Just as the glorious comfort of the American river steamboat of the fifties was responsible for the plans for eating and sleeping aboard the railroad trains, so it was responsible for the introduction of a finer luxury in railroad travel, until to-day, when the resources of the general passenger agent are taxed to discover some new ingenious joy to add to the pleasure of going by this particular line. The full development of the protected vestibule platform and the opportunity it afforded of easy intercourse between the coaches of a train led to many new devices to make the long cross-country trip of the traveller more than ever a thing of joy. First came the buffet-car, with all the conveniences of a man's club; and the car-builders have shown remarkable ingenuity in imitating the mission-like grillroom interiors, despite the many limitations placed upon them. No club was complete without a barber-shop, and soon every fast-rushing limited of any consequence had a dusky servitor whose sharp-bladed razor was warranted not to cut even when the train struck a sharp curve at fifty miles an hour. Stationery, books, and magazines became features of the buffet-car. After that there came a stenographer, whose services were free to the patrons of the train.
Most of these things were for the comfort of men, who form the majority of patrons of the railroad. But a considerable portion of femininity travels, and it sent in a complaint that its comfort was being neglected. The general passenger agents gave quick ear. The men's buffet, with its comfortable adjuncts of smoke and drink was at the forward end of the train, the women were considered in the big, comfortable observation cars at the rear. They were given more stationery, more magazines, even a caseful of books, running from the severe standard works to the gayest and lightest of modern fiction. Ladies' maids were installed upon the trains, and the girl running from New York up to Albany could have her nails manicured while upon the train.
These are all details, but each goes to make the comfort of the traveller upon the American railroad train. Such comfort is not equalled in any other country in the world. From the moment he steps from his cab, the American traveller passing through the magnificence of superb waiting-rooms enters palatial trains, superior to the private trains of royalty upon the other side of the ocean. A corps of well-trained _attaches_ look to his comfort and his ease, every moment that he is upon the train, whether his ride be of an hour's duration or a four-days' run across the continent. Other railroaders whom he does not see, engine crews, changing each few hours upon his run, signalmen in the towers along the route, telegraphers, despatchers, train walkers, car inspectors help in their small but important ways to make his trip one of comfort and of safety. The entire organization of the railroad lends itself to that very purpose.
The railroad does not stop at the mere exercise of its great function as a carrier; it does not even stop with the exercise of its every ingenuity toward safety in its transportation; it goes a little further and gives to the man or woman who rides upon its rails, a degree of luxurious comfort equal to if not even greater than that man or woman can receive at any other place.
CHAPTER XIX
GETTING THE CITY OUT INTO THE COUNTRY
COMMUTERS' TRAINS IN MANY TOWNS--RAPID INCREASE IN THE VOLUME OF SUBURBAN TRAVEL--ELECTRIFICATION OF THE LINES--LONG ISLAND RAILROAD ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY SUBURBAN--VARIED DISTANCES OF SUBURBAN HOMES FROM THE CITIES--CLUB-CARS FOR COMMUTERS--STATEROOMS IN THE SUBURBAN CARS--SPECIAL TRANSFER COMMUTERS.
When the Commuter slams his desk shut at the close of a busy day, he is fully aware that he is a superior being. Other mortals condemned to hard labor in the city may squeeze within the ill-ventilated confines of trolley-car, elevated or subway train, may find their way to stuffy apartments, which, if their fronts were to be suddenly removed, would look for all the world like shoe-boxes stuck tier upon tier in a shop. The Commuter thrusts out his chest. Not for him. His is a different life. He even feels justified in thinking that his is the only life. There is nothing narrow about the Commuter; the open breath of the country has tended to widen him.
He finds his way to the showy railroad terminal, down the crowded concourse with a human stream of other Commuters to the 5:37. That train is part of his regular calendar of life. It has been such ever since he took flight to the country, a dozen years ago. If the 5:37 should ever be stricken from the time-card the Commuter would feel as if the light had been extinguished. Once, when some meddler violently assumed to change it into a 5:31, the Commuter was one of a committee who visited a terrified general passenger agent and had the course of time set right again. There is only one other train which must approach the 5:37 in regularity; that is the 7:52, on which the Commuter slinks sorrowfully into the dirty town each morning. Other trains may be jumped about on the time-card, the Commuter is oblivious of their fate. But let his 7:52 be ten minutes late into the big terminal three mornings in succession, and the Commuter begins to write letters to the papers and to the officers of the railroad.
