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It is a matter of pride with the railroad to keep its passenger equipment bright and shiny and new of appearance. It is part sentiment and part good business. For a railroad cannot hope to attract passengers with dirty, unkempt, weather-beaten cars. So it is that the paint-shop is a large function of the car-shop. American railroads may not go quite as much into gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a private carriage or an automobile.

So it is that a passenger coach spends from eighteen to twenty days in the paint-shop alone, in its period of refurbishing. It is primed at first and then it receives from three to five coats of surfacer. This is all hand-work, requiring both strong muscles and infinite patience on the part of the painters. Two or three coats of the standard color of the railroad, by which its equipment is known distinctively, are given to the exterior.

Lettering and striping follow, then finally two coats of fine varnish are flowed and rubbed to a high and brilliant polish.

The car is now ready for the dust and the dirt of the line. About every year it will come back again for re-varnishing and at the end of about eight years it will again undergo practically the same treatment within the paint-shop as was given it at the beginning. It will come in rusty and begrimed after many thousands of miles up and down the toilsome line.

Within three weeks it will emerge from the paint-shop fresh and radiant, having obtained a new lease of life.

If the same process were to be applied to the freight equipment, the paint-shop would be of almost unlimited size. But freight-cars are not varnished. They are merely painted with the best of time-resisting pigments, usually a dull and sombre red. The freight-cars literally go through a bath in the paint-shop. Expert painters stand, like fire-fighters, with a hose-nozzle in their hands. Through the hose the paint is forced, gallons upon gallons of it; and when it is all over the freight-car is a fine, even red, just like the painters themselves. The lettering is a quick matter, with the use of stencils.

There remain two other great divisions of a central plant of this sort--locomotive repair shops and car repair shops, for the needs of the immediate divisions with their heavy traffic. These shops, extensive in themselves, present no radical differences from the usual division shops which a great railroad maintains at every division operating point in order to keep its rolling stock in the best of order. They are used to make light repairs. The master mechanic is a discerning man. He must know and judge accurately when a disabled car or locomotive should go to the company's main shops, when the repairs can best be made at the local plant. It is one of the points upon which the economy of the shop system depends.

On this matter of shop economy whole volumes might be written, and have been written. In the beginning of shop practices there was little system in these matters, just as the shop work was reckoned far below its real importance. One of the earliest of real railroads was the Columbia & Philadelphia--nowadays one of the main stems of the Pennsylvania's trunk line--and it was from the beginning a railroad of quite heavy traffic, double-tracked and reaching into a fat country. Yet a shop at Parkersburg, halfway up the line, employing forty men in all, was considered quite enough for the maintenance of equipment. If one of those early engines broke down at either terminal, the engineer, the fireman and perhaps the local blacksmith had to make their own repairs.

Nothing was standard, not even the sizes of such simple affairs as nuts and bolts. Years of railroading have changed all this. The master-mechanics and the master car-builders meet in annual sessions; and by means of reports from their expert committees have been evolved standards in every detail of rolling stock--standard materials, standard compositions, standard sizes, even standards in nomenclature of railroad apparatus down to the smallest parts.

Even with this assistance there still remains a mass of detail in every railroad shop; and a large clerical force is one of its greatest efficiencies. A sharp and accurate accounting is kept of the cost of repairs upon each locomotive and car, even such general shop costs as gas and heat are pro-rated against it. There is no time that the railroad cannot tell to a nicety the precise cost of each unit of its equipment.

These units are not, in many roads, increased, without precise orders from the board of directors or the executive committee of the board. In order to get around this rule some niceties in reconstruction have been known. A single timber of a worn-out freight car has kept the unit and the number of the old car, and going into the new has prevented the creation of a forbidden unit.

The system upon which cars and locomotives are numbered varies greatly upon different systems. In some cases the first figures of the numbers indicate the class and style of the car or locomotive, in others they mean nothing. When a car or a locomotive is nigh worn out its number passes from it and is given to some newcomer. The old servant has a neatly painted "X" placed before its number. That "X" is its death warrant. In a little time it leads the way to the scrap heap.

The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel, a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad man sees at one time or another. It may not always be possible to trace the responsibility for such an accident. But there is a responsibility, and the men who work at forge or lathe, at press or planer feel that it is there. They form no mean brigade of this great industrial army of America.

