Those two buildings tell the story of changing times; in their mute way they tell the growth of the American city.
In other days this township made cheese. To-day they drive the milk to the depot. Each morning finds a big refrigerator car, built in the fashion of passenger equipment, so that it may be handled on passenger trains, at the milk station. The farmer boys are prompt with their milk, it is checked and weighed and placed in the car, in cans and in bottles. Hardly has the last big ten-gallon can gone clattering into the car before the whistle of the warning local is heard up the line, just beyond the curve at the water-tank. While the train is at the depot, in all the bustle of the comings and goings at a country station, the engine makes quick drill movement and picks up the milk-car.
Farther down the line that same train picks up more milk-cars. By the time it reaches the junction where it intersects the main line it is a considerable train for a branch line. Indeed at the junction there are more milk-cars, from other branches that ramble off into the real back-country. There are enough of them now to make a train through to the city. The trainmaster has a good engine ready for every afternoon, and the milk express goes scurrying into town with passenger rights and on passenger schedules. You cannot hurry the babies' milk through to town any too quickly.
This is all first-day milk. You can take a compass, place the pin-leg squarely in the heart of the busy town--a place of brick and asphalt, of steel and concrete, without ever a hint of growing things--and with the pencil-leg trace a segment of a circle--the outer line some 200 miles distant from the centre. Afterwards you can draw a second circle segment, its outer line some 350 miles from the same town centre. From within the inner circle comes the first-day milk, delivered to the railroad during the early part of a day and on the householder's table in the big city the next morning. From without this inner circle and within the outer, comes the second-day milk which has another twenty-four hours in its transit to town. The whole thing, once rather badly handled by itinerant single dealers, has been reduced to scientific business by skilful cooperation between the big milk-dealers of the present day and the railroads.
It is night.
The last of the office lights in the towering buildings has been snuffed out. Downtown is quiet--quiet for a little time, for soon after sun-up it will be a vortex once again; these narrow, deep-canyoned streets will be astir and human-filled once again. But at nine o'clock in the evening the policeman's footfall on the pavement echoes in lonely streets. A tired bookkeeper scurrying home after a vexatious hunt for his balances gets sharp scrutiny from the policeman. Downtown is asleep.
Then, from around the turn of a sharp corner comes a night train of wagons, drawn by a small brigade of horses. These are not filled with market-truck; market-truck will not reach the town till midnight at the earliest. These are great high-boxed vans, painted white, a bit gaudy in lettering. They make you think of those long-ago days when you used to go down to the depot to see the circus come in, for the big wagons are precisely like those that used to shroud mystery as they rolled from the trains down to the show-lot. We follow this procession of half a dozen great vans, follow it through the twisting, narrow streets of downtown, across a famous old ferry, straight up to the long sheds of a railroad terminal.
On the one side of the terminal, the passenger trains are coming and going at all hours. By day this shed at which the big vans back, each into its own carefully marked place, is a general freight-house; by night it is given over to the stocking of the city babies' milk bottles. The ferried vans are hardly emptied of their empty cans and cases before the first of the milk trains comes backing in at the other side of the long covered platform. Hissing arcs up under that slimsy roof throw high lights and deep shadows here and there and everywhere. They show the platform-men tugging at the car fastenings before the brakes are fairly released. In another minute, the big side-doors are thrown open, almost simultaneously, in still another, the place is alive with the rattle of trucks. The milk--tons upon tons of it--in ten-gallon cans and in cases of individual bottles, is being loaded within those circus-like cans. A second milk-train comes bumping in at a far platform. There is another brigade of vans waiting for it there. A third train is due to arrive in another half-hour. The vans that it will fill are already beginning to back into place and unload their cans and cases upon the platforms.
Here are almost 200 great four-horse trucks being filled simultaneously, and all working with the almost rhythmic harmony of organization. You want to know how they do it? Ask that man over there, he in a short rough coat, who carries a lantern on his arm and with it peers interestedly into every one of the cars. That man's word is law on this platform, for he is its boss. He has been filling the babies' milk bottles from this particular terminal for almost a quarter of a century now. His railroad was the first to bring milk into a large city.
