ELECTRICITY INTO ITS OWN

Electric suburban train on the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Philadelphia and Paoli.

The Boston and Albany is a co-tenant with the New Haven in the huge and murky South Station. It has always been a rich railroad. Twenty-five years ago it was building superb stone bridges and stations, structures of real architectural worth—a full quarter of a century it was in advance of almost every other railroad in America. In those days the Boston and Albany probably did not dream that the time would come when its chief asset would be the value of its right of way across the newer and the finer portion of Boston. “The Albany Road,” as the older Bostonians like to term the B. and A., has the extreme possibilities of cost for the electric transformation of its lines all the way from Worcester east, not only met but many times multiplied in the development possibilities of the Back Bay district which it now traverses with its through track and interrupts with its somewhat ungainly storage yards. These yards, now used for the holding of empty passengers coaches, occupy tremendously valuable acres on Boylston Street within a block of Copley Square—the artistic and literary center of the Hub. They are essential, perhaps, to the economical operation of the road’s terminal, but when you come to consider the growth of the city, a tremendous waste. They have stood—a noisy, dirty, open space—stretching squarely across the path of Boston’s finest possible development. If these were marshlands, like those that used to abound along the Charles River, Boston long ago would have filled them in and added many valuable building sites to its taxable area. For remember that the development of the Grand Central Terminal has proceeded far enough already to show that in these days of heavy steel and concrete construction, and with the absolute cleanliness of electric railroad operation, it is possible to build a hotel over a big railroad yard without one guest in a thousand ever knowing that a train is being handled underneath his feet every thirty seconds or thereabouts. Indeed, in the Grand Central scheme provision is being made already for the construction of an opera house right over the station approach tracks; the congregation of St. Bartholomew’s is building over the same railroad yards one of the finest church structures in America.

Here, then, is a golden opportunity for the Boston and Albany—by the substitution of electric power for steam and the roofing of its yards—to develop those tremendously valuable vacant acres back of Copley Square; and the man who goes to Boston ten years hence probably will not see a smoky gash cut diagonally through the heart of one of the handsomest cities in America in order to permit a busy railroad to deliver its passenger and freight at a convenient downtown point. It is hard to estimate the financial benefits which eventually will result to the Boston and Albany of cellarless city squares over its Boylston Street yards. The benefit to Boston, like the benefit to New York through the development of the Grand Central and Pennsylvania terminals, is hardly to be expressed in dollars and cents.

In Chicago the question of terminal electrification has taken a less definite form than in Boston, although the Chicagoans are making fearful outcry against the filth that is poured out over their city from thousands of soft-coal locomotives. The Illinois Central has been ranked as the chief offender because of its commanding location—blocking as it does the lovely lake front for so many miles. Chicago has ambitious plans for that lake front. You may see them, hanging upon the walls of her Art Institute. These plans, of necessity, embrace the transformation not only of the terminal but of the railroad tracks within her heart from steam to electric operation.

Perhaps Chicago’s plans are more definite than those of the railroads that serve her. It is significant that the great North Western Terminal, still very new, was builded with a slotted train-shed roof in order to release the smoke and foul gases from the many steam locomotives which are constantly using it. It is equally significant that the new Union Station, which is being built to accommodate four others of her largest railroads is also being equipped with a slotted train-shed roof, and for the same reason. On the other hand, it is gratifying to notice that the tentative plans for the new Illinois Central terminal contemplate the erection of a double-decked station, very similar in type to the new Grand Central—a station which, from the very nature of its design, must, of necessity, use electric traction. Doubly gratifying this is to Chicagoans: for as we have already said, the Illinois Central, which, through its occupation of the lake front by its maze of steam-operated tracks, has so long hampered the really artistic development of Chicago’s greatest natural asset—the edge of its lovely lake. For some years past the Illinois Central has been particularly slow to make the best uses of its great suburban zone south of Chicago; slow to realize its even larger opportunities of a development even greater than that of today. This has come home with peculiar force to the many, many thousands of commuters who use its suburban trains each day. Now they know why the road has been so loath to retire its antique cars and locomotives in this service. The filing of the primary plans for its new terminal on the lake front at Twelfth Street and Michigan Avenue shows that the road is at last planning to do the big thing in a really big way. And it is not fair to suppose that it has overlooked a single economic possibility of the electric development of its immensely valuable terminal. The result of this development upon the other railroads with their steam-operated terminals in the heart of Chicago, will be awaited with interest.[8]

