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Title: The Modern Railroad

Author: Edward Hungerford

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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MODERN
RAILROAD ***

THE MODERN RAILROAD

Ready for the day’s run

THE
MODERN RAILROAD

BY

EDWARD HUNGERFORD
AUTHOR OF “LITTLE CORKY,” “THE MAN WHO STOLE A
RAILROAD,” ETC.

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911

Copyright
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911
Published November, 1911
Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London, England

PRESS OF THE VAIL COMPANY
COSHOCTON, U. S. A.

TO MY FATHER
IN RECOGNITION OF HIS
INTEREST AND APPRECIATION
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED

PREFACE

T O bring to the great lay mind some slight idea of the intricacy and the
involved detail of railroad operation is the purpose of this book. Of the
intricacies and involved details of railroad finance and railroad politics; of
the quarrels between the railroads, the organizations of their employees, the
governmental commissions, or the shippers, it says little or nothing. These
difficult and pertinent questions have been and still are being competently
discussed by other writers.
The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors and
publishers of Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, The Saturday Evening
Post, and Outing in permitting the introduction into this work of portions or
entire articles which he has written for them in the past. He would also feel
remiss if he did not publish his sincere acknowledgments to “The American
Railway,” a compilation from Scribner’s Magazine, published in 1887, Mr.
Logan G. McPherson’s “The Workings of the Railroad,” Mr. C. F. Carter’s
“When Railroads Were New,” and Mr. Frank H. Spearman’s “The Strategy
of Great Railroads.” Out of a sizable reference library of railroad works,
these volumes were the most helpful to him in the preparation of certain
chapters of this book.
E. H.
Brooklyn, New York,
August 1, 1911.

CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
The Railroads and Their Beginnings 1
Two great groups of railroads; East to West, and North to
South—Some of the giant roads—Canals—Development
of the country’s natural resources—Railroad projects—
Locomotives imported—First locomotive of American
manufacture—Opposition of canal-owners to railroads—
Development of Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines—The
merging of small lines into systems.

CHAPTER II
The Gradual Development of the Railroad 15
Alarm of canal-owners at the success of railroads—The
making of the Baltimore & Ohio—The “Tom Thumb”
engine—Difficulties in crossing the Appalachians—
Extension to Pittsburgh—Troubles of the Erie Railroad—
This road the first to use the telegraph—The prairies
begin to be crossed by railways—Chicago’s first railroad,
the Galena & Chicago Union—Illinois Central—Rock
Island, the first to span the Mississippi—Proposals to run
railroads to the Pacific—The Central Pacific organized—
It and the Union Pacific meet—Other Pacific roads.

CHAPTER III
The Building of a Railroad 34
Cost of a single-track road—Financing—Securing a
charter—Survey-work and its dangers—Grades—
Construction—Track-laying.

CHAPTER IV
Tunnels 48
Their use in reducing grades—The Hoosac Tunnel—The
use of shafts—Tunnelling under water—The Detroit
River tunnel.

CHAPTER V
Bridges 56
Bridges of timber, then stone, then steel—The Starucca
Viaduct—The first iron bridge in the United States—
Steel bridges—Engineering triumphs—Different types of
railroad bridge—The deck span and the truss span—
Suspension bridges—Cantilever bridges—Reaching the
solid rock with caissons—The work of “sand-hogs”—
The cantilever over the Pend Oreille River—Variety of
problems in bridge-building—Points in favor of the stone
bridge—Bridges over the Keys of Florida.

CHAPTER VI
The Passenger Stations 80
Early trains for suburbanites—Importance of the
towerman—Automatic switch systems—The
interlocking machine—Capacities of the largest
passenger terminals—Room for locomotives, car-storage,
etc.—Storing and cleaning cars—The concourse—
Waiting-rooms—Baggage accommodations—Heating—
Great development of passenger stations—Some notable
stations in America.

CHAPTER VII
The Freight Terminals and the Yards 107
Convenience of having freight stations at several points
in a city—The Pennsylvania Railroad’s scheme at New

York as an example—Coal handled apart from other
freight—Assorting the cars—The transfer house—
Charges for the use of cars not promptly returned to their
home roads—The hard work of the yardmaster.

CHAPTER VIII
The Locomotives and the Cars 119
Honor required in the building of a locomotive—Some of
the early locomotives—Some notable locomotive-
builders—Increase of the size of engines—Stephenson’s
air-brake—The workshops—The various parts of the
engine—Cars of the old-time—Improvements by Winans
and others—Steel cars for freight.

CHAPTER IX
Rebuilding a Railroad 138
Reconstruction necessary in many cases—Old grades too
heavy—Curves straightened—Tunnels avoided—These
improvements required especially by freight lines.

CHAPTER X
The Railroad and its President 152
Supervision of the classified activities—Engineering,
operating, maintenance of way, etc.—The divisional
system as followed in the Pennsylvania Road—The
departmental plan as followed in the New York Central—
Need for vice-presidents—The board of directors—
Harriman a model president—How the Pennsylvania
forced itself into New York City—Action of a president
to save the life of a laborer’s child—“Keep right on
obeying orders”—Some railroad presidents compared—
High salaries of presidents.

CHAPTER XI
The Legal and Financial Departments 170
Functions of general counsel, and those of general
attorney—A shrewd legal mind’s worth to a railroad—
The function of the claim-agent—Men and women who
feign injury—The secret service as an aid to the claim-
agent—Wages of employees the greatest of a railroad’s
expenditures—The pay-car—The comptroller or auditor
—Division of the income from through tickets—Claims
for lost or damaged freight—Purchasing-agent and store-
keeper.

CHAPTER XII
The General Manager 187
His duty to keep employees in harmonious actions
—“The superintendent deals with men; the general
manager with superintendents”—“The general manager
is really king”—Cases in which his power is almost
despotic—He must know men.

CHAPTER XIII
The Superintendent 202
His headship of the transportation organism—His
manner of dealing with an offended shipper—His manner
with commuters—His manner with a spiteful “kicker”—
A dishonest conductor who had a “pull”—A system of
demerits for employees—Dealing with drunkards—With
selfish and covetous men.

CHAPTER XIV
Operating the Railroad 220
Authority of the chief clerk and that of the assistant
superintendent—Responsibilities of engineers, firemen,

master mechanic, train-master, train-despatcher—
Arranging the time-table—Fundamental rules of
operation—Signals—Selecting engine and cars for a train
—Clerical work of conductors—A trip with the
conductor—The despatcher’s authority—Signals along
the line—Maintenance of way—Superintendent of
bridges and buildings—Road-master—Section boss.

CHAPTER XV
The Fellows Out Upon the Line 243
Men who run the trains must have brain as well as
muscle—Their training—From farmer’s boy to engineer
—The brakeman’s dangerous work—Baggagemen and
mail clerks—Hand-switchmen—The multifarious duties
of country station-agents.

CHAPTER XVI
Keeping The Line Open 256
The wrecking train and its supplies—Floods dammed by
an embankment—Right of way always given to the
wrecking-train—Expeditious work in repairing the track
—Collapse of the roof of a tunnel—Telegraph crippled
by storms—Winter storms the severest test—Trains in
quick succession help to keep the line open in
snowstorms—The rotary plough.

CHAPTER XVII
The G. P. A. and His Office 276
He has to keep the road advertised—Must be an after-
dinner orator, and many-sided—His geniality, urbanity,
courtesy—Excessive rivalry for passenger traffic—
Increasing luxury in Pullman cars—Many printed forms
of tickets, etc.

CHAPTER XVIII
The Luxury of Modern Railroad Travel 292
Special trains provided—Private cars—Specials for
actors, actresses, and musicians—Crude coaches on early
railroads—Luxurious old-time sleeping-cars—Pullman’s
sleepers made at first from old coaches—His pioneer—
The first dining-cars—The present-day dining-cars—
Dinners, table d’hôte and a la carte—Café-cars—Buffet-
cars—Care for the comfort of women.

CHAPTER XIX
Getting the City out into the Country 311
Commuters’ trains in many towns—Rapid increase in the
volume of suburban travel—Electrification of the lines—
Long Island Railroad almost exclusively suburban—
Varied distances of suburban homes from the cities—
Club-cars for commuters—Staterooms in the suburban
cars—Special transfer commuters.

CHAPTER XX
Freight Traffic 325
Income from freight traffic greater than from passenger
—Competition in freight rates—Afterwards a standard
rate-sheet—Rate-wars virtually ended by the Interstate
Commerce Commission classification of freight into
groups—Differential freight rates—Demurrage for delay
in emptying cars—Coal traffic—Modern methods of
handling lard and other freight.

CHAPTER XXI
The Drama of the Freight 343

Fast trains for precious and perishable goods—Cars
invented for fruits and for fish—Milk trains—Systematic
handling of the cans—Auctioning garden-truck at
midnight—A historic city freight-house.

CHAPTER XXII
Making Traffic 355
Enticing settlers to the virgin lands of the West—
Emigration bureaus—Railways extended for the benefit
of emigrants—The first continuous railroad across the
American continent—Campaigns for developing sparsely
settled places in the West—Unprofitable branch railroads
in the East—Development of scientific farming—
Improved farms are traffic-makers—New factories being
opened—How railroad managers have developed
Atlantic City.

CHAPTER XXIII
The Express Service and the Railroad Mail 369
Development of express business—Railroad conductors
the first mail and express messengers—William F.
Harnden’s express service—Postage rates—
Establishment and organization of great express
companies—Collection and distribution of express
matter—Relation between express companies and
railroads—Beginnings of post-office department—
Statistics—Railroad mail service—Newspaper delivery
—Handling of mail matter—Growth of the service.

CHAPTER XXIV
The Mechanical Departments 388
Care and repair of cars and engines—The locomotive
cleaned and inspected after each long journey—Frequent

visits of engines to the shops and foundries at Altoona—
The table for testing the power and speed of locomotives
—The car shops—Steel cars beginning to supersede
wooden ones—Painting a freight car—Lack of method in
early repair shops—Search for flaws in wheels.

CHAPTER XXV
The Railroad Marine 404
Steamship lines under railroad control—Fleet of New
York Central—Tugs—Railroad connections at New York
harbor—Handling of freight—Ferry-boats—Tunnel
under Detroit River—Car-ferries and lake routes—Great
Lakes steamship lines under railroad control.

CHAPTER XXVI
Keeping in Touch with the Men 418
The first organized branch of the Railroad Y. M. C. A.—
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s gift of a club-house—Growth of
the Railroad Y. M. C. A.—Plans by the railways to care
for the sick and the crippled—The pension system—
Entertainments— Model restaurants—Free legal advice
—Employees’ magazines—The Order of the Red Spot.

CHAPTER XXVII
The Coming of Electricity 432
Electric street cars—Suburban cars—Electric third-rail
from Utica to Syracuse—Some railroads partially adopt
electric power—The benefit of electric power in tunnels
—Also at terminal stations—Conditions which make
electric traction practical and economical—Hopeful
outlook for electric traction—The monorail and the
gyroscope car, invented by Louis Brennan—A similar
invention by August Scherl.

Appendix 449
Efficiency through Organization.

Index 465

ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE

Ready for the day’s run Frontispiece
An early locomotive built by William Norris for
the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad 18
The historic “John Bull” of the Camden &
Amboy Railroad—and its train 18
A heavy-grade type of locomotive built for the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1864. Its flaring
stack was typical of those years 19
Construction engineers blaze their way across the
face of new country 38
The making of an embankment by dump-train 39
“Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes
of restless engines” 39
Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of
the high hills 44
A giant fill—in the making 44
The finishing touches to the track 45

This machine can lay a mile of track a day 45
“Sometimes the construction engineer ... brings
his line face to face with a mountain” 52
Finishing the lining of a tunnel 52
The busiest tunnel point in the world—at the
west portals of the Bergen tunnels, six Erie tracks
below, four Lackawanna above 53
The Hackensack portals of the Pennsylvania’s
great tunnels under New York City 53
Concrete affords wonderful opportunities for the
bridge-builders 68
The Lackawanna is building the largest concrete
bridge in the world across the Delaware River at
Slateford, Pa. 68
The bridge-builder lays out an assembling-yard
for gathering together the different parts of his
new construction 69
The new Brandywine Viaduct of the Baltimore &
Ohio, at Wilmington, Del. 69
The Northwestern’s monumental new terminal on
the West Side of Chicago 82
The Union Station at Washington 83
A model American railroad station—the Union
Station of the New York Central, Boston &
Albany, Delaware & Hudson, and West Shore
railroads at Albany 102
The classic portal of the Pennsylvania’s new
station in New York 102
The beautiful concourse of the new Pennsylvania
Station, in New York 103
“The waiting-room is the monumental and
artistic expression of the station”—the waiting-
room of the Union Depot at Troy, New York 103

Something over a million dollars’ worth of
passenger cars are constantly stored in this yard 114
A scene in the great freight-yards that surround
Chicago 114
The intricacy of tracks and the “throat” of a
modern terminal yard: South Station, Boston, and
its approaches 115
One of the “diamond-stack” locomotives used on
the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early seventies 126
Prairie type passenger locomotive of the Lake
Shore Railroad 126
Pacific type passenger locomotive of the New
York Central lines 126
Atlantic type passenger locomotive, built by the
Pennsylvania Railroad at its Altoona shops 126
One of the great Mallet pushing engines of the
Delaware & Hudson Company 127
A ten-wheeled switching locomotive of the Lake
Shore Railroad 127
Suburban passenger locomotive of the New York
Central lines 127
Consolidation freight locomotive of the
Pennsylvania system 127
Where Harriman stretched the Southern Pacific
in a straight line across the Great Salt Lake 140
Line revision on the New York Central—
tunnelling through the bases of these jutting
peaks along the Hudson River does away with
sharp and dangerous curves 140
Impressive grade revision on the Union Pacific in
the Black Hills of Wyoming. The discarded line
may be seen at the right 141

The old and the new on the Great Northern—the
“William Crooks,” the first engine of the Hill
system, and one of the newest Mallets 154
The Southern Pacific finds direct entrance into
San Francisco for one of its branch lines by
tunnels piercing the heart of the suburbs 155
Portal of the abandoned tunnel of the Alleghany
Portage Railroad near Johnstown, Pa., the first
railroad tunnel in the United States 155
The freight department of the modern railroad
requires a veritable army of clerks 176
The farmer who sued the railroad for permanent
injuries—as the detectives with their cameras
found him 177
Oil-burning locomotive on the Southern Pacific
system 190
The steel passenger coach such as has become
standard upon the American railroad 190
Electric car, generating its own power by a
gasoline engine 190
Both locomotive and train—gasoline motor car
designed for branch line service 190
The biggest locomotive in the world: built by the
Santa Fe Railroad at its Topeka shops 191
The conductor is a high type of railroad
employee 208
The engineer—oil-can in hand—is forever
fussing at his machine 208
Railroad responsibility does not end even with
the track walker 209
The fireman has a hard job and a steady one 209
How the real timetable of the division looks—the
one used in headquarters 222

The electro-pneumatic signal-box in the control
tower of a modern terminal 228
The responsible men who stand at the switch-
tower of a modern terminal: a large tower of the
“manual” type 228
“When winter comes upon the lines the
superintendent will have full use for every one of
his wits” 229
Watchful signals guarding the main line of a busy
railroad 229
“When the train comes to a water station the
fireman gets out and fills the tank” 248
A freight-crew and its “hack” 248
A view through the span of a modern truss bridge
gives an idea of its strength and solidity 249
The New York Central is adopting the new form
of “Upper quadrant” signal 249
The wrecking train ready to start out from the
yard 262
“Two of these great cranes can grab a wounded
Mogul locomotive and put her out of the way” 262
“The shop-men form no mean brigade in this
industrial army of America” 263
“Winter days when the wind-blown snow forms
mountains upon the tracks” 272
“The despatcher may have come from some
lonely country station” 273
“The superintendent is not above getting out and
bossing the wrecking-gang once in a great while” 273
The New York Central Railroad is building a new
Grand Central Station in New York City, for itself
and its tenant, the New York, New Haven &
Hartford Railroad 284

The concourse of the new Grand Central Station,
New York, will be one of the largest rooms in the
world 284
South Station, Boston, is the busiest railroad
terminal in the world 285
The train-shed and approach tracks of Broad
Street Station, Philadelphia, still one of the finest
of American railroad passenger terminals 285
Connecting drawing-room and stateroom 296
“A man may have as fine a bed in a sleeping-car
as in the best hotel in all the land” 296
“You may have the manicure upon the modern
train” 297
“The dining-car is a sociable sort of place” 297
An interior view of one of the earliest Pullman
sleeping-cars 302
Interior of a standard sleeping-car of to-day 303
“Even in winter there is a homely, homey air
about the commuter’s station” 314
Entrance to the great four-track open cut which
the Erie has built for the commuter’s comfort at
Jersey City 314
A model way-station on the lines of the Boston &
Albany Railroad 315
The yardmaster’s office—in an abandoned
switch-tower 315
“The inside of any freight-house is a busy place” 328
St. John’s Park, the great freight-house of the
New York Central Railroad in down-town New
York 328
The great ore-docks of the West Shore Railroad
at Buffalo 329

The great bridge of the New York Central at
Watkins Glen 340
Building the wonderful bridge of the Idaho &
Washington Northern over the Pend Oreille
River, Washington 341
Inside the West Albany shops of the New York
Central: picking up a locomotive with the
travelling crane 350
A locomotive upon the testing-table at the
Altoona shops of the Pennsylvania 350
“The roundhouse is a sprawling thing” 351
Denizens of the roundhouse 351
“In the Far West the farm-train has long since
come into its own” 360
“Even in New York State the interest in these
itinerant agricultural schools is keen, indeed” 361
Interior of the dairy demonstration car of an
agricultural train 361
The famous Thomas Viaduct, on the Baltimore &
Ohio at Relay, Md., built by B. H. Latrobe in
1835, and still in use 366
The historic Starucca Viaduct upon the Erie 366
The cylinders of the Delaware & Hudson Mallet 367
The interior of this gasoline-motor-car on the
Union Pacific presents a most unusual effect, yet
a maximum of view of the outer world 367
A portion of the great double-track Susquehanna
River bridge of the Baltimore & Ohio—a giant
among American railroad bridges 372
“In summer the brakemen have pleasant enough
times of railroading” 373

A famous cantilever rapidly disappearing—the
substitution of a new Kentucky river bridge for
the old, on the Queen & Crescent system 373
Triple-phase, alternating current locomotive built
by the General Electric Co. for use in the
Cascade Tunnel, of the Great Northern Railway 390
Heavy service, alternating and direct current
freight locomotive built by the Westinghouse
Company for the New York, New Haven &
Hartford Railroad 390
The monoroad in practical use for carrying
passengers at City Island, New York 391
The cigar-shaped car of the monoroad 391
A modern railroad freight and passenger
terminal: the terminal of the West Shore Railroad
at Weehawken, opposite New York City 406
High-speed, direct-current passenger locomotive
built by the General Electric Company for
terminal service of the New York Central at the
Grand Central Station 407
This is what New York Central McCrea did for
the men of the Canadian Pacific up at Kenora 420
A clubhouse built by the Southern Pacific for its
men at Roseville, California 420
The B. & O. boys enjoying the Railroad Y. M. C.
A., Chicago Junction 421
“The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company has
organized a brass band for its employees” 421
A high-speed electric locomotive on the
Pennsylvania bringing a through train out of the
tunnel underneath the Hudson River and into the
New York City terminal 434

High-speed, direct-current locomotive built by
the Westinghouse Company for the terminal
service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, in New
York 434
Two triple-phase locomotives of the Great
Northern Railway helping a double-header steam
train up the grade into the Cascade Tunnel 435
The outer shell of the New Haven’s freight
locomotive removed, showing the working parts
of the machine 435

The railroad is a monster. His feet are dipped into the navigable seas, and
his many arms reach into the uplands. His fingers clutch the treasures of the
hills—coal, iron, timber—all the wealth of Mother Earth. His busy hands
touch the broad prairies of corn, wheat, fruits—the yearly produce of the
land. With ceaseless activity he brings the raw material that it may be made
into the finished. He centralizes industry. He fills the ships that sail the
seas. He brings the remote town in quick touch with the busy city. He
stimulates life. He makes life.
His arms stretch through the towns and over the land. His steel muscles
reach across great rivers and deep valleys, his tireless hands have long
since burrowed their way through God’s eternal hills. He is here, there,
everywhere. His great life is part and parcel of the great life of the nation.
He reaches an arm into an unknown country, and it is known! Great tracts
of land that were untraversed become farms; hillsides yield up their mineral
treasure; a busy town springs into life where there was no habitation of man
a little time before, and the town becomes a city. Commerce is born. The
railroad bids death and stagnation begone. It creates. It reaches forth with
its life, and life is born.

The railroad is life itself!

THE MODERN RAILROAD

CHAPTER I

THE RAILROADS AND THEIR BEGINNINGS
Two Great Groups of Railroads; East to
West, and North to South—Some of
the Giant Roads—Canals—
Development of the Country’s
Natural Resources—Railroad
Projects—Locomotives Imported—
First Locomotive of American
Manufacture—Opposition of Canal-
owners to Railroads—Development of
Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Mines—The
Merging of Small Lines into Systems.

F IFTEEN or twenty great railroad systems are the overland carriers of
the United States. Measured by corporations, known by a vast variety of
differing names, there are many, many more than these. But this great
number is reduced, through common ownership or through a common
purpose in operation, to less than a score of transportation organisms, each
with its own field, its own purposes, and its own ambitions.
The greater number of these railroads reach from east to west, and so follow
the natural lines of traffic within the country. Two or three systems—such
as the Illinois Central and the Delaware & Hudson—run at variance with
this natural trend, and may be classed as cross-country routes. A few
properties have no long-reaching routes, but derive their incomes from the
transportation business of a comparatively small exclusive territory, as the
Boston & Maine in Northern New England, the New Haven in Southern
New England, both of them recently brought under a more or less direct
single control, and the Long Island. Still other properties find their greatest
revenue in bringing anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania mountains to the

seaboard, and among these are the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the
Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Philadelphia & Reading systems.
The very great railroads of America are the east and west lines. These break
themselves quite naturally into two divisions—one group east of the
Mississippi River, the other west of that stream. The easterly group aim to
find an eastern terminal in and about New York. Their western arms reach
Chicago and St. Louis, where the other group of transcontinentals begin.
Giants among these eastern roads are the Pennsylvania and the New York
Central. Of lesser size, but still ranking as great railroads within this
territory are the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Erie.
Several of the anthracite roads enjoy through connections to Chicago and
St. Louis, breaking at Buffalo as an interchange point, about half way
between New York and Chicago. There are important roads in the South,
reaching between Gulf points and New York and taking care of the traffic of
the centres of the section, now rapidly increasing its industrial importance.
The western group of transcontinental routes are the giants in point of
mileage. The eastern roads, serving a closely-built country, carry an almost
incredible tonnage; but the long, gaunt western lines are reaching into a
country that has its to-morrow still ahead. Of these, the so-called Harriman
lines—the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific—occupy the centre of
the country, and reach from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The Santa Fe and
the Gould roads share this territory.
To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of
railroads, the Burlington, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific,
together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther north
Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway,
another approaching completion in the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The
“Grangers” (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that
occupy the eastern end of this western territory,—the St. Paul, the Gould
lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island—are just now showing
pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade in its
infancy. The first two of these have already laid their rails over the great
slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building of railroads in
the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the present time.

The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great
systems, it may be well to go back into the past, to examine the eighty years
that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are illuminating.
They tell with precise accuracy the development of American
transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only a few brief pages, our
review of them must be cursory.
When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America
firmly established as a nation, the people began to give earnest attention to
internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and
unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for
development; but with an independent nation all was very different. The
United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to
develop that wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the
first that it must depend almost wholly on transportation facilities. To
appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at the
beginning of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars at
Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that seaport from Wheeling;
so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar a barrel for
the Baltimore market. With a better form of transportation it would cost a
dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to Baltimore, making the
price of the commodity at the first of these points under transit facilities
four dollars a barrel. It did not take much of that sort of reasoning to make
the States appreciate from the very first that a great effort must be made
toward development. That effort, having been made, brought its own
reward.
The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal
works. Canals had already proved their success in England and within
Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States
established their value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these
were built in New England before the Revolution. After the close of that
conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the
State of New York in planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it
was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo—from Atlantic tidewater to the
navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises
along the entire seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles,
and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the outset. Canals were

also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the success
of the earliest of these ditches was a great encouragement to other
investments of the sort, even where there existed far less necessity for their
construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a little time.
The invention of the steamboat just a century ago was an incentive
indirectly to canal growth but there were other things that halted the minds
of farsighted and conservative men. Canals were fearfully expensive things;
likewise, they were delicate works, in need of constant and expensive
repairs to keep them in order. Moreover, there were many winter months in
which they were frozen and useless. It was quite clear to these farsighted
men from the outset that the canal was not the real solution of the
transportation problem upon which rested the internal development of the
United States.
They turned their attention to roads. But, while roads were comparatively
easy to maintain and were possible routes of communication the entire year
round, they could not begin to compare with the canals in point of tonnage
capacity, because of the limitations of the drawing power of animals. Some
visionary souls experimented with sail wagons, but of course with no
practical results.
At this time there came distinct rumors from across the sea of a new
transportation method in England—the railroad. The English railroads were
crude affairs built to handle the products of the collieries in the northeast
corner of the country, to bring the coal down to the docks. But there came
more rumors—of a young engineer, one Stephenson, who had perfected
some sort of a steam wagon that would run on rails—a locomotive he called
it,—and there was to be one of these railroads built from Stockton to
Darlington to carry passengers and also freight. These reports were of vast
interest to the earnest men who were trying to solve this perplexing problem
of internal transportation. Some of them, who owned collieries up in the
northeastern portion of Pennsylvania and who were concerned with the
proposition of getting their product to tidewater, were particularly
interested. These gentlemen were called the Delaware & Hudson Company,
and they had already accomplished much in building a hundred miles of
canal from Honesdale, an interior town, across a mountainous land to
Kingston on the navigable Hudson River. But the canal, considered a

monumental work in its day, solved only a part of the problem. There still
remained the stiff ridge of the Moosic Mountain that no canal work might
ever possibly climb.
To the Delaware & Hudson Company, then, the railroad proposition was of
absorbing interest, of sufficient interest to warrant it in sending Horatio
Allen, one of the canal engineers, all the way to England for investigation
and report. Allen was filled with the enthusiasm of youth. He went prepared
to look into a new era in transportation.
In the meantime other railroad projects were also under way in the country,
short and crude affairs though they were. As early as 1807 Silas Whitney
built a short line on Beacon Hill, Boston, which is accredited as being the
first American railroad. It was a simple affair with an inclined plane which
was used to handle brick; and it is said that it was preceded twelve years by
an even more crude tramway, built for the same purpose. Another early
short length of railroad was built by Thomas Leiper at his quarry in
Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It has its chief interest from the fact that it
was designed by John Thomson, father of J. Edgar Thomson, who became
at a much later day president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and
who is known as one of the master minds in American transportation
progress. Similar records remain of the existence of a short line near
Richmond, Va., built to carry supplies to a powder mill, and other lines at
Bear Creek Furnace, Pennsylvania, and at Nashua, N. H. But the only one
of these roads that seems to have attained a lasting distinction was one built
by Gridley Bryant in 1826 to carry granite for the Bunker Hill Monument
from the quarries at Quincy, Mass., to the docks four miles distant. This
road was built of heavy wooden rails attached in a substantial way to stone
sleepers imbedded in the earth. It attained considerable distinction and
became of such general interest that a public house was opened alongside
its rails to accommodate sightseers from afar who came to see it. This
railroad continued in service for more than a quarter of a century.
But the motive power of all these railroads was the horse; and it was patent
from the outset that the horse had neither the staying nor the hauling powers
to make him a real factor in the railroad situation. So when Horatio Allen
returned to New York from England in January, 1829, with glowing
accounts of the success of the English railroads, he found the progressive

men of the Delaware & Hudson anxiously awaiting an inspection of the
Stourbridge Lion, the first of four locomotives purchased by Allen for
importation into the United States. Three of these machines were from the
works of Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge; the fourth was the creation
of Stephenson’s master hand. The Lion arrived in May of that year, and
after having been set up on blocks and fired for the benefit of a group of
scientific men in New York it was shipped by river and canal to Honesdale.
Allen placed the Stourbridge Lion—which resembled a giant grasshopper
with its mass of exterior valves, and joints—on the crude wooden track of
the railroad, which extended over the mountain to Carbondale, seventeen
miles distant. A few days later—the ninth of August, to be exact—he ran the
Lion, the first turning of an engine wheel upon American soil. Details of
that scene have come easily down to to-day. The track was built of heavy
hemlock stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quarter inches wide and
one-half an inch thick were spiked. The engine weighed seven tons, instead
of three tons, as had been expected. It so happened that the rails had
become slightly warped just above the terminal of the railroad, where the
track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek on a bending trestle. Allen had been
warned against this trestle and his only response was to call for passengers
upon the initial ride. No one accepted. There was a precious Pennsylvania
regard shown for the safety of one’s neck. So, after running the engine up
and down the coal dock for a few minutes, Allen waved good-bye to the
crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed away from the village
around the abrupt curve and over the trembling trestle at a rate of ten miles
an hour. The crowd which had expected to see the engine derailed, broke
into resounding cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive in the United States
had served to prove its worth.
The career of the Stourbridge Lion was short lived. It hauled coal cars for a
little time at Honesdale; but it was too big an engine for so slight a railroad,
and it was soon dismantled. Its boiler continued to serve the Delaware &
Hudson Company for many years at its shops on the hillside above
Carbondale. The fate of the three other imported English locomotives
remains a mystery. They were brought to New York and stored, eventually
to find their way to the scrap heap in some unknown fashion.

Mr. Allen held no short-lived career. His experiments with the locomotive
ranked him as a railroad engineer of the highest class, and before the year
1829 closed he was made chief engineer of what was at first known as the
Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, and afterwards as the South Carolina
Railroad. This was an ambitious project, designed to connect the old
Carolina seaport with the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles
distant. It achieved its greatest fame as the railroad which first operated a
locomotive of American manufacture.
This engine, called the Best Friend of Charleston, was built at the West
Point Foundry in New York City and was shipped to Charleston in the Fall
of 1830. It was a crude affair, and on its trial trip, on November 2, of that
year, it sprung a wheel out of shape and became derailed. Still it was a
beginning; and after the wheels had been put in good shape it entered into
regular service, which was more than the Stourbridge Lion had ever done. It
could haul four or five cars with forty or fifty passengers at a speed of from
fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, so the Charleston & Hamburg became
the first of our steam railroads with a regular passenger service. A little
later, a bigger and better engine, also of American manufacture and called
the West Point, was sent down from New York.
Word of these early railroad experiments travelled across the country as if
by some magic predecessor of the telegraph. Other railroad projects found
themselves under way. Another colliery railroad, a marvellous thing of
planes and gravity descents, was built at Mauch Chunk in the Lehigh
Valley, and this stout old road is in use to-day as a passenger-carrier.
But it was already seen that the future of the railroad was not to be limited
to quarries or collieries. Up in New England the railroad fever had taken
hold with force; and in 1831, construction was begun on the Boston &
Lowell Railroad. This line was analogous to the Manchester & Liverpool,
which proved itself from the beginning a tremendous money-earner.
Boston, a seaport of sixty thousand inhabitants was to be linked with
Lowell, then possessing but six thousand inhabitants. Still, even in those
days, Lowell had developed to a point that saw fifteen thousand tons of
freight and thirty-seven thousand passengers handled between the two cities
over the Middlesex Canal in 1829.

Then there developed the first of a new sort of antagonism that the railroad
was to face. The owners of the canals were keen-sighted enough to discover
a dangerous new antagonist in the railroads. They protested to the
Legislature that their charter gave them a monopoly of the carrying
privileges between Boston and Lowell, and for two years they were able to
strangle the ambitions of the proposed railroad. This fight was a type of
other battles that were to follow between the canals and the railroads. The
various lines that reached across New York State from Albany to Buffalo,
paralleling the Erie Canal, were once prohibited from carrying freight, for
fear that the canal’s supremacy as a carrier might be disturbed. The
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, struggling to blaze a path toward the West, was
for a long time halted by the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which proposed to
hold to its monopoly of the valley of the Potomac.
The Boston & Lowell, however, conquered its obstacles and was finally
opened to traffic, June 26, 1835. Within a few months similar lines reaching
from Boston to Worcester on the west, and Providence on the south had also
been opened. By 1839 Boston & Worcester had been extended through to
Springfield on the Connecticut River, where it connected with the Western
Railroad, extending over the Berkshires to Greenbush, opposite Albany. The
Providence Road was rapidly extended through to Stonington, Connecticut.
From that point fast steamboats were operated through to New York, and a
quick line of communication was established between Boston and New
York. Before that time the fastest route between these two cities had been
by steamboat to Norwich, then by coach over the post-road up to Boston.
Norwich saw the railroad take away its supremacy in the through traffic.
Finally it awoke to its necessity, and arranged to build a railroad to reach
the existing line at Providence.
Between New York and Philadelphia railroad communication came quickly
into being, the first route opened being the Camden & Amboy, which
terminated at the end of a long ferry ride from New York. Even after more
direct routes had been established and the Delaware crossed at Trenton, it
was many years before the trains ran direct from Jersey City into the heart
of the Quaker City. The cars from New York used to stop at Tacony,
considerably above the city and there was still a steamboat ride down the
river.

The railroad route to Baltimore was only a partial one. A steamboat took the
traveller to New Castle, Delaware, where a short pioneer railroad crossed to
French Town, Maryland. After that there was another long steamboat ride
down the flat reaches of the Chesapeake Bay before Baltimore was finally
reached. A little later there developed an all-rail route between Philadelphia
and Baltimore although not upon the line of the present most direct route.
From Philadelphia an early double-track railroad extended west to
Columbia, upon the Susquehanna River. An early route extended due north
from Baltimore to York, and then to Harrisburg; the parent stem of what
afterwards became the Northern Central. A branch from this line was
extended through to Columbia, and the New Castle and French Town route
lost popularity.
But the Columbia and Philadelphia route was destined to more important
things than merely affording an all-rail route to Baltimore. At Columbia it
connected with the important Pennsylvania State system of internal canals
and railroads, affording a direct line of communication with Pittsburgh and
the headwaters of the Ohio River.
This was accomplished by use of a canal through to Hollidaysburgh upon
the east slope of the Alleghanies, and the well-famed Alleghany Portage
Railroad over the summit of those mountains to Johnstown, where another
canal reached down into Pittsburgh and enjoyed unexampled prosperity
from 1834 to 1854. The Alleghany Portage railroad was a solidly
constructed affair and its rails after the fashion of almost all railroads of that
day were laid upon stone sleepers, rows of which may still be seen where
the long-since abandoned railroad found its path across the mountains. The
Portage Railroad was operated by the most elaborate system of inclined
planes ever put to service within the United States; one has only to turn to
the pages of Dickens’s “American Notes” to read:
“We left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived
at the foot of the mountain, which is crossed by railroad. There
are ten inclined planes, five ascending and five descending; the
carriages are dragged up the former and slowly let down the
latter by means of stationary engines, the comparatively level
spaces between being traversed sometimes by horse and

sometimes by engine power, as the case demands.... The journey
is very carefully made, however, only two carriages travelling
together; and while proper precaution is taken, is not to be
dreaded for its dangers.”
The Portage Railroad was the first to surmount the Alleghanies although in
course of time its elaborate system of planes disappeared, as they
disappeared elsewhere, under the development of the locomotive.
An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route of
communication across the Keystone State, which was afterwards to develop
into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of the
enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was
supposedly free to use its rails for the hauling of his produce in his own
cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that
of an improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in 1834,
the horse-teams of private freight haulers alternated upon the tracks
between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses
hauling a four-wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently
did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive fretting along for
hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the
Philadelphia & Columbia—the name of the road had been reversed—and in
1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly organized Pennsylvania
Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route
from Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful
Horse Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel, through to Pittsburgh; it had
created its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany
Portage Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies
had been organized to control freight-carrying upon the tracks of the
Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People’s line, the
other the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines,
which in recent years have become so vexed a problem to the Interstate
Commerce Commission.
There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to
bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down to
tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which
were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America’s mightiest

systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be built was the
Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of
a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a
descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a connection
with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new
railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend
in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just so much as a
passenger carrier.
Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the
Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip
behind the American built locomotive DeWitt Clinton, when the railroad
fever took hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold
of it but a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some
of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way
through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked
with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-
building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady
to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from
Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led to Tonawanda
and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of ’37 was
a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter
before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was a reality.
Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns
across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was jealous of
this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of
eminent draymen, ’bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany
to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections within her
boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both
passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the city from
the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led towards the west.
This matter of carrying passengers across a city has always stimulated local
pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a bitter war to prevent the Lake
Shore Railroad from making its gauge uniform through that city and
abandoning a time-honored transfer of passengers and freight there.

But there seems to be no stopping of the hand of ultimate destiny in
railroading. The little weak roads across the Empire State were first
gathered into the powerful New York Central, and after a time they were
permitted to carry freight, the privilege denied them a long time because of
the power of the Erie Canal. After a little longer time there was a great
bridge built across the Hudson River at Albany, and soon after the close of
the Civil War shrewd old Commodore Vanderbilt brought the railroad that
had been built up the east shore of the Hudson, his pet New York & Harlem,
and the merged chain of railroads across the State, into the New York
Central & Hudson River Railroad, his great lifework. That system spread
itself steadily. It built a new short line from Syracuse to Rochester, another
from Batavia to Buffalo. It absorbed and it consolidated; gradually it sent its
tentacles over the entire imperial strength of New York State.

CHAPTER II

THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE
RAILROAD
Alarm of Canal-owners at the Success of
Railroads—The Making of the
Baltimore & Ohio—The “Tom Thumb”
Engine—Difficulties in Crossing the
Appalachians—Extension to
Pittsburgh—Troubles of the Erie
Railroad—This Road the First to Use
the Telegraph—The Prairies Begin to
be Crossed by Railways—Chicago’s
First Railroad, the Galena & Chicago
Union—Illinois Central—Rock
Island, the First to Span the Mississippi
—Proposals to Run Railroads to the
Pacific—The Central Pacific
Organized—It and the Union Pacific
Meet—Other Pacific Roads.

A LL the railroad projects already related were timid projects in the
beginning, with hardly a thought of ultimate greatness. Yet there were
men, even in the earliest days of railroading, whose minds winged to great
enterprises, whose dreams were empire-wide. Of such men was the
Baltimore & Ohio born.
Baltimore, like Philadelphia, had greedily watched the success of the Erie
Canal upon its completion, and noted with alarm its possible effects upon
its own wharves. Philadelphia, with the wealth of the great State of
Pennsylvania behind, had sought to protect herself by the construction of

the long links of canal and railroad to Pittsburgh, of which you have already
read. But Baltimore had no great State to call to her support. She must look
to herself for strength. Out of her eminent necessity for self-preservation
came men of the strength and the fibre to meet the emergency. Baltimore
might have retreated from the situation, as some of the New England towns
had retreated from it, and become a somnolent reminiscence of a
prosperous Colonial seaport. She did nothing of the sort. Instead she made
herself the terminal and inspiration of a great railroad, laid the foundations
of a great and lasting growth.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was born February 12, 1827. On the
evening of that day, a little group of citizens of the sturdy old Southern
metropolis gathered at the house of George Brown. Mr. Brown together
with Philip E. Thomas, a distinguished merchant and philanthropist of
Baltimore, had been making investigation into the possibilities of railroads.
The fact that the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was already well
advanced in construction, would have its eastern terminus at the Potomac
River, near Washington, brought no comfort to the merchants of Baltimore.
Wonder not then, that the stern old traders of that city assembled to consider
“the best means of restoring to the city of Baltimore that portion of the
western trade which has lately been diverted from it by the introduction of
steam navigation and other causes.” From that February day to this the
corporate title of the Baltimore & Ohio has been unchanged, despite the
career of the most extreme vicissitudes—long years of shadows that were
almost complete despair, other years that were brilliant with success.
It was decided at the outset that the commercial supremacy of Baltimore
rested on her conquest of the Appalachian Mountains, of her reaching by an
easy artificial highway the almost limitless waterways of the West that
linked themselves with the navigable Ohio. But for the beginning it was
agreed that Cumberland, long an important point on the well-famed
National Highway, and even then a centre in the coal traffic, was a far
enough distant goal to be worthy of the most ambitious enterprise. Indeed a
long cutting through a hill in the first section of the road proved a serious
financial obstacle to the directors of the struggling railroad. But these last
were men who persevered. They started to lay their track for the thirteen
miles from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills on July 4, 1828. That occasion was
honored by an old-time celebration in which the chief figure was Charles

Carroll, of Carrollton, who laid the first stone of the new line. After his
services were finished he said to a friend:
“I consider this among the most important things of my life, second only to
the signing of the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.”
Of that act President Hadley, of Yale, has written: “One man’s life formed
the connecting link between the political revolution of the one century and
the industrial revolution of the other.”
No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the directors
found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise was then so
unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark. Even the
construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first planned to use
wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted upon stone
sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track was obviously
wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the traffic was at all
sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden sleepers.
But the track was the least of the company’s problems. It had gone ahead to
build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent motive-
power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the question for
hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance. The Baltimore
& Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car which was
carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.
Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power
problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the
outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore
partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent
that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him
that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the struggling
little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from Baltimore. He
came to the aid of its directors in their problem of motive-power.
That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a locomotive
around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York, bought an
engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car—not larger than a hand-car,
geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief problem of the B. &
O. His little engine—the Tom Thumb—was a primitive enough affair, but it

pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who were pinning their entire
faith to their railroad project.

Two years after the beginning of the work, “brigades” of horse-cars were in
regular service to Ellicott’s Mills; by the first of December, 1831, trains—
steam-drawn—ran through to Frederick, Md.; five months later, to a day,
they had reached Point of Rocks on the Potomac, seventy miles from
Baltimore. At Point of Rocks the road was halted for a long time. The
power of the powerful Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which had been great
enough to keep State or national grants from struggling railroads, was
raised to defend its claim to a monopoly of the Potomac Valley, by right of
priority. This right was sustained in the courts, and the railroad held back
two years, until it could buy a compromise.
In 1835, a highly profitable branch was opened to Washington, while early
in the following year, trains were running through to Harpers Ferry, at the
mouth of the Shenandoah.
During that same Summer of 1835, definite steps were taken toward the
extension of the railroad to Pittsburgh, as well as Wheeling. But it was three
years later before the struggling company was ready to make a surveying
reconnaissance of these extensions of the road. All through that time actual
construction work was slowly but quite surely progressing westward from
Harpers Ferry, and on November 5, 1842, trains entered Cumberland, the
one-time objective point of the enterprise.

