The stone Union Station at Cleveland is still in use, but the folk of that town do not brag of it nowadays. Cleveland has grown a good deal since they built the Union Station there.
The first real passenger terminals of importance in the country were the Park Square in Boston, and the Grand Central in New York, to which reference has already been made. These presented architectural pretensions such as the railroads of the country had not before offered to the cities they served. They also served as models for bigger things that were to follow. In Boston, the Lowell Road planned and built a large new station, and the era of the passenger terminal was begun.
When the Pennsylvania Railroad built Broad Street Station, at Philadelphia, it built a terminal a little finer than anything accomplished up to that time. Even to-day, with the dignity of years creeping upon it, Broad Street is still one of the foremost American stations. The policy of its owners has been to keep it abreast of the demands of the day, and only recently it has been greatly enlarged again, its protecting, interlocking, and signal system being made second to none in the world. To the traveller, the ivory-white waiting-room, where Philadelphians delight to congregate, is an unending source of admiration; engineers find interest in the intricate system of tunnels and bridges by which a number of trunk-line divisions are brought into the station without crossing at level. Broad Street Station shows a yearly increase in its passenger traffic of about five per cent. It has a daily movement of more than 600 loaded trains in and out, in addition to a heavy switching movement. But because of the steady increase of its traffic the Pennsylvania has already planned to relieve it by building a new main for express trains out at West Philadelphia. When that is done Broad Street will be used exclusively for suburban traffic. A short distance away stands the Market Street Station, of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a terminal rivalling Broad Street in beauty, and only slightly inferior in capacity. Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
But the first big station terminals--in our American sense that a thing big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world--were those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention.
The Boston terminal--South Station--was preceded by a giant structure erected along the bank of the Charles River to receive a multitude of through and suburban railroad lines entering from the north. This terminal--North Station--embraced the structure of the Boston & Lowell Railroad and superseded those of the Boston & Maine and Fitchburg railroads. The merging of these and other interests into the present Boston & Maine made the North Station a possibility. It is not a structure of particular distinction, from either an architectural or an engineering standpoint, but it has proved itself a mighty convenience to a travelling public, using a multiplicity of busy lines.
The convenience of it made the South Station a possibility. Boston, like Philadelphia, spreads out well beyond its actual boundaries and measures itself as a vast community, including many near-by cities and villages.
With the consolidation of a number of railroads in Southern New England into the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, and the popularity of the North Station so close at hand, the South Station came as a matter of course. It replaced the stations of the New York & New England--whose site forms part of its site--the Old Colony, the Boston & Albany, and the Park Square Station. To accommodate the vast traffic of all these railroads, a great terminal was designed and built, a thing whose bigness is hardly realized by the passenger coming and going through it and who knows it only as a thing of some thousands of shuffling feet, giant shadows, and long distances.
In addition to the 28 sub-tracks in the train-shed, South Station is, in effect, a through station for electric suburban traffic. This service has not yet been installed, but the tracks are ready for use upon short notice, when the facilities of the main train-shed shall become overtaxed.
This through station has been ingeniously devised underneath the train-shed and waiting-rooms of the terminal. It is served by two tracks leading from the main entrance tracks to the station--guarded by separate interlocking and tower controls, and consists of two extensive loops. For suburban service, with no baggage to be handled, these loops will some day afford a great accommodation. Three or four electric trains may be stood upon each. The time and necessity of reversing the trains is entirely obviated, and upon the two tracks of this sub-station a short-haul traffic can be handled almost equal in numbers to that of the train-shed overhead.
What such a statement means can be better realized by a recourse to bold statistics. South Station handled 31,831,390 passengers in 1909, who travelled two and fro in some 800 trains daily. It has handled more than 900 trains in a single day. Its baggage men take care of more than 2,500,000 trunks in a twelvemonth. The statistics of a city gate like South Station are, in themselves, sizable.
St. Louis has one passenger station to serve as city gate for the traffic that comes and goes at that important railroad centre. That gate is the chief through passenger traffic point of the world. From its train-shed one may take through trains to every corner of the United States and a few distant corners of Mexico and Canada. St. Louis, like most Western cities has no volume of suburban traffic as New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, but it is a consequential point for through passengers. The better to serve the needs of the 22 different railroad systems entering that city, the Union Station was built a dozen years ago. It was thought to be big enough to last St. Louis many years. Before the World's Fair of 1904 opened in that city the Union Station was already judged inadequate, and an elaborate plan was consummated for its enlargement.
