The Railroad Problem :: CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XI

THE RAILROAD AND NATIONAL DEFENSE

The Secretary of the Navy met a high officer of the telephone company in Washington some months ago.

“I have noticed a great deal about your new transcontinental telephone line,” said he. “I wonder if you could tell me how long it would take us, in a national crisis, to get in telephone communication with each navy yard in the United States and what the cost would be.”

The telephone man stepped to the nearest of his contraptions. In a moment he was back.

“Not more than five minutes,” he said quietly, “and in such a crisis there would be no charge to the government.”

The telephone, the telegraph, and the railroad are the three great avenues of national communication. In time of peace they throb with its traffic and beat in consonance with the heartbeats of its commerce. In time of war their value to the nation multiplies, almost incredibly. It is then of vital necessity that they be preserved in their entirety. It is of almost equal military necessity that they be kept close to the armies that are afield.Of the telephone we have just spoken. The services of the telegraph at the time of the Civil War are too well remembered today for it to be ignored in any future national crisis. But it is of the railroad that we are talking in this book—the railroad that brings the food to your larder, even the milk to your doorstep; that keeps the coal upon your hearthstone and the clothing upon the backs of you and yours; that carries you to and fro over the face of the land. It is the railroad, that living, breathing thing that girdles the whole land and sends its tentacles into even the smallest town, that, as you already know, is your servant in times of peace. How can it be made to serve you in time of war?

When the last great war was fought in the United States, our railroads had barely attained their majority. In the days of the Civil War there were no railroad systems, as we know them today. Instead there was a motley of small individualistic railroads, poorly coordinated. They were, for the most part, poorly built and insufficiently equipped. Nothing was standardized. Even the track-gauges varied and passengers or freight going a considerable distance found it necessary to change cars at intersecting points.

Nevertheless, the railroad played a tremendous part in the War of the Rebellion. Because of it Sherman made his conquering march from Atlanta to the sea. He was something of a railroader himself, that doughty general. And upon his immediate staff were expert railroaders. Over the crude railroads of the Georgia of that day, with the aid of their war-racked cars and locomotives, they supplied the commissary of the Sherman army as it made its way across a devastated land.

THE RAILROAD IN THE CIVIL WAR

This picture of a section of Alexandria, Virginia, was taken in 1864 and shows
the cars and engines of the United States Military Railroad of that day.

In the North the military railroad, reaching down from the very portal of the Long Bridge at Washington, its railheads almost always touching the Union lines, was an almost indispensable factor to the Army of the Potomac. The Baltimore and Ohio was hardly a less important factor. It paid a high price for the accident of location. One of Stonewall Jackson’s earliest and most brilliant achievements was the seizure of eight locomotives from its roundhouse at Martinsburg and their movement, some forty miles, over a dirt road to Winchester, Virginia, where they found the tracks of a part of the railroad system of the Confederacy. Later on Jackson returned to Martinsburg and helped himself to twelve more B. and O. locomotives, also moving these over the turnpike to Winchester. He knew and Lee knew that even a clumsy balloon-topped, wood-burning locomotive was worth 500 horses in transport service. And the South was none too plentifully supplied with locomotives even before the war began.

The most of the work of the railroads in the Civil War was not dramatic. But it was thorough—the carrying of men between the cities of the Middle West and the Army of the Cumberland. At first it was chaotic, but it became well systematized. The direct line between New York and Washington—although then composed of four separate railroads—was recognized as a route of vast strategic value. The men who handled troops and supplies over it, in doing so qualified themselves to assume the mastery of the great railroad systems that were to spring into being at the close of the war—as a result of both construction and consolidation.

In 1898, when the country was again plunged into war, preparation of the railroad lines of the land had grown to maturity. Unfortunately, however, the theater of the war was close to the corner of the land which was then most poorly equipped with railroads. But the standardization of the operating conditions had been largely accomplished. One could run a car or locomotive upon practically every important line in the land without changing the gauge of its wheels. This last, of itself, was important. It meant that the equipment of larger and stronger roads to the North could be sent down to the Plant System and the Florida Central and Peninsular—barely equipped for ordinary purposes—which were suddenly called upon to handle an extraordinary traffic. This, of itself, was a mixed blessing. For the borrowed locomotives were often too heavy for the light rails and long bridges over the Florida marshes. Derailments were frequent and the delays they entailed, protracted.

The men who went to Tampa in that hot summer of 1898 have not forgotten the Florida Central and Peninsular nor the Plant System, even though those two railroads have now passed into history. Nor has the War Department forgotten them. On one memorable occasion, the Quartermaster started a special trainload of emergency army supplies south from Philadelphia to Tampa. In order to make sure that the train should go through promptly, he placed one of his own representatives upon it, with orders to push it through. The train disappeared. After three weeks, the Quartermaster’s Department found it on a siding at a place called Turkey Creek, a good eighteen miles from Tampa—held there because of the hopelessly congested terminal at the waterside. And they never yet have found the special representative who was to put it through.

These abominable conditions, the conditions that made it necessary to take from four to six days from the great mobilization camp at Chattanooga to Port Tampa, a journey which should have been done in from one-half to one-third of this time, were not to be charged to the poor men who were struggling to operate those inadequate railroads. They were doing the best they could, without plan and without facilities. And it is interesting to note in this connection, that in that same memorable summer, an appeal came to Washington not to put more than 500 troops a day through the Jersey City gateway for fear of congesting the terminals there!

