THE BUSH TERMINAL
South Brooklyn, New York City.
NEW FREIGHT TERMINAL WAREHOUSE AT ROCHESTER
Built by the Buffalo, Rochester, & Pittsburgh Railway.A modern combination of freight house and storage warehouse.
There is, on one of the harbor-shores of metropolitan New York, a city within a city. It is located in Brooklyn, to be exact, and it occupies somewhat more than a half-mile of waterfront—a waterfront cut into long deep-water piers, of the most modern type and running far out into the harbor. Back of these piers and connected with them by means of an intricate, but extremely well-planned system of industrial railroad, rise many buildings of steel and stone and concrete, almost all of them built to a single type and differing only in the minor details of their construction. On the many floors of this group of buildings are myriad separate industries, widely diverse as to character and product but all of them capable of concentrated location. Together they employ many thousands of men and women and the high-grade freight which they send out each day would pay a king’s ransom.
In other days the greater number of these industries were scattered about both Brooklyn and the Manhattanboroughs of New York. As a rule they were remote from both freight houses and sidings. The freight-terminal situation of New York, owing to the peculiar physical formation of the city and its segregation from the mainland by several great navigable rivers, the upper harbor, and the Sound, is most difficult of operation. All the railroads find it necessary to lighter their freight over these navigable streams, either upon car-floats or in other forms of vessels. And, even under the most favorable operating conditions of light freight traffic, there is constant danger of congestion.
But to a manufacturer situated on one of the narrow sidestreets of either Manhattan or Brooklyn, the situation was infinitely worse. His problem was to even reach the freight houses along the watersides of the town—a problem to be imperfectly solved by the use of trucks. Fifty trucks in a narrow street, crowding and jostling, mean infinite congestion and loss of time. Add to this the prima-donna-like temperament of the average truck-driver, showing itself in constant and protracted strikes, and you can see why the manufacturers have flocked not only to that great industrial city in South Brooklyn, but to others like it which have begun to spring up in and around metropolitan New York. Not only is the trucking expense entirely eliminated—the freight cars are waiting in the great community shipping rooms in the ground floor of the very factory—but heat and light and power are alike brought to a fixed and reasonable cost. And the newest of these manufacturing buildings are fabricated so strongly that it is both possible and practicable to raisea loaded box car to any of their floors—to the manufacturer’s individual shipping room, if you please.
Here is an idea instantly adaptable to the freight terminal of any railroad. A remarkably progressive small railroad—the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh—has recently built a freight terminal of this very sort at Rochester. And there is hardly an important city reached by an important railroad that does not offer many opportunities for the development of freight terminals of this sort, terminals which, like the Grand Central station, would bring direct revenue to the railroad which built them. In this hour when the cost of foodstuffs is occupying so large a portion of public attention, when a large part of the problem lies in the marketing and storage facilities, or the lack of them, it might be possible to develop the freight terminal as both a cold-storage plant and a market. And all of this would tend to bring additional revenue to the railroad, as well as to simplify greatly, if not to solve entirely, some of the great transportation and terminal problems which are today troubling our cities and our larger towns and which are making their food costs mount rapidly to heights which the imagination has heretofore failed to grasp.
Already the residents of these communities are taking definite steps toward relief. In the city of New York, Commissioner John J. Dillon of the state Department of Food and Markets has proposed that the state erect a public wholesale market house for the private sale or auctions of foodstuffs of every sort and in every quantity. This market would be open, on equalterms and without favor or prejudice to buyers of every sort. It is believed that it would, in every way, tend to simplify the terminal handling of foodstuffs and in just such measure help to reduce food costs to the ultimate consumer.
Commissioner Dillon estimates the cost of such a market house at from $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. Owing to a recent wave of stringent economy, upon certain lines, at Albany, this suggestion of his has not been looked upon with great favor by the executive branch of the state government. Yet it is probable that in the long run a state which has not turned a hair at a recently voted appropriation of $10,000,000 for a necessary addition to its park lands will halt at a necessary appropriation of $4,000,000 to reduce food costs in its largest city, even more to provide similar food stations in its other large communities. We soon shall see how it has voted $150,000,000 for a canal of little or no practical value. The suggested expenditure for market houses is as nothing compared with that.
