  THE REGIONAL RAILROAD AT HOME Nearly six years ago I began a careful study of the possibilities of a regional railroad development within the United States. At that time I had not visited Europe. Yet a fairly thorough knowledge of the general plan of her railway organization, acquired through a process of careful reading, had made me cognizant of the regional plan as it exists there; particularly of the French rÉseaux. It was then apparent—well before our entrance into the World War—that the scheme of organization upon which our roads had been upbuilt for eighty-five years was approaching the end of its usefulness. Over-consolidation, the decline of real competition between the separate carriers, the increasing unintelligent interference of government with the minor details of railroad operation, the decline of morale—each of these things separately, all of them together, bespoke the slowly approaching end of our old order of railroad things. What was to replace it? Government ownership? Some of the people who in 1916 had a stray thought or two that the state ownership and operation of our railroads might not be such a bad thing after all, by the end of 1920 were pretty well disillusioned. At the beginning of this book I reviewed in some slight detail the achievements and the failures of the United States Railroad Administration. It proved that in the centralization of an entire railroad structure of this land certain great operating economies might be accomplished; it also proved quite as definitely the fact that our 265,000 miles of railroad consolidated into a single structure was far too clumsy and too unwieldy for any sort of efficient operation whatsoever. Three years ago I attempted the fabrication of alternative railroad centralization and decentralization schemes. In the one I bowed abjectly to our great American god of competition. To the limit of my ability and knowledge I recognized banking control, natural traffic routes and breaking points, and interlocking directorates and ownerships. On paper I laid down a number of “competitively consolidated” railroads—not more than twenty, or at the most twenty-five,—for the entire United States. I linked widely separated roads because they already had linked themselves by joint ownership; I split New England in twain, giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania and the rest of her railroads to the already overburdened and somewhat unwieldy New York Central. Such moves followed the logic of Wall Street. The comfort and convenience of Boston mattered not at all. Did she not have competition? What mattered it that under such a plan the Baltimore and Ohio, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, or the Canadian roads would have no entrance either to her or to the fine industrial territory about her, save over the rails of competitors? That was a mere detail! And while Boston might have the competition of two roads, little of the rest of New England would. As I have already said in this book, railroad competition may be the industrial necessity, nay even the very breath of commercial life, to such fine manufacturing towns as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids, but how about such fine manufacturing towns as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence? Are they not also entitled to the breath of commercial life? Yet to give these four big typical New England towns railroad competition would mean the complete dismemberment of the compact New Haven system—an almost utter impossibility. Southern New England is already pretty tightly set as a simon-pure railroad region. It can be regarded as nothing else. So I tore up my “competitive consolidation” plan and began Return to New England. Just as the present Boston and Albany would make a good east and west main-stem from Boston through Massachusetts to Albany for our newly created Southern New England Lines so would the erstwhile Fitchburg perform a similar office for the Northern New England Lines, which would include the Boston and Maine, Maine Central, Rutland, Central Vermont—probably, as to-day, right through to New London—and the Bangor and Aroostook. There would be left when this was done but two separate or “foreign” roads in the New England territory. And these would be “foreign” in the fullest sense of the word—the Grand Trunk (just now being absorbed into the Canadian national railroad system) and the Canadian Pacific, which reach across Maine toward Canada’s winter ports upon A good many people attempting this very difficult problem of regionalizing the railroads of New England have attempted to leave the Boston and Albany out of their calculations, which not only spoils the picture but makes the entire regional plan almost utterly senseless. Others doing the same thing have attempted to balance matters by giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania, which is perhaps a little worse. That distinguished student of American railroads, Professor E. Z. Ripley of Harvard, who undertook recently a regionalization scheme at the behest of the Interstate Commerce Commission, fell into no such error. He gave New Haven to the Baltimore and Ohio, and I suspect did it knowing full well that the Pennsylvania, having been offered the New Haven long ago and having refused it, would probably not have a change of heart in the near future. In its recent close new traffic alliance