More recently the railroads of the South have been called upon again to handle troops and munitions and commissary. Of course the problems that have confronted them upon the Mexican border are hardly comparable with those of the Civil War or the Spanish-American War. Yet on the very morning that the entire country was shocked by Villa’s audacious raid upon Columbus, New Mexico, the heads of the great railroad systems that come together at El Paso were alert and ready for any orders that the War Department might give. At 6:45 P.M. that evening a telegraphic request for trains came from Washington to the general headquarters of the Southern Pacific lines at Houston. Five thousand troops were to be moved from the camps at Galveston and near-by Texas City, and as quickly as possible. Early in the morning the trains began moving. The railroad had made a full night of it. Throughout the night they had brought their extra equipment into Galveston from San Antonio, from New Orleans, from Shreveport—every important operating center within twelve hours’ run. The trains were ready as quickly as the troops. And they made the long run of 881 miles up over the long single-track to El Paso in an average of thirty-six hours—under the conditions, a really remarkable performance.

THE RAILROAD “DOING ITS BIT”

Hauling a trainload of army trucks and supplies from Chicago to
Gen. Pershing’s expedition “somewhere in Mexico.”

The Santa FÉ and the Rock Island operate direct lines from Chicago to El Paso. They were called upon during many months of the past year to carry munitions south to the border—particularly motor trucks—and were not found wanting. The Rock Island with its complementary line, the El Paso and Southwestern, carried 170 motor trucks and water wagons from Chicago to El Paso, 1,446 miles, on a fifty-hour schedule. The “limited” with all of its reputation for fast running and its high-speed equipment only makes this distance in forty-three hours and a half, while the ordinary schedule for freight—which is the equipment upon which it was necessary to handle the motor trucks and the water wagons—is 129 hours and 50 minutes from one city to the other. But Pershing needed the automobiles. They were vital for his expedition. And it was a part of the day’s work for the railroad to carry them down to the border in record time.[14]

The job of handling the troops on the Texas line has hardly been more than part of the day’s work. The railroaders down there will tell you that. The real job of the railroad recently has been laid overseas in the nations that are fighting so bitterly for mastery. The German military use of railroads is most interesting because it is the best. American travelers for years past have noticed upon the trucks of each separate piece of rolling stock in the Empire, its military destination, as well as cabalistic figures to denote its carrying capacity in men and horses and pounds of freight. Yet these were but the surface indications of a great plan—whose formulas had been worked out and rested on the shelves of the war headquarters in Berlin. How well the plan has worked we all know now. For the first time in its history the railroad has become an active fighting factor—not merely to be content with the bringing of powder and shell and food and equipment up to the bases of the fighting lines; not merely to assemble troops, in a comparatively leisurely fashion, or to take tired and sick and wounded men back to their homes; but to be a striking arm, if you please, moving whole brigades and even armies with all the tensity and speed and resource at its command. In other days you might laugh at the peaceful little German passenger train, making its leisurely way in all the pomp and circumstance that only an Empire may show. But you cannot laugh at the German military train, black with troopers, darting its way across the Kaiserland with a speed and definiteness that is all but human.

It has been stated that the real reason why the Germans failed to reach Paris in their memorable drive of September, 1914, was that even their remarkable system of military railroads failed in this supreme crisis. If this be so, it must be that the task placed upon them was superhuman. For it was just such military trains as we have just seen, multiplied in dozens and in hundreds, that moved whole brigades to southern Galicia during the first two weeks of April, 1915—a distance, roughly speaking, equal to that from Boston to Detroit. It was the military plan for the railroads of Germany that brought the regiments out of the trenches in Arras in the last week in June of that same year and on the Fourth of July had them hammering at the might of Warsaw. And Warsaw is 800 miles from the low fields of Arras. Not until the war is over will the whole military workings of the German railroads be known. But examples such as these show that they did work. And it may be remembered that when the German army began flowing in a tidal fashion up over the Russian steppes they came to von Hindenburg and reminded him of Napoleon and the retreat from Moscow. And von Hindenburg showed his great teeth and remarked that Napoleon had had no railroads.

“The bread which our soldiers eat today in Windau was baked yesterday in Breslau,” he added. And it takes only a single glance at the map to see that Windau is approximately 500 miles distant from Breslau. “We drink German mineral water and we eat fresh meat direct from Berlin. If necessary, we can build fifty miles of railroad in two days. Therefore it is nonsense to speak now of the times and the strategy of Napoleon.”

