there could be a constant and high-speed operation of electric multiple-unit rapid transit trains, free from all street traffic interruptions. A man coming into the main passenger terminal of either town from New York or Chicago or any other outlying city, by a swift and easy platform change of cars, could be set down in a few more minutes in virtually any section that he wished to reach.
Electrification! Intensive passenger operation! We have not as yet even scratched the surface of their possibilities. All the way across the country lie development opportunities such as these. There is a rare one in St. Louis—the transformation of the ancient and dirty Eads Bridge over the Mississippi, with the far more dirty tunnel that threads the very heart of the city on the way to the huge Union Station, by changing from the steam locomotive to the electric one, or the multiple-unit train. This done, a rapid transit railroad is established automatically, into two States, from the easternmost part of East St. Louis, across the Eads Bridge, as we have just seen, and through the heart of the town in the tunnel that has threaded it for more than fifty years—what a splendid chance for a big downtown station at Broadway and another under the old post-office!—then out from the tunnel again transversely through the train-shed of the Union Station, out Mill Creek valley along the Wabash right-of-way to the smart West End of St. Louis, through Forest Park and Delmar and branching perhaps off to University City and even far St. Charles. It all is almost as easy and as simple as the nose on your face. While the result on the street traffic of congested downtown St. Louis would be appreciable from the beginning.