with the New Haven—an alliance whose outward expression consists very largely of some new through trains and sleeping-car services from New England by way of the Hell Gate Bridge and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City—the Pennsylvania undoubtedly has all of the New Haven that it can easily digest. Broad Street cannot be anxious to undertake the management of the Litchfield branch in Connecticut, or the Chatham one down Cape Cod way. Yet I hear you asking Professor Ripley, if the Pennsylvania does not want to buy the New Haven, how much more so would the Baltimore and Ohio, whose terminals in New York are weak and whose finances generally are in a far more precarious condition, want to attempt the thing? Can the keen-minded Mr. Willard at Baltimore be more anxious than the keen-minded Mr. Rea at Philadelphia to undertake the This entire question of the probable ownership of the regional roads I have left until the succeeding and final chapter of this book. I do not agree in the opinion of many bankers that the regionalization of the roads should be attempted in a supine bowing to their financial results of recent years, and so should be based upon these showings. I believe that it should be based fundamentally upon the service needs of the communities that the regional roads of to-morrow will have to serve. The Southern Tier of the state of New York for too many years suffered set-backs from the fact that virtually its sole railroad servant was a historic line, which wholesale fraud had doomed to a lifetime of perpetual near-paralysis. So much for New England. Such planning is typical of that which might be expected of any non-competitive regional plan. Along the entire outer or coastline rim of the United States the regional plan without compromise or variation works out pretty well indeed, all the way from the proposed Northern New England Lines that you have just seen out to the Californian railroad, or the Puget Sound Lines, which would immediately adjoin the Californian upon the north. Along the outer edges of the country it would be easy to devise. It is a pretty plan, and in its simplicity most beguiling. And yet when one comes to the center of the country this same simple non-competitive regional plan becomes almost utterly impossible. After all we are working with things as they are A careful study of the rival plans—non-competitive regional and highly competitive regional—has led me to a firm belief that the real solution of our problem of railroad organization in this country lies in a compromise between them. Were we to start afresh to plan the railroads of the United States, supposing that not a mile of track had been laid down between the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific and that our vision was sufficiently Aladdin-like to foresee the present growth of the land (really built up upon that very railroad development), we might well have adopted a purely regional plan, as did the French so long ago. But much as we may admire such a theory we cannot entirely ignore hard facts—the important properties already built and well developed, the recognized making and breaking points of traffic, the individual morale and tradition of the several roads—the sort of thing that we have shown, despite all of its recent labor troubles, still so existent upon the Pennsylvania and some other roads. So in compromise we use the purely regional idea where the purely regional idea best serves high theory and the broad pathways of hard fact and established principle. We begin in New England and there we create an autonomous regional railroad—probably two, for reasons which we have already stated—each as we have seen with headquarters in New England’s traditional capital, Boston. Next we cross the Hudson River and tackle the great congested railroad district that lies between it and the thousand-distant cities of Chicago and St. Louis as a bloc. Here begins our problem in dead earnest. Shall we make two great regions of most if not all of it—the one to the north with the dark-green cars and the traditional name of New York Central, and the one to the south occupying all the rest of the territory down to the Potomac and the Ohio River with the wine-red cars and the traditions of the Pennsylvania? No, not unless we want to consider the operation of two great railroads of between twenty-five and thirty thousand miles of No, I think that we can do better than that. We can easily make four long narrow regions, stretching from New York about four and five hundred miles to the west, and to these give auxiliary regions, or rather regional railroads, further on, to Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. The most northerly of these will be, of course, the New York Central, the unit management of which will be terminated or broken at Buffalo—as of other days—and to which will be handed the Delaware and Hudson, north of Albany, possibly the northern portions of the Ontario and Western, and some lesser properties. It might be possible to go even further and give the generally efficient even though somewhat unwieldy New York Central the Lehigh Valley, the Lackawanna, the Erie (east of Jamestown), the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg, and the rest of the Delaware and Hudson. But I hardly think that this would be practicable. We are trying, even in our theories, to keep our feet on the