He rode in his car north from Ogden one day, toward the great National Park of the Yellowstone. At that time the only direct rail entrance to that splendid reserve was by the rival Hill lines. Harriman had called for a report upon the opportunities for the Southern Pacific to strike its own line into the west edge of the Park. That report was being explained to him in great detail as he rode north from Ogden. His chiefs had a hundred practical reasons against building the line. Harriman listened faithfully to the explanation, as was his way. Then he turned to one of the signers of the report, a high officer of his property.
“You have never been in the Yellowstone?” he asked.
The officer admitted that he had not.
“I have,” said Harriman triumphantly, “and I am going to build that road.”
That road was built and became successful from its beginning; but Harriman was a railroader with the intuitive sense that gives genius to a great statesman or to a great general. The average railroad president does not hold a controlling interest himself and he must be guided pretty carefully by the judgment of his department heads; he must win the coöperation of his board by tact and subtlety rather than by the display of an iron will; and where he leads he must take the responsibility.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, as has already been told in an earlier chapter, recently forced its entrance into New York City and marked its terminal there with a monumental station. That move was a strategy of the highest order, and was made that the road might place itself upon an even fighting basis for traffic with its chief competitor. But it cost. Two mighty rivers had to be crossed, whole blocks of high-priced real estate secured, a busy city threaded, the opposition of local authorities (who stood with palms outstretched) honestly downed. That all cost. That would have been a mighty expenditure for the Federal Government; for a private corporation it was all but staggering.
When the station was finished, a rarely beautiful thing with its classic public rooms, its long vistas, and its vast dimensions, that private corporation built, within a niche of the great waiting-room, a bronze figure of its former president, the late A. J. Cassatt, where all hurrying humanity might see it. But, though a thousand nervous travellers see that statue in the passing of a single hour, not a hundred of them will know the splendid tragedy it represents; for many of the high officers of that railroad—some of the men who caused the bronze to be erected—to this day believe that the production of that great station was the cause of the death of their chief. He had dreamed of that terminal for years; his engineer had deemed it all but impossible, and he had sent overseas for other engineers. One of these, who had conquered the busy Thames, said that he could tunnel the two great rivers. He was asked the cost, and he gave it. His first figures were staggering, but the railroad president did not abandon his hope. He summoned his board and put the problem to them.
There was pulling power between that president and his board, and the pulling was all in a single direction. Their system—a railroad that acknowledged no superior—could not keep in the very front rank without its terminal in the heart of the seaboard city, eliminating forever the delays and the inconveniences of a ferry service; the road could not afford to drop into second rank, and so it assumed the great undertaking.
That meant many things more than laymen understand; the selling of securities in delicate markets, home and foreign, which fluctuate wildly on the promulgation of anticorporation talk; the evading of untiring competitors; the appeasing of hungry politicians, only too anxious to feed at the hands of a wealthy corporation. In this case, it meant more than all these things, for the two rivers were quite as treacherous as the American engineers had pronounced them. They would sound in their tunnel bearings and find rock which seemed soft, and their dynamite charges would be sufficient. Then it would prove hard, and their blast as inefficient as that of a child’s toy cannon. Again, the rock would drill as hard as the hardest gneiss—the very backbone of Mother Earth herself, and the hard-rock men would prepare a heavy charge of dynamite. Then the stuff was as soft as gravel, and their heavy charge would have torn off the roofs of half a dozen houses. When they were under one of the rivers they found its bed—the roof of their tunnel—as soft as mud. There came a day when the little foaming swirls of water above their headings became a geyser: the river-bed had blown entirely out.
After that, some of the younger engineers felt like throwing themselves into the wicked river, but the biggest engineer of all never lost his faith. He sent upstream and brought down a whole Spanish Armada of clumsy scows, each heaped high with sticky clay. That clay—in thousands of cubic yards—made a new river-bottom and the tunnel shields went forward.