When the Union Station was originally planned, St. Louis demanded a gate that would be worthy of her size and dignity. No type of through station would do, the head-house terminal was demanded and built, even though in actual practice it necessitated backing each arriving train into the shed. A station of giant size with the largest train-shed in the world was built and hailed with a glad acclaim by the Western town.
When the station was found inadequate, the engineers found their plans for enlarging it would have to be adapted to a very confined area, proscribed by immovable railroad properties to the south, highway viaducts to the east and west, and a granite head-house, costing several million dollars, to the north. Within that confined area, they were to correct the evils of insufficient capacity--a train-shed with a single 4-track throat and some standing tracks of but 3 cars' length, inadequate baggage arrangements, and lesser evils. Within two years, they had substituted, without increasing the area of the Union Station property, a 10-car capacity for each of the 32 tracks of the train-shed, a double throat with 6 tracks, increased concourses and distributing platforms for passengers, and a complete subway system for the handling of baggage. The prosecution of that work, while the station was in constant and busy use, ranks as one of the marvels of latter-day practical engineering.
From the standpoint of the architect, no other station has yet been built in the United States that can compare with the new Union Station at Washington. For years, the overcrowded railroad stations at that city have been but wretched gateways to the national capitol. Now the city that is fast becoming the Mecca of all Americans has an entrance worthy of her dignity, and in keeping with the increasing magnificence of her architectural works.
The Washington Station is in full accord with the wonderful architectural development of that city, and has a setting in the creation of a great facing plaza, in which 100,000 troops may be gathered in review. Some day the plaza is to be surrounded by a group of public buildings but even in that day the white marble station, exceeding in size all other Washington buildings save the Capitol itself, will remain the dominating feature of that facing plaza. It has been created in simple classic outline, a vaulted train-shed being purposely omitted, in order that the station should not overshadow the proportions of the near-by Capitol.
Similarly, the vaulted train-shed has been omitted in the splendid new white granite terminal which the Chicago and Northwestern Railway has just completed on the West Side of Chicago. That new terminal is a real addition to a town which has long boasted two model stations--one in La Salle Street and the other upon the Lake Front. The Northwestern terminal is one of the fine architectural features of Chicago--a structure of classic design, the dominating feature of which is a colonnaded portico, monumental in type and towering to a height of 120 feet above the main street entrance.
This new terminal has a possible capacity of a quarter of a million passengers each day. It has some novel features for the comfort of passengers. A great many travellers cross Chicago in the course of twenty-four hours; in many cases this is the single break in a weary and dirty journey. For these, the new terminal not only provides the customary lounging rooms and barber shops, but also private baths. There is a series of rooms where invalids, women with children, or other persons seeking privacy, may go directly by private elevator where they may rest while waiting for connecting trains. For women there are tea-rooms and hospital rooms, with trained nurses in attendance. That is almost the last note in comfort for the traveller. There are, in addition to all these, private rooms where the suburbanite may change into his evening clothes and proceed in his various social duties, changing back again before he catches his late train out into the country.
New York City is still in the process of rebuilding and readjusting her gateways. Two magnificent terminals in her metropolitan district have already been finished; the third is still under construction. The first of these terminals is a real water-gate, built for the Lackawanna Railroad and situated in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from the corporate New York. It is a handsome architectural creation in steel and concrete.
Its tall clock-tower dominates the river front by night and day and those who come and go through its portals find themselves in a succession of white and vaulted hallways and concourses that suggest a library or museum more than the mere commercial structure of a railroad corporation.
An interesting feature of the Hoboken Station is the abandonment of the high train-shed such as has come to be a distinguishing feature of some of the world's great terminals. Engine smoke and gases work havoc with the structural steel work of such sheds, and the engineers of the Hoboken Station fashioned a low-lying roof, slotted to receive the locomotive stacks. The result is a clean train-house, yet admirably protected from the stress of weather. It is a novel note in terminal engineering.
