High-speed, direct-current passenger locomotive built by the General Electric Company
for terminal service of the New York Central at the Grand Central Station

Even if a railroad is not engaged in the steamship business, as such, even to the extent of one or two small steamboats on inland waters, it may still possess a considerable harbor fleet,—wharves, and slips—that, taken together, make a sizable aggregate. Every railroad that has any sort of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will protect itself by having its own wharves and landing-stages—even grain elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet—ferries, scows, lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. It means that the railroad must pay attention to marine laws and marine customs.

When a railroad boasts of a terminal in such a city as Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco, its fleet of harbor craft is apt to be quite a sizable navy. Take, for instance, the New York Central’s fleet in and around New York harbor. It consists of 269 vessels, divided into the following classes: 9 ferry-boats, 22 tugs, 7 steam-lighters, 50 car-floats, 10 steam-hoist barges, 25 open barges, 6 scow barges, 105 covered barges, and 35 grain-boats. And out of all these barges, 10 are further equipped for refrigerator use.

In such a fleet, eliminating of course the ferry-boats which have their own peculiar uses, the tugs are almost the sole motive power. There is a bit of poetry about them, too, even if they are short and stubby, ofttimes poking their cushioned noses impertinently up against larger and far more stately craft. But no captain, even though he walk the bridge of an eight-hundred foot steamship, sneers at a tug. It takes eighteen of them to place the new giant Olympic in her wharf on the North River, and no crack company of horsemen ever moved in more precise drill or better coÖperation than these noisy, punting, helping-hands of the harbor of New York. For ocean ports are different from those along the lakes. A captain sailing a five-thousand ton ship on fresh water would be ashamed to use a tug at Detroit, or any other of the Great Lake ports, even where the current runs almost like a mill-race, unless he was turning in a channel whose width was but a wee bit more than the length of his ship. But Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and Chicago do not have the tides—and it is the tide that makes harbor navigation a finely specialized science at the big ocean ports.

All of the big Atlantic ports save New York have abundant track facilities alongside the piers, where berth the ships from half the world over. In New York, the same geographical conditions that have gone to make her so superb a port and given her so generous a harbor-frontage have blocked the railroads in their efforts to reach all her piers with unbroken rails. So the railroads entering that harbor have found it necessary to provide themselves with such fleets as we have noticed as belonging to the New York Central. For inland shippers seem to have a preference for sending their east-bound export merchandise through New York, because of the frequency of sailings from her wharves to half the recognized ports of the world.

If you are a manufacturer—at Utica, N. Y., let us say—and you wished to send a carload of your product to London, Eng., you would find that the railroad definitely agrees to do certain things for you. On your minimum basis of a carload lot it will place that carload at any pier in the harbor of New York. Indeed, it would do a little more. If some of that carload lot that starts down out of Utica is going to London, some more on a different ship to Calcutta, and still some more on a tropic-bound liner to South America, the railroad would make free delivery of your consignment to the piers of these three ships. It limits, however, the delivery of a carload lot to three different piers.

This sounds simple, perhaps, and, in reality, is not. For in a single day of twenty-four hours there may arrive at Weehawken and Sixtieth Street, Manhattan—the two great freight terminals of the rails of the New York Central system at New York—from four to six hundred, eight hundred cars, perhaps, filled with merchandise bound for half a hundred different piers, along from forty to sixty miles of water-front.

Now you see the use of all this army of lighters and barges—stubby-nosed craft, awkward craft, boats that have not even a single stanza of the poetry of the sea written upon their contents. By night, by day, when an imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter, when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot’s path is fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. The eight or ten great railroads that terminate in New York are pouring export merchandise to all of her piers, while from those long sprawling structures they are drawing up imported goods to go forward to every corner of the land. And in addition to this there is the vast local commerce of the City of New York, which, as we saw when we were considering the freight terminals, back in Chapter VII, is no slight matter of itself. But this traffic, as well as much of that of the great interchange between the railroads terminating at New York, is handled most effectively by the car-floats on each of which twelve to sixteen standard box-cars may be loaded with great expedition.