"We get it over," he will tell you, "by the experience of some little time, and by planning. You saw the numbers on the team side of this milk platform. That's only half the problem. There are a dozen different milk-handling concerns doing business at this shed, and their stuff comes together on this one train. Yet we get the thing out by having each concern--each truck--come up to its own position at the team side. The other half of the problem we solve by having a certain position for each milk-car.
"Here is the Hygienic Milk Company up on the Heights. You have seen their fancy dairies all over town. Well, the Hygienic has a station up at Bottger's, on our Lancaster & Essex division, that fills two cars at that station every blessed day. Their two cars stand in beyond this No. 14 pillar every night; so we know just where to direct their trucks. That's business--just system. We spot the cars every night."
"Spot the cars?" you interrupt. He smiles a bit at your ignorance.
"This train is made up in just the same fashion every night," he explains.
"These two Hygienic cars are always the fifth and sixth. If they were the eighth and ninth some nifty evening--if some smart Aleck of a yardmaster up the line would take to shuffling up these cars as you shuffle a deck of cards--we would have a near riot here, and I couldn't get these platforms cleared of the milkmen for that market-truck train that backs in here from the south every night at 11:55.
[Illustration: INSIDE THE WEST ALBANY SHOPS OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL: PICKING UP A LOCOMOTIVE WITH THE TRAVELLING CRANE]
[Illustration: A LOCOMOTIVE UPON THE TESTING-TABLE AT THE ALTOONA SHOPS OF THE PENNSYLVANIA]
[Illustration: "THE ROUNDHOUSE IS A SPRAWLING THING"]
[Illustration: DENIZENS OF THE ROUNDHOUSE]
"So they keep closely to the formation of our trains, and that of itself is no terminal problem. Away up the line 90 miles--150,--250,--everywhere that we have a big junction yard, the yard boss has his positive instructions about these milk trains. By the time this fellow has cleared out of P---- J----, 90 miles up the road and our nearest road yard outside of the metropolitan district, it's always in just the shape you see it to-night. After that there's nothing to be done here except cut off the road engine at our terminal yard and pick out a switcher to back her into position at this shed. It's nice work, and night after night that engineer of the switcher does not vary four inches in the locations of these car-doors."
He lifts his lantern, and we peek into the interior of one of these cool milk-cars. This has the bottled milk in cases. The cases are packed four tiers high--never higher--and your guide explains to you that four cases is the limit of a hand-truck. All these things make for simplicity in handling. You peer into another car. The ten-gallon cans are in long diagonal rows, covering the entire floor of the car. They form a regular tessellated pattern, like the marble tiling of old-fashioned hotels and banks.
"Those little farmer boys," says the platform boss, "sure do that trick well. That speaks pretty neat for Sullivanville. They all used to put the cans in straight rows, running lengthwise of the car. One day one of the smartest of those Sullivanville boys discovered that by putting the cans in diagonal rows, this-wise, he would gain a hundred cans in the loading.
That added a thousand gallons to the capacity of the car. The Super gave him a good job, and some day you'll see he'll be running a railroad of his own."
Midnight.
Downtown is still more deserted, if that is possible, than when we first saw it three hours ago. The stillness of the deep night is hard upon the city; yet here on this broad quay street which runs its stone-paved length up and down past the wharves of the harbor-front, all is alive.
This is the midnight market. Under the very noses of the steamships that have brought this garden-truck up from the south, it is being auctioned off to a hundred or so keen-nosed, keener-witted wholesalers. They wander about under long awning roofs erected in the centre of the street, through the gaunt open shadowy spaces of the piers, poking into the tops of barrels, pinching, tasting, critically examining all the while that they are dickering in prices. When the day is fully born and downtown alive once again, there will be other wholesale markets, more sedate-looking affairs in rooms that have been built for the purpose by the traffic departments of the railroads. In these rooms, with the seats arranged in tiers and each seat having a broad writing arm like a college classroom, fruit and vegetables will be sold in carload lots. There will be records of prices--quotations. The thing will approach the dignity of those bourses where cotton and coffee and metals and securities are sold.