But before such market houses can be planned and erected comes the opportunity of the railroads whose lines reach New York. If they can build such terminals, or even adapt, temporarily at least, their present plants to meet such a public and general need they will be proving themselves, in truth, public servants.
If I may be permitted here and now to enter asotto-voceremark, it would be that an absence of some such definite, modern, constructive methods as these—not alone in regard to food transportation, terminal handling, storage, and marketing, but as to speculationitself—is going to bring the United States closer to a practical and nation-wide experiment in socialism than the disturbed railroad situation has ever brought it. It seems as if the Railroad’s older brother, the steward and purveyor of our great estate, was about to fall ill. I think that I can see that tremulous, but stern nurse, Regulation, turning her attention toward him. And I am quite sure that if he does break down at this time he is going to know Regulation as the Railroad never has known her.
All these things are more or less intimately related to the question of terminals—more rather than less. And they are all most intimately related to the question of the freight-traffic development of the railroad.
“Get the terminals,” were James J. Hill’s repeated orders to his lieutenants in the creative period of his railroads. Hill knew the value of terminals, freight terminals in particular; he knew that it took a freight car bound from east to west or west to east as long to go through the city of Chicago as from Chicago to St. Paul—400 miles—and that is why he set out to get his terminals in growing cities while the land was cheap and the getting was good. Hill had vision. He was also tremendously practical. It was the combination of these qualities that made him the master railroader of his generation.
There is another form of transportation whose development always has been and always will be directly connected with the development of the railroads. I am referring to the use of the inland waterways of thecountry—not merely the Great Lakes which today bear the most highly developed commerce of any fresh-waterways in the world, but our rivers and our canals. With the notable exception of the Great Lakes, which we have just cited, we are decades behind Europe in the use of these waterways. And to make a bad matter worse Federal legislation has sought to penalize the enterprise of the railroads in any attempts to develop the use of the waterways in their own interest. Just how this came about is a matter of plainly recorded history; a story of the attempts of certain ill-advised carriers to purchase and to strangle water lines, because of the competition which they offered. But the railroads which operated the huge grain and coal fleets on the Great Lakes were not throttling—they were developing. And the success of their example was slowly but surely having its effect on their fellows elsewhere across the land.
Fortunately the same hands that make a law may repeal it. And the odious anti-railroad provisions of the navigation law that accompanied the opening of the Panama Canal should be revoked at once. The railroads should be aided and encouraged in the development, through their capital and the use of their connecting land lines as well as their advantageous waterfront terminals in almost all our cities, in developing a waterborne traffic. Such a traffic, devoting itself chiefly, if not exclusively, to the lower, coarser, and slower moving grades of freight would be a tremendous relief to their rails; in the long run probably saving them huge capital expenditures for the constructionof third and fourth tracks to relieve their overburdened double-tracks. Congestion on our railroads is not always a question of overcrowded terminals.
Take that great, elaborate, and all but economically useless ditch which the state of New York is just completing from the Hudson River at Troy to the foot of Lake Erie at Buffalo—the outgrowth of the once-famous Erie Canal. As a piece of engineering the new Barge Canal is a marvel. Its locks are comparatively few, roomy, marvels of operating mechanism, its fairway is generous—together these give a water pathway large enough for a barge of 2,000 tons burden. Two thousand tons is roughly equal to forty modern freight cars—a fair length train. Two of these barges would have the tonnage equivalent of a full-length modern freight train. Fifty of them would be a genuine relief to the crowded rails of the New York Central’s six tracks from Albany to Buffalo.
But the New York Central is not permitted to operate barges through the new Erie Canal from Troy to Buffalo. Oh, no! and for that matter, not from New York up the waters of the Hudson to Troy. The Federal regulation takes care of the waters of the Hudson—and keeps them freight-desolate—the sovereign state of New York prevents their passing through the sacred portals of its new $150,000,000 canal. For, truth to tell, the new canal was designed for but two or three real purposes; to keep the port of Buffalo from falling into decay, to find jobs for numerous deserving feeders at the public trough and keep down the local freight rates of the New York Central, which it parallelsfor its entire length. If it succeeds in these things—and it probably will—the men who control the present destinies of the state government will probably lose no time in worrying over the fact that the canal is practically completed, yet no boats of the modern type for which it was builded have been launched—or even planned. For a traffic not one one-thousandth of that at Panama, a canal of half the size and half the cost has been constructed.