ground. It would be better by far to take this last group and make it the second of our long, narrow northeastern regions—call it, if you will, the Erie-Lackawanna and place its eastern terminals at Albany, at New York, and, by means of the absorption of some sixty miles of the Reading, at Philadelphia too. This would make a well-balanced and compact group, fairly competitive and yet accomplishing great economies in the common use of trackage and terminals. The wastage in these things alone is hardly less than appalling, the opportunities for saving tremendous. The third of this particular grouping of regions would be quite naturally the Pennsylvania. It too would be terminated as of other days, at Pittsburg, although, as we shall presently see, with its own auxiliary regional railroad it would go into the chief cities east of Mississippi. But suppose one takes the Baltimore and Ohio, chops it off at Parkersburg, at Wheeling, and at Pittsburg—as one did with the Pennsylvania—and adds to it the greater part of the Reading, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Western Maryland, and one or two much lesser properties. The result is a fairly compact property, sufficiently competitive in its reach to the larger terminal cities of its territory to appease those who must continue to bow the knee before that particular god of business, and yet enough unified to be easily handled from its traditional headquarters at Baltimore. That would seem to be more generally satisfactory than the obliteration of the Baltimore and Ohio, with its fine traditions, its good morale, and its general record of excellent service. So much then for our four regional railroads to lie north of the Potomac, west of the Hudson River and east of Buffalo, Pittsburg, and Wheeling. How about the region that lies immediately west of these three last important gateway cities? Shall we consider those great railroad States of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan (the lower peninsula), and Illinois as a great single non-competitive region, in full accord with the high theory of the regional plan? No, not if we have any real regard for the feelings of the residents of those four great States. A single railroad for those four States might be workable, but I doubt it. I even doubt if you could operate successfully either a single railroad for either Ohio or Indiana. Illinois we shall leave out of consideration for the moment, while Michigan would probably be pleased as Punch to have her It is south of Michigan that the problem complicates. And here it is that I can only see to-day, and for many many hundreds of days to come, the retention of a pretty generally competitive transport plan. Regions, yes, if we still like the sound of the word. But regions which interlace so that in reality the word becomes a good deal of a misnomer. The New York Central Lines West (formerly the Lake Shore, the Big Four, and the Pittsburg and Lake Erie and the Lake Erie and Western), reaching from the terminal of the parent property at Buffalo out to Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburg, would have a president and real headquarters at Cleveland; the Erie-Lackawanna West would consist of the Wabash (east of the Mississippi River), the Nickel Plate, the Erie (west of Jamestown), the Wheeling and Lake Erie, the Clover Leaf and the Bessemer and Lake Erie. The Pennsylvania Lines West would be virtually as they existed prior to the recent after-the-war reconsolidation, but with the addition of a needed feeder into Detroit; and finally the Baltimore and Ohio West would consist of its present property plus the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Western, the Monon, and the Hocking Valley—all with headquarters at Cincinnati. That interesting little cross-country road of the interesting Henry Ford, the Detroit, Toledo, and Ironton, might easily fit into the westerly region of the Pennsylvania, while the Baltimore and Ohio would be given at least a trackage entrance into Detroit over the PÈre Marquette, so as to keep it on par with its three regional competitors. The rest of the PÈre Marquette would be merged into the embracing Michigan Central. Just as this region, almost immediately east of the Mississippi River, bids fair to remain competitive for an indefinite It might be found more practicable to bring Union Pacific directly into Chicago over the rails of one or the other of these last two properties (Union Pacific’s financial interest in Illinois Central already is a powerful one), although the Union Pacific’s operating heads would probably prefer one of the routes between Chicago and Omaha discarded by the larger Northwestern grouping; the present Milwaukee between those two cities is better built and so more easily operated than Illinois Central or Chicago Great Western. Union Pacific for a long time has felt that it has the same right as its chief transcontinental competitor, the Santa FÉ, to a direct entrance into “But,” you interrupt, “how about Southern Pacific in such a case? It is also a pretty warm competitor of the Santa FÉ.” To bring both Santa FÉ and Union Pacific into the Chicago gateway as transcontinental competitors and bar out Southern Pacific would be indeed grossly unfair. I have no intention of doing anything of the sort. Cross quickly with me from the Middle West territory to the lovely Pacific coast. Here again we think clearly in