The Pennsylvania Station, opened in November, 1910, has already become one of the notable landmarks of New York. Beneath it disappeared the biggest hole ever excavated at one time in the metropolitan city; for the great station is not so famed either for its architectural beauty or for the completeness of its details (although it is in the foreguard of the world's great terminals in both of these regards), as for the stupendous engineering project that was found necessary to connect it with the trunk-line railroads that it serves. To the west, this takes form in two parallel tunnels underneath the city, the Hudson River, and the Jersey Heights; to the east a still heavier traffic, composed of empty trains in Pennsylvania service and a great army of Long Island commuters, is carried under the very heart of Manhattan Island and under the East River in four parallel tunnels. Trains run for six miles under the greatest city of the continent, with its flanking rivers and environs, without ever seeing more than a momentary flash of daylight. The terminal has no train-shed or other of the familiar external appearances of the usual railroad station in a large city.
[Illustration: A MODEL AMERICAN RAILROAD STATION--THE UNION STATION OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL, BOSTON & ALBANY, DELAWARE & HUDSON, AND WEST SHORE RAILROADS AT ALBANY]
[Illustration: THE CLASSIC PORTAL OF THE PENNSYLVANIA'S NEW STATION IN NEW YORK]
[Illustration: THE BEAUTIFUL CONCOURSE OF THE NEW PENNSYLVANIA STATION, IN NEW YORK]
[Illustration: "THE WAITING-ROOM IS THE MONUMENTAL AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION OF THE STATION,"--THE WAITING-ROOM OF THE UNION DEPOT AT TROY, NEW YORK]
The Pennsylvania terminal also departs radically from the other great terminals in its track arrangements. The twenty-one parallel station tracks, with their platforms, are placed in a basement forty feet below street level. In fact, the great building is divided into three levels. At the street level are the broad entrances, the chief of these forming itself into a broad arcade, lined with shops that cater particularly to the demands of the traveller. On this floor are also the railroad's commodious restaurant and lunch-room.
On the intermediate plane, or level, the real business of the passenger prefatory to his journey is transacted. The concourse, the great general waiting-room, with its subsidiary rooms for men and women, the ticket offices, and the telegraph offices are there gathered. From the roomy concourse, covered in steel and glass after the fashion of the famous train-sheds in Frankfort and Dresden, Germany, individual stairs and elevators lead to each of the track platforms. A sub-concourse, hung directly underneath the main structure, is reserved for exit purposes only, and serves to separate the streams of incoming and outgoing passengers. The north side of the station is separated and reserved for the use of the Long Island passengers, chiefly commuters.
The theory of operation of the station is simplicity itself. A Pennsylvania through train from the West, after discharging its passengers and baggage, will not be backed out of the train-house, but will continue on through the station, under more tunnels and another river, to the storage yards just outside of Long Island City. Similarly, trains made ready for a long trip at the yards will proceed empty under the East River tunnels to the big station, where they will receive their outbound load.
This is the theory of the station, an operating theory which makes it in part like a giant way-station and saves much terminal congestion. The Long Island trains and a few short-line Pennsylvania express trains will be turned in the station. These are the exception.
Of interest fully equal to that of the new Pennsylvania Station, is the construction of a new Grand Central Station upon the site of and during the use of the old. The Grand Central Station, used by both the New York Central and the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroads, has been for many years New York's great gateway to the east as well as the north and west. It has developed a great suburban and a great through traffic since the construction of the first station--away back in 1871. Temporary relief was gained in the early eighties by the construction of an annex to the east of the original station. Still further improvement was gained ten years ago by tearing out a series of ill-arranged public rooms and substituting for them the single beautiful waiting-room that has proved so great a delight to travellers. Now that waiting-room is about to be demolished in the face of plans for the newer and greater Grand Central.
The building of the new station has offered tremendous problems to the engineers, for it has demanded a complete reconstruction within extremely limited area, while not placing hindrances in the way of the constant operation of one of the world's greatest terminals. Coincident with the rebuilding of the new station has come the substitution of electricity for steam on the terminal lines of its two tenants, the New York, New Haven, & Hartford, and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroads. In order to work the three-mile tunnel through Park Avenue and the sole entrance for trains to the station at greatest capacity, it was found necessary to extend the yards of the new station far north of those of the old. This work, alone, has necessitated the acquisition of whole city blocks of tremendously valuable real estate and the excavation of several million cubic yards of rock and earth.
To accomplish the work of reconstruction and still enable the station to handle its great traffic without serious interruption, serious forethought and definite plans of action were found necessary. The plan was developed by constructing a temporary building of brick and plaster covering a vacant city block in Madison Avenue, at the west of the station. Into this temporary structure a branch post office, an important adjunct of the Grand Central, was moved from the extreme eastern side of the terminal.
