But perhaps the most interesting of all the ferry routes of New York harbor is the attenuated line from the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad's waterside terminal at Port Morris in the Bronx, for ten miles through the East River, Hell Gate, around the sharp turn and tides of Corlears Hook and again of the Battery, and across the Hudson River to the old terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City. Over this route goes through traffic--freight and passenger--from New England to the South and the Southwest. The freight-traffic is handled largely by car-floats in charge of the busy puffing tugs, while the passenger traffic goes in ferry-boats different from the others that ply in New York harbor.
For these ferry-boats are really nothing more than a bettered type of car-float--a type equipped with powerful engines for self-propulsion.
Through passenger trains run each day and each night between Boston and Baltimore and Washington, and these trains are handled between Port Morris and Jersey City upon them. The familiar _Maryland_, which is operated jointly by the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems upon this route, will receive an entire passenger train of ordinary length, excepting, of course, the locomotive, upon her great deck, which is, in reality, a miniature railroad yard, equipped with two long parallel tracks that can be quickly attached to the ferry-bridges at Port Morris and Jersey City.
The trip, with the loading and unloading of the train, is accomplished, under favorable weather conditions, in about an hour.
It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down a broad ship's deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. This ferry is also finally threatened by the bridge-builders. As this is written, workmen are already preparing the pier foundations for a great railroad bridge that is to span the East River not far from Hell Gate, and which is to give an unbroken line of rails from the New Haven's terminal at Port Morris, through Long Island City, to the Pennsylvania's tunnels and terminal in Manhattan Island.
So, also, have the tunnel-builders contrived to rob the through traveller on the Michigan Central of the more or less thrilling water transfer from Canada to the United States at Detroit. The Detroit River tunnel has superseded one of the most important car-ferries in the country, but it has given to the operating heads of the Michigan Central one of the very shortest through routes from New York to Chicago and robbed them of one of the fearful handicaps of their main line--the possibilities for constant and exasperating delays to their through trains while being ferried across the Detroit River.
Do not underestimate the possibilities of those delays. Within the past ten years, the transport _Michigan_, plying from Detroit to Windsor, the Canadian town directly opposite, and carrying a Chicago-Montreal flyer, was stuck for ten hours in the ice, so near the slip that a long plank would have almost reached from her deck to the wharf. That, in the lesser form, has been the history of winter after winter at the Detroit ferry.
Shipbuilders have done their best to meet the obstacle by building car-ferries of tremendous power, sometimes even equipping them with both side-wheels and screws. But the real problem of possible delay can only be solved there by tunnels, and it is expected that the Grand Trunk, the Canadian Pacific, and the Wabash--which still use the car-ferries across the Detroit River--will sooner or later either tunnel beneath it or acquire trackage rights through the Michigan Central tubes.
The Detroit River is a narrow but important part of the tremendously important water highway up the Great Lakes, and at every part of the whole length of that highway the railroads have tried to break their way across.
It has not been found impossible to bridge the St. Lawrence or the Niagara Rivers or the wide straits at Sault Ste. Marie, but there are other points, even besides Detroit, that have as yet baffled the genius of the bridge-builder. One of the most important of these is where Lake Michigan forces its outlet into Lake Huron through the two peninsulas of the great State that bears its name. To make the two parts of Michigan physically one with unbroken rail will probably not be accomplished in many years.
In the meantime the stout and tremendously powerful ferry _Algomah_--built so as to literally crush the ice down under her tremendous bows--plies between Mackinac City, the Island of Mackinac, situated midstream, and St.
Ignace, on the north shore of the broad strait. Despite the fearful severity of the winters in northern Michigan the _Algomah_ keeps that important path open the year round--not only for herself but for the great car-floats that follow in her wake.
What is possible at the Straits of Mackinac is also possible across the widest part of any one of the Great Lakes--excepting always the emotionless Superior. At least that is the way the railroad traffic men have argued for many years, and so for these many years car-ferries have plied successfully across the very hearts of three of the lakes. Of all the chain, Lake Michigan offers the greatest natural obstruction to the natural traffic movements of the land--its great length, stretching north and south, forming an obstacle to through rail movements, and contributing not a little to the railroad importance and the wealth of Chicago.
So it was that car-ferries were established many years ago across Lake Michigan and are operated throughout the lake to-day--from Manitowoc, Kewaunee, Milwaukee, Menominee, and Manistique on the west shore of the lake, to Frankfort, Ludington, Northport, Grand Haven, St. Joseph, and Benton Harbor upon the east shore. These vessels are of different construction from the ferries that cross the narrow Detroit River. They lack the low freeboard and the other typical ferry construction, and are, instead, deep-gulled vessels, generally built of steel and always of great structural strength.