An early locomotive built by William Norris for the Philadelphia &
Reading Railroad

The historic “John Bull” of the Camden & Amboy Railroad—and its
train

A heavy-grade type of locomotive built for the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1864. Its flaring
stack was typical of those years

But beyond Cumberland the road gradually left the comfortable valley of
the Potomac, and these early railroad builders found themselves confronted
with new difficulties. To build a railroad across the range of the
Appalachians, with the primitive methods and machinery of those days was
no simple task. For nine years the construction work dragged. In 1851 the
line had only been finished to Piedmont, twenty-nine miles west of
Cumberland, and its builders were well-nigh discouraged. Let us quote
from the ancient history of the B. & O., from which we derive these facts,
in an exact paragraph:

“In the Fall of 1851, the Board found themselves, almost
without warning, in the midst of a financial crisis, with a family
of more than 5,000 laborers and 1,200 horses to be provided for,
while their treasury was rapidly growing weaker. The
commercial existence of the city of Baltimore depended on the
prompt and successful prosecution of the unfinished road.”
In October, 1852, it was found that there had been expended for
construction west of Cumberland, $7,217,732.51. But the road was going
ahead once more. Its Board had dug deep into their pockets and the
commercial crisis that hovered over Baltimore was passed. Two years later
the road entered Wheeling, and its corporate title was no longer a misnomer.
A little later, a more direct line was built to Parkersburg, West Virginia, and
direct connection entered with the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, which
reached St. Louis. The railroad was beginning to feel its way out across the
land.
War between North and South had been declared before the long delayed
extension to Pittsburgh was finished. In that time a real master-hand had
come to the Baltimore & Ohio. In its early days the names of Philip E.
Thomas, Peter Cooper, Ross Winans, and B. H. Latrobe were indissolubly
linked with this pioneer railroad; in its second era John W. Garrett gave
brilliancy to its administration. Even before, as well as throughout the four
trying years of the war, when the road’s tracks were being repeatedly torn
up and its bridges burned, Mr. Garrett was laying down his masterly policy
of expansion. It was a discouraging beginning that confronted him. The two
expensive extensions to the Ohio River had been a severe drain on the
company’s treasury, traffic was at low ebb, the great financial panic of 1857
had been hard to surmount.
But Mr. Garrett was one of the first of American railroaders to see that a
trunk-line should start at the seaboard and end at Chicago or the
Mississippi. He pushed his line to Pittsburgh, to Cleveland, to Sandusky, to
Chicago. It began to reach new and growing traffic centres. The Baltimore
& Ohio entered upon an era of magnificent prosperity.
The first cloud upon that era came in the early seventies, when its powerful
rival, the Pennsylvania, secured control of the Philadelphia, Wilmington &

Baltimore, the B. & O.’s connecting link on its immensely profitable
through route from New York to Washington. Pennsylvania interests
tunnelled for long miles through the rocky foundations of Baltimore,
purchased an independent line to Washington—the Baltimore & Potomac—
and the B. & O. found itself deprived of its best congested traffic district.
For eleven years it was unable to retaliate, though not a soul believed the
Baltimore & Ohio to be other than a splendid, conservative property. It
owned its own sleeping-car company, its own express company, its own
telegraph company. The name of Garrett was behind it. Logan G.
McPherson says:
“When it was desired to obtain additional funds, bonds were
always issued instead of the capital stock being increased.
Interest on bonds has always to be met, whereas dividends on
stocks can be passed. It was announced, however, that the
retention of the stock capitalization at less than fifteen millions
of dollars was an evidence of conservatism, as the continuance
of semi-annual dividends of five per cent was thereby
permitted.”
John W. Garrett died in 1884, and was succeeded in the presidency by his
son Robert Garrett, who announced himself ready to continue a policy of
expansion. The younger Garrett sought to regain an entrance for his traffic
to New York. To that end he built a line into Philadelphia and prepared to
strike across the State of New Jersey. He failed in that end by the failure of
one of his confidential aides; the line that he had counted on for entrance
into the American metropolis was snapped up by his greatest rival just as
his own fingers were almost upon it. Later the B. & O. was permitted a
trackage entrance into Jersey City, but the terms of that entrance were so
stringent as to mean a practical surrender upon its part.
If Baltimore & Ohio had won that battle, a different story might have been
chronicled. As it was, it stood a loser in a fearfully expensive fight; the
English investors in the property became investigators—of a sudden the
bottom dropped out of things. The stock went slipping down as only a mob-
chased stock in Wall Street can drop; the road that had been the pride of
Baltimore became, for the moment, her shame. It was shown, upon
investigation, that the road had long gone upon a slender standing: millions

of dollars that should actually have been charged to loss had been charged
against its capital and included in the surplus. Ten years after Mr. Garrett’s
death the road found itself in even more bitter straits. It was a laughing
stock and a reproach among railroad men. Its profitable side-properties—
the sleeping-car company, the express company, the telegraph company,—
the first two of which should never be permitted to go outside of the control
of any really great railroad company—had been sold, one after another, in
attempts to save the day of reckoning. Just before the Chicago Fair the road
reached low-water mark. Its passenger cars were weather-beaten and
ravaged almost beyond hope of paint-shops; it was sometimes necessary to
hold outgoing trains in the famous old Camden station at Baltimore, until
the lamps and drinking glasses could be secured from some incoming train.
In that day of low-water mark it was actually and seriously proposed to
abandon the passenger service of the road!
Out of that chaos came the B. & O. of to-day, a substantial and well-
managed railroad property. Mr. Garrett was the first of the railroaders to
construct a single property from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi;
John F. Cowan, L. F. Loree, Oscar G. Murray, and Daniel Willard have been
his successors in the revamping of the B. & O., eliminating its costly
grades, enlarging yard and terminal facilities, and making the historic road a
carrier of the first class.

The history of the Erie Railroad is hardly less dramatic than that of the
Baltimore & Ohio; its financial disasters were not owing to the errors that
come of crass stupidity. For the Erie did its good part in the making of
railroad law. Built and operated in the earliest railroad days as a single
enterprise through the southern tier of counties of New York State from the
Hudson River to Lake Erie, while the roads to the north that were
eventually to be welded by Commodore Vanderbilt into the great New York
Central were still quarrelling among themselves, it was wrecked time and
time again by unscrupulous schemes of high finance. It was made to wear
mill-stones in the shape of outrageous bonded indebtednesses that acted as a
fearful handicap for many years and prevented a remarkably well located
property from standing to-day as the peer of the Pennsylvania or of the New

York Central. The story of these outrages has been told and retold—they are
integral parts of the financial history of the country. Suffice it to say here
and now that the Erie has been operated with more or less success by no
less than four struggling corporations; that it has never come closer to
achieving success than under its present president, F. D. Underwood; and
that no one save those who have stood close to Underwood has known or
appreciated the heritage of handicap that was given to him to shoulder. For
it has been part of our railroad principle in this country—a mighty sad part,
too—that no matter how villainously stocks and bonds may have been
issued at any time—only to bring failure swiftly and inevitably,—such
bogus paper has always been protected in reorganization. A railroad which
becomes bankrupt cannot be abandoned. That has been done only in rare
cases. Even the Baltimore & Ohio, at the end of its rope less than twenty
years ago, was not permitted to abandon its passenger service. It must pull
itself up out of the difficulties, and—in America at least—it must pull its
trashy paper up too, in order that no holder of such paper may be
unprotected. The paper can no more be abandoned than the right-of-way.
The result is seen in railroads staggering under vast and questionable
capitalization (there is no cleaning of the slate); but the sins of those that
have gone before are truly visited upon the third and the fourth generation,
as well as upon the poor humans who, under such burdens, are trying to
operate a railroad property.
From the beginning the story of Erie has been a story of difficulties. The
original scheme of building a New York railroad from Piermont-on-Hudson
to Dunkirk on Lake Erie—some 450 miles—seems in the face of the
resources of the State at that time and the engineering difficulties to be
solved, almost quixotic. But the road was built step by step, section by
section, until in May, 1851, a triumphal first train was operated over its
entire length. President Fillmore was the guest of honor on the train, but
shared attention with Daniel Webster on the trip. Webster, in order that he
might see the country, insisted on making the entire tedious journey in a
rocking-chair, which was lashed upon a flat-car. Another flat-car was
occupied by a railroad officer who was designated to receive the flags. C. F.
Carter, in his interesting sketch on the early days of the Erie, writes:
“By a singular coincidence, the ladies at every one of the more
than sixty stations between Piermont and Dunkirk had

conceived the idea that it would be as original as it was
appropriate to present a flag wrought by their own fair hands to
the railroad company when the first train passed through to Lake
Erie. As it would have consumed altogether too much time to
make a stop for each of these flag presentations, the engineer
merely slowed down at three-fourths of the stations long enough
to permit the man on the flat-car to scoop up the banners in his
arms, much like the hands on the old-fashioned Marsh
harvesters gathered up armfuls of grain for binding. At the end
of the journey the Erie Railroad had a collection of flags that
would have done credit to a victorious army.”
Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph
came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line, built
for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of the
road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days. It was
only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his
message like a letter, beginning with “Dear sir” and ending with “Yours
truly.” The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast train
rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the right-of-way over
those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on single-track lines
were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a train was waiting for
another coming in an opposite direction, and the train came not after an
hour, the first train proceeded forward “under flag.” That meant that a man,
walking with a flag in his hand preceded the train to protect it. The
locomotive and its train of cars necessarily proceeded at snail’s pace.
It was not so very long after that observation-car trip that Daniel Webster
took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie’s superintendent,
Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of the road. The train
on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound express at Turner’s.
After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing the opposing train, Minot
was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed up the line fourteen miles to
Goshen to hold that west-bound train until he should arrive there. He then
ordered his train-crew to proceed. They rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had
too much regard for his own precious neck to break the time-card rules,
even under the superintendent’s orders. So finally Minot took charge of the

engine himself, while Lewis cautiously seated himself in the last seat of the
last car and awaited the worst.
It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had
received the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it
had not arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to
reach Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By
the use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in
running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains by
telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early
railroads.
At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief that
the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, “some two hundred
thousand dollars in a year,” and his neighbors laughed at him for his
extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months’ operation of the road the
receipts—mostly from freight—were $1,755,285.
To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not yet
been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of scheming;
the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the monumental
tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property—a property with
possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The present
management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen the
future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its lines for the
full development of the property as a carrier of goods, rather than of
through passengers.

The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the
beginning, the different roads—such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore &
Ohio, and New York Central—were being pushed west over the Alleghany
Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era
where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era
which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange stock-
watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and

Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The first
railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built in
1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State
capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the Sandusky, was the first
locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.
The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad—now a
part of the Wabash—extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to
Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a
locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N. J.,—
the founders of a famous locomotive works—was landed from a packet-
steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard upon
the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:
“The little locomotive had no whistle, no spark-arrester, no cow-
catcher, and the cab was open to the sky. Its speed was about six
miles an hour, and where the railroad and the highway lay
parallel to each other there was frequently a trial of speed
between the locomotive with its ‘pleasure cars’ and the stage-
coaches. Sometimes the stage-coaches came in ahead. Six
inches of snow were sufficient to blockade the trains drawn by
this American engine.”
In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from
Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the east
shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago
with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its
chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,—afterwards a part of
the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the
extended New York Central system—was also pushing toward Chicago as a
goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow
work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the
railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful
financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted beside
the “fly-by-night” schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the single trunk-
line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to Cleveland that
was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the trunk-line connection
east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing completion.

Chicago’s first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the
cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the really
great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was incorporated
in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in laying tracks,
for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des Plaines; and its
first locomotive, the Pioneer, had been bought second-hand from the
Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York State. The rails were
second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the Western railroads were
already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it was a railroad, and it was
with a deal of pride that John B. Turner, its president, used to ascend to an
observatory on the second floor of the old Halsted Street depot to sight with
a telescope the smoke of his morning train coming across the prairie. The
Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was organized in 1859. For a time it was
so desperately poor that it could not pay the interest on its bonds, and there
was a time when its officers had to meet the pay-roll out of their own
pockets; but it succeeded in absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at
the beginning. In another decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting
the Far West with the populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed.
The Chicago and Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between
the Lakes and the eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs.
The business that came to it because of that linking was the first strong
impulse that led to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.
The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois
Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later
when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears,
construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to
Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking
race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main
line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready
for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly
showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to effect
their escape to the North.

Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the
Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a
bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should
seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while
there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States, that
Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to the
Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six years
later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque, Iowa,
for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and his
convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New
York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific
railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was a
shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the
propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge
Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney
had died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea,
came Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond &
Whitcomb of the fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New
England folk to come to Boston to see the Boston Museum and the
panoramas, which were the gay diversion of that day. In one year he
brought two hundred thousand folk into that sacred Massachusetts town,
and he began to be rated as a rich man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad
idea and freely spent his money in its propagation. He organized the
People’s Pacific Railroad,—and a part of his scheme formed the foundation
of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like the others, spent his money and failed
to see the fruition of his plan. There seemed to be something ill-fated about
that plan of a railroad to the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had
gathered on the Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real
transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas
City by 1856. That particular railroad—the Missouri Pacific—through its
western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the
coast within the past year.
When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the seemingly hopeless task of
trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm of
Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer. The
thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham, who

had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought that
august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war, into
making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of ten
men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with
enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the
location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to
Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad
had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with interest,
but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into the high
passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would certainly
have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he believed so
earnestly. He found it—making a route that would save 148 miles and
$13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities. When he
went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends,
Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that pass
in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins
has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they were sending
for the three other capitalists of Sacramento—the Crocker brothers, who
had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford, a wholesale
grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central Pacific Railroad was
organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on the new line at
Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California shook with laughter at
the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers building a railroad across the
crest of the Sierras.
How they built their railroad successfully and amassed six really great
American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a deaf
ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that bankers
dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring their credit),
found their route through the mountains just as Judah had promised,
brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand Chinese
laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the pines by a
single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to the mountains,
and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys. “Two thousand
feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where eagles were at
home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could neither be surmounted
nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a bank swallow’s hole

from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended in persuading
the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight half the battles of the
Revolution.”
While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union
Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A
Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental
track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial blot
upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the Spring of
1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of subsidy
getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles away
from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began that
has never been approached in the history of railroad building. Twenty-five
thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of
locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten
miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of
such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford,
who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific at
Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment
the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.
After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific,
and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single
railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into its
own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the Northern
Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake country straight
to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike was driven in
the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and so far the only
railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Within a year
the Western Pacific—the westernmost of the chain of Gould roads—has
begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As this volume goes to
press finishing touches are being placed upon the Puget Sound extension of
the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the last transcontinental to be
stretched across these United States for a number of years to come. Far to
the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is finding its way across the wilderness
of the Canadian Rockies, creating a great city—Prince Rupert—at its
western terminal. It should be ready for its through traffic within the next
three years.

This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading—an eighty-year
struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through many
vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused to
invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. It has been assailed
by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of the so-
called “pooling agreements,” and it has cut its own strong arms by building
foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while the
highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud canals have fallen
into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful existence.
Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the business; and
for the first time the country sees practically every line, large or small,
honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all but passed into
history.

CHAPTER III

THE BUILDING OF A RAILROAD
Cost of a Single-track Road—Financing—
Securing a Charter—Survey-work and
its Dangers—Grades—Construction
—Track-laying.

T HE railroad has its beginning in the inspiration and in the imagination
of men. Perchance a great tract of country, rich in possibilities, stands
undeveloped for lack of transportation facilities. The living arm of the
railroad will bring to it both strength and growth. It will bring to it the
materials, the men, and the machinery needed for its development. It will
take from it its products seeking markets in communities already
established.
In that way the first railroads began, reaching their arms carefully in from
the Atlantic and the navigable rivers and bays that emptied into it. In the
beginning there was hardly any inland country. All the important towns
were spread along the sea-coast or along those same navigable tributaries,
and it was sorry shrift for any community that did not possess a wharf to
which vessels of considerable tonnage might attain. Where such
communities did not possess natural water-ways, they sought to obtain
artificial ones; and the result was the extraordinary impetus that was given
to the building of canals during the first half of the nineteenth century—a
page of American industrial history that has been told in another chapter.
It was found quite impossible to handle bulky freight economically by
wagon, no matter how romantic the turnpike might be for passenger traffic
in the old-time coaches. The canal was so much better as a carrier that it
was hailed with acclaim, and waxed powerful. In the height of its power it
laughed at the puny efforts of the railroad, and then, as you have seen,

sought by every possible means to throttle the growth of the steel highway.
Within eighty years it was powerless, and the railroad was conqueror. There
were hundreds of miles of abandoned canal within the country, many of
them being converted into roadbeds of railroads; and the water-highway,
with its slow transit and its utter helplessness during the frozen months of
the year, was not able to exist except where quantities of the coarsest sort of
freight were to be moved.
Without railroads, the United States to-day would, in all probability, not be
radically different from the United States of a hundred years ago. All the
large towns and cities would still be clustered upon the coast and
waterways, and back of them would still rest many, many square miles of
undeveloped country; the nation would have remained a sprawling, helpless
thing, weakened by its very size, and subject both to internal conflict and to
attacks of foreign invaders. It has been repeatedly said that if there had been
a through railroad development in the South during the fifties, there would
have been no Civil War. France for five hundred years before the signing of
our Declaration, was a civilized and progressive nation. Yet century after
century passed without her inland towns showing material change; and her
seaports, lacking the impetus of interior growth, remained quiescent. Such a
metropolis as Marseilles is to-day, became possible only when the railroad
made this seaport the south gate of a mightily developing nation.

Let us assume that we are about to build a railroad. If we are going to strike
our road in from some existing line or some accessible port into virgin
country, we may hope for land or money grants from the State, county,
town, or city Government. That is a faint hope, however, in these piping
days of the twentieth century. So much scandal once attached itself to these
grants that they have become all but obsolete. We shall have to fall back
upon the individual enterprise and help of the persons who are to benefit by
the coming of the railroad. They may be folk who simply regard our project
as a good investment, and place their money in it with hopes of a fair return.
Even if we are not going into virgin territory to give whole townships and
counties their first sight of the locomotive, but are going to strike into a

community already provided with railroad facilities but seemingly offering
fair opportunity for profit in a competitive traffic, we shall find capital
ready to stand back of us. A railroad will cost much money, the mere cost of
single-track construction generally running far in excess of $35,000 a mile;
and it should have resources, particularly in a highly competitive territory,
to enable it to carry on a losing fight at the first.
For the money it receives it will issue securities, upon incorporation and
legal organization, almost invariably in the form of capital stock and of
mortgage-bonds. The stock will probably be held by the men who wish to
control the construction and the operation of the line; the bonds will be
issued to those persons who invest their money in it, either for profit or as
an aid to the community it seeks to enter. The bonds are, in almost all cases,
the preferable security. They pay a guaranteed interest at a certain rate, and
at the end of a designated term of years they are redeemable at face value,
in cash or in the capital stock of the company. There are other forms of loan
obligations which the railroad issues—debenture bonds, second-mortgage
bonds, short-term notes, and the like. To enter upon a description of these
would mean a detour into the devious highways and byways of railroad
finance—an excursion which we have no desire to make in this book.
In building our line we will issue as few bonds in proportion to our stock as
will make our company fairly stable in organization, and its proposition
attractive to investors. For we shall have to pay our interest coupons upon
the bonds from the beginning. We can begin even moderate dividends upon
our stock after our enterprise has entered upon fair sailing. The all-
important initial problem of financing having been at least partly settled, we
will go before the Legislature and secure a charter for our road. In these
modern days we shall probably have also to make application to some State
railroad or public utility commission. It will consider our case with great
care, granting hearings so that we may state our plans, and that folk living
in the territory which we are about to tap may urge the necessity of our
coming, and that rival railroads or other opponents may state their
objections. After the entire evidence has been sifted down and weighed in
truly judicial fashion, we may hope for word to “go ahead,” from the
official commission, which, though it assumes none of our risk of loss in
projecting the line, will gratuitously assume many of the details of its
management.

Perhaps the politicians will poke their noses into our plan; they sometimes
do. If we have plenty of capital behind us; if it becomes rumored that the P
—— or the N—— or the X——, one of the big existing properties, is back
of us, or some “big Wall Street fellow” is guiding our bonds, we can almost
confidently expect their interference. After that it becomes a matter of
diplomacy—and may the best man win!

Let us assume that some of these big obstacles have already been passed,
that the politicians have been placed at arm’s length, that the money needed
is in sight—we are ready to begin the construction of our line. The location
is the thing that next vexes us. A few errors in the placing of our line may
spell failure for the whole enterprise. Obviously, these errors will be of the
sort that admit of no easy correction.
If our line is to link two important traffic centres and is to make a specialty
of through traffic it will have to be very much of a town that will bend the
straightness of our route. If, on the other hand, the line is to pick up its
traffic from the territory it traverses we can afford to neglect no place of
possibilities. We must make concessions, even if we make many twists and
turns and climb steep grades; we cannot afford to pass business by. Perhaps
we may even have to worm our way into the hearts of towns already grown
and closely built, and this will be expensive work. But it will be worth
every cent of that expense to go after competitive business.
We roughly outline our route, and the engineers get their camping duds
ready, particularly in these days when new railroads almost invariably go
into a new country. Their first trip over the route will be known as the
reconnaissance. On it they will make rough plotting of the territory through
which the new line is to place its rails. Our engineers are experienced. They
survey the country with practised eyes. The line must go on this side of that
ridge, because of the prevailing winds and their influence upon snowdrifts
(it costs a mint of money to run ploughs through a long winter), and on the
other side of the next ridge, because the other side has easily worked loam,
and this side heavy rock. There must be passes through hills and through
mountains to be selected now and then, and all the while the engineer must

bear in mind that the amount of his excavation should very nearly balance
the amount of embankment-fill. Bridges are to be avoided and tunnels must
come only in case of absolute necessity.
There will be several of these reconnaissances and from them the engineers
who are to build the line, and the men who are to own and operate it, will
finally pick a route close to what will be the permanent way.

Construction engineers blaze their way across the face of new country

The making of an embankment by dump-train

“Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless engines”

Then the real survey-work begins. The engineers divide the line, if it is of
any great length, and the several divisions prosecute their work
simultaneously. Each surveying party consists of a front flag-man, who is a
captain and commands a brigade of axe-men in their work of cutting away
trees and bushes; the transit-man, who makes his record of distances and
angles and commands his brigade of chain-men and flag-men; and the
leveller, who studies contour all the while, and supervisors, rod-men and
more axe-men. Topographers are carried, their big drawing boards being
strapped with the camp equipment; and a good cook is a big detail not
likely to be overlooked.
In soft and rolling country this is a form of camp life that turns back the
scoffer: busy summer days and indolent summer nights around the camp-
fire, pipes drawing well and plans being set for the morrow’s work. Another

summer all this will be changed. The resistless path of the railroad will be
stepped through here, the group of nodding pines will be gone, for a culvert
will span the creek at this very point.
Sometimes the work of these parties becomes intense and dramatic. The
chief, lowered into a deep and rocky river cañon, is making rough notes and
sketches, following the character of the rock formation, and dreaming the
great dreams that all great engineers, great architects, great creators must
dream perforce. He is dreaming of the day when, a year or two hence, the
railroad’s path shall have crowded itself into this impasse, and when the
folk who dine luxuriously in the showy cars will fret because of the curve
that spills their soup, and who never know of the man who was slipped
down over a six-hundred-foot cliff in order that the railroad might find its
way.
It is then that the surveying party begins to have its thrills. Perhaps to put
that line through the cañon the party will have to descend the river in
canoes. If the river be too rough, then there is the alternative of being
lowered over the cliffsides. Talk of your dangers of Alpine climbing! The
engineers who plan and build railroads through any mountainous country
miss not a single one of them. Everywhere the lines must find a foothold.
This is the proposition that admits of but one answer—solution. Sometimes
the men who follow the chief in the deep river cañons, the men with heavy
instruments to carry and to operate—transits, levels, and the like—must
have lines of logs strung together for their precarious foothold as they work.
Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope that lowers the engineer down over
the cliffside snaps, and the folk in the cheerful dining-room do not know of
the graves that are dug beside the railroad’s resistless path.
It is all new and wonderful, blazing this path for civilization; sometimes it
is even accidental. An engineer, baffled to find a crossing over the Rockies
for a transcontinental route saw an eagle disappear through a cleft in the
hills that his eye had not before detected. He followed the course of the
eagle; to-day the rails of the transcontinental reach through that cleft, and
the time-table shows it as Eagle Pass.

Possibly there are still alternative routes when the surveyers return in the
fall and begin to make their finished drawings. Final choices must now be
made, and land-maps that show the property that the railroad will have to
acquire, prepared. The details, of infinite number, are being worked out
with infinite care.
The great problem of all is the problem of grades; in a mountainous stretch
of line this is almost the entire problem. Obviously a perfect stretch of
railroad would be straight and without grades. The railroad that comes
nearest that practically impossible standard comes nearest to perfection. But
as it comes near this perfection, the cost of construction multiplies many
times. Most new lines must feel their way carefully at the outset. Moreover
it is not an impossible thing to reconstruct it after years of affluence—of
which more in another chapter.
A three-per-cent grade is almost the extreme limit for anything like a
profitable operation; even a two-per-cent grade is one in which the
operating people look forward to reconstruction and elimination. Yet there
are short lengths of line up in the mining camps of Colorado, where grades
of more than four per cent are operated; and it is a matter of railroad history
that away back in 1852, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was being
pushed through toward Parkersburg, and the great Kingwood tunnel was
being dug, B. H. Latrobe, the chief engineer of the company, built and
successfully operated a temporary line over the divide at a grade of ten per
cent—528 feet to the mile. A locomotive which weighed 28 tons on its
driving-wheels carried a single passenger car, weighing 15 tons, in safety
and in regular operation over this stupendous grade for more than six
months. The ascent was made by means of zigzag tracks on the so-called
switchback principle. That scheme succeeded earlier planes operated by
endless chains; an instance of which is the quite famous road of Mauch
Chunk, originally operated for coal, and now a side scenic trip for
passengers. Other planes of this sort, you will remember, were in operation
at Albany and Schenectady on the old Mohawk & Hudson route, now a part
of the New York Central lines; but all of them involved a change of
passengers and freight to and from their cars, and the zigzag switchback
was considered quite an advance in its day. Two of these ancient
switchbacks are still in regular use for passengers and freight—one at
Honesdale, Pa., and the other at Ithaca, N. Y.

The matter of grades being settled, and with it as a corrollary the question
of minor curves, minor details next claim attention. Perhaps the water
supply along the new line is defective. Then arrangements must be made for
impounding, and perhaps suitable dams and waterworks will be built for
this purpose. The water must be soft, to protect the locomotive boilers; if
hard, an apparatus is erected for the softening process. Grade crossings are
to be avoided, highway crossings being built, wherever possible, over or
under the railroad.
A railroad crossing another railroad at grade is an abomination not to be
permitted nowadays. The universal use of the air-brake has permitted a
reduction of the “head-room,”—the necessary clearance between the rail
and overhead obstruction—from 20 feet to 14 feet. The old “head-room”
was necessary to protect the brakeman who worked atop of the box-cars.
This reduction of six feet in clearance was a matter of infinite relief to
engineers, particularly in the bridging of one railroad over another.

The entire problem of bridges is so intricate a phase of American railroad
construction as to demand attention in a subsequent chapter. In actual
railroad practice it is apt to demand a separate branch of engineering skill,
both in construction and in maintenance. We turn our attention back to the
main problem of the building of our railroad.
When all plans are finished, contracts remain to be divided and sub-divided;
for it would be a brave contractor, indeed, who in these days would consent
to essay himself, any considerable length of railroad line. In fact, in recent
work of heavy nature, the price is almost invariably placed at an indefinite
figure, a certain definite percentage of profit being allowed the contractor
on each cubic yard of rock or soil. In such a case the contractor’s business
becomes far less a game of chance; he is, in effect, the railroad’s agent
supervising its construction at a certain set stipend.
Let us say that the construction on our railroad begins in the early spring.
As a matter of real fact it would not be halted long because of adverse
weather conditions. Even up in the frozen and uninhabitable wilds of the

Canadian Northwest, work has been prosecuted on the new Grand Trunk
Pacific throughout the entire twelve months. But in summer the
construction gangs rejoice. The great proposition of bringing mile after mile
of future railroad to sub-grade—the level upon which the cross-ties are to
be set—fairly sweeps forward under the genial warmth of the sun. The
construction is under the supervision of competent engineers, who are, of
course, under the direct supervision of the railroad’s own organization.
Every six to twelve or fifteen miles of new line is divided into sections,
better known as residencies, for each is under the eye of its own resident
engineer. He reports to the construction engineer, who in turn reports to the
chief engineer of the railroad, an officer who reports to no less person than
the president of the company.
This great force—for each engineer has gathered about him a competent
staff of young men as expert with compass, with level, and with transit as
were the men who first projected the line—is in the field as quickly as the
contractor. They are to see him bring the line to sub-grade; to see him place
bridges and culverts, bisect high hills with cuttings, bore tunnels through
even higher hills and mountains, span deep valleys with great
embankments. To facilitate quick construction the residencies are made
numerous; work begins at as many initial points as possible. These points,
of course, are situated, where possible, close to water communication or
existing railroad lines, in order that material may be brought with the least
possible delay and expense.

Of course, if the country has a sharp contour, the ordinary difficulties of
line-construction multiply very rapidly. The great cuttings through the hills
may have to be carved out of resisting rock, a work that is carried on
through many levels, known to the engineers as ledges or as benches. If
there are high hills to be notched there will probably be great hollows where
the circumstances do not justify carrying the line on bridge or trestle. In
these cases come the fills, or embankments. We have already shown how
the locating engineer in the first instance has tried to plan his line so that the
earth or rock from his cutting will be as nearly as possible sufficient to form
the near-by embankments. Sometimes it is not, and then the resident

engineers must locate borrow-pits, where the hungry demand of the railroad
for dirt will cause a great hollow to show itself on the face of the earth. The
borrow-pit must be carefully located—convenient of access, far enough
from the track not to be a danger spot to it. This is one of the infinity of
problems that come to the construction engineer.
For these big jobs laborers’ camps will be established close to them; and
small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless dummy-engines
and forcing their narrow-gauged rails here and there and everywhere, will
be busy for long weeks and months. There will not be much hand-cutting in
the ledges. Steam shovels, mounted like locomotives upon the rails, and
pushing forward all the while, will fairly eat out the hillside. One of these
will catch up in a single dip of his giant arm more than a wagon load of soft
earth or of rock that has been blasted apart for his coming.
To make the fills the engineers must often build rough wooden trestles out
of the permanent level of the line. The dummy-engines, with their trails of
dump-cars, coming from the back of the steam shovels in the cutting, or
from the nearest borrow-pit, will hardly seem in a single day to make an
appreciable effect upon the fill. But the days and weeks together count, and
the dumping multiplies until the rough trestle has completely disappeared,
and the railroad has a firm and permanent path across the edge of the dizzy
embankment. And these embankments can be made truly dizzy. The
passenger going west from Omaha on the new Lane cut-off of the Union
Pacific finds his path for almost twenty miles through deep cuttings of the
crests of the rolling Nebraska hills, across the edge of the long fills over
wide valleys. The Lackawanna railroad building a great cut-off on its main
line where it passes through New Jersey has just finished the largest railroad
embankment ever built—an earthen structure for two tracks, three miles
long and seventy-five to one hundred and ten feet in height.

Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of the high hills

A giant fill—in the making

The finishing touches to the track

This machine can lay a mile of track a day

As the line goes forward, the track follows. The new railroad has probably
popularized itself from the outset by hiring the near-by farmers and their
teams to grade the line through their localities, particularly where an almost
level country makes the grading a slight matter. Sometimes in level country,
grading machines, drawn by horses, or by traction engines, have been used
to advantage. These machines are equipped with ploughs which loosen the
soil and place it on conveyor belts. Material can be deposited twenty-two
feet away from the line, and a four-foot excavation can be made by these
machines with ease.
But the laying of the track—the line having been finished at sub-grade with
a top width of from 14 to 20 feet for each standard gauge track to be laid—
the line begins to assume the appearance of a real railroad. Upon the first
stretches of completed track, locomotives and cars employed in
construction service begin to operate. As the track grows, their field of

operation increases. Then comes the day when the track sections begin to be
joined; the railroad is beginning to be a real pathway of steel.
To build this pathway is comparatively a simple matter, once the sub-grade
is finished. A mile a day is not too much for any confident contractor to
expect of his construction gangs. There was that time, back in ’69, when a
world’s record of ten miles of track laid in a single day was established on
the Central Pacific. For that mile of standard track the contractor will need
3,168 ties—eight carloads; 352 rails—five carloads; and a carload of angle
irons, bolts, and spikes, as fasteners.
The track-layers are as proud of their profession as any man might be of his.
Their skill is a wondrous thing. Two men who follow the wake of a wagon
roughly place the ties as fast as they are dropped upon the right-of-way.
Another man aligns them with a line that has been strung by one of the
young engineers, a fourth with a notched board, marks the location of one
rail. That rail—the line side—follows close to the location marks. It is
roughly banded and lightly fastened in place. The other rail—the gauge side
—quickly follows. The wonderfully accurate gauge representing the 4 feet,
8½ inches that is almost the standard of the work, and which is tested every
morning by the engineers, is in constant use. The railroad track must be
true; there is not room for even the variation of a fraction of an inch in the
gauge of the two rails.
In fastening the two long lines of rails, the profession of track-laying rises
to almost supreme heights. The men who fasten the rail with angle iron and
a single roughly-adjusted bolt in each rail-end are head-strappers and past
masters in their art. After them in due season come the back-strappers,
finishing that fine work of solidly bolting the rail against the vast strain of a
thousand-ton train being shot over it at lightning speed. And after the back-
strappers and the men who have spiked the rail to the ties, comes the
locomotive itself, bringing more ties, more rails, more angle-bars and bolts,
and more spikes to the front. Then sometime later the road-bed is ballasted
and the line made ready for heavy operation.
But track-laying is frequently machine systematized these days; and in this,
as in so many smaller things, the mechanical device has supplanted the
man. A real giant is the track-laying machine. It is mounted upon railroad

tracks and is a form of overhead carrier with a tremendous overhang. The
carrier is fed with the cross-ties from supply cars just back of the machine
and the ties are dropped, each close to its appointed place, as a locomotive
slowly pushes the entire apparatus forward. In a smaller way the heavy steel
rails are delivered from under the overhang of the carrier. A gang of men
make short work of the fastening of the rail to the cross-ties and the
machine moves steadily forward. It has been known to make two miles a
day at this work.

Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-
builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day
comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to
the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new
markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that
has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted
depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds
where it has never before sounded.
Life is awakened. The railroad, which is life, has reached forth a new arm,
and creation is begun.

CHAPTER IV

TUNNELS
Their Use in Reducing Grades—The Hoosac
Tunnel—The Use Of Shafts—
Tunnelling Under Water—The
Detroit River Tunnel.

S OMETIMES the construction engineer of the railroad brings his new
line face to face with a mountain too steep to be easily mounted. Then
he may prepare to pierce it. Tunnels are not pleasant things through which
to ride. They are, moreover, expensive to construct, and when once
constructed are an unending care, necessitating expensive and constant
inspection. But—and that “but” in this case is a very large one—they
reduce grades and distances in a wholesale fashion; and when you reduce
grades you are pretty sure to be reducing operating expenses. A railroad
man will think twice in his opposition to a smoky bore of a tunnel that will
cost some three to five million dollars, when his expert advisers tell him
that that same smoky bore will save him a hundred thousand tons of coal in
the course of a year.
From almost its very beginnings the American railroad has been dependent
upon tunnels, and thus has closely followed European precedent. The
Alleghany Portage Railroad, to which reference has already been made,
passed through what is said to have been the first railroad tunnel in the
United States. It pierced a spur in the Alleghany Mountains, and it was 901
feet in length, 20 feet wide, and 19 feet high within the arch, 150 feet at
each end being arched with cut stone. The old tunnel, built in 1832, which
has not echoed with the panting of the locomotive for more than half a
century, is still to be found not far from Johnstown, Pa. It simply serves the
purpose to-day of calling attention to the durable fashion in which the
earliest of our railroad-builders worked.

Of the building of the Baltimore & Ohio, tunnel-construction formed an
early part, several paths being found across the steep profiles of the
Alleghanies. The Kingwood Tunnel, which B. H. Latrobe drove, was nearly
a mile long and the chief of these bores. But when the Hoosac Tunnel was
first proposed—piercing the rocky heart of one of the greatest of the
Berkshires—the country stood aghast. Four miles and a half of tunnel! That
seemed ridiculous away back in 1854, when the plan was first broached and
folk were not slow to say what they thought of such an absurd plan. For
twenty years it looked as though these scoffers were in the right—the work
of digging that monumental tunnel was a fearful drain on the treasury of the
commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was lending its aid to the project.
But the tunnel-diggers finally conquered—they almost always do—and the
Hoosac remains to-day the greatest of all mountain tunnels in America. The
system of continuous tunnels, by which the Pennsylvania Railroad recently
reached its terminal in New York, stretches from Bergen Hill in New Jersey
to Sunnyside, Long Island, a distance of some ten miles. In fact the largest
feature of recent tunnel-work in this country has been in connection with
terminal and rapid-transit development in the larger cities. For a good many
years New York and Baltimore, in particular, have been pierced with these
sub-surface railroads; it is a construction feature that increases as our great
cities themselves increase. No river is to-day too formidable to be
conquered by these underground traffic routes. A river such as the Hudson
or the Detroit may sometimes halt the bridge-builders; it has but slight
terror for the tunnel engineers.
The tunnel-work is apt to be a separate part of the work of building a
railroad. It calls for its own talent, and that of an exceedingly expert sort. If
the tunnel is more than a half or three-quarters of a mile long it will
probably be dug from a shaft or shafts as well as from its portals. In this
way the work will not only be greatly hastened but the shafts will continue
in use after the work is completed as vents for the discharge of engine
smoke and gases from the tube. The work must be under the constant and
close supervision of resident engineers. The survey lines must be corrected
daily, for the tunnel must not go astray. It must drive a true course from
heading to heading. In the shafts plumb lines, with heavy bobs, to lessen
vibration, will be hung. Sometimes these bobs are immersed in water or in
molasses.

From the portals and from the bottoms of the shafts the headings are driven.
If the tunnel is to accommodate no more than a single track it will be built
from 15 to 16½ feet wide, and from 21 to 22 feet high, inside of its lining;
so the general method is first to drive a top heading of about 10 feet in
height up under the roof of the bore. The rest of the material is taken out in
its own good season on two following benches or levels.
Piercing a granite mountain is no rapid work. When the Pennsylvania
Railroad built its second Gallitzin Tunnel in 1903, 13 men, working 4 drills
in the top heading, were able to drill 16 holes, each 10 feet deep, in a single
day. The engineers there figured that each blast removed twenty-three cubic
yards of the rock. At night, when the “hard-rock men” were sleeping and
their drills silent, a gang of fourteen “muckers” removed the loosened
material.
Slow work that. The Northern Pacific finding its way through the crest of
the Cascade Mountains by means of the great Stampede Tunnel, nearly two
miles in length, demanded that the contractor work under pressure and
make 13½ feet of tunnel a day. The contractor, working under the bonus
plan, did better. With his army of 350 “hard-rock men,” “muckers,” and
their helpers, and his tireless battery of 36 drills he sometimes made as high
as eighteen feet a day from the two headings. On a three-year job he beat
his contract time by seven days. The Northern Pacific paid the price, $118
for each lineal foot of tunnel. That was a high price, occasioned largely by
the fact that the work was carried forward in what was then an almost
unbroken wilderness. The Wabash finding its way through the great and
forbidding hills of Western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh a dozen years later
was able to dig its succession of tunnels at an average cost of $4,509 for
100 feet. Of that amount $2,527 went for labor; and $260 was the price of a
ton of dynamite.
When the tunnel engineer finds that his bore is not to pierce hard-rock, of
whose solidity he is more than reasonably assured, he prepares to use
cutting-shields. These shields, proceeding simultaneously from the portals
and from the footings of the shafts, are steel rings of a circumference only
slightly greater than that of the finished tunnel. With pick and with drill and
dynamite, they constantly clear a path for it, whereupon it is pressed
forward in that path. Dummy tracks follow the cutting-shield; and dummy

locomotives—more likely electric than steam in these days—are used in
removing the material. Electricity has been a boon to latter-day tunnel-
workers. Its use for light and power keeps the tunnel quite clear of all gases
during the work of boring.
In rare cases, the rock through which the shield has been forced is strong
enough to support itself; in most works the engineers prefer to line the bore,
with brick and concrete, as a rule. This lining is set in the path of the
cutting-shield before its protection is entirely withdrawn; and so the heavy
roof-timbering which was formerly a trade-mark of the successful tunnel
engineer is no longer used.
Tunnel-boring becomes doubly difficult when the railroad is to be carried
under a river or some broad arm of the sea. Men work in an unnatural
environment when they work below the surface of great waters, and the
record of such work is a record of many tragedies. At any instant firm rock
may cease, silt or sand or an underground stream may make its appearance
and the helpless workmen find a ready grave. In work where there is even
the slightest expectation of such a contingency the air-lock, with its
artificial pressure to hold back the soft earth and moisture is brought into
use. In another chapter we shall see how the caisson is operated. Suffice it
to say now that the necessity of “working under the air,” brings no comfort
to any one. It vastly hinders and complicates the work of construction, and
adds greatly to the expense. Moreover, it has its own record of tragedies.
Still it remains, to the infinite credit of a national persistence, that there is
no record in the annals of American engineering where the workers have
finally given up a tunnel job. Lives have been sacrificed, good-sized
fortunes swept away, but in the end the resistless railroad has always found
its underground path.
The tunnel-workers can tell you of the accident when the subway was being
driven under the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn, three years ago.
The cutting-shield, which was advancing from the Brooklyn side, suddenly
slipped out from the rock into the unprotected soft mud of the river bottom.
The heavily compressed air shot a geyser straight up to the surface of the
river some fifty feet above. A workman shot through the geyser, pirouetted
gayly for a fraction of a second above the river, then dropped, to be picked
up by the crew of a passing ferryboat. In a week he was back at work again

inside the cutting-shield. His fortune was the opposite of that which
generally awaits a man caught in a tunnel accident.
“It ain’t as bad as it used to be,” one of them informs you. “When I first got
into this profession, they didn’t have the electricity for lights or moving the
cars or nothing. We used to try and get along with safety lamps an’ near
choke to death. It was more like hell then than it is now.”

“Sometimes the construction engineer ... brings his line face to face with
a mountain”

Finishing the lining of a tunnel

The busiest tunnel point in the world—at the west portals of the Bergen
tunnels,
six Erie tracks below, four Lackawanna above

The Hackensack portals of the Pennsylvania’s great tunnels under New
York City

But your interest in the man who was blown from the tunnel to the surface
of the river and escaped with his life is not entirely satiated, and you ask
more questions. What do they do when they strike soft mud like that?
“We get down and pray,” he of the experience in this weird form of
construction engineering tells you. “We try to get the boys safely back
through the air-lock, and then we quit boring till we can fix things up from
outside. If it’s a real bad case we’ve got to make land to bore through. It’s
generally done by dumping rock and bags of sand from floats just over
where she blows out. It’s a pretty rough way of doctoring her up, but it has
to go, and generally it does. All we want is to get it to hold until we can set
the rings of the tunnel.

“That ain’t always the worst. I’ve been driving a bore under water this way,
when we struck stiff rock overhead and soft mud underneath the edge.
That’s something that makes the engineers hump. You can’t rest a cast-iron
tunnel like this on mud and you get a wondering if you’ve got to quit after
all this work under the durned old river, and let the boss lose his money.
“The last time we struck a snag of that sort, the boss didn’t give up. He
wasn’t that kind. He had a chief engineer that was brass tacks from
beginning to end. What do you suppose that fellow did? He bored holes in
the bottom of the lining and drove steel legs right down to the next ledge of
solid rock below. There’s that tunnel to-day, carrying 32,000 people
between five and six o’clock every night perched down there seventy feet
underground like a big caterpillar sprawled under the wickedest ledge o’
rock you ever see.”
It takes a real genius of an engineer for this sort of work. He who drives his
bore into the unknown must be on guard for the unexpected. Emergencies
arise upon the minute, and the tunnel engineer must be ready with his wits
and ingenuity to meet them. Finally the day does come when the bores from
either shore are hard upon one another. If there has been blasting under the
bed of the river it is reduced to a minimum. The drills work at half-speed,
the fever of expectancy hangs over the men. Those who are close at the
heading catch faint sounds of the workmen on the other side of the thin
barrier—the last barrier of the river that was supposed to acknowledge no
conqueror.
The first tiny aperture between the two bores is greeted with wild cheers.
On the surface far above, the whistles of the shaft-houses carry forth the
news to the outer world; it is echoed and reëchoed by the noisy river craft.
The aperture grows larger. It is large enough to permit the passage of a
man’s body; and a man, enjoying fame for this one moment in his life,
crawls through it. The men knock off work and have a rough spread in the
tunnel. At night the engineers and contractors banquet in a hotel. “Not so
bad,” the chief engineer says quietly. “We were ⅜ of an inch out, in 8,000
feet.” It was not so bad. It spoke wonders for his profession. To carry forth
two giant bores from the opposite sides of a broad river, and have them
meet within ⅜ of an inch of perfect alignment, was an achievement well
worth attention.

