With this in mind they have sought to meet the New York terminal situation, not with large expenditures but with an adaptation of the tolls close at hand. Already they have entered into a contract with a trucking concern upon Manhattan Island to work out the details of a most ingenious plan which goes after this fashion.
For many years past the Erie has operated two ferry-lines from its historic terminal at Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, to New York—Chambers and Twenty-third streets respectively. To meet the large suburban passenger necessities of the road it is necessary to operate these upon fairly frequent headways. Yet Pavonia Avenue is not an accepted route for through motoring, either freight or passenger which means that the Erie ferry-boats have been more crowded in their cabins than upon their team decks. Yet it is obvious that it costs little or no more to operate a well filled ferry-boat than one that is but half-filled. Moreover in Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, the Erie possesses not only ample freight-house facilities but room for a large future expansion of them.
Of course, it was quite out of the question to expect the average merchant of Manhattan Island to go to Jersey City to get his freight, particularly when the Erie’s enterprising competitors were crying their willingness to set it down in the West Street piers. Mohammed would not go to the mountain, but in this instance the mountain would come to Mohammed. The Erie made arrangements with a large trucking concern in the City of New York to take classified freight in ten-ton units to the merchants’ doors. These truck-bodies are four-wheeled, their forward wheels being rather light and rather small. There are three of these bodies to one tractor unit, which means of course that while one body is in transit attached to the tractor, the other two are at the respective termini being loaded and unloaded. So is time saved; and so is saved the expensive overhead upon the tractor-unit while the clock goes steadily ticking forward.
Eighteen of these truck and tractor combinations go upon a single ferry-boat. The ferry-boat headway is seven and one-half minutes, which means that working at full speed 1760 tons—a fair-sized train-load, for classified freight—can be handled each hour. And if you wish more figures still, please understand that the terminal cost of trucking to the merchant of Manhattan has been lowered by this method from eight to ten cents a hundred to but five or six.
Economies? Sometimes I think we of America do not know, even yet, the real meaning of the word.
Yet this is but the beginning of the Erie’s work at its New York terminals. Its big job, upon which it is just now embarking, is bringing into play the container in its most real sense not merely as a detachable truck-body but as a steel-box which can be loaded and then handled in almost any conceivable form of transport.
The idea is simplicity itself, nor is it a particularly new one. For many years past the express companies have used it for the transport of their comparatively small and valuable packages, placing these in large iron-bound wooden trunks for safety in carriage. It is more than a dozen years ago that a professor in one of the New England colleges—Amherst, I think—wrote an article in which he advocated the scheme for all package-freight and sent the article to a technical publication, which promptly refused it, saying that it was entirely too visionary an idea.
Yet here we are, fairly come to it in these days. The Erie plan in its last refinements proposes to unload the package-freight for New York at its yards at Croxton, New Jersey, just west of the Bergen tunnels, and then after reassortment to reload it into steel container-boxes, seventeen and one-half feet by eight and one-half, and with a working capacity of five tons. Two of these containers will fill the platform of an average flat-car.
The reassortment or transfer work at Croxton will be not only into containers for the Erie’s various sole and joint freight-stations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queensborough, but also to individual business houses, where the volume of the freight justifies such a step. Great retail stores, such as Macy’s or Wanamaker’s or Altman’s, easily would receive one or more of these containers each day. So would the important wholesalers, and all other considerable distributing concerns of the City of New York.
The containers placed upon the flat-cars at Croxton will quickly traverse the three or four brief miles to the water-side of Weehawken, just across from West Fortieth Street, Manhattan. Here they will go upon the huge floats originally built for the terminal movement of loaded box-cars but each easily adapted for the carrying of sixty of the five-ton containers. All the elaborate plans that have been made for the extension and development of the port of New York predicate the scrapping of this great harbor fleet of car-floats—some eight million dollars’ worth all told. In this book I am aiming to show possible railroad economies, not expenditures. It is easy enough to depict elaborate plans which involve vast capital expenditure. We have had rather too many of these in this country in recent years. It seems to me that by far the best plans are those that give large operating economies with a minimum of actual expense. These are the sort that I am trying to show within these pages.