Seneca Falls has been made a port, and so has Rome and so has Holley—and if the citizens of these sleepy towns doubt this they may go down and see the wharves and warehouses, the docks and levees which a benevolent state has wished upon them. And even if there are no boats to patronize these wonderful establishments they are kept atrim, and throughout all the watches of the night brilliantly alight. Perhaps the argosy is yet to plow the waters of the Erie! One thing I know. I traveled on a night train on the Delaware and Hudson not so long ago and chanced to see the great locks of the Champlain Canal—twin sister to the new Erie—all the distance ablaze with clusters of arc lamps. Traffic? Not a bit of it. There is no traffic upon the Champlain Canal. And the gods in the high heavens must laugh aloud as they read of “America Efficient” and night after night gaze down upon the brilliancy of those glaring lights upon the unused lengths of the canals of the state of New York.
“One hundred and fifty millions of dollars,” groans the practical engineer, “and the state of New York might have had instead of 350 miles of canals, 1,000miles of railroads, every mile of the needed improved highways she has been building, many more beside. The overhead that the freight will have to pay going through the expensive and extravagant new canal is far greater than that of the best of railroads.”
All of which is perfectly true. But, in the words of an economist of another generation, it is a condition and not a theory which confronts us. The canals have been built—but no vessels have been builded for them. The waterways cannot remain unused. The state has two ways by which it may force their use. It may build, equip, and operate its own barges and so bring at once a widespread experiment in government transportation that seems almost foredoomed to complete failure, or it may take steps to induce, not only the New York Central, but the other railroads which link New York and Buffalo, to build and operate barges upon the canals. Remember that these railroads are more than merely links; local freight-carriers between New York and Buffalo. And Buffalo, as you probably know, is one of the larger of the terminals at the base of the Great Lakes.
Each year millions of bushels of grain—other coarse freight as well—find their way to its docks for rail transshipment to New York or Boston, where in turn they may go into the holds of vessels for transportation overseas. The Erie Canal is as much a link as any of these railroads. And, despite the fact that the state of New York has been foolish enough to build and maintain it exclusively from its own treasury, the fact remains that it is a water avenue of nationalcommunication. A glance at your atlas will satisfy you as to that.
Of one thing the state of New York may be certain. Private capital is not going to build traffic upon the Erie and the Champlain canals—particularly in view of the legislation which tends to discourage, if not actually to prevent, a company of any real size or influence operating upon the canal. The tendency of today is entirely toward centralization and consolidation. And the small independent transportation company, deprived of feeding traffic and adequate joint or independent terminals has a hard shift for existence.
I have dilated upon the New York canals because they are typical of the river opportunities that await the railroad throughout the rest of the country. You think of the old-time river boat—you still can see a few of them rubbing their blunt noses against the levees at New Orleans or Memphis or St. Louis or Pittsburgh—and you laugh at me. I might reply by calling your attention to the fact that the tonnage of the port of Pittsburgh, which moves entirely on the muddy rivers that serve it, is in excess of the tonnage of many of the greatest and most famous seaports in the world—Liverpool to make a shining comparison. And as for the river steamboat—it is capable of infinite development, of transformation from the gaudy and inefficient carrier of ante-bellum days into a mighty freight-hauler of today. The Great Lakes have witnessed a complete transformation of the type of freight vessel upon their waters. The genius that effected the revolution of their naval architecture is availablefor the development of the river craft of the United States.
Need more be said? The opportunity awaits. Preceded by the necessary repeal legislation, to which I have already referred, it is, at the least, among the very largest of the opportunities that today await the sick man of American business.
