GIFT OF THE STRATEGY OF GREAT RAILROADS BY FRANK H. SPEARMAN WITH MAPS CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK:::::::::::::::: 1906 COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published November, 1904 TROW DIRECTORY WUNTINO AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK TO WILLIAM C. BROWN VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL AND THE LAKE SHORE RAILROADS 182286 CONTENTS PAGE THE VANDERBILT LINES. i THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM 21 THE HARRIMAN LINES 47 THE HILL LINES c 69 THE FIGHT FOR PITTSBURG -> 91 THE GOULD LINES . . 113 THE ROCK ISLAND SYSTEM , 133 THE ATCHISON I 55'" THE CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE AND ST. PAUL . .175- THE CHICAGO AND NORTHWESTERN . . . .195. THE REBUILDING OF AN AMERICAN RAILROAD . 213' THE FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD . . 235- THE EARLY DAY IN RAILROADING .... 263 LIST OF MAPS FACING PAGE The New York Central Lines ........ 12 The Pennsylvania Railroad System . . . . . . 24 The Harriman Lines 48 The Hill Lines ... V . V * ... . . 72 The Wabash System . . . . 96 The Gould Lines 120 The Rock Island System 144 The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway System . 1 60 The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway . . . 1 80 The Chicago and Northwestern Railway. . *. . . 204 The Chicago and Alton Railway . . .. .. .214 THE VANDERBILT LINES THE VANDERBILT LINES ON the lower river front of a little New Jersey town, flanked on the one hand by dreaming hulks of rheumatic towboats, and on the other by the decaying buildings of a past generation, stands a forsaken hotel. Its windows, framed once to cheer, stare wide and sightless upon the street, and its heavy oak doors swing crazily to every wind ; its floors creak uneasily under strange feet and its broken halls echo vacantly to living voices. Only bats and spiders and wood-worms seek its hospi- tality now; yet to the American railroad world this ruin ought to be of singular interest. The name of the place was once the Steamboat Hotel the genius of its owner breaking out even then in the title he chose for his inn. But the venture was never, at its best, all that its founder hoped. What now lends strange interest to the shabby landmark is, that out of the magic of its early days have risen stately palaces, lofty faades, a dynasty of American railway magnates, the splendor of Oriental dreams, and a system of transportation unapproached in the story of the 3 The Strategy of Great Railroads world; for under the roof of this New Brunswick ruin Mrs. Vanderbilt, it is said, saved the first eight hundred dollars that gave her husband, the Com- modore, his start in the transportation business. To-day the Vanderbilts are the merchant princes of the railway world. Yesterday, on their own lines, they handled 70,000 cars ; to-morrow it may be 100,000. When the founder of the system began in those early days to wrestle with problems of transportation, when he was getting his first taste of competition and rate wars and was carry- ing passengers by boat from New Brunswick to New York for sixpence, with their dinners (per- haps literally) thrown in the straight tariff being two shillings Spain still retained a vast American empire ; but the Vanderbilt dynasty, growing ever more powerful, has seen the last vestige of Spanish sovereignty wiped from the maps of two conti- nents. When the founder of the Vanderbilt for- tunes lay in swaddling clothes the house of Baring Bros. & Co. stood at the height of its power, and its founder, Sir Francis Baring, was writing his " Observations on the Founding of the Bank of England." When this young Cornelius Vander- bilt, the future Commodore, had reached the ob- scurity of his twenty-first year, Nathan Rothschild, already powerful, was spurring upon London with the secret of the French defeat at Waterloo ; The Vanderbilt Lines but the Vanderbilts have lived to see the name of many capitalists forgotten and the fame even of the greatest equalled by their own. Busied with its transportation concerns, the house saw the earliest alignment of those political movements in the United States that resulted in the most stupendous civil conflict of modern times. They stuck to their ferryboats and their junk rails when Beecher was the pulpit and Greeley and Bennett and Raymond were the press of this country. While still active in their busi- ness they have seen the rise of every existing political party, and they may easily survive the obsequies of the last of them as they stand to-day. In the stage-coach and the canal mule they met and overcame the threatening competition of fifty years ago; and their forces would face to-morrow with equal steadiness a billion-dollar invasion of their railroad territory. They alone, in all the railroad world of to-day, go back, owners and managers in unbroken succession, of the tele- phone, the cable, and the telegraph. Nor in all that time have they ever wrecked a railroad or maintained a poor one. The Vanderbilts are not, of choice, fighters; they have been conservative and well-balanced merchants. No other family can lay claim to titles such as theirs to great and honorable achieve- 5 The Strategy of Great Railroads ment as masters of transportation. To meet ob- jection let it at once be conceded that the meaning we attach to these adjectives is relative. But if we consider a moment, what other combination in industrial enterprise can boast a more colossal and creditable monument than the New York Central lines ? Aside from their remarkable history, Vanderbilt affairs are of present moment in American railroad control because they are so powerful both in the extent of their holdings and the character of them. A map of the New York Central lines is start- ling. At first glance the spread of their ramifica- tions would seem to cover the United States. There are in the various systems under this con- trol 1 2,000 miles of railroad ; but these figures do not tell all. It must be remembered that a Vanderbilt line is always a good line. If they buy a streak of rust and first and last they have bought many they make a good railroad of it. The outcast youngster is fumigated, scrubbed, and properly clothed before he is allowed to take his place at the foot of the Vanderbilt table, with the aristocratic New York Central and the emotionless Lake Shore. The acquiring of the Nickel Plate years ago, and that of the Lake Erie and Western very recently, are cases in point. Moreover, how shall the mere mileage of 6 The Vanderbilt Lines any system reckon in comparison with New York City terminals that are in themselves equal in value to whole divisions of roads spread over desert stretches ? It is asserted by an alert pas- senger department, and no doubt with truth, that more than one-half the people of the United States live in the territory covered by the Vanderbilt lines; certainly the people within their territory are the active half of the country. Vanderbilt steamboats plough the great lakes from end to end with the speed and with the capacity of freight trains many times enlarged ; and their rails, ignor- ing political boundaries, are factors in the trans- portation systems of Canada. Vanderbilt lines are powerful in New England, and they make their rates over their own roads at Toronto, at London, and at Montreal. Their cars and their boats may be found side by side at the Straits of Mackinac, and their roads stretch thence in un- broken joints to the Mississippi, at St. Louis in Missouri and at Cairo in Illinois. They intercept the Illinois River at Peoria; they tap the Ohio River at its starting point with a road that earns $68,000 a mile, and strike it again and again now at Wheeling, at Cincinnati, and at Louisville and they abandon it only at its mouth. If to this map the spheres of Vanderbilt influ- ence are added we should be compelled to annex 7 The Strategy of Great Railroads the territory of the whole Northwest with the Chicago and Northwestern system and its branches of 8,000 miles spreading as far west as Wyoming, penetrating the Black Hills, and pushing docks from Marquette to Duluth into Lake Superior. Happily, however, and contrary to popular im- pression, the Northwestern is not a Vanderbilt line, their interests in it being only those of a moderate minority. Nevertheless, at our greatest inland railroad gateway, Chicago, three of the most powerful lines of the Vanderbilt system re- ceive the traffic oyf the Northwest from every road of importance and exchange for it their commodi- ties from the dense territory on the Atlantic sea- board. And notwithstanding the immense ton- nage delivered to the New York Central lines by their Western and Northwestern connections, the great system gives, in turn, to each of them a ton- nage materially greater in amount than it receives demonstrating eloquently the resources of the territory that it serves. Paradoxical as it may be, it