"Like the river ferries," says James C. Mills, "they are ice-crushers, but of greater size and power. During two or three of the winter months the lakes are frozen in a solid sheet of ice for twenty and thirty miles from the shores, and in extremely severe winters the ice-fields meet in mid-lake. To keep a channel open in the depth of winter even for daily passages back and forth, is a hazardous undertaking for the hardy mariners. The frequent gales which sweep the lakes break up the fields into ice-floes which, driven one way or another with great force, pile up in huge banks, often in the direct course of the transports and as high as their upper decks. At such times they free themselves only after repeated buckings of the shifting mass of ice, sometimes miles in extent, by running their stout prows up on the edge of the mass, breaking it down by their sheer weight, and ploughing through the ragged, grinding blocks of ice thus formed."[1]
[1] "Our Inland Seas," by James C. Mills, 1910.
Four tracks, running the full length of the ship, generally fill the main deck of these trans-lake ships. The loading of the cars on to these tracks is accomplished at the stern, the bow being built high and, as we have just seen, somewhat after the fashion of an overhanging prow. The main deck is completely roofed over with cabins and deck-houses, so that, viewed from the rear, the ship seems to be an itinerant pair of railroad tunnels, dark and gloomy. The upper decks are gay with the resources of the marine architect--for the greater part of these boats offer accommodations for passengers as well as for from eighteen to thirty freight cars. These great ferries form valuable feeders to the Grand Trunk, the Pere Marquette, the Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids & Indiana, and some minor routes crossing Michigan.
Similarly, car-ferries crossing Lake Erie from Cleveland to Port Stanley are considerable factors both in general merchandise and in the coal trade. Another Lake Erie route of heavy tonnage extends from Ashtabula, Ohio, to Port Burwell, Ontario. Within the last few years a car-ferry has been established across Lake Ontario, from Charlotte--which is the port of Rochester, N. Y.--to Coburg on the Canadian side, which has already developed for itself a considerable traffic.
But the car-ferries, extensive as they are, form but a small portion of the railroad interests upon the waters of the Great Lakes. Almost all of the great lines through those much-travelled waters are the property of some railroad system whose rails touch one or more of their terminals.
Thus the Northern Steamship Company, running from Buffalo to Chicago and Duluth, touches the rails of its parent company, the Great Northern Railroad, at this last port. The Erie & Western Transportation Company--popularly known as the Anchor Line--also running from Buffalo to Duluth, is a Pennsylvania property. Both of these lines are operated for passenger service, as well as freight. The New York Central and the Erie cover the same territory with exclusively freight routes. The Rutland Railroad has a line all the way from its western terminal at Ogdensburg, on the St. Lawrence River, to Chicago. The Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk operate important lines through Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. Even a small road, like the Algomah Central, has its own freight and passenger steamboats running south from the Soo as far as Cleveland, Ohio. It is a pretty poor line with Great Lakes terminals that cannot boast some sort of steamship service of its own.
In the development of the coastwise and the inland waterways of the United States, the railroad may be doing the nation a far greater service than it imagines. For the general trend of railroad expansion in the country to-day seems to be toward a development of the auxiliary water-routes rather than toward their curtailment. The railroad has finally realized that some coarse commodities can be carried far more economically by water than by rail. It is to-day seeking to avail itself of that acquired knowledge. If competing and feeding trolley lines are good things for railroads to own--and the present-day judgment seems to be that they are--the same rule holds doubly good in regard to both competing and feeding water-routes.
CHAPTER XXVI
KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH THE MEN
THE FIRST ORGANIZED BRANCH OF THE RAILROAD Y. M. C. A.--CORNELIUS VANDERBILT'S GIFT OF A CLUB-HOUSE--GROWTH OF THE RAILROAD Y. M. C.
A.--PLANS BY THE RAILWAYS TO CARE FOR THE SICK AND THE CRIPPLED--THE PENSION SYSTEM--ENTERTAINMENTS--MODEL RESTAURANTS--FREE LEGAL ADVICE--EMPLOYEES' MAGAZINES--THE ORDER OF THE RED SPOT.