Perhaps by this time you are beginning to be genuinely interested in the opportunity for the development of the freight traffic of the railroad. It is not entirely an opportunity of the operating or the engineering departments. Indeed, at the present time the greatest activities of the traffic-soliciting forces of the railroad are given to its larger customers—patrons whose shipments run in carload, if not in trainload lots. The undeveloped field of freight opportunity for the railroad is the smaller patron—the man who ships “less than carload,” but whose traffic fostered and increased would mean trainloads by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands. The railroads, through their industrial departments already have begun to accomplish much along these lines. One big road—the Baltimore and Ohio—has begun, on a very large scale, to make an intensive study of the resources of the territory which it occupies. It sends a corps of its investigators—college-trained men, all of them, into a single small city and keeps them there for one or two or three weeks. When they are done with both this field work and the review of it back at headquarters, the road has in its archives at Baltimore a book of 100 pages or more which is a complete record of that city, not alone industrially, butsocially and historically as well. And if the town is clamorous for a new depot—most towns are—a study of this book will do much toward giving the answer. It may show that it finally is entitled to a new passenger gateway; and it may show also that it is careless about its pavements and its lawns, about the upkeep of the public buildings which it already has—in which case the railroad has a fairly good reason for refusing a new station.
Other railroads are following these methods—most of our roads are quickly imitative at least, even when they are unwilling to break precedent and take a definite lead. Yet, in my own humble opinion, they have not begun to even scratch the surface possibilities of traffic development.
The experience of the express companies is illuminating in this regard. Confronted with the establishment of the parcel post and threatened for a season at least with the loss of much of their small-parcel traffic to it, they began to look about to find where they might develop a tonnage with which to fill their cars and wagons. At that moment the cost of living was making one of its periodic ascents. The express companies took advantage of the situation and began the development of a food-products service direct to the consumer. The idea was popular. It met with instant approval and tided the express companies over the hardest period of their history.
These things are interesting in the abstract. In the concrete they may yet spell the very salvation of therailroad. Two things are necessary, however, to transform them from the abstract to the concrete—brains and money.
I think that I have shown you enough already to convince you that brains is not lacking in the conduct of the railroad, despite the extreme difficulty which it is having today in gaining recruits from the best type of young men who come trooping out from the preparatory schools, the technical schools, and the colleges of the land. True it is that we have not yet raised master railroaders to take the places of James J. Hill or E. H. Harriman. Yet it is by no means certain that such master railroaders may not be in the making today on our great overland carriers. Take such men as Daniel Willard, the hard-headed, far-seeing president of the Baltimore and Ohio, Hale Holden, the diplomatic and statesmanlike head of the historic Burlington, Charles H. Markham of the Illinois Central, James H. Hustis of the Boston and Maine, Howard Elliott of the New Haven, William T. Noonan of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh, or Carl R. Gray of the Western Maryland—these are men to whom the future development of our railroads may safely be trusted.
Bricks cannot be made without straw. And these men cannot bring the great sick man of American business back to health without our help—without the help and cooperation of every thinking man and woman in the United States. That cooperation must come without delay, not only to relieve the plight of the railroad with which we already are familiar, but also to make it possible for him to take advantage ofthe great opportunities which await him. The average railroader—feeling that the cards were all against him, that his credit at the bank was nearly nil, and that he must spend the greater part of his time on the defensive, fighting legislation that he believed to be grossly unfair—has not given much attention to these great new ideas, vastly radical in their conception and requiring in their execution much overturning of well-established methods and precedents. Yet this is not to be interpreted as showing that he lacks vision.
For remember that the sick man of American business is not too ill to realize his opportunity. But he knows that first he must regain his feet once more before he can begin important creative work. He knows that the lines along which he has been working for a long time have been cramped and restricted—conservative, to put it mildly. But he also knows that before he can begin on extensive creative work he must have several things—money and, more than money, public aid and sympathy.
And of these things—the present necessity of our railroads—we shall soon treat. But before we come to them we shall come to a consideration of a railroad problem of recent compelling attention—a problem that is both opportunity and necessity, and so deserves to be considered between them.
THE RAILROAD AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
TheSecretary of the Navy met a high officer of the telephone company in Washington some months ago.
“I have noticed a great deal about your new transcontinental telephone line,” said he. “I wonder if you could tell me how long it would take us, in a national crisis, to get in telephone communication with each navy yard in the United States and what the cost would be.”