is true that the Van- derbilt lines east of the Chicago gateway are too strong to own, or at least to grant exclusive favors to, any one line into the West or Northwest. The great transportation capacity of the Michigan Central, the Lake Shore, and the Big Four means that they must receive from, as well as give to, 8 The Vanderbilt Lines connecting lines a huge volume of freight. The traffic the Vanderbilt lines exchange with the St. Paul road, for example, is far too large to be dis- turbed by any exclusive interchange at Chicago, and it is this particular feature of traffic inter- change that bobs up at every step in railroad con- solidation to disturb the dreams of railroad kings. The Alton, for instance, may be considered the natural link in the Harriman lines to Chicago, but when can the Union Pacific afford to ignore what the Northwestern road has to offer, if treated fairly ? Mr. Hill is a director of the Erie road, but he could hardly venture to stop Burlington interchange of traffic with the Lake Shore and the Michigan Central. The truth is, that which people continually see in the railroad sky is consolidation, and there are periodical outbursts of alarm at the menace of rail- road monoply. What people do not realize is that the country all the while is growing faster than the railroads; that it is constantly ahead of all successful transportation combinations, and that railroad consolidation is only a reflection of the country's development in every other direction. The New York Central lines, because they are made up of some of the oldest railroads in the country, afford many interesting data on the ques- tion of consolidation, since first and last they are 9 The Strategy of Great Railroads all consolidations. Their beginning goes back to the New York Central Railroad, seventeen miles long, in 1831 ; but the most advanced anti-mon- opoly champion of 1904 could hardly stand for separate lines of railroad in Kansas, much less in New York State, seventeen miles long. The de- velopment of the richest country in the world that covered by the Vanderbilt rails has always forced the investments of the house ahead even of its ambitions. The problem of the New York Central lines has never been so much to secure business by taking it from competitors as to pro- vide for the volume that has naturally fallen to their share. Thus the study ever foremost in the system, growing so fast and so unwieldly, has been the railroad problem of operating the handling of the traffic. The proper fitting to its place of each extension and each newly acquired line in a railroad system such as this is in itself a brain-racking matter. A concourse of the railroad presidents of such a com- bination becomes a domestic congress acting as a committee of the whole, in which measures for the well-being of each branch of the system are considered and on which the resources of the keenest railroad intellects are brought to meet the exigencies of each case. In the country where railroad operating has 10 The Vanderbilt Lines been brought to so high a degree of excellence as in this it is impossible to award the credit for its development to any one railroad system. Each has its particular achievements, and in operation one or two have particularly high reputations. Of the Vanderbilt interests, however, it must be said that either they have been exceptionally lucky or exceptionally wise in attracting to themselves a type of executive men who are always bigger than anything laid down in railroad books. " System " is recognized pretty generally to-day as a requi- site in the successful conduct of any business; but successful men, better than others, understand the grave danger that lies in system. No railroad can afford to let any system of operation ossify on it. In reality, system in any business is but a necessary evil, and the best system is tearing down all the time as well as building up. Herein the New York Central lines show to an unusual degree their power in the transportation world. That adherence to rules which under small men paralyzes a railroad's activities becomes under the Vanderbilt staffs a code elastic enough to cover an emergency rather than rigid enough to cause one. The heart of the Vanderbilt lines is the New York Central; but in its operation it is never for q moment forgotten that "system" was made foi the New York Central and not the New York ii The Strategy of Great Railroads Central for system. The New York Central lines breathe through the Lake Shore road; but the Lake Shore code of operation is most surprising in its flexibility and its easy adaptation to the one supreme end of getting results. That which may have seemed good railroading on the Lake Shore when these words are written may seem poor rail- roading by the time they are printed. Every day almost the viewpoint changes to meet new con- ditions, and every day from the outposts of the New York Central lines letters go to headquar- ters from trained observers high executive offi- cials bearing a heading that is always the same : THE SITUATION We feel that wjTget news in the daily press; so we do. But as to the special news that bears continually on the interests of the New York Central lines, one should see these private daily journals. The men that write them are past- masters in the school of journalism and draw sala- ries beyond the dreams of editors. Every day their articles bear the one insistent title : THE SITUATION As shifting as the sands of the Mississippi, un- certain as the freaks of fortune, and at times as startling as a political revolution is this daily busi- ness situation. The millions of people in the 12 V QF'TW UNIVERSITY OF THE NEW ' 8 C RAL LINES. The Vanderbilt Lines grain-producing territory of the Missouri River country and the Mississippi Valley are, or ought to be, vitally interested in the question of Gulf transportation for their export grain, but they know nothing about the roads that supply their Gulf outlet; not so, however, the Vanderbilts. From month to month, week to week if need be, they know the exact physical condition of every road to the Gulf of Mexico their own rivals in the transportation of grain to the seaboard. If a Gulf road is so poor in condition and equipment as to be harmless the fact is known at Forty- second Street in New York, and every step to better it is there carefully noted. The rise and fall, the growth and decay of every American in- dustry, if it bears even collaterally on railroad in- terests, is malted by the New York Central lines. Grain, for instance, is their most important east- bound commodity, and Chicago is a great thor- oughfare for the grain traffic. Grain is fifty per cent. one-half of the entire eastbound business of the Lake Shore road from Chicago; yet so in- credible are the industrial activities of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that this enormous item is but nine per cent, of the total business of the Lake Shore. However, 200,000,000 bushels of grain pass through the Chicago gateway in a single year. 13 The Strategy of Great Railroads In the development of this business Chicago elevators have become of huge importance. It is these enormous and picturesque piles, whose pro- portions mark the skylines of the Chicago sunset, that have been for years a compelling factor in grain transportation. They have stood during a generation as a monument of Chicago industrial enterprise, and but a few years ago the last of them were being built with the bribe of big bonuses to contractors for their rapid completion, and the struggle of men against the elements to make these huge receptacles ready within an imperative limit has been the subject of stirring romance. Within recent years a Chicago road in condemn- ing for terminal purposes the site of a Chicago elevator was compelled in court to cover the ground with gold. To-day it is harAy too much to say that could the railroad have waited it might in time have acquired the site so far as its value for elevator purposes is concerned for the taxes. Chicago has an elevator storage capacity of 50,000,000 bushels of grain the regular houses 37,000,000 bushels, and the grain "hospitals," where grain is dried and cleaned or mixed for grades, 13,000,000 bushels. Within recent years there have been as high as 30,000,000 bushels of grain in storage in Chicago. No more impres- sive example of the daily readjustment of traffic 14 The Vanderbilt Lines conditions can be had than in the story of the downfall of the elevators in the economy of trans- portation. Two years ago these elevators held 12,000,000 bushels; last year their store had shrunk to 9,000,000 bushels ; to-day it is 4,000,- ooo bushels. The fate of the elevator is a revela- tion of the pitiless movement of The Situation. There is quite as much grain as ever, but pros- perity has so intrenched the Western farmer that he is no longer compelled to sell on the day that he threshes out his crop. Moreover, the