A famous cantilever rapidly disappearing—the substitution of a new
Kentucky river bridge for the old, on the Queen & Crescent system

By the beginning of the Civil War, there was a well established business, a business established with admirable foresight. Such men as Adams, Wells and Fargo, and Benjamin F. Cheney, one of the founders of the American Express Company, said that the express business should be kept within narrow limits—so within narrow limits it has been kept, and to-day when Harnden’s suitcase has developed into a business paying luscious dividends on more than a hundred million dollars of capital stock, there are five great companies: the American Express Company, the Adams Express Company, the Wells, Fargo Express Company, the United States Express Company, and the National Express Company. The interests of these companies are closely interwoven—for instance: while the National Express Company is operated as a separate business, it is absolutely controlled by the American Express Company. In addition to this Big Five, there is a cluster of smaller companies, such as the Great Northern Express Company, of J. J. Hill’s system, the Southern Express Company, the Long Island Express Co., and two thriving carriers in the Dominion of Canada. These in turn are more or less closely affiliated with the larger companies.

The express companies no longer force a man to bring his shipment to their offices. In every considerable town, there are whole fleets of wagons that reach to the outermost limits, both for collection and for distribution. In this service the automobile truck has begun readily to displace the older type of horse and wagon. The wagon service brings the express package, no matter how small or how large, to a central distributing depot, where all are gathered together and sent, in through railroad cars, to their destinations, being handled very largely as we have seen the L. C. L. freight handled in the great transfer houses of the railroads. The express company guarantees the safe delivery of the package that is entrusted to its care. This package may be of the smallest sort imaginable, or it may be a consignment of a million dollars in specie. In either case, the express company still accepts the entire responsibility.

If there are whole brigades of delivery wagons in the cities there are also whole platoons of special cars owned by the railroads and dedicated to the express service. This brings us to the crux of the express question—its relations to the railroad. These are embraced in voluminous contracts and subcontracts—which are generally placed among the secret archives of all the companies that subscribe to them. The Interstate Commerce Commission, at Washington, has had, however, access to most of these contracts and of them it has said:

The railroad mail service is, in many ways, closely analogous to that of the express service. To it also, are devoted whole platoons and brigades of especially equipped cars, and it comes under the direction of the capable traffic officers of a great government department.

The Post-office Department is practically as old as the nation itself. For it was away back in November, 1776, that Ebenezer Hazard, who had been appointed Postmaster General to the Continental Congress, filed a memorandum of gentle complaint because of the long distances he was compelled to travel to keep pace with the wanderings of the Continental Army. But it was not until George Washington had become President of the United States, in April, 1789, that the Post-office Department came into any real semblance of organization. Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts, was the man to whom was given the task of making a real business out of what had once been a haphazard courtesy of the past of stage-drivers and ships’ captains. Some men had made individual businesses out of the management of stage-routes—in fact, Benjamin Franklin was an early postman. But the United States Government from the beginning created the mail service as a monopoly for itself—following the rule of other nations.

In 1789 the Post-office Department was a crude enough affair. The Postmaster General had but one clerk, there were but 75 post-offices and 1,875 miles of post-roads in the whole country. In the first year of the department’s activities the cost of mail transportation is given as being $22,081, with the total revenue $37,935. The total expenditures of the department that year were $32,140, leaving a surplus for the twelvemonth of $5,795, a somewhat better showing than has been made in some years since that time.

The report of the Post-office Department for the year ending June 30, 1910, lies before us as we write this chapter. It tells the graphic growth of a great business in one hundred and twenty years. For in this last twelvemonth the receipts were $224,128,657—a really vast sum compared with that modest $37,935 for 1789-90. The expenditures for this year ending June 30, 1910, were even higher—$229,977,224—leaving a deficit of $5,848,567. The Postmaster General has asserted, however, that he will have succeeded in turning that loss into a slight profit for the year ending June 30, 1911. These figures do not alone show the growth of the mail service of a great land that has become entirely dependent upon this great function of its business and social life. Think of the 75 post-offices of 1789, compared with the 59,580 offices of 1910—and that because of the marvellous development of the rural free delivery during the past ten or twelve years, a decrease from the high-water mark of 76,688 in 1900. Figures are sometimes impressive and the statistics of the Post-office Department show that 78,557 postmasters, clerks, and carriers give the major portion of their time to its service. In addition to these, those same statistics enumerate 40,997 rural delivery carriers, who bring the entire post-office force up to the astounding total of 119,554 men and women.

