The Railroad Problem

before the coming of the next-particularly if we are cool-headed and smart-headed enough to take critical reckoning of our weaknesses and to use such a reckoning as a stepping-stone

consider the measures of immediate relief that must be granted them. They must be considered too-briefly, but with a due appreciation of their i

easure, a closed book. They have little realization of what was accomplished in suburban electrification in Paris or in Berlin well before the beginning of the war; hardly greater realization of the marvels wrought in the suburban zones of New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco. And the tremendous accomplis

r parts of the land-the new Union Station in Kansas City, the Union Station at Minneapolis, and the North Western Terminal at Chicago coming first to mind among these. But the passenger terminal developments along the Atlantic seaboard have differed from those of the M

ey are impressive, majestic, beautiful. Yet the big railroaders do not always see them in this light. They find themselves, by one means or another, compelled to gratify local civic pride by the expenditure of hundreds of thousands and even millions of d

s been evolved which is not merely monumental, but an economic solution of its o

cans were gaining the travel habit. The genus commuter had been born. The first of the railroad Vanderbilts saw all these things. And, because he had the fine gift of vision, he turned his far-seeing toward action. On Forty-second Street-then a struggl

eation of the artist was the creation of the engineer-the huge switching yard, black and interlaced with steel tracks. It was a mightily congested railroad yard; upon its tight-set edges the growing city pressed. Skyscrapers sprang up roundabout and looked

s land, had been second in fame only to the Capitol at Washington, was gone. Workmen had torn it stone from stone and brick from brick and carted it off as

train shed of a half-dozen tracks, to relieve the pressure upon the original station. Another twelve years and the laborers were again upon the Grand Central, this time adding stories to the original structure and trying to simplify its operation by new baggage and waiting rooms. Within the third dozen years the workmen we

affic has doubled each ten years for the past three decades. When the statisticians put down their pencils the engineers whistled. To fashion a station for the traffic of 1960, even for that of 1935, meant such a passenger station as no railroad head, no engineer, no architect had ever before dreamed of building. At a low estimate, it meant that there would have to be some forty or fifty stub-tracks in the train shed. In the great train shed of the Union St

r-track tunnel under Park Avenue, from the very throat of the train-shed yard up to Harlem, four miles distant, it represented an almost ideal form of traction, largely be

the suburban traffic of the terminal. In that way the new Grand Central was planned. And that one thing represented its first important demarkation from the other great passenger stations

ng this way or that, slipping into the dark cool train shed under grinding brakes, or else starting from that giant cavern with gathering speed, to roll halfway across the continent before the final halt. To the layman it was fascinating, because he knew that the chaos was really ordered, on a scientific and tremendous scale, that the a

he largest city of our continent. For, while the new Grand Central, service and approach yards considered even as a single level-some sixty acres all told-are larger than the older yard, they apparently have disappeared. In that thing alone a great obstacle

the monumental passenger stations in so many of our metropolitan cities. The New York Central, for reasons of its own, has been reticent in stating both the cost of the new Grand Central and the income which it derives not only from the rentals of the privileges in the station itself-restaurants, news stands, barber shops, checking stands, and the like-but also from the ground rental of the great group of huge buildin

e its dream of long years-a terminal situated in the heart of Manhattan Island; a passenger terminal so situated as to place the great railroad of the red cars in a real competitive position with the railroad of the Vanderbilts, which so long had held exclusive terminal facilities within the congested island o

s as a part of the development of the Grand Central property. One of these hotels is completed and immensely popular; the other has just been begun. The New York Central will not only derive a generous ground rent from these taverns-it places itself in a splendid strategic position to receive the traffic of their patrons. It is a somewhat singular thing-an instance perhaps, of the lack of vision of railroaders of an earlier generation-that modern hotels were not long ago made an integral part of our larger passenger terminals at least. Our English cousins have not overlooked this opportunity. The great hotels builded into their t

New Haven and the New York Central, the lessee of the Boston and Albany. Though both of these systems participate in the joint operation of the new Grand Central Terminal of New York, neither of them has leaped at the possibility in Boston. The tremendous financial difficulties through which the New Haven property has been struggling for the last six or eight years and from which it has not yet emerged, are undoubtedly the cause of this. The Bost

'S ELECTRIC

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in line of the Pennsylvania Railr

he development possibilities of the Back Bay district which it now traverses with its through track and interrupts with its somewhat ungainly storage yards. These yards, now used for the holding of empty passengers coaches, occupy tremendously valuable acres on Boylston Street within a block of Copley Square-the artistic and literary center of the Hub. They are essential, perhaps, to the economical operation of the road's terminal, but when you come to consider the growth of the city, a tremendous waste. They have stood-a noisy, dirty, open space-stretching squarely across the path of Boston's finest possible development. If these were marshlands, like those that used to abound along the Charles River, Boston long ago would have filled them in

will not see a smoky gash cut diagonally through the heart of one of the handsomest cities in America in order to permit a busy railroad to deliver its passenger and freight at a convenient downtown point. It is hard to estimate the financial benefits which eventually

ft-coal locomotives. The Illinois Central has been ranked as the chief offender because of its commanding location-blocking as it does the lovely lake front for so many miles. Chicago has ambitious plans for that lake fron