After that, the last traces of the rough rock and silt are removed, the iron
rings of the tunnel made fast together, the air pressure released, the cutting-
shields, that formed so essential a feature of the construction, removed.
Then there remains only the work of installing conduits and wiring and
laying the tracks before the tunnel is ready for the traffic of the railroad.

The Michigan Central has recently finished a tunnel under the busy Detroit
River, at Detroit, which eliminates the use of a car-ferry at that point. The
tunnel was built in a manner entirely new to engineers. The river at Detroit
is about three-quarters of a mile wide, and its bed is of soft blue clay,
making it difficult to bore a tunnel safely and economically. To meet this
obstacle a new fashion of tunnel-building was created.
The tunnel itself consists of two tubes, each made from steel ⅜ of an inch in
thickness and reinforced every twelve feet by outer “fins.” The channel was
dredged and a foundation bed of concrete laid. The sections of the tunnel,
each 250 feet long, were then put in position one at a time. The section-ends
were closed at a shore plant with water-tight wooden bulkheads. They were
then lashed to four floating cylinders of compressed air and towed out to
position. After that it was merely a matter of detail to drop the sections into
place, pour in more concrete and make the new section fast. The wooden
bulkheads next the completed tube were then removed and the structure was
ready for the track-layers. The sub-aqueous portion of the new Detroit
Tunnel is 2,600 feet long; it joins on the Detroit side with a land tunnel
2,100 feet long, and on the Canadian side with a land tunnel of 3,192 feet.
It takes more than a river, carrying through its narrow throat the vast and
growing traffic of the Great Lakes—a traffic that is comparable with that of
the Atlantic itself—to halt the progress of the railroad.

CHAPTER V

BRIDGES
Bridges of Timber, then Stone, then Steel—
The Starucca Viaduct—The First Iron
Bridge in the U. S.—Steel Bridges—
Engineering Triumphs—Different
Types of Railroad Bridge—The Deck
Span and the Truss Span—Suspension
Bridges—Cantilever Bridges—
Reaching the Solid Rock with Caissons
—The Work of “Sand-hogs”—The
Cantilever over the Pend Oreille
River—Variety of Problems in Bridge-
building—Points in Favor of the Stone
Bridge—Bridges over the Keys of
Florida.

W HEN the habitations of man first began to multiply upon the banks of
the water courses, the profession of the bridge-builder was born. The
first bridge was probably a felled tree spanning some modest brook. But
from that first bridge came a magnificent development. Bridge-building
became an art and a science. Men wrought gigantic structures in stone,
long-arched viaducts, with which they defied time. Then for two thousand
years the profession of the bridge-builder stood absolutely still.
With the coming of the iron and steel age it moved forward again. The
development of a fibre of great strength and without the dead weight of
granite gave engineers new possibilities. They began in simple fashion, and
then they developed once again, with marvellous strides. Steel, the dead
thing with a living muscle, could span waterways from which stone shrank.
Steel redrew the maps of nations. Proud rivers at which the paths of man

had halted, were conquered for the first time. Routes of traffic of every sort
were simplified; the railroad made new progress; and economic saving of
millions of dollars was made to this gray old world.
The earliest of the very distinguished list of American bridge-builders
erected great timber structures for the highroads and the post-roads. Some
of them went back many centuries and came to the stone bridge, in many
ways the most wonderful of all the artifices by which man conquers the
obstructive power of a running stream. But the building of stone bridges
took time and money, and time and money were little known factors in a
new land that had begun to expand rapidly.
So at first the railroad followed the course of the highroad and the post-
road, and took the timber bridge unto itself. In some cases it actually
fastened itself upon the highroad bridge, as at Trenton, N. J., where a
faithful wooden structure built by Theodore Burr in 1803 was strengthened
and widened in 1848 to take the first through railroad route from New York.
It continued its heavy dual work until 1875 when it was superseded by a
steel bridge. A dozen years ago the railroad tracks were moved from that
structure to a magnificent and permanent stone-arch built near-by. Thus the
railroad crossing the Delaware at Trenton has, in this way, typified step by
step every stage of the development of American bridge-building.
The timber bridges developed the steel truss bridge, the typically American
construction, of to-day. In an earlier day the timber bridges were the glory
of the engineer. Sometimes you see one of these old fellows remaining, like
the long structure that Mr. Walcott built across the Connecticut River at
Springfield, Mass., in 1805, and which still does good service; but the most
of them have passed away. Fire has been their most persistent enemy.
Within the past two years fire destroyed the staunch toll-bridge at Waterford
on the Hudson, just above Troy. The bridge was a faithful carrier for one
hundred and four years. In many ways it was typical of those first
constructions. It consisted of four clear arch spans—one 154 feet, another
161 feet, the third 176 feet, and the fourth 180 feet in length. It was built of
yellow pine, wonderfully hewn and fitted, hung upon solid pegs; and save
for the renewal of some of the arch footings, the roof, and the side
coverings, it was unchanged through all the years—even though the heavy
trolley-cars of a through interurban line were finally turned upon it.

About the same time, the once-famed Permanent Bridge across the
Schuylkill River at Philadelphia was built. It had two arches of 150 feet
each and one of 195 feet. In its day it was regarded as nothing less than a
triumph. A very old publication says:
“The plan was furnished by Mr. Timothy Palmer, of
Newburyport, Mass., a self-taught architect. He brought with
him five workmen from New England. They at once evinced
superior intelligence and adroitness in a business which was
found to be a peculiar art, acquired by habits not promptly
gained by even good workmen in other branches of framing in
wood.... The frame is a masterly piece of workmanship,
combining in its principles that of king-post and braces or
trusses with those of a stone arch.”
In after years, the Permanent Bridge was also entrusted with the carrying of
a railroad. It has, however, disappeared these many years.
The early railroad builders did not neglect the possibilities of the stone
bridge. Two notable early examples of this form of construction still remain
—the Starrucca Viaduct upon the Erie Railroad, near Susquehanna, Pa., and
an even earlier structure, the stone-arch bridge across the Patapsco River at
Relay, Md., which B. H. Latrobe, the most distinguished of all American
railroad engineers, built for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in 1833-35. The
Thomas Viaduct, as it has been known for three-quarters of a century, was
the first stone-arch bridge ever built to carry railroad traffic. It was erected
in a day when the railroad was just graduating from the use of teams of
horses as motive-power. In this day, when locomotives have begun to reach
practical limits of size and weight, that viaduct is still in use as an integral
part of the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio. It is built on a curve, and
consists of 8 spans of stone arches, 67 feet 6 inches, centre to centre of
piers, which, together with the abutments at each end, make the total length
of the structure 612 feet. It is in as good condition to-day as upon the day it
was built.
When the Erie Railroad was being constructed across the Southern Tier
counties of New York in 1848, its course was halted near the point where
the rails first reached the beautiful valley of the Susquehanna. A side-valley,

a quarter of a mile in width, stretched itself squarely across the railroad’s
path. There was no way it could be avoided, and it could be crossed only at
a high level. For a time the projectors of the Erie considered making a solid
fill, but the tremendous cost of such an embankment was prohibitive. While
they were at their wits’ ends, James P. Kirkwood, a shrewd Scotchman, who
had been working as a civil engineer upon the Boston & Albany, appeared.
Kirkwood spanned the valley with the Starucca Viaduct, one of the most
beautiful bridges ever built in America. He opened quarries close at hand
and by indefatigable energy built his stone bridge in a single summer. It has
been in use ever since. The increasing weight of its burdens has never been
of consequence to it, and to-day it remains an important link in a busy
trunk-line railroad. It is 1,200 feet in length and consists of 18 arches of 50
feet clear span apiece.
But stone bridges even then cost money, and so the timber structure still
remained the most available. Many men can still remember the tunnels, into
whose darkness the railroad cars plunged every time they crossed a stream
of any importance whatsoever. They have nearly all gone. The wooden
bridge was ill suited to the ravages of weather and of fire—ravages that
were quickened by the railroad, rather than hindered. A substitute material
was demanded. It was found—in iron.
The first iron bridge in the United States is believed to be the one erected by
Trumbull in 1840 over the Erie Canal at Frankfort, N. Y. Record is also held
of one of these bridges being built for the North Adams branch of the
Boston & Albany Railroad, in 1846. About a year later, Nathaniel Rider
began to build iron bridges for the New York & Harlem, the Erie, and some
others of the early railroads. His bridges—of the truss type, of course, that
type having been worked out in the timber bridges of the land—were each
composed of cast-iron top-chords and post, the remaining part of the
structure being fabricated of wrought-iron. The members were bolted
together. Still, the failure of a Rider bridge upon the Erie in 1850, followed
closely by the failure of a similar structure over the River Dee, in England,
influenced officials of that railroad to a conclusion that iron bridges were
unpractical, and to order them to be removed and replaced by wooden
structures. For a time it looked as if the iron bridge were doomed. That was
a dark day for the bridge engineers. A contemporary account says:

“The first impulse to the general adoption of iron for railroad
bridges was given by Benjamin H. Latrobe, chief engineer of the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. When the extension of this road
from Cumberland to Wheeling was begun, he decided to use this
material in all the new bridges. Mr. Latrobe had previously
much experience in the construction of wooden bridges in which
iron was extensively used; he had also designed and used the
fish-bellied girder constructed of cast and wrought-iron.”
Under the influence of the really great Latrobe, an iron span of 124 feet was
built in 1852 at Harpers Ferry. In that same year, the B. & O. built its
Monongahela River Bridge, a really pretentious structure of 3 spans of 205
feet each, and the first really great iron railroad bridge in all the land. The
path was set. The conquest of iron over wood as a bridge material was
merely a problem of good engineering. The iron bridge quickly came into
its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad began building cast-iron bridges of
from 65 to 110 feet span at its Altoona shops for the many creeks and runs
along the western end of its line. The other railroads were following in rapid
order. Squire Whipple, Bollman, Pratt—all the others who could design and
build iron bridges—were kept more than busy by the work that poured in
upon them.
And in the day when the iron bridge was coming into its own, Sir Henry
Bessemer, over in England, was bringing the steel age into existence, first
making toy cannon models for the lasting joy of Napoleon III, and then
making a whole world see that steel—that dead thing with the living muscle
—was no longer to be limited for use in tools and cutting surface. Steel was
to become the very right-hand of man. And so steel came to the bridge-
builders, at first only in the most important wearing points such as pins and
rivets, finally to be the whole fabric of the modern bridge. The transition
was gradual. The early engineers began using less and less of cast-iron and
more and more of wrought, until they had practically eliminated cast-iron as
a bridge material. Then there came a quick change; there was another dark
day for the railroad bridge engineers of America. In 1876—that very year
when the land was so joyously celebrating its Centennial—a passenger train
went crashing through a defective bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio. There was a
great property loss—thousands and thousands of dollars, and a loss of lives

that could never be expressed in dollars. An outraged land asked the bridge-
builders if they really knew their business.
Out of that Ashtabula wreck came the scientific testing of bridges and
bridge materials, and the abolition of the rule-of-thumb in the cheaper sorts
of construction. Out of that miserable wreckage came also the use of steel
in the railroad bridge. Steel had found itself; and how the steel bridges
began to spring up across the land! They spanned the Ohio, and they
spanned the Mississippi, and they spanned the Missouri; a great structure
threw itself over the deep gorge of the Kentucky River. When the day came
that fire destroyed the famous wooden viaduct of the Erie over the Genesee
River at Portage, N. Y. (you must remember the pictures of that tremendous
structure in the early geographies), steel took its place.
All this while the bridge engineer attempted more and more. He built over
the deep gorge of the Niagara. He conquered the St. Lawrence in and about
Montreal. He laughed at the mighty Hudson and flung a dizzy steel trestle
over its bosom at Poughkeepsie. He built at Cairo, at Thebes, and at
Memphis, on the Mississippi, and again and again and still again at St.
Louis. The East River no longer halted him or compelled him to resort to
the alternative of the very expensive types of suspension bridge. He has
finally thrown a great cantilever over it, from Manhattan to Long Island.
The steel bridge has come into its own.

Let us study for a moment the construction of the different types of railroad
bridge. For the tiny creeks—the little things that are mad torrents in spring,
and run stark-dry in midsummer—where they cannot be poured through a
pipe or a concrete moulded culvert, the simplest of bridge forms will
suffice. And the simplest of bridge forms consists of two wooden beams
laid from abutment to abutment and holding the ties and rails of the track-
structure. As the first development of that simplest idea comes the
substitution of steel for wood, giving, as we have already seen, protection
against fire and a far greater strength. The steel beam has greater strength
than a wooden beam of the same outside dimension and yet in its design it
effects for itself a great saving of material, by cutting out superfluous parts

and becoming the structural standard of to-day, the I beam. When the I
beam becomes too large to be made in a single pouring or a single rolling, it
may be constructed of steel plates and angles firmly riveted together, and
thus still remains the possibility of the simplest form of bridge. That single
span may be further increased, or the bridge developed into a succession of
increased spans by the substitution of the lattice-work girder, effecting
further saving in weight without material loss of strength for the solid-plate
girder. The track may be laid atop of such girders or—to save clearance in
overhead crossing—swung between them at their bases.
The limit in this form of bridge is generally in a 65-foot or a 100-foot span.
It is not practical to build the girders up outside of a shop; and the 65-foot
length represents the two flat-cars that must be used to transport any one of
them to the bridge location. Some railroads have used three cars for the
hauling of a single girder, and so increased these spans to 100 feet; but as a
rule, over 65 feet, and the truss, the most common form of railroad bridge in
this country, comes into use.
The truss is a distinct evolution from those old timber bridges of which we
have already spoken. Burr and Latrobe and Bollman and Howe and Squire
Whipple—those distinguished engineers of other days—have evolved it,
step by step. It is, in one sense, no more than an enlarged form of lattice
girder, the work of the different designers having been to accomplish at all
times, a maximum of strength with a minimum of weight. It is built of
members that stand pulling-strain, and those that stand pressure-strain; and
these are respectively known as tension and as compression members. In
them rests the real strength of the truss. But in addition to the structure are
the bracing-rods, generally placed as diagonals and built to sustain the
structure against both lateral and wind-strains. The members that form the
trusses are stoutly riveted together; the rapid rat-a-tap-tap of the riveter is
no longer a novelty in any corner of the land. Sometimes certain of the
important bearing-points are connected by steel pins instead of rivets—
another survival of the old days of the timber bridge.
As a rule, the railroad is carried through the truss—and this is known as the
through span. Sometimes it is carried upon the top of the structure, and then
the truss becomes known as a deck span. A long bridge may effectively
combine both of these types of span. The splendid new double-track truss

bridge recently built by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad over the
Susquehanna River between Havre-de-Grace and Aiken, Md., to replace a
single-track bridge in the same location, is a splendid example of the best
type of such structures. At the point of crossing, the river is divided into
channels by Watson Island; the width of the west channel being
approximately 2,600 feet and that of the east channel being approximately
1,400 feet. The distance across the low-lying island is 2,000 feet—making
the length of the entire bridge about 6,000 feet. The bridge, as originally
constructed when the line from Baltimore to Philadelphia was built, in
1886, had a steel trestle over Watson Island. In building the new structure,
this viaduct was eliminated in favor of a bridge structure of 90-foot girder
spans, placed upon concrete piers. Additional piers were placed in the west
channel, shortening the deck spans from 480 to 240 feet; the through span
over the main channel was kept at the original length—520 feet. In the east
channel, the span lengths remained unchanged, with a single slight
exception. The changes in the span lengths involved new masonry, and all
piers were sunk to solid rock, those in the west channel being carried by
caissons to a depth of more than seventy feet beneath low-water. The total
amount of new masonry and concrete approximated 62,000 cubic yards.
The long span-lengths of the deck span over the east channel and the
through span over the navigable portion of the west channel—each 520 feet
in length—occasioned heavy construction. The deck span, for instance,
weighed 12,000 pounds to each foot of bridge. The total weight of this very
long bridge reaches the enormous figure of 32,000,000 pounds. And yet,
even the untechnical observe the extreme simplicity of its lines of
construction, and feel that the engineer, A. W. Thompson, has done his work
well. The construction of the giant took two years and a half. During that
time, the trains of the B. & O. were diverted to the closely adjacent
Pennsylvania, so that the bridge-builders might continue with a minimum of
delay.
The truss span reaches its limitations at a little over 500 feet in length—we
have just seen how the Susquehanna structure had its spans cut in halves in
the non-navigable portions of the river. The spans of two great railroad
bridges over the Ohio at Cincinnati reached 519 and 550 feet, but they were
built in a day when the weights of locomotives and of train-loads had not
yet begun to rise. Nowadays the shorter span is the safer and by far the best.

The engineer builds plenty of midstream piers, looking out only for a decent
width for any navigable channels.
And when because of peculiarities of location he cannot place his pier
midstream, then it is time for him to get out his pencils and begin his
drawings all over again. He can perhaps build a suspension bridge—a clear
span of 1,500 feet will be as nothing to it,—but suspension bridges take a
long time to build and are fearfully expensive in the building. It is more
than likely, then, that he will turn to the cantilever. In the cantilever, two
giant trusses are cunningly balanced upon string supporting towers. They
are constructed by being built out from the towers, evenly, so that the
balance of weight may never be lost for a single hour. The two projecting
arms are finally caught together in mid-air and over the very centre of the
span—caught and made fast by the riveters. The result is a bridge of
surpassing strength and fairly low cost, a real triumph for the bridge
engineer.
The first of these cantilever bridges built in the United States was of iron. It
was designed and constructed by C. Shaler Smith across the deep gorge of
the Kentucky River in 1876-77. Mr. Smith also built the second cantilever,
the Minnehaha, across the Mississippi, at St. Paul, Minn., in 1879-80. The
third and fourth were the Niagara and the Frazer River bridges built in the
early eighties. In their trail came many others—one of the most notable
among them being the great Poughkeepsie Bridge.

We are going to see something of the construction of one of these great
railroad bridges. Let us begin at the beginning, and see the men, as they
work upon the foundations of abutments and of piers—many times
hundreds of feet under the waters of the very stream that they will
eventually conquer. For months this important work of getting a good
foothold for the monster will go forth almost unseen by the workaday world
—by the aid of the great timber footings, which the engineer calls his
caissons. These caissons (they are really nothing more or less than great
wooden boxes), are slowly sunk into the sand or soft rock under the

tremendous weight of the many courses of masonry. They sink to solid rock
—or something that closely approximates solid rock.
We are going down into one of the caissons that form the foothold of a
single great pier of a modern railroad bridge; we are going to stand for a
very few minutes under air-pressure with the “sand-hogs”—men whom we
first came to know when we studied the boring of a tunnel. Air pressure
spells danger. It takes a good nerve to work high up on the exposed steel
frame of some growing bridge, but the bridge-builders have air and sunlight
in which to pursue their hazardous work. The sand-hog has neither. He toils
in a box down in the depths of the unknown, working with pick and shovel
under artificial light and under a pressure that becomes all but intolerable.
The knowledge that the most precious and vital of all man’s needs—fresh
air—is controlled by another, and through delicate and intricate mechanism,
cannot add to his peace of mind.
No wonder, then, that it is the highest paid of all merely manual work. The
sand-hog working 50 feet below datum is paid $3.50 for an eight-hour day.
But 50 feet is but the beginning to these human worms, who burrow deep
into the earth. Below it they first begin to divide their day into two working
periods. The air begins to count, and men with steel muscled arms must
rest. As they approach 80 feet below datum—the engineers’ phrase for sea
level,—they are working two periods each day of one hour and a half
apiece, while their daily pay has risen to $4. There is your rough
arithmetical law of sand-hogs. As your caisson goes down so does the
length of your working-day decrease; inversely, their air pressures and the
pay of the men increase. The cost? The cost leaps forward in geometrical
progression. It is the owner’s turn to groan this time.
One hundred feet is the limit. At 100 feet the air pressure is more than 50
pounds to the square inch—three additional atmospheres—and the limit of
human endurance is reached. The men work two shifts of forty minutes
each as a daily portion and the law steps in to say that they must rest four
hours between the shifts. They are paid $4.50 for that day’s work—which
means something more than $4 an hour for the time that they are actually at
work in the caisson.

You have expressed your interest in the sand-hog, given vent to a desire to
go down into their underworld. You wonder what three pressures is going to
feel like. Permission is given and a physician begins examining you. You
cannot go into the caisson unless you are sound of heart and stout of body.
This is no joking matter. The sand-hogs’ rules read like the training
instructions for a college football team. No drink, regular hours, simple diet,
the donning of heavy clothes after they leave the pressure, constant
reëxamination—these rules are inflexible when the caissons go to far
depths. By their observance the difficult foundation construction of this new
bridge has been kept free from accident—there have been few cases of the
“bends” brought to the specially constructed hospital in the bottom of the
cavity.
The “bends” sounds complicated, and is, in reality, almost the simplest of
human ailments in its diagnosis. A “bubble” of high pressure air works its
way into the human structure while a man is in the caisson. When he comes
out into the normal atmosphere the bubble is caught and remains. If it is
caught near any vital organ that bubble is apt to spell death. Generally the
bubbles are caught in the joints—frequently the elbow or the knee—where
they cause excruciating pain. Then the specially constructed hospital
crowded on the narrow platform formed by the top of the pier, comes into
full play. Its sick room is incased in an air-tight cylinder. The man suffering
from the “bends,” together with physicians and nurses, is put under a
pressure that gradually increases until it reaches that of the caisson. After
that it is a comparatively simple matter to relieve the bubble and bring the
air in the hospital back to a normal pressure.
The path is clear for us to go down into the caisson. A party of sand-hogs,
hot and exhausted after forty minutes of work within, come out of the little
manhole at the top of the air-lock. We step through the little manhole and
into a tiny steel bucket that rests within the air-lock there at the top of the
shaft. A word of command—farewell to the bright blue sky overhead—the
black manhole cover is replaced. It is suddenly very dark. A single faint
incandescent gives a dim glow in the tiny place.

Concrete affords wonderful opportunities for the bridge-builders

The Lackawanna is building the largest concrete bridge in the world
across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa.

The bridge-builder lays out an assemblying-yard for gathering together
the different parts of his new construction

The new Brandywine Viaduct of the Baltimore & Ohio, at Wilmington,
Del.

You are not thinking of that. They are putting the pressure on. You can feel
it. Your eardrums feel as if they would break; they vibrate. You must show
your distress.
“Pinch your nose and swallow hard,” says the man who stands beside you
in the bucket.
He stands so close to you that you can fairly feel the pulsation of his heart,
but his voice sounds miles away. You swallow hard, the hardest you have
ever swallowed, and you pinch your nose. You feel better. The far-away
voice speaks again in your ear. “Three atmospheres,” is all it says. The
caisson shaft is no place for extended conversation. You descend in an
express elevator car; in that bucket you just drop. You have all the eerie
sensations that a Coney Island “novelty ride” might give you. There is a

row of dim incandescents all the way down the smooth side of the shaft,
and when you look you forget that this is vertical traction and think of an
uptown subway tube as you see it recede from the rear of an express. A final
manhole, the gate at the foot of the shaft and you stop abruptly. It seems as
if you had almost bumped against the under side of China.
“This is it,” says the far-away voice.
A timbered room, not larger than a parlor in a city flat and not near so high.
A close and murky place, filled with a little company of men—shadowy
humans of a real underworld there under the dull electric glow.
“They’re finding the footing for the shaft,” says the voice. “We’re on rock
at last at 94 feet.”

When the footings are finished and the caisson’s edges have ceased to cut
its path straight downward, that timbered construction will rest here far
below the city for long ages. The sand-hogs will come out of their working
chamber for the last time—it will be poured full of concrete, more solid
than rock itself. The air pressure will be withdrawn—there is no longer mud
or shifting sand for it to withhold. Then, section by section, the steel lining
of the caisson shaft will be withdrawn, while concrete, tramped into place,
makes the shaft a hidden monolith 100 feet or so in length. Upon the tops of
all these monoliths a close grillage of steel beams will be laid; upon that
grillage will be riveted the steel plates and columns of the bridge tower. The
great structure is to have sure footing; these giant feet bind and clasp
themselves throughout the years against the mighty river that has been
conquered and humbled by the work of man.

“You should have been down in one of the boxes when they had to burn
torches, before they got the electric light,” says one of the bridge engineers.
“I worked in one of those that we left under a stone tower of the Brooklyn

Bridge. Now we’re almost in clover. They even cool and dry the
compressed air before we breathe it.”
An order goes aloft over an electric wire, the engineer who sits smoking his
pipe on the sun-baked platform of the traveller derrick pulls a lever, and we
go slipping up the shaft toward fresh air and freedom only a little less
rapidly than we descended it. We do not reach it too quickly. There is a long
wait in the air-lock after the lower manhole has closed, while the pressure is
being reduced. You begin to worry and you ask your guide as to the delay.
Nothing wrong?
He smiles at your timorous question and explains. It would be dangerous to
come out from the caisson pressure quickly. He does not want to have to
send you to that air-tight hospital with a bad case of the “bends.”
“How long in the air-lock?” you ask.
“Fifty minutes,” he answers.
Then he explains in more detail. You have been under a pressure of 50
pounds to the square inch—that’s your three atmospheres, and under the
rules you must spend fifty minutes in the tiny air-lock. Up to a pressure of
36 pounds you must spend two minutes there for every three pounds of
pressure. When you get above that “law of 36” it is a minute to the pound.
When that manhole cover overhead finally slides open you feel blinded by
the light, even though the sun is hidden behind a passing cloud. The air-lock
tender reaches down with his arms and gives you a lift up onto his narrow
perch.
“Want to be a sand-hog?” he smiles.
“Not yet a while,” you answer, in all truth. “Not until every other job is
gone.”

You are standing aloft, balancing yourself upon tiny planks at the steadily
advancing end of the bridge, as it forces itself over a stream of formidable

width. Overhead, a gigantic, ungainly traveller, equipped with steel derricks
at every corner, is advancing foot by foot as the bridge advances foot by
foot. Underneath, through the thin network of planks, of girder and of
supporting false work, you can see the surface of the river a full hundred
feet below. A steamboat is passing directly beneath you. From your perch
she looks like a great yellow bird. Those fine black specks upon her back
are the humans who are gathered upon her upper deck.
Whistles call and the derricks groan as they swing the thousands of bridge-
members, that are flying together at the beck of the engineer, into their final
resting-places. There is the deafening racket of the riveters, here and there
and everywhere. There are crude railroad tracks upon the temporary
flooring of the bridge deck, and the calls of the dummy locomotives add to
the racket. The railroad tracks lead to the shore, to temporary yards where
the bridge materials are assembled as fast as they come from the shops in a
city three hundred miles distant.
For, remember that while the sand-hogs were burrowing under the surface
of the river to find footholds for this monster, other men were burrowing
into the hillsides to find the precious ore for the welding of his muscles. A
hundred thousand picks must have fought in his behalf, furnaces blazed for
miles before the crude ore became the finished, perfect steel. Of the forging
and the rolling of the steel a whole book might be written. It is enough now
to say that of the 50,000,000 pounds of steel, every pound was made on
honor. The railroad had its inspectors everywhere, but the rolling-mill men
held to their formulas for perfect steel, and perfect steel was the result. A
slight flaw in the metal, and possibly at some unexpected day, a great
catastrophe. The safety of human life was upon the men who forged the
steel, and they forged honor into every great girder, into every rod and bolt
and plate. This conqueror of the river was a warrior built in honor.
The safety of human life depends upon the men who build this bridge.
Study carefully the face of this man who stands beside you, the man who
evolved this bridge as a season’s work of his restless mind. His face is the
face of a man who has high regard for human safety; that factor creeps to
the fore as he talks to you. He is telling of the method of constructing the
upper works of a bridge of this size.

“We’re getting ahead all the time,” he laughs, “and we’re moving rather
forward in our construction methods. In an older day we did this work with
derricks of a rather simple sort, operated them by small portable steam
engines. You can’t handle bridge-members—units that are only held down
by the clearances of tunnels and the transporting powers of the railroads—
that way to-day. We’ve nearly half a million dollars tied up here in
constructing-appliances. These steel-boom derricks, travellers, and steel-
wire hoists, the compressing engines for handling the riveters, cost big
money.
“Our method? That’s a simple enough affair as a rule. We set up this spindly
tower on rails, that we call the ‘traveller’ and it moves backwards and
forwards over the trusses and the timber falsework that we build before the
steel really begins to be set up. When the steel—the trusses—is up and
riveted, then away with the falsework. Our bridge stands by itself. You can
put up a 500-foot span in no time at all by using the falsework.”
You make bold to ask what the engineer does when the river is too deep to
admit of falsework. He is quick to answer.
“We generally fall back on a cantilever,” he says, without hesitation. Then
he begins to tell you about one of the latest of American problems—the new
bridge of the Idaho & Washington Northern Railroad, just now being built
over the Pend Oreille River, Washington. They could span that narrow cleft
only on the cantilever principle, and when they began to balance their
cantilever, there was not enough room for the back arm. But the engineers
only chewed off fresh cigars and began forcing their great span out mid-air.
They made the balance by placing 600 tons of steel rails on the back-arm.
For every foot the span reached out anew over a so-called “bottomless”
they added a few more rails. You can generally trust an engineer in such a
time as that.
Look closely now upon the workmen who are fabricating this giant bridge.
Look closely upon them. They are different from those whom we saw
toiling in the caissons below. Scandinavians may and do toil as sand-hogs at
the bottom of the stream; Lithuanians may mine the ore, and Hungarians
roll it into steel; Americans build upon their toil and erect this bridge. These
builders speak no unfamiliar tongue. They are the product of Ohio, the

Middle West, the South, the Pacific Coast, New England; they rise
immeasurably superior to every other class of labor employed upon the
work. Some of them have been sailors, and their talk has the savor of the
sea. All of them are men, clear-headed, cool-headed, true-headed men.
If you come upon them at the noon-hour, sprawled along the narrow ledge
of a single plank you may be impressed by two things—their Americanism
and their cosmopolitanism. The first of these is writ upon each man as you
look at him; the second is evident in talk with him. This big fellow must
have been a sheriff out in Montana, and he must have been a sheriff for bad
men to dodge; his neighbor is talking about his last job, a sky-high
cantilever down in Peru. The two side-partners over by the tool-box are just
back from India. American bridge-building talent encircles the world. Here
is a boss who got his first training down on the Nile; his assistant has done
some mighty big work on the Trans-Siberian.
These are the men who are building the bridge. In a little time there will be
no advancing ends, finding their path from pier-top to pier-top. There will
be, instead, a long and slender path for the railroad; the bridgemen will have
done their work well; a great river will have once again been conquered.

The bridge problem is always different, it constantly has the fascination of
variety. That variety will come into play at unexpected turns. Once, down in
a deep Colorado cañon, whose walls rose precipitously for a thousand-odd
feet, and which was all but filled by a deep and rapid river, the engineers of
the Rio Grande & Western found absolutely no ledge whatsoever upon
which they might rest their rails. They puzzled upon the problem for a little
while, and then they swung a girder bridge parallel with the river. The
bridge was supported by braced girders, that fastened their feet in the walls
of the cañon, hardly wider there than a narrow city house. The railroad has
been running over that construction for more than thirty years; it is one of
the scenic wonders of the land, and a triumph for the engineer that built it.
In constructing the expensive West Shore Railroad up the Hudson River,
similar difficulties were experienced south of West Point, and truss bridges
were built parallel with the steep river banks to carry the tracks from ledge

to ledge. It is not an unusual matter for the construction engineer to spend a
quarter of a million dollars to span some deep, waterless gully in the
mountains, which could not be filled for more than twice that sum.
Many times, in these days of increasing weight of equipment, it becomes
necessary to replace a bridge, without interrupting the traffic. The
construction engineer never fails to meet the problem. Years ago, he took
Roebling’s famous suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, removed the stone
towers and replaced them with towers of steel, without delaying a single
train; and a little later he took that bridge itself, and substituted a heavy
cantilever for it, while all the time a heavy traffic poured itself over the
structure. The rebuilder of bridges works like the original builder—with
plentiful falsework. He timbers in and around his structure, and then step by
step and with exceeding caution removes the old and substitutes the new.
An old girder is taken out between trains; before another train of cars shall
roll over the structure a new one is ready, temporarily bolted until the
riveters can make it fast. It sounds complicated, but it is remarkably simple,
under the careful plans of a patient engineer, who has that infinite thing that
we call genius.
Sometimes a bold engineer strikes out into a new method, quicker and less
expensive than these piecemeal efforts. Of such was the job at Steubenville,
O., where a 205-foot double-track span was erected on heavy falsework
alongside the old bridge. In a carefully chosen interval between a service of
frequent trains, both the old and the new spans—together weighing 1,300
tons—were fastened together and drawn sideways a distance of twenty-five
feet in one minute and forty seconds. The new span was then in place, and
the old one—ready to be dismantled—stood on falsework at the side. The
entire job had been accomplished in an interval of seventeen minutes
between trains.
That is not unusual. The floating method is sometimes adopted with
remarkable success—especially in the case of draw-bridge spans. There the
problem complicates itself exceedingly, for both the water and the land
highways must be kept open for traffic; yet it is a matter of record that the
Pennsylvania Railroad, operating a fearfully heavy suburban service in and
out of Jersey City, recently substituted one draw for another on its
Hackensack River Bridge without delaying a single train.

But even in this high noon of the day of steel, the stone bridge holds its
own. The big chiefs of railroad construction look upon it with favor. Higher
priced than a steel bridge of equal capacity it requires initial outlay. But
forever after, it represents a saving—a saving chiefly in that very important
figure, maintenance. A steel bridge requires constant attention and constant
expense. A stone bridge requires little of either; and therein lies its strength
in its old age. Engineers point to such structures as the Thomas Viaduct
down at Relay, or to the wonderful stone bridges that have stood through
the centuries in older lands; they bear in mind the constant battle that a steel
bridge must make against the ravages of weather and against the sinister
thefts of corrosion, and ofttimes they rule in favor of the oldest type of
sizable bridge.
Two things are all-important in the choice between the steel bridge and the
arch bridge of stone or concrete. The first is the accessibility of the quarries.
If they are not very near the solid bridge will cost four times that of one of
steel and the average American railroad is not able to spend money in that
fashion, even in the hopes of future economies in maintenance. If the
quarries are close at hand, as they were years ago when Kirkwood built the
Starucca Viaduct for the Erie, the cost of a masonry bridge will hardly
exceed that of steel trusses, and the concrete structure may cost a little less.
Then there comes into play the second consideration. The stone or concrete
bridge has tremendous weight, no ordinary foundation work will serve it. If
the river bed and banks be of sand or poor earth, the engineer had best give
up his hopes of the Roman form of structure. He can build steel towers and
trusses on piles of caissons—hardly solid stone piers and abutments and
aides.
All these things considered, the stone bridge is still more than holding its
own in modern railroad construction. The Boston & Albany Railroad began
building these splendidly permanent structures along its lines through the
Berkshires more than twenty years ago. More recently both the
Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio have been looking with favor upon
this type of bridge. The Baltimore & Ohio has just finished building its
massive Brandywine Viaduct, near Wilmington, a splendid double-track

structure, 764 feet in length, and composed of two 80-foot, two 90-foot, and
three 100-foot arches.
The three great stone bridges that the Pennsylvania has built upon its main
line are all four-tracked. Two splendid examples of these span the Raritan
River at New Brunswick, and the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. The
third, spanning the Susquehanna at Rockville, Pa., just north of Harrisburg,
is the largest stone bridge in the world. It is over a mile in length, and is
composed of 48 arches; 220,000 tons of masonry was employed in its
construction.
Concrete viaducts were first employed in interurban electric railroad
construction, and latterly they have been brought more to the service of the
steam railroad. A splendid example of this very new form of construction
exists in the extension of the Florida East Coast Railroad over the keys and
shallow waters of Southern Florida, for seventy-five miles between
Homestead and Key West. A considerable portion of the line is over the sea.
The Florida keys are like a series of stepping-stones, leading into the ocean
from the tip of the peninsula to Key West. They lie in the form of a curve,
the channels separating the islands varying from a few hundred feet to
several miles in width. Nearly thirty of these islands were used in the
construction of the new railroad. More than fifty miles of rock and earthen
embankment have been built where the intervening waters are shallow, but
where the water is deeper and the openings are exposed to storms by breaks
in the outer reef, concrete arch viaducts have been used. These viaducts
consist of 50-foot reinforced concrete arch spans and piers, with here and
there a 60-foot span.
There are four of these arch viaducts aggregating 5.78 miles in length. The
longest is between Long Key and Grassy Key, 2.7 miles, and is called the
Long Key Viaduct; across Knight’s Key Channel, 7,300 feet; across
Moser’s Channel, 7,800 feet, and across Bahia Honda Channel, 4,950 feet.
The material of these islands is coralline limestone. In many places the
embankment for the roadway is 8 or 9 feet in height, and the roadbed is
ballasted with the same material. The result is one of the finest and safest
railway roadbeds in the world.

Across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa., the Delaware, Lackawanna &
Western Railroad is building the largest concrete bridge in the world, a few
feet longer than the great structure by which the Illinois Central crosses the
Big Muddy River and just 100 feet longer than the Connecticut Avenue
Bridge, at Washington, D. C. The Lackawanna’s bridge is 1,450 feet long,
with five arches of 150-foot span, and a number of shorter arches. The track
is carried at an elevation of 75 feet above highwater; and to find living-rock
as a solid foundation for a structure of so great a weight, the abutments and
piers were carried about 61 feet below the surface of the ground.

With the bridge-builder at his elbow, the railroad constructing engineer
hesitates at no river, no arm of the sea, no deep valley, no wild ravine, no
cleft in the mountain-side. He calls to his aid the magic of the men who
have made this branch of American practical science famous: a feathery
trestle appears, as if by magic. Across its narrow edge the steel rails follow
their resistless path.

CHAPTER VI

THE PASSENGER STATIONS
Early Trains for Suburbanites—Importance
of the Towerman—Automatic Switch
Systems—The Interlocking Machine—
Capacities of the Largest Passenger
Terminals—Room for Locomotives,
Car-storage, etc.—Storing and
Cleaning Cars—The Concourse—
Waiting-rooms—Baggage
Accommodations—Heating—Great
Development of Passenger Stations—
Some Notable Stations in America.

T HE railroad terminal is the city gate. Without, it rises in the superior
arrogance of white granite, as an architectural something. It has broad
portals, and through these portals a host of folk both come and go. Within,
this city gate is a thing of stupendous apartments and monumental
dimensions, a thing not to be grasped in a moment. In a single great
apartment—a vaulted room so great as to have its dimensions run into
distant vistas—are the steam caravans that come and go. It is a busy place, a
place of an infinite variety of business.

In the early morning the train-shed gives the first sign of the new-born day.
Before the dawn is well upon the city, the great arcs that run into those
distant vistas in wonderful symmetry are hissing and alight, and the first of
500 incoming trains is finding its way into the gloom of the shed. Some few

trains have started out with the early mails and the morning papers. The
great rush into town is yet to begin.
Even before dawn, a thousand little homes without the city have been
awake and fretful. The gray fogs of the night lie low, and lights begin to
twinkle, lines of shuffling figures to find their way to the nearest suburban
station. It is very early morning when these begin to pass through the city
gate. The earliest suburban trains slip in from the yards and come to a slow,
grinding stop beneath the shed. Before the wheels have ceased turning, the
first of the workers is off the cars and running down the platform. In fifteen
seconds, the platform is black with men.
There are many more of these trains, a great multiplication of men within a
little time. Before seven o’clock, the trains begin to increase; to follow
more and more closely upon one another’s heels. After seven, they come
still oftener; two or three of them may stop simultaneously on different
tracks under the great vault of the shed; they are heavy with people. There
is a constant clatter of engines, stamping and puffing, dragging their heavily
laden trains and snapping them quickly out of the way of others to follow.
The electric lights under the shed go out with a protesting sputter, and you
realize that the day is at hand. This mighty army of those who live without
the city walls is flocking in, in an unceasing current now. There is an
endless procession from the track platforms; a stream of humans finding its
way to the day’s work.
Do you want figures so that you may see the might of this army?
Binghamton, N. Y., is a city; a little less than fifty thousand persons live
there. If the whole population of Binghamton—every man, woman, and
child—were poured through the portals of this terminal on any one of six
mornings of the week, it would be about equal to this suburban traffic. In a
single hour—from seven to eight—45 trains have arrived under the roof of
this shed and discharged their human freight; in the following hour, 64
trains empty another great brigade of the army from without the city walls.

The city gate is indeed a busy place. Its concourse or head platform echoes
all day long with the unending tread of shuffling feet; beyond the fence,
with its bulletins and ticket-examiners, is the vault of the train-shed, a thing
of great shadows, even in midday. Its echoes are also unending. There
seems to be no end of pushing and shoving and hauling among the engines;
there must be an infinite stock of trains somewhere without. The human
stream flows all the while.
The marvel of all this is that the terminal, which seems so intricate, so
baffling, is under the control of one man—a man to whom it is as simple as
the ten fingers of his hands. This man is keeper of the city gate. His watch-
house is situated just without the big and squatty train-shed. It is long and
narrow, glass-lined and sun-filled. Through its windows he keeps track of
those who come and go.
“There’s Second Seventeen, with them school teachers coming back from
the convention out at Kansas City. Put her in on Twenty-one so’s to give the
baggage folks a chance. Them women travel with lots of duds.”
These are orders to his assistants and orders in that watch tower are rarely
repeated. The assistants are in shirt-sleeves like their chief, for the sun-filled
tower is broiling hot. They nod to one another, click small levers, and
Second Seventeen—a long train of sleeping-cars coming into the city in the
hot moisture of the early June morning—is sent easily and carefully in upon
track Twenty-one in the train-shed of the terminal. There you have the
explanation of that order that was meaningless to you but a moment ago.
Track Twenty-one is nearest the in-baggage room of the station. With two
cars, piled roof-high with heavy trunks, the thoughtfulness of the towerman
in sending the special upon track Twenty-one will be appreciated by the
baggage handlers. A vast amount of manual labor will be saved; and that
counts, even upon a cool day.