Once aboard the 5:37 the Commuter trails his way into the smoker. Jim, the brakeman, who is the source of all trustworthy information about the railroad, and who can even foreshadow the resignation of the president, has stored away the table and the cards. They are produced for the daily consideration of a dime and a game that runs week in and week out is ready to begin. Smith, of the Standard Oil crowd, drops into his seat; Higgins, the lawyer, into his; the others are quickly filled; packages--foodstuffs from the cheaper city markets and hurried purchases made at noon from handy shops--go into the racks, and the Commuter is oblivious until, as if by instinct, a familiar red barn goes flying backwards. The game is off again until to-morrow morning; he is sorting his own packages out of the rack. The train halts for a single nervous moment, and he is on the platform. The cars roll past him; the party are at a three-handed game now.
The Commuter finds his way up a steep road to his home on the hillside, his very own home. It looks as sweet, set in there among the bushes and the trees, as it did the day he bought it; and that day it looked to him as Paradise. When night comes, there comes a peace and quiet, a peculiar country coolness in the air. The city is steaming from the hot day, and through the night the pavements and the roofs still emit heat. The Commuter has forgotten the city. He sleeps as he slept as a boy on a farm, where a city was but a hazy dream in his mind. When he awakes he is refreshed, invigorated. The country has repaid him for the trouble that he has taken to reach it. He goes into town again on that blessed 7:52, twice as good a workingman as the man who has the next desk to his, the poor chap who had to sit on the apartment steps until after midnight in order to get even a miserable degree of comfort.
That is why the city goes out into the country.
The Commuter is apt to settle his thoughts upon himself, to forget that he is but an infinitely small part of a mighty home-going army that nightly calls all the passenger resources of the railroad into play. There are more than 100,000 of him alone in the metropolitan district around New York. The busy Long Island Railroad takes a host of him nightly off to the garden spots of that wonderful land from which it takes its name; the Central Railroad reaches off into the lowlands, and the Erie and the Lackawanna into the highlands of New Jersey; the New York Central and the New Haven tap the picturesque shores of the Hudson and the Sound.
Boston repeats New York in this human tide that ebbs and flows daily through her gates. From both her North and South stations mighty armies of Commuters come and go until one wonders sometimes if any one really lives in Boston itself. There are more than 60,000 of this army at the Hub. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and the Reading handle from their terminals an army of equal size each night; another finds its way from the smoky, dirty heart of Pittsburgh out into the attractive towns that perch the hills in her vicinage.
Middle West cities, even those of good size, differ from Eastern in the fact that they are rarely hampered in their growth by natural conditions.
In big towns like Cleveland and Detroit, for instance, the natural and the artificial electric transit facilities are so good as to bring the commutation business to a minimum. Not so with Chicago. The Illinois Central from the south, the Northwestern and the St. Paul from the north, serve rapidly growing suburban areas that will compare with some of the best in the East. Then, after the Commuters in the East are safely home, another army is finding its way across the bay, and off to the north and the south of San Francisco. These are the big centres of commuting as the American railroads know it. In smaller measure it exists at every large city in the country. The familiar monthly card ticket, representing its cousin, that holy-of-holies--the annual pass, is issued from good-sized villages and pretentious country seats. The Commuter is already a national institution.
Conductor John M. Dorsey, who used to run an Erie train out of Jersey City in the long ago, once showed us what he thought was the first example of a pure commutation business. It was a list issued to Erie conductors in 1860, and containing the names of 162 persons who travelled daily in and out of New York by the way of Jersey City. These folk lived in Passaic (they called it Boiling Springs in those days), and in Paterson, and all the way up the line to Goshen and Middletown. When a man wanted to commute then he paid a monthly fee to the railroad and they printed his name on this official list. Such a scheme would be obviously out of the question these days.
When New York refused to stop growing, and more and more people began making the daily trip in and out of Jersey City, the handy method of the commutation ticket was substituted for the cumbersome printed list, and the Erie and all the other railroads began to cater to the Commuter with special short-distance trains. Committees came to railroad officers from various small towns and aided them in fixing a definite basis of fare, which remains to-day at something between six-tenths and three-quarters of a cent a mile. In later years, the real estate business became the science that it is to-day, and the suburban business began to move forward in long leaps.