The historic gray Union Station, which still stands at Cleveland, housed what was destined to be the very first systematic effort of the railroad to get in touch and keep in touch with its men. In that building, once new and splendid, but now old and grimy, George Meyers, the depot master, gathered a group of railroaders on a Sunday away back in 1870. The man came again on a second Sunday, still again on a third; after a little while those Sunday afternoon gatherings became habitual, and a new kink in all the intricacy of railroading was established. The meetings were partly religious and partly social, and eventually they led to a distinct innovation in that depot.
This little conference of Meyers was, in 1872, developed into the first organized branch of the railroad Young Men's Christian Association.
General John H. Devereux, the general manager of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway; Reuben F. Smith, of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad, and Oscar Townsend of the Big Four Railroad were chosen directors of the branch. Henry W. Stage, a train-despatcher on the Lake Shore, was earnestly and intensely enthusiastic in this work; and because of his zeal and enthusiasm, together with that of George Meyers, this branch was successful from the outset.
The Lake Shore Railroad, whose headquarters were in that same Union Depot at Cleveland then was and still is a pet property of the Vanderbilt family, also owners of the great New York Central system. The heads of that family began watching the Cleveland experiment with unusual interest.
The reports that came from them were unusual. That scheme of the depot master's seemed to be making a better grade of railroader in and around Cleveland, and any institution that bettered the type of railroaders interested the Vanderbilts. So the thing that Meyers had founded soon had wealthy patrons and strong friends.
The Vanderbilts kept their shoulders to the wheels of the railroad Y. M.
C. A., kept it out of the ruts and from falling. They saw it introduced here and introduced there on their group of railroads; saw it spread to other lines; and finally, Cornelius Vanderbilt himself built a splendid club-house for railroad men at the great terminal of his road in New York City and turned it over to the management of the railroad Y. M. C. A. That house, standing almost in the shade of the Grand Central Station, after a quarter of a century, still ranks as one of the distinctly fine club-homes of a city that is opulent in club-houses. It is still dedicated to simplicity, to democracy, to decency, and to good fellowship.
There is not a railroader coming into the big passenger terminal--from either the New York Central or the New Haven system--who is not welcome to it, day or night. Engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen all come into its hospitable door after a long hard run to find the clean comfort of good meals, bath, comfortable beds, good fellowship awaiting them. There is the peculiar and the successful field of the railroad Y. M. C. A.; perhaps as much as any, the real reason for its pronounced success.
Few railroaders in train service can leave their homes in the morning, "double their runs," and be home at night. The hard part of the business is that in most cases a man will have to spend one night, occasionally two nights, out on the run. The difficulties of this are not readily understood without a slight examination. In a large city the railroader finds that it is a shabby sort of a hotel or lodging-house that can come regularly within his scheme of economy. When he strikes the little town, or frequently the big terminal or division freight-yard around which is no town at all, the problem only multiplies. J. M. Burwick, a veteran conductor of the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad, told that problem in his own sincere way last year at a big dinner of railroad men in St. Louis.
"I left home a beautiful morning in '72," said Mr. Burwick. "I went down to Lafayette and to my first boarding-house; and up to that time I don't think any railroad man ever found a boarding-house except it was tied up to a saloon. I was in a place like that. Another place I was running into was where they made a division point in a corn-field. The company built a large building for the benefit of the men, and then they rented it to be run as a hotel. But the man in charge ran it to make money, and the steak he cut with his razor. I know he did, because it was so thin. At other places we had to sleep in a hot yard, in a hot caboose not fit for a man to try and sleep in; and then we had to stay awake on the road that night."
That was Burwick's testimony as to the conditions just before the coming of the railroad Y. M. C. A. An engineer from the New York Central, a man who had slept many nights in that comfortable club-house at the Grand Central, went up into Canada a few years ago and took an engine on a division running out of Kenora. The only place that a railroad man could find board and lodging in that town at that time was a boarding-house with the saloon attachment, and he was welcome there for but a limited time, unless he was a reasonably liberal patron of the saloon. The engineer--his name is McCrea--changed that order of things and established a branch of the railroad Y. M. C. A., which in four years gained 300 members and threatened to close the saloons of the place.
[Illustration: THIS IS WHAT NEW YORK CENTRAL MCCREA DID FOR THE MEN OF THE CANADIAN PACIFIC UP AT KENORA]
[Illustration: A CLUBHOUSE BUILT BY THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC FOR ITS MEN AT ROSEVILLE, CALIFORNIA]
[Illustration: THE B. & O. BOYS ENJOYING THE RAILROAD Y. M. C. A., CHICAGO JUNCTION]
[Illustration: "THE BROOKLYN RAPID TRANSIT COMPANY HAS ORGANIZED A BRASS BAND FOR ITS EMPLOYEES"]
Now you get the reason for the welcome that the railroad-owners gave this work of the Y. M. C. A. It was not the religious idea alone--men differ in their views of that sort of thing--but one of the most stringent of all railroad rules is that prohibiting the use of liquor by the men, or their frequenting bar-rooms. The necessity of that rule appears upon the face of it. But the Canadian railroad could do little toward enforcing it in a place like Kenora, before McCrea, of the New York Central, arrived there.