Without the railroad the Post-office Department could not have come to its present great development as one of the chief arms of government activity. The postal service is an interesting adjunct of the railroad; the railroad is a vital factor in the successful conduct and development of the postal service. Away back in 1836, Postmaster General Barry, in his annual report, spoke of the rapid multiplication of railroads in all parts of the country and asked if it was not worth while to secure the transportation of mail upon them. He added:

“Already have the railroads between French Town, in Maryland, and New Castle, in Delaware, and between Camden and South Amboy, in New Jersey, afforded great and important facilities to the transportation of the great Eastern Mail.”

As General Barry wrote, the Baltimore & Ohio was spinning its extension lines from Baltimore to Washington, and he expressed an opinion that with that line a through mail service from New York to Washington might be accomplished in sixteen hours. That service is now made between those cities in five hours. General Barry’s appeal must have brought fruit, for Congress, on July 7, 1838, passed an act approving every railroad in the United States as a post-route.

The railroads accepted this responsibility with alacrity. The Baltimore & Ohio equipped compartments in baggage-cars running between Baltimore and Washington, which were kept tightly locked and to which only the postmasters of those two cities had access. Still the early methods of handling merchandise of every sort were crude and it was not until the days of the Civil War that the railroad mail service began to attain anything like its present precision and dispatch. Most great organisms are apt to trace their development to the brilliancy or the inspiration of one man or a group of men, and the railroad mail service has been no exception to that rule.

W. A. Davis, a clerk in the post-office at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1862, conceived the idea that railroad mail could be assorted on the cars before it reached St. Joseph. In those days, St. Joseph was a pretty important sort of a place. The overland mail started west from there, and Davis thought that if it could be at least partly assorted before it reached St. Joseph, there would be no delay in starting overland. The Post-office Department encouraged him and he began what was destined to become the most important and interesting function of the railroad mail service.

In the same years that Davis was studying out postal problems at St. Joseph, Col. G. B. Armstrong was assistant postmaster at Chicago. He was asked by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, of President Lincoln’s Cabinet, to undertake the development of the railroad mail service. He accepted the task August 31, 1864, and a little later was made General Railway Mail Superintendent, a position which he held until 1871, when he was compelled to retire because of ill health. Col. George S. Bangs, of Illinois, succeeded him, and to Col. Bangs was given the opportunity of the third great development in the railroad mail service. In his report for the year 1874 he discussed the possibilities of establishing a fast and exclusive mail train between the two great postal centres of the land—New York and Chicago. To quote from Colonel Bangs’ report:

Postmaster General Jewell liked Col. Bangs’ idea and told him to arrange with the Lake Shore Railroad and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad for a fast mail train to leave New York at four o’clock in the morning and make Chicago in twenty-four hours. But the Post-office Department, while it might grandly order fast mail trains into service, had no appropriation from which to pay for them. Nevertheless, Col. Bangs appealed to the older Vanderbilt, owner of both the New York Central and Lake Shore Railroads. Commodore Vanderbilt was not a sentimentalist. He had little use for men who came to him with risky propositions and empty pocketbooks. Nevertheless, the mail train idea appealed to the old railroader, and he turned to his son, William H. Vanderbilt, and asked him what he thought of the idea. The younger Vanderbilt suggested building the special cars needed for this service and placing the train in operation, with hopes of remuneration by the following Congress. He felt that the new trains would instantly become so popular as to compel Congress to provide for their up-keep.“If you want to do this, go ahead,” said Commodore Vanderbilt, “but I know the Post-office Department, and you will, too, within a year.”

William H. Vanderbilt went ahead. He constructed and placed in service such trains—of glittering white and gold—as the railroad had never seen. Nightly they made their spectacular run between New York and Chicago with clock-work regularity. They never missed connections. The Pennsylvania Railroad quickly followed the example of its traditional rival. Within a half-year the United States had such a mail service as it had never dreamed of possessing, a mail service a quarter of a century ahead of any other nation in the world.

