Nor has this phase of the situation improved within recent years. A great railroad rebuilt its passenger terminal in an important city ten years ago and blindly imagined that the increase in facilities would carry it a quarter of a century at the least. To-day it is carrying off the remnants of that station improvement to the scrap-heap and trying to see far enough into the future to build a station that shall last it fifty years at least.
There is not an engineer employed by that railroad who will assert himself as possessed of the absolute belief that the new station will be adequate for the traffic of a half century hence, if indeed the great spreading palace of steel and marble be in existence at all at that time. All that they will tell you is to point to the fact that another one of America’s greatest passenger carriers has doubled its traffic within the past ten years.
“How can we gamble with an unknown future of such dimensions?” they ask you in return.
When the Park Square Station of the Boston & Providence Railroad in Boston and the Grand Central Station in New York were built, in the early seventies, they were the first railroad passenger terminals of size that the country had seen. It was thought that they would stand a hundred years as monuments to the genius of the men who designed them. To-day they are both gone, each supplanted by a station that both together might be packed within.
Do you wonder then that railroad operator and engineer alike stand appalled at the tremendous terminal problem that our great cities, growing awesome overnight, are constantly presenting to them?
In the beginning, there were no passenger or freight terminals, nor, indeed, a traffic that demanded them. The passenger cars were apt to be hauled by horses from some downtown depot through the centre of the street to an “outer depot” at the edge of the town where the locomotive replaced the horses. When the cars became heavier, the trains longer and more frequent, the railroads were gradually forced in most cities to remove their rails from the streets and the use of horses was generally abandoned. Still, passengers crossing Baltimore, for some years after the war on their way from the North to Washington, noticed that the trains were broken into cars and drawn one by one by horses across the city, through crowded streets, from one outer railroad station to the other. A venerable white horse was the switching-engine in the Rochester depot until the beginning of the eighties.
When the passenger traffic on the railroads had become a business of extent—about the middle of the past century—the construction of sizable railroad stations began. The Fitchburg Railroad built its stone fortress at Boston, which still stands and was for many years regarded as a marvel of its sort. Down in Baltimore, the Susquehanna Railroad—afterwards the Northern Central—built Calvert Station, and stanch old Calvert is still a busy passenger gateway of the Monumental City. A few years later the Baltimore & Ohio built Camden Station there and Camden Station was regarded as something rather unusually fine for a number of years.
In the sixties, the railroad terminals grew in size, and the old custom of having separate stations at the far sides of important towns was disappearing, as the American began to see and to demand the advantages of through traffic. So Cleveland built at the close of the war a stone Union Station, of such size that Cleveland folks bragged of it for many years. The stone Union Station at Cleveland is still in use, but the folk of that town do not brag of it nowadays. Cleveland has grown a good deal since they built the Union Station there.
The first real passenger terminals of importance in the country were the Park Square in Boston, and the Grand Central in New York, to which reference has already been made. These presented architectural pretensions such as the railroads of the country had not before offered to the cities they served. They also served as models for bigger things that were to follow. In Boston, the Lowell Road planned and built a large new station, and the era of the passenger terminal was begun.