Such responsibility continues outside of the main shops to the smaller shops, down to the roundhouse forces, by whose care and vigilance the big locomotives are kept fitted for their important work; down still farther to the car-inspectors, who, blue signal-lights in hand, creep through the long freight-yards of a winter's night to strike the flaw in the metal, to sound the note of alarm before the worst may come to pass. Some of these last you hear in the night as you scurry across the country. As you rest in your berth, and the express is changing engines at some division point, you may hear the car inspectors coming along the train, striking with their hammers against the wheels, listening intently for the false ring by which they may detect trouble. If you trouble yourself to lift the curtain of your berth, you may see them, a grimy crew, working busily with their hammers, thrusting their torches in among the trucks to see that all is well.

Responsibility for the safety in railroad operation does not cease at the doors of the mechanical department.

CHAPTER XXV

THE RAILROAD MARINE

STEAMSHIP LINES UNDER RAILROAD CONTROL--FLEET OF NEW YORK CENTRAL-- TUGS--RAILROAD CONNECTIONS AT NEW YORK HARBOR--HANDLING OF FREIGHT-- FERRY-BOATS--TUNNEL UNDER DETROIT RIVER--CAR-FERRIES AND LAKE ROUTES-- GREAT LAKES STEAMSHIP LINES UNDER RAILROAD OWNERSHIP.

In the beginning land transportation must have looked up in something resembling fear and awe to water. We can picture the railroad of the thirties as a slender but resourceful David facing the veritable Goliath of water carriage. In earlier chapters of this book we have shown how the canals, representing a distinct phase of water transportation, sought to throttle the railroads at the beginning. But the modern railroad has no fear of water rivalries, either upon the coast or inland. Just as the first railroads were ofttimes timidly built as feeders or complements to water routes, so to-day almost every inland water route is part of a railroad--in operating fact if not in actual ownership. The tables have been turned--the railroad finally dominates. Nine-tenths of all the great water routes in and aroundabout the United States are more or less directly owned and controlled by the railroads. They have become, in every sense, corollaries to land transportation.

This is more distinctly shown in some sections of the land than in others.

For instance, up in New England, where the interests owning the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad have accomplished direct or indirect control of all but a comparatively few miles of the steam and electric railroads in five great States, they have also acquired the steamship interests of that district. The New Haven's original excursion into the steamboat business was when it absorbed the Old Colony Railroad--almost a score of years ago--in order to ensure its entrance into Boston. The Old Colony owned a well-famed and highly prosperous steamboat line from Fall River, Massachusetts, to New York City, part of its through New York-Boston route. Eventually the New Haven acquired all the brisk and busy steamboat lines which ran up the Sound from New York to several Connecticut ports--Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, New London, and Stonington. Any one of these lines was not, perhaps, so much of an acquisition in itself, but all of them were potentials in a future rate situation that might arise. It was good executive management to have these potentials under firm control, and so the New Haven established water routes as a recognized factor of its business--under the separate corporation title of the New England Navigation Company. Once when a new company, under the mellifluous title of the Joy Line, sought to injure its coastwise business by establishing cut-rates from Providence to New York, the New Haven placed two of its older boats in a rival and lower-priced service, and, by means of its great resources, was able to bring the Joy Line into its fold. Later, when the Enterprise Line tried a like programme, the New Haven followed the same aggressive tactics and brought the Enterprise Line to bankruptcy. These things are mentioned here in no spirit of criticism.

But they are the facts that make it impossible for really independent lines of steamboats to run between New York and Providence for any great length of time, despite ample docking facilities and a great free port at each of these cities.

The Metropolitan Line tried to maintain an independent line between New York and Boston with the two finest steamers ever placed in coastwise service--the _Yale_ and the _Harvard_. One of these boats left each city at five o'clock in the afternoon and performed the ocean voyage of 330 miles over the "outside route" in just fifteen hours--and with amazing regularity. But the New Haven Railroad found it to its interest to control the coasting lines around about New England, and so the _Yale_ and _Harvard_ were last winter banished to the Pacific coast.

This is all part of the business of managing great railroad systems. For similar reasons the Pennsylvania Railroad found it advisable to bring a group of steamboat lines plying on Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries under its control, the Harriman lines to reach out and establish ownership of the lines plying up and down several thousand miles along the Pacific coast--these are but a few instances out of many. As yet no large American railroad has essayed to control a transatlantic line, although both the Hill and the Harriman properties are interested in the transpacific carrying business. The Canadian Pacific, however, has already well-established lines across both of the great oceans--making a continuous route under one management from Liverpool, England, to Hong Kong, China. Moreover, it is now building four great steamships which are to be finished simultaneously with the Panama Canal and which will ply through it from New York direct to Hong Kong. The Canadian Northern has also recently embarked in the transatlantic carrying business. The Canadian Pacific and several of the large railroads of the northern part of the United States maintain lines of sizable gross tonnage on the Great Lakes--but of these, more in a little while.