And yet Congress did the very thing that the sagacious old Commodore Vanderbilt had predicted. It absolutely refused to pay for the fast mail trains, and they were taken out of service. There was another factor in the situation, however, and that always a lively factor—the public. When the man out in Sioux City found that his mail was again taking eighteen additional hours to reach him from New York, he rose up in all the fulness of upstrung wrath and let his Congressman hear from him. And he was only one of tens of thousands whose business comfort had been heightened, quite imperceptibly, by the new trains, and upset very perceptibly by their withdrawal. They were returned to service in 1877, and have since become so recognized and useful a function of the mail service that it would be a brash Congress or Postmaster General who would even attempt to tinker with them.

Sometimes you brush elbows with the railroad mail service. You notice perhaps, the big heavy car up forward in the long train, with its open door and its gallows-like crane for snatching mail-bags, at cross-road stations, where the through train does not even deign to slacken speed. If you have had an important and delayed letter to post, you may have breathed your little prayer of thanks to the railroad mail because you are able to drop it into the slot of a car that stood, that was halted for an impatient minute or two in its race overland. But these are hardly more than superficialities of the service. If you wish to come closer to its heart, present yourself sometimes just before dawn at one of the great railroad terminals of a really metropolitan city. You had better present yourself in spirit and not in flesh, because this busy time—when most honest men are asleep—is not a time when visitors are welcomed. The Government is singularly diffident about showing the inner workings of its Post-office Department.

But these inner workings are alive and alert at three o’clock of the morning that you come to the platform sheds of the big terminal—you can see the shadowy outline of the darkened building itself rising up behind you. Most of its platforms which by day are constant and brisk little highways, are also darkened. The long files of empty coaches that line these platforms reflect in their many windows the signal lights of the outer yard. Now and again you catch the flicker of a pointed yellow light against the background of blackness—the bobbing of a watchman’s lantern as he sees that all is well in the few hours of comparative quiet that come to this great terminal.

This one train platform is alert and alive—brilliant under the incandescence of electricity. A brigade of shirt-sleeved men line it, while to its outer edge one great wagon after another—each showing the red, white, and blue of government service under the reflections of the arcs—comes rolling up, with a fearful clatter over the rough pavement of the station yard. From the cavernous recesses of these great wagons their stores are poured forth—dozens and dozens of mail sacks of leather and canvas, each tagged and directed with absolute accuracy.The grimy granite bulk of the general post-office is a scarce half-dozen blocks away from this terminal—an easy span for each of the great mail-wagons. Into that general post-office the mail—letters, newspapers, packages, all of inconceivable variety—has been pouring at flood-tide ever since the close of business nine hours before. The carriers with their heavy pouches began this tide; wagons bringing their contribution greatly swelled it. From the nearer stations the mail came, silent and unseen, through the giant pneumatic tubes that reach out from the general post-office, under city streets, like great arteries. Underneath the ghastly green mercury lamps of the distributing floor of the general post-office, the first steps were taken toward separating the flood. Expert mail-clerks, working under tremendous tension, made a rough classification of all that come under their trained fingers—sometimes by counties, again by States, or even a group of States. One great subdivision was transcontinental and transpacific. This train with its close connections on the Western lines will reach San Francisco just in time to catch there a big, red-funnelled steamship about to depart for Yokohama and Hong Kong. At Hong Kong the red-funnelled boat will connect with a P. & O. steamer whose screws will hardly cease revolving until she reaches Calcutta. The railroad mail service is a thing that reaches much farther than the rights-of-way of the railroads themselves.

There are seven cars in this train—five cars for the postal service and two chartered by the morning newspapers. There are no coaches. Now and then one of these flyers will deign to carry a single sleeper, but such is the exception. The fast mail does not stop to quibble with such trifles as passengers. It even turns its shoulders upon the express companies—they have their own fast special trains across the continent.

The last of the mail-wagons has delivered its valuable load to the cars. The final newspaper wagon comes dashing up to the platform—its horses a-froth and its driver on the edge of profanity.

