THE PASSENGER STATIONS
Early Trains for Suburbanites—Importance of the Towerman—Automatic Switch Systems—The Interlocking Machine—Capacities of the Largest Passenger Terminals—Room for Locomotives, Car-storage, etc.—Storing and Cleaning Cars—The Concourse—Waiting-rooms—Baggage Accommodations—Heating—Great Development of Passenger Stations—Some Notable Stations in America.
The railroad terminal is the city gate. Without, it rises in the superior arrogance of white granite, as an architectural something. It has broad portals, and through these portals a host of folk both come and go. Within, this city gate is a thing of stupendous apartments and monumental dimensions, a thing not to be grasped in a moment. In a single great apartment—a vaulted room so great as to have its dimensions run into distant vistas—are the steam caravans that come and go. It is a busy place, a place of an infinite variety of business.
In the early morning the train-shed gives the first sign of the new-born day. Before the dawn is well upon the city, the great arcs that run into those distant vistas in wonderful symmetry are hissing and alight, and the first of 500 incoming trains is finding its way into the gloom of the shed. Some few trains have started out with the early mails and the morning papers. The great rush into town is yet to begin.
Even before dawn, a thousand little homes without the city have been awake and fretful. The gray fogs of the night lie low, and lights begin to twinkle, lines of shuffling figures to find their way to the nearest suburban station. It is very early morning when these begin to pass through the city gate. The earliest suburban trains slip in from the yards and come to a slow, grinding stop beneath the shed. Before the wheels have ceased turning, the first of the workers is off the cars and running down the platform. In fifteen seconds, the platform is black with men.
There are many more of these trains, a great multiplication of men within a little time. Before seven o’clock, the trains begin to increase; to follow more and more closely upon one another’s heels. After seven, they come still oftener; two or three of them may stop simultaneously on different tracks under the great vault of the shed; they are heavy with people. There is a constant clatter of engines, stamping and puffing, dragging their heavily laden trains and snapping them quickly out of the way of others to follow. The electric lights under the shed go out with a protesting sputter, and you realize that the day is at hand. This mighty army of those who live without the city walls is flocking in, in an unceasing current now. There is an endless procession from the track platforms; a stream of humans finding its way to the day’s work.
Do you want figures so that you may see the might of this army? Binghamton, N. Y., is a city; a little less than fifty thousand persons live there. If the whole population of Binghamton—every man, woman, and child—were poured through the portals of this terminal on any one of six mornings of the week, it would be about equal to this suburban traffic. In a single hour—from seven to eight—45 trains have arrived under the roof of this shed and discharged their human freight; in the following hour, 64 trains empty another great brigade of the army from without the city walls.
The city gate is indeed a busy place. Its concourse or head platform echoes all day long with the unending tread of shuffling feet; beyond the fence, with its bulletins and ticket-examiners, is the vault of the train-shed, a thing of great shadows, even in midday. Its echoes are also unending. There seems to be no end of pushing and shoving and hauling among the engines; there must be an infinite stock of trains somewhere without. The human stream flows all the while.