constant trend in railroad affairs is to transport commodi- ties without rehandling. In grain this means an important economy to the shipper, inasmuch as storage, insurance, and delay are thereby done away with. The reading public may or may not be familiar^ith these constantly changing phases of the industrial world; but by the New York Central lines each of them is marked as impas- sively and as accurately as a doctor at a sick-bed notes a rising or a sinking pulse. In another way the perfecting of the operating of modern railroad systems has made of Americans very notably a hand-to-mouth people. The last generation laid in its supplies in the fall for the winter; this generation buys from day to day. The country merchant bought then twice a year ; he buys now twice a week. Why carry stock 15 The Strategy of Great Railroads when trains run so often and it has been made so easy to get goods ? If within a hundred miles of his jobbers he hardly takes the time to write a letter; he telephones. The travelling man no longer makes a sixty-day trip. He sees his trade once a week or once in two weeks, and covers three or four towns in a day. We become thus wholly dependent for the necessities of life on the masters of transportation, and because we lean on them more and more the slightest break in their facilities becomes each year a more serious matter. Again, such a break causes most unlooked-for changes in the whole situation of supply and demand. The anthracite coal strike caused distress to millions of people who depended for fuel on hard coal. But the railroads are like ants; taking no^account of damage they set at once about repairing it. Soft-coal roads found in The Situation an oppor- tunity to exploit their fuels, with the result that, a year later, boats laden with anthracite coal could not find room in Chicago to unload their car- goes their docks being already piled high with hard coal for which there were no customers : the railroad had shown too easy an escape from an- thracite annoyance and expense. Prosperity gives the operating officer even se- verer tests. In the high-tide periods of business The Vanderbilt Lines every weak spot in the operating department makes itself felt. This is the moment in which reputations take wings, and it is in crises such as these that the Vanderbilt lines have not been found wanting. Their operation suggests at once the precision of a military discipline. What is most striking is that in their code the stiffness of the martinet is wholly absent. The operating officer of such lines as the New York Central and the Lake Shore has his battalions in the motive power, the car equipment, and the division staffs that are under him, and he handles all with an absolute authority. The car and the train movements of his system lie every morning tabulated before him, and this man and his like become, in effect, the field marshals of our daily bread. He moves every day thirty, forty, fifty thousand cars of freight. He divines from his frequent reports the hard-pressed spots in the far-flung lines of his train movements, and with his reserves massed he strengthens his divisions wherever weak spots develop. Nor are these figures of speech in any degree fanciful ; they are as hard, as practical as possible. It is no uncommon thing for midnight orders to empty roundhouses at Buffalo, Utica, or Syracuse and hea"d a battery of New York Cen- tral engines westward to forestall a blockade at a 17 The Strategy of Great Railroads Lake Shore terminal. If the pressure is reversed Lake Shore motive power is thrown with equal celerity into the fight to strengthen car movement on the New York Central. The plan sounds simple, but within very recent years railroad sys- tems of high repute in operating have been com- pletely tied up because motive power to move trains was lacking on one division, or on one road of the system, while on another motive power was standing idle in the roundhouses. Prosperity has for three years put a freight traffic strain on American railroads comparable to a steady World's Fair pressure in passenger movement. The weakest link in the operating chain of all our roads has become so apparent un- der the test that a competent operating officer has need to say to a railroad owner only this : Show me your terminal facilities and I will give you the earning power of your road. So precisely is this true that there have been times when the entire activities of the Vanderbilt system were restricted to the facilities of their intermediate terminals when the effective power of so great a railroad as the Lake Shore has been very strictly limited by two freight yards, that at Elkhart, Indiana, and that at Collinwood, Ohio. Hence it is that, turning the attention of railroad operators from the lessening of grades and curves, the struggle 18 The Vanderbilt Lines to-day is a constant endeavor to enlarge terminals, and a Vanderbilt requisition for a new freight yard frequently calls for a million dollars. Their lines show to-day, with those of the Pennsylvania road, the most interesting examples in the world of terminal improvement, the highest present strat- egy in railroad competition. A slight consideration of these besetting " feat- ures " of the Eastern railroad situation the pres- sure of traffic and operating problems on the various lines as they now stand will make clear the apparent apathy, so far as new fields of con- trol are concerned, of the most powerful interests in the American railway world. It is more than true that they all have their hands full to keep pace with the pressure of the situation as it is reflected in the bursting growth of the country. That they must meet its demands is evident, and to do this may well, as it does, engage all their abilities without listening to the promptings of a wider ambition. THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM LAY a hand over a map of the Pennsylvania lines, and the circulation of the blood through the one suggests the circulation of traffic through the other. When Garrett extended the Baltimore and Ohio westward he saw only St. Louis and Chicago, and ran nothing but trunk lines. The Pennsylvania System is so fed and strengthened, division by division, that each link is in itself al- most a self-sustaining unit. On its intricate map each branch has a particular reason for being; each has been definitely thought out and added because it has a function. Capillaries are as essen- tial to the circulation of the blood as arteries, and one great source of Pennsylvania Railroad pros- perity lies in its capillaries. The system covers the industrial heart of the continent. North of the Potomac and the Ohio its lines are strong at all traffic points from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic seaboard. But the Pennsylvania Railroad, in its essential strength, stands for the State of Pennsylvania, to which, as a State, an industrial pre-eminence has so long 23 The Strategy of Great Railroads been accorded that the country has become de- cently resigned to its marvels. Its anthracite coal alone would make it the richest of our possessions ; its soft coals and cokes, its iron and gas, have made the Pittsburg district first in the world as a traffic centre. Pittsburg itself is a Pennsylvania Road fortress. Its river benches are lined with steel plants and factories, and its river banks are revetted, tier upon tier, with Pennsylvania siding tracks. Penn- sylvania trains are made up under the smoke of its rolling mills and converters, and Pennsylvania shifting engines ceaselessly patrol its industrial camps. There is but one Pittsburg; its locomo- tives are shipped to Siberia, its bridges span the rivers of Africa and .of India, and the battles of Russia and Japan are fought behind its armor- plate. Iron and steel thus become heavy factors in Pennsylvania Railroad freight. But even steel tonnage sinks into obscurity when put beside that of coal. East of Pittsburg, in 1903, the road moved seventy-seven million tons of coal and coke. The history of the Pennsylvania Road is in a way the history of the State. The story goes back to the crossing of the Alleghany Mountains by means of waterways and inclined planes. Then comes a Titan, an American engineer, John Edgar 24 . WISCONSIN I C H I G A I ST. CHICAGO!