[Illustration: "EVEN IN WINTER THERE IS A HOMELY, HOMEY AIR ABOUT THE COMMUTER'S STATION"]
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE GREAT FOUR-TRACK OPEN CUT WHICH THE ERIE HAS BUILT FOR THE COMMUTER'S COMFORT AT JERSEY CITY]
[Illustration: A MODEL WAY-STATION ON THE LINES OF THE BOSTON & ALBANY RAILROAD]
[Illustration: THE YARDMASTER'S OFFICE--IN AN ABANDONED SWITCH-TOWER]
"It seems incredible," said a railroad officer just the other day "but this suburban problem is all but overwhelming for us. It does not increase our revenues at so wonderful a pace, but it does increase in volume from 20 to 25 per cent a year; and think how that keeps us hustling, making facilities for it. There is not a railroad entering New York to-day that could not dismiss its passenger terminal problems to-morrow, if it were not for the Commuter. There is not a railroad coming into New York that could not handle all its through business in a train-house of from four to five tracks. Instead of that, what do we see? The Erie with five through trains requiring a terminal of sixteen tracks; the Lackawanna, with the same number of through trains, a new terminal of even greater size, the overwhelming passenger terminal problem being repeated at every corner of New York, just because of the tremendous annual increase in the suburban passenger business."
The great reconstruction of the Grand Central terminal facilities in the heart of New York, and the erection of a new station there, as described in detail in an earlier chapter, is directly due to the Commuter. When the new station with its double tier of tracks is finished, there will be thirty-two platform tracks in the double train-house, an amount far in excess of that needed for even the great volume of through business that goes and comes over the lines of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven, & Hartford, the two systems that use it. And the new station, involving a tremendous expenditure of money, of brains, and of energy, is not all.
The New Haven has electrified its four-track main line all the way out to Stamford, Conn., in order that it may in some measure cope with this increasing flow of suburban traffic over its already crowded main-line tracks. It has wrestled with the unanticipated problems of electrification because it has been facing a situation that left it no time to experiment elsewhere and approach its main-line problem with deliberation. More and more folk were settling in the suburban towns in its territory each month, and deliberation was quite out of their calculations. The Commuter is rarely deliberate.
So the New Haven, with all the resources of a giant carrier, has found each new measure of relief swallowed up in the new flood and has turned to more radical methods. It has been apparent to its managers for some time past that even the new Grand Central, with its wonderful capacity, would some day prove inadequate, for the reason that the New York Central--the actual owners of the property--was also trying to cope with its own great increase in suburban traffic, and would eventually require more and more space for its own Commuters. With such a possibility in the future--not a distant future with the suburban business doubling in volume every four or five years--the New Haven sought to develop an unimportant freight branch leading from New Rochelle down to the Harlem River. It has almost finished the work of transforming this into a great electric carrier, six tracks in width. Railroad engineers show no hesitancy in saying that eight-track trunks will be needed out of New York in every direction within a dozen years. The Harlem River branch of the New Haven, once it is provided with a suitable terminal, will become a great artery of suburban traffic. It will give trunk capacity to make possible the development of a great new area lying just inland from the Sound, and yet within from 40 to 50 miles of New York City.
A third project in which New Haven capital is known to be interested is that of a high-speed, four-track suburban electric railroad also to reach into the Sound territory as far as Port Chester, with an important branch, diverging to White Plains, the shire-town of Westchester County. This line will feed into the main line of the New York subway, and so avoid cramping the terminals still further. The terminals are the crux of the whole great problem of handling suburban traffic.
The New York Central has also electrified its tracks for a zone of some 40 to 50 miles from its terminal. This work was started primarily by a distressing accident in its old smoke-filled tunnel, that ran the length of Park Avenue under Manhattan Island, but New York Central officers are to-day free to admit that the electrification was close at hand in any event. The operation of a terminal so closely planned as the new Grand Central, with its train-sheds and yards built in layers, would have been a physical impossibility with smoky, dirty, steam locomotives.
The New York Central has been, as we shall see in greater detail in the chapter on the coming of electricity, the first of the standard steam railroads entering New York to provide suburban trains of multiple unit motor-cars, similar to those used in rapid transit subway and elevated trains. The great advantage of these trains over trains handled by either steam or electric locomotives is an operating advantage. The train may be so quickly turned in terminals as to bring the terminal problem down an appreciable percentage, and so to give a greater hauling capacity to main-line tracks. The Central, wedged in tightly by the high hills that lie to the north of the metropolis, has had to pin its faith to plans that utilize the present tracks to the uttermost capacity.
