"We must use judgment, and we must make rates to keep the goods moving all the while. Suppose that both nails and crowbars are made in Pittsburgh and only nails are made at Williamsport. Suppose then that the rate from Pittsburgh to New York for both crowbars and nails is fifty cents a hundred, but that the rate from Williamsport to New York was but 38 cents.
What chance would the nail manufacturer in Pittsburgh have against his competitor in Williamsport, when both men are making annually nails in tens of thousands of tons? It is to help the Pittsburgh man that we make a special 38-cent rate on nails from his town to New York; and when we keep filing these commodity rates at Washington, your shippers ask why we can't have a standard rate-sheet, or the Australian system. The next time some one of them finds that he cannot sell plough shares in Texas because a man down in Fort Wayne has him beaten on standard rates, you watch him hurry here and ask for a special one.
"It is out of this clamor and contention of almost myriad interests, the ambitions of just such thriving little cities as your own, out of the skilled arguments of brainy men that the rate-sheet is born and kept living in a state of perpetual healthy change."
We are tired of rates and the factors that go to make them, and inquire what is the A, B, C of a freight transaction between the railroad and a shipper. The traffic-man makes it quite clear to us.
"When one of our agents receives a consignment of freight," he says, "he immediately issues a bill of lading to the shipper, or consignor, as a receipt and as a contract for the shipment. From his duplicate of this bill of lading he makes out a way-bill, or manifest, which will accompany the car until the freight reaches its destination. This way-bill describes the shipment and the car into which it has been loaded, specifies the shipping point and the destination, the consignor and the consignee, the rate and whether or not the charges have been paid in advance or are to be collected at destination. A copy of this way-bill is given to the freight-conductor, who gives the station agent a receipt for the consignment. At that place of destination a freight-bill, containing a description of the shipment similar to that of the way-bill, and showing in addition the total charge collected or to be paid, is rendered to the consignee, and his receipt is taken for the shipment when it is delivered."
"It seems quite simple," you breathe softly.
"It is not," is his reply, "for it has its complications. I'll show you one of them."
We step through swinging doors of green baize and for a moment from a traffic into an operating department, but an operating department that for the telling in a work of this sort is best allied with the story of the freight traffic. The traffic-manager points to a man sitting at a square and littered desk, his thoughts with sturdy intent upon the mass of correspondence which he is quickly sifting.
"He is the best car-service man in the country," says our guide; and you recall when you were in the auditor's office, that an accounting was being kept between the lines for the use of one another's cars that went on through runs off upon strange or "foreign" lines. The traffic-man continues: "Ours is not a big road, as some roads go. Yet we receive about 40,000 cars a month and, of course, deliver something like the same number in the same thirty days. Yet there is not an hour of any day of the month that this man cannot tell where any one of these cars is, just how long it has been upon our tracks, just how much free time the consignee has for unloading it, or just how much he will have to pay the railroad for his delay in emptying it, so it can get back into service once again."
That waiting charge, the traffic-man explains, is known in the parlance of his business as "demurrage"; and it is another keen example of the constant use to which a railroad puts its equipment, of the tremendous economy that is beginning to be practised in the modern science of railroading. You are introduced to the car-service man, bend low over his desk as he explains a bit of his work to you. Here, for example, is a car filled with automobiles bound from Detroit to a dealer in Worcester, Mass.
This car, in a train of some 60 others, leaves Detroit east-bound over the Michigan Central Railroad. At Buffalo it is switched to the tracks of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. On the evening of the second day it arrives at Rensselaer, across the Hudson River from Albany, and is given over to the Boston & Albany Railroad. To make a concrete instance, let us see how the B. & A. handles the thing through its car-service department.
That department swings into quick action automatically, as soon as the car strikes B. & A. rails at Rensselaer. The freight agent there makes a note of the car and its contents from the way-bill which accompanies it; makes special note, perhaps, of the fact that it is a car designed particularly for the transportation of automobiles. Now let us presume that this big box-car is owned by the Michigan Central. The Boston & Albany will pay that owner railroad 35 cents a day rental--"_per diem_," in the phraseology of the railroads--for the time it is upon B. & A. rails. There are at that very time perhaps hundreds of B. & A. cars on the Michigan Central, and at the end of 30 days these accounts and many, many others are sent to the auditor's department, where they are balanced between the roads with the general freight and passenger accounts.
