Our Railroads To-Morrow. Edward Hungerford
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use to it. They are too deep to be of freight service to the heart of metropolitan New York. To Brooklyn, with a population almost equal to that of Manhattan, to Queens, and to the Bronx they eventually were made of some slight service.
This was not the big part of Smith’s job, however. He made a quick survey of the entire situation in his big district; trains and cars cluttered here and there and everywhere. For the final thirty days of private operation the situation steadily had been growing worse. In the districts roundabout Pittsburg and Philadelphia and New York it had become intolerable. Take, if you will, the industries in those vast manufacturing districts and consider them multiplied tenfold, their influx of fuel and of raw material increased in like proportion, and so with their output. Add these industries one to another and see them in units of tens of dozens of trains, of hundreds and thousands of coal-cars and flat-cars and box-cars. And on the other hand, see all of these poured upon railroads that had been steadily growing weaker for eight or ten years—more rapidly weakened, however, in the last four months than in the entire three years that preceded them. Bear in mind their tremendous loss of man-power through the draft, consider the gradual wearing down of engines and cars and tracks and terminals toward the breaking point, and wonder not then that we had congestion and much worse east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio.
Throughout that autumn of 1917 we watched the bending of the rod of the railroad just as we had watched it bend and then recover again through the two hard winter seasons that have preceded this one. It bent further this winter than ever before—the traffic was so much greater, and the facilities with which to meet it so much weaker. No wonder that freight moved slowly, more slowly, most slowly, and in many cases finally ceased to move at all; that upon the Jersey meadows outside of New York were 30,000 car-loads of merchandise that could not be moved up to that port and to the ships waiting to carry it overseas. At one time 150 ships stood waiting for coal alone in New York Harbor. And overseas was a great war in its critical stages. No wonder, though, that coal began coming in dribblings to hearthstones that were whining for tons of it, that finally it ceased coming at all for whole days, while great and ordinarily comfortable American cities shivered and watched their death rates mount higher than they had mounted in many a year.
It was a man-sized job that confronted A. H. Smith. Like a real railroad man he handled it. He went in at once upon it. He began to do things. He issued immediate embargoes against shipment into the New York district of anything save food, news-print paper, live stock, perishable freight, and freight consigned to the Government. He did more. With a great map of metropolitan New York and its railroad terminals spread before him he began ordering freight concentrated west of Buffalo and Pittsburg and south of Washington into the trunk-lines which variously best serve the great group of cities that constitute the metropolitan district of New York. The Baltimore and Ohio for instance has exclusive terminal facilities upon Staten Island, which with its many shipyards and wharves is an important freight consignment point. In ordinary times, when the situation was dominated by competitive conditions, a car-load of freight offered the New York Central at Toledo or Detroit would be carried on its lines to New York and then floated to Staten Island by car-ferry. In this non-competitive war situation, in this hour when the temporary continental railroad system of the United States was being born, such a car would be taken by the New York Central from Toledo or Detroit to the Baltimore and Ohio at some point west of Pittsburg, and then over it to Staten Island by the shortest possible route.
What Smith was doing in New York his fellow regional directors in Atlanta and in Chicago also were doing. Order was being worked out of chaos. The great railroads of the United States, even temporarily and very hastily welded into a single national system, showed good results of efficiency and economy, just as some of their far-sighted private operators had predicted more than two decades ago. Released from the shackles of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law—Congress had refused such a release to the Railroad War Board but quickly granted it to McAdoo—and from the conflicting regulatory commissions all the way across the land, they were able to simplify and unify their facilities—even though many times at public cost and inconvenience—in a way that enabled them not only to handle the pressure of war traffic and in an admirable fashion but also to show great economies upon their cost-sheets.
To come to actual cases: It was good railroading when the centralized Washington administration began assembling various sections of various lines so as to gain not only more direct routes between important traffic centers but lines of lowest possible gradients as well. In the West particularly, great progress was made in this direction. For instance in the old days of competitive railroading the Southern Pacific quite naturally operated its through route from Dallas or Fort Worth to Los Angeles and San Francisco over its own tracks through San Antonio or El Paso. Of course the old-time and somewhat unfortunate Texas and Pacific had a far shorter route from Dallas and Fort Worth direct to El Paso, but the competitive situation, the fact that it was the Texas and Pacific and not the Southern Pacific, prevented it from getting much volume of traffic for its short line. Under government unification the T. & P. line came into its own, with the result that 500 miles were taken off the through route between the important North Texas cities and southern California—with great resultant time and operating economies.
Similarly, there arose a war-time assembled through line from the oil-fields at Casper, Wyoming, to Montana and Puget Sound points, 880 miles shorter than the route which the competitive situation formerly forced. Freight from southern California to Ogden was hauled 201 miles less than by the pathway formerly used; while the Railroad Administration route between Chicago and Sioux City was 110 miles shorter than the old, and 289 miles were saved in the through traffic between Kansas City and Galveston and Houston. Multiply these examples and it is easy to see how in a period of sixty days in the summer of 1918 nine thousand freight-cars were so rerouted as to effect a saving in mileage traveled by each car of about 195 miles, or a total saving of about 1,754,805 car-miles.
To be ranked with this sort of operating economy was the work undertaken by Regional Director R. H. Aishton at Chicago when early in the spring of 1918 he began consolidating train movements so that instead of the several competing trunk-lines coming down from out of the Northwest, each operating competing through freight-trains each day into the great terminal and interchange yards at St. Paul, and there shifting and resorting their cars incredibly for distribution between the six trunk-lines leading for another five hundred miles down into Chicago, through trains were operated solidly from the Puget Sound points through to Lake Michigan. For through freight the great railroad yards upon the line between St. Paul and Minneapolis represented no more of a stop than was necessary for changing engines, cabooses, and crews. Moreover these through trains were distributed in alternation between the Northern Pacific and Great Northern lines from the Pacific coast down to the Twin Cities, but because of its superior mileage and gradient conditions they were handled on to Chicago almost exclusively by the Northwestern.
Nor was Chicago—with almost inevitable traffic congestion, despite the fact that it now bears upon its western rim the largest interchange and clearing-house yard for freight-cars in the entire world—a railroad point big enough to break this simple scheme of through service. Take the export corn specials out of the Missouri valley. One of these trains, let us say, consisted of thirty-one cars from Omaha and five cars from Sioux City, all moving under special government permits, and was routed intact from Omaha to Philadelphia. It came east over the Northwestern to a point well outside of the Chicago congested district. There it was turned to the tracks of the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern, one of the outermost of the belt-line railroads which encircle Chicago. The Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern in turn delivered the train—intact and unchanged, you will remember—to the Nickel Plate, which at Buffalo handed it to the Lackawanna, which in turn carried it as far as Scranton, giving it there to the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the connecting Philadelphia and Reading for prompt handling through to tide-water and a waiting ship at Philadelphia. There was no switching and but little delay en route, and the train generally went through from the Missouri to the Delaware in considerably less than a week. Such a prompt through movement, with its saving of time and money, was quite unheard of in the days of competitive railroad management.
All the reroutings and consolidations of this sort by no means had been confined to the western portions of the land. In the East many others were made, particularly in the congested sections of war-munitions