When a railroad boasts of a terminal in such a city as Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco, its fleet of harbor craft is apt to be quite a sizable navy. Take, for instance, the New York Central’s fleet in and around New York harbor. It consists of 269 vessels, divided into the following classes: 9 ferry-boats, 22 tugs, 7 steam-lighters, 50 car-floats, 10 steam-hoist barges, 25 open barges, 6 scow barges, 105 covered barges, and 35 grain-boats. And out of all these barges, 10 are further equipped for refrigerator use.
In such a fleet, eliminating of course the ferry-boats which have their own peculiar uses, the tugs are almost the sole motive power. There is a bit of poetry about them, too, even if they are short and stubby, ofttimes poking their cushioned noses impertinently up against larger and far more stately craft. But no captain, even though he walk the bridge of an eight-hundred foot steamship, sneers at a tug. It takes eighteen of them to place the new giant Olympic in her wharf on the North River, and no crack company of horsemen ever moved in more precise drill or better coöperation than these noisy, punting, helping-hands of the harbor of New York. For ocean ports are different from those along the lakes. A captain sailing a five-thousand ton ship on fresh water would be ashamed to use a tug at Detroit, or any other of the Great Lake ports, even where the current runs almost like a mill-race, unless he was turning in a channel whose width was but a wee bit more than the length of his ship. But Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and Chicago do not have the tides—and it is the tide that makes harbor navigation a finely specialized science at the big ocean ports.
All of the big Atlantic ports save New York have abundant track facilities alongside the piers, where berth the ships from half the world over. In New York, the same geographical conditions that have gone to make her so superb a port and given her so generous a harbor-frontage have blocked the railroads in their efforts to reach all her piers with unbroken rails. So the railroads entering that harbor have found it necessary to provide themselves with such fleets as we have noticed as belonging to the New York Central. For inland shippers seem to have a preference for sending their east-bound export merchandise through New York, because of the frequency of sailings from her wharves to half the recognized ports of the world.
If you are a manufacturer—at Utica, N. Y., let us say—and you wished to send a carload of your product to London, Eng., you would find that the railroad definitely agrees to do certain things for you. On your minimum basis of a carload lot it will place that carload at any pier in the harbor of New York. Indeed, it would do a little more. If some of that carload lot that starts down out of Utica is going to London, some more on a different ship to Calcutta, and still some more on a tropic-bound liner to South America, the railroad would make free delivery of your consignment to the piers of these three ships. It limits, however, the delivery of a carload lot to three different piers.
This sounds simple, perhaps, and, in reality, is not. For in a single day of twenty-four hours there may arrive at Weehawken and Sixtieth Street, Manhattan—the two great freight terminals of the rails of the New York Central system at New York—from four to six hundred, eight hundred cars, perhaps, filled with merchandise bound for half a hundred different piers, along from forty to sixty miles of water-front.
Now you see the use of all this army of lighters and barges—stubby-nosed craft, awkward craft, boats that have not even a single stanza of the poetry of the sea written upon their contents. By night, by day, when an imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter, when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot’s path is fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. The eight or ten great railroads that terminate in New York are pouring export merchandise to all of her piers, while from those long sprawling structures they are drawing up imported goods to go forward to every corner of the land. And in addition to this there is the vast local commerce of the City of New York, which, as we saw when we were considering the freight terminals, back in Chapter VII, is no slight matter of itself. But this traffic, as well as much of that of the great interchange between the railroads terminating at New York, is handled most effectively by the car-floats on each of which twelve to sixteen standard box-cars may be loaded with great expedition.
But the clumsy barges and the lighters and the still clumsier car-floats are of little use without the tugs, and these last are the quick couriers of the harbor. Twenty of that New York Central fleet are kept in constant use in the North and East Rivers, and along the harbor shores to Jersey City, Bayonne, and the southern parts of Brooklyn. They do not lie idle, save when they are finally forced to “lay up” for a little time for repairs. And then a reserve tug is in service without delay.
Here is the modern economy of railroad equipment—even though this be the part of the railroad that is afloat. A tug pulls up to a dock, its crews are off almost before their “relief” is standing at its station, and making sure that the craft is in as good order as they left it. While the “relief” is finding its tired way toward home the tug is off again. Its work is constant. Its work is not easy. It does not seem to be systematic and yet it is—wonderfully systematic.
For here and there about the harbor the captains of these N. Y. C. tugs get their orders—just as conductors of the trains upon the steel highways get their clearance cards and yellow tissues. A half-dozen stations give orders, and these are but the speaking stations of a single man who sits before a telephone switchboard close by a narrow street of down-town Manhattan and directs tug movements through the crowded harbor, just as easily as a despatcher moves extra freights over a crowded stretch of single-track line.