[Illustration: A MODERN RAILROAD FREIGHT AND PASSENGER TERMINAL: THE TERMINAL OF THE WEST SHORE RAILROAD AT WEEHAWKEN, OPPOSITE NEW YORK CITY]

[Illustration: HIGH-SPEED, DIRECT-CURRENT PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY FOR TERMINAL SERVICE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL AT THE GRAND CENTRAL STATION]

Even if a railroad is not engaged in the steamship business, as such, even to the extent of one or two small steamboats on inland waters, it may still possess a considerable harbor fleet,--wharves, and slips--that, taken together, make a sizable aggregate. Every railroad that has any sort of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will protect itself by having its own wharves and landing-stages--even grain elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet--ferries, scows, lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. It means that the railroad must pay attention to marine laws and marine customs.

When a railroad boasts of a terminal in such a city as Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco, its fleet of harbor craft is apt to be quite a sizable navy. Take, for instance, the New York Central's fleet in and around New York harbor. It consists of 269 vessels, divided into the following classes: 9 ferry-boats, 22 tugs, 7 steam-lighters, 50 car-floats, 10 steam-hoist barges, 25 open barges, 6 scow barges, 105 covered barges, and 35 grain-boats. And out of all these barges, 10 are further equipped for refrigerator use.

In such a fleet, eliminating of course the ferry-boats which have their own peculiar uses, the tugs are almost the sole motive power. There is a bit of poetry about them, too, even if they are short and stubby, ofttimes poking their cushioned noses impertinently up against larger and far more stately craft. But no captain, even though he walk the bridge of an eight-hundred foot steamship, sneers at a tug. It takes eighteen of them to place the new giant _Olympic_ in her wharf on the North River, and no crack company of horsemen ever moved in more precise drill or better cooperation than these noisy, punting, helping-hands of the harbor of New York. For ocean ports are different from those along the lakes. A captain sailing a five-thousand ton ship on fresh water would be ashamed to use a tug at Detroit, or any other of the Great Lake ports, even where the current runs almost like a mill-race, unless he was turning in a channel whose width was but a wee bit more than the length of his ship. But Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo and Chicago do not have the tides--and it is the tide that makes harbor navigation a finely specialized science at the big ocean ports.

All of the big Atlantic ports save New York have abundant track facilities alongside the piers, where berth the ships from half the world over. In New York, the same geographical conditions that have gone to make her so superb a port and given her so generous a harbor-frontage have blocked the railroads in their efforts to reach all her piers with unbroken rails. So the railroads entering that harbor have found it necessary to provide themselves with such fleets as we have noticed as belonging to the New York Central. For inland shippers seem to have a preference for sending their east-bound export merchandise through New York, because of the frequency of sailings from her wharves to half the recognized ports of the world.

If you are a manufacturer--at Utica, N. Y., let us say--and you wished to send a carload of your product to London, Eng., you would find that the railroad definitely agrees to do certain things for you. On your minimum basis of a carload lot it will place that carload at any pier in the harbor of New York. Indeed, it would do a little more. If some of that carload lot that starts down out of Utica is going to London, some more on a different ship to Calcutta, and still some more on a tropic-bound liner to South America, the railroad would make free delivery of your consignment to the piers of these three ships. It limits, however, the delivery of a carload lot to three different piers.

This sounds simple, perhaps, and, in reality, is not. For in a single day of twenty-four hours there may arrive at Weehawken and Sixtieth Street, Manhattan--the two great freight terminals of the rails of the New York Central system at New York--from four to six hundred, eight hundred cars, perhaps, filled with merchandise bound for half a hundred different piers, along from forty to sixty miles of water-front.

Now you see the use of all this army of lighters and barges--stubby-nosed craft, awkward craft, boats that have not even a single stanza of the poetry of the sea written upon their contents. By night, by day, when an imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter, when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot's path is fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. The eight or ten great railroads that terminate in New York are pouring export merchandise to all of her piers, while from those long sprawling structures they are drawing up imported goods to go forward to every corner of the land. And in addition to this there is the vast local commerce of the City of New York, which, as we saw when we were considering the freight terminals, back in Chapter VII, is no slight matter of itself. But this traffic, as well as much of that of the great interchange between the railroads terminating at New York, is handled most effectively by the car-floats on each of which twelve to sixteen standard box-cars may be loaded with great expedition.