Philadelphia stands next to New York among eastern cities in the electric development of its terminals, although it is interesting to note here and now that for twenty years past the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has handled both freight and passenger trains with electric power through its double terminal and long tunnel in the heart of that city and has handled them both economically and efficiently. The wonder only is that its chief competitors should have retained steam power so long as a motive power in their long tunnels underneath Baltimore. Yet it is one of these competitors which is making the real progress in the Philadelphia situation. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which owns and operates Broad Street Station, probably one of the best-located passenger terminals in any of the very large cities of America, has already begun to use electricity to bring a large number of its suburban trains in and out of that station. After much patient experimentation it has evolved a comparatively inexpensive method of carrying the current to the overhead trolleys of these suburban trains. And the system has already proved itself so economical and so successful as to render its extension to other portions of the system a question of only a comparatively short time.

Electricity should spell opportunity to steam railroads. Yet until recently it seemingly has failed to do this very thing. It has looked as if the steam railroaders of a past generation were not thoroughly awakened to the opportunities it offered; were not willing, at any rate, to strive to find a way toward taking advantage of it. To understand this better let us go back for a moment and consider the one-time but short-lived rivalry between the trolley and the steam locomotive. As soon as the electric railroads—which were, for the most part, developments of the old-fashioned horse-car lines in city streets—began to reach out into the country from the sharp confines of the towns the smarter of the steam railroad men began to show interest in the new motive power. It would have been far better for some of them if they had taken a sharper interest at the beginning; if at that time they had begun to consider earnestly the practical adaptation of electricity to the service of the long-established steam railroad.

In many cases the short suburban railroads, just outside of the larger cities, which had been operated by small dummy locomotives, were the first to be electrified; in some of these cases they became extensions of city trolley lines. People no longer were obliged to come into town upon a poky little dummy train of uncertain schedule and decidedly uncertain habits and then transfer at the edge of the crowded portion of the city to horse cars. They could come flying from the outer country to the heart of the town in half an hour—and, as you know, the business of building and booming suburbs was born. After these suburban lines had been developed the steam railroad men of some of the so-called standard lines, began to study the situation. As far back as 1895 the Nantasket branch of the present New Haven system was made into an electric line. A little steam road, which wandered off into the hills of Columbia County from Hudson, New York, and led a precarious existence, extended its rails a few miles and became the third-rail electric line from Hudson to Albany and a powerful competitor for passenger traffic with a large trunk-line railroad. The New Haven system found the electric third rail a good agent between Hartford and New Britain and the overhead trolley a good substitute for the locomotive on a small branch that ran for a few miles north from its main line at Stamford, Connecticut.

The problems of electric traction for regular railroads were complicated, however, and the big steam roads avoided them until they were forced upon their attention. The interurban roads spread their rails—rather too rapidly in many cases—making themselves frequently the opportunities for such precarious financing as once distinguished the history of steam roads, and also frequently making havoc with thickly settled branch lines and main stems of the steam railroads. In a good many cases the steam roads have had to dig deep into their pockets and buy at good stiff prices interurban roads—a situation that they might have anticipated with just a little forethought.

Such a condition was reached in a populous state along the Atlantic seaboard just a few years ago. A big steam road, plethoric in wealth and importance, had a branch line about 100 miles in length, which tapped a dozen towns, each ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 in population. The branch line carried no through business, nor was its local freight traffic of importance, but it was able to operate profitably eleven local passenger trains in each direction daily. These trains were well filled, as a rule, and the branch returned at least its equitable share toward the dividend account of the entire property. As long as it did that no one at headquarters paid any particular attention to it.