Here, then, is another of the great practical lessons that these three fateful years are teaching America. Consider now how she may avail herself of this particular lesson—the coordination of her great systems of more than a quarter of a million miles of standard steam railroads with an orderly and intelligent military plan, against any invasion. Other nations have had to build railroads with a particular relation to military strategy. Keen-minded Belgians and Frenchmen long ago noted the tendency of Germany to build double-track railroads to comparatively unimportant points upon her western front—since then they have had the opportunity to see the wartime efficiency of these lines, suddenly turned in an August from practical stagnation into busy, flowing currents of military traffic. Of the strategic value of double-track routes, much more in a moment. For this moment consider the location of the principal rail lines of the United States—particularly in their reference to the defense of the nation.The “vital area” of the country, so called, is the coast territory between Portland, Maine, and Washington, District of Columbia, and resting east of the sharp ridges of the Alleghenies. Here is a great part of the wealth, the population, and the banking of the United States. Fortunately, however, this is the district best supplied with efficient railroads, double-tracked, triple-tracked, quadruple-tracked. And a reference to the map will quickly show that these lines are particularly well adapted to coast defense. From the extreme northeastern tip of Maine down to Key West and around the white and curving shore of the Gulf to Brownsville and the mouth of the Rio Grande there is hardly a strategical point that is not well served by existing railroads. North of Boston, the Boston and Maine and the Maine Central systems run, not alone parallel to the coast, but by means of a network of other lines intersecting their coast lines, are prepared to serve them from the inland country every few miles. The importance of this last fact comes to mind when one realizes the possibility of an invading force eluding our naval patrols and cutting our coast line railroads. With a network of adequate line behind the one actually closest to the shore, important communication would not be interrupted for any considerable time.

Boston is linked with New York by three distinct routes of the New Haven system; with Chicago by the Boston and Albany, in practical effect a branch stem of the New York Central system. Nor are these three stems the only protection that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad extends to New England. The exposed and bended arm of Cape Cod is a weak point in the nation’s “vital area.” The New Haven holds and controls the one-time Old Colony Railroad which reaches the old whaling ports of Plymouth, New Bedford, and Provincetown—a railroad which might at any time become of vast strategic importance and which should be at once double-tracked, by the Federal government, if necessary, for the same reason that Germany double-tracked her lines leading to her French and Belgian border. And only second in importance to the Old Colony in case of an attempted invasion from across the Atlantic is the Long Island Railroad, stretching straight out of the city of New York to the very tip of the island. Between the Rockaways and Montauk there are many points on the south edge of Long Island that offer possibilities to landing parties. And it is essential that the railroad that serves this peculiarly barren bit of coast within two hours’ rail run of the largest city upon the American continent be prepared to serve it well in the case of military necessity. Fortunately the Long Island Railroad has been vastly improved—its double-track increased—within the past ten years. It is no longer barred by the East River from actual track connections with the other railroads of the country. The great Pennsylvania tunnels already make it possible in a military emergency to pour filled train and empty, on short headway, into Long Island. The strategic value to the nation of these tunnels will soon be supplemented by the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River which will bind the Pennsylvania and the Long Island railroads with the main lines of the New Haven and the New York Central. This bridge cannot be completed too quickly. It is of immediate strategic necessity.

From New York south the same main-stem railroad that served the North so well in the days of the Civil War still stands. It has, however, ceased to be a chain of railroads, with ferriage at Havre de Grace and heartrending transfers by horse cars across Philadelphia and Baltimore, as it was in the days when New England and the York State and the Jersey regiments went down to Washington and over across the Potomac. From Baltimore north, this ancient stem is now the Pennsylvania Railroad, four-tracked or double-tracked the entire distance, rich in surplus locomotives and cars, and halted no longer by either the Delaware or the Susquehanna rivers. Since the close of the Civil War the Pennsylvania has builded its own line from Baltimore to Washington, while the Baltimore and Ohio, which owned that section of the ancient stem, has thrust its own line up into Philadelphia, coming from that point to Jersey City over the main-line rails of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey systems. This means that there are today between these parallel railroad systems eight main-line tracks from New York to Philadelphia and from four to six from Philadelphia through Baltimore to Washington. It is a combined railroad trunk of which a nation might well be proud. And this nation may yet be profoundly grateful that it has such a railroad trunk, through the heart of its “vital area.”Consider again this “vital area”—the great metropolitan districts of Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore—almost a continuous city, in fact, all the way along the Atlantic coast from the south tip of Maine to the Potomac. It stretches west to the Alleghenies, in fact we may say a little beyond them, to include such vigorous communities as Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo. Here in this “vital area” of the nation are more than eighty per cent of its munition-making plants, its largest hard coal and soft coal deposits, its steel-making plants, its greatest shipyards and its three most important navy yards. Major General Leonard Wood has said that 1,500,000 men would be necessary to properly defend the coast-line from Portland, Maine, to Washington. Therefore the railroad main stem that connects these cities and the many larger cities between them is the most important military base line upon this continent. It needs all the resources of two- and four- and even six-tracked railroads, for General Wood has gone on record as saying that in a national crisis it might be necessary to move half a million men on this great base line within the course of ten short hours. On a conservative estimate these would require 500 trains—trains which, stood end to end, would reach all the way from New York to Washington or to Utica. Such a train movement would stagger even the imagination of a passenger-traffic manager accustomed to figure the “business” in and out of a national inauguration or a big football game at Princeton or New Haven or Cambridge.

A railroader whose pencil has a quick aptitude for figures has estimated that Germany has seven and a half locomotives for every ten miles of track. We have one-third that proportion. Yet the preponderance of what our railroad men like to call “motive power” lies east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio. The same thing is true of cars—cars of every sort and variety. That is not the problem. Here it is.