But the clumsy barges and the lighters and the still clumsier car-floats are of little use without the tugs, and these last are the quick couriers of the harbor. Twenty of that New York Central fleet are kept in constant use in the North and East Rivers, and along the harbor shores to Jersey City, Bayonne, and the southern parts of Brooklyn. They do not lie idle, save when they are finally forced to “lay up” for a little time for repairs. And then a reserve tug is in service without delay.

Here is the modern economy of railroad equipment—even though this be the part of the railroad that is afloat. A tug pulls up to a dock, its crews are off almost before their “relief” is standing at its station, and making sure that the craft is in as good order as they left it. While the “relief” is finding its tired way toward home the tug is off again. Its work is constant. Its work is not easy. It does not seem to be systematic and yet it is—wonderfully systematic.

For here and there about the harbor the captains of these N. Y. C. tugs get their orders—just as conductors of the trains upon the steel highways get their clearance cards and yellow tissues. A half-dozen stations give orders, and these are but the speaking stations of a single man who sits before a telephone switchboard close by a narrow street of down-town Manhattan and directs tug movements through the crowded harbor, just as easily as a despatcher moves extra freights over a crowded stretch of single-track line.

The traffic runs flood-high and the station men gossip of the whispered complaints of the tug-crews, but the man at the switchboard only smiles. A traffic solicitor who plies his heartbreaking work on the floor of the near-by Produce Exchange comes over to him and says:

“I’ve promised Smith & Russell delivery of ten cars of flour at Pier 32, East River, at seven o’clock to-morrow morning. We can’t go back on them.”

The man at the switchboard does not lose that smooth-set smile, even though the loudly ticking clock, just above the plugs and cords, shows him that it is already six o’clock of the evening of a day when the harbor freight has run flood-high.

“All right,” he laughs, “Smith & Russell can count upon us.”

And the next moment he is ordering Tug Twenty-seven to go from the Sixtieth Street pier over to Weehawken to get that small mountain-range of flour-bags that the “huskies” have already begun to build on a pier-floor, alongside of a string of dusty, grimy cars that have bumped their way east from Minneapolis.

Perhaps you are interested in the personality of Tug Twenty-seven. Take yourself away from the cool-witted despatcher and look down upon this craft—the queen of a railroad pet marine. She is as resplendent in her green and gold as any gentleman’s yacht, and her crew even more proud of her. She stands in the water, a mere 110 feet long and 24½ feet beam, but those wonderful shining engines in her heart can develop 1,200 horse-power—as much as many steamboats of three times her size. Her watertube boilers can withstand a locomotive pressure of 185 pounds to the square inch, she has all the accoutrements of coast liners—steam steering gears and electric lights among them. No wonder that her captain waxes eloquent about her.

Now ask him about what she can do. That he takes as personal achievement, and these harbor men are a bashful lot. Still, you can worm it out of him, and after a while you find that Tug Twenty-seven has just brought a punt-nosed car-float, with sixteen loaded cars upon her rails, around from Corlears Hook, through the press of shipping, and around the Battery where cross-tides battle against one another and against craft of all sorts, up to Weehawken “bridge” in forty minutes—which is not so very bad for a ten-mile run through a congested harbor.

“Time counts,” adds the captain. “If they had given me another twelve or fifteen minutes I could have brought around two of the floats—put together ‘V’ fashion and the Twenty-seven with her nose stuck up into the ‘V’.”

In the harbor of New York is a great cluster of ferry-boats operated to overcome her barrier rivers by the several trunk-line railroads whose systems terminate at a long water-jump from the congested Island of Manhattan. To compete with railroads boasting terminals on Manhattan Island itself, these lines have been compelled to equip and operate extensive ferry fleets across both the East and the North Rivers. Across the first of these streams operates the navy of the Long Island Railroad, while across the Hudson ply in an intricate interlacing more than a dozen ferry routes of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, and the West Shore Railroads. The recent completion of the New York-Jersey City-Newark routes of the Hudson tunnels, as well as the inauguration of passenger traffic through both North and East River tunnels to the new Pennsylvania terminal in Manhattan, has caused the abandonment of two ferry routes and curtailment of service upon several others. Tunnel-diggers and bridge-builders make havoc with ferry routes, which must always remain liable to many delays because of fog, floating ice, and such other adverse weather conditions.