There was no physical reason why that branch should not have been made into an interurban electric railroad a dozen years ago—the road that owned it has never found it difficult to sell bonds for the improvement of its property. Though no one paid particular attention to it at headquarters, a roving young engineer with a genius for making money, looked at it enviously—at the dozen prosperous towns it aimed to serve. A fortnight’s visit to the locality convinced him. He went down to a big city where capital was just hungry to be invested profitably and organized an electric railroad to thread each of those towns. Before the headquarters of the steam road was really awake to the situation cars were running on its electric competitor. And the people of the dozen towns seemed to enjoy riding in the electric cars mightily—they were big and fast and clean. The steam road made a brave show of maintaining its service. It hauled long strings of empty coaches rather than surrender its pride; but such pride was almost as empty as the coaches.

Sooner or later any business organization must swallow false pride; and so it came to pass that an emissary of the steam road met the roving young engineer and asked him to put a price on his property. He smiled, totaled his construction and equipment costs, added a quarter of a million dollars to the total, and tossed the figures across the table. The emissary did not smile. He reported to his headquarters and the steam railroad began to fight—it was going to starve out the resources of its trolley competitor by cutting passenger rates to a cent a mile. When the trolley company met that, the railroad would cut the rate in two again—it could afford to pay people to ride on its cars rather than suffer defeat; but they would not ride on its cars, even at a lower rate. And once again the steam road’s emissary went up the branch. He sought out the trolley engineer. The trolley man was indifferent.

“Well,” said the steam-road man, “we’re seeing you.” And at that he threw down a certified check for the exact amount that had been agreed upon at their previous conference.

The trolley man did not touch the paper. He smiled what lady novelists are sometimes pleased to call an inscrutable smile, then shook his head slowly.

“What!” gasped the emissary from the steam road. “Wasn’t that your figure?”

“It was—but isn’t now!” said the engineer. “It’s up a quarter of a million now.”

“Why?”

“Just to teach you folks politeness and a little common decency,” was the reply. And the lesson must have taken hold—for the steam railroad paid the price. The result was that it again held the territory and could regulate the transportation tolls, but what a price had been paid! Two railroads occupied the territory that was a good living for but one. The trolley line, now that it has begun to depreciate and to require constant maintenance repairs, vies with the desolate branch of the steam road, which runs but two half-filled passenger trains a day upon its rails. A tax is laid upon the steam-road property—a greater tax upon the residents of the valley—for operating man after operating man is going to “skin” the service in a desperate attempt to make an extravagant excess of facilities pay its way. The trolley line has already raised many of its five-cent fares to an inconvenient six cents—the steam branch is held fast by the provisions of its charter and the watchfulness of a state regulating commission.

And in the beginning the entire situation could have been solved easily and efficiently by the comparatively modest expenditures required to electrify the steam railroad’s branch.

A good many railroads have taken forethought. The New York Central found some of its profitable lines in western New York undergoing just such electric interurban competition and a few years ago it installed the electric third rail on its West Shore property from Utica to Syracuse, forty-four miles.

The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading. Built in the early eighties from Weehawken, opposite the city of New York, to Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely the New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of the fine business it had held for many years. After a bitter rate war the New York Central, with all the resources and the abilities of the Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively and bought its new rival for a song; but a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been practically useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a relief line for the overflow of through freight.

So the West Shore tracks, adapted for high-class, high-speed through electric service from Utica to Syracuse, represented a happy thought. Under steam conditions only two passenger trains were run over that somewhat moribund property in each direction daily, while the two trains of sleeping cars passing over the tracks at night were of practically no use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions there is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains leaving each terminal hourly, making but a few stops and the run of over forty-four miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local service and the line has become immensely popular. By laying stretches of third and fourth tracks at various points the movement of the New York Central’s overflow through freight has not been seriously incommoded. The electric passenger service is not operated by the New York Central but by the Oneida Railways Company, in which the controlling interests of the steam road have large blocks of stock.