Suppose, if you will, that an enemy finding an entrance to America on the sandy south shore of Long Island—to choose the spot most in the favor of the writers of the lurid fiction of an imaginary war between some European nation and the United States—has actually succeeded in capturing the city of New York. The great military base line of America is broken at its most important point. How are Major General Wood and the rest of the men who are puzzling the great problem out with him, going to move a half-million men—a half or a quarter of that number from New England over into Pennsylvania or down toward the defense lines around the national capital?

Take a look at your railroad map. Look sharply! You will need to look sharply to see the second line of communication between New England and the rest of the nation. There it is—a thin and wavering railroad line, stretching from New Haven up through the Connecticut hills, spanning the Hudson on the slender tracery of the Poughkeepsie bridge and threading still more hills until it reaches Trenton, New Jersey, and the main base line once again. The nation may yet thank a gentleman named Charles S. Mellen for that second line of communication. For while the much discussed ex-president of the New Haven did not build the Poughkeepsie bridge or the New England lines leading to it, he at least caused both of them to be double-tracked, curves and grades ironed out until one heavily laden coal train could follow close upon the heels of another.

Larger Image

AMERICA’S “VITAL AREA”

The workshops and the coalbins of the United States, together with the principal railroads
which must protect them. This bird’s-eye map made as though viewed
from an aeroplane at a point five hundred miles off of Cape Cod.

That was Mellen’s motive in making a large part of this second line of communication into first-class railroad—the perfecting of New England’s long, lean arm down into the Pennsylvania coal bin. But no matter what his motive—he has never pretended to be altruistic—his coal line is of great strategic value. Not alone does it circle around metropolitan New York at a reasonably safe distance, but it intersects the great trunk lines running west from the seaboard—routes that would be of unspeakable strategic value in the case of the seizure of our largest city. For these would be the lines that would have to feed our army—not with mere food, but with men and guns and shells and all that with these go. At Poughkeepsie this second line of communication intersects the main stem of the New York Central, in turn the main stem of the Vanderbilt system reaching almost every important city west of the Alleghenies and east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. At Goshen it intersects the Erie Railroad, come in these recent years from being a reproach and a byword into one of the most efficiently operated railroads in the entire land. Farther south it intersects the Lackawanna and the Lehigh Valley—roads rich in money and in resources.

Suppose now the second line of communication is gone—the graceful span of the Poughkeepsie bridge a mass of twisted steel in the channel of the Hudson. What is the third line of communication? It consists of the aristocratic old Boston and Albany leading due west out of Boston, and threading Worcester and Springfield and Pittsfield—each of these a manufacturing center of no mean importance—and finally coming to Albany, and of the Delaware and Hudson, which, bending southwest from Albany, finds its way through the anthracite hills of Pennsylvania and eventually by way of Harrisburg to the main base at Philadelphia or Baltimore. This line also intersects the east and west trunk lines.

The fourth line of communication? Alas, we must believe that the capture of these three widely separated lines is almost humanly impossible. When they are gone the New England head is fastened to the body of the nation only by a thin artery indeed. For the fourth line of communication is a wavering, roundabout railroad, practically all single-track, which follows close to the Canadian border. It is of conceivable military importance only in the unthinkable event of a quarrel with our cousins to the north. In such a catastrophe this line, of potential military value, could be made of actual value only by double-tracking and by almost complete reconstruction.

Enough now of the possibilities of the cutting of the main military base of the nation. Go south with me for a moment from Washington and see the strategic position of our railroads along the more southerly portions of the Atlantic coast. Cross the Potomac on the nameless steel structure that superseded the historic Long Bridge more than a decade ago and yet is of hardly less military importance. For the trains of every railroad running south from Washington must cross upon its tracks. Of these railroads, three are the trunk stems that, while running many miles back from the actual coast, still serve it. They are the Southern Railway, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Atlantic Coast Line. These three railroads and their direct connections reach from Washington to Norfolk, to Charleston, to Savannah, to Mobile, and to New Orleans—the most important of the southeasterly ports. One of their most interesting connections crosses the keys of Florida and does not stop on its overseas trip until it reaches the last of them—Key West, which is almost within scent of the cigar fumes of Havana. If we ever had to send another army into Cuba, Tampa would be completely out of it.

There is hardly any comparison between these trunk railroads of the Southeast and the lines that struggled so hard to handle the armies at the time of the Spanish-American War. They have been double-tracked for long distances, more generously supplied with locomotives and cars, although they are still quite a way behind their northern brethren in this regard. Still it would not be a very difficult matter in a national crisis to move great fleets of rolling stock from one corner of the land to another. By careful advance planning and a study of rail weights and bridges this would become a comparatively simple matter.Ignore, for the moment, the strategic value of the many railroads in the center of the land; forget the possibility of an army striking us upon our Atlantic coast. Let us turn our faces toward the west coast, toward the great stretch of barren and unprotected Pacific shore from British Columbia down to San Diego. And before we begin tracing strategic routes upon the map let us close our eyes and go back into history.

Do you recall that inspiring picture in the old geographies of the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad—the two doughty locomotives, one facing west, the other east, with their cowcatchers gently touching, while a motley of distinguished guests are indulging in oratory and other things? Do you happen to recall why the Union Pacific was builded, why the national credit was placed behind its construction?