The telephone man stepped to the nearest of his contraptions. In a moment he was back.
“Not more than five minutes,” he said quietly, “and in such a crisis there would be no charge to the government.”
The telephone, the telegraph, and the railroad are the three great avenues of national communication. In time of peace they throb with its traffic and beat in consonance with the heartbeats of its commerce. In time of war their value to the nation multiplies, almost incredibly. It is then of vital necessity that they be preserved in their entirety. It is of almost equal military necessity that they be kept close to the armies that are afield.
Of the telephone we have just spoken. The services of thetelegraph at the time of the Civil War are too well remembered today for it to be ignored in any future national crisis. But it is of the railroad that we are talking in this book—the railroad that brings the food to your larder, even the milk to your doorstep; that keeps the coal upon your hearthstone and the clothing upon the backs of you and yours; that carries you to and fro over the face of the land. It is the railroad, that living, breathing thing that girdles the whole land and sends its tentacles into even the smallest town, that, as you already know, is your servant in times of peace. How can it be made to serve you in time of war?
When the last great war was fought in the United States, our railroads had barely attained their majority. In the days of the Civil War there were no railroad systems, as we know them today. Instead there was a motley of small individualistic railroads, poorly coordinated. They were, for the most part, poorly built and insufficiently equipped. Nothing was standardized. Even the track-gauges varied and passengers or freight going a considerable distance found it necessary to change cars at intersecting points.
Nevertheless, the railroad played a tremendous part in the War of the Rebellion. Because of it Sherman made his conquering march from Atlanta to the sea. He was something of a railroader himself, that doughty general. And upon his immediate staff were expert railroaders. Over the crude railroads of the Georgiaof that day, with the aid of their war-racked cars and locomotives, they supplied the commissary of the Sherman army as it made its way across a devastated land.
THE RAILROAD IN THE CIVIL WAR
This picture of a section of Alexandria, Virginia, was taken in 1864 and showsthe cars and engines of the United States Military Railroad of that day.
In the North the military railroad, reaching down from the very portal of the Long Bridge at Washington, its railheads almost always touching the Union lines, was an almost indispensable factor to the Army of the Potomac. The Baltimore and Ohio was hardly a less important factor. It paid a high price for the accident of location. One of Stonewall Jackson’s earliest and most brilliant achievements was the seizure of eight locomotives from its roundhouse at Martinsburg and their movement, some forty miles, over a dirt road to Winchester, Virginia, where they found the tracks of a part of the railroad system of the Confederacy. Later on Jackson returned to Martinsburg and helped himself to twelve more B. and O. locomotives, also moving these over the turnpike to Winchester. He knew and Lee knew that even a clumsy balloon-topped, wood-burning locomotive was worth 500 horses in transport service. And the South was none too plentifully supplied with locomotives even before the war began.
The most of the work of the railroads in the Civil War was not dramatic. But it was thorough—the carrying of men between the cities of the Middle West and the Army of the Cumberland. At first it was chaotic, but it became well systematized. The direct line between New York and Washington—although then composed of four separate railroads—was recognized as a route of vast strategic value. The men whohandled troops and supplies over it, in doing so qualified themselves to assume the mastery of the great railroad systems that were to spring into being at the close of the war—as a result of both construction and consolidation.
In 1898, when the country was again plunged into war, preparation of the railroad lines of the land had grown to maturity. Unfortunately, however, the theater of the war was close to the corner of the land which was then most poorly equipped with railroads. But the standardization of the operating conditions had been largely accomplished. One could run a car or locomotive upon practically every important line in the land without changing the gauge of its wheels. This last, of itself, was important. It meant that the equipment of larger and stronger roads to the North could be sent down to the Plant System and the Florida Central and Peninsular—barely equipped for ordinary purposes—which were suddenly called upon to handle an extraordinary traffic. This, of itself, was a mixed blessing. For the borrowed locomotives were often too heavy for the light rails and long bridges over the Florida marshes. Derailments were frequent and the delays they entailed, protracted.
