The great railroad that traverses the State of Pennsylvania is another monument to the engineer. The Pennsylvania Railroad was no wobbly affair at any time. Its grades and curves, considering the character of the country through which its trunk rests, are not excessive. It has been a good standard railroad for a good many years past. But in 1902, the Pennsylvania found that its troubles rested in the volume of traffic that was being offered it. Over its middle division from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh it was handling as much tonnage as J. J. Hill’s entire Great Northern system. The heavy tonnage business began to clog the road’s fast passenger traffic (its especial pride) and the fast freight traffic (the mainstay of its shippers), and appeal was made to the reconstruction engineers.
It was no slight appeal at that. Pittsburgh, handling 400,000 freight cars a month, was clogged, congested with such streams as had never before tried to crowd through that narrow neck of the Pennsylvania’s bottle and the orders that went forth for relief were emphatic. Vice-presidents, general managers, superintendents and general superintendents, and engineers of every sort crowded into the president’s office in Broad Street Station, and out of that conference the plans for an exclusively low-grade freight line from New York to Pittsburgh and for the traffic relief of Pittsburgh itself were born.
Every large city has become, in a sense, a bottle-neck for the important railroads that pierce it. In some cases like Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City or Indianapolis, the situation has been solved by the creation of belt-line freight railroads partly or entirely encircling the town. At Buffalo, the New York Central lines have built a connecting line to enable through traffic to escape the congestion of city yards and terminals, while at New Haven, the road of the same name has recently spent several million dollars in enlarging its narrow throat in the middle of the town.
But nowhere else did the situation approach that at Pittsburgh. Through the Pennsylvania’s passenger station there poured not only an abnormally heavy passenger traffic, owing to a heavy suburban service, but every pound of freight bound between the parent company and its two great subsidiaries, the Panhandle and the Fort Wayne. There were further complications right at the station, owing to the proximity of two of the very worst grade-crossings in America, where Penn and Liberty Avenues swept their busy tides of city traffic all day long over the Fort Wayne’s main line tracks. It was a problem that called for the best in engineering skill—and received it.
The Pennsylvania dug deep into its pocket-book and solved the problem magnificently. It began by going back to the vicinity of its great Pitcairn freight-yards at the east of the city, and from them building two connecting laterals (the one to the south and across the Monongahela River to connect with the Panhandle tracks, the other to the north—known as the Brilliant cut-off) across the Alleghany and connecting with the tracks of the West Penn Railroad, which in turn connected with those of the Fort Wayne in the one-time city of Allegheny. That sounds simple, but it was in reality a fearfully expensive undertaking. The mile of Brilliant cut-off, “heavy work” every inch of it, cost $5,500,000, and is to-day the most expensive mile of railroad track in the world.
But the gripping hand was off the traffic throat of Pittsburgh and commercial Pittsburgh breathed more easily once again. The Union Station and its approach tracks were restored to passenger uses; and in the course of things the Pennsylvania tore down the old station, built a new one, and wiped out the two wicked city crossings, as with the stroke of an Aladdin’s hand.
So much for Pittsburgh. Now consider the great new freight line leading to the east from there. Not all of that railroad has yet been built, but the greater part of it is already completed, and every part of the old road that was under tension because of freight congestion has already been relieved.
To build this new double-track railroad across 350 miles of a mountainous State, the engineers studied two points—grade and curvature. Distance was no object, for speed is the very last attainment of heavy tonnage movement. The new route consisted in part of the enlargement of the old routes, and in part of the construction of brand new line. It started east from Pittsburgh, where the great Brilliant cut-off had been built to relieve the tremendous terminal freight congestion, and followed up the valley of the Alleghany River on the route of the West Penn Road, a Pennsylvania property. The main line of the Pennsylvania comes east from Pittsburgh up the valley of the Monongahela for a distance, and then across country to Blairsville Intersection, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, where it is intercepted by the low-grade freight route.
From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the Pennsylvania’s engineers were ordered to four-track the original double-track through that narrow defile in God’s great world, they shook their heads dubiously; then—after the fashion of engineers—they went ahead and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same narrow pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast out a shelf on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the low-grade line.