The grimy granite bulk of the general post-office is a scarce half-dozen blocks away from this terminal—an easy span for each of the great mail-wagons. Into that general post-office the mail—letters, newspapers, packages, all of inconceivable variety—has been pouring at flood-tide ever since the close of business nine hours before. The carriers with their heavy pouches began this tide; wagons bringing their contribution greatly swelled it. From the nearer stations the mail came, silent and unseen, through the giant pneumatic tubes that reach out from the general post-office, under city streets, like great arteries. Underneath the ghastly green mercury lamps of the distributing floor of the general post-office, the first steps were taken toward separating the flood. Expert mail-clerks, working under tremendous tension, made a rough classification of all that come under their trained fingers—sometimes by counties, again by States, or even a group of States. One great subdivision was transcontinental and transpacific. This train with its close connections on the Western lines will reach San Francisco just in time to catch there a big, red-funnelled steamship about to depart for Yokohama and Hong Kong. At Hong Kong the red-funnelled boat will connect with a P. & O. steamer whose screws will hardly cease revolving until she reaches Calcutta. The railroad mail service is a thing that reaches much farther than the rights-of-way of the railroads themselves.
There are seven cars in this train—five cars for the postal service and two chartered by the morning newspapers. There are no coaches. Now and then one of these flyers will deign to carry a single sleeper, but such is the exception. The fast mail does not stop to quibble with such trifles as passengers. It even turns its shoulders upon the express companies—they have their own fast special trains across the continent.
The last of the mail-wagons has delivered its valuable load to the cars. The final newspaper wagon comes dashing up to the platform—its horses a-froth and its driver on the edge of profanity.
“Here’s the firsts,” he yells. “Big fire down the water-front and they wanted to make the edition with it. We were three minutes late.”
Three minutes late! Seventeen minutes ago the last of the smoking-hot forms came from that newspaper’s stereotyping rooms and here are the first ten thousand copies of the morning’s run—fresh and damp smelling of the forest. Before the driver began his hurried explanation of delay, the copies were being thrown into the last car. He had hardly finished before a big bell, high-hung somewhere in the invisible blackness, speaks its one brief note of authority; lanterns are raised alongside the full length of the train—the seven big cars are softly getting into motion. And before this train is fully in motion the newspaper’s messengers are busy with the papers that have been thrown in at the open door; before it has bumped its way over the wide-spreading “throat” at the entrance of the terminal, they are bringing the first semblance of order out of the miniature mountain of newspapers piled high on the car floor.
Chaos, did we say? Well, hardly that. The circulation manager of the metropolitan morning newspaper has been called a “field marshal of the empire of print,” and field marshals incline to order rather than to chaos. It is less than seventeen minutes from the first of that torrent of newspapers pouring from the hopper of the grinding press, yet here they are, each in an accurate bundle of not more than two hundred and fifty copies, and accurately tagged. The label of each bundle bears in big clear letters the news company or dealer to whom it is consigned, the town, the railroad and its connections. There is not much chance for errors here.
As the newspaper messengers begin to arrange their stock—the papers for the nearest towns on top so that they may be most easily reached, to be thrown off while it is still dusk, so that Mr. Early Riser may read his favorite metropolitan journal as he sips his breakfast coffee—so are the mail-clerks in the cars ahead bending to their tasks. Roundabout them are rows of pouches held in iron frames, with their hungry throats held wide open, and infinite racks of small pigeon-holes—the same kind that you remember in the up-country post-offices. When the pouches first come into the car they are opened and their contents “dumped-up,” to use the parlance of the service, upon the shelf-like tables that run the length of the place. The next process is “facing-up”—bringing addressed sides of all the matter uppermost for facility in distribution. And after that the distribution itself—no easy matter when all the world is constantly writing to all the world, and the criss-cross currents are all but innumerable.
So come all classes of mail to these swift-flying cars—letters, newspapers, packages, the specially protected registered mail,—and for all of these classes the apparently endless sorting goes steadily forward, while the train rounds sharp curves and sends the ordinarily sure-footed clerks clutching handrails for balance, under the dead glow of acetylene, holding each separate mail-piece for a fraction of a second—sometimes longer if it be a “sticker” in the chirography or the detail of its address—and then shooting it into the proper pigeon-hole or open-mouthed pouch. Some of these cars are destined for cities or States or groups of States—the wheels under one of them are not going to cease revolving for any length of time until it stands on the long Mole, opposite San Francisco, and the through pouches, with the British coat-of-arms and the meaningful “G. R.” stamped upon them, are being shipped aboard the red-funnelled steamship which is to carry them on the last leg of their long journey over two seas and a broad continent, from London to Hong Kong.
These trains are no longer novel on the modern railroad. They are established features of the train service. From New York City goes forward one-sixth of all the mail matter originating in the United States. The aggregate circulation of all the New York morning newspapers is somewhat larger than the aggregate circulation of the morning newspapers of the other cities of the country, so from New York there goes forth between midnight and dawn a flotilla of special mail and newspaper trains. Two of the fastest of these start from the Grand Central Station. The “Boston Special” of the New York, New Haven & Hartford leaves that spacious terminal at just 2:10 A. M., no matter what desperate excuses may be telephoned at the last moment by some circulation manager who is confronted by a disabled press, or some such disaster. It slips through the suburban territory without halting—the nearby commuters are served with their papers and their mail by the early morning locals. Bridgeport, at 3:31 A. M., is the first halt; New Haven, at 3:52, the second. At New Haven, the papers for Hartford, Springfield, and the whole Connecticut valley country are thrown off. At New London, which is reached at 4:53 A. M., go the papers for Norwich, Worcester, Newport, and New Bedford. One more halt, at Providence, and the train, running as fast as the fastest of New Haven flyers, is at the South Station, Boston—at just 7:20 o’clock. A Boston & Maine flyer, taking mail and newspapers away up the coast through three States, leaves the North Station at 8:01 A. M., and so there follows a quick transfer of mail and newspapers through the twisting streets of the Hub.
The other early morning flyer leaves the Grand Central at 3:05 o’clock, and it makes its course over the main stem of the New York Central Lines. It reaches Albany at 6:30 o’clock and not only distributes there for Western Massachusetts and Vermont, the upper Hudson Valley and the Lake Champlain territory north to Montreal, but overhauls a passenger train that left New York a little after midnight. It continues its course through the heart of the Empire State—reaching Syracuse at 10:05 A. M. and Rochester at 11:47 A. M. At Buffalo, which is reached at 1:20 P. M., there are important connections for the West and Southwest, and the Chicago letters in that grimy train are going out on the first delivery from the Chicago post-office the next morning.