The men who went to Tampa in that hot summer of 1898 have not forgotten the Florida Central and Peninsular nor the Plant System, even though those two railroads have now passed into history. Nor has the War Department forgotten them. On one memorable occasion, the Quartermaster started a specialtrainload of emergency army supplies south from Philadelphia to Tampa. In order to make sure that the train should go through promptly, he placed one of his own representatives upon it, with orders to push it through. The train disappeared. After three weeks, the Quartermaster’s Department found it on a siding at a place called Turkey Creek, a good eighteen miles from Tampa—held there because of the hopelessly congested terminal at the waterside. And they never yet have found the special representative who was to put it through.
These abominable conditions, the conditions that made it necessary to take from four to six days from the great mobilization camp at Chattanooga to Port Tampa, a journey which should have been done in from one-half to one-third of this time, were not to be charged to the poor men who were struggling to operate those inadequate railroads. They were doing the best they could, without plan and without facilities. And it is interesting to note in this connection, that in that same memorable summer, an appeal came to Washington not to put more than 500 troops a day through the Jersey City gateway for fear of congesting the terminals there!
More recently the railroads of the South have been called upon again to handle troops and munitions and commissary. Of course the problems that have confronted them upon the Mexican border are hardly comparable with those of the Civil War or the Spanish-American War. Yet on the very morning that theentire country was shocked by Villa’s audacious raid upon Columbus, New Mexico, the heads of the great railroad systems that come together at El Paso were alert and ready for any orders that the War Department might give. At 6:45P.M.that evening a telegraphic request for trains came from Washington to the general headquarters of the Southern Pacific lines at Houston. Five thousand troops were to be moved from the camps at Galveston and near-by Texas City, and as quickly as possible. Early in the morning the trains began moving. The railroad had made a full night of it. Throughout the night they had brought their extra equipment into Galveston from San Antonio, from New Orleans, from Shreveport—every important operating center within twelve hours’ run. The trains were ready as quickly as the troops. And they made the long run of 881 miles up over the long single-track to El Paso in an average of thirty-six hours—under the conditions, a really remarkable performance.
THE RAILROAD “DOING ITS BIT”
Hauling a trainload of army trucks and supplies from Chicago toGen. Pershing’s expedition “somewhere in Mexico.”
The Santa Fé and the Rock Island operate direct lines from Chicago to El Paso. They were called upon during many months of the past year to carry munitions south to the border—particularly motor trucks—and were not found wanting. The Rock Island with its complementary line, the El Paso and Southwestern, carried 170 motor trucks and water wagons from Chicago to El Paso, 1,446 miles, on a fifty-hour schedule. The “limited” with all of its reputation for fast running and its high-speed equipment only makes this distance in forty-three hours and a half, while theordinary schedule for freight—which is the equipment upon which it was necessary to handle the motor trucks and the water wagons—is 129 hours and 50 minutes from one city to the other. But Pershing needed the automobiles. They were vital for his expedition. And it was a part of the day’s work for the railroad to carry them down to the border in record time.[14]
The job of handling the troops on the Texas line has hardly been more than part of the day’s work. The railroaders down there will tell you that. The realjob of the railroad recently has been laid overseas in the nations that are fighting so bitterly for mastery. The German military use of railroads is most interesting because it is the best. American travelers for years past have noticed upon the trucks of each separate piece of rolling stock in the Empire, its military destination, as well as cabalistic figures to denote its carrying capacity in men and horses and pounds of freight. Yet these were but the surface indications of a great plan—whose formulas had been worked out and restedon the shelves of the war headquarters in Berlin. How well the plan has worked we all know now. For the first time in its history the railroad has become an active fighting factor—not merely to be content with the bringing of powder and shell and food and equipment up to the bases of the fighting lines; not merely to assemble troops, in a comparatively leisurely fashion, or to take tired and sick and wounded men back to their homes; but to be a striking arm, if you please, moving whole brigades and even armies with all the tensity andspeed and resource at its command. In other days you might laugh at the peaceful little German passenger train, making its leisurely way in all the pomp and circumstance that only an Empire may show. But you cannot laugh at the German military train, black with troopers, darting its way across the Kaiserland with a speed and definiteness that is all but human.