Military necessity is the answer. The men who went before the Congress of the fifties and the sixties and who argued ably and well for the building of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States laid great stress upon this question of military necessity.

“Only by the building of such a railroad as this,” they argued, “can the Union be held absolutely indissoluble.”

So came the name of the road.

Today one looks at the military necessity of the Union Pacific Railroad from another point of view. Now open your eyes. Look at your map and see that military value of this first great transcontinental railroad. Its chief eastern terminal is at Council Bluffs, on the bank of the Missouri River and but an overnight ride from Chicago, with which it is connected by six excellent railroads—most of them double-tracked. Its northerly main stem is double-tracked practically the entire distance to Ogden, Utah, an even thousand miles distant from the Missouri. A twin main stem runs from Cheyenne down to Denver and east to Kansas City, where it enjoys direct connections to St. Louis, Memphis, and the entire South. The North and East feed the road chiefly through its Council Bluffs gateway.

At Ogden the Union Pacific divides into three great feeding lines—the main one extending due west to Sacramento and San Francisco, with one to the north reaching Portland and Seattle and another to the south running direct to Los Angeles. While these three lines are nominally separate railroads, they are, in effect, component parts of the Union Pacific System. In any military crisis requiring the rapid transcontinental movement of troops they would become extremely important parts.

The Union Pacific is, of course, supplemented by other transcontinentals. To the south rests the long main stem of the Santa FÉ, which boasts not only that it is the only railroad with its own rails direct from Chicago to California, but that it already has more than fifty per cent of its main line double-tracked. Farther south still is the Southern Pacific, which, although its real eastern terminal is at New Orleans, enjoys a practical Chicago terminal over the lines of the Rock Island. In the north are three American transcontinentals—the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern. While the Milwaukee is the only one of these with its own rails from Chicago to Seattle, its two rivals maintain a brisk competition by the use of the Burlington and the North Western systems between Chicago and St. Paul.

By the use of these roads it would be possible to throw a great number of troops and munitions across to almost any section of the Pacific coast and in a very short time. And for more than twenty years there has existed a north and south trunk line, that would make it possible to obtain a flexible use of troops between San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. There are lines close to the coast all the way from Eureka past Coos Bay to Astoria and the Puget Sound country. The main north and south trunk lies anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles inland from the coast all the way from Los Angeles to Seattle. Perhaps it is well that this is so. It is unfortunate only that no more than a comparatively small portion of it is double-tracked and that a large part of it through northern California and Oregon is so threaded through the high mountains as to be very difficult to operate. Military strategy demands that this important trunk line be made possible to operate at highest efficiency. That can only come through grade correction and a completion of double-track.

I have laid stress and constant repetition upon this question of double-track, simply because a double-track railroad is almost ten times as efficient as a single-track railroad. That should be apparent to a layman even upon the very face of things.

The other day I sat in the Southern Pacific offices at Houston, Texas, and talked with a genius of a railroad operator in regard to this very thing. He was telling of the remarkable record made by his road in getting the troops across from Galveston to El Paso. I asked what was the best he could do in a real emergency—an emergency calling for perhaps the movement of 50,000 troops, instead of 5,000.

“Under normal conditions we can put five trainloads a day of troops across Texas, in addition to our regular traffic and keep them moving at a rate of from seventeen to eighteen miles an hour, including stops. We could put on more trains, but this would not accomplish much except to tie up all of them. We have to figure the capacity of our main line very largely by the frequency of the passing sidings.”

“Suppose a crisis should arise—a crisis which demanded an even quicker movement of troops?” I asked.

He did not hesitate in his reply.

“In such a crisis we would pull all our other traffic off the line and move from ten to twelve trains a day.”

Which, translated, would mean at the most from five to six regiments of 2,000 men and their accouterments. And this on a railroad with a tremendously high reputation for efficient operation. Here is the case for single-track.

Now consider double-track. The Union Pacific moves in summertime eight through passenger trains west-bound out of its ancient transfer station at Council Bluffs, an equal number east-bound. Frequently there are extra sections of these trains, to say nothing of a pretty steady schedule of freights. Yet even this by no means represents the capacity of its low grades and double-track to Ogden. The Pennsylvania Railroad in twenty-four hours has handled 121 trains bound in a single direction out of its great yards at Altoona, which means a train every eleven minutes and a half. While the main line of the Pennsylvania is four-tracked, that traffic was freight and handled almost entirely upon one of a pair of freight tracks. If such a performance was possible in the steep hills of the Keystone state, it would hardly be exaggeration to suggest that the Union Pacific could handle a military train bound west from the Missouri at least every thirty minutes. Taking 1,000 men to the train as a moderate estimate, this great road could dispatch nearly 50,000 men a day without in any degree congesting itself. And while its central connecting stem at Ogden—that portion of the Southern Pacific once known as the Central Pacific—is by no means completely double-tracked, in a military necessity it could be made so at once by the simple expedient of using for a one-way movement of the trains, the newly built Western Pacific which parallels it all the way from Ogden to San Francisco.