/ V lurlington iLaHarpe (eokuk , Warsaw L I Decatur Crawfo , FARRINGTON 3end _ TOLEDO st.K Vincennes lot Jefferson i New Albany Morrow CINCINNATI idison "LOUISVILLE MISSOURI K E N T U C I THE PENNSVLV li.koAl) SYSTEM. OF THE UNJYERSITr OF The Pennsylvania System Thomson, who runs the pioneer grades and spikes the iron rails clear across the summit of the Alle- ghanies. Thomson laid the foundations of the greatness that underlies the present Pennsylvania System ; he made it possible to move, as this road does, one million tons of freight in a single day on one American railroad. The Pennsylvania men of to-day would laugh if compared to Thom- son. "We are specialists," they say, "that is, pigmies. Thomson was great in everything operating, traffic, motive power, finance ; but most of all in organization." Tradition under such circumstances becomes an influence, and the Pennsylvania System has an unbroken tradition of nearly sixty years of suc- cessful railroading. Stress is laid most of all on organization, a legacy rounded out and bequeathed from management to management. Nor has any railroad speculator ever succeeded in seating him- self in the saddle of Pennsylvania affairs; for fifty-nine years the company's destinies have been controlled by its owners, the stockholders, and annually they have approved or disapproved its policies. In return, they have received what few American railway investors can boast a satis- factory return on their shares for every calendar year since 1846. It can hardly occasion surprise, then, that the Pennsylvania Railroad should enjoy 25 The Strategy of Great Railroads high credit; it has earned an international repu- tation for good faith. With a background of such united effort and a success so unusual it is not hard to understand why Pennsylvania standards and practice are held high among American railroads. In 1861 the Pennsylvania Road put the first steel fire-box under an American locomotive boiler. The Pennsyl- vania was the first of our roads to lay steel rails and the first, in 1 863, to lay Bessemer rails in this country. It was the first to use the air-brake and the signal block system. The Number One shop still standing at Altoona was the first, in 1873, to use an overhead crane. In 1852 the Pennsylvania Road moved 70,000 tons of freight in a year ; it now moves that much in an hour. It handled, then, half a million passengers in a year, now it cares for a hundred and twenty-three million. The system that once mustered fifty engines now counts 2 15,000 freight cars, and a single shop plant at Altoona turns out five new locomotives every week. This is high-pressure railroading. Pennsylvania plans need to be laid on an unexampled scale, for the reason that nowhere do precedents exist for its requirements. Moreover, peculiar difficulties at- tend the operating of the great Pennsylvania main line across the higher Alleghanies, where, the traffic 26 The Pennsylvania System being largely coal, the movement reaches a climax with the utmost regularity in November and March, remaining near the high mark during the winter months between. Thus the heavy move- ment comes against the elements when they are at their worst. If it could be shifted to July and August, when engines run at one hundred per cent. of their rating, no especial difficulty would be felt in mountain railroading; but when grades are to be climbed in winter storms, with engines running at fifty per cent, and sixty per cent, of their effec- tiveness, the problems become severe. At the best, operating cost under such condi- tions stands at the high point, and a railroad needs the most ample track and yard room if the charge is not to become excessive. In consequence, a continual effort is made to enlarge Pennsylvania facilities. An Altoona roundhouse cares for 250 locomotives every day, and a companion house has been built to take care of 300. The Altoono plant has shopped and repaired as many as 148 engines in a single month. The material triumphs of Pennsylvania man- agement are thus very considerable ; they do not, however, by any means engage all of its activities. Out of 1,200,000 railroad employees in this coun- try, over 1 53,000 are on the pay rolls of the Penn- sylvania System. Here is the heaviest moral 27 The Strategy of Great Railroads accountability put upon any existing railroad management. What of the employees ? When a man enters the Pennsylvania service he may at once protect himself with insurance benefits against sickness or accident, and the same agency which provides this health and accident insurance pays his family a full benefit for his death from any cause. The Pennsylvania em- ployee thus has offered to him the advantages of several insurance companies in one. This Relief Department, too, considered purely as insurance, enjoys advantages that take it quite out of com- parison with ordinary insurance ; for instance, the company pays all costs of its operation. Again, the weak feature of all fraternal insurance is its instability. But the relief insurance provided to Pennsylvania employees is backed by the entire responsibility of the company, a mere statement of whose assets would pale the figures that are the joy of the New York actuary. Beyond this, the retired employee belonging to the Relief Depart- ment receives his superannuation allowance wholly distinct from, and in addition to, a pension, which is likewise provided for all retired employees. The distinctive feature in this broadly conceived Pennsylvania Railroad Pension Fund is that the employee contributes nothing whatever to it ex- cept his years of faithful service to the railroad. 28 The Pennsylvania System The company pays the pension, without a tax or contribution of any sort from its employees, and rejoices to-day in one pensioner on its roll of honor ninety years old. Boys and men are in this way made to feel when they enter the service of the company that they become a part of it; that if they will train themselves to co-operate with others they may participate fully and person- ally in the company's success ; and that, after a career of faithful service, every man, from the president down to the laborer, will receive not as a charity but as a gratuity his life pension. The provisions for the care of this immense army of workers do not end here. Many Penn- sylvania employees are so situated in their duties that safe and convenient places for saving a por- tion of their wages are not within reach. The Pennsylvania Company thereupon turns every ticket agent on its lines into a depositary for employees' monthly savings, on which it pays to them three and a half per cent, interest. This Pennsylvania Employees' Savings Fund is like- wise conducted without one dollar of expense, direct or indirect, to its fortunate depositors. It is not intended as a place for the investment of the funds of employees, but for their savings for investment. A man may not deposit more than $1OO in any one month, nor keep above $5,000 29 The Strategy of Great Railroads on balance at any one time, and employees receiv- ing above $300 a month have been excluded from using it. But, notwithstanding these restric- tions, the aggregate deposits received since its founding in 1887 excee d ten millions of dollars, and since that time more than one million dollars of interest have been allowed to Pennsylvania Rail- road workers by the Savings Fund trustees. Moreover, six millions of dollars have been with- drawn by employees for homes and investments. So many safeguards mean a great deal of pains- taking thought at headquarters, and it comes as a surprise to learn that, in return for duties most exacting, Pennsylvania Railroad directors receive under the company charter no compensation; but in the State of Pennsylvania no position is held in higher esteem than that of director of the Pennsylvania Railroad; it is a badge of honor to which no citizen is too distinguished to aspire. These directors represent, in the his- tory of the road, a continuous line of able finan- ciers, and are aided in their work by four addi- tional directors, who serve as vice-presidents : S. M. Prevost, head of the traffic ; Charles E. Pugh, head of operations ; Captain Green, in charge of the general finances, and Samuel Rea, specially charged with the New York, tunnel extension ; and they are men who command a peculiar loy- 30 The Pennsylvania System alty from their subordinate heads. Indeed, the officers and executives of the Pennsylvania Rail- road have been to a remarkable degree all-round men. From its roll of engineers alone may be named J. Edgar Thomson, Edward Miller, Will- iam B. Foster, George B. Roberts, A. J. Cassatt, Herman J. Lombaert, J. N. Du Barry, W. H. Brown, Strickland Kneass, and Samuel Rea. Vice-President McCrea, in charge of all company affairs west of Pittsburg, is also of this type of men not alone engineer, but thoroughly trained railroad man. Thomas A. Scott and Frank Thomson, though not engineers, were everything else that American railroad men can be, and their chapters in the road's story and their services to the country in the Civil War are national chapters. The continual problem before all of these men has been to keep pace with the transportation needs of the most highly developed and most active industrial portion of the United States. Pennsylvania management of necessity stands in high light in the worlds both of transportation and finance, and because silent under controversy and abuse it is often reproached with being careless of public opinion ; yet silence under clamor does not needfully imply insensibility to criticism. The situation of