We are back in the traffic-manager’s comfortable office for a final word with him. He is fumbling with his own correspondence. It seems that a lawyer down in Washington has been saying that he could save the railroads of the land a million dollars a day in the economical operation of their property, and the railroader is exceedingly wroth at that assertion.
“He speaks of pig iron, and says that we should teach our laborers the minimum movements necessary to put a single pig in a car—just as masons have been taught to handle brick with minimum effort and a maximum economy in work accomplished has been effected.” The traffic-man laughs, rather harshly. “The lawyer is all right, except for two things; and his anecdote about the brick is certainly well told. Only it just happens that the railroad does not load or unload freight by the carload—that is the duty of the consignor and the consignee—and it also happens that pig iron rarely is handled “L.C.L.” In carload lots it is not loaded or unloaded by hand, but by big magnets on a crane which picks up a ton of the bars at a time and thinks nothing of it.”
The freight traffic-manager has made his point once again, and he is satisfied. He tells a little of the modern methods in freight handling, one of them how an ingenious packing-house expert in Chicago saved thousands of dollars annually in the handling of lard. In other days lard was rolled aboard box-cars, a barrel to a hand-truck, a rather slow and a rather costly process. The Chicago man devised a method of melting lard and, while it was fluid, pouring it, like petroleum, into a tank-car. When it reached its destination at some big terminal, the lard was again melted to fluid and poured out from the tank. That is the science of big freight handling to-day. Not alone do cranes, with magnet-bars handle pig-iron and castings by the ton, but great hoists at Cleveland and Conneaut and the other big lake towns close to the Pittsburgh district reach deep into the hearts of giant ships, bring from them the ore of Lake Superior’s shores, and fill the whole waiting trains within fifteen or twenty minutes. Into the empty holds of the ships they pour bituminous coal from Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, a carload at a time. The hoist-crane reaches down to the dock siding for a gondola, snaps the car-body off from the trucks, lifts it aloft over the open hatch of the waiting vessel, and turns it upside down. In less time than it takes to tell it, the coal is in the ship, and the car-body is being slipped back again upon its trucks.
CHAPTER XXI
THE DRAMA OF THE FREIGHT
Fast Trains for Precious and Perishable Goods—Cars Invented for Fruits and for Fish—Milk Trains—Systematic Handling of the Cans—Auctioning Garden-truck at Midnight—A Historic City Freight-house.
Perhaps you have seen a gay Limited in green and gold start forth with much ado from some big city station, and have concluded that the romance of the railroad rests with it; that the long lines of murky-red freight cars have little of the dramatic about them. If you have thought that, you have thought wrong.
Romance and drama reach high climax sometimes in the transportation of commodities. Fast trains, running upon the express schedules of the finest Limiteds, sometimes bring silk, $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 worth to the train, across the continent. A special may be hired by some impatient manufacturer to send a shipment through half a dozen States. There are notable speed records in the handling of fast freight, records of notable trains that are as well known among the traffic specialists as the Limiteds are known to the outside world.