These are pertinent questions. They come with added force upon a statement of the present plight of our overland carriers and before one comes to consider the measures of immediate relief that must be granted them. They must be considered too—briefly, but with a due appreciation of their importance. The railroaders of vision—and I have never believed that there was a really big railroader who lacked vision—today are thinking of them.
For a beginning take the possibility of the application of electricity as a motive power in the operation of the railroad. Our overland carriers have only begun to sound the vast possibilities of this great agent of energy. To many of the roads, its present attainments both in Europe and in America are still, in large measure, a closed book. They have little realization of what was accomplished in suburban electrification in Paris or in Berlin well before the beginning of the war; hardly greater realization of the marvels wrought in the suburban zones of New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco. And the tremendous accomplishment of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway in transforming nearly 500 miles of its main line over the crest of the Rocky Mountains is still so new and so dazzling as to have given railroad managers in other sections of the land little opportunity to consider its opportunities as applied to their own properties.
Within the past few years the folk of the East have seen several important terminals—terminals really vast in their proportions and their accommodations—developed in the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard. There have been important passenger stations erected in other parts of the land—the new Union Station in Kansas City, the Union Station at Minneapolis, and the North Western Terminal at Chicago coming first to mind among these. But the passenger terminal developments along the Atlantic seaboard have differed from those of the Middle West chiefly in the fact that into their planning and construction has been interwoven the use of electricity as a motive power for the trains which are to use them. Practically every one of these is so designed as to make its operation by steam power impossible.
The ambitious good taste of many of our cities growing into a real metropolitanism has been gratified in this decade of our national progress by the erection of monumental passenger stations. These structures invariably are more than merely creditable—they are impressive, majestic, beautiful. Yet the big railroaders do not always see them in this light. They find themselves, by one means or another, compelled to gratify local civic pride by the expenditure of hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars more than it would cost to build a plain, efficient terminal, large enough to accommodate the traffic of both today and tomorrow. The extra expenditure goes to produce a granite palace, generally ornate and sometimes extravagant to the last degree.
Yet in all this widespread development of the American terminal, one at least has been evolved which is not merely monumental, but an economic solution of its own great cost. I refer to the new Grand Central Terminal in the city of New York.
You may recall the old Grand Central Station. It was no mean terminal. Commodore Vanderbilt built it himself soon after the close of the Civil War. The passenger business of the railroads of the land was then beginning to be a considerable thing. Americans were gaining the travel habit. The genus commuter had been born. The first of the railroad Vanderbilts saw all these things. And, because he had the fine gift of vision, he turned his far-seeing toward action. On Forty-second Street—then a struggling crossroad at the back of New York—he erected the greatest railroad terminal in the world. It was indeed a giant structure, and the biggest of our American towns had, in its Grand Central depot, a toy over which it might brag for many and many a day.
New York was in genuine ecstasy about it. Its ornate and graceful train shed spanned thirteen tracks, and even if our fathers did wonder where all the cars could come from to fill so spacious an apartment they had to marvel at its beauty. And beyond this creation of the artist was the creation of the engineer—the huge switching yard, black and interlaced with steel tracks. It was a mightily congested railroad yard; upon its tight-set edges the growing city pressed. Skyscrapers sprang up roundabout and looked down upon the cars and locomotives. The value of that land, given as a switching yard for a passenger terminal, eventually was reckoned close to $100,000,000. And the yard itself became a black barrier to the development of the heart of metropolitan New York.