the present management of the Penn- sylvania is rather that of men under the pressure The Strategy of Great Railroads of serious affairs, and endeavoring day by day to pass for the best on very difficult questions. In particular, Mr. Cassatt, as the executive front to- day of Pennsylvania interests, has been hotly as- sailed as a disturber of public tranquillity. There seems to have been a well-considered attempt to place him widely before the American imagi- nation as a sensational type of railroad chauffeur driving a motor-car down the railroad highway at an insensate speed, reckless of the interests of investors, the opinion of the public, and the com- mon rights of property. But to set him forth in this light has called for the most complete distor- tion of the man as he really is, and the mere sight of this Nestor of American railroad presidents wholly dispels such a conception. A grave man and somewhat spare in his height, with the slight stoop of the careful thinker ; easily quiet but perfectly responsive. In his presence no atmosphere of "drive," hasty action, or confused thought suggests itself. This is a very safe man, one reflects instinctively, deliberate in considering, slow of judgment, patient in decision, but capable when action must come of a tremendous initiative and follow-through. The source of such strength is apparent in the man's manner; Mr. Cassatt has the simplicity of Lincoln. 32 Tho Pennsylvania System One could easily associate this executive chief of the Pennsylvania Road with a farm, but not so easily with an automobile. Met on a highway in Iowa, one would expect to find Mr. Cassatt superintending the planting of a six-thousand- acre field of his own corn. The impression under those circumstances would be that such a man would make a good governor of the State, and no surprise would be felt to learn on inquiry that he had been governor. Such a model farm owner, if asked about the adjustment of hoppers on the battery of corn-planting machines lining up then to cross the field, would explain with genuine interest that he had adjusted the planters himself after they left the factory so that the hopper should deposit in each hill precisely four kernels of corn, and not occasionally three or five. Or if you remarked on the sleekness of his hun- dred teams of mules, his appreciation of the com- ment would lead him to speak of the popular misconception concerning the mule as an evil- tempered laborer, and as being less trustworthy than the horse. But Mr. Cassatt's cares and responsibilities do not He among corn-planters nor along Iowa high- ways. They have followed him for some years as the head of one of the most important railroads in existence, and he stands with his associates in 33 The Strategy of Great Railroads this management as trustee of an investment so huge that figures lose their force in attempting to express its measure. The Pennsylvania System controls nearly one hundred and fifty corporations mostly railroad companies east of Pittsburg alone. About the time Mr. Cassatt took the presi- dency very grave questions became apparent on the horizon of Pennsylvania Railroad affairs. It was evident that the day could be named when the traffic of that large portion of our industries dependent on the Pennsylvania System for trans- portation would swamp its existing facilities. The situation needed to be met by very extensive additions to track and terminal facilities, and plans were at once laid to provide them. But the day of congestion came ; the day of a traffic flood so terrific as to burst in an hour from the control and restraint of the highest transportation facili- ties in the world. Strangely enough, the very measures taken to meet these wholly new industrial conditions have been made the particular object of hostile com- ment. There is nothing whatever unnecessarily radical, nothing savoring in the least of the revo- lutionary in the present Pennsylvania better- ments. The simple truth behind them is that for this country's industrial expansion so great an 34 The Pennsylvania System artery of our transportation system must be con- tinually enlarged. Nor is this policy new in Pennsylvania Rail- road history; it has prevailed for fifty years. Thirty-five years ago the Pennsylvania Road took on itself the enormous obligations of the leases and investments of that portion of its present sys- tem known as the "Lines west of Pittsburg." There was at the time abundance of criticism for a step declared to be rash and unwarranted ; but will any stand forth to-day to declare that the western terminus of the Pennsylvania should have been fixed at Pittsburg? Thirty-three years ago the Pennsylvania Road assumed control of the United Railroads of New Jersey, by which to- day it reaches New York City, and with their control it assumed the obligation of a ten per cent, dividend on the stock. For many years that investment steadily showed a deficit in direct results to that division of railroad, but is there one to-day to call this an unwarranted investment? The connection at Philadelphia by way of the Delaware River bridge with the West Jersey Sea- shore System was provided at a cost of more than two and a half millions at a time when the presi- dent and none of his staff believed it could be made to pay for years; yet the investment paid from the start, and if a slight extra fare were 35 The Strategy of Great Railroads not imposed that gateway would be swamped with Atlantic City passenger traffic. The obligations of the Pennsylvania manage- ment are toward its stockholders and the investors in its securities; but there is also a very definite obligation toward the millions of people of the West and Southwest, who live along thousands of miles of railroads connecting with or tributary to the Pennsylvania System, and find in it their sole gateway into New York City; and unless these people should still be compelled to change cars and baggage in Philadelphia the acquisition of the United Jersey roads must be justified, and it has by unanimous public opinion received such justification that the Pennsylvania's New York Division is now on an equal plane with the Penn- sylvania main line. Having solved these problems satisfactorily, a further grave question had for twenty years con- fronted the Pennsylvania management and been the cause of much anxious study. Should the Pennsylvania Railroad remain forever on the west side of the Hudson River? The question was not one to which an answer might lie open indefinitely. Only by immediate action could a passenger terminal in New York City be obtained short of a cost absolutely prohibitive. Should the Pennsylvania Railroad then not endeavor to 36 The Pennsylvania System improve upon the plans conceived by Pennsyl- vania forefathers ? Should it consent forever to discharge its New York passengers into ferry- boats and land them on the water-line of that city, or should it cross the Hudson River by bridge or tunnel and convey them to the centre of Manhattan Island? The consensus of opin- ion was that the Pennsylvania Road must ulti- mately land its passengers at New York, and without unnecessary ado it is making its Hudson River extension by tunnels; and Pennsylvania management will always stand justified in these immense betterments. , In considering Pennsylvania improvements, too, this fact must not be lost sight of: that the Penn- sylvania is a high-class passenger route. Its sys- tem accounts for one-sixth of the whole vast total of passengers carried by all our railroads. Between the seaboard cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, the necessities of this public service cannot be compared with those of any other in this country, because nowhere else is there such passenger traffic. Speed is, in effect, an American demand ; that safety must precede speed as effectively as human ingenuity can con- trive is a Pennsylvania maxim ; hence a million of dollars to remove one danger from a set of running tracks. Every minute of running time 37 The Strategy of Great Railroads between such cities becomes inestimably valu- able ; curvature and grade must be reduced to a minimum to lop off every possible sixty seconds between terminals, when coachload after coach- load and train after train of busy people follow one another. Track elevation through interme- diate cities helps vastly in this ; hence the extraor- dinary work at Newark, Elizabeth, and New Brunswick, the straightened line at Trenton, and the beautiful four-track stone-arch viaducts across the Delaware and the Raritan rivers. These bet- terments afford a steel highway practically level and straight from Broad Street in Philadelphia to Jersey City ; and at Jersey City even the Hudson River will come out of the account on the day when the Pennsylvania passenger steps from his coach in a Pennsylvania station at Seventh Ave- nue and Thirty-third Street in New York City, one block from Herald Square. What less may be said of the