The railroads crossing New Jersey and reaching the west bank of the Hudson have not been behind the routes that enter from the north in providing for the suburban business. The recently opened McAdoo Tunnel, linking the Jersey terminals of the Erie, the Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania with both the downtown and the uptown theatre, hotel, and shopping district of Manhattan, has been a great stimulus to the suburban development across the Hudson.
The Lackawanna has done its part by boring a second tunnel under the Bergen Hill, parallel to its original tube, giving a four-track entrance to its fine new terminal, and relieving the congestion of suburban traffic night and morning at its worst point, the neck of the bottle. The Erie has already completed, as a part of its extensive terminal reconstruction-work in Jersey City, a similar project, a four-track open cut through the stout backbone of Bergen Hill. The open cut replaces completely the so-called Bergen Tunnel, which has already become a matter of history.
We have already told of the Pennsylvania terminal in New York. The Pennsylvania built the new station for through travel rather than for the Commuter, at the outset. But the Pennsylvania, with the exception of a brisk traffic out to Newark, is hardly a big suburban road, in the New York metropolitan district. The great volume of Commuters who will flock to its station nightly, will be bound east, not west. The Long Island Railroad, its property stretching less than one hundred miles east from New York, through what is one of the most attractive residential localities in the world, is almost exclusively a suburban system. Long Island is not a manufacturing or agricultural territory of consequence.
There is not a town of 10,000 souls east of the New York City line.
Freight traffic and through traffic, aside from some summer excursion business, is conspicuous by its absence. Yet the Long Island operates through its local station at Jamaica (an even dozen miles distant from the new Pennsylvania terminal), more than 800 trains a day. That, of itself, represents a volume of traffic, and speaks wonders for the desirability of the broad and sandy island as an escape from the city to the country.
"We have from 18,000 to 20,000 Commuters all the year round," said a Long Island official, just the other day; "and this branch of our traffic--our chief stronghold--is increasing at the rate of 25 per cent annually. We are trying to increase our facilities to keep pace with the demand made upon them; that is why we became tenants in the new Pennsylvania Station.
For our share of that work we will pay $65,000,000--some money. But we cut twenty minutes off every Commuter's trip in each direction every day, and that is worth while in a day when every road is reaching out for new business. We do not consider that $65,000,000 to save a man forty minutes a day is money ill-spent; but I am frank in saying that we also expect our 25 per cent annual increase to remain for several years in order to make good such an expenditure."
Part of that $65,000,000 is yet to be spent on the electrification of the Long Island suburban lines, within a zone of from 30 to 40 miles out from the new terminal. The through trains running to the far eastern points of the island will run direct from the Pennsylvania Station as far as Jamaica by electricity, heavy motors hauling the standard equipment. At Jamaica, in a million-dollar transfer station that is part of the big improvement scheme, the steam locomotives will take up their part of the work.
Electricity for long stretches of standard railroad where the traffic is comparatively slight is still an economic impossibility.
So much for New York, where the lead has been taken in providing suburban service on the railroads operated by electricity. The problem is being approached in Boston--who, like her larger sister, refuses to stay "put."
South Station and North Station, on opposite sides of the city, are of the largest size, but they are beginning to feel the strain of traffic, which forges ahead every year. The Metropolitan Improvements Commission of that city has already made a careful study of the problem. It plans to relieve the situation by constructing a four-track tunnel from one station to the other, and operating both of them--as far as suburban traffic is concerned--as through stations rather than as terminals. In a word, Boston & Maine local trains entering North Station would not end their runs there as at present, but would continue through the proposed tunnel to a second stop at South Station, where they would become outgoing New York, New Haven, & Hartford suburban locals. The same operation would be continued in a reverse direction. A more complicated adaptation of the scheme from a construction standpoint would still use the connecting tunnel and provide car-yards for the Boston & Maine trains outside of South Station, with a similar yard for the New Haven locals just beyond North Station. The main gain made by such a plan is the elimination of switching--the same point at which the New York Central and the Long Island have aimed in making their suburban trains of multiple units. With the hauling in and out of empty trains to and from a terminal eliminated, the capacity may be almost doubled. Another gain is the convenience to passengers who under such a plan would be enabled to reach either side of the city without changing cars, and a recourse to street transit facilities. The Boston plan, of course, embodies a change from steam to electricity as a motive power. It is one of the most comprehensive plans yet submitted for the solving of the great problem of getting the city out into the country.
In Philadelphia, they are feeling the pressure of the Commuter at both the big downtown terminals, the Pennsylvania and the Reading, while the first of these roads is already planning to electrify its suburban lines and to give Broad Street Station exclusively to this class of traffic.