But the midnight market scorns such formalities, such dignities. It clings to its own hubbub--its own unsystematic way of accomplishing a great business. It prefers to sell as the stuff is unloaded; that has been its method for three-quarters of a century and any method that has stood 75 years is at least entitled to a measure of consideration. But not all its offerings have come by these big coasting steamships, whose outlines show vague at their piers in the darkness of the night. For, grinding against the piles of these same wharves, as the unseen tide changes, are groups of car-floats that have been ferried from the great railroad terminals across the river. Each car-float has two trackfuls of refrigerator cars--12 or 14 or 16 in all--lined against a long roofed platform running just above keel. When the pert and busy little tugs have pushed and pulled and bunted the floats all into position, the platforms are quickly connected by gangways, canvas-covered against the stress of hard weather. A great freight-house, almost Venetian in type, floats upon the surface of the silent river and becomes part and parcel of the pier itself. After that it is quick work to open each of the cars--to wheel out sample barrels of potatoes, of cabbage, of celery, of lettuce, of cauliflower--all the growing things of country farms that go to feed the hungry city.
The trading here is over in an hour, or two hours at the longest when the shipments are heavy; and then the wholesalers are wheeling their wagons into place to cart away their purchases to their own stores and warehouses. From these the retailers--the men who carry on their businesses in stalls in the public market-houses and those that have their own little shops on the street corners--make their selections. If you are a city man, you may now know that your grocer at the corner is up betimes, when the sun is just showing himself on lazy September mornings. He has been poking his way with his own horse and wagon down to the wholesalers, buying his day's stock and getting it placed just before the earliest of the housewives begins her marketing.
You demand a concrete example of a city freight-house; and here it is--the historic St. John's Park of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad in New York. Up over the lines of the Central, back for hundreds of weary miles, you may hear the railroaders speak of "the Park," you may see long strings of cars, bearing merchandise tagged through to it. At Sixtieth Street, where the big freights of the New York Central come to a final halt, you see the cars sent south in long strings, each hauled by a red dummy locomotive and preceded by a boy astride a horse and holding a red flag, a familiar sight to all New Yorkers who reside upon the far west side of the town.
St. John's Park handles a very large percentage of all the perishable food that comes into New York each day. It is the dingy freight-house that fills the double block between Hudson and Varick and Beach and Laight Streets; and when you ask, "Where is the park?" they will tell you that there was a day when the entire site of this freight-house--possibly the most congested in the world--was a gentle tree-filled square that faced old St. John's Church. There is never a trace of the park nowadays. The old church now faces a narrow street wherein truckmen shove and elbow and disappear in the gates of the freight station.
On the Hudson Street side of the structure six pairs of railroad tracks curve into it; and far above on the cornice of the structure one can see the benign figure of the old Commodore--a heroic bronze surrounded by replicas of the trains and the steamships that he loved so well. The building of the large freight station on the site of St. John's Park away back in 1868 was a real accomplishment to the first of the house of Vanderbilt. Think of it: that freight-house could hold 100 cars. There was nothing else in all the broad land quite like that!
Into St. John's Park at dawn come trainloads of produce. Even before the doors of the freight-house have opened, at six, a string of "coolers" has stopped in Hudson Street and the commission men are carting out the poultry. As soon as the station gets down to real business, butter and eggs and cheese pour in through it in carload lots.
"It doesn't bother us much," the foreman tells you. "Still, on the Monday before Christmas we had a fairly brisk day. We had 155 cars of turkeys alone that morning."