freight-traffic requirements on the main line of a railroad system which last year carried one-quarter of all freight tonnage moved by railroads in the United States ? In one year these Pennsylvania main line earnings from freight alone exceeded $116,000 a mile, and the total earnings exceeded $150,000 a mile. The present management has been com- pelled to build what is, in effect, a duplicate 38 The Pennsylvania System Pennsylvania road over the Alleghanies. Here, again, certain postulates come into the reckoning. If one is to undertake four-tracking in a moun- tainous country one must be at least sure that his railroad is in its final resting place ; the cost of shifting such an alignment afterward would bankrupt a kingdom. All grades then remaining and all curvature must remain forever. To handle this enormous freight traffic double- tracked and low-grade lines have everywhere been built around congested terminals. The big " Tren- ton cut-off," branching from the main line at Trenton with a double, low-grade track, strikes westward, leaving Philadelphia out of its course. Twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia it unites again, like a traffic river, with the main line. Again and again this is done ; at Pittsburg, at Altoona, these lines are skilfully run completely around overloaded yards. Opposite Harrisburg the west bank of the Susquehanna has been pre-empted, and a new Pennsylvania road is being built with a double-track stone-arch bridge, all its own, near Columbia; and from the crest of the Alleghanies it will soon be possible for the Pennsylvania Com- pany to send freight to tide-water against grades no- where heavier than sixteen feet to the mile. Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania engineering has built to itself a monument that will last with the monu- 39 The Strategy of Great Railroads ments of time. At Rockville, just above the capi- tal city, they have thrown across the Susquehanna a four-track bridge of monolithic stone seven- eighths of a mile long and stepped in graceful arches as enduring as the mountains that look down on the beautiful river. Bridges, like men, have their tables of mortality ; but in the expect- ancy of life accorded to American bridges here is a structure to which no limit of years may be assigned ; it has been built to last forever. At Petersburg, up the blue Juniata, the line forks again, and a new double-track road has been built along the route of the early State public works. It follows the old canal to Hollidaysburg and the " Portage " railroad up the eastern slope of the Alleghanies, flowing, so to say, into the main line again at Gallitzin, where a group of double-track and single-track tunnels take the lines across the Alleghany divide. From Gallitzin to Pittsburg, down the west slope of the Alleghanies, the original location was considered bold, but the four-tracking has involved work that is gigantic. Where the Conemaugh River bursts through Chestnut Ridge it has cut an exquisite defile known as the Packsaddle. Narrow and forbidding to the construction en- gineer, the Packsaddle stands like a defiance flung by the mountains. Here the Pennsylvania con- 40 The Pennsylvania System tractors have gone in with drills and giant pow- der, and with thousands of men they have liter- ally torn from the cheek of the mountain a shelf wide enough to carry two new running tracks. Before entering Packsaddle, at Bolivar, the lines fork, the low-grade " West Pennsylvania " tracks following the river through Packsaddle to Pitts- burg, while the main line, with its four tracks, rises through Packsaddle and, running across country, strikes the Monongahela River near Braddock's Fields. The traveller then realizes what the Pennsylvania and its engineers have accomplished. Where nature conflicts with the railroad operations it has been conquered; yet, while riding upon a road without a superior in any country, the most inspiring scenery surrounds him. However, unparalleled engineering feats are not the greatest chapter in present-day Pennsyl- vania management. When Mr. Cassatt assumed executive control of the Pennsylvania System, he found freight rates from end to end of the United States steeped in discrimination. By traffic man- agers the last pretence of justice in the sale of freight transportation had been abandoned, and Mr. Cassatt, coming in as President of the Pennsylvania, found railroads under the club of the big shippers. The instrument of this rate discrimination has The Strategy of Great Railroads always been the secret rebate : the upbuilding of one shipper's fortunes at the expense of another, the curse of traffic management, and the most try- ing problem in railroad affairs. It has been preached upon, inveighed against, and legislated against, all quite in vain. Like the robber baron of the Rhine, the American industrial baron has long laid under tribute the transportation lines of America; the big buyer of transportation has taken the American road by the throat and forced it to deliver. To make the situation more cheer- ful, the railroad has been held by orators and jurists as responsible for the demoralized situation and for the upbuilding of trusts and monopolies. Though railroads have been parties to secret rebates, it would be difficult to show that they have always been willing parties. Escape from a situation confessedly intolerable had been sought for years; but escape seemed impossible. The big shipper dictated his terms, and the small ship- per and the railroad paid the bills. Congress passed laws of no avail. The courts of the United States had been repeatedly appealed to, but while conditions grew steadily worse they sat with folded arms behind the broad conclusion that transportation was a private commodity which might be sold to one man at one price and to his neighbor at another price. 42 The Pennsylvania System It has been denied that such is the case, but there are facts that put clearly on record the atti- tude of American courts during this period of transportation anarchism. In 1879 Mr. Cassatt, then vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in charge of traffic, testified in the equity suits brought by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, known as the Standard Oil Inquiries. He told the court without evasion or reservation the exact relations between the Standard Oil Company and the Pennsylvania Road, and his testimony thus became an official record, subject to the use of every Pennsylvania shipper who might seek in court to recover excessive freight charges made upon his particular shipments. Must it not be inferred that if the attitude of American courts promised relief to the small shipper the Pennsyl- vania Road, with Mr. Cassatt's testimony on record, would have been deluged with suits to recover excessive charges? But were any such suits brought*? Not one. Counsel understood too well the hopelessness in that day of a legal appeal to advise any client to proceed against a railroad on the ground of unjust discrimination. Twenty years later Mr. Cassatt, drawn against his strong personal inclination out of his retire- ment, was elected to the presidency of the Penn- sylvania Railroad System ; but whoever else had 43 The Strategy of Great Railroads forgotten Standard Oil and 1879, Mr. Cassatt had not forgotten. He determined that rate dis- crimination in the United States, the impover- ishment of the investor, the ruin of the honest shipper, and the cause of so many railroad receiv- erships should cease, and to the task of putting it down he and his associates addressed themselves ; and after public prints and public speakers had shouted themselves hoarse ; after Congress had failed in solving the problem, as it has always failed ; after the courts of the United States had failed, as they have always failed, this railroad man and his associates took the abuse in hand and stamped it out of American railroading. It was the community of interest plan evolved by Mr. Cassatt that did away with secret freight rates and rebates. To accomplish this, the Penn- sylvania, acting with other heavy owners in the railroad field, acquired large interests in the weaker roads, until, with co-operation, courage, and pa- tience the trunk lines, one and all, were brought into a phalanx against the common enemy. This is the record of Alexander J. Cassatt. He has made unjust discrimination in railroad traffic a thing of the past. He, largely, has made it possible for the public freight rate to stalk abroad day or night, unarmed anywhere in the United States. The traditional Captain of In- 44 The Pennsylvania System dustry to-day that should attempt to dictate terms to a trunk-line manager would be laughed out of the traffic offices. Mr. Cassatt has fought the fight of the courts, of Congress, of the small ship- per, and of common honesty until it has become possible for an American to ship a single carload of freight as cheaply as a trust can