In the meantime great progress is being made in its development. A. H. Smith, the big, energetic president of the New York Central, with his usual verve and enthusiasm has taken hold of the idea and seems bound to put it over. Already he has had built ten steel units of containers four for passenger service and holding ten boxes each, and six for freight service and holding but six boxes apiece. The passenger service units are being tried out in the United States mail service; the freight-service ones are in experimentation by the American Railway Express. Just what will be the final development in operation of these units Smith himself does not know. He believes that the possibilities are almost too great for instant grasp. That is why he has his road and himself back of the new idea. He has watched it carefully, almost apprehensively. Because of a certain indefinite fear that one of the great steel boxes might some fine day be hurtled from the platform of a car running at high speed and into some group of waiting people by the side of the railroad, he has caused extraordinary care to be taken to have them firmly fastened not merely upon, but into, the platform-cars. A long steel girder-side of the car does the trick, while in these days of bandits and rumors of bandits along the line the fact that there is no possible process of opening the steel door of the container-box once it is set into its place upon the car gives an assurance of protection to the merchandise that no other form of carrier can offer.
Here again the motor-truck correlates. In the first experimental trials by the New York Central of this forward-looking device, they have come into quick and easy terminal service; the big olive-green trucks of the United States Mail service and the deep-blue ones of the American Railway Express.
I began this chapter with the motor-truck. With the motor-truck I shall close it. It is the object of great dreams of transport. Yet these are not, after all, mere dreams. They are, as we have seen just now, the carefully developed plans of engineers long since become expert in transportation. I could have carried you much further into these plans—into their application for the relief of Philadelphia, whose great water-front along the Delaware is only reached by the box-car after miles of tedious switching through congested trackage, and where the motor-truck offers an almost immediate and a comparatively inexpensive solution of the freight terminal problem; into Chicago where the situation is nearly as bad; and into Boston, where it is considerably worse, and where again the motor-truck plus the container in terminal service is a veritable key to the problem. Further still could I have carried you in this discursion—to Baltimore, to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, to Detroit, elsewhere still. I have hesitated to weary you with too much detail. You have had enough to prove my points, while only space prevents the discussion of the financial phases of this service, sometimes known as store-door delivery.
I shall admit that store-door delivery has no attractive sound to the practical operating railroad executive. He is gun-shy, tremendously gun-shy of it. And yet I do not wonder at that. Your railroader feels that sooner or later—and probably much sooner than later—the charges for this service would be tacked upon his shoulders flatly included within his transportation rate. Aside from that I think that he would welcome it distinctly. It would greatly simplify the traffic problems in and around his freight-terminals to say nothing of making vast savings in the use of his equipment.
Moreover the day is coming when he will be compelled to welcome it willy-nilly. For, in my opinion, the motor-truck will occupy a place in the railroads’ necessities to-morrow only second to that of the locomotive itself. It represents the railroad’s newest field of development, by far its largest field of possibilities. Remember that the pictures which you have just seen in some detail of the Cincinnati and the New York terminal situations are but two out of many of these possibilities. The others are so vast and so many as to be termed limitless. They represent progress—progress in the field of American transport as definite and as distinct as that which marked the coming of the locomotive. The years pass by. In them we do move. We do progress. And transport enterprise consists in translating vision to practical operation, along lines such as we just have seen. So shall our railroad of to-morrow be upbuilt.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TWILIGHT OF COMPETITION