“Here’s the firsts,” he yells. “Big fire down the water-front and they wanted to make the edition with it. We were three minutes late.”

Three minutes late! Seventeen minutes ago the last of the smoking-hot forms came from that newspaper’s stereotyping rooms and here are the first ten thousand copies of the morning’s run—fresh and damp smelling of the forest. Before the driver began his hurried explanation of delay, the copies were being thrown into the last car. He had hardly finished before a big bell, high-hung somewhere in the invisible blackness, speaks its one brief note of authority; lanterns are raised alongside the full length of the train—the seven big cars are softly getting into motion. And before this train is fully in motion the newspaper’s messengers are busy with the papers that have been thrown in at the open door; before it has bumped its way over the wide-spreading “throat” at the entrance of the terminal, they are bringing the first semblance of order out of the miniature mountain of newspapers piled high on the car floor.

Chaos, did we say? Well, hardly that. The circulation manager of the metropolitan morning newspaper has been called a “field marshal of the empire of print,” and field marshals incline to order rather than to chaos. It is less than seventeen minutes from the first of that torrent of newspapers pouring from the hopper of the grinding press, yet here they are, each in an accurate bundle of not more than two hundred and fifty copies, and accurately tagged. The label of each bundle bears in big clear letters the news company or dealer to whom it is consigned, the town, the railroad and its connections. There is not much chance for errors here.

As the newspaper messengers begin to arrange their stock—the papers for the nearest towns on top so that they may be most easily reached, to be thrown off while it is still dusk, so that Mr. Early Riser may read his favorite metropolitan journal as he sips his breakfast coffee—so are the mail-clerks in the cars ahead bending to their tasks. Roundabout them are rows of pouches held in iron frames, with their hungry throats held wide open, and infinite racks of small pigeon-holes—the same kind that you remember in the up-country post-offices. When the pouches first come into the car they are opened and their contents “dumped-up,” to use the parlance of the service, upon the shelf-like tables that run the length of the place. The next process is “facing-up”—bringing addressed sides of all the matter uppermost for facility in distribution. And after that the distribution itself—no easy matter when all the world is constantly writing to all the world, and the criss-cross currents are all but innumerable.

So come all classes of mail to these swift-flying cars—letters, newspapers, packages, the specially protected registered mail,—and for all of these classes the apparently endless sorting goes steadily forward, while the train rounds sharp curves and sends the ordinarily sure-footed clerks clutching handrails for balance, under the dead glow of acetylene, holding each separate mail-piece for a fraction of a second—sometimes longer if it be a “sticker” in the chirography or the detail of its address—and then shooting it into the proper pigeon-hole or open-mouthed pouch. Some of these cars are destined for cities or States or groups of States—the wheels under one of them are not going to cease revolving for any length of time until it stands on the long Mole, opposite San Francisco, and the through pouches, with the British coat-of-arms and the meaningful “G. R.” stamped upon them, are being shipped aboard the red-funnelled steamship which is to carry them on the last leg of their long journey over two seas and a broad continent, from London to Hong Kong.These trains are no longer novel on the modern railroad. They are established features of the train service. From New York City goes forward one-sixth of all the mail matter originating in the United States. The aggregate circulation of all the New York morning newspapers is somewhat larger than the aggregate circulation of the morning newspapers of the other cities of the country, so from New York there goes forth between midnight and dawn a flotilla of special mail and newspaper trains. Two of the fastest of these start from the Grand Central Station. The “Boston Special” of the New York, New Haven & Hartford leaves that spacious terminal at just 2:10 A. M., no matter what desperate excuses may be telephoned at the last moment by some circulation manager who is confronted by a disabled press, or some such disaster. It slips through the suburban territory without halting—the nearby commuters are served with their papers and their mail by the early morning locals. Bridgeport, at 3:31 A. M., is the first halt; New Haven, at 3:52, the second. At New Haven, the papers for Hartford, Springfield, and the whole Connecticut valley country are thrown off. At New London, which is reached at 4:53 A. M., go the papers for Norwich, Worcester, Newport, and New Bedford. One more halt, at Providence, and the train, running as fast as the fastest of New Haven flyers, is at the South Station, Boston—at just 7:20 o’clock. A Boston & Maine flyer, taking mail and newspapers away up the coast through three States, leaves the North Station at 8:01 A. M., and so there follows a quick transfer of mail and newspapers through the twisting streets of the Hub.