our own terms of purely regional railroads. Two of them would occupy the extreme coastal district all the way from the Mexican line to the Canadian. The most southernly of this twain is the Californian railroad, a fine, dignified name for a fine, dignified railroad extending well beyond the bounds of even the great Golden State, north to Medford, Oregon, and east to El Paso, to Albuquerque, to Salt Lake, and to Ogden. Within this huge and rather sparse territory—sparse as compared in a rail traffic sense with the territories west of the Mississippi River—we should have an absolutely non-competitive railroad, but under strict regulation operated for the greatest good of the greatest number. That has been done before in California; it is being done to-day and most successfully. The Southern Pacific is usually most responsive to its huge non-competitive territory. It gives to it in most cases an adequate service. New England lends itself to the non-competitive and highly economical regional railroad. So does the west coast too, but because of its giant sweep we give this last seaboard two regions, the one to the north of the Californian railroad, the Puget Sound Lines, extending, as we have seen, north from Medford, and west from Spokane as well as south from Vancouver, British Columbia, and northwest from Ogden, Utah. East of these two great railroads—and yet neither of them too intensive for successful management by a single executive head—are the Colorado Lines, embracing roughly the main mass of railroad trackage within the State and extending Now we begin to get these roads running down into the immediate Southwest from Chicago and into their proper relationship—the Rock Island, with its lines from Chicago, St. Louis, and Memphis, coming together and reaching to El Paso and out to the Colorado Lines near the eastern Colorado border; the Santa FÉ, taking the original Missouri Pacific between Kansas City and St. Louis for a much-needed entrance into the latter city and touching the Colorado Lines at La Junta and the Californian both at Albuquerque and at El Paso; the Burlington shorn of its Twin Cities line, but given either the Missouri Pacific west of Kansas City or the former Kansas Pacific (to-day a detached but well-built branch of the Union Pacific) or both and terminating both at the Colorado State line and, by the acquisition of the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient and the building of a few hundred miles of railroad, with the Californian somewhere in the general neighborhood of Albuquerque. Here is balance. Here is a fair adjustment between logical competitors, the retention of competition where it is not practicable to eliminate it, and its abolishment where it is feasible to uproot it and establish great operating economies in the wake of the change. We are not quite done. We have hardly considered the South. It is very much entitled to consideration, with its great growth in the last few years and its wonderful opportunities of the immediate future. But because, like California, it still has its intensive growth in the future rather than in the past, it is not too late to bend it into the economic regional plan. We left the Californian railroad with an important eastern No, that would hardly do. The Iron Mountain reaching in a splendid strategic position from St. Louis to Texas, shorn of its wretched mÉsalliance with the Missouri Pacific and given instead the Alton and certain portions of the ’Frisco and Missouri, Kansas, and Texas systems, would make an excellent feeder for the Texas Lines right through to Kansas City, to St. Louis, and Chicago, and still avoid the operation of too many miles or too attenuated a single system under one executive head. Meanwhile the competitive factor in the competitive territory which we have permitted to remain within the land would be appeased by the fact that the Rock Island, the Santa FÉ, and the Burlington would also bind the Texas Lines to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. Our plan continues to balance, and to balance extremely well. The Texas Lines would have still another competitive entrance into Chicago. We will take the Illinois Central—deleted, if you will recall, of its rather superfluous line to Omaha—and make it the main-stem and core of a far larger railroad which we may well give the more dignified and embracing title of Mississippi Valley railroad. From New Orleans straight north to Chicago, west to Beaumont, northwest to Shreveport and to Little Rock, possibly east to Mobile, and northeast to Birmingham—here is the making of a really dominating and yet very logical regional railroad. It also might and probably There still remains the southeastern corner of the United States—and right here our problem reaches its final and most perplexing phase. Whether to rearrange it in two or three simon-pure regions or to have two or three competing systems within a comparatively large regional district is a question not easy of correct solution. I believe that the latter is the solution most likely to come, however. The inter-ownership of the Atlantic Coast Line and the Louisville and Nashville railroads is a factor not easily to be ignored. Ranged against this combined system—which in its final entity probably would include the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis and the historic Georgia railroad—is the huge Southern railway, upon