The Pennsylvania hauls two great trains—built up of mail sections from its new terminal on Manhattan Island, which has a great post-office in process of growth, built over a portion of its platform tracks, and newspaper sections from the old Jersey terminal, which is still most convenient to a majority of the metropolitan papers. The first of these trains is bound for the South and the Southwest. It leaves New York at 2:20 A. M., passes Philadelphia at 4:25, and steams into Baltimore at 6:40 A. M. Another hour sees it in Washington and transferring its load to the mail-trains that are about to start for the long journey to Atlanta and New Orleans. A New Yorker sojourning for a part of the winter at Palm Beach, Florida, can be sure of having his favorite Sunday paper not later than Tuesday morning.
The second Pennsylvania train leaves thirty minutes later and follows the main line of that much-travelled highway all the way to Pittsburgh, which it reaches just at noon. Other railroads out of New York start fast newspaper and mail trains just before dawn and combine regular passenger facilities with them—the Lehigh Valley despatching a flyer at 2:00 o’clock from the old Pennsylvania terminal in Jersey City for the populous northeastern corner of Pennsylvania and the so-called Southern Tier of New York State. The Lackawanna reaches a somewhat similar territory by its fast express, which leaves Hoboken at 2:30 o’clock.
A similar cluster of mail and newspaper flyers starts out of Chicago early each morning—east over the Lake Shore, the Michigan Central, and the Pennsylvania, south over the Monon and the Illinois Central, and west and northwest over the Northwestern, the Rock Island, and the Santa Fe. Other great cities follow the same programme in lesser scale—there are many important fast-mail trains that make their departures from initial terminals throughout all the daylight hours and late into the evening. A regiment of mail-cars make their way over the face of the land on fast through expresses of every sort. The postal service is a business of magnitude within itself.
The Postmaster General’s report for the year ending June 30, 1910, gives a clear conception of its magnitude. He showed then that there were 176 full railroad post-office lines, manned by 1,736 crews of 8,332 clerks. There were also 1,392 compartment railroad post-office lines—lines in which a portion of a baggage or smoking-car is partitioned for the sole use of the postal service—manned by 4,085 crews of 5,407 clerks, 18 electric car lines with 20 crews and 22 clerks, and 55 steamboat lines with 98 crews and 86 clerks. Of the cars built for the exclusive use of the railroad mail service, 1,114 were in use and 206 held in reserve, while 3,208 of the compartment cars were in use, 559 of these being held in reserve. In addition, the Post-office Department operates 25 trolley mail-cars.
Great progress has been made in the substitution of steel mail-cars for wooden ones—a real step forward when one pauses to consider the dangerous position in which the mail-cars are placed in most trains. The records of the Post-office Department are filled with stories of heroism on the part of mail-clerks in saving, both the extremely valuable merchandise that is given to their care, and vastly more valuable human lives. The list of the post-office employees who have met death while on duty in the railroad mail service is not a short one.
But the railroads are coöperating with the Government in giving the finest type of steel cars to its mail service,—sixty of these are already in use on the Pennsylvania system,—for, as we stated at the outset of this chapter, the transportation of Uncle Sam’s mail is no slight function of the modern railroad. The big operating men across the land are constantly bending their heads with those of the post-office officials toward the betterment of that transportation.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS