There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city’s larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets, building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the constant replenishing of the city’s larder.
That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that are the pride of the railroad’s traffic head, go so quickly over the rails to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight conductor thumbing his “Sartor Resartus,” and discussing Carlyle as a stylist.
“Yes, we do bring some food up to town,” he admits. “I’ve got enough grub aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We’ve two refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago. The Chicago car has been iced twice—at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago. Soon we’ll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing.
“The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he’ll be fretting about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He’s got a lake tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we’ve got a branch running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a lake for its refrigerating stations. It’s just one of the many little kinks in running a road.”
We express a desire to see the big preference train, and—the block being still set against her—we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the train boss’s arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a string of white and yellow box-cars.
“California fruit,” he says; “they don’t think anything of sending it all the way across the continent. You might have thought those ranchers over there on the Pacific coast would have been discouraged when they were told that there were a dozen icing stations between the two oceans, and that the icing cost was prohibitive. They weren’t a bit. They just sat down and did some tall thinking, and after a while they developed this type of car. We call it pre-cooled. The car is cleaned and brought to a chill before loading. After that the temperature is not allowed to rise while the fruit is being piled away inside. It is closed and sealed, while still ice-cold, and icy-cold she comes bumping her way east over three or four thousand miles of track. It may be scorching down there along the S. P.; they may be just gasping for air in the Missouri bottoms; but that pre-cooled car comes right along, keeping its cargo fresh and cool and pure. We can deliver her anywhere here on the Atlantic seaboard, and no risk of spoiling the stuff.”
We slip along another half-dozen cars. The conductor halts again and fumbles with his way-bills.
“There’s the boy,” he laughs. “He’s halibut. There’s half a dozen halibuts along here in a string.”
We do not like to show an utter ignorance of the food question and we venture an assertion.
“Halibut comes from Newfoundland?” we ask. “How do you get it around here?”