That department swings into quick action automatically, as soon as the car strikes B. & A. rails at Rensselaer. The freight agent there makes a note of the car and its contents from the way-bill which accompanies it; makes special note, perhaps, of the fact that it is a car designed particularly for the transportation of automobiles. Now let us presume that this big box-car is owned by the Michigan Central. The Boston & Albany will pay that owner railroad 35 cents a day rental—“per diem,” in the phraseology of the railroads—for the time it is upon B. & A. rails. There are at that very time perhaps hundreds of B. & A. cars on the Michigan Central, and at the end of 30 days these accounts and many, many others are sent to the auditor’s department, where they are balanced between the roads with the general freight and passenger accounts.
This movement of freight cars makes a valuable barometer of the general condition of business. The daily papers have a custom of making national compilations of car-service reports part of their most interesting market news. In dull seasons the cars come home from long service on other roads. But in very busy seasons all roads have little compunction about borrowing “foreign” cars for use in their local service. With shippers begging cars from every quarter and threatening all manner of dire things, 35 cents daily is a small rental to pay for the use of a roomy car. Besides, the other fellows are all doing the same thing, and no one road can hope to get all its cars back even with the use of a vigilant corps of young men who search “foreign” yards. But in the dull seasons they come trundling home, like lost cattle finding the big barn once again. In the business depression of 1907, a Western car-service man received cars that had been absent from the home road for seven years.
We turn from the car-service men back into a department that is strictly traffic. Coal service is one of the principal sources of income for this particular railroad. It stretches some of its branches into bituminous fields, and others through the anthracite fields that Nature, in some freakish mood, implanted in just a few counties of Northeastern Pennsylvania. That entire country is comparable to a cut of beef, the coal veins resembling streaks of fat that run hither and thither. As in beef, the lean predominates. The fat streaks are the valuable coal veins, the lean the earth, slate and rock in which the coal was planted during some great convulsion of Nature in the process of the creation of the world. How it got into this particular spot science cannot tell. What it is, further than the fact that it is mostly carbon, science only guesses. It guesses that it was originally bituminous coal and that by some process of intense squeezing in an upheaval of Nature, the oil and tar and gas of the bituminous coal was squeezed out and the much more valuable anthracite deposits created.
Mining consists in getting the streaks of fat anthracite out of the bulk of lean earth and rock. The veins run well down into the mountains, and, as do the little streaks of fat, lose themselves in the rock, or lean, to continue the simile. Some of the veins are but a few feet in thickness, while some run to as high as twenty and thirty feet, and, as a rule, the farther down into the earth they go the better the coal; and the farther down you go the more difficult and expensive is the mining.
Now, here is a traffic that demands and receives special attention. In other days the mining of anthracite coal was, itself, merely a department of operating for the half-dozen systems that stretched their rails into that valuable Pennsylvania corner. That work has now been removed into the control of separate mining companies; but the handling of coal is a great function of not only these roads, but of the systems that reach their tendrils into the valuable bituminous fields here and there about the country.
The great bridge of the New York
Central at Watkins Glen
Building the wonderful bridge of the Idaho & Washington
Northern over the Pend Oreille River, Washington
To fill the coal-bins of New York City alone, requires some 10,500,000 tons of anthracite yearly. Now you cease to wonder why this road has a coal traffic expert, a man of surpassingly good salary. He keeps keen oversight over the operating department in its handling of this giant traffic, sees to it that the trains come over the mountains and into the great terminals at Jersey City in good order, and that the railroad’s marine department is ready with tugs and scows and lighters to handle the product as it comes in, in thousands of tons every twenty-four hours. This would all be quite simple if the trains and the boats were always running on schedule. But the unexpected constantly comes to pass in railroading, and so the railroads provide against emergencies by establishing great coal storage plants outside of New York and other large cities—communities that would be in dire distress if their coal supply were cut short even for twenty-four hours. Sometimes about 500,000 tons will be kept in a single one of these storage piles—a black mountain running lengthwise between sidings and served with giant cranes.