ship a thou- sand; and when the accounts in American rail- road history are made up this fact cannot be overlooked, distorted, or forgotten. Out of a rate situation so disastrous and forbid- ding, it will hardly be believed that any good could have come, yet one signal good has come. In reducing the income of American roads, low rates have forced operating departments to ex- haust their ingenuity in railroad economies. With the income painfully curtailed, every con- ceivable retrenchment has been found necessary until saving has become in American railroading a science. In operation it has put the American road ahead of all others in the world, although a comparison with English roads will show that everything the American road buys costs more than the English road pays. A single exception may be thought to occur in the matter of coal. Undoubtedly the Pennsylvania Road has cheaper coal than its English cousins, but the American roads, as a whole, have coal as high in cost as the 45 The Strategy of Great Railroads British. To reflect that our grain to-day is moved at a rate of two and a half mills per ton-mile, that a ton is hauled forty miles for ten cents, is to force the conviction that traffic-rate demoraliza- tion has after all brought some compensation. Without this experience American roads might to-day be on a level in operative cost with Eng- lish roads, doing a much smaller business and not affording our country that industrial advance to which low rates have contributed so much. THE HARRIMAN LINES WA S H IN GIT N *C" ON / ""* * >\. ... .-x^" VelLLOwiroH i NlATION AL THK II A I D A r T A j S D A K N G NEBRASKA COUNCIL BLUFFS WORTH M EX I C LINES. THE HARRIMAN LINES IN the years of his reign Edward H. Harri* man is youngest among American masters of transportation. It is scarcely more than six years February l, 1898 since the reorganization of the Union Pacific was completed and Mr. Harri- man and his friends took final and formal posses- sion of it. Within that time he has risen to the very first rank of the powers in American rail- roading. What, however, is of more vital matter, the record is that Harriman railroading has been uni- formly good railroading. It will be difficult to point a case in which, in Mr. Harriman's hands, a railroad or its public has suffered hardship, and the instances are marked in which the immediate benefits of his control have been, to both, enor- mous. It is not, then, merely that Mr. Harriman is the owner of seventeen thousand miles of rail- road ; it is, rather, because every mile of road he owns stands for good railroading, that he is worth estimating. He took over the Alton when it had aged like a puff-ball and was ready to dis- 49 The Strategy of Great Railroads solve into dust. For years it had been famed as an earner, and where seven and eight per cent, dividends were treasured as an annual return Alton stock was ranked with things celestial. Unfortunately these really unusual distributions were effected by indefensible economies. Rail- roading should occupy at least as high an indus- trial a plane as farming, and a farmer that should strip his land yearly of its total produce and give nothing back to the soil would hardly rank as a thrifty husbandman. Good farmers keep up their machinery, buildings, and fences; they fertilize occasionally; but the Alton fertilizing was put wholly into dividends, and Mr. Harriman bought a road that had not alone let bridges, tracks, and rolling stock run down, but had sold even terminal rights, while distributing eight per cent, to stock- holders. Without delay or hesitation he set about making of the Alton the best possible road of its class, and its class is the first. He has overhauled the system completely, and put it physically a little in advance of every competitor. To instance : For thirty years the Alton had been strong in a territory possessing the richest coal deposits in Illinois, and not until the Harriman forces took hold of the road had it ever developed a coal business. Not only has the new Alton been equipped with what it never before had, cars and 50 The Harriman Lines motive power to handle this traffic, but its engi- neers in rebuilding the line show the lowest maximum grades from the Illinois coal fields into Chicago. Beginning with nothing, the new owners have within five years developed a coal traffic that already ranks second in volume among the soft-coal roads of its territory. While, in a legal sense, a railroad may be quite within its rights in declining to provide for the handling of such traffic, deeming it of small profit, and may legally decline to expend earn- ings in reducing grades and maintaining right of way in a word, in improving its facilities for do- ing business the public dependent on such a road for transportation will feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are entitled to industrial opportunities as good as those enjoyed by more fortunate neighbors : that their railroad should be kept in the front rank just as their homes and streets and farms are kept ; and the attitude has a show of reasonableness. These are points which the new policy of the Alton has sought to meet, and that its local public appreciates the effort is shown by the steady development of industries of every sort along its line. Out of a very heavy passenger traffic on the Alton ninety per cent, originates in its local territory. Under Harriman management bridges have been eliminated, curves The Strategy of Great Railroads cut out, heavy steel rails laid, new car equipment provided, and motive power has been made to conform to the highest standard. Mr. Harriman has made of the Alton practically a speeding track across Illinois and Missouri, and some con- ception of the undertaking may be had when the fact is stated that to do this has cost him $ 1 9,000 a mile more money, mile for mile, than has gone into improvements on any other portion of his railroad holdings. What this means to that pub- lic which must depend on the Alton for its rail- road facilities is a part of the Harriman railroad record. Alton shippers can get rates that put their products on an equal basis in competitive markets because the road can do business against all comers. But Mr. Harriman controls also the Union Pacific and its tremendously powerful California ally, the Southern Pacific, as well as the Alton and the Kansas City Southern. Whenever freight is to be moved to or from the Pacific Coast, Har- riman lines, from their long intrenchment and their vigorous condition, are first among those to be reckoned with ; and in the big system that Mr. Harriman has built up they all group strategi- cally around that road the very name of which, in the story of the American railroad, is a name to eronjure with the Union Pacific. Of all American roads the Union Pacific has 52 The Harriman Lines traditions the most spectacular. Its undertaking involved the daring of visionary men. The con- ception of such a road was among the earliest of American dreams, and while its working out was a national pride it became also a national scandal. For nearly thirty years after being completed the Union Pacific was operated with varying for- tunes. In that sensational period it had shown great earning power but had been at times badly managed. It had played a part never to be for- gotten in the development of the West ; but its strength was bowed under an insupportable bur- den of Government debt and Government domi- nation, and the sins of its builders were visited a thousandfold upon its hapless head. It had opened to settlers vast regions of fertile country and brought a new world into touch with metro- politan centres and markets. In every section traversed by this earliest transcontinental line cities and towns had sprung up and prospered, and prosper to-day. The Union Pacific was the West of our pioneer generation, and neither the misfortunes of the one nor the triumphs of the other can ever be divorced ; indeed, the industrial and intellectual prosperity of the West is bound up in the story of the Union Pacific. Taking the historical trail of the explorer, the adventurer, and the Mormon of the early day, the 53 The Strategy of Great Railroads road followed the valley of the Platte, then a sandy waste and now an irrigated garden, far beyond the hundredth meridian, and pre-empted a railroad territory that under supportable con- ditions would have given it a position at all times impregnable. But its changing owners, busied with secondary schemes, allowed valuable local territory to be filched from it by the Burlington and the Northwestern, leaving the Union Pacific to stretch its way from the Missouri without one good feeder where it might have had a dozen. With these changing fortunes, the Southern Pacific, California ally of the Union Pacific and its sole outlit to the coast its absolute depend- ence for through traffic became gradually a covert enemy, and building its own lines to the