Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

For while Chicago lies upon a broad flat plain and presents no topographical problems whatsoever to the railroad engineer, Cincinnati, crouched under fearful hills there along the river, has always been his despair. When Collis P. Huntington first conceived the idea of a real transcontinental railroad system forty or more years ago and sought to bring his Chesapeake and Ohio, as an integral unit of that plan, into Cincinnati, he found the roads already there most hostile to his entrance. They held the town impregnable. Yet Huntington outwitted them by a superb coup d’ état of engineering in which he thrust a marvelous great bridge over the Ohio into the heart of the city and the upper levels of its Central Union Station.

To-day Cincinnati stands as it stood then—seemingly impregnable. Its railroad terminals forever are clotted and congested. And seemingly they are incapable of expansion, short of the expenditure of many millions of dollars. From one of these, the Panhandle freight-house at the east end of the heart of the city, along the river edge to three or four others close together, the downtown stations of the Big Four, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Queen and Crescent, it is hardly more than a mile. A direct track along the levee connects all of them, yet the records show that the average time for a freight car to go from the first of these freight-houses to any one of the last four for years past has been two days and fourteen hours. It was because of practical conditions such as these that a great deal of the transfer work of less-than-car-load freight from one railroad to another through Cincinnati was performed by a transfer company through the city streets. The huge wagons of this concern, each drawn by horses or mules, the driver seated athwart of the southwest horse or mule, used to be familiar sights in the narrow streets of the town close to the river. I say “used to be” advisedly. For these quaint and ancient vehicles have to-day disappeared from the downtown heart of Cincinnati. In their place the motor-truck has shown its ubiquitous self. And in place of the 115 horse-drawn open trucks—our English cousins would call them “lorries”—have come fifteen efficient, modern, five-ton gasolene trucks. The mules and the horses have been turned out to pasture. Nor is this all. A good many of the little switching engines that used to haul the local transfer or “trap-cars” from one main freight-house to another, or from the sub-stations in various outlying industrial sections of the Cincinnati district, have been released for service elsewhere, and a vast saving effected in men and in money.

Before we came to the detailed method in which these fifteen motor-truck chasses are being operated, consider for a longer moment the peculiar topographical layout of Cincinnati: On that narrow shelf of flats or bottoms between the high hills and the river in which the older portion of the city is tightly built are situated the greater portion of its industries. There it is that its business life centers. There it is then that its railroad terminals have also been centered since first the locomotive poked his way down to the banks of the Ohio. And since they have expanded to almost every square inch of available territory. To the east end of this long and narrow strip come the Panhandle lines of the Pennsylvania system, the Louisville and Nashville’s main-stem and the Norfolk and Western railroad. At its western end are grouped the Kentucky Central division of the Louisville and Nashville, the Queen and Crescent lines of the Southern system, the Baltimore and Ohio reaching east, north, and west on four important stems, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Big Four lines of the New York Central.

The volume of traffic which these lines bring into Cincinnati and take out of her crowded heart is vast indeed, and growing rapidly year by year. Not only is the local traffic a thing to reckoned in many thousands of tons, but the fact that there are three railroad bridges there across the Ohio, each carrying at least one important through route to the South, means a vast amount of through freight to go through that gateway—and much of it there to be transferred, which further complicates the situation.

And more than all these things the steady growth of the city has meant a constant demand for addition to her railroad facilities—addition that because of the recent difficulties in railroad finance, as well as the terrible topographical difficulties of the Cincinnati situation, have not kept pace with the industrial growth of the city. Fortunately a good deal of this recent growth has been away from her civic heart rather than close to it. New factories have sprung up in new industrial districts, well to the north and the northwest of the older portions of the town. And in order to accommodate the smaller concerns of these sections—Brighton, Ivorydale, and Norwood chief amongst them—the competing railroads which threaded them opened up sub-station freight-houses in each of them. These served concerns not large enough to have their own private sidings, while in order to give these industries the benefits of the same through-car service for L. C. L. (less-than-car-load) business that downtown business houses enjoyed they were served by the downtown freight-houses. The distances from these sub-stations—three or four to eight or ten miles—were of course quite out of the question for the horse-drawn lorries. So it became the practice there, as in other widespread metropolitan cities, to load package-freight in local box-cars—in the parlance of the business, “trap-cars”—and send these in the convoy of a switch-engine to the downtown station where space was required for their spotting and unloading. And a confounded situation was thus doubly confounded.

In regular practice these trap-cars with their outbound freight would leave the outlying sub-station each afternoon soon after their closing hour—4:30—but they would not reach the downtown stations until early evening, some hours after the L. C. L. or through package-freight cars for that day had all been closed and sealed and sent merrily on their way toward their destinations. At the best the stuff they carried would make the through outbound cars of the second day. At the worst they might make the cars the fourth or fifth day, while impatient shippers began to burn the telegraph wires with all their woes.

To-day the freight from those outlying sub-stations at Brighton, Ivorydale, Norwood, Oakley, and Sixth Street, Storrs, Covington, and Newport is leaving them at their closing hours and going out from the main downtown freight-stations that same evening—almost without a miss. The shipper smiles. And, as in the case of the L. C. L. freight to be transferred from one railroad to another at Cincinnati, great time, money, and temper are saved and efficiency gained. The reason why? Let me hasten to answer.

The motor-truck has come into railroad terminal service and has there found a field peculiarly if not exclusively its own.

And because the Cincinnati experiment has passed the stage of mere experimental trials and doubtings, because there in that fine old town at the double bend of the Ohio a real progress step in transportation has been taken that is not only of actual value to it to-day but of potential value to every other big town in America to-morrow, let us go a little more closely into its workings. Let us begin by calling to the witness-chair J. J. Schultz, president and general manager of the Cincinnati Motor Terminals and himself a railroad operating man of long experience.

Mr. Schultz tells us quickly how a little more than four and a half years ago the experiment began in the badly overcrowded downtown freight-station of the Big Four, just south of and adjoining the equally badly crowded Central Union (passenger) Station. It was a simple enough plant then—two motor-truck chasses, bought on credit from a Cleveland concern, and twelve cage-bodies worked out through the ingenuity of a local blacksmith. These were placed in service between the main freight-house of the Big Four and one or two of the outlying sub-stations. The success of the plan was almost immediate. The two trucks went scurrying back and forth all day long, picking up and depositing the loaded bodies until the other railroad men of Cincinnati began to realize that their Vanderbilt competitors had scored a sort of a beat on them. Then they began to look into the motor-truck proposition on their own, with the direct result that to-day every freight-house in Cincinnati except one is equipped for handling standardized motor-truck bodies on and off standardized motor-trucks.