Still the railroad ferries round about New York derive no small income from the trucking service of a metropolitan city which has had to struggle for many years against great intersecting rivers, and so they will probably continue to be for many years interesting and picturesque features of New York harbor.

But perhaps the most interesting of all the ferry routes of New York harbor is the attenuated line from the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad’s waterside terminal at Port Morris in the Bronx, for ten miles through the East River, Hell Gate, around the sharp turn and tides of Corlears Hook and again of the Battery, and across the Hudson River to the old terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City. Over this route goes through traffic—freight and passenger—from New England to the South and the Southwest. The freight-traffic is handled largely by car-floats in charge of the busy puffing tugs, while the passenger traffic goes in ferry-boats different from the others that ply in New York harbor.For these ferry-boats are really nothing more than a bettered type of car-float—a type equipped with powerful engines for self-propulsion. Through passenger trains run each day and each night between Boston and Baltimore and Washington, and these trains are handled between Port Morris and Jersey City upon them. The familiar Maryland, which is operated jointly by the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems upon this route, will receive an entire passenger train of ordinary length, excepting, of course, the locomotive, upon her great deck, which is, in reality, a miniature railroad yard, equipped with two long parallel tracks that can be quickly attached to the ferry-bridges at Port Morris and Jersey City. The trip, with the loading and unloading of the train, is accomplished, under favorable weather conditions, in about an hour.

It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down a broad ship’s deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. This ferry is also finally threatened by the bridge-builders. As this is written, workmen are already preparing the pier foundations for a great railroad bridge that is to span the East River not far from Hell Gate, and which is to give an unbroken line of rails from the New Haven’s terminal at Port Morris, through Long Island City, to the Pennsylvania’s tunnels and terminal in Manhattan Island.

So, also, have the tunnel-builders contrived to rob the through traveller on the Michigan Central of the more or less thrilling water transfer from Canada to the United States at Detroit. The Detroit River tunnel has superseded one of the most important car-ferries in the country, but it has given to the operating heads of the Michigan Central one of the very shortest through routes from New York to Chicago and robbed them of one of the fearful handicaps of their main line—the possibilities for constant and exasperating delays to their through trains while being ferried across the Detroit River.

Do not underestimate the possibilities of those delays. Within the past ten years, the transport Michigan, plying from Detroit to Windsor, the Canadian town directly opposite, and carrying a Chicago-Montreal flyer, was stuck for ten hours in the ice, so near the slip that a long plank would have almost reached from her deck to the wharf. That, in the lesser form, has been the history of winter after winter at the Detroit ferry. Shipbuilders have done their best to meet the obstacle by building car-ferries of tremendous power, sometimes even equipping them with both side-wheels and screws. But the real problem of possible delay can only be solved there by tunnels, and it is expected that the Grand Trunk, the Canadian Pacific, and the Wabash—which still use the car-ferries across the Detroit River—will sooner or later either tunnel beneath it or acquire trackage rights through the Michigan Central tubes.

The Detroit River is a narrow but important part of the tremendously important water highway up the Great Lakes, and at every part of the whole length of that highway the railroads have tried to break their way across. It has not been found impossible to bridge the St. Lawrence or the Niagara Rivers or the wide straits at Sault Ste. Marie, but there are other points, even besides Detroit, that have as yet baffled the genius of the bridge-builder. One of the most important of these is where Lake Michigan forces its outlet into Lake Huron through the two peninsulas of the great State that bears its name. To make the two parts of Michigan physically one with unbroken rail will probably not be accomplished in many years. In the meantime the stout and tremendously powerful ferry Algomah—built so as to literally crush the ice down under her tremendous bows—plies between Mackinac City, the Island of Mackinac, situated midstream, and St. Ignace, on the north shore of the broad strait. Despite the fearful severity of the winters in northern Michigan the Algomah keeps that important path open the year round—not only for herself but for the great car-floats that follow in her wake.