which much thought and money has been expended within the last ten or twelve years, and which would meet it at virtually every important competitive point. Only two other important railroads occupy this southeastern territory, south of Virginia—the Central of Georgia and the Seaboard Air Line. The first of these is the property of the Illinois Central and yet could not logically be made a portion of the Mississippi Valley railroad which we were outlining but a minute ago. The economic thing probably would be to parcel out these two properties, and several smaller ones, between the new Atlantic Coast Line and Southern railway combinations and finally retain for each of these their present valuable entrances into the City of New Orleans. A great portion of the Seaboard Air Line lies in Florida, but Florida like New England and Texas and California lends herself quite readily to the absolute non-competitive regional plan. A Florida railroad would be touched by the Atlantic Coast Line and the larger Southern railway at Jacksonville, at Pensacola, and at intermediate points. Economy is indeed a watchword for this plan. I shall not attempt to take your time or dull your interest in its details by giving you too many of them. A very few single but rather typical examples of the savings to be made, were it ever to be placed in effect, will be illustrative. Here for instance is that so-called Southern Tier of New York—the long row of counties which lies for nearly two hundred miles against its Pennsylvania line. Many years ago the historic Erie pushed its rails through the Southern Tier. From its main line—originally built from Piermont-on-Hudson to Dunkirk, New York—it gradually shot branches north into the heart of the Empire State to Canandaigua, to Rochester, and to Buffalo. Eventually it made an interlacing of these branches, and in those days—when men hardly dared dream of the motor-car or the improved highway—the branches generally were profitable. The Rochester branch, about one hundred miles in length, was typical of many of its fellows. It diverged from the main line at Painted Post, just west of Corning, and for the Then in the early eighties there came a competitor through that narrow valley. The rich Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western, ambitious for a line of its own into the growing Buffalo gateway, in 1882 and 1883 laid down its rails alongside the Erie—along the main line all the way from Great Bend, Pennsylvania, just a few miles east of Binghamton, New York, to Painted Post, and along the Rochester branch as far as Wayland. The new railroad was a main-stem; double-tracked it gave frequent and swift service. The little Rochester branch line of the Erie shriveled up and all but died. In the regional organization that you have just seen me outline, I have brought together the rich Lackawanna and the poverty-stricken Erie, along with the Lehigh Valley, the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg, the southerly divisions of the Delaware and Hudson, and the Ulster and Delaware railroads. It takes no large amount of imagination to forsee that such a combination—and most railroad executives and broad-visioned bankers will agree that it is a logical one—can greatly simplify operation in southern and western New York and abandon miles of railroad that should have been abandoned many years since. In effect, this Erie-Lackawanna system would have at least two separate main lines from its combined terminals at New York (how effectively these might be combined we discovered when we saw the possibilities of the electrification applied to the suburban traffic of the New York metropolitan district) all the way to Binghamton, a little more than two hundred miles distant. From that point west to the brisk small city of Corning the traffic could be consolidated upon one of these main lines, possibly three-tracked or four-tracked, and the other abandoned—a quick and easy solution I could take the atlas maps of western New York and show you many, many more miles of railroad which could be abandoned profitably to-day, not to the hindrance but to the positive benefit of the communities which they are supposed to serve yet no longer serve, efficiently at least. But let us turn our attention from trackage to terminals and for the moment consider the chief city of western New York—the chief in size at any rate, Buffalo. Twelve steam railroads to-day enter Buffalo and share four main passenger-stations there. The Lackawanna has a handsome new terminal at the harbor-front, into which enter not only its trains but those of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg and the Nickel Plate lines. The Lehigh Valley has an almost equally new and handsome station, which it shares with the Grand Trunk. The Erie plays the lone hand in a very ancient building, while the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Michigan Central, and one or two other roads are housed in the Exchange Street Station, which is fairly antediluvian in its antiquity and its inefficiency. For some years Buffalo dreamed her dreams of a real union station, which would rise majestically from the lake-front in the neighborhood of the historic court-house and jail where Czolgosz, the assassin of William McKinley, met his trial and his just fate. Travelers who have had to pass through Buffalo and who have been compelled to change from one