THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS

All the folk who come and go upon the railroad know the passenger stations. Few of them know the freight terminals. Yet it is from this last source that the railroad will derive the greater part of its revenue. The freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a single structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all its passengers, even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so to concentrate this part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal.

With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of trucking is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in order to eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the stimulus of competition, will establish freight stations at each point where any considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These stations will consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight (your traffic expert calls this “LCL,” meaning “less than carload”), and wagon yards for carload lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses, one for inbound, the other for outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have to be ample for the accommodation of a host of trucks and drays as well as for the long rows of freight-cars.

In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be a freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its shipping-rooms and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American city there may be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So much for the general commodity freight. Then there are the special commodities.

Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see, after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic burden that increases yearly.

It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and the handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal scheme. It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic; and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves, elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.

So you see the railroad’s freight terminal in any large city is like the fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together somewhere; and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city the railroad creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and outgoing—100 trains a day, perhaps—is gathered together and sorted with system and regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and the mail packages.

To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme, let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by which the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.

The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through Eastern New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth, lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many piers and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the smoky, busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight terminal. There are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight station at Jersey City (the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and another much larger plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper harbor, almost behind the Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now awaiting its greatest development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its ownership control of the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling line, 4 and 6 tracks wide, around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger terminal yards at Long Island City. This encircling line—the New York Connecting Railroad it is called—will be continued by a splendid bridge over the East River to an actual connection with the New Haven system reaching up into New England. When this is done, one of the bugaboos of the freightmen—the slow and ofttimes dangerous movement of barges and car-floats through the East River, past the entire length of Manhattan Island—will be ended. Greenville will become the distributing point for the bulk of New England freight that comes and goes from the south and the west through New York.

Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank well to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.

Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the neck of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main line from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark, united to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a gateway by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in reality. A big assorting or classification yard was built there for outgoing freight, and another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added and one of the great transfer houses of the country—but of that, more in a moment.

The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are closed and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy floats are being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville. There is not much loafing at either of those points along about supper-time. Switching crews show feverish activity in snatching the cars from the floats, and yardmasters bend themselves nervously toward forming the long trains that are to go rumbling toward the west throughout the night.Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a dozen switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no longer. They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals, cars that are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting begins. The night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser officers in the field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns in hand, they are running along the trains (these are pulling in from the waterfront every five minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping and revamping the freight traffic of the night.

This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for Pittsburgh, the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the points diverging therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has been in progress for more than an hour at one end of the classification tracks, there are long trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some large city or important distributing point. After that it is a simple enough matter to bring engines and cabooses and start the trains through. Then the sorting of the cars is begun again and continues until the freight receiving points and the freight interchange points in the metropolitan district have been swept clean for the night.

The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller scale, for it handles package freight—“less than carload.” It is a long structure, stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long sidings and unloading sheds. It takes the “LCL” stuff coming by night from the connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses, and a little after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great mass of matter, from 200 to 500 carloads a day.

Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day and by night.

You ship a box—sixty pounds to one hundred pounds—from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.; a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, ad infinitum. You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a problem in freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail service. Ten thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising here and there and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to destination, make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts have finished their difficult work.

If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the problem would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds weight, or less, perhaps—“LCL” anyway. From its destination it goes with other boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house the car in which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track, seals are broken, doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The transfer-house is roomy and systematic. If it were anything less it would resemble chaos.

But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting points have regular stands, upon which nightly are placed cars bound for these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house), each transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite that number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is mail-sorting on a Titanic scale.

Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one of the switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to replace it. Beyond that, the yardmaster’s superiors are all the time demanding that he show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.

When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects forfeits from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not expedite its passage; this the railroaders know as “per diem.” The great trick in operating is to keep per diem down; and so the “foreign” cars, so called, must be promptly returned to their home roads.

“We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern from Chicago every day,” the man who has this yard in charge explains. “It’s up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I can’t, I do the best I can.” He scratches his head. “Perhaps I’ll use a Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not, something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out beyond Washington there’d be trouble, and I’ve got to dig out something empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell. Mos’ generally, though, when we’ve got a turn of Western stuff, I’ve got my ‘empty’ tracks stuffed full o’ them New England cars.”

We mention something about the transfer-house being a mighty good thing.

“It’s a necessary evil,” says our guide, correcting us.

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

Here is another great railroad yard—this almost filling a mighty crevice between God’s eternal hills. This is within the mountain country, and the gossip that you get around the roundhouse is all of grades. You hear how Smith and the 2,999 pulled seven Pullmans around the Saddleback without a pusher; how some of the big preference freights take four engines to mount the summit; the tales of daring are tales of pushers and of trains breaking apart on the fearful mountain stretches.

Randall is yardmaster here, and Randall is the opposite of the layman’s picture of a yardmaster—a slovenly, worn, profane sort of fellow. Randall does not swear; he rarely even gets excited; his system of administration is so perfectly devised that even in a stress he rarely has to turn to work with his own hands. With him railroading is a fine, practical science. He will tell you of the methods at Collinwood, at Altoona, at Buffalo, at Chicago—wherein they differ. He is cool, calculating, clever, a capital railroader in addition to all these.