Excavation for the new terminal began at its eastern edge and at that edge the first portions of the new structure have been completed. A waiting-room was then established in temporary quarters, the last vestiges of the old Grand Central removed, and the main front and centre of the new station fabricated. Similarly, as the excavation has progressed from the east to the west side of the terminal, the great bulk of the traffic has been gradually shifted from the old high-level to the new low-level.
The new Grand Central complete will have its main train-shed devoted to through traffic. A second train-shed of similar arrangement and of slightly smaller dimensions will be constructed underneath the main shed for suburban traffic, and a single head-house will serve both floors. The head-house will have as its chief architectural feature, a concourse of mammoth proportions. The lesser features of the new Grand Central will contribute to make the new terminal, built upon the site of the historic old, one of the world's greatest gateways. The fact that steam locomotives are absolutely prohibited from entering either of the two new stations on Manhattan Island makes these the cleanest railroad terminals yet built.
So not only have our railroads begun to build great stations; they are to-day building really beautiful stations. An age in which the American demands the exquisite and the monumental in his architecture, palatial homes, palatial shops, palatial hotels, demands that the railroad station be something more than the mere expression of a commercial utility. Stone, the sturdy and durable building material of all the ages, has become the expression of these buildings from without. Within, they are gay with rare marbles and mural paintings. There is nothing too fine for the railroad passenger terminal of to-day in the United States.
When the master fancy of the architect, Richardson, designed the splendid stations at Worcester and Springfield, as well as a host of smaller attractive stations along the line of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the beginnings were made. More recently this rising American desire for beauty and good taste has shown itself in such elaborate and artistic structures as the stations at Albany and Scranton. The last step has come in the designing of the palatial terminals in Chicago, in Washington, and in New York City. It would take a bold prophet to anticipate what the next step might be.
CHAPTER VII
THE FREIGHT TERMINALS AND THE YARDS
CONVENIENCE OF HAVING FREIGHT STATIONS AT SEVERAL POINTS IN A CITY--THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD'S SCHEME AT NEW YORK AS AN EXAMPLE--COAL HANDLED APART FROM OTHER FREIGHT--ASSORTING THE CARS--THE TRANSFER HOUSE--CHARGES FOR THE USE OF CARS NOT PROMPTLY RETURNED TO THEIR HOME ROADS--THE HARD WORK OF THE YARDMASTER.
All the folk who come and go upon the railroad know the passenger stations. Few of them know the freight terminals. Yet it is from this last source that the railroad will derive the greater part of its revenue. The freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a single structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all its passengers, even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so to concentrate this part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal.
With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of trucking is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in order to eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the stimulus of competition, will establish freight stations at each point where any considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These stations will consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight (your traffic expert calls this "LCL," meaning "less than carload"), and wagon yards for carload lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses, one for inbound, the other for outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have to be ample for the accommodation of a host of trucks and drays as well as for the long rows of freight-cars.
In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be a freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its shipping-rooms and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American city there may be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So much for the general commodity freight. Then there are the special commodities.
Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see, after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic burden that increases yearly.
It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and the handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal scheme. It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic; and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves, elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.
So you see the railroad's freight terminal in any large city is like the fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together somewhere; and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city the railroad creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and outgoing--100 trains a day, perhaps--is gathered together and sorted with system and regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and the mail packages.
To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme, let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by which the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.
The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through Eastern New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth, lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many piers and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the smoky, busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight terminal. There are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight station at Jersey City (the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and another much larger plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper harbor, almost behind the Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now awaiting its greatest development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its ownership control of the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling line, 4 and 6 tracks wide, around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger terminal yards at Long Island City. This encircling line--the New York Connecting Railroad it is called--will be continued by a splendid bridge over the East River to an actual connection with the New Haven system reaching up into New England. When this is done, one of the bugaboos of the freightmen--the slow and ofttimes dangerous movement of barges and car-floats through the East River, past the entire length of Manhattan Island--will be ended. Greenville will become the distributing point for the bulk of New England freight that comes and goes from the south and the west through New York.
Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank well to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.
Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the neck of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main line from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark, united to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a gateway by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in reality. A big assorting or classification yard was built there for outgoing freight, and another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added and one of the great transfer houses of the country--but of that, more in a moment.
The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o'clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are closed and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy floats are being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville.