The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading. Built in the early eighties from Weehawken, opposite the city of New York, to Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely the New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of the fine business it had held for many years. After a bitter rate war the New York Central, with all the resources and the abilities of the Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively and bought its new rival for a song; but a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been practically useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a relief line for the overflow of through freight.
So the West Shore tracks, adapted for high-class, high-speed through electric service from Utica to Syracuse, represented a happy thought. Under steam conditions only two passenger trains were run over that somewhat moribund property in each direction daily, while the two trains of sleeping cars passing over the tracks at night were of practically no use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions there is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains leaving each terminal hourly, making but a few stops and the run of over forty-four miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local service and the line has become immensely popular. By laying stretches of third and fourth tracks at various points the movement of the New York Central’s overflow through freight has not been seriously incommoded. The electric passenger service is not operated by the New York Central but by the Oneida Railways Company, in which the controlling interests of the steam road have large blocks of stock.
Similarly the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system, running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street-railroad system, though reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system and now operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch. Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas and decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger service than to rent again its branches to outside companies—and perhaps because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of suburban lines in the metropolitan district around New York and wished to test electric traction to its own satisfaction—but ten years ago it changed the suburban service lines from the south up into Rochester from steam to electric. More recently it has tried a third method—by organizing an entirely separate trolley company to build an overhead trolley road paralleling its main line from Waverly, New York, to Corning, New York. In some stretches this new trolley road is built on the right of way of the Erie’s main line.
The Erie people have preferred to conduct their electrification experiments in outlying lines of comparatively slight traffic rather than to commit themselves to a great electrification problem in their congested territory round New York and make some blunder that could be rectified only at a cost of many millions of dollars. That seems good sense, and the Pennsylvania followed the same plan. While its great new station in New York was still a matter of engineer’s blueprints, it began practical experiments with electric traction in the flat southern portion of New Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally situated in every respect for such experiments—its original and rather indirect route from Camden to Atlantic City, which had since been more or less superseded by a shorter “air-line” route. The third rail was installed and the new line became at once popular for suburban traffic in and out of Philadelphia and for the great press of local traffic between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Of the success of that move on the part of the Pennsylvania there has never been the slightest question. Regular trains have been operated for several years over this route at a high rate of speed, and not the slightest difficulty has been found in maintaining the schedules.
In the Far West the Southern Pacific has made notable progress in the application of electricity as a motive power for branch-line traffic. Practically all of its many suburban lines in and around Portland and Oakland (just across the bay from San Francisco) are today being operated in this way—which enables modern steel passenger trains of two or three coaches to be operated at very frequent intervals, thus providing a branch-line service practically impossible to obtain in any other way. When, in the next chapter, we come to consider the automobile as a factor in railroad transportation, we shall consider this entire question of branch-line operation in far greater detail. I always have considered it one of the great neglected opportunities of the average American railroad. But to take advantage of it means a more intense study of its details and its problems. Our railroads, as you know already, have been woefully under officered. It is chiefly because of this serious defect in their organization that the branch lines, their problems and their possibilities, have so long been neglected.
One thing more before we are entirely away from this entire question of the electric operation of the standard railroad: The use of this silent, all-powerful motive force is by no means to be confined to suburban or to branch lines. The New Haven management is steadily engaged in lengthening and extending its New York suburban zone. In the beginning, while it still was in a decidedly experimental state, this zone extended only from the Grand Central Terminal to Stamford, Connecticut—some thirty-four miles all told. Now it has been extended and completed through to New Haven, practically twice the original distance. In a little while it is probable that the New Haven will have completed another link in this great electric chain which slowly but surely it is weaving for itself. And there are traffic experts in New England who do not hesitate to express their belief that in another ten years, perhaps in half that time, all through traffic between New York and Boston—235 miles—will move behind electric locomotives.
There is nothing particularly visionary in this. Last year I rode a longer distance than that on a standard express train—the Olympian, one of the finest trains upon the North American continent, which means, of course, in the whole world. And the electrification of the main line of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway, whose boast it is that it owns and operates the Olympian, was then but half complete. To be even more exact, only one-half of the first unit of installation, from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, had been installed. Workmen were still busy west of Deer Lodge, rigging, stretching the wires, finishing the substations and making the busy line ready for electric locomotives all the way through to Avery. And it was announced that when Avery was reached and the first contract-section completed—440 miles, about equal to the distance between New York and Buffalo—work would be started on another great link to the west; this one to reach the heart of Spokane itself. And in a little longer time electric locomotives would be hauling the yellow trains of the Milwaukee right down to tidewater at Seattle—a span of trollified line equaling roughly about one-half the entire run from Chicago to Puget Sound.[9]
THE OLYMPIAN