railroad to another there shared these dreams of a station into which all the trains should pass. But the city authorities and those of the railroads came to an absolute impasse in the matter. The New York Central, for instance, did not want to continue backing its through New York-Chicago passenger trains into the Buffalo station. It proposed as a compromise So while mayors and general managers and high-priced engineers and all the other bigwigs stormed and argued the Lackawanna people and the Lehigh Valley people went right ahead and built their own passenger stations. It is not conceivable that these large handsome stations would now be abandoned. In the creation of the regional plan it is not necessary. It becomes obvious from the beginning that the many trains of the Erie-Lackawanna would easily fill the Lackawanna Station to repletion and permit of the final abandonment of the ancient Erie passenger-house with one of its most exasperating rail grade-crossing problems in the land as a perplexity always attendant upon its operation. The Lehigh Valley Station, but slightly enlarged in its head-house accommodations, can easily be brought to meet the necessity of the other regional systems entering Buffalo—those of the New York Central, the Michigan Central, and the Pennsylvania. For it so happens that the present train-shed of the new Lehigh Valley passenger terminal lies parallel with and immediately adjacent to the tracks and platforms of the old Exchange Street Station of the New York Central. To make the head-house (the passenger, baggage, mail, and other facilities) of the Lehigh Valley Station accommodate the trains that now enter Exchange Street would hardly involve more than a rearrangement of these last groups of tracks and platforms, at an astonishingly low cost and with an astounding degree of operating saving—this last a factor which seemingly enters but little if at all into the calculations of the men who design our dazzling new American railroad stations. Economy enters into the operation of a passenger terminal as it does into that of a freight terminal—and what can be accomplished in this last direction we already have seen. The upkeep of the passenger, baggage, and mail facilities of a Rochester is but seventy miles distant from Buffalo. It is entered by six steam railroads, which occupy five separate and distinct passenger stations. McAdoo brought this down to but four, yet recently the Pennsylvania decided that it could no longer share the occupancy of the handsome and commodious station of the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburg, so it reopened its former individual passenger station, for three trains in and three trains out each day. We do not have to go as far as Vancouver to see the essential waste of the pride of the competitive system. Rochester is a city of a little more than 300,000 persons. Two stations, anyway—two of the existing stations—and possibly but one—the excellent new station of the New York Central—would serve all the passenger needs of both her steam and her interurban electric railroads, and with no more than the slightest trackage rearrangement. And at an operating economy, as well as an economy to the purse and time of the average traveler who must cross the city from one road to another, that is not capable of quick estimate. Cleveland has just embarked upon an extravagant union station project which, after all is said and done, is not to be a union station. For some of the more sensible of the railroads who come to her have refused to be beguiled by so obvious a real-estate scheme and one involving huge expenditures at the very time when the average American railroad is pleading poverty and reducing its expenditures because of that plea. The huge capital expenditure of that proposed new Cleveland passenger-station might be saved in a large part, and still that enterprising city be given a fine passenger gateway that would express worthily her great pride and her great wealth. I have always had a feeling that with foresight—and an abolition of foolish competitive pride—the huge capital expenditure already made and yet to be made upon the new Union Station of Chicago could have been very largely saved It is useless, it seems to me, to stress too heavily the wage of the American railroad employee when gross capital expenditures of this sort have been made and are continuing to be made; or the rate of the traffic return. Our railroads have been far too greatly burdened by these gewgaws. Once in a while, of course, a station comes along, like the new Grand Central Terminal in New York, which is the fruition of a positive genius. If all of our passenger terminals had the economic strength of the new Grand Central it would not have been necessary to write these paragraphs. And I do not think either that it would have been necessary to raise the passenger-fares far from their before-the-war levels. But when one balances one Grand Central against a baker’s dozen of Washington Terminals (with that overhead and operating cost of thirty-four cents a passenger) he sees at once the genuine value of that one Grand Central. I can have no quarrel with the fine civic spirit that demands that the railroad station of the modern American city shall be the full architectural expression of its progress and its growth—in truth a city gateway. The exquisite monumental concourses of the Pennsylvania