THE DRAMA OF THE FREIGHT

Perhaps you have seen a gay Limited in green and gold start forth with much ado from some big city station, and have concluded that the romance of the railroad rests with it; that the long lines of murky-red freight cars have little of the dramatic about them. If you have thought that, you have thought wrong.

Romance and drama reach high climax sometimes in the transportation of commodities. Fast trains, running upon the express schedules of the finest Limiteds, sometimes bring silk, $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 worth to the train, across the continent. A special may be hired by some impatient manufacturer to send a shipment through half a dozen States. There are notable speed records in the handling of fast freight, records of notable trains that are as well known among the traffic specialists as the Limiteds are known to the outside world.

There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city’s larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets, building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the constant replenishing of the city’s larder.

That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that are the pride of the railroad’s traffic head, go so quickly over the rails to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight conductor thumbing his “Sartor Resartus,” and discussing Carlyle as a stylist.

“Yes, we do bring some food up to town,” he admits. “I’ve got enough grub aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We’ve two refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago. The Chicago car has been iced twice—at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago. Soon we’ll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing.

“The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he’ll be fretting about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He’s got a lake tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we’ve got a branch running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a lake for its refrigerating stations. It’s just one of the many little kinks in running a road.”

We express a desire to see the big preference train, and—the block being still set against her—we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the train boss’s arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a string of white and yellow box-cars.

“California fruit,” he says; “they don’t think anything of sending it all the way across the continent. You might have thought those ranchers over there on the Pacific coast would have been discouraged when they were told that there were a dozen icing stations between the two oceans, and that the icing cost was prohibitive. They weren’t a bit. They just sat down and did some tall thinking, and after a while they developed this type of car. We call it pre-cooled. The car is cleaned and brought to a chill before loading. After that the temperature is not allowed to rise while the fruit is being piled away inside. It is closed and sealed, while still ice-cold, and icy-cold she comes bumping her way east over three or four thousand miles of track. It may be scorching down there along the S. P.; they may be just gasping for air in the Missouri bottoms; but that pre-cooled car comes right along, keeping its cargo fresh and cool and pure. We can deliver her anywhere here on the Atlantic seaboard, and no risk of spoiling the stuff.”

We slip along another half-dozen cars. The conductor halts again and fumbles with his way-bills.

“There’s the boy,” he laughs. “He’s halibut. There’s half a dozen halibuts along here in a string.”

We do not like to show an utter ignorance of the food question and we venture an assertion.

“Halibut comes from Newfoundland?” we ask. “How do you get it around here?”

The freighter grins sympathetically at our lack of knowledge.

“Bless you,” he says. “That little fishing pond up there on the Banks isn’t big enough for a land which has 27,000,000 folks gathered in its cities. These cars have come in from big Yem Hill’s road—all the way from Tacoma up on Puget Sound—State of Washington. Some of those people who live in Boston might have a fit if they knew that their beloved halibut was born and raised in the Pacific Ocean; but that’s the truth of the matter.

“This fish (and some of it’s going straight to Boston to be sold in the very shade of Faneuil Hall), has come 7,000 miles to be eaten on the very shores of the Atlantic. When the fishing ship that caught this cargo was fifty miles off the docks, she began calling Tacoma with her wireless. The yardmaster of the Northern Pacific was ready there for the news from that rat-a-tap. He had a string of refrigerator cars ready; they were ready and set out along the wharf by the time the ship was made fast.

“Five minutes later the fish were being loaded into the cars. They had a gang of stevedores working there clock-like, as those fellows work around the big tents of a three-ring circus. First there went in a layer of ice, then a layer of fish, then another of ice. In thirty minutes the job was done. In forty-five minutes that string of fish-cars was coming east on an express-train schedule. It was knocked apart at St. Paul and again at Chicago. Here’s our share of the spoils, and we’re not loafing here on the old main line.

“We’re preference freight, if you please, and no old bumpety-bump with coal and ore taking the low-grade tracks. They sandwich us in among the all-Pullmans, even when we’re on the four-track divisions, for food is quick; food won’t keep forever; and those folks down in the city are getting hungry.”

He starts to say more, but the engine call halts him. The block is clear once again. The conductor catches a car step, the “preference” starts forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us—more market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession, these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part. To-night again, the food is going up to the city.The scene changes. Now we are off in the rolling country of up-State—dairy country, if you please. The railroad that stretches its thick black trail the length of the valley is no four-track line, with heavy trains coursing over it every three or four or five or ten minutes. This is but a single-track branch; in the parlance of the railroaders it is a “jerkwater”; and the coming of its two passenger trains and that of the way-freight each day are events in the little towns that line it. Still, even this little branch is doing its part in the filling of the city’s larder. This branch has the filling of the city babies’ milk bottles as its own particular problem.

At early dawn, the muddy brown roads that lead to the little depot there at the flour mills are alive. The farmer boys are bringing the milk to the railroad. Down the track a few hundred yards beyond the depot is the slick, clean, new milk-station. Over across the brook is the cheese-factory, deserted and given over to the gentle fingers of decay. Those two buildings tell the story of changing times; in their mute way they tell the growth of the American city.