The railroad Y. M. C. A., with its comfortable housing facilities, its vigorous stand for better morals and better men, has made that rule one of the easiest in the book to be strictly observed. That is why the railroad-owners and the railroad heads, whose religious views have sometimes been at variance with those of the Y. M. C. A., have given hearty endorsement to its work along their lines. They like the sort of man it finishes.
So the railroad Y. M. C. A. has grown. It now has some 240 branches reaching from Hawaii, in the West, to some important division points in Eastern Maine. None of these have houses that can be compared, of course, with the comfortable home at the Grand Central Station in New York. In fact, some of them are still housed in crude fashion, in an abandoned shed or depot that some railroad has fitted up as a start in the work, over some store or freight-house perhaps; but each year sees these replaced by neat homes, such as those at Harrisburgh, on the Pennsylvania; at Collinwood, O., on the Lake Shore; at Baltimore, on the B. & O.; at the St. Louis Union Station, and the Williamson, W. Va., on the Norfolk and Western Railway. On a single system--the New York Central--there are 38 associations, with 27 buildings built for the purpose and valued at $700,000, and a very active membership of 12,799 railroaders. In the national organization membership there are more than 85,000 men, representing every department of the railroad service. An average of 15,500 meals--and mighty good reasonably priced meals they are, too--is served daily, while more than 50,000 railroaders come to the club-houses each twenty-four hours.
Beyond the necessity for maintaining the moral fibre of the railroader (and it is astonishing how little maintenance such a corps needs) is the decent necessity of taking care of him in case of illness. Railroading, with all the safety devices that have multiplied in its service within the past quarter of a century, is still a hazardous occupation to the men who are out upon the line. The list of cripples, and the death-list of a twelvemonth, are still appalling things--appalling in the aggregate, fearful in any single concrete case, a case where there may be a helpless wife and little children to be brought into the reckoning.
The railroads have begun to shoulder their responsibility in this matter.
Legislation has helped in the matter but to-day big carriers are preparing to do even more--to pay premiums and carry some form of casualty insurance on each of their employees, who may be engaged in a hazardous part of the work. That thing is going to do more than any other one thing possibly could do. When a big railroad realizes that its bill for premiums is going to be reduced by the addition of many simple protective devices, those devices are going to be instantly adopted. That is the way of railroads, and of business, although it is not to be charged for a single moment that the American railroads have not done much within the past 25 years toward raising the margin of safety for their employees.
Of course, the railroaders have long since had their insurance, although the regular life companies look upon them with distrust as risks. They have been forced either to pay high premiums in the regular companies or else to organize insurance of their own. Their brotherhoods have carried forth this work with interest and with skill. These brotherhoods, or unions, of the locomotive engineers, the firemen, the conductors, the trainmen, and several other branches of the service, have been mighty agents, too, in the development of the moral fibre of the American railroader. Lack of space prevents a consideration of each in detail. To do them but simple justice, to sing the epic of the mighty Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, for instance (which has only recently finished a great building of its own in Cleveland), would require a volume for itself.
But the railroads have not been negligent in this matter. For instance, a man on the Baltimore & Ohio can pay $1.00 a month out of his pay envelope and have $1,000.00 life insurance. He can likewise pay $3.00 a month, and $3,000.00 will be paid his heirs upon his death. The railroad company stands back of this fund and guarantees the insurance. It makes good from its own treasury any deficit or shortage that might be incurred in its operation.
For twenty years the Pennsylvania has conducted a similar work, under the title of the Voluntary Relief Department. Membership in this is, as the name indicates, purely voluntary, the road's employees being admitted, after favorable physical examination, up to the age of 45 years and 6 months. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company in this instance also stands as guarantor of the insurance fund.
A close examination of it in some detail may interest. The following table shows the detail--the five classes into which employees may enter:
1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th Class Class Class Class Class Monthly pay Any $35 or $55 or $75 or $95 or rate more more more more
Contributions per month: Class $0.75 $1.50 $2.25 $3.00 $3.75