Larger Image

The Northwestern’s monumental new terminal on the West Side of
Chicago

Larger Image

The Union Station at Washington

This keeper of the city gate represents the survival of the fittest, the very
cream of his profession. The chances are that he began his railroading off in
some lonely way station on a branch line, developed qualities that brought
him to the quick and favorable attention of his chiefs, then advanced
steadily along the rapid lines of promotion that railroading holds for some
men. He is one of three men, who, for certain hours, hold the keeping of the
complicated city gate within their own well-drilled minds. The tower is the
mind, the brain centre, the ganglion, of that city gate; but the tower is only

wondrously mechanical, after all; the mind of the careful towerman is the
mind that controls all the mechanism.
To the average traveller, the city gate is a thing that impresses itself upon
his mind by its exterior and interior beauty, or its convenience of
arrangement. He notes the broad concourses, the ample entrances and exits,
the compelling magnificence of the public rooms, the great sweep of the
train-shed roof, but beyond that train-shed roof is a tangle of tracks and
signals about which he does not worry his busy head. Those tracks and
signals represent more truly the station than the mere architectural
magnificence of its outer shell. They are a tangle and a maze, apparently,
but a tangle and maze that must represent skill and ease in their tremendous
operation. They are neither tangle nor maze to the shirt-sleeved men in the
tower. They must know each track, each switch-point, each signal as
intimately and familiarly as they know the fingers of their hands.
Every mechanical device is employed to simplify the tangle for the comfort
of the busy minds that must constantly employ themselves in solving it. In
the big watch-tower—the “control” of the terminal—there is a map that is
more than map. It depicts in miniature all the tracks and switches and
signals that lie without and roundabout the tower; but this map shows
switches and signals changing as the switches and signals of the train-yard
change. It brings the distant corners of the terminal in closer touch with the
towermen. In fog or blinding storm, this track model is invaluable—a
veritable compass set within the brain of the terminal.
This illuminated map sets upon the best piece of mechanism that has yet
been devised for the operation of the terminal yard. It is a long boxed affair,
not entirely unlike the box of the old-fashioned square piano, but in this
case (the terminal we are watching being of unusual capacity) more than
thirty feet in length. This box is the very brains of the terminal. It represents
the acme of mechanical condensation. Reduced to its earliest and simplest
equivalent—the separate hand operation of a gigantic cluster of switches in
a great terminal yard—it would cover a vast area and result in the
employment of an army of switchmen. Carelessness on the part of any one
member of this army might cause a serious accident. The margin of safety
would be very low in such a case.

The first schemes of automatic switch systems eliminated the necessity of
employing an army of switchmen. A cluster of levers, in a tower of
commanding location, was connected by steel rods with the switches and
the signals which protected them. A man in the tower operated this group of
levers. In this way, the control of the yard was simplified, and responsibility
was placed upon a better paid and better trained man than the average hand
switchman. The margin of safety was considerably broadened.
Then came an amendment to that first system. Some genius of a mechanic
built an interlocking switch machine, a thing of cogs and clutches, by which
a collision in a railroad yard became almost a physical impossibility. In
these mechanical interlocking devices the tower levers are so controlled,
one by another, that signals cannot be given for trains to proceed until all
switches in the route governed are first properly set and locked; and
conversely, so that the switches of a route governed by signal cannot be
moved during the display of a signal giving the right of way over them. By
installation of the interlocking, some of the responsibility is taken by
mechanical device from human brain and the margin of safety broadened
still further.
This “piano box” represents still further condensation of the switch and
signal control and interlocking devices. The men who designed this
particular city gate designed it to accommodate more than a thousand
outgoing and incoming passenger trains each twenty-four hours; they had
found that the condensations given by earlier systems were not sufficient
for their purpose. After bringing several switches, designed to act in
concert, upon a single lever, they found that they would have a row of 360
levers. Set closely together these would require a tower about 160 feet long.
It is roughly figured that it is not desirable to assign more than twenty of
these heavy levers to a single towerman and that meant eighteen men,
working at a shift. Moreover, the throwing of a heavy switch half a mile
distant from the tower is not a slight manual exercise.
Then the “piano box”—electro-pneumatic—was installed; 150 feet of
levers was reduced to 30 feet of small handles hardly larger than faucet
handles and quite as easily turned. The control of a great terminal was
brought down to three towermen, acting under the direction of their chief,
the shirt-sleeved keeper of the city gate.

“We’ve got to keep them hustling,” he tells you. “There’s the morning
express in from New York. She’s heavy this morning. That train over there,
coming across the swing-bridge, is the millionaire’s special. She’s all club-
cars, comes in every mornin’ from the seaside. Her wheels’ll stop on the
same nick as the express. Watch them both, carefully.”
“Isn’t it quite a trick handling those trains simultaneously?”
“Not much,” a smile fixed itself upon the chief towerman’s features, as he
fingered his greasy timetable. “Here’s four trains pulling out here
simultaneously at 5:40. On top of that we get a Forest Hills local in at 5:39,
a Hudson Upper local at 5:40, an Ogontz at 5:42, a Readville at 5:43, all
incoming, and pull out two more at 5:43. Ten trains in just four minutes
isn’t bad, and we haven’t begun to feel the capacity of this terminal yet.
“That isn’t all of it. We get the whole thing criss-crossed on us sometimes;
and perhaps they’ll put on an extra getting out of here at 5:40, and that’ll
bother us a little, for we have regular tracks assigned for all our scheduled
trains. If they don’t run in the extras on us, or we don’t get a breakdown
anywhere, it’s pretty plain sailing. Ring off your 10:10, Jimmy.”
Jimmy, the assistant at the far end of the tower, touched one of the little
handles, a blade on a signal bridge opposite the end of the train-shed
dropped, a big locomotive caught the rails instantly and cautiously led a
long train of heavy cars out through the intricacy of tracks and switches
until it was past the tower, over the “throat” of the yard, and, striking on the
main line, was gaining speed once more.
“It’s as easy for him as unbroken rail off in the country,” said the chief
towerman to me, as he waved salutation at the engineer passing below him.
Then he fell into a detailed and wondrous explanation of the intricacies of
the “piano-box” mechanism. On the lower floor of the tower were air
condensers, and through the medium of electricity and compressed air
heavy switches and signals a half-mile off are worked almost by finger
touch. Each switch is guarded by at least one signal, possibly two—home
and distant—and these blades show an open or a closed path to the
engineer. They are so arranged that normally they stand at danger and in
case of breakdown they return by gravity to danger. At night the blades,

which in various positions show safety and danger and caution, are replaced
by lights—red for danger, yellow for caution, green for safety—according
to the present standard rules.

This physiology of the passenger terminal has dwelt so far upon its brain
and its nerve structure; the anatomy is hardly less interesting. Almost every
great passenger terminal in America is built upon the head-house plan. In
this scheme trains arrive and depart upon a series of parallel tracks
terminating within some sort of train-shed. It is the ideal scheme from the
standpoint of the passenger, for no stairs or bridges or subways are
necessary to reach any track. The tracks are generally laid in pairs, and
between each pair a broad platform is built, which is in reality a long-armed
extension of a common distributing platform or concourse extending across
the head of the tracks. Sometimes these extension platforms are laid on both
sides of a single track for greater facility in handling baggage and for the
quick unloading of heavy trains.
But in case any number of trains are to be operated through the terminal, the
head-house scheme becomes impracticable and an abomination to the
operating department. It makes necessary all manner of backing and turning
trains and a tremendous amount of energy and time is spent in so doing. So
we find the head-house stations—the real terminals of America—for the
most part along the seaboard or at the termination of really important
railroad routes. They are an expensive luxury at any other point.
At the outer end of the train-shed, its tracks begin to converge. They are in
rough similarity to the sticks of an open fan and at the handle they are
reduced to anywhere from two to eight main tracks, the connections with
the through tracks that serve the station. The point of convergence is known
to the towerman and all the other workers as the “throat” of the yard. It is
by far the most important point of the terminal, and is the usual location of
the control tower, with its authority over several hundred switches and
signals.

Upon the number of main tracks in this “throat” depends the capacity of the
terminal, quite as much as the number of tracks in the train-shed or the size
of any other of its facilities. If there are as many as eight tracks in this
“throat”—an unusual number—the signals and switches will probably be
arranged so that in the morning five tracks may be used for the rush of
incoming business, and three tracks for outgoing business, while in the late
afternoon conditions are exactly reversed, five tracks being used for
hurrying the suburbanites homeward, three for the lesser business incoming
to the terminal. With four tracks in the “throat”—a usual number—three
may be used in the direction of the volume of greatest business. Each of
these tracks is like a separate entrance to the terminal, and when five are
open from the train-shed simultaneously, as in this first case, five outgoing
trains may be started simultaneously from as many tracks.
In this connection, a comparative table of the capacity of several of the
largest American passenger terminals may not be without interest:

Approach Station
Tracks Tracks
Broad Street Station, Philadelphia 4 16
Market Street Station, Philadelphia 4 13
North Station, Boston 8 24
South Station, Boston 8 28
Union Station, St. Louis 6 32
Union Station, Washington 6 33
Northwestern Station, Chicago 6 16
Lackawanna Terminal, Hoboken 4 14
Pennsylvania Station, New York 2 21
Grand Central Station, New York 4 32

But the approach and train-shed tracks are only a part of the yards that are
necessary at every large passenger terminal. Certain provisions are
necessary for mail and express service (freight of every sort is handled as
far as possible in separate yards and terminals), and extensive provision for
the storage and care of cars and motive power. In the last case, it becomes

advisable to have the roundhouse, or roundhouses, for locomotive storage
within short striking distance of the terminal station. These are vast
structures, their very form requiring large tracts of land. The American plan
of radiating engine-storage tracks from a common centre, occupied by a
turntable, has never prevailed in England. Some few attempts have been
made in this country to build parallel storage tracks, with the transfer table
for an operating arm, but almost every attempt of this sort has been induced
by a necessity for unusual economy in land-space. We shall need the
turntables as long as we continue to use steam as a motive power, and the
early method of grouping storage tracks and radii from the table has never
lost its favor with operating officers.
A full-size roundhouse, with a diameter approximating 300 feet, has as its
necessary accessories, facilities for coaling the locomotives—several at a
time—as well as supplying them with water, sand, and other necessities.
Possibly the terminal will be big enough to demand shop facilities for
trifling repairs and maintenance of both cars and motive power. A big
passenger terminal is a much bigger thing than that gaudy waiting-room in
which you sit, whilst your train is being made ready to take you out from
the city.
Great as the room assigned to locomotives, greater must be yard-room for
car-storage, in rough proportions, as the length of the locomotive to the
average train length. It takes something approaching a genius to lay out the
car-yards, particularly in the case of passenger terminals, which are almost
invariably in the heart of great cities where land values are fabulously high.
These yards, in order to earn the appreciation of the men who must operate
them, must be easy of access and be of sufficient size to meet the heavy
demands that are to be put upon them. To appreciate them, let us consider
them in daily use.
The heavy express which has discharged its baggage and passengers in the
train-shed is hauled out to the yards by one of the sturdy little switch-
engines that are eternally poking their way about the yards. The engine that
has pulled it in from the road backs itself down to the roundhouse, without
another thought of the train. Its responsibility ended as soon as the run
ended in the train-shed. The engineer simply has to see that his locomotive
is carefully put away in the roundhouse; and, on some roads, that his

fireman cleans its upper parts before the next run out upon the line. The
roundhouse crew is then supposed to take care of the rest of the engine.
In the meantime, the stout little switching-engine has hauled the cars out to
the yards, separating the Pullman equipment and placing day-coaches,
baggage cars, and the like in a position by themselves. An effort is made to
keep the equipment for the heavy through trains reserved, allowance being
made for occasional changes for repair and maintenance. In the case of the
local and suburban trains, their varying traffic requires varying lengths; and
it is possible that two or three of the train-shed tracks contain a supply of
extra coaches in order that emergencies of sudden and unexpected traffic
may be met.
The yards must afford full facilities for storing and cleaning cars. This last
is a thorough operation, compressed air being used in many cases and to
great advantage. Within, seats are thoroughly dusted, floors swept,
woodwork wiped, while the railroad’s pride in the outer appearance of its
equipment is shown by the scrupulous care with which a small army of
cleaners, ladders in hand, wash down the varnished sides of the coaches. In
addition, both coaches and Pullmans must be stocked with linen and ice-
water, lighting tanks filled and trucks inspected while in storage yards.
Most elaborate provisions are made for the stocking of dining and buffet
cars.
Through equipment will rest in the yards from six to twenty-four hours, as
an average. The local and suburban trains have a programme of their own,
slightly different. The engine that is to make the run will get its train in the
first place from the storage yard. It is only a big express run, where the
locomotive is privileged to back into the station, to find its train made ready
there for it by some fag of a switch-engine. The engine that hauls the local
backs its own train into the station, makes its run out upon the line, 15, 25,
50 miles, whatever the case may be, and brings the train back into the
station. It kicks the cars out, just beyond the cover of the train-shed and
while it is hurrying to the turntable the cars are being hastily swept and
dusted. An hour will be allowed the engineer to turn his engine and get his
coal and water supply, and then he will start out again on his local run. This
performance will be repeated one or more times, before the coaches are sent

to the yard for thorough cleaning and stocking, and the locomotive housed
for a little rest in the programme.
This is not the universal programme, but it is typical. It seems simple; but
with the multiplicity of local trains in service, the demands of the regular
through traffic, and the special demands that come unexpectedly day after
day, that car storage yard has got to be arranged for an economy of
operation, as well as with the economy of space in view. Each storage track
must be of convenient access and the chances are that a separate tower and
interlocking may be set aside for the quick, convenient, and safe operation
of the storage yard. In any event, it must be so built as to be worked without
interference of any sort on the main line tracks of the terminal.
So much for the terminal, in reference to its operation; now let us consider
it for a moment from the standpoint of the passenger. The first point to be
considered by the engineers who design it is the point that we have just
considered—safety and convenience in operation. A terminal might be, and
sometimes is, an architectural triumph and a thing of monumental beauty,
but a curse and an extravagance as an operating proposition. The architects,
the mural painters, the furniture designers and the like are called in last. It is
their province to make the setting for the thing the engineers have already
created.
So in considering the terminal station as a building, we must still give ear to
the engineer. He must plan for the future, anticipate the number of persons
who are to pass through this city’s gate fifty years hence, and plan his
concourse, so many square inches for each one of those future users of the
terminal. Exits and entrances to the trains must be built in order that
incoming and outgoing streams of persons shall not conflict. All these
points require careful study. It is possible to design a baggage-room so bad
as to make the station all but a failure; a stuffy ticket-office that is almost an
impossibility to use under pressure conditions. The good engineer thinks
two or three thousand times before he begins the design of a passenger
terminal.
The concourse, or head platform, that joins all the different track platforms
is the main feature of the terminal building. Upon it some persons
congregate preparatory to going through the gates to their trains, and other

persons congregate awaiting the arrival of trains—a matter which is
carefully bulletined for their convenience. Arriving and departing
passengers, with a percentage of idlers, must be accommodated upon it. It
must be capacious. Exits to the street should be provided, without the
necessity of passing through the station building, and the carriage stand
should be close at hand.
The waiting-room will be the monumental and artistic expression of the
terminal. It may or may not be a portion of the entrance to the concourse
and train-shed, but it is essential that it be conveniently located, that
smoking-rooms, women’s waiting-rooms, parcel-check, telephone,
telegraph, news-stand, and restaurant facilities be close at hand. It is hardly
less desirable that the ticket-offices adjoin the waiting-room yet the
architect who so places his ticket-offices that the belated traveller has
unnecessary delay in purchasing his tickets, will bring down unnumbered
curses upon his defenceless head.
The modern station will make provision for numerous railroad offices—be
a complete modern office-building in fact, although not emblazoning that in
its architectural design—and will have lunch-stand and restaurant facilities,
with their necessary addenda of store-rooms, refrigerators and kitchens, as
complete as those of the largest hotels.
The baggage accommodations deserve a paragraph by themselves.
Americans, due to the liberal baggage provisions of our railroads, travel
each year with increased impedimenta. Each year the task of the baggage-
handlers multiplies. Making room for trunks has come to be an important
terminal provision. In the large terminals, this traffic is divided, an in-
baggage room receiving from incoming trains and distributing to various
forms of city baggage delivery and an out-baggage room receiving and
checking baggage for outgoing trains. The in-baggage room is always much
the largest, because of the delays that almost invariably hold trunks for a
time—short or long—upon their arrival at a terminal.
It is desirable that baggage be handled with as little inconvenience as
possible to passengers; and for this reason almost all terminals have
subways extending from the “in” and “out” rooms beneath all train-shed
platforms and connected with each of these by elevators, large enough to

receive a full-sized baggage-truck. In this way annoyance and delay to
passengers is minimized. In the case of heavy through trains, where
baggage runs unusually heavy, the baggage-cars are frequently detached
and switched in upon special tracks that run alongside the baggage rooms.
The passenger terminal must also provide mail and express facilities among
these structures, but these, as has already been intimated, are generally apart
and quite separate from the passenger facilities. A power plant is another
necessity. The buildings must be heated, cars warmed in freezing weather
long before the locomotives are attached, ice-machines operated for the
station restaurant, power supplied to elevators, dynamos, and lesser
mechanisms about the terminal. This is a feature that is not radically
different from that of other large commercial structures.
The capacity of a modern railroad is measured by the capacity of its
terminals rather than by that of its main line tracks. The railroads were not
quick to realize nor to appreciate this fact at the first. It was finally forced
upon their attention, and in that way became one of the fundamental
principles of American railroad construction and operation.
The terminal became recognized as one of the most efficient possible
solutions of the congestion problem, a little more than a quarter of a century
ago. It was then that the double-tracking and four-tracking devices were
found to measure all out of cost with the relief that was to be derived from
them. It was then that the engineers were told to meet the situation with a
relief that should be measurably low in cost.
The result of their work has been to put America foremost with her railroad
terminals. The engineers have worked against great odds in many cases.
The railroads in the beginning took little or no forethought for their
terminals. They neglected rare opportunities to buy land for these facilities
in the beginning, when the cities were small and the land cheap. They have
paid in millions of dollars for this neglect. In some cases, the early railroads
had little money to expend upon this city real estate; but in few cases did
any of their managers have the gift of prophecy that made them foresee the
great cities of to-day or the great tides of traffic they would be called upon
to move.

Nor has this phase of the situation improved within recent years. A great
railroad rebuilt its passenger terminal in an important city ten years ago and
blindly imagined that the increase in facilities would carry it a quarter of a
century at the least. To-day it is carrying off the remnants of that station
improvement to the scrap-heap and trying to see far enough into the future
to build a station that shall last it fifty years at least.
There is not an engineer employed by that railroad who will assert himself
as possessed of the absolute belief that the new station will be adequate for
the traffic of a half century hence, if indeed the great spreading palace of
steel and marble be in existence at all at that time. All that they will tell you
is to point to the fact that another one of America’s greatest passenger
carriers has doubled its traffic within the past ten years.
“How can we gamble with an unknown future of such dimensions?” they
ask you in return.
When the Park Square Station of the Boston & Providence Railroad in
Boston and the Grand Central Station in New York were built, in the early
seventies, they were the first railroad passenger terminals of size that the
country had seen. It was thought that they would stand a hundred years as
monuments to the genius of the men who designed them. To-day they are
both gone, each supplanted by a station that both together might be packed
within.
Do you wonder then that railroad operator and engineer alike stand appalled
at the tremendous terminal problem that our great cities, growing awesome
overnight, are constantly presenting to them?

In the beginning, there were no passenger or freight terminals, nor, indeed,
a traffic that demanded them. The passenger cars were apt to be hauled by
horses from some downtown depot through the centre of the street to an
“outer depot” at the edge of the town where the locomotive replaced the
horses. When the cars became heavier, the trains longer and more frequent,
the railroads were gradually forced in most cities to remove their rails from
the streets and the use of horses was generally abandoned. Still, passengers

crossing Baltimore, for some years after the war on their way from the
North to Washington, noticed that the trains were broken into cars and
drawn one by one by horses across the city, through crowded streets, from
one outer railroad station to the other. A venerable white horse was the
switching-engine in the Rochester depot until the beginning of the eighties.
When the passenger traffic on the railroads had become a business of extent
—about the middle of the past century—the construction of sizable railroad
stations began. The Fitchburg Railroad built its stone fortress at Boston,
which still stands and was for many years regarded as a marvel of its sort.
Down in Baltimore, the Susquehanna Railroad—afterwards the Northern
Central—built Calvert Station, and stanch old Calvert is still a busy
passenger gateway of the Monumental City. A few years later the Baltimore
& Ohio built Camden Station there and Camden Station was regarded as
something rather unusually fine for a number of years.
In the sixties, the railroad terminals grew in size, and the old custom of
having separate stations at the far sides of important towns was
disappearing, as the American began to see and to demand the advantages
of through traffic. So Cleveland built at the close of the war a stone Union
Station, of such size that Cleveland folks bragged of it for many years. The
stone Union Station at Cleveland is still in use, but the folk of that town do
not brag of it nowadays. Cleveland has grown a good deal since they built
the Union Station there.
The first real passenger terminals of importance in the country were the
Park Square in Boston, and the Grand Central in New York, to which
reference has already been made. These presented architectural pretensions
such as the railroads of the country had not before offered to the cities they
served. They also served as models for bigger things that were to follow. In
Boston, the Lowell Road planned and built a large new station, and the era
of the passenger terminal was begun.
When the Pennsylvania Railroad built Broad Street Station, at Philadelphia,
it built a terminal a little finer than anything accomplished up to that time.
Even to-day, with the dignity of years creeping upon it, Broad Street is still
one of the foremost American stations. The policy of its owners has been to
keep it abreast of the demands of the day, and only recently it has been

greatly enlarged again, its protecting, interlocking, and signal system being
made second to none in the world. To the traveller, the ivory-white waiting-
room, where Philadelphians delight to congregate, is an unending source of
admiration; engineers find interest in the intricate system of tunnels and
bridges by which a number of trunk-line divisions are brought into the
station without crossing at level. Broad Street Station shows a yearly
increase in its passenger traffic of about five per cent. It has a daily
movement of more than 600 loaded trains in and out, in addition to a heavy
switching movement. But because of the steady increase of its traffic the
Pennsylvania has already planned to relieve it by building a new main for
express trains out at West Philadelphia. When that is done Broad Street will
be used exclusively for suburban traffic. A short distance away stands the
Market Street Station, of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a terminal
rivalling Broad Street in beauty, and only slightly inferior in capacity.
Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
But the first big station terminals—in our American sense that a thing big
must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world—were
those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic
far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-
shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a
measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each
has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention.
The Boston terminal—South Station—was preceded by a giant structure
erected along the bank of the Charles River to receive a multitude of
through and suburban railroad lines entering from the north. This terminal
—North Station—embraced the structure of the Boston & Lowell Railroad
and superseded those of the Boston & Maine and Fitchburg railroads. The
merging of these and other interests into the present Boston & Maine made
the North Station a possibility. It is not a structure of particular distinction,
from either an architectural or an engineering standpoint, but it has proved
itself a mighty convenience to a travelling public, using a multiplicity of
busy lines.
The convenience of it made the South Station a possibility. Boston, like
Philadelphia, spreads out well beyond its actual boundaries and measures
itself as a vast community, including many near-by cities and villages. With

the consolidation of a number of railroads in Southern New England into
the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, and the popularity of the
North Station so close at hand, the South Station came as a matter of
course. It replaced the stations of the New York & New England—whose
site forms part of its site—the Old Colony, the Boston & Albany, and the
Park Square Station. To accommodate the vast traffic of all these railroads,
a great terminal was designed and built, a thing whose bigness is hardly
realized by the passenger coming and going through it and who knows it
only as a thing of some thousands of shuffling feet, giant shadows, and long
distances.
In addition to the 28 sub-tracks in the train-shed, South Station is, in effect,
a through station for electric suburban traffic. This service has not yet been
installed, but the tracks are ready for use upon short notice, when the
facilities of the main train-shed shall become overtaxed. This through
station has been ingeniously devised underneath the train-shed and waiting-
rooms of the terminal. It is served by two tracks leading from the main
entrance tracks to the station—guarded by separate interlocking and tower
controls, and consists of two extensive loops. For suburban service, with no
baggage to be handled, these loops will some day afford a great
accommodation. Three or four electric trains may be stood upon each. The
time and necessity of reversing the trains is entirely obviated, and upon the
two tracks of this sub-station a short-haul traffic can be handled almost
equal in numbers to that of the train-shed overhead.
What such a statement means can be better realized by a recourse to bold
statistics. South Station handled 31,831,390 passengers in 1909, who
travelled two and fro in some 800 trains daily. It has handled more than 900
trains in a single day. Its baggage men take care of more than 2,500,000
trunks in a twelvemonth. The statistics of a city gate like South Station are,
in themselves, sizable.
St. Louis has one passenger station to serve as city gate for the traffic that
comes and goes at that important railroad centre. That gate is the chief
through passenger traffic point of the world. From its train-shed one may
take through trains to every corner of the United States and a few distant
corners of Mexico and Canada. St. Louis, like most Western cities has no
volume of suburban traffic as New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, but it is a

consequential point for through passengers. The better to serve the needs of
the 22 different railroad systems entering that city, the Union Station was
built a dozen years ago. It was thought to be big enough to last St. Louis
many years. Before the World’s Fair of 1904 opened in that city the Union
Station was already judged inadequate, and an elaborate plan was
consummated for its enlargement.
When the Union Station was originally planned, St. Louis demanded a gate
that would be worthy of her size and dignity. No type of through station
would do, the head-house terminal was demanded and built, even though in
actual practice it necessitated backing each arriving train into the shed. A
station of giant size with the largest train-shed in the world was built and
hailed with a glad acclaim by the Western town.
When the station was found inadequate, the engineers found their plans for
enlarging it would have to be adapted to a very confined area, proscribed by
immovable railroad properties to the south, highway viaducts to the east
and west, and a granite head-house, costing several million dollars, to the
north. Within that confined area, they were to correct the evils of
insufficient capacity—a train-shed with a single 4-track throat and some
standing tracks of but 3 cars’ length, inadequate baggage arrangements, and
lesser evils. Within two years, they had substituted, without increasing the
area of the Union Station property, a 10-car capacity for each of the 32
tracks of the train-shed, a double throat with 6 tracks, increased concourses
and distributing platforms for passengers, and a complete subway system
for the handling of baggage. The prosecution of that work, while the station
was in constant and busy use, ranks as one of the marvels of latter-day
practical engineering.
From the standpoint of the architect, no other station has yet been built in
the United States that can compare with the new Union Station at
Washington. For years, the overcrowded railroad stations at that city have
been but wretched gateways to the national capitol. Now the city that is fast
becoming the Mecca of all Americans has an entrance worthy of her
dignity, and in keeping with the increasing magnificence of her architectural
works.

The Washington Station is in full accord with the wonderful architectural
development of that city, and has a setting in the creation of a great facing
plaza, in which 100,000 troops may be gathered in review. Some day the
plaza is to be surrounded by a group of public buildings but even in that day
the white marble station, exceeding in size all other Washington buildings
save the Capitol itself, will remain the dominating feature of that facing
plaza. It has been created in simple classic outline, a vaulted train-shed
being purposely omitted, in order that the station should not overshadow the
proportions of the near-by Capitol.
Similarly, the vaulted train-shed has been omitted in the splendid new white
granite terminal which the Chicago and Northwestern Railway has just
completed on the West Side of Chicago. That new terminal is a real addition
to a town which has long boasted two model stations—one in La Salle
Street and the other upon the Lake Front. The Northwestern terminal is one
of the fine architectural features of Chicago—a structure of classic design,
the dominating feature of which is a colonnaded portico, monumental in
type and towering to a height of 120 feet above the main street entrance.
This new terminal has a possible capacity of a quarter of a million
passengers each day. It has some novel features for the comfort of
passengers. A great many travellers cross Chicago in the course of twenty-
four hours; in many cases this is the single break in a weary and dirty
journey. For these, the new terminal not only provides the customary
lounging rooms and barber shops, but also private baths. There is a series of
rooms where invalids, women with children, or other persons seeking
privacy, may go directly by private elevator where they may rest while
waiting for connecting trains. For women there are tea-rooms and hospital
rooms, with trained nurses in attendance. That is almost the last note in
comfort for the traveller. There are, in addition to all these, private rooms
where the suburbanite may change into his evening clothes and proceed in
his various social duties, changing back again before he catches his late
train out into the country.

New York City is still in the process of rebuilding and readjusting her
gateways. Two magnificent terminals in her metropolitan district have
already been finished; the third is still under construction. The first of these
terminals is a real water-gate, built for the Lackawanna Railroad and
situated in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from the corporate New
York. It is a handsome architectural creation in steel and concrete. Its tall
clock-tower dominates the river front by night and day and those who come
and go through its portals find themselves in a succession of white and
vaulted hallways and concourses that suggest a library or museum more
than the mere commercial structure of a railroad corporation.
An interesting feature of the Hoboken Station is the abandonment of the
high train-shed such as has come to be a distinguishing feature of some of
the world’s great terminals. Engine smoke and gases work havoc with the
structural steel work of such sheds, and the engineers of the Hoboken
Station fashioned a low-lying roof, slotted to receive the locomotive stacks.
The result is a clean train-house, yet admirably protected from the stress of
weather. It is a novel note in terminal engineering.
The Pennsylvania Station, opened in November, 1910, has already become
one of the notable landmarks of New York. Beneath it disappeared the
biggest hole ever excavated at one time in the metropolitan city; for the
great station is not so famed either for its architectural beauty or for the
completeness of its details (although it is in the foreguard of the world’s
great terminals in both of these regards), as for the stupendous engineering
project that was found necessary to connect it with the trunk-line railroads
that it serves. To the west, this takes form in two parallel tunnels underneath
the city, the Hudson River, and the Jersey Heights; to the east a still heavier
traffic, composed of empty trains in Pennsylvania service and a great army
of Long Island commuters, is carried under the very heart of Manhattan
Island and under the East River in four parallel tunnels. Trains run for six
miles under the greatest city of the continent, with its flanking rivers and
environs, without ever seeing more than a momentary flash of daylight. The
terminal has no train-shed or other of the familiar external appearances of
the usual railroad station in a large city.

A model American railroad station—the Union Station of the New York
Central,
Boston & Albany, Delaware & Hudson, and West Shore railroads at
Albany

The classic portal of the Pennsylvania’s new station in New York

The beautiful concourse of the new Pennsylvania Station, in New York

“The waiting-room is the monumental and artistic expression of the
station,”—the waiting-room of the Union Depot at Troy, New York

The Pennsylvania terminal also departs radically from the other great
terminals in its track arrangements. The twenty-one parallel station tracks,
with their platforms, are placed in a basement forty feet below street level.
In fact, the great building is divided into three levels. At the street level are
the broad entrances, the chief of these forming itself into a broad arcade,
lined with shops that cater particularly to the demands of the traveller. On
this floor are also the railroad’s commodious restaurant and lunch-room.
On the intermediate plane, or level, the real business of the passenger
prefatory to his journey is transacted. The concourse, the great general
waiting-room, with its subsidiary rooms for men and women, the ticket
offices, and the telegraph offices are there gathered. From the roomy
concourse, covered in steel and glass after the fashion of the famous train-
sheds in Frankfort and Dresden, Germany, individual stairs and elevators

lead to each of the track platforms. A sub-concourse, hung directly
underneath the main structure, is reserved for exit purposes only, and serves
to separate the streams of incoming and outgoing passengers. The north side
of the station is separated and reserved for the use of the Long Island
passengers, chiefly commuters.
The theory of operation of the station is simplicity itself. A Pennsylvania
through train from the West, after discharging its passengers and baggage,
will not be backed out of the train-house, but will continue on through the
station, under more tunnels and another river, to the storage yards just
outside of Long Island City. Similarly, trains made ready for a long trip at
the yards will proceed empty under the East River tunnels to the big station,
where they will receive their outbound load. This is the theory of the
station, an operating theory which makes it in part like a giant way-station
and saves much terminal congestion. The Long Island trains and a few
short-line Pennsylvania express trains will be turned in the station. These
are the exception.
Of interest fully equal to that of the new Pennsylvania Station, is the
construction of a new Grand Central Station upon the site of and during the
use of the old. The Grand Central Station, used by both the New York
Central and the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroads, has been for
many years New York’s great gateway to the east as well as the north and
west. It has developed a great suburban and a great through traffic since the
construction of the first station—away back in 1871. Temporary relief was
gained in the early eighties by the construction of an annex to the east of the
original station. Still further improvement was gained ten years ago by
tearing out a series of ill-arranged public rooms and substituting for them
the single beautiful waiting-room that has proved so great a delight to
travellers. Now that waiting-room is about to be demolished in the face of
plans for the newer and greater Grand Central.
The building of the new station has offered tremendous problems to the
engineers, for it has demanded a complete reconstruction within extremely
limited area, while not placing hindrances in the way of the constant
operation of one of the world’s greatest terminals. Coincident with the
rebuilding of the new station has come the substitution of electricity for
steam on the terminal lines of its two tenants, the New York, New Haven, &

Hartford, and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroads. In order to
work the three-mile tunnel through Park Avenue and the sole entrance for
trains to the station at greatest capacity, it was found necessary to extend the
yards of the new station far north of those of the old. This work, alone, has
necessitated the acquisition of whole city blocks of tremendously valuable
real estate and the excavation of several million cubic yards of rock and
earth.
To accomplish the work of reconstruction and still enable the station to
handle its great traffic without serious interruption, serious forethought and
definite plans of action were found necessary. The plan was developed by
constructing a temporary building of brick and plaster covering a vacant
city block in Madison Avenue, at the west of the station. Into this temporary
structure a branch post office, an important adjunct of the Grand Central,
was moved from the extreme eastern side of the terminal. Excavation for
the new terminal began at its eastern edge and at that edge the first portions
of the new structure have been completed. A waiting-room was then
established in temporary quarters, the last vestiges of the old Grand Central
removed, and the main front and centre of the new station fabricated.
Similarly, as the excavation has progressed from the east to the west side of
the terminal, the great bulk of the traffic has been gradually shifted from the
old high-level to the new low-level.
The new Grand Central complete will have its main train-shed devoted to
through traffic. A second train-shed of similar arrangement and of slightly
smaller dimensions will be constructed underneath the main shed for
suburban traffic, and a single head-house will serve both floors. The head-
house will have as its chief architectural feature, a concourse of mammoth
proportions. The lesser features of the new Grand Central will contribute to
make the new terminal, built upon the site of the historic old, one of the
world’s greatest gateways. The fact that steam locomotives are absolutely
prohibited from entering either of the two new stations on Manhattan Island
makes these the cleanest railroad terminals yet built.
So not only have our railroads begun to build great stations; they are to-day
building really beautiful stations. An age in which the American demands
the exquisite and the monumental in his architecture, palatial homes,
palatial shops, palatial hotels, demands that the railroad station be

something more than the mere expression of a commercial utility. Stone, the
sturdy and durable building material of all the ages, has become the
expression of these buildings from without. Within, they are gay with rare
marbles and mural paintings. There is nothing too fine for the railroad
passenger terminal of to-day in the United States.
When the master fancy of the architect, Richardson, designed the splendid
stations at Worcester and Springfield, as well as a host of smaller attractive
stations along the line of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the beginnings
were made. More recently this rising American desire for beauty and good
taste has shown itself in such elaborate and artistic structures as the stations
at Albany and Scranton. The last step has come in the designing of the
palatial terminals in Chicago, in Washington, and in New York City. It
would take a bold prophet to anticipate what the next step might be.

CHAPTER VII

THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS
Convenience of Having Freight Stations at
Several Points in a City—The
Pennsylvania Railroad’s Scheme at
New York as an Example—Coal
Handled Apart from Other Freight—
Assorting the Cars—The Transfer
House—Charges for the Use of Cars
not Promptly Returned to Their Home
Roads—The Hard Work of the
Yardmaster.

A LL the folk who come and go upon the railroad know the passenger
stations. Few of them know the freight terminals. Yet it is from this last
source that the railroad will derive the greater part of its revenue. The
freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for
varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a single
structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all its passengers,
even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so to concentrate this
part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal.
With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of trucking
is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in order to
eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the stimulus of
competition, will establish freight stations at each point where any
considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These stations will
consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight (your traffic expert
calls this “LCL,” meaning “less than carload”), and wagon yards for carload
lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses, one for inbound, the other for
outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have to be ample for the

accommodation of a host of trucks and drays as well as for the long rows of
freight-cars.
In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be a
freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its shipping-rooms
and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American city there may
be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So much for the
general commodity freight. Then there are the special commodities.
Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in the
regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets and
storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a hundred
different accessible points about the city. One begins to see, after a little
while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each opportunity to gain
lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line gained means some
appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic burden that increases
yearly.
It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to
accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates
there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and the
handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal scheme. It
may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic; and in such a
case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of every sort form other
busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves, elevators, and car-floats
to enter into the scheme.
So you see the railroad’s freight terminal in any large city is like the fingers
of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive centre,
gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside from the
private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together somewhere;
and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city the railroad
creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and outgoing—100
trains a day, perhaps—is gathered together and sorted with system and
regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and the mail
packages.
To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme,
let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by which

the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the
metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.
The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a
great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through Eastern
New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island,
Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in
addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth,
lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a
tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and
east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many piers
and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the smoky,
busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight terminal. There
are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight station at Jersey City
(the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and another much larger
plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper harbor, almost behind the
Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now awaiting its greatest
development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its ownership control of
the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling line, 4 and 6 tracks wide,
around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger terminal yards at Long Island
City. This encircling line—the New York Connecting Railroad it is called—
will be continued by a splendid bridge over the East River to an actual
connection with the New Haven system reaching up into New England.
When this is done, one of the bugaboos of the freightmen—the slow and
ofttimes dangerous movement of barges and car-floats through the East
River, past the entire length of Manhattan Island—will be ended. Greenville
will become the distributing point for the bulk of New England freight that
comes and goes from the south and the west through New York.
Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable
magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that
reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey
meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank
well to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and
Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.
Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the neck
of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main line

from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that
carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark, united
to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a gateway
by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in reality. A big
assorting or classification yard was built there for outgoing freight, and
another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added and one of the great
transfer houses of the country—but of that, more in a moment.
The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of
Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the
railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are closed
and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy floats are
being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville. There is not
much loafing at either of those points along about supper-time. Switching
crews show feverish activity in snatching the cars from the floats, and
yardmasters bend themselves nervously toward forming the long trains that
are to go rumbling toward the west throughout the night.
Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a
wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city at
nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and only
hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that busy
junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago train from
Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard without
pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a dozen
switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no longer.
They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals, cars that
are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting begins. The
night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser officers in the
field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns in hand, they are
running along the trains (these are pulling in from the waterfront every five
minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping and revamping the
freight traffic of the night.
This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for Pittsburgh,
the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the points diverging
therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has been in progress for
more than an hour at one end of the classification tracks, there are long

trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some large city or important
distributing point. After that it is a simple enough matter to bring engines
and cabooses and start the trains through. Then the sorting of the cars is
begun again and continues until the freight receiving points and the freight
interchange points in the metropolitan district have been swept clean for the
night.
The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller scale,
for it handles package freight—“less than carload.” It is a long structure,
stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long sidings and
unloading sheds. It takes the “LCL” stuff coming by night from the
connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses, and a little
after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great mass of matter,
from 200 to 500 carloads a day.
Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt
freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is
hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of
the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day
and by night.
You ship a box—sixty pounds to one hundred pounds—from Wilkes-Barre,
Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to
Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.;
a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, ad infinitum.
You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a problem in
freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail service. Ten
thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising here and there
and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to destination,
make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts have finished
their difficult work.
If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the problem
would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds weight,
or less, perhaps—“LCL” anyway. From its destination it goes with other
boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house the car in
which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track, seals are broken,

doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The transfer-house is roomy and
systematic. If it were anything less it would resemble chaos.
But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting
points have regular stands, upon which nightly are placed cars bound for
these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house), each
transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite that
number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a
checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its
proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is mail-
sorting on a Titanic scale.
Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through
car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the
transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than
enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one of the
switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to replace it.
Beyond that, the yardmaster’s superiors are all the time demanding that he
show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.
When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects forfeits
from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not expedite its passage;
this the railroaders know as “per diem.” The great trick in operating is to
keep per diem down; and so the “foreign” cars, so called, must be promptly
returned to their home roads.
“We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern
from Chicago every day,” the man who has this yard in charge explains.
“It’s up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I
can’t, I do the best I can.” He scratches his head. “Perhaps I’ll use a
Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not,
something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car
over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out
beyond Washington there’d be trouble, and I’ve got to dig out something
empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell. Mos’
generally, though, when we’ve got a turn of Western stuff, I’ve got my
‘empty’ tracks stuffed full o’ them New England cars.”
We mention something about the transfer-house being a mighty good thing.

“It’s a necessary evil,” says our guide, correcting us.
He starts to explain. “See here. The X——, over in its Jersey City transfer-
house, got near a carload of that fancy porcelain brick through from
Haverstraw las’ week, and that young whelp of a college boy that’s hangin’
round there learnin’ the railroad business gets it into his noodle that it’s
somethin’ awful, awful for that stuff to be goin’ through to Middle Ohio in a
Maine Central box, an ‘LCL’ at that. So out he dumps it into a system car
right here an’ now, and saves his road about one dollar and fifty cents per
diem. Of course they pay about one hundred and thirty-five dollars for
damages to that brick in the transferrin’. But the boy’s all right in the
transfer-house. If he was out on the engine he might blow up the biler.”

Here is another great railroad yard—this almost filling a mighty crevice
between God’s eternal hills. This is within the mountain country, and the
gossip that you get around the roundhouse is all of grades. You hear how
Smith and the 2,999 pulled seven Pullmans around the Saddleback without
a pusher; how some of the big preference freights take four engines to
mount the summit; the tales of daring are tales of pushers and of trains
breaking apart on the fearful mountain stretches.
Randall is yardmaster here, and Randall is the opposite of the layman’s
picture of a yardmaster—a slovenly, worn, profane sort of fellow. Randall
does not swear; he rarely even gets excited; his system of administration is
so perfectly devised that even in a stress he rarely has to turn to work with
his own hands. With him railroading is a fine, practical science. He will tell
you of the methods at Collinwood, at Altoona, at Buffalo, at Chicago—
wherein they differ. He is cool, calculating, clever, a capital railroader in
addition to all these.

Something over a million dollars’ worth of passenger cars
are constantly stored in this yard

A scene in the great freight-yards that surround Chicago

The intricacy of tracks and the “throat” of a modern terminal yard:
South Station, Boston, and its approaches

You speak of his yard as being overwhelmingly big. He answers in his
deliberate way:
“We’ve more than 200 miles of track in this yard; something more than
2,000 switches operate it.”
Then he takes you down from his office, elevated in an abandoned switch-
tower, and looking down upon his domain. He explains with great care that,
his yard being a main-line division point and not a point with many
intersecting branches or “foreign roads,” its transfer-house is
inconsequential. The same process that goes forward with the package-
freight in the transfer-houses, Randall carries on in this yard with cars.
These operations are separated for east-bound and west-bound freight and
each is given an entirely separate yard, easily reached from the group of
roundhouses that hold the freight motive power of that part of the system.
Randall’s, being an unusually large yard, further divides these activities into

separate yards for loaded and empty cars on the west-bound side. No east-
bound “empties” are handled over his road.
We follow him to the nearest operating point, the west-bound classification
yard for loaded cars. In the old days this was a broad flat reach of about 20
parallel tracks, terminating at each end in approaches of lead of “ladder”
track. Upon each set of 3 or 4 tracks a switch-engine is busy in the eternal
classification process. In these more modern days you may see the “hump”
or gravity-yard, although you will still find skilled railroaders who are
prejudiced against its use. In the hump-yard half of the work of the switch-
engines is done by gravity. This new type of railroad facility has an artificial
hill, just above the termination of the parallel tracks where they cluster
together, and upon this hump one switch-engine with a trained crew does
the work of six engines and crews in the old type of yard.
A preference freight rolls into the receiving yard for the west-bound
classification. Its engine uncouples and steams off for a well-earned rest in
the smoky roundhouse. A switch-engine uncouples the caboose that has
been tacked on behind over the division, and it is shunted off to the near-by
caboose track, where its crew will have close oversight of it—perhaps sleep
in it—until it is ready to accompany some east-bound freight a few hours
hence.
Blue flags (blue lights at night) are fastened at each end of the dismantled
cars, and the inspectors have a quarter of an hour to make sure if the
equipment is in good order. If the car is found with broken running-gear it is
marked, and soon after drilled out from its fellows, sent to the transfer-
house to have its contents removed, to the shops for repairs, or the “cripple”
track for junk, if its case is well-nigh hopeless.
With the “O. K.” of the car inspectors finally pronounced, the train that was
comes up to the hump, and the expert crew that operates there makes short
work of sorting out the cars—this track for “stuff” southwest of Pittsburgh,
this next for Cleveland and Chicago, the third for transcontinental; and so it
goes. Two lines of cars are drilled at the same time, for just ahead of the
switch-engine is an open-platform car, known as the “pole-car,” and by
means of heavy timbers the “pole-man” guides two rows of heavy cars
down the slight grades to their resting-places.

