The Modern Railroad

by Edward Hungerford

So in considering the terminal station as a building, we must still give ear to the engineer. He must plan for the future, anticipate the number of persons who are to pass through this city’s gate fifty years hence, and plan his concourse, so many square inches for each one of those future users of the terminal. Exits and entrances to the trains must be built in order that incoming and outgoing streams of persons shall not conflict. All these points require careful study. It is possible to design a baggage-room so bad as to make the station all but a failure; a stuffy ticket-office that is almost an impossibility to use under pressure conditions. The good engineer thinks two or three thousand times before he begins the design of a passenger terminal.

The concourse, or head platform, that joins all the different track platforms is the main feature of the terminal building. Upon it some persons congregate preparatory to going through the gates to their trains, and other persons congregate awaiting the arrival of trains—a matter which is carefully bulletined for their convenience. Arriving and departing passengers, with a percentage of idlers, must be accommodated upon it. It must be capacious. Exits to the street should be provided, without the necessity of passing through the station building, and the carriage stand should be close at hand.

The waiting-room will be the monumental and artistic expression of the terminal. It may or may not be a portion of the entrance to the concourse and train-shed, but it is essential that it be conveniently located, that smoking-rooms, women’s waiting-rooms, parcel-check, telephone, telegraph, news-stand, and restaurant facilities be close at hand. It is hardly less desirable that the ticket-offices adjoin the waiting-room yet the architect who so places his ticket-offices that the belated traveller has unnecessary delay in purchasing his tickets, will bring down unnumbered curses upon his defenceless head.

The modern station will make provision for numerous railroad offices—be a complete modern office-building in fact, although not emblazoning that in its architectural design—and will have lunch-stand and restaurant facilities, with their necessary addenda of store-rooms, refrigerators and kitchens, as complete as those of the largest hotels.

The baggage accommodations deserve a paragraph by themselves. Americans, due to the liberal baggage provisions of our railroads, travel each year with increased impedimenta. Each year the task of the baggage-handlers multiplies. Making room for trunks has come to be an important terminal provision. In the large terminals, this traffic is divided, an in-baggage room receiving from incoming trains and distributing to various forms of city baggage delivery and an out-baggage room receiving and checking baggage for outgoing trains. The in-baggage room is always much the largest, because of the delays that almost invariably hold trunks for a time—short or long—upon their arrival at a terminal.

It is desirable that baggage be handled with as little inconvenience as possible to passengers; and for this reason almost all terminals have subways extending from the “in” and “out” rooms beneath all train-shed platforms and connected with each of these by elevators, large enough to receive a full-sized baggage-truck. In this way annoyance and delay to passengers is minimized. In the case of heavy through trains, where baggage runs unusually heavy, the baggage-cars are frequently detached and switched in upon special tracks that run alongside the baggage rooms.

The passenger terminal must also provide mail and express facilities among these structures, but these, as has already been intimated, are generally apart and quite separate from the passenger facilities. A power plant is another necessity. The buildings must be heated, cars warmed in freezing weather long before the locomotives are attached, ice-machines operated for the station restaurant, power supplied to elevators, dynamos, and lesser mechanisms about the terminal. This is a feature that is not radically different from that of other large commercial structures.

The capacity of a modern railroad is measured by the capacity of its terminals rather than by that of its main line tracks. The railroads were not quick to realize nor to appreciate this fact at the first. It was finally forced upon their attention, and in that way became one of the fundamental principles of American railroad construction and operation.

The terminal became recognized as one of the most efficient possible solutions of the congestion problem, a little more than a quarter of a century ago. It was then that the double-tracking and four-tracking devices were found to measure all out of cost with the relief that was to be derived from them. It was then that the engineers were told to meet the situation with a relief that should be measurably low in cost.

The result of their work has been to put America foremost with her railroad terminals. The engineers have worked against great odds in many cases. The railroads in the beginning took little or no forethought for their terminals. They neglected rare opportunities to buy land for these facilities in the beginning, when the cities were small and the land cheap. They have paid in millions of dollars for this neglect. In some cases, the early railroads had little money to expend upon this city real estate; but in few cases did any of their managers have the gift of prophecy that made them foresee the great cities of to-day or the great tides of traffic they would be called upon to move.