The Commuter is apt to settle his thoughts upon himself, to forget that he is but an infinitely small part of a mighty home-going army that nightly calls all the passenger resources of the railroad into play. There are more than 100,000 of him alone in the metropolitan district around New York. The busy Long Island Railroad takes a host of him nightly off to the garden spots of that wonderful land from which it takes its name; the Central Railroad reaches off into the lowlands, and the Erie and the Lackawanna into the highlands of New Jersey; the New York Central and the New Haven tap the picturesque shores of the Hudson and the Sound.
Boston repeats New York in this human tide that ebbs and flows daily through her gates. From both her North and South stations mighty armies of Commuters come and go until one wonders sometimes if any one really lives in Boston itself. There are more than 60,000 of this army at the Hub. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and the Reading handle from their terminals an army of equal size each night; another finds its way from the smoky, dirty heart of Pittsburgh out into the attractive towns that perch the hills in her vicinage.
Middle West cities, even those of good size, differ from Eastern in the fact that they are rarely hampered in their growth by natural conditions. In big towns like Cleveland and Detroit, for instance, the natural and the artificial electric transit facilities are so good as to bring the commutation business to a minimum. Not so with Chicago. The Illinois Central from the south, the Northwestern and the St. Paul from the north, serve rapidly growing suburban areas that will compare with some of the best in the East. Then, after the Commuters in the East are safely home, another army is finding its way across the bay, and off to the north and the south of San Francisco. These are the big centres of commuting as the American railroads know it. In smaller measure it exists at every large city in the country. The familiar monthly card ticket, representing its cousin, that holy-of-holies—the annual pass, is issued from good-sized villages and pretentious country seats. The Commuter is already a national institution.
Conductor John M. Dorsey, who used to run an Erie train out of Jersey City in the long ago, once showed us what he thought was the first example of a pure commutation business. It was a list issued to Erie conductors in 1860, and containing the names of 162 persons who travelled daily in and out of New York by the way of Jersey City. These folk lived in Passaic (they called it Boiling Springs in those days), and in Paterson, and all the way up the line to Goshen and Middletown. When a man wanted to commute then he paid a monthly fee to the railroad and they printed his name on this official list. Such a scheme would be obviously out of the question these days.
When New York refused to stop growing, and more and more people began making the daily trip in and out of Jersey City, the handy method of the commutation ticket was substituted for the cumbersome printed list, and the Erie and all the other railroads began to cater to the Commuter with special short-distance trains. Committees came to railroad officers from various small towns and aided them in fixing a definite basis of fare, which remains to-day at something between six-tenths and three-quarters of a cent a mile. In later years, the real estate business became the science that it is to-day, and the suburban business began to move forward in long leaps.
“Even in winter there is a homely, homey air about the commuter’s station”