The cars do not rest long upon the classification-yard tracks. From the far
end of each of these they are being gathered in solid trains, one for
Pittsburgh, another for Cleveland and Chicago, the third transcontinental,
and so on. Engines of the next division are being hitched to them, pet
“hacks” brought from the caboose tracks, and the long strings of loaded
box-cars are off toward the West in incredibly short time.
Of course there are some trains that never go upon the “classification” at
Randall’s yard. There are solid coal trains bound in and out of New York, of
Philadelphia, and of Boston, that pass him empty and filled, and only
change engines and cabooses at his command. There are through freights,
bound from one seaboard to the other, from the Far East to the Far West,
that do likewise. But the majority of the freight movement has the sorting
out within his domain, his four humps are busy day and night with an
ordinary run of traffic, and you shudder to think what must be the condition
when business begins to run at high tide.
“We get it a-humming every once in a while,” he finally confesses. “We had
one day, a little time ago, when we received 121 east-bound trains in
twenty-four hours, more than 3,200 cars all told. That meant, on an average,
a train every 11½ minutes. That same day we got 78 west-bound freights,
with more than 3,600 cars. That meant nearly 7,000 cars handled on the in-
freight in twenty-four hours, or a train coming in to me every 7½ minutes
during day and night. They don’t do much better than that on some of the
subway and elevated railroads in the big cities; and I haven’t said a word
about the trains and cars we despatched—just about as much again, of
course.”
Through yards such as these there are incoming streams of merchandise,
equal at least to the outgoing, passing through classification yards in
carload lots and the great transfer-houses in “LCL.” These streams must be
kept separate and from clogging one another or themselves. Cars must carry
loads whenever they are moved—“empties” are the bogy-men of the
superintendents of transportation—and cars from “foreign” systems must be
quickly returned to their home roads. The yardmaster at a busy freight point
has his own worries. His puzzle is unending. To it he must bend the bigness
of a big mind, he must be prepared to handle the unequal volumes of traffic
that pass through his domain with an equal skill: in dull times he must seek

to keep his plant working under conditions of rare economy; when the
freight rises to flood tide, he must fight in harness to prevent the freight
from congesting. The word “failure” has been stricken out of his vocabulary
by his superiors.
It takes a high grade of railroader to serve as yardmaster.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LOCOMOTIVES AND THE CARS
Honor Required in the Building of a
Locomotive—Some of the Early
Locomotives—Some Notable
Locomotive-builders—Increase of the
Size of Engines—Stephenson’s Air-
brake—The Workshops—The Various
Parts of the Engine—Cars of the Old-
time—Improvements by Winans and
Others—Steel Cars for Freight.

F ROM out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. We have
already told of the honor that is forged in the building of the bridge;
honor of no less degree has gone into the forging of the most vital and most
human thing upon the railroad, outside of man himself. That man has ever
been able to create and build the locomotive, a giant creature of some 200
tons, perhaps, built together with infinite care of some 5,000 to 7,000 parts,
and these parts acting with the delicacy of the hair-spring of a watch, almost
passes ordinary belief. The wonder becomes even greater when it is realized
that this monster creature, set upon two slender rails, is capable of pulling a
4,000 ton train, through every stress of weather and over considerable
grades.
To tell in detail of the locomotive in one chapter is short allowance to a
subject that fairly demands for itself a whole book, a technical mind for the
telling, and at least a fairly technical mind for the understanding; a subject
that in its history goes hand in hand with that of the railroad itself. Yet the
limitations of this book forbid a more lengthy description.

We have already told of a very few of the earliest and most famous
American locomotives; the Stourbridge Lion, which Horatio Allen brought
to the Delaware & Hudson Company; the Best Friend, which was built in
New York City, and which went to Charleston, South Carolina, to be the
first American locomotive to run in the United States, the De Witt Clinton,
which awoke the echoes of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in a single
day; and the Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, which induced the directors
of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to change their motive power from horses
to steam, and so opened a great new development for their property.
A little while after Cooper’s Tom Thumb had achieved the astounding feat
of beating a team of horses in hauling a railroad coach, the directors of the
B. & O. offered a prize of $4,000 “for the most approved engine that shall
be delivered for trial upon the road on or before June 1, 1831; and $3,500
for the engine which shall be adjudged the next best.” It was determined in
this prospectus that “the engine, when in operation must not exceed three
and one-half tons weight and must, on a level road, be capable of drawing
day by day fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of wagons, fifteen miles an
hour.”
Three locomotives answered this generous offer. Of them but one, the York,
oftener called the Arabian, built at York, Pa., by Davis & Gartner, and
hauled to Baltimore by horses over the turnpikes, was of practical service.
Phineas Davis was a watch and clock maker, but he succeeded in devising a
locomotive that was the forerunner of the famous Grasshopper upon the
Baltimore & Ohio. Better name was never given to a locomotive, the rude
and ungainly angles formed by rods and levers giving a distinct
resemblance to the long-legged bugs. Yet the Grasshoppers served their
purpose. In the late eighties, the Arabian was still in service in the Mount
Clare yards at Baltimore. With a single exception, it never had an accident
or even left the rails. That exception was just before the completion of the
Washington branch, and Davis was a passenger upon the engine. It was
going at a fair rate of speed when suddenly it rolled over upon its side in the
ditch. No one was hurt, save Davis, who was instantly killed. It seemed a
strange caprice of Fate, for although careful examination was immediately
made, both of the engine and of the track, no reason could ever be assigned
for the accident.

In that same year, 1831, the John Bull, which was built by George & Robert
Stephenson & Company, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England, was received
in Philadelphia for the Camden & Amboy Railroad. As long as the
locomotive continues to serve the railroad the name of George Stephenson,
its inventor, must be indissolubly linked with it. The John Bull was easily
the most famous Stephenson engine ever sent to the United States. It has
been shown at all our great expositions, and now occupies a position of
honor in the great Smithsonian institution at Washington. Of these early
engines, which it was found necessary to bring from England, a volume
once issued by the Rogers Locomotive Works, of Paterson, N. J., has said:
“These locomotives ... furnished the types and patterns from
which those which were afterwards built here were fashioned.
But American designs soon began to depart from their British
prototypes, and a process of adaption to the existing conditions
of the railroads in this country followed, which afterwards
differentiated the American locomotives more and more from
those built in Great Britain. A marked feature of difference
between American and English locomotives has been the use of
a forward truck under the former.”
As a matter of fact, the English engines, built for use on long straight
stretches of line would never have served on the early roads in this country
with their steep and curving routes through the mountains. So, in the latter
part of the year 1831, John B. Jervis invented what he called “a new plan of
frame, with a bearing-carriage for a locomotive engine” for the use of the
Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, in which he introduced the forward truck
which is to-day a distinctive feature of American engines. Its effectiveness
was at once recognized, and its almost general adoption immediately
followed. Five years later, Henry R. Campbell, of Philadelphia, had
patented his system of two driving-wheels and a truck, and the distinctive
type of American locomotive was born.
In the development of that peculiarly successful type, great names have
been written into the history of American locomotive-building—the names
of such men as Rogers and Winans and Hinckley and Mason and Brooks
and Matthias Baldwin and William Norris; the last two both of
Philadelphia. Norris, after some interesting smaller engines, built the

George Washington in 1835. This engine was not one whit less than a
triumph. It ascended the steep plane of the Columbia Railroad in
Philadelphia, a grade of 7½ per cent, carrying two passenger cars in which
were seated 53 persons. It came to a stop on that grade and started up again
by its own efforts. After reaching the summit, the engine was turned around
and came down, stopping once in its descent.
That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane,
and the performance of the George Washington has not been attempted in
all these years save in the case of Latrobe’s temporary line at Kingwood
Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment,
pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine
overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in
England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American
locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170
others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony.
William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for
the growing nation across the Atlantic.
Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the
beginning of his life. He lived long enough to lay the foundation of one of
the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm that
has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and kept it
alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin’s first locomotive was built in
1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad; and that
it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed twenty
years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built two years
later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg Company. After
that his works were regularly established, their head to give his patience and
untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive. The history of Baldwin
locomotives is, in an important sense, the history of the industry in the
United States.
It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for
much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger
locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the
Governor Paine for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in 1848,
and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a pair of

driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back of the
fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin must have
given full value, for it is related that the engine could be started from a state
of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The Pennsylvania Railroad
ordered three of the same sort, and one of these once hauled a special train
carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty miles an hour. In weight, the
locomotive was steadily increasing. In the beginning, these engines
weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late forties engines of twenty-
five tons each were being built for the Reading Road, and these were
regarded as monsters.
Year by year the locomotive was being perfected in all its details. The cab
made its appearance and was first opposed by the engineers, who imagined
that they would be badly penned in, in case of accident. The Erie
contributed the bell-rope signal from the train; we have already heard of
that first whistle on the locomotive of the Sandusky and Mad River
Railroad. The Boston & Worcester devised the headlight, so that time might
be saved by handling freight at night. More important than these were the
experiments by Ross Winans and by S. M. Felton that led to the substitution
of coal for wood as a fuel, and the development by Rogers at his Paterson
works of the link device, so necessary in stopping, starting, and reversing
the locomotive.
Gradually the size of the locomotive increased to 28 and 30 tons in the late
fifties. Finally James Milholland, engineer of machinery for the
Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, built in 1863 a pusher engine for coal
trains that weighed something over 50 tons. When folk saw that engine they
almost gasped, and wondered what the railroads were coming to. But the
wiser men kept silent. They knew that as long as bridges and roadbeds and
fine steel rails were increased in strength, the limit of size of the locomotive
had not been reached. The greater grip the locomotive has upon the rail, the
greater its pulling power, the greater its efficiency. Sheer weight, and weight
alone, gives that grip. It certainly takes a weight of seven tons to give a grip
of one ton upon a dry rail; in the case of wet rails this ratio becomes ten to
one.
Then wonder not that the locomotive steadily increased in size, that the
Moguls with six driving-wheels, and the Consolidations with eight, came

into vogue a few years after the close of the war, and that these kept
increasing in weight all the while. Height and width were and still are
rigidly limited by the clearance of the line. The locomotive must stand no
more than fourteen or sixteen feet high and from nine to eleven feet wide;
in length the problem only meets the genius of the designer.
But it is altogether possible that the limit of the size of the locomotive
would have been reached long ago if it had not been for the coming of the
air-brake. This most important assurance of the safety of the railroad
passenger came into its being in 1869, when George Westinghouse, its
inventor, was permitted to try it on a Panhandle train. From the beginning
of railroads the necessity for brakes was apparent, and in 1833 Robert
Stephenson patented a steam brake for the driving-wheels. That same brake,
with compressed air substituted for steam, is essentially the Westinghouse
device of to-day. But Westinghouse made the air do the work of steam.
After he had developed the idea he offered it to leading Eastern railroads,
but they one and all declined it.
Finally, he was permitted to place it on a Panhandle train, full assurance
having been given to the railroad officials that he would be personally
responsible for any injury done to their equipment. Four cars and an engine
were fitted with the new device and the train started forth from Pittsburgh to
Steubenville. On the way its progress was halted by a farm wagon which
was caught in the rail at a highway crossing. The engineer whistled for the
handbrakes in the good old-fashioned way but he knew that he was too late.
Then he thought of the air-brake. He had little faith in the contraption, but
he gave its handle a wrench and the train stopped ten feet from the wagon.
Several lives were saved and the air-brake was proven. From that day forth
it was simply a question of developing the device to its fullest possibility,
and Mr. Westinghouse has proved himself able to do that very thing.
The air-brake was a fact. Steel had come into use for axles, driving-wheel
tires, frames, and every other vital or bearing part of the locomotive; and
the designers were again increasing its size. They passed the Consolidation
and built the Mastodon. These were freighters—each with ten drivers—
drivers with tremendous gripping force. They went through what M. N.
Forney has called a “period of adolescence in railroad progress,” and in that
period they experimented with huge driving-wheels only to discard them

once again. Then they built bigger engines than even the Mastodon; the
Decapod, with twelve driving-wheels; the El Gobernador which was built
by the Southern Pacific at its Sacramento shops in 1884, weighing, with
engine and tender fully equipped, 113 tons.
Still the locomotive grows and its progenitors talk of the 500-ton machine.
They have recently built the Mallet articulated compound, which because of
its very great weight has splendid gripping force and is especially adapted
for pushing-service on heavy grades. The Baltimore & Ohio, the Erie, the
New York Central, the Great Northern, and the Santa Fe have already
become committed to this type of engine. The American locomotive
Company has just completed for the Delaware & Hudson several Mallet
articulated compounds that are among the most powerful locomotives yet
constructed. They were designed for pusher service, on heavy grades, north
from Carbondale on the main line of the D. & H., which average from .81
to 1.36 per cent. Up to recently the heavy northbound coal traffic up these
grades has been handled by the use of two heavy pusher engines. A single
one of the new Mallets will do the work of the two pushers, and therein lies
the economy in their use.
These new giants are, in operation, two 8-wheel engines, with individual
cylinders, steam chests and supplies from a single boiler and fire-box. The
gripping power of 16 driving-wheels under the enormous weight of 223
tons can be imagined; the designers estimate it at the high figure of forty-
three tons. The exceptional length of these monster engines—a fraction
over ninety feet—is carried around the curves of mountainous lines by an
ingenious joint in their solid steel frames. This then is only the latest of
American engines; but not quite the biggest, for the Topeka shops of the
Santa Fe Railroad claim that honor with their new Mallets, each 121 feet
long and weighing complete 810,000 pounds. The 500-ton locomotive does
not seem so very far away when one comes to consider the Santa Fe giants.
These engines, which are operated in pushing freights over the heavy
grades in the Southwest, were built from two of the Santa Fe’s heaviest
freight engines. They operate with equal facility in either direction as there
is not a turntable in the land which would come anywhere near
accommodating them.

Larger Image

One of the “diamond-stack” locomotives used on the Pennsylvania
Railroad in the early seventies
Prairie type passenger locomotive of the Lake Shore
Pacific type passenger locomotive of the New York Central
Atlantic type passenger locomotive, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad
at its Altoona Shops

Larger Image

One of the great Mallet pushing engines of the Delaware & Hudson
Company
A ten-wheeled switching locomotive of the Lake Shore
Suburban passenger locomotive of the New York Central
Consolidation freight locomotive of the Pennsylvania

In recent years, the rather graceful custom of giving names to the
classification of locomotives has been extended to the passenger motive-
power. In 1895, the Baldwins created the Atlantic type of four-driver
locomotive for high-speed service both on the Atlantic Coast Line and on

the Atlantic City Railroad, from Camden to the ocean—and the name has
stuck. The Brooks plant of the American Locomotive Company at Dunkirk
similarly developed the Pacific type for passenger locomotives with six
drivers instead of four. The Prairie type was appropriately enough
sponsored by the Burlington system. It is like the Pacific type save that the
forward or lead truck (the Englishman would blandly call it the “bogey”)
has but two instead of the conventional four wheels.
Your locomotive-builder is apt to be more systematic about these types of
engine, and he falls back on what is generally known as Whyte’s
classification. The basis of this simple system is in the number of wheels of
the engine itself. Each type is described by a series of three numbers, the
first of these being the number of wheels in front of the drivers, the second
the number of drivers, and the third the number of wheels to the rear of
these. The eight-wheel American type, the simplest for illustration here,
would thus be described as “4-4-0.”
The trailer, which is described by the third number in this series, is a recent
addition to the locomotive family in this country. It came from the constant
lengthening of the fire-box, due to the necessity of providing greater steam-
power for engines of increasing weight and cylinder capacity. When the
fire-box began to overhang too far, the trailer-wheels were introduced, and a
device was affixed to the locomotive by which they might receive its weight
for hill-climbing purposes. This last device has not proved particularly
successful. But the trailer itself has become a fixed device in locomotive
construction. When the third figure in Whyte’s classification is a cypher it
simply means that there are no trailers. Similarly the first figure a cypher,
indicates the absence of a forward truck or even wheels, which is common
in some forms of switch-engines, where the weight is entirely concentrated
on the drivers for better gripping power upon the rail.
Such, in brief, is the development of the locomotive. It has been
development rather than change, for while some designers have fretted
about whether the engine’s cab should be in the middle of the boiler or at its
end and others have recently developed the Walsheart gears upon the
outside of the engine frame, where it is of easier access than the old-style
links, the general design of the iron-horse remains practically the same as
that given it by our grand-daddies. They planned carefully and they planned

for the long years. The essential features of their designs have not been
questioned. It has simply been a problem of growth.

From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. If you would
better understand the iron horse, find your way to any of the great plants in
which he is being built. Begin at the beginning in a factory, which seems,
with dozens of shops and great yards, to be almost a miniature city. Begin at
the draughting-rooms where each locomotive is given a whole ledger page
—sometimes two or three—for specifications. From those specifications,
the young draughtsmen take their instructions. They work out their charts
and elevations, their detailed plans; and the ink is hardly dry upon their
drawings before they are being whisked away to the blueprint rooms. The
blueprints are still damp, when in turn they are hurried to the different
construction shops of the plant.
You see these shops, one by one, in care of an expert guide. You see the
wooden patterns going to the blast furnaces at the foundries and to the
sullen tappings of the trip-hammers. You leave the blacksmiths and stand
for a moment—not long—under the terrific din of the boiler-makers. The
boiler, the great trunk of the locomotive, is built of steel plate—plate that is
the very pride of the rolling-mills. In some foreign lands, copper fire-boxes
are demanded; but the real American locomotive has these also of steel.
The steel plates are rolled to form the boiler itself, flanged by angle-workers
into the square fire-box. Finally the boiler and the fire-box are riveted
together, section by section—made as fast by steel thread as man’s
ingenuity can make them. Together they form a unit. Another unit is being
formed in an adjacent shop, the solidly welded steel frame in which the
boiler shall yet set, and to which truck and drivers will be firmly fastened.
Forward on this frame will sit the cylinders; in another corner of this shop
they are being made ready. Cast-iron still remains the best material for the
cylinders and the steam-chests. These are cast in one piece and the rule
holds good where there are two cylinders, as in the case of the compounds.
The cylinders, and steam-chest for one side and half the “saddle” of the
locomotive, upon which the forward end of the boiler rests, are nowadays

generally made in a single casting. After that it is a simple enough matter to
smooth down the outer surface, bore the cylinders to perfect surfacing, and
line the steam-chests with a bushing that can be readily removed once it is
worn out.
The driving-wheels are an important detail of the construction of the
locomotive. They are made in rough castings—of steel for fast passenger
engines, and of iron for other forms of motive power—and are then made
true in giant lathes. The steel tires are shrunk on the wheels, a work of
astounding nicety; and in turn the wheels themselves are heated and shrunk
upon the axles—of the best steel that man can forge. To place these wheels
upon the axles is hair-line work. A 9-inch hub receives an axle just 8.973
inches—no more, no less—in diameter. It is keyed and then under the slight
expansion of a gentle heat it is rammed upon the axle-end. It goes on to
stay, and stay it must.
From all these shops, a busy industrial railroad brings the different parts to
the great and busy hall of the erecting-shop, a vast place of vast distances
and filled always with the noisy clatter of great industry. Here the different
parts, which have been carefully built by skilled artisans, are assembled into
the finished whole. The cylinders and saddle-halves are placed and firmly
riveted together. Into the collar of that saddle a giant overhead crane
carefully sets the boiler and the fire-box. They are quickly riveted to the
upper flange of the saddle: the locomotive is coming into a semblance of
itself.
The cab is fastened into position; then the boiler-makers descend upon the
unfinished engine and place the 200 or more flue-tubes that run from fire-
box to smoke-box, just underneath the stack. They make every tube and
joint fast—put into the growing locomotive all the energy and all the skill
of good workmanship. When they are gone the giant crane again comes
noiselessly down along the ceiling. It reaches down, grasps the engine-
trunk, and swings it high aloft.
Down there, resting on real railroad tracks, are the driving-wheels and the
lead truck, carefully spaced in anticipation. The crane, lifting the fifty tons
of boiler and frame with no apparent effort whatsoever, places its load
squarely upon the wheels that are to carry it. Again the mechanics are busy;

the engine is growing into a solid unit. Upon their heels follow testers, men
who must look for steam or water leaks. They work under a test of air,
carrying lighted candles into every nook and cranny of the giant. If the
candle flutters, air is escaping, and the leak must be found.
Finally comes the report “O. K.” from the testing crew. The stacks, the
steam and sand domes, and the air-brakes are being made fast. The engine is
hurried off to the paint-shop. There it may find its companion in life, the
humble useful tender already awaiting it. It came direct from the tender
shop; for the appendage of the locomotive is no longer a specially rigged
flat-car but a solid steel plate construction built to carry some 9,000 gallons
of water and about 16 tons of coal. Only a little time ago, a New Yorker,
scion of a wealthy and famous family of railroaders, proved himself worth
his oats by designing a tender of great practicability and of great economy
of construction.
When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and refulgent
—brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it must be partly
dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the road which has
purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled through a
freight train—never coupled together—in charge of an inspector from the
locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never leave his
charges until they have been receipted for. After that the locomotive begins
to bend to the work for which he was created. Unless he is of a very unusual
sort or was built for some very especial purpose, he soon loses his identity.
The days are gone when locomotives were christened after the fashion of
ships. There are too many of them. Each is given the cold informality of a
number, marshalled for service in a mighty company.
Cars came as corollary to the locomotive. In the beginning the passenger
coaches were nothing more or less than old-time stage-coaches which had
been set upon wheels so flanged as to enable them to stay upon the rail. So
it was that the first cars built for the railroad followed stage-coach models.
It was a practical necessity from the first to draw more than one small coach
at a time, so the couplings and the bumper devices came as a matter of
development. Then came the day when an aspiring inventor grouped several
stage-coaches together on a single rigid frame and he had really developed

a form of railroad coach—a form which our English and continental cousins
still cling fondly to, in despite of its most apparent disadvantages.
Four wheels quickly gave way to eight. In the early thirties, Ross Winans
developed a double-truck car for use on the Baltimore & Ohio. Compared
with anything that had gone before it was certainly a pretentious vehicle. It
was thirty feet in length, four-wheel trucks being attached at the ends, very
much after the present fashion. There were seats on the flat roof, which
were reached by a ladder in the corner, and the car itself was divided into
three compartments. A little later Winans tore out the cross partitions in the
car and introduced the end doors and the centre aisle, thus establishing the
American passenger coach of to-day. The Baltimore & Ohio manufactured
a number of these coaches at its famous Mount Clare shops. They were
known for years as the “Washington cars,” probably because they were the
first run on the Washington branch.
If Winans had been able to establish his patent rights to the double-truck car
he might have reaped a fortune from its royalties alone. But when he went
to assert his right as an inventor, it was discovered that the idea was not
absolutely new. Gridley Bryant, in his old Quincy Granite Railroad, just
south of Boston, had used the device in crude form. The four-wheeled flat
cars which he had employed in bringing stone from the quarries down to the
dock were not long enough for granite slabs. He had met that emergency by
fastening two of them together with coupling-rings, and thus in a way had
created the eight-wheel car. So Winans lost his patent although credit is
given him for having really developed the passenger car of to-day.
The form, once set, came quickly into vogue. In a few of the Southern
States, old-fashioned gentlemen followed the early English fashion of
having their private carriages attached to flat freight-cars whenever they
went on railroad trips, but even this was a passing fad. At that time
carriages were no novelty, and railroad cars were. They were stuffy little
affairs compared with the coaches of to-day, miserably lighted and heated
and ventilated, but Americans were very proud of them. The fashion that
made early locomotives gay with color, with brass and burnished metals of
other sorts, found full scope upon the passenger cars, both inside and out.
They were pannelled and striped, ornamented and lettered to the limit of the
skill of gifted painters. A coach, named the Morris Run, on the old Tioga

Railroad, which began running south from Elmira about 1840, was
decorated in red and green and yellow and blue and gilt and several other
colors. It would have made a modern circus band wagon inconspicuous. But
the day came when the brass stars and the red stack-bands began to
disappear with the names from the locomotives and in that day the railroad
cars became subdued in colorings. Some of the gay frescoes of the interiors,
typical of the taste of an earlier day, were in use within the present
generation.
While the “Washington cars” set a type, there was much yet to be
accomplished in the development both of the passenger coach and of the
freight car, and this much was chiefly in the line of the development of
safety devices. The old-time passenger rode in a very decent fear of his life.
Sometimes a loosened end of one of the “strap rails” would come plunging
up through the flimsy floor of the coach and impale some unfortunate
passenger upon its end against the ceiling; other times the cars would go
rolling off the banks and crashing into kindling-wood against one another.
They were lightly built contrivances, incapable of standing any sort of
shock or collision.
But improvements came one by one—better devices for coupling them
together, culminating in the modern automatic “jaw coupler,” better
framing, better platforms, better trucks, improved hand-brakes; and after
them the now universal air-brakes made life safer both for the traveller and
the railroad employee. Finally came the steel-end vestibule; and where cars
have been equipped with this very comfortable device, telescoping in
collision, a very common and disastrous accident in which one car-shell
enveloped another, has been rendered impossible.
The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An
early railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting
on an inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave,
surmounted by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: “Sacred to the
memory of a man who stood upon a platform.” The railroad used every
method to keep its passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they
began to encourage it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse
between the cars.

The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor
in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use necessitated
passengers going the length of the train, a movement which, in itself, was
facilitated by the main design of American cars, as differentiated from those
of English railroads. When the English roads began the universal use of
dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan of their car construction and
produce what are still known across the Atlantic as “corridor trains.”
To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman, the sleeping-car
man, set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had
been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut,
rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to
facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after three
or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform enclosure of
folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his vestibule that did
more than merely protect passengers from the stress of weather; these, of
course, then served as effective anti-telescoping devices. The Pennsylvania
Railroad began the use of these vestibules in 1886 and they were soon
universally adopted by American railroads on their fast through trains.
After that a better vestibule was devised by Col. W. D. Mann, one that
extended the full width of the car. In fact the platform of the car had
practically ceased to exist, the structure being full-framed to include its
entrances at both ends.
After the vestibule came the steel car, introduced within the past ten years
for freight service, and within the past five or six for passenger equipment.
It has everything to commend it, save a slightly increased original cost,
which is more than compensated by economy of maintenance, to say
nothing of the intangible but certain raised factor of safety. It is to become
universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American railroads
almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to the scrap-
heap.
Of the forms and varieties of railroad passenger coaches there are many,
and these will be described when we come to consider in a later chapter the
luxury of modern railroad travel. But the variety of passenger equipment
quite pales before that of the freight service. Flat-cars, coal-cars, box-cars,

grain-cars, live-stock cars—the list runs on into catalogue form. There are
refrigerator cars that are kept filled with salt and ice or ice alone, precooled
cars that are merely kept air-tight, and ventilator cars employing a distinct
reverse of that method; and up in northern climates there are heater-cars
which are kept warm by lamps or by stoves and which are used for the
transportation of fresh fruit and vegetables in winter just as the refrigerator-
cars and the precooled cars are used for that same purpose in summer.
Almost all the safety devices that have been added to the running-gear of
the passenger equipment have been added to the freight equipment also, to
the great safety and peace of mind of the railroad employee. The car itself
remains the simple essential of the very beginnings of the railroad. Its
change has been a change in size, in weight, and in strength.
The first freight cars of the very old railroad at Mauch Chunk weighed
1,600 pounds each, and were permitted to carry a weight or “burden” of
only 3,200 pounds. When the Boston & Albany first began using freight
cars 30 feet long, it was so confused that it gave each end of the car a
separate number for convenience in billing and designating consignments.
Nowadays 40 tons is the right load for an efficient car, although they go as
high as 55 and 60 tons’ capacity; the car itself may weigh approximately
half that figure.
Freight cars by hundreds of thousands go bumping all over the different
railroads of the land, and all the while they are getting bumped and broken
in accidents—large and small. In such cases they are hauled to the nearest
shop of the railroad upon which they are travelling and there repaired at the
cost of the road that owns them. In earlier days, the job of master mechanic
was no sinecure, for each road built its cars upon its own plans and no two
of these plans were alike. A simple broken part necessitated the
manufacture of a new part. It was a matter of great confusion and expensive
to every line.
The organization of the Master Car Builders, in 1867, solved that problem.
This organization, through committee, made first the freight car standard
and then the passenger standard. Axles, bolts, king-pins—every one of the
intricate car-parts—were brought to standard and numbered sizes. After that
all that a master mechanic had to do was to keep an assortment of standard

car parts in his store-room, and he could make reasonable repairs to any car
that travelled rails. The standardization has gone steadily forward year by
year; it has included a variety of things, even such details as systematic
numbering and lettering of cars. It is one of the evidences of the constant
bettering of the American railroad, the steady effort to bring it to an
economical and scientific basis.
Recently some of the railroads have made intelligent experiments, seeking
to devise a vehicle that should be both locomotive and car, and that should
be especially adapted for small side-lines, where traffic runs exceedingly
light. Some success has been found in the use of a passenger coach, into
which a gasolene engine has been introduced, and several of these cars are
in regular use in the West. Two or three of them have been employed for
three or four years on Union Pacific branches in and around Denver. They
render a possible solution for one railroad problem—the problem of
providing sufficient service for some branch where local traffic is slight.
The gasolene car requires but two men, as against a minimum crew of five
men for even the smallest steam passenger train. It can be quickly handled,
will make many successive stops readily, and generally provides an
efficient addition to the regular passenger equipment. A few years ago it
would have given the standard steam railroads an excellent weapon against
the constant encroachments of paralleling electric roads through their good
passenger traffic districts; even to-day it offers a possible solution of the
difficult problem of the very small branch side-lines.

CHAPTER IX

REBUILDING A RAILROAD
Reconstruction Necessary in Many Cases—
Old Grades too Heavy—Curves
Straightened—Tunnels Avoided—
These Improvements Required
Especially by Freight Lines.

T O the operating heads of the great railroad systems, rebuilding a line is
to-day a far more important problem than the building of new routes.
The country has grown—grown in wealth, among other things. The causes
that demanded the very greatest economy in the building of early railroad
lines no longer exist. The hill that the early engineer carefully rounded with
his line is now pierced without a second thought. Grades that were once
deemed slight are now classed as impossible. The almost infinite
development in the operation of the railroad has seen the grade or the curve,
not as a slight matter, but as a matter which, however slight in a single
instance, becomes in the course of constant operation a heavy operating
expense. To-day the operating folk of the big railroads are counting the
pennies where they countlessly multiply in these fashions; it is one of the
greatest factors in the grinding operation competition between the great
railroad systems of the country.
It is all quite as it should be. The early builders did the best that they might
do with the opportunities that were theirs. They got the railroad through. It
developed wealth for itself, as well as for the territory it served; and with
that wealth it is enabled in these piping days of peace and plenty to correct
the alignment errors of the early builders. Moreover, there are frequent
cases where the steady increase of traffic has rendered it necessary for a
railroad to parallel its trunks with new lines, quite aside from the
consideration of grade and curve.

As far back as the early fifties this great work of rebuilding the trunk-line
railroads was begun. Certain serious errors in the original alignment of the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad between Baltimore and the Potomac River were
corrected, even though at a considerable expense. As time went on, other
railroads continued this correction work. It is still being prosecuted east and
west of the Mississippi. Ten million dollars, fifty million dollars, looks like
a lot of money to the stockholders of any company, when their president
tells them that this is to be the cost of this new relief line, this
reconstruction, that cut-off; but what is $1,000,000 when it is going to save
more than $100,000 a year in the operation of your railroad? It is the big
sight of the big situation that the railroads make nowadays at this
reconstruction work.
Mr. Harriman, with his transcontinentals from the Mississippi watersheds
west, was almost the pioneer in this work of wholesale reconstruction. The
wholesale operating benefits that have resulted from it in the case of his
group of Pacifics have been largely responsible for his preëminence in the
railroad world. And yet, once his method was tried, it all seemed simpler
than A, B, C.
Take the case of the Lucin cut-off on his Southern Pacific. When the Union
Pacific was being pushed across the plains and threaded over the Rockies
and the Sierras, the Great Salt Lake of Utah lay directly in its path. The
railroad did the obvious thing and carefully made a detour around the lake.
When Mr. Harriman took over the Union Pacific, then in a state of physical
decadence, and linked it with his Southern Pacific, and surveyed the
situation carefully, he decreed that the Great Salt Lake should no longer
cause a trunk-line railroad to double in its path. He caused a line to be
surveyed direct across the marshy lake from Ogden to Lucin and when that
was done he had a line—on paper—103 miles long as against 147 miles by
the old line. The engineer hesitated, but Harriman urged and they
courageously began the construction of miles and miles of embankment and
of trestle. Then new difficulties arose. Sink-holes developed. In a few
minutes structures that had been the work of long months silently
disappeared. The engineers in charge came to Harriman.
“It is not possible,” they told him.

“You must carry it through whether it is possible or not,” Harriman replied.
Eventually they carried it through.

When it was done, the Union Pacific had not only shortened its
transcontinental line 44 miles, but it had eliminated more than 1,500 feet of
heavy grade and 3,919 degrees of curvature. An operating economy of
between $900,000 and $1,000,000 a year had been effected and the
stockholders of the company had a good investment for the $10,000,000
that the Lucin cut-off had cost them.
Nor was that all on the Union Pacific. On other sections of its main line
similar reconstruction work has added to the economy of operation by
millions of dollars each year. For twenty miles west from Omaha, where the
old historic transcontinental formerly dipped south to avoid a series of
undulating hills, the new Lane cut-off cuts squarely across them—20 miles
of deep cuts and heavy fills—“heavy railroad,” as the engineers like to put
it. And again, where the old line twisted and wound itself over the Black
Hills, and wobbled unsteadily through Wyoming, the reconstruction
engineers pressed their work.

Where Harriman stretched the Southern Pacific in a
straight line across the Great Salt Lake

Line revision on the New York Central—tunnelling through the bases
of these
jutting peaks along the Hudson River does away with sharp and
dangerous curves

Impressive grade revision on the Union Pacific in the Black Hills of
Wyoming.
The discarded line may be seen at the right

It is not generally understood that the summit of the Union Pacific is in the
Black Hills, which are the first foothill range of the Rockies, rather than in
the mountain crest beyond. The Black Hills have always been a baffling
proposition, with their short, steep slopes. The engineers wrinkled their
brows at the thought of correcting the old line through there, but Harriman
simply said that they must, that the board—which meant E. H. Harriman
himself—had directed that 247 feet be cut from the road’s crest there; and
247 feet, almost to the inch, was cut. It took giant fills and embankments
and an army of men but the grades were brought to a minimum for a Rocky
Mountain stretch. Wooden trestles, old and affording a constant fire-risk,
were swallowed up in embankments; a single slice through a hill-top, a
quarter of a mile long and eighty feet deep, did its part in reducing the
grades; antiquated cars disappeared before equipment of the modern class;
dilapidated shanties were supplanted by fine, permanent railroad stations.

The new Union Pacific is a monument to the reconstruction engineer—and
to E. H. Harriman.
The Canadian Pacific Railway, while traversing but one small northeastern
corner of the United States, is essentially an American railroad, both in
equipment and in operation. It forms an important half of that all-British
Red Line encircling the globe, of which any Englishman is so very proud.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway was completing its last link in this
unbroken line of rails from St. John, N. B., and Montreal, to Vancouver, the
question of grades was indeed a secondary one. The vital thing was to cut
the line through, and to that end great sacrifices of grade efficiency were
made. So that when the line was through, and the first Imperial Limited was
making its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific over a single railroad
system, it was indeed a line with structural defects. At one point—the
famous Big Hill, near Field, Alta.—in order to overcome the steep Rocky
Mountain climbs, it was necessary to use from four to six engines for
comparatively light freight and passenger trains. And at that, it was difficult
to attain a speed of more than four or five miles an hour.
Within the last three years, this fearful grade has been corrected by the very
first spiral tunnels ever built upon the American continent. Spiral tunnel
construction of this kind is not new. It has been used with remarkable
success by the railroads of Continental Europe, in piercing the High-Alpine
boundaries between France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Coming from the east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train first enters
the spiral tunnel—they call it the “corkscrew” out in Alberta—under
Cathedral Mountain. This first bore is some 3,200 feet in length. Emerging
from it, the train runs back east across the Kicking Horse River, then enters
the eastern spiral tunnel, and after describing an elliptic curve, emerges, and
again crosses the Kicking Horse westward. This whole thing is a perfect
maze—the railroad doubling back upon itself twice, tunnelling under two
mountains, and crossing the river twice in order to cut down the grade. The
work cost $1,500,000. The mere cost of the explosives came to over
$250,000. It was one of the really great tunnel jobs of the world. Yet despite
the complicated work caused by the spiral shape of the tunnels, they met
exactly. The worth of the thing to the Canadian Pacific is shown in the fact
that those same trains that formerly required four to six engines, are now

handled easily over this Big-Hill grade with but two engines, and at a speed
of about twenty-five miles an hour.
Other railroads by the dozen, whose lines traverse mountainous or even
hilly country, are engaged in this proposition of lowering their grades. F. D.
Underwood, president of the Erie, and known as one of the ablest operating
heads in this country, has been engaged in cutting off some of the heavy
hill-climbs on that old-time route from the seaboard to the lakes.
Underwood has already seen Erie’s hopes of success in developing the
property as essentially a freighter and for the immediate improvement of
that portion of its facilities he has built three new relief lines, a small stretch
near Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and then through the upper
Genesee Valley, the third and most important eastward from a point near
Port Jervis and piercing the summit of the Shawangunk Mountains.
The line through the Genesee Valley extends from Hunts, on the Buffalo
division, about 20 miles west of Hornell, to Hinsdale on the main line, and
is 33 miles long. It cuts off a heavy grade between Hornell and Hinsdale on
the main line—a little over one per cent—for both east-bound and west-
bound freight. At that particular point, Erie’s west-bound freight
approximates 75 per cent of the east-bound, and so the new line recognizes
that fact by establishing the west-bound maximum grade at 3-10 of one per
cent, as against a maximum of 2-10 of one per cent in the other direction.
Brought to a plain understanding, a single locomotive has no difficulty in
handling 80 cars, each bearing 40 tons of coal, over this new low-grade
line. To take one-half that load over the old main line required a pusher.
On the east end of the line, where Erie’s engineers built their greatest low-
grade cut-off, the coal rolls down to the seaboard in such quantities as to
make the west-bound tonnage only a quarter of the east-bound; so the
reconstruction engineers were satisfied with a maximum west-bound grade
at 6-10 of one per cent as against the maximum of 2-10 east-bound, in the
direction of the heavy traffic. The cut-off, which is double-tracked and is
42½ miles long, increases the distance from New York to Chicago 8 miles;
but this is not an essential fact, for, like the Genesee Valley Road it is built
exclusively for freight service, and not only almost triples the hauling
capacity of a locomotive but actually permits of faster running time for the
freight trains between Jersey City and Port Jervis. To build the cut-off

required a really great expenditure, for like all these new lines it was “heavy
work,” embracing a tunnel nearly a mile long under the crest of the
Shawangunk Ridge, and a steel trestle over the Moodna Valley, 3,200 feet
in length and 190 feet high. Still President Underwood can contemplate his
locomotives hauling three times their old loads over it. The economy of
such a proposition becomes apparent upon the face of it.
The Baltimore & Ohio, the Southern, and the Norfolk & Western have
recently lowered their grades and straightened their curves in similar
fashion; the Lehigh Valley, by the erection of a great new bridge at
Towanda, Pa., has taken a bad link out of its main line; the Chicago &
Alton, when the engineers told it that it must abandon miles upon miles of
its main line (for long years its pride) and build anew, told those engineers
to go ahead. Stretch by stretch the old road was revamped to meet in every
way modern conditions. A steel bridge across the Missouri, which was the
first steel bridge built in America, and which cost $500,000, was sent to the
scrap-heap while the old-timers groaned. “That which yesterday was a
railroad marvel becomes a curiosity to-morrow,” observes Frank H.
Spearman, in speaking of this very thing.
The rebuilding of the Chicago & Alton was a clean-cut affair. The 70-pound
rails were torn from the main line and sent to sidings and branch lines in
favor of the 80-pound rails; for while men were tearing at the tracks, the
shops were working overtime; 55-ton freight engines that could haul 30 cars
were to give way to 165-ton motive power, capable of picking up and
carrying a hundred cars with ease. That was why the old bridge had to go in
favor of one which cost an even million dollars. And when the Alton built
heavy new bridges at dozens of other points besides the Missouri, it built
them after the new fashion, with solid rock ballast floor, affording
additional comfort and safety to its patrons.
In a flat State like Illinois there were no very serious grade defects to be
corrected, but through the gentle undulations of rolling country the line
twisted and turned like a lazy brook. The rebuilders stopped that. When
they were done there was a single section of 40 miles, straight as the arrow
flies, and many tangents of from 15 to 29 miles. In some cases when the
trains were transferred to the completed line, the old, spindly, wobbly affair
could be seen for miles in roadbed, to the one side or the other of the new.

In some cases, this abandoned right-of-way was sold to interurban electric
railroads; in one particular case one of the abandoned bridges was included
in the sale.

The Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western is one of the old time Eastern
Roads that have waxed immensely prosperous with the years. Originally
built as an anthracite coal carrier from the Eastern Pennsylvania Mountains
to the seaboard, it has developed into a through freight and passenger
carrier of importance. The old-time engineer knew how to plan good
railroads; the Pennsylvania to-day is building its new low-grade freight line
on the very surveys made by its pioneer surveyors three-quarters of a
century ago; but, as we have already intimated, those railroads were
financially weak. Early annual reports of the Pennsylvania tell how its stock
was peddled in Philadelphia from house to house—up one street and down
another—and how sometimes two houses joined together to buy a single
share. Money was not plentiful in the middle of the last century.
So the Lackawanna engineers were compelled to build their road in semi-
mountainous districts, along the lines of least resistance, rather than by the
most direct routes. As it came east from Scranton over the Pocono
Mountains it found its way in a roundabout course to the middle of
Northern New Jersey. The road wound south and then wound north again,
its grades were steep, some of its curves were short, and it dipped through
two tunnels—one at Oxford Furnace, the other at Manunka Chunk.
To iron out those time-taking dips, the sharp curves, the grades, and the
tunnel, the Lackawanna cut-off—the “heaviest” bit of railroad in the world
—was begun three years ago. A new route 28½ miles long was surveyed
diagonally across from Port Morris on the main line in New Jersey to the
main line again at the Delaware Water Gap. Despite the fact that it must
cross the watersheds diagonally—the watersheds formed by deep valleys
and high rocky ridges—the line as surveyed and built is only three miles
longer than an absolute air-line. It shortens the Lackawanna’s main stem
from New York to Buffalo—already the shortest route between these two

cities—by 15 miles, and brings that busy lake port a trifle within 400 miles
from the seaboard.
To cross those watersheds at a sharp diagonal meant “heavy work”; and the
engineers, to run their straight-cut, low-grade line, found that they would
have to make tremendous cuts and fills—these last alone totalling
14,600,00 cubic yards. The Lackawanna’s engineers will give you a faint
idea of the stupendous size of these embankments. To build them up of
stone and earth at the rate of a cartload a minute for each working-day of
the year would require 81 years for the job. To do it in less than three years
has meant the employment of whole trains of dump-cars, the purchase of
600-acre farms for single borrow-pits, the energy and administration of real
engineers.
There have been cuts through solid rock, 65 bridges and culverts to be
wrought of concrete, a single embankment (at the Pequest River) three
miles in length, 110 feet high, and 300 feet wide at its base. The traveller
who rides over the completed double-track road will have but a faint idea of
the human labor and the human energy that have gone to construct it.

