Here, then, is another of the great practical lessons that these three fateful years are teaching America. Consider now how she may avail herself of this particular lesson—the coordination of her great systems of more than a quarter of a million miles of standard steam railroads with an orderly and intelligent military plan, against any invasion. Other nations have had to build railroads with a particular relation to military strategy. Keen-minded Belgians and Frenchmen long ago noted the tendency of Germany to build double-track railroads to comparatively unimportant points upon her western front—since then they have had the opportunity to see the wartime efficiency of these lines, suddenly turned in an August from practical stagnation into busy, flowing currents of military traffic. Of the strategic value of double-track routes, much more in a moment. For this moment consider the location of the principal rail lines of the United States—particularly in their reference to the defense of the nation.
The “vital area” of the country, so called, is the coast territory between Portland, Maine, and Washington, District of Columbia, and resting east of the sharp ridges of the Alleghenies. Here is a great part of the wealth, the population, and the banking of the United States. Fortunately, however, this is the district best supplied with efficient railroads, double-tracked, triple-tracked, quadruple-tracked. And a reference to the map will quickly show that these lines are particularly well adapted to coast defense. From the extreme northeastern tip of Maine down to Key West and around the white and curving shore of the Gulf to Brownsville and the mouth of the Rio Grande there is hardly a strategical point that is not well served by existing railroads. North of Boston, the Boston and Maine and the Maine Central systems run, not alone parallel to the coast, but by means of a network of other lines intersecting their coast lines, are prepared to serve them from the inland country every few miles. The importance of this last fact comes to mind when one realizes the possibility of an invading force eluding our naval patrols and cutting our coast line railroads. With a network of adequate line behind the one actually closest to the shore, important communication would not be interrupted for any considerable time.
Boston is linked with New York by three distinct routes of the New Haven system; with Chicago by the Boston and Albany, in practical effect a branch stem of the New York Central system. Nor are these three stems the only protection that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad extends to New England. The exposed and bended arm of Cape Cod is a weak point in the nation’s “vital area.” The New Haven holds and controls the one-time Old Colony Railroad which reaches the old whaling ports of Plymouth, New Bedford, and Provincetown—a railroad which might at any time become of vast strategic importance and which should be at once double-tracked, by the Federal government, if necessary, for the same reason that Germany double-tracked her lines leading to her French and Belgian border. And only second in importance to the Old Colony in case of an attempted invasion from across the Atlantic is the Long Island Railroad, stretching straight out of the city of New York to the very tip of the island. Between the Rockaways and Montauk there are many points on the south edge of Long Island that offer possibilities to landing parties. And it is essential that the railroad that serves this peculiarly barren bit of coast within two hours’ rail run of the largest city upon the American continent be prepared to serve it well in the case of military necessity. Fortunately the Long Island Railroad has been vastly improved—its double-track increased—within the past ten years. It is no longer barred by the East River from actual track connections with the other railroads of the country. The great Pennsylvania tunnels already make it possible in a military emergency to pour filled train and empty, on short headway, into Long Island. The strategic value to the nation of these tunnels will soon be supplemented by the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River which will bind the Pennsylvania and the Long Island railroads with the main lines of the New Haven and the New York Central. This bridge cannot be completed too quickly. It is of immediate strategic necessity.
From New York south the same main-stem railroad that served the North so well in the days of the Civil War still stands. It has, however, ceased to be a chain of railroads, with ferriage at Havre de Grace and heartrending transfers by horse cars across Philadelphia and Baltimore, as it was in the days when New England and the York State and the Jersey regiments went down to Washington and over across the Potomac. From Baltimore north, this ancient stem is now the Pennsylvania Railroad, four-tracked or double-tracked the entire distance, rich in surplus locomotives and cars, and halted no longer by either the Delaware or the Susquehanna rivers. Since the close of the Civil War the Pennsylvania has builded its own line from Baltimore to Washington, while the Baltimore and Ohio, which owned that section of the ancient stem, has thrust its own line up into Philadelphia, coming from that point to Jersey City over the main-line rails of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey systems. This means that there are today between these parallel railroad systems eight main-line tracks from New York to Philadelphia and from four to six from Philadelphia through Baltimore to Washington. It is a combined railroad trunk of which a nation might well be proud. And this nation may yet be profoundly grateful that it has such a railroad trunk, through the heart of its “vital area.”
Consider again this “vital area”—the great metropolitan districts of Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore—almost a continuous city, in fact, all the way along the Atlantic coast from the south tip of Maine to the Potomac. It stretches west to the Alleghenies, in fact we may say a little beyond them, to include such vigorous communities as Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo. Here in this “vital area” of the nation are more than eighty per cent of its munition-making plants, its largest hard coal and soft coal deposits, its steel-making plants, its greatest shipyards and its three most important navy yards. Major General Leonard Wood has said that 1,500,000 men would be necessary to properly defend the coast-line from Portland, Maine, to Washington. Therefore the railroad main stem that connects these cities and the many larger cities between them is the most important military base line upon this continent. It needs all the resources of two- and four- and even six-tracked railroads, for General Wood has gone on record as saying that in a national crisis it might be necessary to move half a million men on this great base line within the course of ten short hours. On a conservative estimate these would require 500 trains—trains which, stood end to end, would reach all the way from New York to Washington or to Utica. Such a train movement would stagger even the imagination of a passenger-traffic manager accustomed to figure the “business” in and out of a national inauguration or a big football game at Princeton or New Haven or Cambridge.
A railroader whose pencil has a quick aptitude for figures has estimated that Germany has seven and a half locomotives for every ten miles of track. We have one-third that proportion. Yet the preponderance of what our railroad men like to call “motive power” lies east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio. The same thing is true of cars—cars of every sort and variety. That is not the problem. Here it is.
Suppose, if you will, that an enemy finding an entrance to America on the sandy south shore of Long Island—to choose the spot most in the favor of the writers of the lurid fiction of an imaginary war between some European nation and the United States—has actually succeeded in capturing the city of New York. The great military base line of America is broken at its most important point. How are Major General Wood and the rest of the men who are puzzling the great problem out with him, going to move a half-million men—a half or a quarter of that number from New England over into Pennsylvania or down toward the defense lines around the national capital?
Take a look at your railroad map. Look sharply! You will need to look sharply to see the second line of communication between New England and the rest of the nation. There it is—a thin and wavering railroad line, stretching from New Haven up through the Connecticut hills, spanning the Hudson on the slender tracery of the Poughkeepsie bridge and threading still more hills until it reaches Trenton, New Jersey, and the main base line once again. The nation may yet thank a gentleman named Charles S. Mellen for that second line of communication. For while the much discussed ex-president of the New Haven did not build the Poughkeepsie bridge or the New England lines leading to it, he at least caused both of them to be double-tracked, curves and grades ironed out until one heavily laden coal train could follow close upon the heels of another.