Philadelphia is such a wide-spreading and sprawling town that the trolley lines have afforded little real rapid transit to the outlying sections, while relief by subways and elevated lines has so far been meagre. As a result, a great burden of interurban as well as suburban traffic has been laid upon the railroads there, and they have been compelled repeatedly to enlarge both track and station facilities.
The Illinois Central, carrying a heavy traffic south of Chicago, has prepared plans for the electrification of 325 miles of its suburban lines, and radical enlargement of terminal facilities. The Illinois Central has been very progressive in its methods of handling the Commuter traffic. Its side-door cars, permitting quick loading and unloading, have long marked a progressive step in equipment. The Chicago and Northwestern, in its splendid new white marble terminal on the West Side of Chicago, will give its chief use toward the upbuilding of a suburban traffic, already strong and well developed.
The Commuter covers a varied zone. His station may be less than a mile from the terminal and his home still within the crowded confines of the town, or he may be the last passenger of the train as it reaches the far end of its suburban run. The average commutation district runs about 30 miles out, with by far the heavier part of the traffic in the first 15 miles of this. Most of the railroads that cluster in at New York, however, issue commutation tickets out over a 70 or 80-mile radius. One man for many years held the record as a long-distance Commuter. He preferred to sleep nights within the quiet confines of Philadelphia and his 90-mile trip to New York, with a 90-mile return at the end of every day became a mere incident in his life. His record was beaten this year. A man arrives and departs from the Grand Central Station five days out of the week, who travels 320 miles on every one of them. He catches a fast train from his home town at seven o'clock in the morning, breakfasts on the train, and is at his New York office at 11:30 o'clock. He leaves his desk at 3:30 o'clock, dines on the returning express, and is home by eight. His daily trip, with all incidental expenses, aggregates more than $12.00; so he deserves to rank as the Champion Commuter.
If few Commuters can approach the mileage record of this man there are many who do not hesitate at extra expenditures for their comfort. About all of the best suburban expresses that come into New York carry some sort of club or private-parlor cars. The club car is one of the most elaborate developments of the entire Commuter idea. It is a comfortable coach, which is rented to a group of responsible men coming either from a single point or a chain of contiguous points. The railroad charges from $250 to $300 a month for the use of this car in addition to the commutation fares, and the "club" arranges dues to cover this cost and the cost of such attendants and supplies as it may elect to place on its roving house. It must guarantee a certain number of riders to the railroad every trip, so the membership of the "club" is kept high enough to allow for a reasonable percentage failing to use the car daily. Some railroads go at the thing in another way. They supply the car and its attendants and make a monthly extra charge, in addition to commutation. The car is entirely filled with regular riders, so it is in a sense a club car.
Such a car has been running for some years on one of the suburban trains of the Harlem road. It is unique in some ways, and in these an outgrowth of early customs. The first of these began years ago, when the Oldest Commuter began his habit of riding to and from town in the baggage-car.
There is something about a baggage-car that fascinates the ordinary man traveller. Perhaps it is the solemn rule of the railroad that attempts to prevent him from riding in this form of conveyance. At any rate in this particular case the Oldest Commuter gradually picks up an acquaintance with the baggageman; and, presuming upon that acquaintance gradually appropriates the baggageman's old chair for his own use. The baggageman was good-natured, for the Oldest Commuter was a generous fellow and never forgot Christmas-times and the like. He got another old chair from somewhere, and all was well until the Next Oldest Commuter absorbed the baggageman's chair, and the baggageman had to bring a third into his car.
The Next to the Next Oldest Commuter swallowed that up, and after a time there was a row of comfy old-fashioned chairs all around the edge of the dingy baggage-car, and an atmosphere of smoke and good stories that warmed the cockles of the baggageman's heart. You could have raised $100,000,000 for an enterprise from the crowd of men who rode regularly in that little car, but the baggageman neither knew nor cared about that. He simply knew that there was a good crowd of Commuters who rode with him daily.
After another little time the railroad took cognizance of that particular baggage-car. The general passenger agent, who was a fellow both wise and solemn, talked with the general manager, and one day that little club of Commuters had a surprise. Instead of their baggage-car, the down train hauled a bright new car all fitted with fancy things--curtains and carpets and big stuffed chairs, and the baggageman was rigged out in a fine new uniform as an attendant. The general passenger agent fondly imagined that he had made the one really happy stroke of his existence.