The great railroad that traverses the State of Pennsylvania is another
monument to the engineer. The Pennsylvania Railroad was no wobbly affair
at any time. Its grades and curves, considering the character of the country
through which its trunk rests, are not excessive. It has been a good standard
railroad for a good many years past. But in 1902, the Pennsylvania found
that its troubles rested in the volume of traffic that was being offered it.
Over its middle division from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh it was handling as
much tonnage as J. J. Hill’s entire Great Northern system. The heavy
tonnage business began to clog the road’s fast passenger traffic (its especial
pride) and the fast freight traffic (the mainstay of its shippers), and appeal
was made to the reconstruction engineers.
It was no slight appeal at that. Pittsburgh, handling 400,000 freight cars a
month, was clogged, congested with such streams as had never before tried
to crowd through that narrow neck of the Pennsylvania’s bottle and the

orders that went forth for relief were emphatic. Vice-presidents, general
managers, superintendents and general superintendents, and engineers of
every sort crowded into the president’s office in Broad Street Station, and
out of that conference the plans for an exclusively low-grade freight line
from New York to Pittsburgh and for the traffic relief of Pittsburgh itself
were born.
Every large city has become, in a sense, a bottle-neck for the important
railroads that pierce it. In some cases like Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas
City or Indianapolis, the situation has been solved by the creation of belt-
line freight railroads partly or entirely encircling the town. At Buffalo, the
New York Central lines have built a connecting line to enable through
traffic to escape the congestion of city yards and terminals, while at New
Haven, the road of the same name has recently spent several million dollars
in enlarging its narrow throat in the middle of the town.
But nowhere else did the situation approach that at Pittsburgh. Through the
Pennsylvania’s passenger station there poured not only an abnormally
heavy passenger traffic, owing to a heavy suburban service, but every
pound of freight bound between the parent company and its two great
subsidiaries, the Panhandle and the Fort Wayne. There were further
complications right at the station, owing to the proximity of two of the very
worst grade-crossings in America, where Penn and Liberty Avenues swept
their busy tides of city traffic all day long over the Fort Wayne’s main line
tracks. It was a problem that called for the best in engineering skill—and
received it.
The Pennsylvania dug deep into its pocket-book and solved the problem
magnificently. It began by going back to the vicinity of its great Pitcairn
freight-yards at the east of the city, and from them building two connecting
laterals (the one to the south and across the Monongahela River to connect
with the Panhandle tracks, the other to the north—known as the Brilliant
cut-off) across the Alleghany and connecting with the tracks of the West
Penn Railroad, which in turn connected with those of the Fort Wayne in the
one-time city of Allegheny. That sounds simple, but it was in reality a
fearfully expensive undertaking. The mile of Brilliant cut-off, “heavy work”
every inch of it, cost $5,500,000, and is to-day the most expensive mile of
railroad track in the world.

But the gripping hand was off the traffic throat of Pittsburgh and
commercial Pittsburgh breathed more easily once again. The Union Station
and its approach tracks were restored to passenger uses; and in the course of
things the Pennsylvania tore down the old station, built a new one, and
wiped out the two wicked city crossings, as with the stroke of an Aladdin’s
hand.
So much for Pittsburgh. Now consider the great new freight line leading to
the east from there. Not all of that railroad has yet been built, but the greater
part of it is already completed, and every part of the old road that was under
tension because of freight congestion has already been relieved.
To build this new double-track railroad across 350 miles of a mountainous
State, the engineers studied two points—grade and curvature. Distance was
no object, for speed is the very last attainment of heavy tonnage movement.
The new route consisted in part of the enlargement of the old routes, and in
part of the construction of brand new line. It started east from Pittsburgh,
where the great Brilliant cut-off had been built to relieve the tremendous
terminal freight congestion, and followed up the valley of the Alleghany
River on the route of the West Penn Road, a Pennsylvania property. The
main line of the Pennsylvania comes east from Pittsburgh up the valley of
the Monongahela for a distance, and then across country to Blairsville
Intersection, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, where it is intercepted by the low-
grade freight route.
From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and
forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the
slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the
Pennsylvania’s engineers were ordered to four-track the original double-
track through that narrow defile in God’s great world, they shook their
heads dubiously; then—after the fashion of engineers—they went ahead
and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same narrow
pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast out a shelf
on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the low-grade line.
Just beyond Gallitzin, where the Pennsylvania pierces with two great
tunnels the very summit of the Alleghanies, the low-grade line takes its own
course once more, breaking farther and farther away from the main line,

and for long sections following the trail of the long-since abandoned
Portage Railroad. The day is coming when Gallitzin Tunnels are to be left
high in the air. The Pennsylvania’s officers tell you that frankly.
“We have plans for a six-mile tunnel, to be handled by electric motive-
power already made,” said one of them, just the other day, “and every year
we wait, that tunnel grows longer, the approaching grades less and less. It
will cost money—money into millions of dollars—and it will earn 10 per
cent on the investment.”
From Gallitzin, the low-grade line delves far south to Hollidaysburgh and
then follows the tracks of a former branch line up to Petersburg on the main
line, which it parallels to the Susquehanna. Where the main line crosses the
Susquehanna at Rockville, the low-grade freight route diverges once again
and follows the west bank of the river for a number of miles, completely
avoiding in that way Harrisburg and the steel-making towns to the south of
it with all of their conditions of congestion. The freight route crosses the
broad Susquehanna at Shock’s Mills, eight miles north of Columbia, and
follows the east bank of the river for twenty miles to Shenks Ferry, where it
turns abruptly eastward through the rugged hills of Lancaster County to a
connection with the main line at Parkesburg. From thence it follows the
main line nearly all the way to Glen Loch, crossing and re-crossing it but at
all times retaining its nominal grades. At Glen Loch it makes a wide detour
around Philadelphia and its suburbs and reaches with a long straight “short
cut” over to the main line at Morrisville near Trenton.
So much for the location of this great line of reconstruction. In grades and
in curvatures it has achieved real triumphs. The great tonnage here is also
always east-bound—coal and iron coming to the seaboard. Its grades also
are chiefly consequential then to the east-bound movement. To that
movement the heavy grades are again at the almost incredible figure of 3-10
of one per cent—some seventeen feet to the mile. That will mean more
when it is understood that that figure is equal to the pull that is required of
an engine to start a heavy freight train upon an absolutely level track. With
such a pull, grades become as nothing, and the Pennsylvania’s operating
department is enabled to run 75 trains an hour over this low-grade line; hour
after hour upon a 15 minutes’ interval.

Ask a Pennsylvania officer what he would do with such traffic on his old
main line to-day, and he will tell you that he would rather resign than tackle
the proposition. The same thing is true on the New York Central lines. Like
the Pennsylvania, that railroad thought a little time ago that with its four
tracks it might move all civilization. Its acquisition of the bankrupt West
Shore Railroad in the eighties gave it two extra tracks across New York
State that for a long time were carried on the company’s books as
deadwood. Now they are filled with freight operation and bringing in a
healthy return to their owners. The growing land is always catching up to its
new railroad facilities, no matter how rapidly they may be constructed.
To-morrow?
The railroad operator does not like to think of that. He meets to-day and he
plans as best he may against that to-morrow. To meet the great unknown he
bids the engineers—those who construct and those who reconstruct—to
him, and begs that they exercise their best wits to help him to see a little
way into the dim and shadowy future.

CHAPTER X

THE RAILROAD AND ITS PRESIDENT
Supervision of the Classified Activities—
Engineering, Operating, Maintenance
of Way, etc.—The Divisional System
as Followed in the Pennsylvania Road
—The Departmental Plan as Followed
in the New York Central—Need for
Vice-presidents—The Board of
Directors—Harriman a Model
President—How the Pennsylvania
Forced Itself into New York City—
Action of a President to Save the Life
of a Laborer’s Child—“Keep Right on
Obeying Orders”—Some Railroad
Presidents Compared—High Salaries
of Presidents.

A LL the widely divergent lines of human activity in the organization of
the railroad converge in the office of its president. He is the focal point
of the entire system. More than that, he is its head and front. If he is
anything less, the sooner he is out of his job the better for both the railroad
and himself; for, although there is a great variety of departments in the
organization of steam railroad transportation and each department will have
still greater varieties of activities, there is but a single activity delegated to
the office that bears only the modest word “president” in gilt letters upon its
door. The function of that office is to supervise. To understand that
supervision better, consider for a moment the rough structure of the
railroad.

Its activities are grouped into classes. The activity of soliciting business,
both freight and passenger, forms the traffic department, in many ways the
most important of all; for from it comes nearly all the vast revenue needed
for the maintenance of the organism. The legal department looks after the
railroad’s rights—its franchises, its charters, the law fabric of its almost
innumerable relations with the various railroad commissions, legislatures,
city councils, and town and country boards. If the road be really sizable—
with 8,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 miles of track—it will probably organize
into separate departments the buying of its great quantities of supplies, the
keeping of its intricate books, and the handling of its money. The business
of building its lines and structures will need special talent for an
engineering department. The department that will employ the great rank and
file of the railroad’s army of employees is the operating department, called
by some big roads the transportation department.
There are two other great factors of conducting a railroad; maintaining its
lines—the tracks, bridges, tunnels and other features of the permanent way;
and keeping both cars and engines fit for service. This last work, organized
as the mechanical department, will probably rank next to operating in the
number of its employees, and the value of its equipment is one of the
greatest assets of the railroad. It is generally expressed in great shops
located here and there and everywhere, at convenient points upon the
system.
Generally the maintenance-of-way department comes under operating—it is
only fair that a general manager should supervise the condition of the line
over which he is expected to operate his trains at high speed and in absolute
safety. The same argument should hold true as to the equipment. But right
here is the great rock upon which the principle of American railroad
organization splits in twain.
From the president’s office downward, the system of organization may be
divisional or departmental. In the former case, the division superintendent is
the real unit of railroad operation: under his guidance and responsibility
come not only the operation of the trains but the maintenance both of the
line and of the rolling-stock. In the case of departmental organization that
superintendent—and also, above him, the general superintendent—
exercises no authority over the engineers of maintenance-of-way or the

master mechanics of the shops along the system. Those lines of railroad
activity do not converge with that of train operation below the office of the
general manager. The greatest outside power that is given to a division
superintendent on a purely departmental road is a sort of coöperation with
the master mechanic in the matter of the men who handle the road’s motive
power. This coöperation is many times intricate and involved. If the master
mechanic and the division superintendent are not harmoniously inclined
toward one another, and things very naturally go wrong with the motive-
power, it is a difficult matter to locate responsibility.

The Pennsylvania system, which is one of the most perfectly organized in
the world, is strongly organized upon the divisional system. The division
superintendent upon the Pennsylvania is indeed a prince above his
principality, and he is well trained for his rulership. Pennsylvania men go
through the mill. It takes a pretty capable man to combine the ability for
handling trains and handling men with the intricate knowledge for
command over an engineering corps devoted to maintenance-of-way, as
well as command over a machine-shop which may employ a thousand
skilled workmen. In order to give its division heads that tremendous
training, the Pennsylvania sends its men through its own West Point, the
great shops at Altoona. The men who have sat in the big, roomy office in
Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, and who have been addressed as
president, have been proud of the days when they were up in the hills of the
Keystone State, standing their trick in overalls at the lathe, or carrying chain
and rod over long stretches of track. To-day every Pennsylvania
superintendent, possibly with a single exception or two, is a civil or
mechanical engineer.

The old and the new on the Great Northern—the “William Crooks,” the
first
engine of the Hill system, and one of the newest Mallets

The Southern Pacific finds direct entrance into San Francisco for one
of its branch lines by tunnels piercing the heart of the suburbs

Portal of the abandoned tunnel of the Alleghany Portage Railroad near
Johnstown, Pa., the first railroad tunnel in the United States

On the other hand, the New York Central has also been brought into a high
state of organization, and stands firmly on the departmental plan.
“We believe that our superintendents should specialize in train operation,”
says one of the high officers of that road. “In other words, we do not believe
that a man, to get his traffic through over a stretch of line, should
necessarily know to a fraction of an inch the best wheel-base for an engine
of a given type or the precise construction of a truss bridge. Such
requirements take away from the special training that is to-day needed for
every high-class railroader. A railroader is made better by sticking to one
thing and sticking to it faithfully; and our departmental method, by which
the maintenance of line and rolling-stock comes under the sole supervision
of men expert in those specialties, we think the best. Sometimes we develop

a very wizard in traffic handling, who has never had a chance at a technical
education.”
And there you have the very essence of the other side of the proposition.
Between these two sides there are various shadings and gradings, but the
question has never been definitely solved. It has reduced the vast
complexity in the organization of the modern railroad of the larger size.
That has become so very complex it fairly cried for expert relief. One man
has recently spent a busy term of years in simplifying the organization of
the Harriman lines. To cut the intricate lines of red-tape in a big railroad
office, to reduce to a minimum the vast needless correspondence between
departments and between branches of a single department, is a problem that
calls for genius—and offers for its solution no small reward.

In other days—and we refer to no ancient history, for the electric light was
proved and the hundred-ton locomotive already increasing the average
tonnage of the American freight train—the presidents of the biggest roads
were content to worry along with one or two assistants. But two decades
ago, the railroads were still simple matters; there did not exist the intimate
relations between one and the others of them, as shown by stockholdings in
competing and feeding lines to-day—the constant waiting of their
executives upon the sessions of the different railroad commissions. These
complications of American railroading have also further complicated the
organizations of the different systems, and have brought a demand for
executives of the keenest type. It is no slight strain that a man works under
when he becomes the head of a ten-thousand-mile railroad.
So to-day the president of the railroad has fortified himself in the only
possible way—by creating vice-presidencies. Each ranking department to-
day is apt to be recognized in council by a vice-president; and these heads
form a cabinet as informal as that of the Federal Government and, in its
way, quite as important. Legal traffic, and engineering traffic each demands
a vice-president at that cabinet-board, and gets him. The general manager
usually is the vice-president representing operation. One big road has eight

vice-presidents. It is indeed a poor property that cannot show three or four
men that are the fittest to hold this title.
There is another cabinet where the president must sit, which is formal and
recognized; it is the board of directors. Between it and the lesser cabinet the
president must take good care that he is not ground as between millstones.
The cabinet of his department heads will tell him how he can spend his
money; but he must get it from the upper cabinet. It is not always
harmonious pulling in the upper cabinet. Imagine for a moment the troubles
that sometimes arise in the lower.
You are sitting in the office of a big railroad president, talking straight to
that big-shouldered soul himself. Outside is the shadowy roof of the train-
shed of a terminal, which is filled with long lines of cars that come and go,
of platforms that are black with humans one instant and quite deserted the
next. The room has the quiet elegance of a comfortable home library. There
are long rows of books upon the shelves; a great table is set squarely in the
centre. But it is business—for a ticker is slowly spelling the fate of that
railroad and every other railroad, upon the endless tape; a huge map of the
system—many thousands of miles of high-class railroad—lies under the
glass that covers the table top.
“They don’t always pull together,” the president of the railroad admits,
when you ask him about the lower cabinet. “Sometimes they pull apart
when they have honestly different ideas as to policy, and other times—
there’s to be a big college football game up at G—— next Saturday. We
have only two private cars for our four vice-presidents, every single blessed
one of whom wants to go. I don’t want to go myself, and I’ve contributed
my car, but we’re one short then, and the man that’s left is going around like
a boy who’s had a chip knocked off his shoulder. He’s just been in here, and
I’ve settled the matter by hiring a car for his party from the Pullman folks
and footing the bill myself. I sent him out ashamed of himself.
“That’s Pete every time. Flares up quick, and every time he flares up I can
remember when we were working the day-and-night tricks in a God-
forsaken junction out on a prairie stretch of the Great West. He’s like a boy
in some ways—awfully fussy about the rights and prerogatives of his
department; and he’ll go all to pieces over some little thing if he thinks

another man has stepped over on to his side of the line. But let a big
situation arise—a flood that sets a whole division of our lines awash; a
wicked congestion of traffic in midwinter blizzards; a nasty accident that
takes away our nerve—and you ought to see Pete! He’ll be handling the
thing as if he were putting a ball up on the links, and he’ll never lose his
confident smile. That man in one such emergency is worth the hire of a
dozen Pullmans.”
You ask about the upper cabinet, and the president lowers his voice. The
board is no matter for light conversation. He steps to the window and points
down into the concourse of the train-shed.
“I happen to know that young fellow over there by the mailbox,” he
answers. “He’s one of our travelling freight-agents. He’s lucky. He works
for one boss, and is responsible to him; I work for a whole regiment of
bosses, and am held responsible by a group of pretty keen old citizens who
gather around this table and put me on the rack.
“There are many interests in this property, and some of them are too big to
sleep in the same bed. I have three directors who never speak to one another
outside of this room, and rarely ever in it. There is another who represents
the holdings of a road that fights this at every turn, and he hurts the property
worse than any good husky plague. A big estate, with a bitter aversion to
spending money for any purpose whatsoever, has another director here; and
a banking interest presents a director who seconds him in every move, fool
or good. That is the crowd I have got to work with when I want ten or
fifteen millions to hold our own against some other fellow who is crowding
us hard for business in our competitive territory or threatening to run a line
into one of our own private melon-patches. That boy down there is lucky.
He has only got to get out and land a couple of hundred carloads from a
shipper who hates corporations worse than politics, and who has just had a
claim for spoiled goods turned down by this particular corporation. That
boy has the cinch job.”

This imaginary railroad president has told you of one of the vital points in
the business of the railroad, the necessity for constant teamwork. A railroad
head may have the genius of a Napoleon, the stubborn persistence of a
Grant, or the marvellous executive ability of a Pierpont Morgan, and be
worthless if his board is not working enthusiastically with and for him. It is
not all pie and preserves by any means. The board may set its sweet will
straight against his, and he may be forced to execute a policy of which in
his own mind he has no trust. It is only once in a generation that a man like
Harriman, who can bend a whole mighty directorate to his absolute will,
arises. Harriman was a railroad president in the fullest sense of the word.
He rode in his car north from Ogden one day, toward the great National
Park of the Yellowstone. At that time the only direct rail entrance to that
splendid reserve was by the rival Hill lines. Harriman had called for a report
upon the opportunities for the Southern Pacific to strike its own line into the
west edge of the Park. That report was being explained to him in great
detail as he rode north from Ogden. His chiefs had a hundred practical
reasons against building the line. Harriman listened faithfully to the
explanation, as was his way. Then he turned to one of the signers of the
report, a high officer of his property.
“You have never been in the Yellowstone?” he asked.
The officer admitted that he had not.
“I have,” said Harriman triumphantly, “and I am going to build that road.”
That road was built and became successful from its beginning; but
Harriman was a railroader with the intuitive sense that gives genius to a
great statesman or to a great general. The average railroad president does
not hold a controlling interest himself and he must be guided pretty
carefully by the judgment of his department heads; he must win the
coöperation of his board by tact and subtlety rather than by the display of an
iron will; and where he leads he must take the responsibility.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, as has already been told in an earlier chapter,
recently forced its entrance into New York City and marked its terminal
there with a monumental station. That move was a strategy of the highest
order, and was made that the road might place itself upon an even fighting

basis for traffic with its chief competitor. But it cost. Two mighty rivers had
to be crossed, whole blocks of high-priced real estate secured, a busy city
threaded, the opposition of local authorities (who stood with palms
outstretched) honestly downed. That all cost. That would have been a
mighty expenditure for the Federal Government; for a private corporation it
was all but staggering.
When the station was finished, a rarely beautiful thing with its classic
public rooms, its long vistas, and its vast dimensions, that private
corporation built, within a niche of the great waiting-room, a bronze figure
of its former president, the late A. J. Cassatt, where all hurrying humanity
might see it. But, though a thousand nervous travellers see that statue in the
passing of a single hour, not a hundred of them will know the splendid
tragedy it represents; for many of the high officers of that railroad—some of
the men who caused the bronze to be erected—to this day believe that the
production of that great station was the cause of the death of their chief. He
had dreamed of that terminal for years; his engineer had deemed it all but
impossible, and he had sent overseas for other engineers. One of these, who
had conquered the busy Thames, said that he could tunnel the two great
rivers. He was asked the cost, and he gave it. His first figures were
staggering, but the railroad president did not abandon his hope. He
summoned his board and put the problem to them.
There was pulling power between that president and his board, and the
pulling was all in a single direction. Their system—a railroad that
acknowledged no superior—could not keep in the very front rank without
its terminal in the heart of the seaboard city, eliminating forever the delays
and the inconveniences of a ferry service; the road could not afford to drop
into second rank, and so it assumed the great undertaking.
That meant many things more than laymen understand; the selling of
securities in delicate markets, home and foreign, which fluctuate wildly on
the promulgation of anticorporation talk; the evading of untiring
competitors; the appeasing of hungry politicians, only too anxious to feed at
the hands of a wealthy corporation. In this case, it meant more than all these
things, for the two rivers were quite as treacherous as the American
engineers had pronounced them. They would sound in their tunnel bearings
and find rock which seemed soft, and their dynamite charges would be

sufficient. Then it would prove hard, and their blast as inefficient as that of
a child’s toy cannon. Again, the rock would drill as hard as the hardest
gneiss—the very backbone of Mother Earth herself, and the hard-rock men
would prepare a heavy charge of dynamite. Then the stuff was as soft as
gravel, and their heavy charge would have torn off the roofs of half a dozen
houses. When they were under one of the rivers they found its bed—the
roof of their tunnel—as soft as mud. There came a day when the little
foaming swirls of water above their headings became a geyser: the river-
bed had blown entirely out.
After that, some of the younger engineers felt like throwing themselves into
the wicked river, but the biggest engineer of all never lost his faith. He sent
upstream and brought down a whole Spanish Armada of clumsy scows,
each heaped high with sticky clay. That clay—in thousands of cubic yards
—made a new river-bottom and the tunnel shields went forward.
There were other obstacles and discouragements, almost an infinite array of
them, to be surmounted, but this railroad president had steeled his mind to
the accomplishment of that terminal. In the making of it he gave his life.
When the day came for the drafts upon the railroad’s treasury, mounting
higher and higher, he was cheer; when bad news came from the burrowing
engineers, he was courage; when timid stockholders and directors began to
worry, he was comfort. He gave of his vitality to the organization, to the
making of the terminal, until the day came when he gave too much—and
his life went out while he was still like a mighty king in battle. He did not
live to see the classic lines of the great station building. As he stands in the
waiting-room, he stands in bronze. Those bronze eyes are powerless to see
the splendid fruition of his endeavors.
That sort of thing—heroic courage and death-bringing devotion to an
enterprise—repeats itself now and then among the executives of the
railroads. When the panic of 1907 reached high tide, there was a certain
railroad president who, like his fellows, viewed it with no little alarm. He
had lunched with a big steel man, the kind the newspapers like to call a
magnate, and the steel man had scared him. The company for which the
former labored was going to close half a dozen of its plants—was going to
throw some thousands of poorly provided men out of work.

The railroad president took that bad news back to his comfortable office; at
night it travelled with him in his automobile to his big and showy house. It
would hit his company hard in its heavy tonnage district, but that was only a
single phase of the situation. He thought of things becoming more
disjointed when the news became public—before that week had run its
course. That night the president made up his mind to take a big step. It was
risky business, but he thought it worth the risk.
He sent for the steel man in the morning and asked him what was the best
price he could make for his product. The steel man cut his regular profit in
half, but the president was not satisfied.
“You’ll have to show me a better margin than that,” he said.
“We’ll eliminate profits,” said the steel man, “and give you the stuff at cost,
to save shutting down our plant.”
“Is that the best you can do?” persisted the president.
Before he was done, the steel man had also eliminated depreciation on
plants and half a dozen minor expenses. He agreed to deliver at the mere
cost of raw material and labor. Then he received an order that would have
broken some records in prosperous times. The road was committed to some
big building projects and it needed whole trainloads of girders and columns;
bridges by the dozen. The railroad president went further, and helped out
the steel man’s car-building plant. He ordered 3,000 steel freight cars, and
every day he was getting reports from his general manager of a further
falling of traffic tides. They had motive-power rusting on sidings, and they
were dumping freight cars in the ditches along the right-of-way because
they did not have storage-room for them. That took courage of a certain
high-grade sort. When those freshly-painted new steel cars began to be
delivered in daily batches of sixty, some of his directors asked him where
he was going to find room to store them. He did not answer, for he did not
know; but in the long run he won out. His company had a new equipment
for the returning flood-tide of traffic which had cost it 25 per cent less than
that of its competitors. When the time came to build its big improvement it
had the steel all stored and ready. The president was able to tell his directors
then that he had saved them $1,700,000 on that close bargain that he had
driven in panicky times.

Sometimes a little thing makes a railroad president big.
The head of a busy road in the Middle West was hurrying to Chicago one
day to attend a mighty important conference of railroad chiefs. His special
was halted at a division point for an engine-change, and the president was
enjoying a three-minute breathing spell walking up and down beside his car.
An Italian track laborer tried to make his way to him. The president’s
secretary, who was on the job, after the manner of presidents’ secretaries,
stopped the man. The signal was given that the train was ready, but the
president saw that the track-hand was crying. He ordered his train held and
went over to him. The story was quickly told. The track-hand’s little boy
had been playing in the yards and had hidden in an open box-car; so his
small companions had reported. Afterwards the car had been closed and
sealed by a yardmaster’s employee. Somewhere it was bumping its weary
way in a lazy freight train, while a small boy, hungry and scared, was vainly
calling to be let out.
Perhaps that president had a boy of the same size—they always do in
stories; and perhaps—this being reality—he did not. But he stopped there
for three precious hours, at that busy division point, while he sent orders
broadcast to find the boy, orders that went with big authority because they
came from the high boss himself. He was late at the conference, because
that search was taking his mind and his attention. He hung for hours at a
long-distance telephone, personally directing the boy-hunt with his
marvellously fertile and resourceful mind. When action came entirely too
slowly he ordered the men out of the shops and all interchange freight
halted, until every one of 12,000 or 14,000 box cars had been opened and
searched. Finally, from one of these they drew forth the limp and almost
lifeless body of a small boy.
The railroad chief died a little while ago and was buried in a city 500 miles
away from the line that he had controlled. The track-hands of his line, with
that delicate sensibility that is part and parcel of the Italian, dug deep into
their scanty savings and hired a special train, that they might march in a
body at his funeral.
It sometimes takes a big man to do a little thing in a big way.

Here is Underwood, the railroad president who took hold of the Erie when
the property was a byword and a joke, who began pouring money into it to
give it real improvements and possibilities for economical handling, and
made it a practical and a profitable freighter, a freighter of no mean
importance at that. He once issued an order that any car on the road (no
matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel should be immediately
cut out of the train. The order was posted in every yardmaster’s office up
and down that system.
Some time after it went into effect, Underwood was hurrying east in his
private car. It was essential that he should reach Jersey City in the early
morning, for he had a big day’s grist awaiting him at his office. A real
railroad president, working 18 hours a day, can brook few delays. But when
the president awoke, his car was not in motion; the foot of his bunk was
higher than the head. He looked out and found himself in a railroad yard
three or four hundred miles from his office. When he got up and out he saw
why his bed had been aslant. The observation end of his car was jacked up
and the car-repairers were slipping a new pair of wheels underneath it. A
car-tinker bossed the job and Underwood addressed him.
“Who gave you authority to cut out my car?” he asked.
“If you will walk over to my coop,” said the car-tinker, politely, “you will
find my authority in orders from headquarters to cut out any car (no matter
of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel.”
When the new wheels were in place the president of the road put his hand
upon the shoulder of the car-tinker and marched him uptown. The man
obeyed, not knowing what was coming to him. Underwood walked him
straight into a jeweller’s shop, picked out the best gold watch in the case
and handed it to the car-tinker.
“You keep right on obeying orders,” he said.
The relations between a railroad president at the head of the organization,
and some man who struggles ahead in the army of which the president is
general, would make a whole book. They still tell a story in Broad Street

Station, Philadelphia, of Mr. Cassatt, the Pennsylvania’s great president,
and the brakeman.
It seems that one of the suburban locals that took Cassatt to his country
home up the main line was halted one night by an unfriendly signal. The
president, mildly wondering at the delay, found his way to the rear platform.
On the lower step of that platform, in plain violation of the company’s rule,
sat the rear brakeman. Cassatt was never a man who was quick with words,
but he said in a low voice:
“Young man, isn’t there a rule on this road that a brakeman shall go a
certain distance to the rear of a stalled train to protect it by danger signal?”
The brakeman spat upon the right-of-way and, without lifting his eyes from
it, said:
“If there is, it’s none of your damn business.”
Cassatt—the man who could strike an arm of Pennsylvania into the heart of
metropolitan New York at a cost of many millions of dollars—was much
embarrassed.
“Oh, certainly it isn’t,” he said with an attempt at a smile. “I was merely
asking for information.”
The next morning the president of the Pennsylvania summoned the
trainmaster of that suburban division to his desk and reported the matter.
The trainmaster turned three colors. It was lèse-majesté of the most heinous
sort. He proposed the immediate dismissal of the offending brakeman.
Cassatt ruled against that. He was too big a man to be seeking to rob any
brakeman of his job.
“Just tell him,” he said to the trainmaster, with a suggestion of a smile about
his lips, “that he cussed the president, and that, as a personal favor, I should
like him to be more polite to passengers in the future.”
No two railroad presidents come up to their problem in quite the same way.
Take the two members of the Western railroad world—one gone now—Hill
and Harriman. In J. J. Hill’s domain the personality of the man counts for
everything. He picks his men, advances them, rejects or dismisses them, by

a rare intuitive sense, with which he judges character. A high chief in his
ranks once asked for a vacation in which to take his family to Europe. Hill
granted it. When the man came back from Europe another was at his desk.
Hill did not approve of long vacations, and that was his method of showing
it. The department head should have known better.
On the other hand, Harriman measured his men impersonally—as if in a
master scale. He measured them by results. A man might personally be
somewhat repugnant to him, but if he accomplished results for the road, he
held his place, at least until some one came along who could do even better.
W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, and James McCrea, of the
Pennsylvania, are the heads of two railroads great in mileage and in volume
of traffic; yet their methods are in many essentials radically different.
McCrea is the essence of Pennsylvania policy—coldly impersonal. It is
easier to gain an audience with the president of the United States than with
the president of the Pennsylvania. No Pennsylvania man from president
down to the lowest ranking officer, grants an interview to a newspaper
reporter. It would be risky business for any officer of the Pennsylvania to
have his photograph published or himself glorified by reason of his
connection with the company. The company is the corporation.
When it speaks, it speaks impersonally through its press agent, a clever
young man with clever assistants, who both answers newspaper questions
and advances newspaper information. His function is a new one of the
American railroad, and allies itself directly with the office of the president.
W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, probably stands preëminent to-day
among American railroad executives. He has shouldered himself up from
the ranks of the railroad army, and only good wishes have gone to him as he
has stepped from one high post to a still higher one. He has come, as nine
out of ten successful executives have come, from the operating end of the
railroad.
Brown is particularly accessible to newspaper reporters. He talks with them,
carefully and painstakingly, and sees to it that they are correctly informed as
to each of the great railroad problems of the day. He believes sincerely that
the head of a railroad should be personality and that the personality should

stand forth directly in the guidance of the property. In his own case, at least,
he has demonstrated the value of his theory.
For all this work and all this strain, the railroad president demands that he
be adequately paid. He has a good many perquisites—chief among them a
comfortable private car at his beck and call; but perquisites are not salary.
The head and front of the American railroad to-day receives anywhere from
$15,000 to $75,000; an astonishingly large percentage of railroad presidents
are receiving at least $50,000 annually. But they work for their pay—
sometimes with their life-devotion, as in the case of the big man who built
the big terminal; other times with the hard sense of the president who
bought his steel girders and cars in the time of panic. Here is a case in point.
A road in the Middle West, which was so compact as to make it quite local
in character, had a big traffic proposition to handle and was handling it in a
miserable fashion. One local celebrity after another tackled it, until the
directors were laying side bets with one another as to the precise day when
the receiver should walk into the office. Finally, Eastern capital, which was
heavily interested in the property, revolted at the local offerings, and sent
out an operating man with a big reputation to take hold of it.
The directors received him with a certain veiled distrust as coming from
another land, but in the end they hired him. The matter of salary came up
last of all.
“Fifty thousand,” said the New Yorker in a low voice.
One of the local directors spoke up.
“Fifteen thousand!” said he. “It’s out of the question. We’ve never paid
more than twelve.”
“So I should imagine,” was the dry response. “But I said fifty, not fifteen.”
The consternation that followed may be imagined! In the end the New
Yorker carried his point. At the end of just twelve months he had, through
his acquaintance in Wall Street, and his keen insight into the big channels of
finance, cut that little road’s interest charges just $800,000 a year. The
receiver has not come yet. The road has accomplished a miracle and has
begun to pay dividends. There is another miracle to relate. Last spring, the

directors of the road voted an increase in salary to their president—and he
courteously refused it!
“I think the presidency of this road is worth $50,000 a year,” he said,
frankly, “and not one cent more.”
That is the way a president should stand above and with his board.
Only a little time ago, another president, who had no easier proposition to
set upon its feet, was criticised by a querulous old director for his lavish use
of private cars and special trains. That president was having his own
troubles—his job had no soft places; but he said nothing when the testy old
fellow lectured him as he might have lectured a sin-filled schoolboy. When
the director was done, the president spoke in a low voice.
“Gentlemen, my resignation is on the table,” was his reply to the censure.
The next moment there was consternation in that board. The president
slipped out of the room and left them to consider the matter. When he
returned, the chairman of the board, who had nodded in half approval at the
censure, was at the door to greet him.
“We refuse to accept your resignation,” he said; “but the board does feel
that you ought to have a new car—the present one’s getting shabby, Phil.”
And in that moment the president felt that his work had gained one little
ounce of appreciation.

CHAPTER XI

THE LEGAL AND FINANCIAL DEPARTMENTS
Functions of General Counsel, and Those
of General Attorney—A Shrewd
Legal Mind’s Worth to a Railroad—
The Function of the Claim-agent—
Men and Women who Feign Injury—
The Secret Service as an Aid to the
Claim-agent—Wages of Employees the
Greatest of a Railroad’s Expenditures
—The Pay-car—The Comptroller or
Auditor—Division of the Income from
Through Tickets—Claims for Lost or
Damaged Freight—Purchasing-agent
and Store-keeper.

A T the very elbow of the railroad president stands the general counsel.
He is shrewd, resourceful, diplomatic. He has quick perception and
action, the faith and the loyalty of a friend. In many cases he is a personal
officer of the president—in the highest sense. If there is a change of
administration of the railroad, there is apt to be a change in the office of the
general counsel. If B——, who has been guiding the destinies of the T. &
S., goes to Transcontinental, he is apt to take Y——, his general counsel
along with him. For except in the case of some exquisitely organized roads
like the Pennsylvania, for instance, the general counsel is in every sense
personal to the president. He advises him privately, urges him to this step,
cautions him from that.
On the other hand, the general attorney is more apt to be the legal officer of
the railroad. Like the general counsel he has an old-fashioned pride in his
profession that makes him hesitate at accepting a vice-presidency; he likes

the ring of “general attorney” or “general counsel” in his own ears. Railroad
history and tradition both go to prove that. He will hardly drop those titles
for anything less than that of president.
The general attorney, unlike the general counsel, in most cases will make
his offices in the railroad’s headquarters. He will handle its litigation, and if
in half a dozen years he can bring down its verdict costs from $1,250,000 to
$750,000 for an average twelve month, as one man did, he will be well
worth the large salary that he demands and gets. And his salary will be only
one of many of the heavy expenses of the legal department. When that
functionary asks for money he gets it and without many questionings. The
operating department, the traffic department, the engineers, may have to
give sharp account for their appropriations; the legal end of the railroad is
trusted to accomplish accurate results, without detailed accounting. In some
cases it might prove embarrassing.

You want to know the value of the shrewd and perceptive legal mind to a
big railroad? Here is a case that proves his worth:
A certain transportation company in the East had a legal vice-president who
many people supposed was a political heritage to the road, a man for whom
it was supposed a berth had been made by the owner of the property, who
was something of a politician himself. A quick turning of the wheel of
fortune had thrown one political party out of business at the capital, and
another in. The man was given a place in the railroad offices, and a little
later was made a vice-president. It so happened that the vice-president knew
more than supposers might even imagine; but he was a quiet man, and
sometimes some of his own clerks wondered why he drew his big salary.
After he had been at his desk a dozen years they found the reason.
In gathering up a number of railroad properties to make the parent company
—after the fashion of modern railroad practice—one of the most important
of these old-time units was found to be in woefully shabby physical form. It
was a valuable road in the consolidation. The new parent was willing to
guarantee an annual rental of 10 per cent on its stock; but as a railroad it

fairly shook at the knees. It stood in dire need of reconstruction, and the
men who were offering it a high rental made that a provision of the deal.
The old road finally agreed to spend $12,000,000 in revising its line and in
buying new locomotives, cars, and bridges. With much ado it accomplished
its revision, and brought itself up closer to modern standards of railroading.
A decade later when the governmental supervision of the railroads had
come into the full flush of its authority, the quiet vice-president had an
armful of State commission reports and vouchers brought to his desk. He
locked himself in his room, and in a week he had made from them a 20,000-
word abstract in long hand. Then he took his report in to the president of the
road.
The acute mind of that general counsel—you see that he was vice-president
in this particular case—searching here and there and everywhere, had
discovered a mouse-hole. The old-time road had not fulfilled its part of the
contract. It had found that it could revise its lines at a cost of a little less
than $9,000,000 and had quietly pocketed the change. The big rent-paying
consolidation went into the courts, after its cool, impassive way. The case
went to a referee and the referee took four years to hear the case and decide
it. There were 5,000 exhibits offered in evidence and 8,000 closely written
pages of evidence, making a case nearly equal to that of the receivership of
the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New York City, which fills
twenty pudgy volumes of some 800 pages each.
The referee decided in favor of the parent company, and rendered a verdict
close to $6,000,000, principal and interest. The case was appealed, and
sustained. That vice-president had proved his worth. The president of the
defendant road came to him.
“We simply can’t pay,” he pleaded. “We’ve no reserve fund.”
“Then we will take it out of your rental,” was the emotionless reply of the
quiet vice-president.
That type of man stands forth as a possibility to every one of the dozens and
dozens of young men who make the main staff of the railroad’s legal
department. Those fellows come to the railroad fresh from the law schools.
Their salaries are small but their experience and their opportunities are

enormous. It is a far better career at the beginning than a briefless existence
in one’s own office, even though one’s own name is emblazoned in brilliant
gilt letters upon the door. A young man coming into the legal department of
a large railroad has a diversity of work offered him. He draws up the
simplest of papers at first, acts as assistant to a trial lawyer, then finally
comes to the time when he will alone fight the railroad’s case in some
minor cause in a small court. After that the causes get bigger, the courts
more important, he begins to delve into law libraries and to write briefs.
Gradually he emerges into a full-fledged lawyer. He may eventually
become general attorney or general counsel, and he may find himself
welcome to the partnership of some really important law firm. He has
knowledge that may be of value in fighting the railroad; whether he will use
that knowledge in afterwards fighting his employer is a matter for his own
conscience to determine.
There are special departments under the main heading of the law
department. Counsel, the ablest of counsel, is retained at each important
point reached by the railroad, and these counsel must act in conjunction and
coöperation with headquarters. Special tax counsel have an important office
by themselves, for the railroad sometimes finds itself in a difficult position.
In its pride it may announce to the world, through the newspapers, that the
new Bingtown depot has cost $400,000, but when the Bingtown appraisers
come around, possessing in their bosoms no inherent love for the railroad,
those newspaper clippings in their hands, the tax counsel begins to earn his
salary.
In these days of Federal and State supervision and regulation of railroad
management, with now and then an aldermanic chamber or a county board
of supervisors trying its hand at the game, there is sure to be special
counsel, generally known as the commerce or commission counsel,
assigned to the complaints and hearings. For intricate, involved, or unusual
cases the road may go outside of its own ranks and hire special counsel—
lawyers who are specialists in the very thing involved.
Just as the big and tactful attorney stands back of the railroad’s president, so
there crouches at his feet the claim-agent of the company, who is its watch-
dog and its scenting hound. Back of this claim-agent, who must have
achieved a reputation for keen-sightedness and marked ability before

receiving his position, is a busy company of claim agents, at headquarters
and every division headquarters upon the system. Together, these form a
militant organization that stands with the legal department to defend the
railroad’s treasury against indiscriminate raiding.
Sometimes, because the work dovetails in many ways closely with that of
the operating department, these claim-agents work under the order of the
general manager and the division superintendents. A sly old fellow who
once headed a big road in the Middle West once explained the reason why
—in the case of his property—without even a trace of a smile.
“John says,” he was speaking of his own general counsel, “that a claim-
agent can’t be yanked up before any of these touchy bar associations and
charged with unprofessional practices if we can show cases—that they’re
just railroad men and not lawyers, at all.”
That was an exaggerated case. As a rule, the young claim-agent has
abundant need to be upon his mettle. The public, with an inborn itching
against the corporation, keeps him upon that mettle. The man who has had a
slight bump upon a railroad train—to make an instance—hunts out the
claim office at headquarters. He gets quick treatment and mighty courteous
treatment. If he can prove himself in any way entitled to a reimbursement,
he gets it—in cash upon the spot. Likewise he signs a release—a most
ponderous and impressive document. When his “John Smith” goes upon
that document he has, in its own magnificent phrasing “in consideration of
money received” released the railroad company from all obligation to him
from the beginning of the world, the fall of man and the decline of the
Roman Empire up to the very moment of the signing.
He goes home, pretty well satisfied with himself. It was only a little bump
at that. A twenty-five cent bottle of arnica had made him physically himself
once again; and as for his suit, well, that was pretty well worn, anyway, and
three dollars to a tailor would make it a good “second best” for next winter.
He feels that the ten dollars that the railroad gave him was pretty abundant
compensation.
But wait until he sees his neighbor. The neighbor almost froths at the mouth
when he hears of the transaction—of the impressively worded release that
was signed.