Here, then, is the answer, here the way that in a military crisis we may also gain a double-track transcontinental route across the north edge of the country. We simply need to take two out of the three single-track lines there—the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern—and by keeping the traffic moving in a single direction, we gain at once a practical and effective double-track railroad. This method can be repeated in the South from Chicago to El Paso and thence across to Los Angeles, by a similar operating combination of the Santa FÉ, the Rock Island, the El Paso and Southwestern, and the Southern Pacific. The map itself will suggest numerous other combinations of the same sort.

Physically, the railroads of the United States are today wonderfully well adapted to any military crisis that they might be asked to meet. And the constant raising of their efficiency during the past decade, because of the growing tendency of expenses to overlap income, has done nothing to impair their military value. Potentially, they are fit and ready. Ready, they are actually; fit and ready is an entirely different matter. Let us come to it, here and now.

Suppose that tomorrow the “cry of war” were to resound from one end of this country to the other, that an army of at least 1,000,000 men were to spring into being as quickly and as easily as all these pacificists aver. Immediately the railroads would be called to their superhuman tasks of transporting men and horses, and motor trucks, munitions, and materials of every sort. And somewhere this great problem of military rail transport would have to center. Today, in times of peace, it centers in the Quartermaster’s Department of the War Department, which contracts with the railroads for the carrying of troops and supplies just as any private organization might arrange. The existing study of the War Department provides that in the declaration of war the railroads shall be operated by the Board of Engineers. Yet to a large extent this earlier study has been superseded by President Wilson in the appointment of a Council of National Defense to take over the industrial, commercial, and social mobilization of the United States in case of a great crisis. As a member of this council Mr. Wilson has appointed Daniel Willard, of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in direct charge of the transportation and communication, in such a crisis. Of this, much more will be said in a moment.

It is conceded that in any great national crisis the government would immediately take over the operation of the railroads. The advocates of government ownership point to this as a clinching argument for their proposition. As a matter of fact it argues nothing of the sort. The United States government, by act of Congress early in the Civil War, took over the operation of all the railroads, although it actually took control of those roads only in the theater of the war. It also took over Thomas A. Scott, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a remarkable railroader, and placed him in charge of the military roads—which, in itself, is significant. Under Scott’s brilliant leadership were such men as David Craig McCallum and Herman Haupt, the last of these a man whose combined knowledge of army organization and railroad operation made him almost invaluable to the government. And the real success of the Federal military railroads in the Civil War was due to the fact that the government officers who operated them were expert railroaders borrowed for the nonce from civil life.

ROCK ISLAND GOVERNMENT BRIDGE

Built and owned jointly by the United States Government and the Rock Island Railroad, it crosses
the Mississippi, connects Rock Island and Davenport, and is a point of military importance.

It would be hardly less than a calamity for the army to attempt to operate the railroads of the United States or any considerable part of them. The army officers know that. Leonard Wood knows it. The War College down at Washington knows it and has prepared a new study of the new problem recognizing the necessity of keeping the railroads in any crisis operated by railroad men. An army man is no more competent to operate a railroad than a railroader is to command a brigade upon the field of battle.

There is a railroad executive up in New England who well remembers the days of the Spanish war. At that time he was trainmaster of the Southern Railway at Asheville, North Carolina. His division ran from Knoxville, Tennessee, down to the main line at Salisbury—242 miles. It threaded the Blue Ridge Mountains and did it with difficulty. It was a hard road to operate at the best. And in 1898 Fate called upon it to handle a considerable number of troops from the concentration camp at Chattanooga down toward the embarkation stations at Norfolk and Newport News. That was the difficult problem, with the high grades, the many curves, and the few passing sidings. To accomplish it meant careful planning. The division staff made such a plan. Each meeting point for the regular trains and the extra was carefully designated and a time allowance for meals at Asheville was arranged; forty minutes, no more, no less.

Being well planned, the operation went along smoothly—that is, until the road was forced to break away from its own scheme. The trainmaster was about to dispatch one of the troop trains from Asheville, its forty-minute meal period having nearly expired, when an assistant informed him that the officers of the regiment it carried were not aboard. The trainmaster hurried downstairs. The officers were having their after-dinner coffee and their cigars and showed no disposition whatsoever to hurry out to the cars. He made up his mind quickly. He knew that if this train was delayed ten minutes the whole operating plan would go to pieces and the entire division become almost hopelessly congested. He went to the commanding officer and quickly explained this to him.

The colonel of the volunteers quickly waved him to one side.

“This train’ll start when I’m good and ready to have it start,” he said huskily.

The trainmaster stood his ground.

“I’ll have to send it on in three minutes,” he said politely, “and you gentlemen will have to take your chance in getting on another section.”

The army man (volunteer) swore a great big oath, and added:

“You make a move to start this train before I give the word and I will make you a military prisoner.”

The railroader capitulated, although today he is sorry that he did not stick it out and go to prison. And the operating schedule of his division went to pot. Stalled trains piled up for miles along its main line and its sidings. Incredible delays were the immediate result of one man’s tinkering with the delicate operating structure of the railroad.

But given even a fairly free hand, a measure of authority, and some opportunity for preparation, the railroader will be able to give a good account of himself in the military handling of troops. He has shown that during the past year when he has been called upon to hurriedly move our army toward the south border of the nation. I have told already of the records made on that occasion—how long trains, filled with troops and provisions and munitions of war, were sent down to the border in double-quick time. One thing I have not yet told—the provisions for housing and feeding these troops while they are on the road.