milar in type to the new Grand Central-a station which, from the very nature of its design, must, of necessity, use electric traction. Doubly gratifying this is to Chicagoans: for as we have already said, the Illinois Central, which, through its occupation of the lake front by its maze of steam-operated tracks, has so long hampered the really artistic development of Chicago's greatest natural asset-the edge of its lovely lake. For some years past the Illinois Central has been particularly slow to make the best uses of its great suburban zone south of Chicago; slow to realize its even larger opportunities of a development even greater than that of today. This has come home with

at its chief competitors should have retained steam power so long as a motive power in their long tunnels underneath Baltimore. Yet it is one of these competitors which is making the real progress in the Philadelphia situation. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which owns and operates Broad Street Station, probably one of the best-located passenger terminals in any of the very large cities of America, has already begun to use e

rstand this better let us go back for a moment and consider the one-time but short-lived rivalry between the trolley and the steam locomotive. As soon as the electric railroads-which were, for the most part, developments of the old-fashioned horse-car lines in city streets-began to reach out into the country from the sharp confines of the

from the outer country to the heart of the town in half an hour-and, as you know, the business of building and booming suburbs was born. After these suburban lines had been developed the steam railroad men of some of the so-called standard lines, began to study the situation. As far back as 1895 the Nantasket branch of the present New Haven system was made into an electric line. A little steam road, which wandered off into the hills of Columbia County from Hudson,

in many cases-making themselves frequently the opportunities for such precarious financing as once distinguished the history of steam roads, and also frequently making havoc with thickly settled branch lines and main stems

ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 in population. The branch line carried no through business, nor was its local freight traffic of importance, but it was able to operate profitably eleven local passenger trains in each direction dail

ooked at it enviously-at the dozen prosperous towns it aimed to serve. A fortnight's visit to the locality convinced him. He went down to a big city where capital was just hungry to be invested profitably and organized an electric railroad to thread each of those towns. Before the headquarters of the steam road was really awake to the situation ca

total, and tossed the figures across the table. The emissary did not smile. He reported to his headquarters and the steam railroad began to fight-it was going to starve out the resources of its trolley competitor by cutting passenger rates to a cent a mile. When the trolley company met that, the rail

at that he threw down a certified check for the exact amo

what lady novelists are sometimes pleased to call

ry from the steam road. "

id the engineer. "It's up

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for but one. The trolley line, now that it has begun to depreciate and to require constant maintenance repairs, vies with the desolate branch of the steam road, which runs but two half-filled passenger trains a day upon its rails. A tax is laid upon the steam-road property-a greater tax upon the residents of the valley-for operating man

olved easily and efficiently by the comparatively modest ex

s in western New York undergoing just such electric interurban competition and a few years ago it in

Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of the fine business it had held for many years. After a bitter rate war the New York Central, with all the resources and the abilities of the Vanderbilts behind it, wo

ally no use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions there is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains leaving each terminal hourly, making but a few stops and the run of over forty-four miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local service and the line has become immensely popular. By la

saw the application of these ideas and decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger service than to rent again its branches to outside companies-and perhaps because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of suburban lines in the metropolitan district around New York and wished to test electric traction to its own satisfaction-but ten years

New York was still a matter of engineer's blueprints, it began practical experiments with electric traction in the flat southern portion of New Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally situated in every respect for such experiments-its original and rather indirect route from Camden to Atlantic City, which had since been more or less superseded by a shorter "air-line" route. The third rail was installed and the new line

e operated at very frequent intervals, thus providing a branch-line service practically impossible to obtain in any other way. When, in the next chapter, we come to consider the automobile as a factor in railroad transportation, we shall consider this entire question of branch-line operation in far greater detail. I always have considered it one of the great neglect

beginning, while it still was in a decidedly experimental state, this zone extended only from the Grand Central Terminal to Stamford, Connecticut-some thirty-four miles all told. Now it has been extended and completed through to New Haven, practically twice the original distance. In a little while it is probable that the New Haven will have

e. To be even more exact, only one-half of the first unit of installation, from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, had been installed. Workmen were still busy west of Deer Lodge, rigging, stretching the wires, finishing the substations and making the busy line ready for electric locomotives all the way through to Avery. And it was announced that when Avery was reached and the first contract-section completed

OLYM

o, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railw

HAULED BY

lwaukee, & St. Paul a

ays cross near

inentals for half their run. Translated into the comfort of the passenger, it means that for a long night and two days that are all too short, the trail of the Olympian is dustless, smokeless, odorless; it means t

electric locomotive over its older brother of the steam persuasion are but multiplied. The electric locomotives of the Milwaukee, being the newest and th

t this is the very thing that the Milwaukee is doing today-upon each of its heavily laden trains as they cross and recross the backbone of the continent. Its great new locomotives take all the power th

mergency. That is the only part which the brakes on a Milwaukee electric train play today. The electric locomotive in a large sense is its own brake. In other words, a turn of the engineer's hand transforms its great motors into dynamos; gravity pulls the trains a

he competitors in the Northwest, has been watching with keen interest the tremendous operating economies that electricity has brought to the road of the yellow cars and has already announced its intention of transforming at once its main line between Seattle and Spokane-200 miles-from