This movement of freight cars makes a valuable barometer of the general condition of business. The daily papers have a custom of making national compilations of car-service reports part of their most interesting market news. In dull seasons the cars come home from long service on other roads.
But in very busy seasons all roads have little compunction about borrowing "foreign" cars for use in their local service. With shippers begging cars from every quarter and threatening all manner of dire things, 35 cents daily is a small rental to pay for the use of a roomy car. Besides, the other fellows are all doing the same thing, and no one road can hope to get all its cars back even with the use of a vigilant corps of young men who search "foreign" yards. But in the dull seasons they come trundling home, like lost cattle finding the big barn once again. In the business depression of 1907, a Western car-service man received cars that had been absent from the home road for seven years.
We turn from the car-service men back into a department that is strictly traffic. Coal service is one of the principal sources of income for this particular railroad. It stretches some of its branches into bituminous fields, and others through the anthracite fields that Nature, in some freakish mood, implanted in just a few counties of Northeastern Pennsylvania. That entire country is comparable to a cut of beef, the coal veins resembling streaks of fat that run hither and thither. As in beef, the lean predominates. The fat streaks are the valuable coal veins, the lean the earth, slate and rock in which the coal was planted during some great convulsion of Nature in the process of the creation of the world.
How it got into this particular spot science cannot tell. What it is, further than the fact that it is mostly carbon, science only guesses. It guesses that it was originally bituminous coal and that by some process of intense squeezing in an upheaval of Nature, the oil and tar and gas of the bituminous coal was squeezed out and the much more valuable anthracite deposits created.
Mining consists in getting the streaks of fat anthracite out of the bulk of lean earth and rock. The veins run well down into the mountains, and, as do the little streaks of fat, lose themselves in the rock, or lean, to continue the simile. Some of the veins are but a few feet in thickness, while some run to as high as twenty and thirty feet, and, as a rule, the farther down into the earth they go the better the coal; and the farther down you go the more difficult and expensive is the mining.
Now, here is a traffic that demands and receives special attention. In other days the mining of anthracite coal was, itself, merely a department of operating for the half-dozen systems that stretched their rails into that valuable Pennsylvania corner. That work has now been removed into the control of separate mining companies; but the handling of coal is a great function of not only these roads, but of the systems that reach their tendrils into the valuable bituminous fields here and there about the country.
[Illustration: THE GREAT BRIDGE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL AT WATKINS GLEN]
[Illustration: BUILDING THE WONDERFUL BRIDGE OF THE IDAHO & WASHINGTON NORTHERN OVER THE PEND OREILLE RIVER, WASHINGTON]
To fill the coal-bins of New York City alone, requires some 10,500,000 tons of anthracite yearly. Now you cease to wonder why this road has a coal traffic expert, a man of surpassingly good salary. He keeps keen oversight over the operating department in its handling of this giant traffic, sees to it that the trains come over the mountains and into the great terminals at Jersey City in good order, and that the railroad's marine department is ready with tugs and scows and lighters to handle the product as it comes in, in thousands of tons every twenty-four hours.
This would all be quite simple if the trains and the boats were always running on schedule. But the unexpected constantly comes to pass in railroading, and so the railroads provide against emergencies by establishing great coal storage plants outside of New York and other large cities--communities that would be in dire distress if their coal supply were cut short even for twenty-four hours. Sometimes about 500,000 tons will be kept in a single one of these storage piles--a black mountain running lengthwise between sidings and served with giant cranes.
We are back in the traffic-manager's comfortable office for a final word with him. He is fumbling with his own correspondence. It seems that a lawyer down in Washington has been saying that he could save the railroads of the land a million dollars a day in the economical operation of their property, and the railroader is exceedingly wroth at that assertion.
