If the Erie plans will bring to each of its water-side piers in lower Manhattan some 7200 tons of assorted merchandise a day, against about 400 tons as at present accomplished by the old-fashioned and rather awkward device of ferrying the loaded cars themselves across the Hudson River, it would seem to be both a real efficiency, as well as a mere economy. Carried out by other roads using the harbor-side of West Street, Manhattan, it would quickly become a vast efficiency—the storage of freight upon the crowded pier floors ended; motor-trucks coming in, receiving in a time always to be measured in seconds, rather than in minutes, the steel containers upon their stout chasses, and then departing in a quick and orderly fashion. J. J. Mantell, the New York manager of the Erie, who has created this new plan and now has its execution in charge, estimates that carried out upon the lines of his competitors it would mean that the railroads coming into New York from the west would need but seven piers instead of the thirty-five that they now occupy. Twenty-eight piers would be released for steamship service and the necessity of extensive, and expensive, harbor improvements deferred, for a number of years at least.
The container idea, having once come into the public eye here in the United States, has steadily and rather rapidly gained in favor. A gentleman in St. Louis has apparently gone the Cincinnati method one better by devising a steel container which is interchangeable not only between motor-trucks and railroad freight-cars, but from these chasses to barge or flat-cars, or into the hold of a steamboat. His scheme already is in actual use, although not in perfected form, in the Federal barge service established three years ago upon the Warrior River. Twenty of the big steel boxes were purchased for use there, and there they are still in use.
It so happens that the Warrior River barges have no deck-houses, merely open holds into which the coal from the Alabama hills can easily be poured or unloaded. To make “return load”—always that valuable factor in transportation, either water or rail-merchandise freight must be garnered in New Orleans. And an open-hold barge is hardly comparable to a box-car; not at least in the mind of a shipper, who has some lurking desire to have his goods arrive in fair condition at the far end of the run.
So the steel container, which H. W. Kirchner of St. Louis has designed, came into play. It carries merchandise not only from New Orleans to Birmingport (just below Birmingham) but, atop of the coal, back to New Orleans again. The inventor has had no joy whatever in this very informal trial of his device. He would prefer to have his containers handled and placed in a more orderly and systematic fashion. Yet the fact remains that a beginning has been made in the actual use of the only practical binding force yet brought forward which looks to a physical linking of the several different arms of freight transport. Any firm believer not only in the theory of correlated transportation but also in the high values to be achieved by its practical application in this country cannot help having a joy in this Warrior River experiment, an experiment which sooner or later is to be extended to the similar barge service which the United States Government has now succeeded in establishing upon the Mississippi. It already has been shown on the Warrior River line that the container can, and does, cut labor costs at terminals all the way from sixty-five cents to four cents a ton—the time for unloading from twelve to twenty-four hours down to but one or two, at the most.
There is coming to-day in this country—slowly, but very surely—a reversal of the old-time tradition that the inland waterway is per se a competitor of the railroad. Many years ago the railroads themselves showed how small a figure a river or canal, always more or less subject to seasonal or weather influences, was to the steel highway as a competitor, while the attempts that have been made since then—and generally at large capital expenditure—to bring about the resurrection of the inland waterway as a competitor of the railroad have so far proved abortive.
But to regard the inland waterway as supplementary to the railroad, or the railroad as supplementary to the inland waterway—it is merely a choice of phrasings—is a very different story indeed. True it is that the statute laws to-day pronounce sternly against such a sensible, economic solution of a large phase of our American transport problem. True it is that a good many other keen business men still can see the waterway in no other light than as a club over the railroad. True it is that a good many otherwise sagacious railroad executives can see the waterway as nothing but an obsolete agent of transport or as a foolish dream of visionary idealists. Yet the fact remains that the waterway does have its place in transport. The railroad has a place, and in intelligent analysis these places dovetail somehow, somewhere. They do not conflict. And the sooner realization is made of this, the better—for all of us.
Some day we shall have to change our statute laws and then, instead of barring our railroads from our waterways, we shall invite, urge, implore, and if necessary compel them to use these great natural arteries of inland transport, chiefly for the relief of their overcrowded rails, particularly the rail terminals. And how overcrowded these are yet to be, it is hard to realize in this present moment of industrial slump.
In that day the container is to be, as I have said already, the binding agent between these different avenues of transport. Its flexibility, its adaptability, its obvious economy are going to bring it into its own.