It has been stated that the real reason why the Germans failed to reach Paris in their memorable drive of September, 1914, was that even their remarkable system of military railroads failed in this supreme crisis. If this be so, it must be that the task placed upon them was superhuman. For it was just such military trains as we have just seen, multiplied in dozens and in hundreds, that moved whole brigades to southern Galicia during the first two weeks of April, 1915—a distance, roughly speaking, equal to that from Boston to Detroit. It was the military plan for the railroads of Germany that brought the regiments out of the trenches in Arras in the last week in June of that same year and on the Fourth of July had them hammering at the might of Warsaw. And Warsaw is 800 miles from the low fields of Arras. Not until the war is over will the whole military workings of the German railroads be known. But examples such as these show that they did work. And it may be remembered that when the German army began flowing in a tidal fashion up over the Russian steppes they came to von Hindenburg and reminded him of Napoleon and the retreat from Moscow. And vonHindenburg showed his great teeth and remarked that Napoleon had had no railroads.
“The bread which our soldiers eat today in Windau was baked yesterday in Breslau,” he added. And it takes only a single glance at the map to see that Windau is approximately 500 miles distant from Breslau. “We drink German mineral water and we eat fresh meat direct from Berlin. If necessary, we can build fifty miles of railroad in two days. Therefore it is nonsense to speak now of the times and the strategy of Napoleon.”
Here, then, is another of the great practical lessons that these three fateful years are teaching America. Consider now how she may avail herself of this particular lesson—the coordination of her great systems of more than a quarter of a million miles of standard steam railroads with an orderly and intelligent military plan, against any invasion. Other nations have had to build railroads with a particular relation to military strategy. Keen-minded Belgians and Frenchmen long ago noted the tendency of Germany to build double-track railroads to comparatively unimportant points upon her western front—since then they have had the opportunity to see the wartime efficiency of these lines, suddenly turned in an August from practical stagnation into busy, flowing currents of military traffic. Of the strategic value of double-track routes, much more in a moment. For this moment consider the location of the principal rail lines of the United States—particularly in their reference to the defense of the nation.
The “vital area” of the country, so called, is the coast territory between Portland, Maine, and Washington, District of Columbia, and resting east of the sharp ridges of the Alleghenies. Here is a great part of the wealth, the population, and the banking of the United States. Fortunately, however, this is the district best supplied with efficient railroads, double-tracked, triple-tracked, quadruple-tracked. And a reference to the map will quickly show that these lines are particularly well adapted to coast defense. From the extreme northeastern tip of Maine down to Key West and around the white and curving shore of the Gulf to Brownsville and the mouth of the Rio Grande there is hardly a strategical point that is not well served by existing railroads. North of Boston, the Boston and Maine and the Maine Central systems run, not alone parallel to the coast, but by means of a network of other lines intersecting their coast lines, are prepared to serve them from the inland country every few miles. The importance of this last fact comes to mind when one realizes the possibility of an invading force eluding our naval patrols and cutting our coast line railroads. With a network of adequate line behind the one actually closest to the shore, important communication would not be interrupted for any considerable time.
Boston is linked with New York by three distinct routes of the New Haven system; with Chicago by the Boston and Albany, in practical effect a branch stem of the New York Central system. Nor are these three stems the only protection that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad extends to NewEngland. The exposed and bended arm of Cape Cod is a weak point in the nation’s “vital area.” The New Haven holds and controls the one-time Old Colony Railroad which reaches the old whaling ports of Plymouth, New Bedford, and Provincetown—a railroad which might at any time become of vast strategic importance and which should be at once double-tracked, by the Federal government, if necessary, for the same reason that Germany double-tracked her lines leading to her French and Belgian border. And only second in importance to the Old Colony in case of an attempted invasion from across the Atlantic is the Long Island Railroad, stretching straight out of the city of New York to the very tip of the island. Between the Rockaways and Montauk there are many points on the south edge of Long Island that offer possibilities to landing parties. And it is essential that the railroad that serves this peculiarly barren bit of coast within two hours’ rail run of the largest city upon the American continent be prepared to serve it well in the case of military necessity. Fortunately the Long Island Railroad has been vastly improved—its double-track increased—within the past ten years. It is no longer barred by the East River from actual track connections with the other railroads of the country. The great Pennsylvania tunnels already make it possible in a military emergency to pour filled train and empty, on short headway, into Long Island. The strategic value to the nation of these tunnels will soon be supplemented by the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River which will bind the Pennsylvania and the Long Island railroadswith the main lines of the New Haven and the New York Central. This bridge cannot be completed too quickly. It is of immediate strategic necessity.
