The traffic runs flood-high and the station men gossip of the whispered complaints of the tug-crews, but the man at the switchboard only smiles. A traffic solicitor who plies his heartbreaking work on the floor of the near-by Produce Exchange comes over to him and says:
“I’ve promised Smith & Russell delivery of ten cars of flour at Pier 32, East River, at seven o’clock to-morrow morning. We can’t go back on them.”
The man at the switchboard does not lose that smooth-set smile, even though the loudly ticking clock, just above the plugs and cords, shows him that it is already six o’clock of the evening of a day when the harbor freight has run flood-high.
“All right,” he laughs, “Smith & Russell can count upon us.”
And the next moment he is ordering Tug Twenty-seven to go from the Sixtieth Street pier over to Weehawken to get that small mountain-range of flour-bags that the “huskies” have already begun to build on a pier-floor, alongside of a string of dusty, grimy cars that have bumped their way east from Minneapolis.
Perhaps you are interested in the personality of Tug Twenty-seven. Take yourself away from the cool-witted despatcher and look down upon this craft—the queen of a railroad pet marine. She is as resplendent in her green and gold as any gentleman’s yacht, and her crew even more proud of her. She stands in the water, a mere 110 feet long and 24½ feet beam, but those wonderful shining engines in her heart can develop 1,200 horse-power—as much as many steamboats of three times her size. Her watertube boilers can withstand a locomotive pressure of 185 pounds to the square inch, she has all the accoutrements of coast liners—steam steering gears and electric lights among them. No wonder that her captain waxes eloquent about her.
Now ask him about what she can do. That he takes as personal achievement, and these harbor men are a bashful lot. Still, you can worm it out of him, and after a while you find that Tug Twenty-seven has just brought a punt-nosed car-float, with sixteen loaded cars upon her rails, around from Corlears Hook, through the press of shipping, and around the Battery where cross-tides battle against one another and against craft of all sorts, up to Weehawken “bridge” in forty minutes—which is not so very bad for a ten-mile run through a congested harbor.
“Time counts,” adds the captain. “If they had given me another twelve or fifteen minutes I could have brought around two of the floats—put together ‘V’ fashion and the Twenty-seven with her nose stuck up into the ‘V’.”
In the harbor of New York is a great cluster of ferry-boats operated to overcome her barrier rivers by the several trunk-line railroads whose systems terminate at a long water-jump from the congested Island of Manhattan. To compete with railroads boasting terminals on Manhattan Island itself, these lines have been compelled to equip and operate extensive ferry fleets across both the East and the North Rivers. Across the first of these streams operates the navy of the Long Island Railroad, while across the Hudson ply in an intricate interlacing more than a dozen ferry routes of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, and the West Shore Railroads. The recent completion of the New York-Jersey City-Newark routes of the Hudson tunnels, as well as the inauguration of passenger traffic through both North and East River tunnels to the new Pennsylvania terminal in Manhattan, has caused the abandonment of two ferry routes and curtailment of service upon several others. Tunnel-diggers and bridge-builders make havoc with ferry routes, which must always remain liable to many delays because of fog, floating ice, and such other adverse weather conditions.