Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a dozen switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no longer. They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals, cars that are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting begins. The night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser officers in the field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns in hand, they are running along the trains (these are pulling in from the waterfront every five minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping and revamping the freight traffic of the night.
This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for Pittsburgh, the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the points diverging therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has been in progress for more than an hour at one end of the classification tracks, there are long trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some large city or important distributing point. After that it is a simple enough matter to bring engines and cabooses and start the trains through. Then the sorting of the cars is begun again and continues until the freight receiving points and the freight interchange points in the metropolitan district have been swept clean for the night.
The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller scale, for it handles package freight—“less than carload.” It is a long structure, stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long sidings and unloading sheds. It takes the “LCL” stuff coming by night from the connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses, and a little after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great mass of matter, from 200 to 500 carloads a day.
Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day and by night.
You ship a box—sixty pounds to one hundred pounds—from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.; a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, ad infinitum. You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a problem in freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail service. Ten thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising here and there and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to destination, make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts have finished their difficult work.
If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the problem would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds weight, or less, perhaps—“LCL” anyway. From its destination it goes with other boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house the car in which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track, seals are broken, doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The transfer-house is roomy and systematic. If it were anything less it would resemble chaos.
But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting points have regular stands, upon which nightly are placed cars bound for these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house), each transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite that number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is mail-sorting on a Titanic scale.
Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one of the switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to replace it. Beyond that, the yardmaster’s superiors are all the time demanding that he show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.
When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects forfeits from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not expedite its passage; this the railroaders know as “per diem.” The great trick in operating is to keep per diem down; and so the “foreign” cars, so called, must be promptly returned to their home roads.
“We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern from Chicago every day,” the man who has this yard in charge explains. “It’s up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I can’t, I do the best I can.” He scratches his head. “Perhaps I’ll use a Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not, something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out beyond Washington there’d be trouble, and I’ve got to dig out something empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell. Mos’ generally, though, when we’ve got a turn of Western stuff, I’ve got my ‘empty’ tracks stuffed full o’ them New England cars.”