From New York south the same main-stem railroad that served the North so well in the days of the Civil War still stands. It has, however, ceased to be a chain of railroads, with ferriage at Havre de Grace and heartrending transfers by horse cars across Philadelphia and Baltimore, as it was in the days when New England and the York State and the Jersey regiments went down to Washington and over across the Potomac. From Baltimore north, this ancient stem is now the Pennsylvania Railroad, four-tracked or double-tracked the entire distance, rich in surplus locomotives and cars, and halted no longer by either the Delaware or the Susquehanna rivers. Since the close of the Civil War the Pennsylvania has builded its own line from Baltimore to Washington, while the Baltimore and Ohio, which owned that section of the ancient stem, has thrust its own line up into Philadelphia, coming from that point to Jersey City over the main-line rails of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey systems. This means that there are today between these parallel railroad systems eight main-line tracks from New York to Philadelphia and from four to six from Philadelphia through Baltimore to Washington. It is a combined railroad trunk of which a nation might well be proud. And this nation may yet be profoundly grateful that it has such a railroad trunk, through the heart of its “vital area.”
Consider again this “vital area”—the great metropolitan districts of Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore—almost a continuous city, in fact, all the way along the Atlantic coast from the south tip of Maine to the Potomac. It stretches west to the Alleghenies, in fact we may say a little beyond them, to include such vigorous communities as Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo. Here in this “vital area” of the nation are more than eighty per cent of its munition-making plants, its largest hard coal and soft coal deposits, its steel-making plants, its greatest shipyards and its three most important navy yards. Major General Leonard Wood has said that 1,500,000 men would be necessary to properly defend the coast-line from Portland, Maine, to Washington. Therefore the railroad main stem that connects these cities and the many larger cities between them is the most important military base line upon this continent. It needs all the resources of two- and four- and even six-tracked railroads, for General Wood has gone on record as saying that in a national crisis it might be necessary to move half a million men on this great base line within the course of ten short hours. On a conservative estimate these would require 500 trains—trains which, stood end to end, would reach all the way from New York to Washington or to Utica. Such a train movement would stagger even the imagination of a passenger-traffic manager accustomed to figure the “business” in and out of a national inauguration or a big football game at Princeton or New Haven or Cambridge.
A railroader whose pencil has a quick aptitude forfigures has estimated that Germany has seven and a half locomotives for every ten miles of track. We have one-third that proportion. Yet the preponderance of what our railroad men like to call “motive power” lies east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio. The same thing is true of cars—cars of every sort and variety. That is not the problem. Here it is.
Suppose, if you will, that an enemy finding an entrance to America on the sandy south shore of Long Island—to choose the spot most in the favor of the writers of the lurid fiction of an imaginary war between some European nation and the United States—has actually succeeded in capturing the city of New York. The great military base line of America is broken at its most important point. How are Major General Wood and the rest of the men who are puzzling the great problem out with him, going to move a half-million men—a half or a quarter of that number from New England over into Pennsylvania or down toward the defense lines around the national capital?
Take a look at your railroad map. Look sharply! You will need to look sharply to see the second line of communication between New England and the rest of the nation. There it is—a thin and wavering railroad line, stretching from New Haven up through the Connecticut hills, spanning the Hudson on the slender tracery of the Poughkeepsie bridge and threading still more hills until it reaches Trenton, New Jersey, and the main base line once again. The nation may yet thank a gentleman named Charles S. Mellen for that second line of communication. For while the muchdiscussed ex-president of the New Haven did not build the Poughkeepsie bridge or the New England lines leading to it, he at least caused both of them to be double-tracked, curves and grades ironed out until one heavily laden coal train could follow close upon the heels of another.