When the Pennsylvania Railroad built Broad Street Station, at Philadelphia, it built a terminal a little finer than anything accomplished up to that time. Even to-day, with the dignity of years creeping upon it, Broad Street is still one of the foremost American stations. The policy of its owners has been to keep it abreast of the demands of the day, and only recently it has been greatly enlarged again, its protecting, interlocking, and signal system being made second to none in the world. To the traveller, the ivory-white waiting-room, where Philadelphians delight to congregate, is an unending source of admiration; engineers find interest in the intricate system of tunnels and bridges by which a number of trunk-line divisions are brought into the station without crossing at level. Broad Street Station shows a yearly increase in its passenger traffic of about five per cent. It has a daily movement of more than 600 loaded trains in and out, in addition to a heavy switching movement. But because of the steady increase of its traffic the Pennsylvania has already planned to relieve it by building a new main for express trains out at West Philadelphia. When that is done Broad Street will be used exclusively for suburban traffic. A short distance away stands the Market Street Station, of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a terminal rivalling Broad Street in beauty, and only slightly inferior in capacity. Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
But the first big station terminals—in our American sense that a thing big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world—were those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention.
The Boston terminal—South Station—was preceded by a giant structure erected along the bank of the Charles River to receive a multitude of through and suburban railroad lines entering from the north. This terminal—North Station—embraced the structure of the Boston & Lowell Railroad and superseded those of the Boston & Maine and Fitchburg railroads. The merging of these and other interests into the present Boston & Maine made the North Station a possibility. It is not a structure of particular distinction, from either an architectural or an engineering standpoint, but it has proved itself a mighty convenience to a travelling public, using a multiplicity of busy lines.
The convenience of it made the South Station a possibility. Boston, like Philadelphia, spreads out well beyond its actual boundaries and measures itself as a vast community, including many near-by cities and villages. With the consolidation of a number of railroads in Southern New England into the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, and the popularity of the North Station so close at hand, the South Station came as a matter of course. It replaced the stations of the New York & New England—whose site forms part of its site—the Old Colony, the Boston & Albany, and the Park Square Station. To accommodate the vast traffic of all these railroads, a great terminal was designed and built, a thing whose bigness is hardly realized by the passenger coming and going through it and who knows it only as a thing of some thousands of shuffling feet, giant shadows, and long distances.
In addition to the 28 sub-tracks in the train-shed, South Station is, in effect, a through station for electric suburban traffic. This service has not yet been installed, but the tracks are ready for use upon short notice, when the facilities of the main train-shed shall become overtaxed. This through station has been ingeniously devised underneath the train-shed and waiting-rooms of the terminal. It is served by two tracks leading from the main entrance tracks to the station—guarded by separate interlocking and tower controls, and consists of two extensive loops. For suburban service, with no baggage to be handled, these loops will some day afford a great accommodation. Three or four electric trains may be stood upon each. The time and necessity of reversing the trains is entirely obviated, and upon the two tracks of this sub-station a short-haul traffic can be handled almost equal in numbers to that of the train-shed overhead.
What such a statement means can be better realized by a recourse to bold statistics. South Station handled 31,831,390 passengers in 1909, who travelled two and fro in some 800 trains daily. It has handled more than 900 trains in a single day. Its baggage men take care of more than 2,500,000 trunks in a twelvemonth. The statistics of a city gate like South Station are, in themselves, sizable.
St. Louis has one passenger station to serve as city gate for the traffic that comes and goes at that important railroad centre. That gate is the chief through passenger traffic point of the world. From its train-shed one may take through trains to every corner of the United States and a few distant corners of Mexico and Canada. St. Louis, like most Western cities has no volume of suburban traffic as New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, but it is a consequential point for through passengers. The better to serve the needs of the 22 different railroad systems entering that city, the Union Station was built a dozen years ago. It was thought to be big enough to last St. Louis many years. Before the World’s Fair of 1904 opened in that city the Union Station was already judged inadequate, and an elaborate plan was consummated for its enlargement.
When the Union Station was originally planned, St. Louis demanded a gate that would be worthy of her size and dignity. No type of through station would do, the head-house terminal was demanded and built, even though in actual practice it necessitated backing each arriving train into the shed. A station of giant size with the largest train-shed in the world was built and hailed with a glad acclaim by the Western town.
When the station was found inadequate, the engineers found their plans for enlarging it would have to be adapted to a very confined area, proscribed by immovable railroad properties to the south, highway viaducts to the east and west, and a granite head-house, costing several million dollars, to the north. Within that confined area, they were to correct the evils of insufficient capacity—a train-shed with a single 4-track throat and some standing tracks of but 3 cars’ length, inadequate baggage arrangements, and lesser evils. Within two years, they had substituted, without increasing the area of the Union Station property, a 10-car capacity for each of the 32 tracks of the train-shed, a double throat with 6 tracks, increased concourses and distributing platforms for passengers, and a complete subway system for the handling of baggage. The prosecution of that work, while the station was in constant and busy use, ranks as one of the marvels of latter-day practical engineering.
From the standpoint of the architect, no other station has yet been built in the United States that can compare with the new Union Station at Washington. For years, the overcrowded railroad stations at that city have been but wretched gateways to the national capitol. Now the city that is fast becoming the Mecca of all Americans has an entrance worthy of her dignity, and in keeping with the increasing magnificence of her architectural works.