What is possible at the Straits of Mackinac is also possible across the widest part of any one of the Great Lakes—excepting always the emotionless Superior. At least that is the way the railroad traffic men have argued for many years, and so for these many years car-ferries have plied successfully across the very hearts of three of the lakes. Of all the chain, Lake Michigan offers the greatest natural obstruction to the natural traffic movements of the land—its great length, stretching north and south, forming an obstacle to through rail movements, and contributing not a little to the railroad importance and the wealth of Chicago.

So it was that car-ferries were established many years ago across Lake Michigan and are operated throughout the lake to-day—from Manitowoc, Kewaunee, Milwaukee, Menominee, and Manistique on the west shore of the lake, to Frankfort, Ludington, Northport, Grand Haven, St. Joseph, and Benton Harbor upon the east shore. These vessels are of different construction from the ferries that cross the narrow Detroit River. They lack the low freeboard and the other typical ferry construction, and are, instead, deep-gulled vessels, generally built of steel and always of great structural strength.

“Like the river ferries,” says James C. Mills, “they are ice-crushers, but of greater size and power. During two or three of the winter months the lakes are frozen in a solid sheet of ice for twenty and thirty miles from the shores, and in extremely severe winters the ice-fields meet in mid-lake. To keep a channel open in the depth of winter even for daily passages back and forth, is a hazardous undertaking for the hardy mariners. The frequent gales which sweep the lakes break up the fields into ice-floes which, driven one way or another with great force, pile up in huge banks, often in the direct course of the transports and as high as their upper decks. At such times they free themselves only after repeated buckings of the shifting mass of ice, sometimes miles in extent, by running their stout prows up on the edge of the mass, breaking it down by their sheer weight, and ploughing through the ragged, grinding blocks of ice thus formed.”[1]

Four tracks, running the full length of the ship, generally fill the main deck of these trans-lake ships. The loading of the cars on to these tracks is accomplished at the stern, the bow being built high and, as we have just seen, somewhat after the fashion of an overhanging prow. The main deck is completely roofed over with cabins and deck-houses, so that, viewed from the rear, the ship seems to be an itinerant pair of railroad tunnels, dark and gloomy. The upper decks are gay with the resources of the marine architect—for the greater part of these boats offer accommodations for passengers as well as for from eighteen to thirty freight cars. These great ferries form valuable feeders to the Grand Trunk, the Pere Marquette, the Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids & Indiana, and some minor routes crossing Michigan.

Similarly, car-ferries crossing Lake Erie from Cleveland to Port Stanley are considerable factors both in general merchandise and in the coal trade. Another Lake Erie route of heavy tonnage extends from Ashtabula, Ohio, to Port Burwell, Ontario. Within the last few years a car-ferry has been established across Lake Ontario, from Charlotte—which is the port of Rochester, N. Y.—to Coburg on the Canadian side, which has already developed for itself a considerable traffic.But the car-ferries, extensive as they are, form but a small portion of the railroad interests upon the waters of the Great Lakes. Almost all of the great lines through those much-travelled waters are the property of some railroad system whose rails touch one or more of their terminals. Thus the Northern Steamship Company, running from Buffalo to Chicago and Duluth, touches the rails of its parent company, the Great Northern Railroad, at this last port. The Erie & Western Transportation Company—popularly known as the Anchor Line—also running from Buffalo to Duluth, is a Pennsylvania property. Both of these lines are operated for passenger service, as well as freight. The New York Central and the Erie cover the same territory with exclusively freight routes. The Rutland Railroad has a line all the way from its western terminal at Ogdensburg, on the St. Lawrence River, to Chicago. The Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk operate important lines through Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. Even a small road, like the Algomah Central, has its own freight and passenger steamboats running south from the Soo as far as Cleveland, Ohio. It is a pretty poor line with Great Lakes terminals that cannot boast some sort of steamship service of its own.

In the development of the coastwise and the inland waterways of the United States, the railroad may be doing the nation a far greater service than it imagines. For the general trend of railroad expansion in the country to-day seems to be toward a development of the auxiliary water-routes rather than toward their curtailment. The railroad has finally realized that some coarse commodities can be carried far more economically by water than by rail. It is to-day seeking to avail itself of that acquired knowledge. If competing and feeding trolley lines are good things for railroads to own—and the present-day judgment seems to be that they are—the same rule holds doubly good in regard to both competing and feeding water-routes.