The other early morning flyer leaves the Grand Central at 3:05 o’clock, and it makes its course over the main stem of the New York Central Lines. It reaches Albany at 6:30 o’clock and not only distributes there for Western Massachusetts and Vermont, the upper Hudson Valley and the Lake Champlain territory north to Montreal, but overhauls a passenger train that left New York a little after midnight. It continues its course through the heart of the Empire State—reaching Syracuse at 10:05 A. M. and Rochester at 11:47 A. M. At Buffalo, which is reached at 1:20 P. M., there are important connections for the West and Southwest, and the Chicago letters in that grimy train are going out on the first delivery from the Chicago post-office the next morning.

The Pennsylvania hauls two great trains—built up of mail sections from its new terminal on Manhattan Island, which has a great post-office in process of growth, built over a portion of its platform tracks, and newspaper sections from the old Jersey terminal, which is still most convenient to a majority of the metropolitan papers. The first of these trains is bound for the South and the Southwest. It leaves New York at 2:20 A. M., passes Philadelphia at 4:25, and steams into Baltimore at 6:40 A. M. Another hour sees it in Washington and transferring its load to the mail-trains that are about to start for the long journey to Atlanta and New Orleans. A New Yorker sojourning for a part of the winter at Palm Beach, Florida, can be sure of having his favorite Sunday paper not later than Tuesday morning.

The second Pennsylvania train leaves thirty minutes later and follows the main line of that much-travelled highway all the way to Pittsburgh, which it reaches just at noon. Other railroads out of New York start fast newspaper and mail trains just before dawn and combine regular passenger facilities with them—the Lehigh Valley despatching a flyer at 2:00 o’clock from the old Pennsylvania terminal in Jersey City for the populous northeastern corner of Pennsylvania and the so-called Southern Tier of New York State. The Lackawanna reaches a somewhat similar territory by its fast express, which leaves Hoboken at 2:30 o’clock.

A similar cluster of mail and newspaper flyers starts out of Chicago early each morning—east over the Lake Shore, the Michigan Central, and the Pennsylvania, south over the Monon and the Illinois Central, and west and northwest over the Northwestern, the Rock Island, and the Santa Fe. Other great cities follow the same programme in lesser scale—there are many important fast-mail trains that make their departures from initial terminals throughout all the daylight hours and late into the evening. A regiment of mail-cars make their way over the face of the land on fast through expresses of every sort. The postal service is a business of magnitude within itself.

The Postmaster General’s report for the year ending June 30, 1910, gives a clear conception of its magnitude. He showed then that there were 176 full railroad post-office lines, manned by 1,736 crews of 8,332 clerks. There were also 1,392 compartment railroad post-office lines—lines in which a portion of a baggage or smoking-car is partitioned for the sole use of the postal service—manned by 4,085 crews of 5,407 clerks, 18 electric car lines with 20 crews and 22 clerks, and 55 steamboat lines with 98 crews and 86 clerks. Of the cars built for the exclusive use of the railroad mail service, 1,114 were in use and 206 held in reserve, while 3,208 of the compartment cars were in use, 559 of these being held in reserve. In addition, the Post-office Department operates 25 trolley mail-cars.

Great progress has been made in the substitution of steel mail-cars for wooden ones—a real step forward when one pauses to consider the dangerous position in which the mail-cars are placed in most trains. The records of the Post-office Department are filled with stories of heroism on the part of mail-clerks in saving, both the extremely valuable merchandise that is given to their care, and vastly more valuable human lives. The list of the post-office employees who have met death while on duty in the railroad mail service is not a short one.

But the railroads are coÖperating with the Government in giving the finest type of steel cars to its mail service,—sixty of these are already in use on the Pennsylvania system,—for, as we stated at the outset of this chapter, the transportation of Uncle Sam’s mail is no slight function of the modern railroad. The big operating men across the land are constantly bending their heads with those of the post-office officials toward the betterment of that transportation.