CHAPTER XXII
MAKING TRAFFIC
ENTICING SETTLERS TO THE VIRGIN LANDS OF THE WEST--EMIGRATION BUREAUS--RAILWAYS EXTENDED FOR THE BENEFIT OF EMIGRANTS--THE FIRST CONTINUOUS RAILROAD ACROSS THE AMERICAN CONTINENT--CAMPAIGNS FOR DEVELOPING SPARSELY SETTLED PLACES IN THE WEST--UNPROFITABLE BRANCH RAILROADS IN THE EAST--DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC FARMING--IMPROVED FARMS ARE TRAFFIC-MAKERS--NEW FACTORIES BEING OPENED--HOW RAILROAD MANAGERS HAVE DEVELOPED ATLANTIC CITY.
Your railroad manager of other days was content with the traffic that was offered him--if indeed he deigned to accept it all. For those were the business methods that obtained everywhere in the other days. When competition became the moving force in modern business, the railroad felt it. The land had become gridironed with tracks; business did not offer itself so freely as it had at the outset. When there came a division between routes of a traffic that had formerly belonged to a single route, earnings fell away and stockholders began to ask uncomfortable questions of the men who operated their railroad properties. Then the fight for business began--at first, as we have already seen, by a lively rivalry which showed itself in a merciless slashing of rates. Such fighting methods reacted on the railroads, and their rate-sheets became code and law, only a little less holy than the Federal Constitution, long before the Interstate Commerce Commission exerted its beneficent paternalism over the railroads of the land. But with the rates equalized between the railroads, the competition remained. The one obvious solution of the situation which was left was put into effect. The railroads began to make traffic.
The making of traffic is the most recent and the most highly developed branch of the science of railroading. The first of this specialized business-getting began just before the Civil War. Some of the railroads had put their lines back a little way from the western portion of the Great Lakes along in the late fifties, and they needed folks to live along those lines. It goes without saying that a railroad going into an unpopulated country would never be any great "shakes" of a railroad until people came to dwell along its lines. So the railroad from Galena to Chicago--afterwards the foundation stone for the mighty Northwestern--the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and one or two others started emigration bureaus. Then men who owned those early railroads knew the possibilities of the virgin lands into which they stretched their rails. The proposition that confronted them was to let the folk who lived in the East and even those who were herded in the crowded lands across the Atlantic, know these same possibilities. By means of their first emigration bureaus they accomplished their proposition. Advertising was a crude science in those days, but advertising helped. Throughout the troublous years of the war the men from the East who had read of the glories of the Middle West, who had listened to the tales of the agents of the railroad and coupled them with those of returning travellers, began pouring over the new and struggling railroads. They carried their goods and chattels with them; and so the railroad men knew that they were not going back to the old homes again.
At the close of the war these tides rose to flood. The railroads no longer struggled. There was a steady flow of traffic over their rails, and they were able because of it to engage capital to stretch their rails a little farther west. After they had moved another stretch, the tides of emigration still flowed. That process might have gone ahead in orderly fashion until the Pacific had been reached, if the scheme had not been upset.
They built too many railroads, they overworked their idea. In the broad reaches of the Middle West, lines of steel crumbled into rust, and cross-roads dreamed vainly that they would become villages. Many a struggling village failed to become the city that her enthusiastic residents had fancied. They had the big boom in Kansas, and the bigger collapse that followed. After that, folk stayed East for a while, and the business of making traffic in that territory became an advanced science.
There was another factor in the situation. You will remember that the Summer of '69 saw the first continuous railroad across the American continent--the combination of Central Pacific and Union Pacific. The huge success of that railroad was inspiration for others. In the generation of men that followed the rails that reached from Atlantic to Pacific were multiplied. After that there was a new problem for the owners of the transcontinental railroads. Their statistical charts of originating traffic showed great black masses at either end of the line--where connections were made with the great traffic-bringers from the East, and where the rails ran upon the docks of the Pacific shore. Between those two points was a thin black line, like spider-thread. To make that line black and firm at all points, to bring masses of new traffic at intermediate points, was the demand that the railroad-owner made of his traffic-manager.