It now is definitely understood that troop movements of the regular army, volunteers and militia as well, are to be made with sleeping equipment, particularly on long-distance runs. The practice is to use the so-called standard Pullmans for the officers, the tourist-sleepers for the men—three to the section. Obviously it is out of the question to feed a regiment, or even a portion of it, in dining cars. Sometimes it is difficult to make last-minute arrangements at eating-houses along the line, even if the regiment wished to spare the time to detrain for a meal. The Pullman Company has solved the problem for at least the ordinary movements of the army by the construction of kitchen-cars. These are long, fourteen-section tourist-sleepers, with an unusually capacious kitchen at one end. This kitchen can easily feed not only the car in which it is located, but the occupants of an entire train of average length. It is not difficult for it to give three square meals a day to 300 hungry men. Here is a bit of practical efficiency that is worthy of passing notice.

Of course no one expects that in a time of great military urgency the troops would ride in Pullmans. They would be lucky to get day coaches, and in the final stress of things, it would probably be found necessary to quickly cut windows in the sides of freight cars and hurriedly equip them with seats. A Yankee box car so equipped would be a good deal better than a good many of the small cars in which the German army has been so quickly and so efficiently transferred from one side of that kingdom to the other.

It is the flexibility of the standard equipment of the American railroads that today offers perhaps the largest opportunity for its successful military use. A single instance will prove this. A man—his name is L. W. Luellen—has devised a scheme for mounting heavy rapid-fire ordnance upon steel flat cars. Obviously it would be quite impossible to fire even a miniature “big Bertha” from anything so unstable as a railroad car. But Mr. Luellen has met this difficulty by arranging to have built at intervals not exceeding thirty miles along the entire Atlantic coast, short sidings flanked by heavy concrete bases.

He, too, has studied his railroad map, as a little while ago we were studying it. He has found that a comparatively small number of guns with a fifteen-mile shooting radius, could by means of these permanent bases at thirty-mile intervals protect the entire Atlantic coast, a good portion of the Pacific as well. The method of their operation is simple. The guns would be sent to any section they were needed on fast passenger schedule. It would be a matter of minutes rather than hours, for the flat cars to be run in between the permanent concrete bases and by jacks transferred to them from the cars.

The scheme is so simple that it seems absurd. But the War Department experts say that it is remarkably practical. And Mr. Luellen, who seems to know what he is talking about, says that it would not cost more than $10,000,000 to install it—guns, cars, and permanent bases, along the North Atlantic seaboard. Here is a form of railroad preparedness that would seem worth the careful attention of the national legislature.

Already the American army has what is known as the Medical Reserve Corps, made up of physicians and surgeons all the way across the land. The great national organizations of civil engineers are beginning to plan a similar reserve in the ranks of their own profession. In the American Railway Association, the railroads of this country have a common meeting ground and an organization that can quickly take definite steps toward meeting the Federal authorities in planning the military use of the transportation routes of the country. There is no mistaking the patriotism of the railroaders. Some of them have smarted in recent years under what they have believed to be an unwarranted intrusion by the Federal authorities into the affairs of their properties, but at heart every man of them is loyally American. And every man of them is not merely loyal in a passive sense, but is both willing and able to aid the government with all the resources at his command.

Take the critical situation which broke upon the country early in the present year when diplomatic relations with Germany suddenly were broken and the possibility of war loomed high. President Wilson, acting under the authority which Congress had vested in him immediately appointed a committee of seven prominent Americans—a Council of National Defense. As a member of this Council and in immediate charge of the nation’s transportation and communication in case of emergency Mr. Wilson chose Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. He chose wisely. Of the dominant quality of Mr. Willard’s Americanism as well as of his great railroad ability and executive fitness for so important a post there can be no question.

Within seven days after he had accepted this billet, Willard was at work for the government. He bespoke for it at once the interest and cooperation of the heads of the other great railroads of America. He knew that in any national crisis the interest and the patriotism of these men was never to be doubted. And so he sought their cooperation and not in vain. A full dozen of the biggest railroad executives in the United States closed their desks and at Willard’s suggestion came hurrying to Washington. When their conference was done, a definite plan for the service of the railroads in a time of great national stress had been begun—a program which the railroad executives then returned to study in detail. At the conference they were told of the great defense and offense plans of the War College for the part which the railroad must play in a national emergency. Some of the railroad presidents learned for the first time the designated mobilization centers all the way across the land, the equipment necessary for each, the movement and direction of troop and munition trains, from every one of them.

It is gratifying to know that these railroad executives already are giving much time and thought to the use of our railroads in national defense. So is Major Charles Hine, who, like Herman Haupt, came out of West Point, perfected himself in military training and organization and gave his time after leaving the army to railroad training and organization. Hine started as a brakeman on the Erie Railroad, in order that he might study railroad operation from the bottom up—that he might eventually bring to the railroad some of the really good points of the army. He has since held high executive positions in many of the great railroad systems of the land—studying the problems of each until he knows the railroad map of this country as you and I know the fingers of our hands. The value of such a man to America in an emergency is not to be figured in dollars and cents.