“You’re a chump,” he says. “You could have gone to bed, stayed there a
week and they would have been glad to give you a hundred.”
After which the man looks upon his ten dollars with contempt and a feeling
of injury, and becomes a corporation hater. Or perhaps he was really hurt
and had some sort of a bill from his doctor and his druggist, lost time to be
compensated at his job. The railroad has figured these together and paid
him the sum, with the signing of the release as a necessary feature of the
transaction. The thing was not very serious, we will say, in this instance
also, and the hundred dollars that he received was really a fair
compensation. Now watch the neighbor, who it happens is a pretty shrewd
attorney:
“Let me take the case, even now,” he urges slyly. “I’ll get a verdict of five
thousand for you, if you are wise, and we will divide the proceeds.”
“But I’ve signed their release,” groans the other.
The shyster laughs in his face.
“You were drugged,” he whispers, “drugged, and we will prove it.”
That is not an exaggerated case. It is the sort of thing that the railroad’s
claim-agents are combating every day of the year; and then wonder not, that
some of them finally lose the fine sense of honor, themselves.
And beyond this class of folk, is another—nothing less than criminal. There
are men and women in this broad land who make a business of feigning
injury, and make it a pretty astute business, too, so that they may dig deep
into the strong-boxes of the railroad. The most dramatic of this particular
brand of “nature fakirs” has been Edward Pape, the man with the broken
neck. Pape has a most remarkable deformity and has not been slow to avail
himself of it as a money-making device far beyond the figures that might be
quoted for him by circus side-shows or dime museums. Pape makes a
specialty of the trolley companies. He can so alight from a car, coming
slowly to a stop, that he will fall and go rolling into the gutter. Instantly
there is excitement and a group of men to pick up the prostrate form. He is
found to be badly injured and is hurried to a hospital. There the internes
discover that he has a broken neck. A marvellous set of X-ray photographs
are made, and the railroad is usually willing to settle a large cash sum rather

than stand suit. Within a week he will probably be away and practising his
trick on some unsuspecting railroad.
“There was a time over in Philadelphia that was hell,” Pape once told the
writer. “I’d just finished my fancy fall, and they got me into the sickhouse
and rigged out most to kill. They put hip-boots on me there in bed, with
their soles fastened to the foot-board and a rubber bandage under my chin
and over my head. They put seventy-five pounds in weights on a cord and a
pulley-jigger to that bandage and it nearly killed me all day long. At night I
used to wait until it was dark and then I’d haul up the weights and put them
under the blanket with me. Otherwise, I don’t know how I’d ’a’ got my
sleep.”

The freight department of the modern railroad requires a veritable army
of clerks

The farmer who sued the railroad for permanent injuries—as
the detectives with their cameras found him

Little things like the discomfort of hospital treatment and searching
examinations by railroad surgeons do not seem to discourage these
criminals. They take these as necessary hardships that go with their
profession. Inga Hanson, the woman who impersonated deafness,
dumbness, blindness and paralysis to win a heavy verdict from the Chicago
City Railway Company, and who was afterwards convicted of perjury, was
wheeled daily into the court-room in a chair apparently nothing more than a
living, inert, shapeless mass of humanity, exquisitely trained to enact her
role of deception.
Sometimes the claim-agents, working in conjunction with the railroad’s
secret service, have used the camera to great advantage. A farmer who lives
in New Jersey drove into a seaboard city with a load of produce. At a grade
crossing, a switch-engine overturned his craft, about as gently as such an
accident could be accomplished. The farmer was lucky in that he was

bruised, rather than seriously hurt. Then he saw a lawyer and learned that he
was incapacitated for life by severe internal injuries. He entered suit for
$25,000 against the railroad.
There was a case for the secret-service bureau of the railroad, and it took
little time to find the right detectives, husky enough to get out into the fields
and work for four long weeks as farmhands. When the Jersey farmer began
haying that August, he found less trouble than he had ever before
experienced in hiring low-priced help. He was able to get two big lads, who
were hard workers.
It was a big hay year and the farmer was not averse to turning in to do his
part of the work. He liked to be with the boys he had hired and one of them
had a camera that he could take “great” pictures with. He showed him some
of the pictures that he took those August days on the Jersey farm. The
farmer liked them immensely.
He liked them rather less when his attorney came down from the city one
day, with prints of the same pictures that had been sent him by the law
department of the railroad. The farmer was given a chance to withdraw
from the limelight or else stand a criminal trial for perjury, with the
penitentiary’s gray walls looming up behind. He took the chance. Few of
the dishonest claimants will proceed after such evidence has been put
before them. As for the railroad, it usually works better through getting
signed confessions of guilt than by going through the somewhat intense
workings of a criminal trial.
The secret service stands just back of the claim-agents. It has greater or less
recognition in the case of different railroads but its work is generally much
the same. It is police. Sometimes it is organized like the police department
of a small city, with captains and inspectors at various division
headquarters, and at other times its very existence is denied by the railroad
heads. But its work is much the same. Its men, generally chosen for fitness
from city police or detective staffs, sometimes root out tramps or small
thieves along the line and in the freight-yards, sometimes in gay uniform
patrol the platforms of crowded passenger terminals, sometimes work with
greatest secrecy in “plain clothes”—which in this case may be jeans or
overalls—to detect theft or treason among employees, and sometimes they

receive their greatest laurels in connection with the “fake” suits that are
brought against the railroad.
The secret-service works night and day. Its members, with the claim-agents,
are at the scene of a serious accident as quickly as the wrecking-train itself.
Together with the railroad’s own corps of surgeons, retained in every
important town, and chosen for absolute honesty and integrity, they form an
important adjunct of the personal injury claim service.

The financial officer of the railroad is, of course, the treasurer. It is he who
receives its earnings—running possibly into a hundred millions dollars in
the course of a twelvemonth—and disburses them for supplies and for
wages, for taxes and for bond coupons, and, it is to be hoped, for dividends.
He works through appointed banks; and the bank president who can go out
and capture one or two good railroad accounts for his institution has earned
his salary for several years to come. The selection of the banks is one of the
dramatic phases of the inside politics of railroading; it is a cause of constant
wire-pullings and heartburnings.
“Do you see that whited sepulchre down there?” a big railroad head laughs
to you as he points to a white marble skyscraper closing the vista of a city
canyon. “This road built that temple of business. Our account is its
backbone. Sometimes we deposit a million dollars a day and it is no
uncommon thing for our balance there, approaching coupon or dividend
times to reach sixteen or seventeen million dollars.”
He laughs again, then grows confidential.
“We’re in a bit of a hole,” he admits. “Some of the big manufacturers
downtown are organizing a bank, and it looks as if it was going to be a
pretty solid sort of institution. They want a big account from us, and our
traffic people are urging their cause. In the long run they’ll get the account.”
Then he explains to you that the railroad endeavors to hold down its bank
accounts, although it must have them in a large number of different cities,
to avoid the long shipments of large quantities of money. The agents and the

conductors will, following a carefully arranged system, send their receipts
to the nearest designated banks, mailing memorandum slips of the deposit
both to the treasurer and to the comptroller. The bank in its turn, sends
receipt slips to both of these officers, so the deposit transaction is hedged
about with a sufficient degree of formality and detail.
When it comes to pay out its money, the railroad has no lessened degree of
formality and detail. For the wages of its employees—generally the greatest
of all expenditures—the railroad has proper system and order. The
paymaster makes out the voluminous pay-rolls, they are each properly
attested by the heads of departments; and for his pay-roll totals, the
necessary vouchers are issued to him by the treasurer. He may pay the
railroad army by check or he may send his deputies out over the system in
the pay-cars.
The pay-car is one of the pleasantest of the surviving old-time railroad
customs. The shriek of the whistle of the engine that hauls it is the
pleasantest melody that can come to the ears of the man out upon the line.
To shuffle in a long line up to its platform window where the railroad’s
money is being paid out in tiny envelopes, as each man signs the impressive
roll, is one of the greatest joys that anticipation can hold out. As the car
makes its routine trip over the line each month or each fortnight, it draws its
money from the various repository banks, or else the cash is forwarded to it
at division points from headquarters.
But, like many old customs, the pay-car is disappearing. The railroads are
more and more paying their men by check. It is a better system in many
ways. It avoids the handling of large sums of money, and many of the men
prefer not to have a roll of bills thrust into their hands. The old prejudice
among them against checks is practically over. The checks are constant
incentives toward saving, the small banks in the little town are shrewdly
reaching for the accounts of the thrifty railroaders. There may not be much
for the bank in just one of these accounts, but they can quickly multiply into
considerable sums.
We have already spoken of the comptroller; he is called the auditor upon
some of our railroads. The comptroller is the most passionless and
unemotional of all railroad officials. He measures the worth of his fellows

by cold mathematical rules, by addition, by subtraction, by multiplication,
by division. Even as big a man as the president may shudder at the result of
such coldly accurate measurings.
No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval
of the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a
governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and
wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise,
men fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight.
His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule, an
auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight receipts
report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of sharp-eyed young
men, each also having an almighty respect for mathematical accuracy, will
be up and down the line for him, catching up careless agents on the one
hand, and on the other gently showing them how to keep their accounts
better, and conform more carefully to the company’s established standards.
Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the mileage of the
company’s cars travelling over other roads, and the equipment of other
roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the comptroller, oftener,
however, directly to the operating department. All these make a
considerable office—an office which usually treads its monotonous path
and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well considered in the
organization of the railroad.
The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels—as we have
already indicated—passenger receipts, freight receipts and disbursements,
and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the accounting has, of
course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash fare collections made by
conductors upon the trains. This would be simple enough bookkeeping if a
good many years ago the interline or coupon ticket, entitling the bearer to
ride upon several different roads, had not come into popularity. To
apportion the revenue of a ticket between the half-dozen different lines
upon which it has been used requires almost no end of system and
accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting with its fellows,
with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The coupons themselves
are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single road—because of the freight
as well as the passenger business—may be kept standing in the treasuries of

several hundred other roads. It is a system quite as intricate, in itself, as the
relations between city and country banking and yet it is only a single small
phase of the conduct of the railroad.
The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization,
make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors
at the end of each day’s run. He must see to it that the conductor is neither
careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will bring the matter
quickly to the attention of the operating department.
In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad passenger
traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones across the
country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad
transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which
may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps
be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles’ riding at a saving over
local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has complied
with its provisions within the year’s life of the book, he will be paid $5
rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding at two cents a
mile. Sometimes these books take the form of “scrip” which is silent upon
mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent portions, sold at
wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five cents each.
In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger
receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where there
is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have to be very
careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage books. The
law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to passenger receipts, for
the law seems to point to even finer lines than the comptroller. He cannot
even subtract the $5 which will probably return to the purchaser, and charge
the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales must be credited to a separate
account, and only transferred to the main receipts of the railroad as the strip
is turned in for passage, a few miles at a time.
Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that
the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The
passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts
of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle that

comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and
each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone will
sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office, will
involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the
railroads.
And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation and
settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the railroad. There
is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an overcharge claim, the
routine is comparatively simple. The audit office should have information at
hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle it immediately. But if the claim
is for lost or damaged freight, the thing complicates. Before the freight
claim department will draw a voucher against the treasurer, it will have to
assure its own conscience that the claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.
From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or
telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills—pays its men, as
we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and its fire
insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the twelve months of
the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between receipts and
expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and attested
vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed the very
best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt stating the
precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid.
In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call
him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to
locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical
department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system
for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of
the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the
number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the mileage
of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement.
Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores, and
the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these the
comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive performances—
so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then he will show the

average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon, for the railroad
never forgets the cost.
It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost and
revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The
statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the
railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics become graphic, and the
comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office, prepares
charts, in which statistics become “curves of averages” or jotted and
wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning.
“Government by draughting-board,” sniffs the old-time railroader as he sees
these great “cross-hatched” sheets with their crazy lines of intelligence spun
across them, but it is “government by draughting-board” that has made the
old-time railroader—well, the old-time railroader. The new-time railroader
gives heed to those charts—the pulse readings of the creature that he is
directing—guides his course in no small way by them. They are veritable
charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.
Branching, as a rule, direct from the president’s office and occasionally
from the general manager’s, are the purchasing agent and the store-keeper,
many times one and the same, or the former acting as superior to the latter.
The purchasing agent has no easy role. If he is not above sharp practices—
the gift of a bit of furniture or a theatre box, in the least instances—he will
fulfil only part of the reputation of his office; and if he is—as many, many
of them are—absolutely honest down to the keenest degree of an acute
conscience, he will probably still be under the suspicion of some querulous
minds. His opportunities for deceit and guile are many, so much the more
must he be an honest man in every full sense of that word.
He brings the modern railroad’s passion for standardization down to the
purchase of its every sort of supplies; for his office goes out into the market
for anything, from a box of matches to a locomotive. The very fact that his
department is a non-revenue department, save for an occasional sale of
scrap-iron or discarded materials, only serves to put him the more upon his
guard. He must not yield to the wiles of crafty salesmen. He must measure
their wares by a single standard—economy, as expressed in selling-price, in

durability, and in cost of maintenance; and upon that standard he must
decide between them, as impartially as a justice upon the bench.
He must be guided by standard. If it be typewriters, he must struggle against
the preference of this department or that for some particular machine, and
bring all to the test of his three-headed economy. The successful machine
will then be adopted for the system and brought as such. No small
responsibility rests upon his accuracy of judgment.
His store-keeper must see to it that there is no waste of supplies. He must
see to it, for instance, that the engineers are as careful in their use of oils as
the clerk in that of stationery.
“We use $4,000 worth of lead pencils alone in the course of a single year,”
says one of them; “and if we didn’t keep hammering at the boys, that figure
would jump to $5,000 or $6,000 without realizing it.”
He keeps check on the supplies that he issues. His stock of blank forms,
alone, would do credit to a wholesale stationery house in a sizable city; for
the railroad is a liberal user of printer’s ink in its own devices. He must be
thrifty and he must be economical; he must look to it that the railroad’s
money is not wasted in the purchase and use of its supplies.
Together with the general counsel, the general attorney, the claim-agent, the
treasurer, and the comptroller, the purchasing agent and the store-keeper
stand as guardians of the railroad’s strong-box.

CHAPTER XII

THE GENERAL MANAGER

His Duty to Keep Employees in Harmonious
Action—“The Superintendent Deals
with Men; the General Manager with
Superintendents”—“The General
Manager is Really King”—Cases in
Which his Power is Almost Despotic—
He Must Know Men.

T HE general manager operating the railroad is held strictly responsible
for the economical movement of the trains and the maintenance of the
property. To the greatest portion of the railroad army (nine-tenths of it
employed in the operating department) he is an uncrowned king. The
superintendent, as we shall presently see, is the unit of the operation of the
road, just as the division over which he is head is one of the physical units
that go to make up some thousands of miles of first-class railroad track. The
division superintendent deals in men; the general manager deals in division
superintendents; and right there is the radical difference between the two.
The superintendent must see to it that his men get a square deal. If he does
not see to it in the first instance they will see to it in the last, and woe to him
if such be the case. For the men who work on the steam railroad are well-
paid, well-read, keenly sensitive as to their privileges and their rights. And
from these men have come the division superintendents, as different each
from the other as men can be grown. It is the general manager’s chief duty
to bring these very different men into harmonious action. That is absolutely
essential to the successful operation of the railroad. The general manager
must have absolute firmness with his superintendents. He can appoint or
discharge them as they can appoint or discharge their trainmen—more
quickly in fact, for up to the present time there is no brotherhood of railroad
superintendents.
A certain division superintendent in the East had 150 miles of busy double-
track trunk line under his direction. At his headquarters were a big
classification yard and a coaling-station for the engine of the two divisions
that intersected there. In the course of gradually increasing business, the
coaling-station, which stood in a narrow ledge beside the main-line tracks

and under the breast of a steep mountain-side, had to be enlarged. In so
small a place, that was a difficult engineering problem. It was necessary to
build much bigger coal-pockets and while the engineers were removing the
old and building the new station, temporary coaling facilities had to be
provided for the busy engine point. That part of the problem—more
operating than engineering—was finally solved by going across the main-
line tracks and locating a temporary coaling-station there. That made a bad
situation—with the heavy main-line traffic constantly intersecting with
engines drilling back and forth to their coal supply, and the general manager
was quick to realize it. He went up there and warned his superintendent.
“This is a danger place,” he said, “and a mighty bad one at that. That
tower’s too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two flagmen
here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard every engine
that crosses these main-line tracks.”
Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility for
that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The division
superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed. The
requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of the
system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn’t tell a coal-
pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered that
he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll—and the requisition went into the
waste-basket. The division superintendent did not try to get another
requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing and told
the towerman in the cabin—almost half a mile away—to keep as good a
watch as possible of the cross-over.
The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast
Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were half
a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division
superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager’s
office.
“I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special
signalmen,” that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so
cleared himself of the responsibility.

And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big
land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling
anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of
the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase, it
offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the man
who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them are
far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek to
remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.
Here is the yardmaster at a great interior railroad centre—we call it
Somerset for the sake of convenience. His is one of the biggest yards in all
this land, and he is a man whose judgment should be solidly respected.
There are four improvements in his yards that he deems absolutely
necessary in the face of a rapidly increasing traffic, and for a portion of the
property that depreciates rapidly under hard usage. His is a most important
position; and yet as he cannot spend a cent himself for the use of the
railroad, not even to buy matches, he embodies his four requests for
necessities into a requisition and forwards it to headquarters—at a seaboard
city. His superior officer thinks that Somerset is asking a good deal, and he
cuts the request down to three items. The next link in the chain is a man—
an auditor, perhaps—who happens to be imbued with a strong streak of
economy at that time. Middle division has had its appropriation cut thirty-
three per cent, so off comes another item from Somerset yard. After a time,
the yardmaster is lucky to get one single item through—and that is sure not
to be the essential item that he needed most of all. Good, plucky, valiant
railroader that he is, he is sure to think the whole outfit in the general
offices a set of arrant fools. Perhaps the big accident comes, and then
perhaps he has full opportunity to set himself straight. It is more likely that
he does not, and that he is made the target for Grand Jury indictment and a
lot of other fireworks.
That is an instance of the complications of the modern railroad—the vast
intricacy of organization. Wonder not, then, that many a general manager of
to-day must think twice before he remembers that some particular inland
town is one of the obscure branches of his property.

The superintendent deals with men; the general manager, with
superintendents. That statement is open to a slight modification. The
superintendent deals with the operating army in individual cases; the
general manager deals with them collectively. Somewhere in rank between
the division superintendent and the general manager stands the general
superintendent, but in the rapidly changing structure of American railroad
operation, his office is fast losing its individuality, is to-day in real danger
of utter extinction. On some railroads he is hardly more than a chief clerk to
the general manager, a rubber-stamp whose signature goes mechanically
upon papers bound upwards from division superintendent to general
manager. At the most he is to-day an outside man, getting up and down the
line and making constant reports to his boss, the general manager.

Larger Image

Oil-burning locomotive on the Southern Pacific system
The steel passenger coach, such as has become standard upon the
American railroad
Electric car, generating its own power by a gasoline engine
Both locomotive and train—gasoline motor car designed for branch line
service

Larger Image

The biggest locomotive in the world: built by the Santa Fe Railroad at
its Topeka shops

For the general manager is really king of the entire situation. Just now his
reign is threatened from a new quarter, and you find him receiving the
opposition with both distrust and anger. This is the fine figure of a fine man.
He has come up the ladder, rung by rung—station assistant, telegraph
operator, despatcher, train-master, assistant superintendent, superintendent,
general superintendent, general manager; he knows railroading, stick and
wheel. His own railroad he knows as he might know the fingers of his hand.
When we come into his office, the last of a committee of well-dressed
citizens is slipping out of his door; they are citizens from a prosperous town

in an adjoining State, and he may tell us of their errand.
“K—— is a good town,” he will say, “and gives us a good and growing
traffic. We’ve a lot of nasty grade-crossings there, for the two of our big
lines that right-angle into there seem to get over about every street in the
place at level. They want us to elevate or depress our tracks through there,
and it should be done. This road wants it as much as K—— wants it; for it’s
one of the worst bottle-necks on our main line, and Lord only knows how
many thousands of dollars it’s cost us in delayed traffic.”
This king of the railroad points to a sheaf of blueprints upon his desk.
“That tells the story,” he says simply, “and the end of the chapter is a bill for
nine millions of dollars to get rid of those crossings. According to law, K
—— will have to stand about half of the cost of the work, and K——, like
most progressive American towns, has been running pretty close to her debt
limit. She is staggered at the thought of having to dig out three or four
millions of perfectly good dollars, and so her mayor has made the naive
suggestion that we advance the money and let them pay back their share in
the shape of refunded taxes and annual payments.
“We advance that money—and the big boss has to slip over to France and
try to sell our securities for mere necessities. The truth of the matter is that
we haven’t the money to advance. We’re grubbing to get enough cash to
buy locomotives and cars to keep pace with our business, not running a loan
business for upstart towns that have run through their capital.”
In comes a second delegation, this one another group of commuters. They
have been asking for an additional train in on the Valley branch. The
general manager has said that the road cannot afford it, for the train would
have to be operated at a loss. He proves his statement.
“But,” urges the spokesman of the party, “you will make traffic by it, and
eventually the train will pay.”
“Eventually isn’t to-day,” said the G. M. stanchly, “and it is on to-day that
we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a train
in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your office, and
when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon your
ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent.”

“But this one train?” protests the spokesman.
“Violates that very principle,” replies the general manager. “Not another car
that does not pay its way.”
And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering sundry
threats about going to the commission, the general manager stretches his leg
over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a big map, in colors, of
his system—miles and miles and miles of first-class railroad.
“They come to me—towns like K—— and tell me of their troubles,” he
says, “as if I already did not know of them. I’ve a reconstruction plan for
every ten miles of our main-line.” His finger traces upon the map to a great
division point. “Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some yard,
as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a good-sized
side-line division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of a
superintendent.
“You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its
shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would think
it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and
Chicago. It isn’t. It isn’t really big enough to handle our decent share of that
traffic to-day. We’re trying to pour the business through it to-day, and are
succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It’s a weak valve in our biggest
artery, and some day it’s going to clog.
“It won’t be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years
ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of freight
through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder. They
got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate east-bound
and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I’d been fairly down on my
knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that thing. I always am;
that’s part of the job of general manager.
“I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to, at
this point and at that. Here’s where a couple of our biggest feeders from the
north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly haulers
dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where we
pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our

system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and
we’ve got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled. Don’t
think I don’t know every bit of that. I can see necessary improvements all
the way up our main line; but every one of them takes money, and just now
the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and raise the money. But
when we know and can’t improve—that’s railroading.”
A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite frankly
at us.
“Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh,” he
announces. “They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they’re entitled to a
new one, costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give
them every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend
$100,000 because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural
wonder in Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to
go Stenton one better.”
“You’ve got a lot of these delegations?” we venture.
“I lose track of them,” says the general manager. “It’s all a part of the day’s
work; it’s railroading.”
We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal
there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight the
fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before he was
there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days before that
he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen hours a day.
That’s railroading, too.
The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems. His
biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills; and
these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe its area.
The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight for his road—
running in strongly competitive territory—comes to this terminal. Three
hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for different points,
and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find any one of those
cars without an instant’s delay. And still the narrow physical limitations of
that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a big man.

And sometimes the big man must stoop to examine carefully into the little
things. When McCrea, the present president of the Pennsylvania, was a
general manager off on the western end of that system, his car was halted in
the middle of the night by a bad wreck on a single-track side-line. He might
have remained in his comfortable bed, but that would not have been
McCrea. He got up and dressed, went outside and offered his services to the
wrecking-boss. The wrecking-boss was competent and he knew it.
“There’s nothing you can do, boss,” he said.
“Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing that I can do—with a road
blocked on both sides with wreckage and stalled trains and track to be
laid?” said McCrea. “Well, let me tell you that there are ties down there in
the ditch that will have to be placed before another train goes over here, and
we might as well be beginning.”
And with that General Manager McCrea suited action to word. He went
down into the ditch, picked up a heavy tie, put it over his shoulder, and
brought it up into position. In an instant he was in the ranks, working to
bring order out of chaos. That was the way a big man could do a little thing
in a big way.
It takes a really big man for that very sort of thing. And the big man,
general manager of several thousand miles of railroad, must understand the
smaller men beneath him—any one of whom is apt in some future day to
supersede him. Here is a man who has been known as one of the best
general managers in the whole land. Soon after he was made operating head
of a really big road, a certain train on which he was travelling was much
delayed. The new G. M. inquired the exact reason for the trouble. He was
not so much concerned for his own convenience as he was curious to know
why one of the road’s best through trains should have halted until assistance
should come from the nearest roundhouse.
“The fireman lost his rake,” was the somewhat perfunctory report that the
G. M.’s secretary returned to him. But if that young man thought that his
boss was going to be satisfied with that report, he was mistaken, decidedly.
“Bring the fireman to me,” commanded the chief.

That fireman was not of the sort that is easily feazed. He stood stockily and
in a low voice gave a very circumstantial explanation of the whole
occurrence. It seemed that he had missed the rake that morning when they
had started out from the yard roundhouse to take the Limited down over the
division. He was just going back for another, when they were called to lend
a hand at a small yard wreck. When they were done shoving and bunting
there, they had no time to run back to the roundhouse and get a rake. They
had barely enough time to get to the passenger station for the engine
change. That was a good story, with a deal of explanation, and the fireman
thought that the G. M. must be impressed with it.
The G. M. was not in the least impressed. He looked the coal shover up and
down, from head to feet, then said:
“How about those seven freights that you passed laid out on sidings? You
could have forced any one of those engineers to lend you his rake rather
than lay out this train.”
The effect of that slight observation from the G. M.’s car was not lost on a
man on the system. The new man made good. From that time forward word
went out to the far corners of his road that the “new boss” knew railroading;
that he had four eyes in his head and that you had to be pretty careful what
sort of a story you put up to him. Calculate, if you can, in dollars and cents
the moral effect of such a stand upon the rank and file of the king’s army.
The general manager, as we have already said, must know men.

You are back with your first general manager again. He is tired of all these
problems, and yet he is now turning to another. This is formally entitled the
Situation. It is placed upon his big desk every morning. It is a morning
paper, if you please, prepared for a single reader. The general manager is
“Old Subscriber,” in good measure; and if the paper lacks both editorials
and advertising, it is none the less interesting to its star reader. Its news is as
exclusive as its reader, and exclusively the news of his system.
By it he knows first of the traffic that has been handled in twenty-four
hours, by cars and by trains. He knows by it the reserve forces of the

railroad, in cars and in locomotives, and just where they are located. By the
Situation, he can discover the over-massing of equipment upon one
division, the shortage upon another. After that he can begin to give orders to
his general superintendents and his superintendents of transportation—these
last the men who are directly responsible for car movement—toward
bringing a better balance between traffic and equipment. The Situation is on
his desk at ten o’clock in the morning. By eleven, whole brigades of
locomotives may be under way, moving from their stalls in some giant
roundhouse out toward another division whose superintendent is fairly
shrieking for power.
But the Situation tells more than merely this. It goes into history, and in its
own cold-blooded fashion tells what the road is doing by comparison. It
gives weather conditions and traffic for the corresponding day, one year,
two years, three years, five years before; and the general manager will do
well if he avoids giving mere cursory examination of such tables. The
Situation not only notes weather conditions, it brings to the eyes of the man
whom we have called king in railroad operation the more important train
delays and the reasons that have caused them. Every fact or incident that
may affect the traffic or the operation of the road is noted in its fine-filled
pages. It is in every way a guide and a barometer of the condition of a great
property up to the very hour that the general manager comes to his desk.
But the Situation does not tell the entire story. Out in the nearest passenger
yard is a big private-car, almost as handsome and as well equipped as that
of the president of the road, and that car is in service as many days as it
stands idle there upon the siding. This man has 4,000 miles of railroad
empire in his domain; there are nearly 70,000 faithful privates for his army.
To cover that territory means constant travel. There are side-lines of less
importance that sometimes do not see him for six months at a time.
Of less importance, did we say? We had better not let him hear us breathe
that, for there are men in his employ who remember the first council of the
operating department staff after this G. M. came to the road. They were
gathered there for the time-table meeting—a general superintendent, a
whole round dozen of division superintendents, serious traffic-minded folk
from the passenger department, an auxiliary corps of chief clerks and
stenographers. Division by division, the passenger time-table problem was

adjusted. This superintendent asked a little more running time, for they
were putting in a cluster of new bridges, which made slow orders necessary;
another was thereupon forced to shorten his schedule, for the total running
time between main-line terminals of a road in hot competitive territory
could not be increased a single sixty seconds. Finally, after a vast amount of
argument, the main-line divisions were settled, and attention was given to
the side-lines. The first of these ran through a section purely rural, but there
was not a busier 500 miles of single track in the East.
The general superintendent called attention to it, with a laugh.
“We’ll now tackle the hoejack,” said he.
It was an old joke, and the division heads began to laugh. They stopped
laughing the next instant. The new general manager was on his feet and
pounding thunderously upon his table top. His face was crimson, as he
demanded attention.
“Gentlemen,” said he, scathingly, “the great railroad from which I have had
the honor to come has prided itself upon being a standard railroad. Its
standard is universal wherever its cars and engines run, and its jurisdiction
extends. Some of its lines are the busiest traffic-haulers in the land. The
four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough for the great
volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that press upon their rails.
There are some side-lines, with but two or three trains a day—side-lines
that reach the main-line only through other branches. But there are no
hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters upon that system. Hereafter
there are to be none upon this. The man who is hauling a train on the most
remote corner of this railroad is doing its work quite as much as the biggest
trainmaster here at the terminal. I trust you follow me?”
They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally
accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by
inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the
railroads of the land.
But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular side-
line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us quite aside
he tells it to us:

“The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they
got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the
tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute on
the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. ‘Are you the general manager of this
’ere road?’ he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle bucolic soul,
and he says ‘yes,’ and offers him a real cigar. But the gentle bucolic doesn’t
smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up and says, ‘Well, General,
here’s somethin’ fer ye,’ and shoves a paper with a big red seal into the
boss’s hand.
“It seems that up in that neck o’ woods they get grade crossings removed as
a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the constable
served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight for a hearing
on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in West
Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent
for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn’t enough traffic
over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we never had
an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in use. And at that
the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way they rubbed it into
him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a decent way—first
sent a committee down to the division superintendent to request that
flagman.
“He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got
there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing
was right ‘in the heart of the community,’ as they put it themselves, and the
big citizens’ houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our right-of-way.
Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town Hall, the boss
starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in the morning
before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with their rods and
sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front lawns. And the next
thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the flower-beds. There
hadn’t been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook since the last time
Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk hustled down to the
depot. The agent didn’t ease their minds. The boss wasn’t working hand in
glove with him.

“When the night came for the big time at the Town Hall, it was a regular
‘standing-room only’ business. The boss kept in the background while the
great minds of the township did their best. When it came his turn he
clamped across the platform like an avenging angel. He is a big fellow, and
that night he looked seven-foot-six, as he stuck his long fingers out over
that intelligent body politic and asked what it meant by trying to cow the
only first-class railroad that had ever had enough energy to put its rails
down in that township. Then he calls up an engineer from our construction
department.
“‘Mr. Blinkins,’ he says, in a voice that you could have heard across the
public square, ‘this railroad has decided to temporize no longer in this
highway crossing situation on its lines. How much will it cost to put a
subway under our track at this crossing?’
“The engineer dove into his drawings and said: ‘It’ll be quite a big job, and
we’ll have to cut quite a way into some of the front yards to get the
foundations for our abutments. My estimate of the cost of the proposed
improvement is $160,000.’
“Then it was the boss’s turn again. ‘Under the state law, work on abolishing
a grade crossing begins by the railroad expressing its willingness,’ he told
them. ‘The cost is divided—half being borne by the railroad, the other half
being divided between the township and the State. West Lyndonbrook’s
share will reach $40,000.’ Forty thousand dollars—why $40,000 would
have built either the new union school or the waterworks that that burg had
been hankering for and thought it couldn’t afford. When the boss breathed
about that $40,000 it started the old feuds between the waterworks crowd
and the school crowd. They forgot all about the crossing and our sin-filled
railroad, and got to hammering anew on the old issue. We slinked out while
they were still at it—had the car hooked on to the rear of thirty-eight and
got started while the oratory was taking a fresh turn.
“The boss? The boss is a diplomat. That’s how he keeps his job.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE SUPERINTENDENT
His Headship of the Transportation
Organism—His Manner of Dealing
with an Offended Shipper—His
Manner with Commuters—His Manner
with a Spiteful “Kicker”—A Dishonest
Conductor who had a “Pull”—A
System of Demerits for Employees—
Dealing with Drunkards—With
Selfish and Covetous Men.

I F the general manager is king in modern railroad operation, the division
superintendent is not less than prince. His principality is no mean state. It
may consist of some 500 miles of what he modestly admits is the “best sort
of railroad in all this land”; or it may be a little stretch of 100 miles, or even
less, losing its way back among the hills; but it is a principality, and his rule
is undisputed. If ever it be questioned, it will then be high time for him to
abdicate.
Just as the division is the physical unit of railroad operation, so is its
superintendent the human unit. By him the transportation organism stands
or falls. If it stands, he is able to go forward; the path from his door leads to
the general manager’s office. If it falls—Well, there is to-day in Central
Illinois a gray-haired station-agent who once held his own principality—
4,000 men to take his orders.
“We only discharge for disobedience or dishonesty,” said the president of
that railroad at the time he signed the order reducing the prince to the ranks.
“When we fail to get the real measure of a man, it is our fault, not his. We
never turn out a man who has done his level best for us.”

This man is superintendent of one of the most prosperous of the trunk-line
railroads that reach the metropolis by stretching their rails across New
Jersey. His is a “terminal division,” so called, and he has assumed command
of one of the busiest city gates in all America. His railroad day begins
almost as soon as he is awake. There is a telegraph outfit in the corner of his
bedroom, and as he dresses and shaves he listens mechanically to its
scoldings—to the gossip of the division. It comes as casually to his ear as
the prattle of his children; the key began to be music to him long before he
left the little yellow depot where he first began to be a railroader.
“They’re in pretty good shape this morning, John,” laughs his wife. She,
too, has been listening half unconsciously to the gossip of the wire. Years
ago she “stood her trick” with her husband back in that little yellow depot.
“Got a coal train in the ditch up the other side of Greyport,” is his reply.
“We’ll rip out that nasty cross-over up there some day, when the big boss
wakes up to the cash we’ve put out in wrecks at GP.”
“Going up there?”
“Not this morning, Maggie,” he laughs. “I’ve a committee from the firemen
coming in to see me. They’re nagging for a raise.” He lowers his voice, as if
he almost thought that the walls had ears. “It’s beginning to grind the boys,
too—butter 48 cents, eggs 45, and all their hungry kiddies. But the big boss
—whew!”
He whistles, goes to his key, cuts in, and begins to give orders to the
wrecking-boss up at Greyport.
“Steady, Jim,” he says, in a low voice. “You’ve got all day on that job if you
need it, only watch out for the number two track with your crane. We can’t
risk a side-swipe on one of our pretty trains. We’re detouring the east-bound
passengers over the Central. How’s Hinckley?”
He closes the circuit softly.
“Poor Hinckley,” he says gently. “Do you remember, Maggie? He was
married the same summer we were.”

Through with his breakfast, he hurries down to the station, and before he
slips aboard the suburban train that is to carry him in to his Jersey City
office, he has had the wire again into Greyport. They are getting things
cleaned up there a bit; a baggage-car has been sent up with a special engine
for Hinckley. The superintendent turns from these. One of the little trains
that come out from town in the dusk of early dawn has brought a leather
bag filled with mail. He runs through it as his train slips across the
meadows. By the time he is in his roomy office it is ready to be answered, a
pencilled memorandum on each is sufficient guide for his chief clerk.
Throughout the morning his calendar is a crowded thing. There is a constant
line of restless men sitting on the long bench just without the guarded rail of
the outside office. One by one these are called; they disappear behind
swinging baize doors to stand in front of the superintendent.
For the first of these there is a smile—the caller is a big shipper, big enough
to go to the head of the line and have instant access to the boss. This shipper
is the sort who gives the railroad tonnage in trainload lots. He is hot. He
cannot get cars. He will begin to route over the Triple B——, even though
his siding facilities are wrong for it. They’ll dig him out the cars he needs,
they have folks over there who make it their business to find cars. And
while he is on the subject it seems pretty bad to have stuff coming twelve
and fourteen days through from Chicago. Perhaps he’d better be getting
after the Commission. The shipper is very hot. He expatiates upon his
wrongs, hammers upon the superintendent’s desk, grows scarlet in his
heavy face.
The superintendent’s smile never wavers. He gives close attention, does not
grow excited. A few orders over the telephone, a word of explanation, the
shipper smiles now. Down in his heart he begins to be sorry that he made
these threats about the Triple B——.
That is getting traffic, you say, and the superintendent is an operating man.
You are a bit wrong there. The superintendent is a railroad man and that
means that any part of the railroad business is his business. There is a man,
by name A. H. Smith, who is to-day operating vice-president of the New
York Central system, who held to that idea from the beginning. In the
beginning, Smith was the superintendent of a little side-tracked division of

the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern which centred in at Hillsdale,
Michigan. It was a strong competitive territory, and Smith found that the
traffic that came to his road was so slight that it did not take a great deal of
his time to move it. The superintendents before him had had a lot of time to
speed their fast horses and fuss around their gardens. Not so with Smith. He
went into the business of making traffic. It was a decade that took keen
delight in singing societies, and Smith’s robust voice allied itself to every
choir of importance in three counties. He sang himself into personal
popularity, he sang traffic into coming over the Michigan Southern. After a
while, the folks over in the general offices at Cleveland began to take
notice. The traffic folks were the first to notice, after that—well, a long
story’s short when you know that Smith found himself on a short cut to his
present job.
The superintendent’s smile remains while a solemn-faced delegation of
commuters files into his room. These grave folk have been coming into
town on the 8:52 almost since the road first laid its rails. It is part of their
lives, and they fondly imagine that it is a big part of the road’s—that the
twenty-hour train over the mountains to Chicago is a matter of considerably
less importance than the 8:52. The superintendent broadens his bland smile
and rings for his train sheets. There are other trains than the 8:52 coming
into that terminal—almost a train a minute from a little before eight o’clock
until half-past nine. The superintendent’s finger runs for corroboration over
the train sheets. Twenty-five days this month when 94 per cent of his
suburban trains come under the protection of the big shed of the terminal
right on the scheduled moment—how was that for consistency of
operation?
The commuters’ committee seem a little dazed. Individually, the men are
expert on a good many things—printing, indictments, breakfast foods,
patents, wholesale feathers; but consistency of train operation and train
sheets are a bit confusing.
“The 8:52 has been late a whole lot recently,” doggedly affirms the
chairman. “Last Thursday we were pretty near fifteen minutes late.”
A gleam of triumph comes into the superintendent’s eye. He fumbles anew
among the flimsy train sheets. His forefinger alights upon a line of the

typewritten copy.
“Last Thursday,” he comments, “you can see that we were all laid out by
the Hackensack River draw. A schooner filled with brick got caught by the
ebb tide and laid down on us in the open draw. What you want to see,
gentlemen, is the Treasury departments down at Washington. It is
outrageous that the antiquated navigation laws should be allowed to hold up
business in that way.”
The committee confer among themselves and decide to make the life of the
Secretary of the Treasury uncomfortable for a while.
“You cannot hope for anything better with that Hackensack Bridge,” urges
the superintendent almost malevolently.
He does not tell them, but the boys out on the line know his own experience
with the Hackensack River bridge. Last December and just in the evening
rush-hours they found that the cabin that stands perched at the top of the
trussed draw was afire. The trains bringing home the tired suburbanites
were beginning to line up back of the fire for solid miles. The tired
suburbanites were saying things about this particular railroad. It chanced
that this superintendent was a passenger on one of the trains. He went
forward to the blaze. The towerman had beat a retreat. The superintendent
started to climb up the ice-covered ladder tower toward the burning cabin.
The towerman halted him. The wiry superintendent turned upon him with a
look of infinite scorn:
“We’ve got to hand signal those trains across here—there’s thousands of
folks out here in the meadows that we can’t let miss their supper—”
“I’ve got a family—” began the towerman.
“That’s all right. I’ll signal these across.”
“That ain’t it, boss. Back o’ th’ cabin’s the gasolene tanks, the stuff for
openin’ th’ draw.”
The superintendent gave a low whistle.
“That settles it,” he said. “We’ve got to put this fire out. I can’t risk cutting
this draw out of service.”

It is a matter of record on that railroad that he climbed alone to the top of
the draw and began to put out the fire with his own stout endeavors. He was
not alone for long. Inspired by him, the men that gathered there—engineers,
firemen, trainmen, and conductors, crawled up upon that freezing cold draw
and lent him their efforts. In a half-hour the fire was out, and the stalled
trains were moving again.
This, then, is the measure of the man who sits across the wide office table
from you. The mollified commuters are marching out.
“You don’t encourage kicking?” you ask.
“We don’t discourage it,” he replied. He is reminded of a story and tells it to
you.
“When they made Blank superintendent over there at Broad Street, in
Philadelphia, he went in to make a clean record. He called his chief clerk to
him. ‘Mind you, if you hear kicks, don’t let them get in one ear and out the
other. You bring them in here and we’ll investigate.’ In three days the chief
clerk was busy. ‘Lots of trouble with the suburban traffic to-day,’ he would
say. ‘Wilmington train laid out at Grey’s Ferry; third day that’s happened.’
‘Ugly trainman on the main line wouldn’t close the rear doors. That
fellow’s unpopular.’ ‘Not enough equipment on the Central division.’ ‘No
fire in the stove at Lenden Road,’—a long string of commuter troubles.
After Blank had heard this for a week he began to get nervous. He called
his chief clerk to him. ‘See here,’ he demanded, ‘what’s the matter with our
service? Where are all these kicks coming in from?’ The chief clerk looked
at him—never a snicker. ‘You said you wanted the kicks,’ he replied. ‘Well,
I’ve been letting the head barber downstairs shave me after he was done
with the commuters. He gets every one of the howls.’”
Sometimes the kicks represent a serious side of the superintendent’s
problem. A while ago a man came to a railroad superintendent in Boston
and demanded that a certain ticket-examiner in the passenger terminal be
dismissed. There had been some sort of dispute and the man insisted that
the ticket-examiner be discharged, nothing less. The ticket-examiner, on his
part, told a pretty fair sort of story. Moreover, he said that if in the heat of
the dispute he had transgressed on good manners he was frankly sorry and
that it would not happen again. Back of all that he had a good record: no

complaints had ever before been registered against him. The superintendent
then wrote a letter to the man who had complained and stated that the
offending ticket-examiner had been reprimanded and that the offence would
probably not be repeated.

The conductor is a high type of railroad employee

The engineer—oil-can in hand—is
forever fussing at his machine

Railroad responsibility does not end
even with the track walker

The fireman has a hard job and a steady one

That did not satisfy the man who complained. He was of the sort that are
supposed to have a “pull,” and he threatened to use his pull if the ticket-
examiner were not discharged. He refused to accept apologies or
explanations. He said he was hot. So was the superintendent. He keenly
resented anything that approached interference with his discipline, and he
refused to discharge his employee. Pressure was exerted, the pull was doing
its fine work. The superintendent was—like every other railroad
superintendent in this land—a fine diplomat. He took the man from the train
gate in the terminal and gave him an equally good job in a city a hundred
miles distant from Boston. He flattered himself that he had seen the last of
the man with the pull.

