That young man in the Chambersburg railroad office should be under a course of instruction today, as to the emergency use of his railroad, his division. The division is the operating unit of the railroad in America. Therefore a scheme for the military use of the railroad should begin with its head, the superintendent. In the superintendent’s office of every railroad division that may have possible military value, there should be a member of the army reserve corps, making the plan for the possible military use of his division. In the general superintendent’s office there should be another reserve officer studying the schemes of the several divisions that center there. Similarly the process should be repeated in the general manager’s and the president’s offices, where authority converges still further. This is important work, vital training, if you please. It is hardly the sort of detail work to be placed upon the shoulders of a railroad executive, already burdened with a vast amount of other detail.
The best army training is that which simulates, as far as possible, the actual conditions that might arise in the case of real war. That is why the maneuvers that were held in the East at various times during the past decade have been of tremendous value. They should be repeated and the railroads should be asked to play their part at a moment’s notice. To play that part well at so short a notice means planning in advance. The New Haven railroad recently, on the occasion of the Harvard-Yale game and the inauguration of Yale Bowl, brought sixty-five trains carrying 33,409 passengers into New Haven between 9:26 A.M. and 2:00 P.M.—the record passenger movement in the history of American railroading. Not one of those trains was late, not even to the fraction of a minute. In the very first hour of the afternoon, 22 trains, 221 passenger coaches all told, arrived at an interval of slightly over two minutes—226 passengers to the minute. And the detraining and entraining of these passengers was accomplished with military precision.
But the New Haven’s remarkable performance was the result of planning—planning to the last detail. No wonder that John A. Droege, its general superintendent, is qualified to speak of the military possibilities of the railroad. But Droege knows that advance plans are of vital necessity. Of course, our railroads have met difficult situations when it has become absolutely necessary. The Ohio floods of three years ago proved their ability to meet a great emergency in a great manner. In a few hours many miles of their tracks were completely washed away, hundreds of bridges destroyed, their lines thrown into apparently hopeless confusion. Yet the railroaders never lost their heads. They arranged to reroute their through trains. Then and there it was that the Lake Shore railroad—running from Buffalo to Chicago—showed its resources. For it took upon its broad shoulders the trains from all these completely blocked lines—the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Erie—and for long days tripled its ordinary traffic without apparently feeling the great overload.
Yet this traffic was in some sense routine and it was moving over one of the most generously equipped railroads in America. The military plan, as we have already seen, may have to make large strategic use of railroad lines of comparatively unimportant strength. It is here that the definite plan—from the superintendent’s office upward—counts. It is gratifying to know that the military bill provides an opportunity for the construction of such a plan, gratifying to know that the War College at Washington has succeeded in its detailed study of the use of our railroads in time of war.
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An outline map of the United States showing the railroad routes
of greatest strategic military importance.
It is upon such a study that Mr. Willard was enabled to give the railroad presidents whom he summoned to the Federal Capital such a lucid statement of the parts that each of them and their railroads would be expected to fulfill. Further than this, they are yet to evolve recommendations for terminal yards and double trackings which in an emergency would probably prove of tremendous military value but for which there is no commercial justification whatsoever. It is expected that the United States government will pay for construction work of this sort. It is entirely fit that it should. There hardly can be two sides to this question. The only question comes as to how rapidly these needed improvements can be made, particularly the emergency terminals. It will be unfortunate, to say the least, to attempt to move an army of any real size into a seaport important in a military or naval sense, but inadequately equipped with terminal sidings. It takes, roughly speaking, one mile of railroad train to handle one thousand troops and their accoutrements. To bring an army of fifty thousand men—a very moderate army, indeed—into a smaller city would require the prompt handling and unloading of fifty miles of train. These are the military railroad necessities which must be planned and built by the Federal government—without delay.
All these things are going to cost time and thought—and money. And it is because of this last factor that I have placed this entire question of the military development of our railroads at the end of opportunity and at the beginning of necessity—the immediate needs of the railroad, which we are now going to consider.