In other days this township made cheese. To-day they drive the milk to the depot. Each morning finds a big refrigerator car, built in the fashion of passenger equipment, so that it may be handled on passenger trains, at the milk station. The farmer boys are prompt with their milk, it is checked and weighed and placed in the car, in cans and in bottles. Hardly has the last big ten-gallon can gone clattering into the car before the whistle of the warning local is heard up the line, just beyond the curve at the water-tank. While the train is at the depot, in all the bustle of the comings and goings at a country station, the engine makes quick drill movement and picks up the milk-car.

Farther down the line that same train picks up more milk-cars. By the time it reaches the junction where it intersects the main line it is a considerable train for a branch line. Indeed at the junction there are more milk-cars, from other branches that ramble off into the real back-country. There are enough of them now to make a train through to the city. The trainmaster has a good engine ready for every afternoon, and the milk express goes scurrying into town with passenger rights and on passenger schedules. You cannot hurry the babies’ milk through to town any too quickly.

This is all first-day milk. You can take a compass, place the pin-leg squarely in the heart of the busy town—a place of brick and asphalt, of steel and concrete, without ever a hint of growing things—and with the pencil-leg trace a segment of a circle—the outer line some 200 miles distant from the centre. Afterwards you can draw a second circle segment, its outer line some 350 miles from the same town centre. From within the inner circle comes the first-day milk, delivered to the railroad during the early part of a day and on the householder’s table in the big city the next morning. From without this inner circle and within the outer, comes the second-day milk which has another twenty-four hours in its transit to town. The whole thing, once rather badly handled by itinerant single dealers, has been reduced to scientific business by skilful coÖperation between the big milk-dealers of the present day and the railroads.

It is night.

The last of the office lights in the towering buildings has been snuffed out. Downtown is quiet—quiet for a little time, for soon after sun-up it will be a vortex once again; these narrow, deep-canyoned streets will be astir and human-filled once again. But at nine o’clock in the evening the policeman’s footfall on the pavement echoes in lonely streets. A tired bookkeeper scurrying home after a vexatious hunt for his balances gets sharp scrutiny from the policeman. Downtown is asleep.

Then, from around the turn of a sharp corner comes a night train of wagons, drawn by a small brigade of horses. These are not filled with market-truck; market-truck will not reach the town till midnight at the earliest. These are great high-boxed vans, painted white, a bit gaudy in lettering. They make you think of those long-ago days when you used to go down to the depot to see the circus come in, for the big wagons are precisely like those that used to shroud mystery as they rolled from the trains down to the show-lot. We follow this procession of half a dozen great vans, follow it through the twisting, narrow streets of downtown, across a famous old ferry, straight up to the long sheds of a railroad terminal.

On the one side of the terminal, the passenger trains are coming and going at all hours. By day this shed at which the big vans back, each into its own carefully marked place, is a general freight-house; by night it is given over to the stocking of the city babies’ milk bottles. The ferried vans are hardly emptied of their empty cans and cases before the first of the milk trains comes backing in at the other side of the long covered platform. Hissing arcs up under that slimsy roof throw high lights and deep shadows here and there and everywhere. They show the platform-men tugging at the car fastenings before the brakes are fairly released. In another minute, the big side-doors are thrown open, almost simultaneously, in still another, the place is alive with the rattle of trucks. The milk—tons upon tons of it—in ten-gallon cans and in cases of individual bottles, is being loaded within those circus-like cans. A second milk-train comes bumping in at a far platform. There is another brigade of vans waiting for it there. A third train is due to arrive in another half-hour. The vans that it will fill are already beginning to back into place and unload their cans and cases upon the platforms.

Here are almost 200 great four-horse trucks being filled simultaneously, and all working with the almost rhythmic harmony of organization. You want to know how they do it? Ask that man over there, he in a short rough coat, who carries a lantern on his arm and with it peers interestedly into every one of the cars. That man’s word is law on this platform, for he is its boss. He has been filling the babies’ milk bottles from this particular terminal for almost a quarter of a century now. His railroad was the first to bring milk into a large city.

“We get it over,” he will tell you, “by the experience of some little time, and by planning. You saw the numbers on the team side of this milk platform. That’s only half the problem. There are a dozen different milk-handling concerns doing business at this shed, and their stuff comes together on this one train. Yet we get the thing out by having each concern—each truck—come up to its own position at the team side. The other half of the problem we solve by having a certain position for each milk-car.

“Here is the Hygienic Milk Company up on the Heights. You have seen their fancy dairies all over town. Well, the Hygienic has a station up at Bottger’s, on our Lancaster & Essex division, that fills two cars at that station every blessed day. Their two cars stand in beyond this No. 14 pillar every night; so we know just where to direct their trucks. That’s business—just system. We spot the cars every night.”

“Spot the cars?” you interrupt. He smiles a bit at your ignorance.

“This train is made up in just the same fashion every night,” he explains. “These two Hygienic cars are always the fifth and sixth. If they were the eighth and ninth some nifty evening—if some smart Aleck of a yardmaster up the line would take to shuffling up these cars as you shuffle a deck of cards—we would have a near riot here, and I couldn’t get these platforms cleared of the milkmen for that market-truck train that backs in here from the south every night at 11:55.