Station, the new Grand Central Terminal, and that at Washington have not been lost upon me, When we were considering the electrification of the standard steam railroad in the United States in general, and the Boston suburban zone in particular, I called attention in a brief word to the fact that electrification would vastly increase the passenger capacity of the two great terminals of that city—South Station and North Station. I did not stop then to tell in detail of what it might mean to both of those two civic gateways, already badly crowded in the rush hours of the morning and the evening; of how it might avoid for twenty-five years or more the somewhat imminent present-day necessity of tearing them down and replacing them with far larger stations, at a huge capital expenditure. In South Station the fact that its builders of a quarter of a century ago had the wisdom and the foresight to place underneath the train-shed and head-house loop terminal tracks for future electric operation (tracks and platforms which have never been used and whose very existence is not even suspected by the majority of the people who use the station daily) might defer this necessity. At North Station the time for imperative and radical enlargement is close at hand, unless warded off by an electric installation upon most if not all of the many suburban lines that now enter that busy place. Also in these chapters have I likened New England, in both its topography and its traffic problems, to Old England. Now may I go further and see in Boston fairly accurate replica of London, not alone in appearance—and that it is, with its Christopher Wren churches, its medley of old-time streets, its little parks and squares, and its general appearance Victoria—both of the stations that rest side by side and share the name in common—seemingly is no larger than the Broad Street or Market Street Station in Philadelphia. The combined station certainly is not as large as Broad Street, barely larger than Market Street. Yet in each business day more trains arrive and depart from its train-sheds than either at Broad Street or at Market Street. How is this done? In the beginning the British railway man does not feel that when he builds a railway terminal he has to provide a great congregation place for the people. There is of course at great interchange points in the heart of this country—such as Kansas City or Atlanta or Cincinnati or Omaha or St. Paul—a real need for abundant waiting-room capacity where through travelers may be properly housed between their trains—for a number of hours, if need be. At more strictly terminal or near-terminal points such as Philadelphia or New York or Boston this necessity largely disappears, and the space that is taken by huge waiting-rooms can better be used by more essential station facilities. Victoria Station does not exceed ten platform-tracks in width. To handle more than 300 trains a day within this limited capacity means the very highest efficiency in train handling. Not only does it mean the maximum of promptitude in loading and unloading the trains but an adaptation of their schedules wherever possible so that an incoming train bringing passengers into the station is used for a regular run taking other passengers out again, and so the necessity of an “empty movement” into the storage-yards and back again is avoided. Moreover the When but a few years ago it became necessary to enlarge radically the capacity of the side of Victoria Station belonging to the London, Brighton, and South Coast railway the engineers found that they would have to think twice before they accomplished their purpose. The station was but six tracks in width, divided into two groups of three tracks each—two of these alongside the platforms, with a middle one reserved for the switching of the locomotives backwards and forwards. It was not possible to increase this limited width. Upon the one side stood an important through street of London—Buckingham Palace Road—and upon the other the equally immovable twin-station of the Southeastern and Chatham railway. Therefore the engineers did the one thing possible, short of the enormously expensive job of double-decking the station—they lengthened it, and at a comparatively low cost doubled its capacity. To-day two long trains, standing one behind the other upon the same track, may load and unload their passengers at the same time, and without the slightest confusion or difficulty. The high-level platform (the station-platform at the same height as the floor of the train), which Parliament forced upon the British railways many years ago, is a tremendous help to quick entraining and detraining. Why it has not been more universally adopted in this country it is hard to understand. It is in successful use both in the Grand Central and the Pennsylvania Stations in New York, but at very few other points. And this despite the fact that in order to serve these two highly important stations virtually all the Pullman equipment in the country now has been adapted to high-level platform use. Yet only the Pennsylvania has had the courage and the vision to adapt this very sensible form of platform to its intermediate stations. It already has become a standard upon that great railroad. That the adoption of a regional railroad system for this country would bring this and a hundred other needed |
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