Not a bit of it. That brisk soul chanced to pass through the distant town, and
gasped at sight of the former ticket-examiner still drawing pay from the
railroad. He hastened into the superintendent’s office in Boston and
demanded that the subterfuge end—that the man be actually discharged
from the road’s employ. The superintendent looked at him coolly, not
speaking. The man again threatened his pull. The railroad boss looked at
him through slitted eyes. It was a real crisis for him. His diplomatic smile
was ready. He pointed with his lean forefinger toward the door.
“The case is closed. Good-morning,” was all he said.
After that he began wondering what road would have him after that pull
was exerted. He wondered for a day, for a week, then a month. Then he
forgot the occurrence. The pull, like many other sorts of threats, was thin
air.
Of a different sort was the problem that confronted a superintendent in
Chicago. On a certain suburban train for many years the conductor had
remained with an unchanged run. Gossip had come into the super’s office
that this conductor was systematically stealing from the company. The boss
started a quiet investigation. The conductor with apparently no other
income than his $3 a day, had purchased a neat home in the suburbs, had
sent his boy to Yale, his girl to Vassar. That was Thrift, with a capital T. The
superintendent took the case sharply in hand and summoned the conductor
before him. He was one of the older sort, gray-haired, kind-faced.
“Johnson,” said the boss, “you’ve been with the road a long time and never
had a vacation. I want you to lay off a month and run over to either coast.
I’ll get the transportation for you.”
Johnson protested. He belonged to a generation of railroaders that was not
educated to vacations. The superintendent insisted and had his way, as
superintendents generally do. Johnson started on his vacation, and a
substitute, knowing nothing of the real situation, replaced him. The returns
from that daily run doubled, and the superintendent knew that he was right.
Nowadays when a railroad finds that a conductor is stealing, it invokes the
majesty of the Interstate Commerce Law and prepares to hurry him off
toward a Federal prison. In that day they were content to fire Johnson; that

was sufficient disgrace to the old man. The railroad could not begin to get
back the money that had been trickling out throughout the long years.
But Johnson showed fight. His was an important train in the Chicago
suburban service, and his passengers were important merchants and
manufacturers—big shippers. They got together, under Johnson’s
supervision, and made the hair on the heads of the traffic men turn gray.
Those fellows were Johnson’s friends, and they were not going to see the N
—— turn out a faithful employee. Johnson said that he had not stolen, and
Johnson was not the sort to lie. It might do the N—— good to send some
tonnage over to the M——. The traffic department and the operating locked
horns, as ofttimes they do on roads, both big and little. Traffic won. The
superintendent lost, Johnson went back to his job, and the road put on a
checking system that made its conductors wonder if they had held convict
records.
That case was an exception. There are not many superintendents who are
compelled to back water, mighty few Johnsons among the thousands of
conductors across the land.
We are still in that superintendent’s office in Jersey City. The boss’s smile is
gone. A big railroader just in from the line, his jeans covered with engine
grease, shuffles into the place and stands before the super, hat in hand, like
a naughty boy ready to be whipped. The superintendent speaks in a few low
sentences to him, makes a notation on an envelope. The big man trembles in
front of the little. A bit of a smile comes to the lips of the boss.
“You think of the wife and the kiddies first next time,” he says. “Good-bye
and good luck to you. I’m not much for lecturings,” he adds, after the man
has gone. A little later he begins to explain. “That big fellow had to be
disciplined. There was no two ways about it for either of us. He’s an engine-
man, got a good train, too; but he’s been running signals. We’ve caught him
twice on test. We can’t stand for that. Suppose we have a nasty smash and
the coroner’s jury begins to ask nosey questions? I had to put black on his
envelope.”
He goes into further detail. In other days he would have been forced, in
order to uphold his discipline, to suspend the engineer for from five days to
two weeks—the punishment preceding discharge. There was a possibility—

disagreeable to the superintendent—that the engineer’s family might have
been crowded for sufficient food for a fortnight. Some of those fellows live
pretty close to the proposition all the while. Nowadays the offender is
demerited—once again like the schoolboy. That is what the superintendent
meant by that reference to the envelope, the road’s record of the man’s
service with it.
Sixty demerits—dismissed. That’s the rule of one big road. But the record
does not always continue to be negative. Its positive side rests in the fact
that for every month a man keeps his envelope clear five demerits are taken
from the black side of his envelope. A trainman might have forty-five
demerits against him, be on the narrow edge of discharge, and in eleven
months, after turning the new leaf, have as clean a sheet as the best man on
the division. This is as it should be. The demerit plan—often called the
“Brown system”—represents the triumph of modern railroad operation over
the old.
The superintendent may have all the advantages of a time-tried disciple and
a modern record system; have the prestige and the reputation that come
from the operation of 500 miles of railroad, and still have a hard row to hoe.
Out in the Middle West there was, until recently, a stretch of what was
known as “booze railroad.” It was a division where reputations and records
alike counted for naught, where discipline was a mockery. Train-crews went
from their runs direct to saloons and, what was a deal worse, began their
day’s work within them. The wreck record of that division that went
forward to the State Commission was appalling—and half the wrecks were
not reported. Yardmasters were busy day after day stowing away damaged
equipment far from the curious eyes of passengers—the wrecking crews
were hammering for big over-time pay. It was a thoroughly demoralized
stretch of railroad.
The distressed president of the system sent East for a superintendent who
had a reputation. He thought he had his man. The new broom was a book-
of-rules man. He had a quarter of his operating force laid off all the time, to
go before him. He was a man fond of words, and he lectured those old
fellows as if they had been school children. He might have done quite as
well with his division if he had been operating it from Kamchatka. The men
began to call their rule-books the “Joe Millers.”

The superintendent got mad and was lost—hopelessly. He began
discharging right and left, and the wrath of the gods and of the brotherhoods
(the great labor unions of the railroads), was upon him. The road was
threatened with a big strike at the very time that it could least afford it. He
avoided that strike only by acceding to the demand of the brotherhood
chiefs that the superintendent’s head be given to them on a silver platter.
After that the “Man Without a Country” was in a more enviable position.
There was not a railroad in the country that dared employ him, despite his
excellent technical training. He drifted up into Canada, got a job running a
state-operated line. He held that job less than a year. He was murdered of a
winter’s night in a shadowy railroad yard, shot down by a discharged train
hand.
The grim situation on the “booze division” grew much worse. The president
of that system gave the matter his keen personal attention; he began
scouring the entire width of the land for material, without much success.
When he was thoroughly discouraged, a raw-boned trainmaster from a far
corner of the demoralized division applied for the job of superintendent; he
reckoned he could handle the situation. He had caught the president
unawares standing outside of his private car. The president told him that he
was superintendent.
“There was something in Matt’s eye that took me,” he confessed afterwards.
“You do see something in a man’s eye now and then that beats a whole
barrel of references.”
So Matt Jones (that is nothing like his real name), took up the nastiest
operating proposition in the country. He did not lecture nor discharge, not
he; but the men knew that there was a boss behind the super’s desk. The
fellows who began trifling with the new broom were down in his office the
next morning. Jones selected the leading spirit; he had the advantage of
knowing him.
“Pete,” he said in a quiet way, “you’ve been drinking. It doesn’t go. I’m not
going to discharge you,”—he gave grim thought to the fate of his
predecessor—“but in thirty days you are going to send in your resignation
voluntarily and leave our service.”

The man protested. He had not been drinking; and Matt Jones had better not
try that game anyway. The superintendent wished him a pleasant good-
morning and bowed him out of the office.
In five days the engineer was back, uncalled. The superintendent saw him,
even though he had no more to say than he had not been drinking; that is, he
had quit drinking long ago. In ten days he was back again. This time he
admitted that he had been drinking up to the day that Matt Jones took
office. The superintendent said nothing. He bowed the engineer out again. A
month is a short thing at the best. At the end of the twenty-second day, the
engineer again found his way to the superintendent’s office. He seemed like
a man who had been through a sickness. Big human that he was, he began
crying at the sight of the man who was a real boss.
“For God’s sake, Matt, don’t forget the old days up on the branch. I can’t
get out from the old road,” he said.
“I gave you thirty days’ chance to get on another road,” was all the
satisfaction that he got.
But on the thirtieth day the engineer went to work with a clean envelope
and the new superintendent had an ally of no mean strength. The patient
grinding won; complete victory was only a question of time; the president
five hundred miles away began to notice. You may say what you want,
railroad executives are born, not made. This reads like romance, but it is
truth. Matt Jones is to-day general manager of that system, and a little while
ago a New York paper said he was going to take charge of one of the big
transcontinental that needs a firm hand at its reins.
This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a
clean stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the
transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling it.
The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where
headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local reporters
each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the metropolitan
district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of railroaders; up
here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real to the folk of half a
dozen populous counties than is the president of the road, a stuffy
gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen years to the

dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the townspeople to
thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M. running through their
“lovely little city.”
You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be
entirely disappointed.
“I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the wire,” he
tells you quietly. “We’ve organization on this stretch of line.” He says this
with a bit of pride. “We have men and we have system. My train-masters
are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected to organize beneath
them.”
Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry
for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters
his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on the
line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards. After that he
talks over the long-distance ’phone with the G. M., four hundred miles
away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters, just as the
summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions and at
terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the ’phone is
rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made
Congress pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That bill
promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit by
it.
The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and
speaks to his chief clerk.
“W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get
rattled,” he says.
That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his three
hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this
superintendent’s heart. If it were Europe—the troops would be drawn out,
all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of the
royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But it is not
Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because it so
excessively differs from Europe.

Only the military aides of the President lament upon the informality of his
travel. Some time since a great executive was making the familiar loop
throughout the West. The superintendent of a division of line the far side of
the Missouri was a worrier, and was personally watching the progress. In
order to facilitate rear platform oratory the President’s cars were placed at
the rear of a train that hardly ranked as express. Between towns the delays
grew frequent and a stuffy little aide in uniform protested to the
superintendent.
“Look a’ here, sir,” he said stiffly, “why don’t you let these other trains up
the line wait?” The division was single-track. “You know this is the
President’s train.”
A twinkle came into the super’s eye.
“You’re wrong,” he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. “This is
not the President’s special. This is train number 67 of the B—— main line,
and she hasn’t many more rights on the time-card than a gravel limited.
Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon Limited—
there’s some train, sir. They wouldn’t lay her out. She’s double-extra first-
class all the way through to the coast.”
The point of that was not lost.
An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr.
Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The
superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch of
line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection engine.
“Dee-lighted,” said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the big
cab. The superintendent wondered what he’d think of that nifty stretch of
track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as he
was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle’s “French
Revolution” out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way from Utica
to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along thereafter without
that superintendent’s vote.

All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad
presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of the
best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince grows
old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King. When such
tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee—the men who
gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster’s office—to talk in
whispers.
Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world—it is near kingdom in
itself—miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight yards,
tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes eight
months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For years there
reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a great railroad
system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word to be called
superintendent. They called him “the lion” and did not misuse that word
either. He was a lion, guardian of a great railroad gate, a stern old lion
whose word and whose law were unquestioned.
But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer office
began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder who the
new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable—one an
assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other holding
similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to assume
greater honor, to sit in command at the lion’s great desk.
That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the whisperings
of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of them would
creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone there, head in
hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents gained courage;
they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At other times they
locked horns.
They locked horns over one great question. It was not operation that set
them at odds, not a vexing practical question of how some congested yard
might be lanced so that traffic should flow the more freely, or a main line
section be aided to give a greater daily tonnage. Nothing of that sort for the
two ambitious assistants.

A new pony inspection engine, with an observation room built forward over
the boiler—just the sort that Col. Roosevelt had once used as a reading-
room—was to be built for the division, and each assistant thought that he
needed that engine for the dignity of his job. Each in turn went before the
lion and stated his claims for the possession of the pretty toy. The old man
listened with grave dignity. A week later he sent down to the master
mechanic at the big Depew shops and had him deliver a brand new hand-
car, with his compliments, to each.
The pony-engine went into the roundhouse until the real Prince should
come. Then he sat long hours alone at his desk once more.
Finally they brought a man to him, a fine, upstanding man. The lion rose
from his comfy old chair and gave greeting to the newcomer.
“I’m glad to see you,” was all he said; but to the general manager, who had
come up from New York, his eyes seemed to ask: “You’ve brought the right
man here at last?” He turned to the stranger.
“Would you like a pony engine to get over the division?” was his question.
“I’m willing to go to hell, and go in a caboose,” laughed the stranger.
The old superintendent grasped him by the hand.
“Thank God, they’ve sent a real man to be superintendent at Buffalo,” was
all he said. That was the only recognition that he gave to one who since has
become one of the master railroaders of America, but in that moment the act
of succession had been consummated.

CHAPTER XIV

OPERATING THE RAILROAD
Authority of the Chief Clerk and That of
the Assistant Superintendent—
Responsibilities of Engineers, Firemen,
Master Mechanic, Train-master,
Train-despatcher—Arranging the
Time-table—Fundamental Rules of
Operation—Signals—Selecting Engine
and Cars for a Train—Clerical Work
of Conductors—A Trip with the
Conductor—The Despatcher’s
Authority—Signals Along the Line—
Maintenance of Way—Superintendent
of Bridges and Buildings—Road-
master—Section Boss.

T HE administration of the division runs quite naturally into several
channels. The routine of the work, the making and filing of records and
reports, the handling of the mass of correspondence that must constantly
arise, is usually in the hands of a chief clerk, who has control over the office
force at division headquarters. If there is an assistant superintendent, the
chief clerk will divide responsibility with him, the theory at all times being
to cut off the detail wherever possible. This office work is not radically
different from the office management of any other large business. Its clerks
are about the only unorganized force in railroad employ.
If the management of the road is of the divisional type, the superintendent
of course is a more important executive than if it is of the departmental
type. In either of these cases, as we have seen, he will probably have at least
partial authority over the engineer of maintenance of way, whose force

keeps the line and track structures in full repair, and also looks after
ordinary construction work along the division. In the road of divisional
type, he will also have partial authority over the master mechanic, in charge
of the shops and roundhouses and the locomotives of the division. These
last are regarded by the railroad as part of its machinery, like the planers
and drills in the shops themselves; and for the care and operation of the
locomotives the engineers and firemen are held responsible to the
mechanical department. This is the case even upon those railroads where,
under the departmental system, the superintendent has no direct authority
over the master mechanic upon his division. For the conduct of the trains
which their locomotives pull, both engineers and firemen are directly
responsible to the operating department. The master mechanic simply sees
to it that the railroad’s property is maintained to a certain degree of
efficiency and that the man who operates the locomotives is capable from
every point of view. A reasonable amount of deterioration is expected, and
each locomotive is expected to turn in to the shops for inspection,
overhauling and repairs, at certain stated intervals.
The superintendent has absolute authority over the two officials who are
chiefly interested in the conduct of the trains over the division—the train-
master and the train-despatcher. The first of these two officers, who must
dove-tail their work both night and day, has the assignment of the train
crews. His opinion will be called for whenever the vexed questions of
seniority and promotion arise, and he will be asked to help to plan all extra
or special freight and passenger trains. To show how this is done brings us
close to the question of schedules, and we may pause for a moment to
consider how this important phase of the railroad’s operating is builded
together.
That time-table that you have just pulled from the folder rack seems at first
glance an interminable mass of meaningless figures; yet when you come to
find your journey upon it, it quickly simplifies itself, and you begin to
marvel at the relation the figures bear to one another, how easily you may
pick your course through the long columns of numerals. The more extensive
time-tables that the railroad employees carry are quite as simple, and yet
they are great feats of typographical composition. In reality, both these
forms of printed time-tables are but transcripts of the real time-table of the
division, which is kept set out upon a great board.

This board is ruled in two directions. The regularly spaced intervals in one
direction are marked as time, and represent time—one entire day of twenty-
four hours. In the other direction of the board the stations are spaced in
proportion to their actual spacing upon the line.
The reproduction of a portion of such a board for an imaginary division of a
railroad will illustrate. This line runs from Somerset to Rockville, 120
miles; and portions of it are double-tracked, the rest single-track, as shown
at the top of the diagram. On the double-track, trains going in the same
direction may pass one another only at the vertical lines, which represent
station passing sidings, and on the single-track sections this rule holds, with
the additional one, of course, that trains running in opposite directions may
also pass one another at the vertical station lines. For economy of room
only the seven hours from six o’clock in the morning until one o’clock in
the afternoon are shown here. Following an old-time practice, odd numbers
will represent up-bound trains, from Somerset to Rockville; even numbers,
the down trains.
So we have an early morning accommodation passenger train, No. 1,
leaving Rockville at 6:10 o’clock and proceeding at a leisurely rate of about
twenty miles an hour (which makes allowances for local stops) all the way
to Somerset at the far end of the division, which it is due to reach at 11:45
a. m. It is halted for any length of time only at Honeytown, where upbound
No. 8—local accommodation—and upbound No. 6—fast express—will
pass it. At 6:20 o’clock an upbound local accommodation of the same
nature as No. 1, and hence known as No. 2, leaves Somerset and, halting
only at Robbins’s Corners to permit the fast upbound No. 6 to overhaul and
pass it, reaches Rockville at 1 P. M. Train No. 31, which follows No. 1 out
of Rockville forty minutes later, is a milk train, and so must have a liberal
allowance for stops. It proceeds only as far as Stoneville, where the dairy
country ends, stops there long enough to turn and to water the engine, and
then returns to Rockville as No. 32. Train No. 117 is a way-freight, and still
slower. So it follows the milk-train. It is known as a “low-class” train by the
railroaders. It must wait everywhere for better class trains to pass it. Train
No. 118 is the same class of train, proceeding in the opposing direction.
Train No. 5 is a down express.

Larger Image

How the real time table of the division looks—the one used in
headquarters

Sometimes unforeseen demands of traffic necessitate the running of extra
trains, and these may be strung across the board. This board, in reality, has
all its trains placed upon it by strings and pins, to admit of the constant
changes that the schedules are always undergoing, and the addition of a new
train is a quick proceeding. As a matter of fact, a skilled train-master or
despatcher will rarely take the time actually to string an extra train. He
carries the schedule too completely in his head to admit of such a necessity.
But the extra train is best placed following, as a second section, some good
passenger train, as indicated on the diagram. The regular train will then
carry signals showing that it is followed on this particular day. While the

train orders protect its movement in any event, as will be shown in a
moment, the billing of the extra train as a second section is less of an upset
to the regular operation of the division. Practised operating men found years
ago that the fewer deviations made from the regular programme of the day,
the higher the proportion of safety arose.
Now you begin to see the use of the train-despatcher. If the unforeseen
never came to pass upon the railroad, instead of coming to pass nearly
every hour, there might be no need of that officer. Each engineer, each
conductor, each station agent would have his complete time-tables, and the
road would run every day in full accordance with them. That was the very
earliest and the most primitive way of operating railroads. Almost as early
the need arose of having a special direction over the operation of the trains.
Emergencies arose daily. Trains were often late; storms beat down upon the
line; the snow covered its rails; what might have been, according to the
time-card, an orderly operation of line, became chaos. If a train was ordered
by schedule to meet a train bound in the opposite direction at P——, it
might wait there for long hours, not knowing that the other engine was
broken down at A——.
The invention of the telegraph and its almost instant application to the
railroad service made such special direction possible. So now we find the
explicit directions of the schedule supplemented by even more explicit
directions from the train-despatcher at the head of the train movements
upon each division. Briefly stated, it may be said that the engineer and the
conductor in charge of a train are first guided by the schedule, which, after
many revisions, has been compiled with great care, and in reference to
connecting lines, branches, and adjoining divisions. This schedule acts in
conjunction with certain simple fundamental rules of operation, the A, B, C
of every railroader. By one of these, trains of the same class bound north or
east are given precedence, all other things being equal, over trains bound
south or west. This rule is sometimes superseded by one giving right-of-
way to trains bound up the line—or the reverse.
High-class trains, like the fastest limited expresses, have precedence over
trains of graduated lower classes—down to the slow-moving heavy freights.
When any sort of train loses a certain length of time—usually half an hour
or more—it loses all rights that it might ever have had, and everything else

on the line has precedence over it. A train may lose time if it has to, but
there are never any circumstances that will justify it in running ahead of
time.
All this is the part of railroad operation which governs the relation of one
train to another. There are even simpler but not less vital rules that control
its own operation. In order that the engineer who is guiding the train, and
the conductor who shares the responsibility, may keep in touch with one
another, the device was adopted many years ago of having a cord run
through the cars of passenger trains to a bell signal in the cab of the engine.
This bell signal during recent years has given way to an improved form of
locomotive signal, sounded by means of compressed air in tubes throughout
the train, and operated in connection with the air-brake equipment.
The air-whistle, or bell cord-code of signals, is standard upon all American
railroads, and is as follows:
When the train is standing:

Two signals—start.
Three signals—back.
Four signals—apply or release air-brakes.
Five signals—call in flagman.

When the train is in motion:

Two signals—stop at once.
Three signals—stop at the next station.
Four signals—reduce speed.
Five signals—increase speed.

There also arises a necessity for communication between men who stand
outside the train and who seek to guide the movement of the locomotive.
This necessity has given rise to still another code, transmitted by the hands
—holding a flag, if possible—by day, and a lighted lantern at night. This
signal code follows:

Method of Transmitting Signal. Indication.

Swung across track. Stop.
Raised and lowered vertically. Proceed.
Swung vertically in a circle across the track:
When the train is standing— Back.
When train is in motion— Train has parted.
Swung horizontally in a circle:
When the train is standing— Apply air-brakes.
Held at arm’s length above head:
When the train is standing— Release air-brakes.
Any object waved violently by any person on
or near the track is a stop signal.

By use of his locomotive whistle, the engineer is enabled to acknowledge
these signals, as well as to signal upon his own initiative. His code is also a
standard in railroading. It follows:

—— A short blast.
———— A long blast.
—— Stop, apply brakes.
———— ———— Release brakes.
—— —— ———— Flagman go back and protect rear end of
———— ———— train.
—— ———— ————
————
———— ———— ————
Flagman return to train.
————
———— ———— ———— Train in motion, has parted.
Acknowledgment of signals, not
—— ——
otherwise provided for.
—— —— —— Standing train—back.
—— —— —— —— Call for signals.

———— —— —— Calls attention to following section.
———— ———— ——
Highway crossing signal.
——
Approaching stations, junctions or
————————
railroad crossings at grade.

A succession of short blasts is an alarm for persons on the track and calls
the attention of trainmen to danger ahead.
These signal codes operate fundamentally in connection with the essential
rules of schedule that we have already shown.
Suppose now that we consider the workings of all this system as it comes
down to actual practice in a single concrete instance. We are finding our
way to a big terminal yard in all the murkiness and cloudiness of very early
morning, and once again we hunt out that urbane soul, the yardmaster. He
holds in his hand the yellow tissue of an order from the despatcher of the
division. In the conciseness of telegraphy it tells him to start a third section
of train 118—through freight—at 6:15 o’clock. Just back of his little grimy
box of an office is the big sprawling roundhouse—a dozen freighters with
banked fires standing in the stalls, awaiting summons to work. The twelve
engines are divided into several classifications according to pulling strength
and speed, but the despatcher has designated the particular engine he wishes
for third-118, and he gets it—a big lanky puller—1847. She is chosen
chiefly because she has had the longest roundhouse rest, having brought in
a through freight from up the line, and having been received with engineer’s
report showing her to be in good running order, at five o’clock yesterday
afternoon. Before the 1847 slipped from the turntable into the waiting stall,
the hostlers and the wipers were at her. The hostlers had taken her over the
cinder-pit and cleaned out the fire-box. Then they went over her, cleaning
her, inch by inch, a mechanical inspector in their wake, testing and
sounding and checking every item in the engineer’s report which showed
1847 to be in good order at the end of his run with her. There was not much
chance left for any shirking of responsibility, no matter what might arise
upon the 1847 on any coming day.
We turn and watch the yardmaster once again. He has the roundhouse
foreman send one of the bright young boys who hang around his office

night and day, and who dream of that coming hour when they will handle an
1847 for themselves, to call the engineer and fireman, whose names are
posted “first out.” Or perhaps the telephone has come into play—in these
days in the smaller towns there is hardly a house too humble to have
receiver and transmitter hanging somewhere upon its walls. In any event the
engine-crew are supposed to stay home when off duty, unless especially
excused, and to live within reasonable distance—say a mile—of the
roundhouse.
The caller tells the engineer and fireman to report at the roundhouse at 5:45
a. m. At that hour the hostlers have made the 1847 fit for service. Her tender
has been filled with coal, her tanks with water, even her sand is packed
aboard the box that stands upon the boiler and is ready to help on slippery
rail and upgrade. The engineer makes keen inspection of the 1847 before he
moves her a single inch, makes sure with his keen and practised eye that she
is quite fit for service, pokes here and there and everywhere with his long-
spouted oil-can. At a minute or two after shop whistles have shrieked “six
o’clock” he pulls the 1847 out from the shadows of the roundhouse. He gets
an open signal and switch to the main yard and finds waiting on a siding in
that great place, the trail of freight cars and the caboose that are going with
him to make Third-118.
Now come back for a moment in your thought. While we were still
scurrying down to the grimy yard, the despatcher was creating Third-118.
On his desk were car reports, showing what had been received and sent out,
and there was enough accumulation of stuff in the yards last night to justify
a Third-118. Because good railroading means yard-sidings cleared, and
standing cars and freight, like passengers, kept constantly moving, he did
not hesitate at ordering her out. He found that there would be 32 cars
between tender and caboose, weighing approximately some 1200 tons, and
so he ordered from the roundhouse an engine of a class which the
mechanical department guaranteed capable of pulling from 1,000 to 1,500
tons, gross weight.

Courtesy of the “Railroad Age Gazette”

The electro-pneumatic signal-box in the control tower of a modern
terminal

The responsible men who stand at the switch-tower of a
modern terminal: a large tower of the “manual” type

“When winter comes upon the lines the superintendent
will have full use for every one of his wits”

Watchful signals guarding the main line of a busy railroad

The yardmaster had given the numbers of the cars that were to make Third-
118, just as he received them from one of the despatcher’s assistants, to a
switching foreman, who arranged them, with the quick facility that comes
from long practice, into an order that would permit them to be set off at
various points up the line, with the least possible amount of switching. That
practical sequence worked out in pencil and paper, a stubby switch-engine
effected in reality. The cars and the caboose, in proper order, were ready,
with the crew, and inspected when the 1847 backed to them and Third-118
came into her being.
A yard caller had summoned the train-crew while the roundhouse caller was
rounding up the two men of the engine-crew. Collins, the conductor, and his
brakemen had reported at the yard-office, and were assigned to Third-118.

Collins found the cars and caboose waiting just a few minutes before the
1847 had been coupled to them, with little ado and no formality whatsoever,
beyond the testing of the air-brakes. Into his train-book he had entered the
number of each car and the initials of the road owning it, its destination, its
empty or tare weight; the weight of its load, and the sum of these or its
gross weight. He sees to it that each box-car is firmly seal-locked. If not, he
refuses to accept it from the yardmaster until it has been resealed, and
makes a note of the occurrence. Like the engineer and the hostlers in the
roundhouse, he takes no chances, no responsibilities that do not fairly
belong to him.
With both conductor and engineer ready, Third-118 starts upon her day’s
run. The yard operator has telegraphed the despatcher’s office that 3-118 is
awaiting instructions. In that despatch he has given the locomotive number,
the number and total weight of the cars it hauls, the name of both engineer
and conductor. The train-despatcher enters these details of train and crew at
the head of a column of his train register. On that register there are spaces
for the entries of arriving and leaving times of the train as telegraphed him
by the operators at each telegraph station on the division.
The train once so entered by a despatcher’s clerk, the despatcher sends a
clearance card to the telegraph operator at the little yard office who repeats
it back for accuracy. Then the yard operator presents that clearance order to
the engineer and conductor, who read it aloud to him—also for accuracy, of
course—and then sign that they have read and understood the order. The
signatures are then reported to the despatcher’s office, which wires
“Complete.” “Complete” goes in writing upon the copies of the order made
in manifold, which go to engineer, to conductor, and to the operator’s own
files. The engineer reads his order to the fireman, who repeats it back to
him; the conductor follows the same routine with his brakemen. That all
sounds complicated, but quickly becomes mechanical and rapid; the danger
is that it may become so mechanical and rapid as to permit of serious errors
passing unchecked through the routine. But the railroad has done its part. It
has, for itself, taken every possible precaution against error and resulting
accident.
We are privileged, and we climb into the caboose of Third-118. We hold
credentials to Collins, her conductor, and they are unimpeachable. We can

see that from his face as he holds his lantern over them: he would not even
let us into his caboose until his own mind was set. After that there was
barely time to jump aboard. The 1847 is beginning to clear the yard before
we have had time for a good look at the inside of the little caboose.
“You won’t find our hack any fancy place,” says Collins. “But we’ve had it
nine years now, and it seems kind of homelike to us after all this time.”
The “we” consists of Collins and his rear brakeman. The forward brakeman,
who is held responsible for the front half of the train, has his headquarters
in the cab of the 1847. The caboose is a home-like place, snugly warmed by
a red-hot stove placed in its corner and lined with bunks made into beds,
Pullman fashion; only never was there a Pullman sleeper that gave you less
sense of the impressive and a greater sense of a snug cabin. Squarely placed
in its centre is a sort of wooden pyramid and the steps up this lead to the
lookout from where the long snaky train can be watched.
“Kind o’ ol’-fashioned, that,” apologizes Collins. “Th’ las’ time I had th’
cabin into the shops for over-haulin’, they offered to take it out an’ put in
th’ ladders; but I says ‘no’; an’ this is why.”
One by one he lifts its hinged steps. This is a pyramid built of lockers, a
regular treasure house of railroad necessities. There are all sorts of ropes
and jacks and wrenches, extra parts against every emergency. There is a
food closet, and another locker filled with neat stacks of stationery.
“They give us more forms to fill out now than th’ super’s office got twenty
years ago,” he laughs. “I spend more than half my time at that desk.”
The clerical work on Third-118 is considerable. Collins has to keep all the
way-bills of his train—32 cars, almost $100,000 worth of merchandise, and
if he makes a serious error it is apt to cost him his job. He writes a neat
hand, and his records, like his caboose, are kept in ship-shape fashion. He is
a careful student of the ethics and the practices of railroad management and
operation. He has his own ideas on each of these, and when you get to them
they are good ideas. Of such as he railroad executives are every year made
in America.

We slip up the line, slowly threading our passage through the mass of
passenger trains, fast and slow, that all times have the right-of-way over the
third sections of rather ordinary freights. Collins sometimes thrusts his
orders into our hands in order that we may see something of the great detail
of this branch of operating. Each is wonderfully specific, and we know by
that “complete” on the corner that it has been given in detail.
“No. 1 Engine 2236 will wait at Morris Level until 10:00 a. m. for 3-118,
Engine 1847.”
The signature is that of the initials of the division superintendent, the
numerals have been spelled out. It would seem as if the railroad had taken
every possible precaution for safety. And yet again, remember that great
accidents have happened upon American railroads just because men’s minds
have perversely refused to read what eyes and ears have read. And yet there
seems to be nothing to be done, more thorough than is already being done.
“Are all these freights upon schedule?” you may ask Collins, after you meet
a few dozen of them within the limits of a single-track division. He is
decent enough not to laugh at your ignorance.
“Schedule?” he repeats. “It’s a joke. They give our first section a time to get
out on, in the time-card and then one o’ them bright office-boys gets a
figger out o’ his head an’ puts it down for an arrivin’ time. He never hits it
an’ he never expects to. So more an’ more they’re gettin’ to move this
freight on special orders. They can better regulate it then, ’cordin’ to
volume of business. Mos’ of the men carry the schedules of the fas’ an’ th’
way-freights in their domes. Th’ coarse tonnage stuff doesn’t even get
special orders. When they get enough of it, down on th’ main line, they get
an engine out o’ th’ roundhouse, give the train th’ engine number, and start
off. Railroad traffic along the freight end follows business conditions
mighty close.”
It is still daylight when we halt at a junction, across a frozen river from a
city. The city is set upon a steep hillside, and its houses rise from the river
in even terraces. At the top a great domed structure—the State House—
crowns it. It is a still winter’s morning, and the smoke from all the chimney-
pots extends straight heavenward. We wait patiently upon a long siding
until everything else has been moved—through fast expresses heavily laden

with opulent-looking Pullmans, jerky little suburban trains, long draughts of
empty coaches, being drawn by consequential switch-engines in and out of
the train-shed of the passenger station. Finally a certain semaphore blade
drops, we cross over to the important main line and begin pulling on a sharp
curve, across the river, clear of the station with its confusion, through and
past the city to a busy division yard.
In a very little time, for this is their home town, Collins and his crew are
registering at the yardmaster’s office. The engineer of the 1847, and his
fireman, turn in their time-slips and proceed with the locomotive to the
roundhouse where they make a report upon its condition. Their names are
posted on the “in” list or register, and they are off duty until they are
summoned by the callers at this end of the division. The despatcher has, of
course, been apprised of the safe ending of the run of Third-118.
In the despatcher we have a high type of railroad official who works almost
unknown to the great travelling public, and yet accepts a very great measure
of the responsibility for the safe operation of the lines. His orders, sent by
telegraph and bearing that cabalistic initial signature of his superintendent,
are the products of his own mind. There can be no mistake in these, and he
knows it. Each message that he sends may produce disaster, and he knows
that.
He is an executive of a type that is not to be passed by lightly. He has risen
from the ranks of the telegraphers, most likely from some lonely country
station or forlorn signal-tower, and his knowledge of railroad operation,
both theoretical and practical, must approach perfection. On sunny, serene
days he proceeds with the theoretical railroading; when storms or
unexpected influxes of traffic come to harass the division, he will need
every bit of his practical knowledge. Handling a number of special trains—
freight or passenger—is a strain, and that strain is most felt at the
despatcher’s desk.
Now and then your morning paper tells of a railroad wreck, and laconically
adds, “The despatcher was at fault.” The stories of the wrecks that were
forestalled by the sheer genius of the men who sit night and day at the
telegraph instruments at headquarters are the stories that are for the most

part untold, and that far surpass in thrill and interest the stories of the
failures.
The despatcher must also be the full measure of a man. He is, like the silent
figure upon the bridge of a great ship, of unquestioned authority as he sits at
his desk. He may or may not have a map of the line before him as he sits
there, but you may be certain that he knows where every moving train on
the division is at the moment you see him, just as clearly as if it were all
visible there to the naked eye in some sort of picture map. No trains proceed
without his express orders. He has “reliefs” and there is no hour of day or
night when one of these is not at the despatcher’s desk, having the work of
the line under his exact supervision.
The order that any train receives from the despatcher by means of the
telegraph will, as we saw in Collins’s case, direct it to proceed to a certain
point on the line, and will specify every train, regular or extra, that it will
meet, and the meeting point. When the train has proceeded to the end of its
orders there will be more orders from the train-despatcher to be receipted
for, and so it will proceed to the end of the route. It is quite possible that at
any stage of the journey orders will come from headquarters nullifying
those already issued, in part or entirely; and these must be accounted for in
the same thorough and accurate fashion. Some of this seems “red tape” to
the men on the line, and there come times when they are a bit disposed to
rebel at what seems to them useless formality. There also come times when
trains crash into one another; and at those times the railroad, with its infinite
system of recording its orders, is generally apt to be able to place the blame
pretty accurately. Those are the times when the system of train orders
justifies its worth.
Recently the telephone has come into something more than an experimental
use in despatching trains upon American railroads. Various causes have
contributed to this. For one thing, the use of the telephone enables the
average road to make good use of its veterans, men who would indignantly
refuse to become pensioners, and yet who have come to a time in their lives
when they must set their pace in gentler key. A trusted old employee, a man
crippled perhaps in loyalty to the company’s service, a keen-witted
responsible woman, any one of these can competently handle train orders
over a telephone, without having to have the education and the wonderful

expertness that comes only from long experience in telegraphy; and they all
become available in the despatching service. Still another cause has
contributed to the change, which is being reported each week from some
fresh corner of the country—the telegraphers, themselves. Within the past
few years they were able to induce Congress to reduce their day’s work to
eight hours. Translated, this meant that the average way-station which had
been manned by one or two operators would correspondingly need two or
three operators. The telegraphers, by reason of the expert training needed in
their business, kept their wage-scale up, and the railroads felt that eight-
hour bill keenly in their treasuries. So there may have been the least bit of
retribution in their seeking the telephone as a relief. The change has
certainly been made in the keen hope of effecting economy. No railroad
operator would feel ashamed to admit that fine impeachment.
Modern railroading simply makes the same demand of the telephone that it
makes of the telegraph—that it keep the probability of safety high. It makes
the same demand of the men who maintain the signals, the track, the
bridges, and other portions of the right-of-way. Let us consider them in the
passing of an instant.
You know the signals along the line of the railroad—those gaunt, uncanny
things that spell danger or safety to the men in the engine-cabs. A little
while ago, we stood beside a man in the sun-filled tower of a great railroad
terminal and watched him operate the most complicated switch and signal
system in the land, watched him with the crooking of a finger upon the
lever of an electric machine raise this blade, lower that, as he made new
paths for the many trains, coming and going.
A plant of that sort is known as the interlocking. In its simplest form, it will
guard a junction between two single tracks. The mast of the signal will rise,
according to standard custom, at the right of the track in the direction of
travel, and there will probably be two semaphore blades, the upper of which
guards and signals the straight main-line or “superior” track, the lower, the
diverging branch, known as the “inferior” track. The blade raised—
automatically showing a red light—indicates that the main line is closed to
the engineer. “Stop!” “Danger!” are the words it tells him. The blade
lowered, a green light is automatically displayed, and the engineer knows
that he can go ahead at full speed on the main line. The road is clear for

him. The lower blade gives similar indications for the branch diverging line.
Normally, both blades stand at “stop” and “danger,” and the one guarding
the line for which the train is destined, is dropped only on the approach of
the train, itself. In fact, to facilitate the movement of trains, these guarding
signals—known to the signal experts as “home signals”—are generally
interlocked with “distant signals” several hundred feet down the line, on
which blades indicating the diverging tracks forecast the story that the
“home signal” is to tell the engineer. The blade raised—by night displaying
a white or safety signal—on the “distant signal” indicates that the line it
guards is blocked at the “home signal,” and that the engineer must be
prepared to bring his train to a full stop. Dropped—showing the green
safety light—that particular line is open and ready, and the engineer can be
prepared to pass the junction without a very great diminution of speed.
That is the fundamental rule of the signal. Some roads have experimented
with other forms of indicators—disks of one sort or another, semaphore
blades that turn upwards rather than drop. The devices are numerous, but
the principle is the same. When the tracks begin to multiply, and the signals
begin to multiply in even greater proportion, they are generally carried over
the tracks on a light bridge construction—our English cousins call it a
“gantry”—and a series of small semaphore masts built up from the bridge.
One of these masts, or “dolls,” will be assigned to each track; and if there
chances to be an unsignalled siding-track of little importance passing under
the bridge, it will have its own “doll” rising from the bridge although quite
devoid of semaphore blades. So it is all quite as clear as print to the
engineer, even when forty or fifty lights blink at him from a single bridge.
The signals tell their story to him quite as simply as to the man in the tower,
who is setting their blades in accordance with his carefully arranged plans.
Where signals are not of this interlocking type, guarding some junction,
railroad grade crossing, draw-bridge or other point of possible danger, they
are likely to resolve themselves into the block system. This system, in a
rather crude form, with the use of operators at each block-tower or way-
station, has been in development for something less than thirty years upon
the American railroad. In brief, it divides a line—usually double-tracked,
but sometimes used by the so-called “staff” method upon a single-track
road—into sections, or blocks, of from three to five miles each. On double-
track under this system, no two trains, even though travelling in the same

direction are permitted in the same block. At the entrance to each block
stands a tall mast with two of the conventional signal blades. The upper of
these raised denotes that a train is still in the block, and an engineer must
stop his train and wait till it drops, before he can proceed. The lower blade,
when raised, indicates that a train is in the second block ahead, and the
engineer must proceed only with caution and expecting to find that block
closed against him. It is all quite simple; and if the engineers followed the
signals absolutely, there never could be any rear-end collisions on lines
protected by block signals. As a matter of fact, there rarely ever are,
although the engineers do take chances time and time again.
“Why should I stop for that thing,” said a veteran engineer on a fast express
train as we went whirring by one of those upper blades raised and
commanding us in a blood-red point of light to stop, “when I can look down
this straight stretch and see they’re clear? Like as not something’s got into
the mechanism of it and let her flop that way.”
Do not insult the intelligence of that engineer. A little while before, he had
told us, with a deal of pride, that the rolling stock of “his road” placed end
to end would reach from New York to Omaha, a distance of some 1300
miles. Keenest of the keen, he had a sort of contempt for a rule-book in
such a case as that.
“Isn’t it sort of positive?” we began. “Good excuse anyway—”
“It is,” he shouted back, “but somehow it don’t go if you fall behind on
your running time. We’re here to use ordinary good sense—and bring our
trains in on time.”
And yet the railroad has a sharp way of insisting upon compliance with that
book of rules by making, once in a great while, surprise tests. A signal is set
at danger, without any more apparent reason than in the case just cited; a
secret watch is kept, and judgment and discipline are visited upon the heads
of the engineers who permit themselves to run past it.

To operate the signals calls for one body of men, and to maintain them for
faithful service against all manner and stress of wear and weather, another;
just as there must be a working corps to keep the right-of-way in working
order. This last is a mighty brigade of the railroad’s army; for one man in
every four who works for it is employed in keeping the track in order. One
dollar in every six that the railroad spends goes for that purpose.
Maintenance of way on each division divides itself into a superintendent of
bridges and buildings, who sees to the upkeep of those facilities; and a
roadmaster, who specializes upon the track itself. This last officer, almost
invariably one who has begun to shoulder himself up in the ranks of the
railroad army from the very beginning, has his territory divided into
sections from two to five miles in length on double-track, from four to ten
on single. In command of each section a faithful hand-car and a group of
more or less faithful section-hands, figured on an allowance of one to each
mile of track, is a section-boss. The section-boss is a wry and a wise soul, or
should be. He may not know as much about the formulas for compensating
curves as that bright boy who has just come out of a “tech” school to stand
his turn at a transit, but he has a marvellous sort of intuitive sense in
keeping his little stretch of track in order. He can sight his rail and discover
flaws in alignment as a blind man can find surface flaws with the developed
tips of his fingers, and all the while he may be growling at the railroad
management for adding to the weight of its rolling-stock and “pounding the
elevations out of his track.”
In summer he is expert with the “track jacks” and constantly putting in bits
of ballast here and there; and in the winter, when the frost and snow have
made it impossible to touch the ballast, he keeps his elevations by means of
“shims.” A “shim” is a piece of wood, from shingle thickness to the width
of two ties piled one upon the other, and is wedged between the tie and the
rail till summer comes and the line can be corrected by ballasting.
The section-boss must keep pace with a job that is no sinecure. If his gang,
in eagerness to be on dress parade, almost throws dirt on the rear steps of
the boss’s private car as it goes whizzing down the line, he must also see to
it that they keep plugging at it where there is not even a locomotive whistle
within sound. He must be thrifty, economical. He must remember that the
humble cross-tie which once cost a quarter now costs almost a dollar, and

that for one of these to be found neglected in the ditch is almost a capital
crime. He must have an eye for loose spikes and angle-plates, for the big
boss has hinted at the annual loss to the road in these simple factors.
At his call and that of the superintendent of bridges and buildings is a work-
train, made up of a few flat-cars and discarded coaches, doing boarding-
house Pullman service in their declining years, which looks after work too
sizable for the section-boss and his little gang, and yet not large enough for
the attention of the dignified gentlemen who are known as the
reconstruction engineers. Yet some of the feats of these work-train gangs
have the crackle of engineering genius. It takes brains to rip out a little
timber span and replace it in the interval between two trains spaced a couple
of hours apart, and in the railroad, brain work often comes from the shabby
workman, from the man who graduates from the command of his own
battered hand-car.

All this elaborate system of railroad operation has been built up through
many years of practice. Experience has been more than a teacher in the
business, which becomes yearly more and more nearly a developed science;
she has been a whole faculty and a curriculum, too. Methods that promised
well at the outset have been found faulty after trial, and rejected.
Committees of trained experts have pondered and reported voluminously;
the standard railroad codes of every sort have been born because of them.
The operation of the railroad has been brought close to science. It would
seem as if the entire field had been completely covered.
And yet new situations constantly arise, the like of which have never before
presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves in
unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track stretches
through the Middle West that starve through eleven months of the year, and
for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a double-track
trunk-line in the East. Obviously such lines cannot be double-tracked for
thirty days of business; quite as obviously the overtaxed division, its
equipment, and its men must rise to every necessity of the floodtide of
business. There are fat years and there are lean years. There come years of