But to my own mind, the value of such a military reserve corps among the railroaders will be comparatively slight if its membership be confined merely to railroad executives. The qualities of patriotism and good Americanism are by no means confined to the higher-paid railroad men. Take a purely suppositious case—yet an entirely typical one:

Down in the offices of the old Cumberland Valley Railroad at Chambersburg, we will say, there is a boy who is assistant trainmaster or assistant superintendent. He is a smart boy, who has climbed rapidly in railroad ranks because of his abilities. He reads the papers. He is keenly interested in this whole idea of national defense. He reads the newspapers and the magazines and he wonders what his own part would be if Washington were taken by an enemy invader. Being a good railroader he does not have to spend much time in doubts. He knows that his little railroad—ever an important cross-country traffic link from Harrisburg down to Martinsburg and Winchester, will suddenly become part of the military base line north and south along the Atlantic coast. Over its stout rails will come the tidal overflow that ordinarily moves over the four busy tracks of the two railroad systems between Baltimore and Philadelphia. That means that his railroad, his own division, himself, if you please, will be called upon to handle a great traffic from Harrisburg south to the upreached arms of the Norfolk and Western and the Baltimore and Ohio lines.

That young man in the Chambersburg railroad office should be under a course of instruction today, as to the emergency use of his railroad, his division. The division is the operating unit of the railroad in America. Therefore a scheme for the military use of the railroad should begin with its head, the superintendent. In the superintendent’s office of every railroad division that may have possible military value, there should be a member of the army reserve corps, making the plan for the possible military use of his division. In the general superintendent’s office there should be another reserve officer studying the schemes of the several divisions that center there. Similarly the process should be repeated in the general manager’s and the president’s offices, where authority converges still further. This is important work, vital training, if you please. It is hardly the sort of detail work to be placed upon the shoulders of a railroad executive, already burdened with a vast amount of other detail.

The best army training is that which simulates, as far as possible, the actual conditions that might arise in the case of real war. That is why the maneuvers that were held in the East at various times during the past decade have been of tremendous value. They should be repeated and the railroads should be asked to play their part at a moment’s notice. To play that part well at so short a notice means planning in advance. The New Haven railroad recently, on the occasion of the Harvard-Yale game and the inauguration of Yale Bowl, brought sixty-five trains carrying 33,409 passengers into New Haven between 9:26 A.M. and 2:00 P.M.—the record passenger movement in the history of American railroading. Not one of those trains was late, not even to the fraction of a minute. In the very first hour of the afternoon, 22 trains, 221 passenger coaches all told, arrived at an interval of slightly over two minutes—226 passengers to the minute. And the detraining and entraining of these passengers was accomplished with military precision.

But the New Haven’s remarkable performance was the result of planning—planning to the last detail. No wonder that John A. Droege, its general superintendent, is qualified to speak of the military possibilities of the railroad. But Droege knows that advance plans are of vital necessity. Of course, our railroads have met difficult situations when it has become absolutely necessary. The Ohio floods of three years ago proved their ability to meet a great emergency in a great manner. In a few hours many miles of their tracks were completely washed away, hundreds of bridges destroyed, their lines thrown into apparently hopeless confusion. Yet the railroaders never lost their heads. They arranged to reroute their through trains. Then and there it was that the Lake Shore railroad—running from Buffalo to Chicago—showed its resources. For it took upon its broad shoulders the trains from all these completely blocked lines—the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Erie—and for long days tripled its ordinary traffic without apparently feeling the great overload.

Yet this traffic was in some sense routine and it was moving over one of the most generously equipped railroads in America. The military plan, as we have already seen, may have to make large strategic use of railroad lines of comparatively unimportant strength. It is here that the definite plan—from the superintendent’s office upward—counts. It is gratifying to know that the military bill provides an opportunity for the construction of such a plan, gratifying to know that the War College at Washington has succeeded in its detailed study of the use of our railroads in time of war.

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An outline map of the United States showing the railroad routes
of greatest strategic military importance.

It is upon such a study that Mr. Willard was enabled to give the railroad presidents whom he summoned to the Federal Capital such a lucid statement of the parts that each of them and their railroads would be expected to fulfill. Further than this, they are yet to evolve recommendations for terminal yards and double trackings which in an emergency would probably prove of tremendous military value but for which there is no commercial justification whatsoever. It is expected that the United States government will pay for construction work of this sort. It is entirely fit that it should. There hardly can be two sides to this question. The only question comes as to how rapidly these needed improvements can be made, particularly the emergency terminals. It will be unfortunate, to say the least, to attempt to move an army of any real size into a seaport important in a military or naval sense, but inadequately equipped with terminal sidings. It takes, roughly speaking, one mile of railroad train to handle one thousand troops and their accoutrements. To bring an army of fifty thousand men—a very moderate army, indeed—into a smaller city would require the prompt handling and unloading of fifty miles of train. These are the military railroad necessities which must be planned and built by the Federal government—without delay.All these things are going to cost time and thought—and money. And it is because of this last factor that I have placed this entire question of the military development of our railroads at the end of opportunity and at the beginning of necessity—the immediate needs of the railroad, which we are now going to consider.

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