"He speaks of pig iron, and says that we should teach our laborers the minimum movements necessary to put a single pig in a car--just as masons have been taught to handle brick with minimum effort and a maximum economy in work accomplished has been effected." The traffic-man laughs, rather harshly. "The lawyer is all right, except for two things; and his anecdote about the brick is certainly well told. Only it just happens that the railroad does not load or unload freight by the carload--that is the duty of the consignor and the consignee--and it also happens that pig iron rarely is handled "L.C.L." In carload lots it is not loaded or unloaded by hand, but by big magnets on a crane which picks up a ton of the bars at a time and thinks nothing of it."
The freight traffic-manager has made his point once again, and he is satisfied. He tells a little of the modern methods in freight handling, one of them how an ingenious packing-house expert in Chicago saved thousands of dollars annually in the handling of lard. In other days lard was rolled aboard box-cars, a barrel to a hand-truck, a rather slow and a rather costly process. The Chicago man devised a method of melting lard and, while it was fluid, pouring it, like petroleum, into a tank-car. When it reached its destination at some big terminal, the lard was again melted to fluid and poured out from the tank. That is the science of big freight handling to-day. Not alone do cranes, with magnet-bars handle pig-iron and castings by the ton, but great hoists at Cleveland and Conneaut and the other big lake towns close to the Pittsburgh district reach deep into the hearts of giant ships, bring from them the ore of Lake Superior's shores, and fill the whole waiting trains within fifteen or twenty minutes. Into the empty holds of the ships they pour bituminous coal from Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, a carload at a time. The hoist-crane reaches down to the dock siding for a gondola, snaps the car-body off from the trucks, lifts it aloft over the open hatch of the waiting vessel, and turns it upside down. In less time than it takes to tell it, the coal is in the ship, and the car-body is being slipped back again upon its trucks.
CHAPTER XXI
THE DRAMA OF THE FREIGHT
FAST TRAINS FOR PRECIOUS AND PERISHABLE GOODS--CARS INVENTED FOR FRUITS AND FOR FISH--MILK TRAINS--SYSTEMATIC HANDLING OF THE CANS--AUCTIONING GARDEN-TRUCK AT MIDNIGHT--A HISTORIC CITY FREIGHT-HOUSE.
Perhaps you have seen a gay Limited in green and gold start forth with much ado from some big city station, and have concluded that the romance of the railroad rests with it; that the long lines of murky-red freight cars have little of the dramatic about them. If you have thought that, you have thought wrong.
Romance and drama reach high climax sometimes in the transportation of commodities. Fast trains, running upon the express schedules of the finest Limiteds, sometimes bring silk, $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 worth to the train, across the continent. A special may be hired by some impatient manufacturer to send a shipment through half a dozen States. There are notable speed records in the handling of fast freight, records of notable trains that are as well known among the traffic specialists as the Limiteds are known to the outside world.
There is drama, too, when the railroad brings the food up to the city, for it counts as one of its greatest functions this filling of the city's larder. It sets aside certain high officers in its traffic department for the handling of market produce; it provides special facilities for gathering it, special facilities for moving it, special terminal facilities for delivering it in the hearts of the great cities. Sometimes it even goes further and provides and organizes great wholesale markets, building up its traffic by going as far as possible in facilitating the constant replenishing of the city's larder.
That is why these long dark caravans, the fast preference freights that are the pride of the railroad's traffic head, go so quickly over the rails to town. One of them halts in block for an instant to let a brightly lighted passenger train go in ahead of it. While it is halted we climb aboard and engage its conductor in conversation. He is a clever fellow, of the type of the coming railroader. Only last summer, we found a freight conductor thumbing his "Sartor Resartus," and discussing Carlyle as a stylist.
"Yes, we do bring some food up to town," he admits. "I've got enough grub aboard these eighty cars to feed several regiments. We've two refrigerators of meat from Omaha, two from Kansas City, one from Chicago.
The Chicago car has been iced twice--at Elkhart and at Altoona. The other cars had to have an extra filling at Hammond, on the outskirts of Chicago.
Soon we'll have crisp cold weather and we can cut out the icing.
