On the Hudson Street side of the structure six pairs of railroad tracks curve into it; and far above on the cornice of the structure one can see the benign figure of the old Commodore—a heroic bronze surrounded by replicas of the trains and the steamships that he loved so well. The building of the large freight station on the site of St. John’s Park away back in 1868 was a real accomplishment to the first of the house of Vanderbilt. Think of it: that freight-house could hold 100 cars. There was nothing else in all the broad land quite like that!
Into St. John’s Park at dawn come trainloads of produce. Even before the doors of the freight-house have opened, at six, a string of “coolers” has stopped in Hudson Street and the commission men are carting out the poultry. As soon as the station gets down to real business, butter and eggs and cheese pour in through it in carload lots.
“It doesn’t bother us much,” the foreman tells you. “Still, on the Monday before Christmas we had a fairly brisk day. We had 155 cars of turkeys alone that morning.”
CHAPTER XXII
MAKING TRAFFIC
Enticing Settlers to the Virgin Lands of the West—Emigration Bureaus—Railways Extended for the Benefit of Emigrants—The First Continuous Railroad across the American Continent—Campaigns for Developing Sparsely Settled Places in the West—Unprofitable Branch Railroads in the East—Development of Scientific Farming—Improved Farms are Traffic-makers—New Factories being Opened—How Railroad Managers have Developed Atlantic City.
Your railroad manager of other days was content with the traffic that was offered him—if indeed he deigned to accept it all. For those were the business methods that obtained everywhere in the other days. When competition became the moving force in modern business, the railroad felt it. The land had become gridironed with tracks; business did not offer itself so freely as it had at the outset. When there came a division between routes of a traffic that had formerly belonged to a single route, earnings fell away and stockholders began to ask uncomfortable questions of the men who operated their railroad properties. Then the fight for business began—at first, as we have already seen, by a lively rivalry which showed itself in a merciless slashing of rates. Such fighting methods reacted on the railroads, and their rate-sheets became code and law, only a little less holy than the Federal Constitution, long before the Interstate Commerce Commission exerted its beneficent paternalism over the railroads of the land. But with the rates equalized between the railroads, the competition remained. The one obvious solution of the situation which was left was put into effect. The railroads began to make traffic.
The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an unpopulated country would never be any great “shakes” of a railroad until people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to Chicago—afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern—the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes again.