This is all first-day milk. You can take a compass, place the pin-leg squarely in the heart of the busy town—a place of brick and asphalt, of steel and concrete, without ever a hint of growing things—and with the pencil-leg trace a segment of a circle—the outer line some 200 miles distant from the centre. Afterwards you can draw a second circle segment, its outer line some 350 miles from the same town centre. From within the inner circle comes the first-day milk, delivered to the railroad during the early part of a day and on the householder’s table in the big city the next morning. From without this inner circle and within the outer, comes the second-day milk which has another twenty-four hours in its transit to town. The whole thing, once rather badly handled by itinerant single dealers, has been reduced to scientific business by skilful coöperation between the big milk-dealers of the present day and the railroads.
It is night.
The last of the office lights in the towering buildings has been snuffed out. Downtown is quiet—quiet for a little time, for soon after sun-up it will be a vortex once again; these narrow, deep-canyoned streets will be astir and human-filled once again. But at nine o’clock in the evening the policeman’s footfall on the pavement echoes in lonely streets. A tired bookkeeper scurrying home after a vexatious hunt for his balances gets sharp scrutiny from the policeman. Downtown is asleep.
Then, from around the turn of a sharp corner comes a night train of wagons, drawn by a small brigade of horses. These are not filled with market-truck; market-truck will not reach the town till midnight at the earliest. These are great high-boxed vans, painted white, a bit gaudy in lettering. They make you think of those long-ago days when you used to go down to the depot to see the circus come in, for the big wagons are precisely like those that used to shroud mystery as they rolled from the trains down to the show-lot. We follow this procession of half a dozen great vans, follow it through the twisting, narrow streets of downtown, across a famous old ferry, straight up to the long sheds of a railroad terminal.
On the one side of the terminal, the passenger trains are coming and going at all hours. By day this shed at which the big vans back, each into its own carefully marked place, is a general freight-house; by night it is given over to the stocking of the city babies’ milk bottles. The ferried vans are hardly emptied of their empty cans and cases before the first of the milk trains comes backing in at the other side of the long covered platform. Hissing arcs up under that slimsy roof throw high lights and deep shadows here and there and everywhere. They show the platform-men tugging at the car fastenings before the brakes are fairly released. In another minute, the big side-doors are thrown open, almost simultaneously, in still another, the place is alive with the rattle of trucks. The milk—tons upon tons of it—in ten-gallon cans and in cases of individual bottles, is being loaded within those circus-like cans. A second milk-train comes bumping in at a far platform. There is another brigade of vans waiting for it there. A third train is due to arrive in another half-hour. The vans that it will fill are already beginning to back into place and unload their cans and cases upon the platforms.
Here are almost 200 great four-horse trucks being filled simultaneously, and all working with the almost rhythmic harmony of organization. You want to know how they do it? Ask that man over there, he in a short rough coat, who carries a lantern on his arm and with it peers interestedly into every one of the cars. That man’s word is law on this platform, for he is its boss. He has been filling the babies’ milk bottles from this particular terminal for almost a quarter of a century now. His railroad was the first to bring milk into a large city.
“We get it over,” he will tell you, “by the experience of some little time, and by planning. You saw the numbers on the team side of this milk platform. That’s only half the problem. There are a dozen different milk-handling concerns doing business at this shed, and their stuff comes together on this one train. Yet we get the thing out by having each concern—each truck—come up to its own position at the team side. The other half of the problem we solve by having a certain position for each milk-car.
“Here is the Hygienic Milk Company up on the Heights. You have seen their fancy dairies all over town. Well, the Hygienic has a station up at Bottger’s, on our Lancaster & Essex division, that fills two cars at that station every blessed day. Their two cars stand in beyond this No. 14 pillar every night; so we know just where to direct their trucks. That’s business—just system. We spot the cars every night.”
“Spot the cars?” you interrupt. He smiles a bit at your ignorance.