"The boss? The boss will be worrying still. Just as soon as he can cut down his refrigerating stations at the division yards, he'll be fretting about getting those big ice-houses filled for next summer. He's got a lake tucked up in the mountain divisions somewhere, and we've got a branch running in a couple of miles there, and we just pull out the ice during the winter months. You take any of these trunk-lines and it has to have a lake for its refrigerating stations. It's just one of the many little kinks in running a road."
We express a desire to see the big preference train, and--the block being still set against her--we go forward in the black shadows of the cars, the train boss's arm-set lantern showing our way to us. He stops beside a string of white and yellow box-cars.
"California fruit," he says; "they don't think anything of sending it all the way across the continent. You might have thought those ranchers over there on the Pacific coast would have been discouraged when they were told that there were a dozen icing stations between the two oceans, and that the icing cost was prohibitive. They weren't a bit. They just sat down and did some tall thinking, and after a while they developed this type of car.
We call it pre-cooled. The car is cleaned and brought to a chill before loading. After that the temperature is not allowed to rise while the fruit is being piled away inside. It is closed and sealed, while still ice-cold, and icy-cold she comes bumping her way east over three or four thousand miles of track. It may be scorching down there along the S. P.; they may be just gasping for air in the Missouri bottoms; but that pre-cooled car comes right along, keeping its cargo fresh and cool and pure. We can deliver her anywhere here on the Atlantic seaboard, and no risk of spoiling the stuff."
We slip along another half-dozen cars. The conductor halts again and fumbles with his way-bills.
"There's the boy," he laughs. "He's halibut. There's half a dozen halibuts along here in a string."
We do not like to show an utter ignorance of the food question and we venture an assertion.
"Halibut comes from Newfoundland?" we ask. "How do you get it around here?"
The freighter grins sympathetically at our lack of knowledge.
"Bless you," he says. "That little fishing pond up there on the Banks isn't big enough for a land which has 27,000,000 folks gathered in its cities. These cars have come in from big Yem Hill's road--all the way from Tacoma up on Puget Sound--State of Washington. Some of those people who live in Boston might have a fit if they knew that their beloved halibut was born and raised in the Pacific Ocean; but that's the truth of the matter.
"This fish (and some of it's going straight to Boston to be sold in the very shade of Faneuil Hall), has come 7,000 miles to be eaten on the very shores of the Atlantic. When the fishing ship that caught this cargo was fifty miles off the docks, she began calling Tacoma with her wireless. The yardmaster of the Northern Pacific was ready there for the news from that rat-a-tap. He had a string of refrigerator cars ready; they were ready and set out along the wharf by the time the ship was made fast.
"Five minutes later the fish were being loaded into the cars. They had a gang of stevedores working there clock-like, as those fellows work around the big tents of a three-ring circus. First there went in a layer of ice, then a layer of fish, then another of ice. In thirty minutes the job was done. In forty-five minutes that string of fish-cars was coming east on an express-train schedule. It was knocked apart at St. Paul and again at Chicago. Here's our share of the spoils, and we're not loafing here on the old main line.
"We're preference freight, if you please, and no old bumpety-bump with coal and ore taking the low-grade tracks. They sandwich us in among the all-Pullmans, even when we're on the four-track divisions, for food is quick; food won't keep forever; and those folks down in the city are getting hungry."
He starts to say more, but the engine call halts him. The block is clear once again. The conductor catches a car step, the "preference" starts forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us--more market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession, these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part.
To-night again, the food is going up to the city.
The scene changes. Now we are off in the rolling country of up-State--dairy country, if you please. The railroad that stretches its thick black trail the length of the valley is no four-track line, with heavy trains coursing over it every three or four or five or ten minutes.
This is but a single-track branch; in the parlance of the railroaders it is a "jerkwater"; and the coming of its two passenger trains and that of the way-freight each day are events in the little towns that line it.
Still, even this little branch is doing its part in the filling of the city's larder. This branch has the filling of the city babies' milk bottles as its own particular problem.
At early dawn, the muddy brown roads that lead to the little depot there at the flour mills are alive. The farmer boys are bringing the milk to the railroad. Down the track a few hundred yards beyond the depot is the slick, clean, new milk-station. Over across the brook is the cheese-factory, deserted and given over to the gentle fingers of decay.