But the clumsy barges and the lighters and the still clumsier car-floats are of little use without the tugs, and these last are the quick couriers of the harbor. Twenty of that New York Central fleet are kept in constant use in the North and East Rivers, and along the harbor shores to Jersey City, Bayonne, and the southern parts of Brooklyn. They do not lie idle, save when they are finally forced to "lay up" for a little time for repairs. And then a reserve tug is in service without delay.

Here is the modern economy of railroad equipment--even though this be the part of the railroad that is afloat. A tug pulls up to a dock, its crews are off almost before their "relief" is standing at its station, and making sure that the craft is in as good order as they left it. While the "relief" is finding its tired way toward home the tug is off again. Its work is constant. Its work is not easy. It does not seem to be systematic and yet it is--wonderfully systematic.

For here and there about the harbor the captains of these N. Y. C. tugs get their orders--just as conductors of the trains upon the steel highways get their clearance cards and yellow tissues. A half-dozen stations give orders, and these are but the speaking stations of a single man who sits before a telephone switchboard close by a narrow street of down-town Manhattan and directs tug movements through the crowded harbor, just as easily as a despatcher moves extra freights over a crowded stretch of single-track line.

The traffic runs flood-high and the station men gossip of the whispered complaints of the tug-crews, but the man at the switchboard only smiles. A traffic solicitor who plies his heartbreaking work on the floor of the near-by Produce Exchange comes over to him and says:

"I've promised Smith & Russell delivery of ten cars of flour at Pier 32, East River, at seven o'clock to-morrow morning. We can't go back on them."

The man at the switchboard does not lose that smooth-set smile, even though the loudly ticking clock, just above the plugs and cords, shows him that it is already six o'clock of the evening of a day when the harbor freight has run flood-high.

"All right," he laughs, "Smith & Russell can count upon us."

And the next moment he is ordering Tug Twenty-seven to go from the Sixtieth Street pier over to Weehawken to get that small mountain-range of flour-bags that the "huskies" have already begun to build on a pier-floor, alongside of a string of dusty, grimy cars that have bumped their way east from Minneapolis.

Perhaps you are interested in the personality of Tug Twenty-seven. Take yourself away from the cool-witted despatcher and look down upon this craft--the queen of a railroad pet marine. She is as resplendent in her green and gold as any gentleman's yacht, and her crew even more proud of her. She stands in the water, a mere 110 feet long and 24-1/2 feet beam, but those wonderful shining engines in her heart can develop 1,200 horse-power--as much as many steamboats of three times her size. Her watertube boilers can withstand a locomotive pressure of 185 pounds to the square inch, she has all the accoutrements of coast liners--steam steering gears and electric lights among them. No wonder that her captain waxes eloquent about her.

Now ask him about what she can do. That he takes as personal achievement, and these harbor men are a bashful lot. Still, you can worm it out of him, and after a while you find that Tug Twenty-seven has just brought a punt-nosed car-float, with sixteen loaded cars upon her rails, around from Corlears Hook, through the press of shipping, and around the Battery where cross-tides battle against one another and against craft of all sorts, up to Weehawken "bridge" in forty minutes--which is not so very bad for a ten-mile run through a congested harbor.

"Time counts," adds the captain. "If they had given me another twelve or fifteen minutes I could have brought around two of the floats--put together 'V' fashion and the Twenty-seven with her nose stuck up into the 'V'."

In the harbor of New York is a great cluster of ferry-boats operated to overcome her barrier rivers by the several trunk-line railroads whose systems terminate at a long water-jump from the congested Island of Manhattan. To compete with railroads boasting terminals on Manhattan Island itself, these lines have been compelled to equip and operate extensive ferry fleets across both the East and the North Rivers. Across the first of these streams operates the navy of the Long Island Railroad, while across the Hudson ply in an intricate interlacing more than a dozen ferry routes of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, and the West Shore Railroads. The recent completion of the New York-Jersey City-Newark routes of the Hudson tunnels, as well as the inauguration of passenger traffic through both North and East River tunnels to the new Pennsylvania terminal in Manhattan, has caused the abandonment of two ferry routes and curtailment of service upon several others. Tunnel-diggers and bridge-builders make havoc with ferry routes, which must always remain liable to many delays because of fog, floating ice, and such other adverse weather conditions.

Still the railroad ferries round about New York derive no small income from the trucking service of a metropolitan city which has had to struggle for many years against great intersecting rivers, and so they will probably continue to be for many years interesting and picturesque features of New York harbor.

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