Steamship Lines Under Railroad Control—Fleet of New York Central—Tugs—Railroad Connections at New York Harbor—Handling of Freight—Ferry-boats—Tunnel Under Detroit River—Car-ferries and Lake Routes—Great Lakes Steamship Lines Under Railroad Ownership.
In the beginning land transportation must have looked up in something resembling fear and awe to water. We can picture the railroad of the thirties as a slender but resourceful David facing the veritable Goliath of water carriage. In earlier chapters of this book we have shown how the canals, representing a distinct phase of water transportation, sought to throttle the railroads at the beginning. But the modern railroad has no fear of water rivalries, either upon the coast or inland. Just as the first railroads were ofttimes timidly built as feeders or complements to water routes, so to-day almost every inland water route is part of a railroad—in operating fact if not in actual ownership. The tables have been turned—the railroad finally dominates. Nine-tenths of all the great water routes in and aroundabout the United States are more or less directly owned and controlled by the railroads. They have become, in every sense, corollaries to land transportation.
This is more distinctly shown in some sections of the land than in others. For instance, up in New England, where the interests owning the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad have accomplished direct or indirect control of all but a comparatively few miles of the steam and electric railroads in five great States, they have also acquired the steamship interests of that district. The New Haven’s original excursion into the steamboat business was when it absorbed the Old Colony Railroad—almost a score of years ago—in order to ensure its entrance into Boston. The Old Colony owned a well-famed and highly prosperous steamboat line from Fall River, Massachusetts, to New York City, part of its through New York-Boston route. Eventually the New Haven acquired all the brisk and busy steamboat lines which ran up the Sound from New York to several Connecticut ports—Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, New London, and Stonington. Any one of these lines was not, perhaps, so much of an acquisition in itself, but all of them were potentials in a future rate situation that might arise. It was good executive management to have these potentials under firm control, and so the New Haven established water routes as a recognized factor of its business—under the separate corporation title of the New England Navigation Company. Once when a new company, under the mellifluous title of the Joy Line, sought to injure its coastwise business by establishing cut-rates from Providence to New York, the New Haven placed two of its older boats in a rival and lower-priced service, and, by means of its great resources, was able to bring the Joy Line into its fold. Later, when the Enterprise Line tried a like programme, the New Haven followed the same aggressive tactics and brought the Enterprise Line to bankruptcy. These things are mentioned here in no spirit of criticism. But they are the facts that make it impossible for really independent lines of steamboats to run between New York and Providence for any great length of time, despite ample docking facilities and a great free port at each of these cities.
The Metropolitan Line tried to maintain an independent line between New York and Boston with the two finest steamers ever placed in coastwise service—the Yale and the Harvard. One of these boats left each city at five o’clock in the afternoon and performed the ocean voyage of 330 miles over the “outside route” in just fifteen hours—and with amazing regularity. But the New Haven Railroad found it to its interest to control the coasting lines around about New England, and so the Yale and Harvard were last winter banished to the Pacific coast.
This is all part of the business of managing great railroad systems. For similar reasons the Pennsylvania Railroad found it advisable to bring a group of steamboat lines plying on Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries under its control, the Harriman lines to reach out and establish ownership of the lines plying up and down several thousand miles along the Pacific coast—these are but a few instances out of many. As yet no large American railroad has essayed to control a transatlantic line, although both the Hill and the Harriman properties are interested in the transpacific carrying business. The Canadian Pacific, however, has already well-established lines across both of the great oceans—making a continuous route under one management from Liverpool, England, to Hong Kong, China. Moreover, it is now building four great steamships which are to be finished simultaneously with the Panama Canal and which will ply through it from New York direct to Hong Kong. The Canadian Northern has also recently embarked in the transatlantic carrying business. The Canadian Pacific and several of the large railroads of the northern part of the United States maintain lines of sizable gross tonnage on the Great Lakes—but of these, more in a little while.
A modern railroad freight and passenger terminal: the terminal of
the West Shore Railroad at Weehawken, opposite New York City
High-speed, direct-current passenger locomotive built by the General Electric Company
for terminal service of the New York Central at the Grand Central Station
Even if a railroad is not engaged in the steamship business, as such, even to the extent of one or two small steamboats on inland waters, it may still possess a considerable harbor fleet,—wharves, and slips—that, taken together, make a sizable aggregate. Every railroad that has any sort of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will protect itself by having its own wharves and landing-stages—even grain elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet—ferries, scows, lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. It means that the railroad must pay attention to marine laws and marine customs.