Similarly the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system, running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street-railroad system, though reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system and now operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch. Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas and decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger service than to rent again its branches to outside companies—and perhaps because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of suburban lines in the metropolitan district around New York and wished to test electric traction to its own satisfaction—but ten years ago it changed the suburban service lines from the south up into Rochester from steam to electric. More recently it has tried a third method—by organizing an entirely separate trolley company to build an overhead trolley road paralleling its main line from Waverly, New York, to Corning, New York. In some stretches this new trolley road is built on the right of way of the Erie’s main line.

The Erie people have preferred to conduct their electrification experiments in outlying lines of comparatively slight traffic rather than to commit themselves to a great electrification problem in their congested territory round New York and make some blunder that could be rectified only at a cost of many millions of dollars. That seems good sense, and the Pennsylvania followed the same plan. While its great new station in New York was still a matter of engineer’s blueprints, it began practical experiments with electric traction in the flat southern portion of New Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally situated in every respect for such experiments—its original and rather indirect route from Camden to Atlantic City, which had since been more or less superseded by a shorter “air-line” route. The third rail was installed and the new line became at once popular for suburban traffic in and out of Philadelphia and for the great press of local traffic between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Of the success of that move on the part of the Pennsylvania there has never been the slightest question. Regular trains have been operated for several years over this route at a high rate of speed, and not the slightest difficulty has been found in maintaining the schedules.

In the Far West the Southern Pacific has made notable progress in the application of electricity as a motive power for branch-line traffic. Practically all of its many suburban lines in and around Portland and Oakland (just across the bay from San Francisco) are today being operated in this way—which enables modern steel passenger trains of two or three coaches to be operated at very frequent intervals, thus providing a branch-line service practically impossible to obtain in any other way. When, in the next chapter, we come to consider the automobile as a factor in railroad transportation, we shall consider this entire question of branch-line operation in far greater detail. I always have considered it one of the great neglected opportunities of the average American railroad. But to take advantage of it means a more intense study of its details and its problems. Our railroads, as you know already, have been woefully under officered. It is chiefly because of this serious defect in their organization that the branch lines, their problems and their possibilities, have so long been neglected.

One thing more before we are entirely away from this entire question of the electric operation of the standard railroad: The use of this silent, all-powerful motive force is by no means to be confined to suburban or to branch lines. The New Haven management is steadily engaged in lengthening and extending its New York suburban zone. In the beginning, while it still was in a decidedly experimental state, this zone extended only from the Grand Central Terminal to Stamford, Connecticut—some thirty-four miles all told. Now it has been extended and completed through to New Haven, practically twice the original distance. In a little while it is probable that the New Haven will have completed another link in this great electric chain which slowly but surely it is weaving for itself. And there are traffic experts in New England who do not hesitate to express their belief that in another ten years, perhaps in half that time, all through traffic between New York and Boston—235 miles—will move behind electric locomotives.

There is nothing particularly visionary in this. Last year I rode a longer distance than that on a standard express train—the Olympian, one of the finest trains upon the North American continent, which means, of course, in the whole world. And the electrification of the main line of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway, whose boast it is that it owns and operates the Olympian, was then but half complete. To be even more exact, only one-half of the first unit of installation, from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, had been installed. Workmen were still busy west of Deer Lodge, rigging, stretching the wires, finishing the substations and making the busy line ready for electric locomotives all the way through to Avery. And it was announced that when Avery was reached and the first contract-section completed—440 miles, about equal to the distance between New York and Buffalo—work would be started on another great link to the west; this one to reach the heart of Spokane itself. And in a little longer time electric locomotives would be hauling the yellow trains of the Milwaukee right down to tidewater at Seattle—a span of trollified line equaling roughly about one-half the entire run from Chicago to Puget Sound.[9]