CHAPTER XII
SPEEDING UP THE FREIGHT TERMINALS
For years past, old-time railroaders have emphasized the point that the ordinary freight-car did not make money until it had hauled its goods at least forty miles; the newer generation places this figure at nearer eighty miles. And when you ask the whys and the wherefores of this, the answer comes in but two words: “terminal expense.” To reduce drastically this expense, particularly in freight haulage, is to accomplish to-day one of the largest single economies in the operation of the American railroad, while as we have seen, and as we shall again see, further operating economies are apparently its one salvation, no matter who may assume the difficult task of their direction.
I have said already that the maximum profitable haul of the motor-truck upon the highway is from fifty to eighty miles. Now put this figure against the minimum profitable haul of the freight-car and see if we are not driving toward a solution of the freight terminal problem. I think that we are. And a single practical and concrete illustration ought to show the reason for making this statement.
Here is Jones, out near Passaic, New Jersey, tanning leather, and Smith, who has a shoe-factory of modest size at Lynn, Massachusetts, using it. In other days the leather used to go through from New Jersey to the Bay State in car-load lots. But in the last few years this method has proved entirely too slow, even with the slowly returning strength and freight efficiency of our railroads. It takes at least three roads to accomplish the distance between Passaic and Lynn, with both New York and Boston, through which the cars will probably pass, in any brisk season transfer points of fearful and constant congestion—and with both Jones and Smith then swearing and recriminating at one another.
To-day the leather is leaving Jones’s tannery each afternoon at just 3:15 and is rolling up to the Smith factory in Lynn well before noon the next day with an almost clock-like precision. Even in the days that the freight was moving in heavy volume this precision was steadily maintained. Motor-haul all the way? Oh, bless you, no! Two hundred and fifty miles to be covered, and—as this is being written, in the dead of winter—not only to be covered promptly but at a cost considerably less than express, and not so far in advance of first-class freight charges. That eliminates the possibility of the motor-truck doing the job—all the way through at least. But it does not eliminate the fact that it is the motor-truck that has made the transformation possible. Now see what really is done.
Each evening at a quarter after seven a fast-freight train of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad leaves the Mott Haven terminal of that system, in the upper section of New York, for Boston. With selected equipment, it makes good time on the 229-mile run to Boston and pulls in there shortly before six o’clock in the morning. A hard-headed and long-visioned motor-truck concern in New York fills three to a dozen box-cars in that train each night. Into that Mott Haven terminal it operates its own fleet of motor-trucks, not only from all freight-giving points in the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queensborough, and Bronx districts of greater New York, but from the many industrial towns in the vicinage roundabout, up to a radius of from thirty to forty miles. Out of the Boston terminal of the New Haven it operates a similar fleet, and so makes the journey of a package of hides from Passaic to Lynn but a single rail-haul, in addition to the pick-up and the delivery motor-run. Simplicity and efficiency. And efficiency and economy.
In theory there would seemingly be nothing to prevent the single big express company (into which all of the old-time companies were combined, as a war-time measure) from doing this same thing. In practice, however, their contracts with the railroads forbid this very simple and efficient method of working. Those contracts compel the express company to load its freight into railroad baggage-cars, for no matter how short the haul. If the American Railway Express takes two rolls of carpet from Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, New York, to Yonkers, on the very edge of the big town and hardly a dozen miles distant from the carpet-store, it must lug them to its big terminal on the west side of Manhattan Island and there put them in a baggage-car of the New York Central for the haul to its station in Yonkers, from which, of course, there is the second delivery run. There is nothing in the theory—or in its simple practice—to keep the express company’s truck which picked up the rolls of carpets at the Fifth Avenue shop continuing north to the very door of the house in Park Hill or any other section of Yonkers to which they are consigned. In a similar way express freight that is destined from Manhattan Island to a point as near as Newark—seven or eight miles of rail-haul—must all go by baggage-car, which, in its way, is quite as absurd as sending stuff all the way from New York to Chicago by motor-truck.
The big railroaders have not been quick to see the practical possibilities of the motor-truck. Gradually however these are being forced upon their attention. Take Cincinnati. Perhaps you are not a shipper and so are not familiar with the freight situation there. If so, let me tell you that in the days before Uncle Sam attempted consolidation of all his railroads and the old-time competing systems used points of individual attractiveness to gain traffic, the bright young men who sought out preference-freight for their individual lines used, as the strongest of their talking points, to promise the elimination of Cincinnati for any shipment bound north or south or east or west through its vicinage. The late J. J. Hill used to say that it took as long and cost as much for a box-car to go through the Chicago terminals—about twenty-two miles—as from Chicago to the Twin Cities—nearly five hundred miles. Applying a similar test to the Cincinnati terminals one might say that a journey on from the Queen City by the Ohio through to El Paso would be an equally fair comparison.