It is being done to-day. It has taken time, money and almost incredible patience; but it is being done. This is a broad land, and there is still much to be done. In Montana, there is a single county with an area exceeding that of Maryland and a population less than that of the smallest ward of Baltimore; and near-by there is another county, as large as Delaware and Connecticut combined, with mere handful of residents. These are typical. There are great open stretches to the southwest; and the Santa Fe, working hand in hand with the Harriman lines, is busy populating and developing these. In the North Country, James J. Hill's railroads and the new outstretched arm of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul are doing much to exploit the unfarmed lands of Montana, and the intensive possibilities of Washington for fruit-raising, market-gardening and the like. Up and down the Pacific coast, the railroads are uniting in similar campaigns of development.
Hill began the campaign in Montana. He is a dreamer and a far-seer. When he began making presents of blooded bulls to the farmers out along the Great Northern, folk laughed at him, some of his directors thought that he had gone crazy. They thought differently when they knew the results, when they got the traffic reports of the cattle business that was growing along the line.
That thing was typical. The railroad--Hill's railroad and all the other big transcontinentals--lent itself to the fine development of all the traffic that might possibly be obtained within its territory. Heretofore it had roughly combed traffic possibilities, now it began to screen them with a fine mesh screen. The emigrant bureau did its part of the work; the railroad went further and set itself to develop every inch of available land along its lines. Attractive excursions brought settlers to the new country, the railroad was of practical assistance in finding locations for them. Everything is being brought toward the development of those great new States of the West: cross-roads are beginning to become villages; villages, cities. A little time before his death, Mr. Harriman announced that there would be four great cities spread across the American continent--New York, Chicago, Salt Lake, and San Francisco. He then took it upon his own rather roomy shoulders to make Salt Lake City worthy of a place in the file.
From this activity in the West, the Eastern railroads have stolen a lesson. Originally built in many cases to serve the needs of the farmers of some particular locality, they have become merged and welded in a way that has caused them to serve the industrial interests of the country more particularly than the agricultural. One of the valuable old properties of the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey rejoices in the name of Freehold and Jamesburg Agricultural Railroad.
When, after the serious slump in traffic that followed the panic in 1907, the railroads of the East found themselves, for the first time in a decade, with more facilities than freight, they began to cultivate more carefully the traffic branch of transportation science. They took quite readily to the lesson that the transcontinentals gave them. Then they proceeded to put it into effect in practical fashion.
For some years past the problem of the unimportant branches has been a serious one with the big Eastern systems. These branches, many of them once profitable feeders, have been allowed to deteriorate and retrograde, while main-line traffic developed and increased under active conditions of competition. The little towns along the branches seemed to retrograde too; while the busy cities of the country, strung along the main lines of the railroad, absorbed new growth and new energy. Sometimes the branch lines were paralleled by interurban electric railroads, which were able to operate at far less cost than steam railroads, and consequently to charge lower rates of fare; and their slight passenger traffic continued to grow lighter. The freight traffic had long since dwindled to slim proportions; the branch lines were almost entirely agricultural railroads; and the farmers of the East were discouraged and disheartened.
The new movement began in Western New York, which is fairly gridironed with a network of these unprofitable branch railroads. It was started even before the panic of 1907. New York State, with its great resources and its fat treasury, has long been engaged in the development of scientific farming--which means farming for the largest profit that can be brought from the soil. It has a great agricultural school as a part of Cornell University, and an interesting experimental school along similar lines at Geneva. These schools have done a great work. They have educated young men to be modern farmers, in every sense of that phrase; and they have sent leaflets to every corner of the Empire State. But even these methods were not far-reaching enough. It is not every farmer's boy in these days who can afford to go down to Ithaca for a college education in the tilling of the soil; few of the older men care to mingle with the boys at such an institution. Even the pamphlets sent out from Geneva were not sufficient.