South, diverted traffic as much as possible from the patient Overland route. Left thus to the barest of its own resources, strong in its geograph- ical position and weak in every support that a railroad ought to count as strength, the Union Pacific struggled on until 1893, anc ^ a receiver- ship closed its first chapter. It was a strange chapter; nothing quite like it in all other Ameri- can railroading. But it is closed, and the men who, leading forlorn hopes, threw their fortunes, their health, their reputations into that thirty years' struggle will never be forgotten. Monuments to 54 The Harriman Lines their heroic enterprise dot the country between the sands of the Missouri and the coast of the Pacific. They laid the foundations of a com- monwealth in a wilderness. Perhaps the time had never come in all that period when it was possible to raise this prostrate Western giant to its place among American rail- roads. Many men had contemplated it; great men had at times had the road's management. Possibly, one and all, they shrunk from the hercu- lean task of acquiring the Southern Pacific in order that their property should not be hung up with a Western terminus in the Utah desert ; of a final adjustment of the Government debt; and of the rebuilding of the great road across the Rocky Mountains. At all events, in all of those thirty years no sufficient capitalist, no aggressive rail- road owner did grapple with the difficulties until Mr. Harriman, almost yesterday, laid his hands upon this tremendous property and made it the Prussia of his railroad empire. The Union Pacific had at the time sounded the depths of a financial crisis. For five years it had been in the hands of receivers. A lack of funds had cramped its natural effectiveness, and courts had divided its garments among warring creditors until it was reduced to the plight of a strong man stripped of everything. 55 The Strategy of Great Railroads The country, by an unfortunate coincidence, was in a condition almost as deplorable. Its in- dustries lay prostrate under the effects of the most far-reaching panic since 1873. Not a l ne was the monetary stringency acute ; for the first time since the Chicago Haymarket riots men had begun seriously to estimate the symptoms of dis- content among that class of our people most sus- ceptible to the influence of industrial agitators. In the railroad world troops had been called out to curb the violence of mobs ; in the political world new counsellors had arisen with doctrines so sudden and audacious that business men stood confounded. A great political party had sur- rendered completely to a leader who, with some fantastic show of success, urged his own candidacy for the Presidency of the United States on the strength of his explicit pledge that if elected he would do his utmost to debase the national cur- rency. With apprehension the keynote in finan- cial circles, business everywhere in paralysis, capital hiding in secret places, cash hoarded in safe-deposit vaults, and gold already at a colorable premium, Edward H. Harriman planned and laid the foundations for a movement that was almost at once to elevate him to a first place in the rail- road world. To reflect that this has all taken place within 56 The Harriman Lines ten years is to cast upon it the shadow of in- credibility. When the hour for such an under- taking was ripe Mr. Harriman had to look but five years ahead for justification of his venture. It is a commonplace that times of depression are the times to buy as those of prosperity are the times to sell. What men lack when the outlook is gloomy is the courage to make their convic- tions operative. It is not that other men do not realize such opportunities or that they do not see during periods of prosperity the coming of that inevitable day when, through monetary stress, good properties may be had for little price ; the difficulty is when the day comes that out of one thousand men who have foreseen it but one has the decision to back his judgment. Mr. Harri- man possessed the decision; that is why to-day, under brighter skies than those of 1896, other men are reading about Mr. Harriman's achieve- ments instead of Mr. Harriman reading about theirs. Courageous as the idea was in its conception and execution, when the enormous means neces- sary for buying had been provided Mr. Harri- man's work had but begun. He was possessed of a group of exceedingly valuable properties, but all of them stood in urgent need of rehabilita- tion. He had in the Pacific roads and the Alton 57 The Strategy of Great Railroads the corporate titles, the rights of way, and the opportunities; such incidental acquirements as rails, bridges, and rolling stock could not seriously be counted into the bargain, for they had seen their day. It remained to transfer them quietly but firmly to the railroad back yard and cheer- fully to start anew. Moreover, in railroad prac- tice new standards of track grades and curvature had been set, which must be met in order to compete with the best roads, and those exacting standards were uncommonly expensive. Again, in a crisis equally vital, Mr. Harriman showed the stuff of the unusual man. He decided that his roads must be made good roads, the best of their kind, and for this purpose he made figures. Not all of them can be considered here, but one most interesting estimate was this : " For my immediate necessities (so to say) in railroad rebuilding : One hundred millions of dollars." This, I take it, above all else in the record of his railroad operations gives the man his rank among really great railroad men the Vander- bilts, A. J. Cassatt, James J. Hill, Huntington, Garrett, Thomas A. Scott, and the Goulds. It must not be forgotten that other able managers and operators have at different times controlled or owned the Union Pacific. Mr. Harriman was 58 The Harriman Lines the first to make of it a road of the highest rank physically a power in the transportation world worthy of standing, conditions allowed for, with the New York Central lines or the Pennsylvania lines. He needed, for his immense work of making over these many thousand miles of railroads, con- structionists of the highest order, and these, also, he gathered about him. The Alton he gave to S. M. Felton, the Union Pacific he gave to Horace G. Burt, the Southern Pacific to Julius Kruttschnitt, and the Kansas City Southern to S. R. Knott. It will be observed that all of these men are able constructionists, not only presidents or vice-presidents in the sense of being strong executive officers, but highly trained engineers, capable of doing themselves anything they may order done. They, in turn, chose the most capable men they could find as chief engineers of their various lines to carry out the Harriman plans Baldwin of the Alton, Hood of the Southern Pacific, Berry of the Union Pacific : all men that rank, among men as strong as American engineers are admitted to be, as exceptional and with the money ready each man set about his work to make practically new railroads of the Harriman group. Horace G. Burt, then president of the Union 59 The Strategy of Great Railroads Pacific, had already left his impress as an engi- neer on the Chicago and Northwestern Road. On him fell the consideration of the enormous engi- neering difficulties involved in crossing the Rocky Mountain divide. To him must be given credit for the boldness of conception which marks the extraordinary improvements on the new line, and it was his task to convince the new owners of the wisdom of so heavy an outlay. Under his active direction contractors raised an army of laborers to subdue the mountains and assembled an equip- ment of modern machinery much of which was then used for the first time in railroad building. Under Burt these Western men completed in less than two years the work of five, and every day the heavy traffic flowed without interruption over the line they were rebuilding. It is not, perhaps, commonly understood that the highest barrier presented to the Union Pacific in its transcontinental run lies immediately west of the plains about Cheyenne, where the line strikes that secondary range of the Rockies known as the Black Hills. What makes the ascent of these hills of especial difficulty is a great elevation coupled with unusually short slopes. Just here, at the out- set almost, the Union Pacific rises to its greatest height above the sea, and here, in the rebuilding, lay the problem before Berry, chief engineer, as 60 The Harriman Lines to how the grade of this granite summit might possibly be reduced. New limits had been set to the gradients of the proposed improvements; but it is one thing in a directors' meeting to adopt a grade over the Rockies of forty-three feet to the mile and quite another to go into the Rockies and run it. The chief engineer had to match his wits against those of engineers who, a generation earlier, had laid out the pioneer line and done their work well ; thirty-five years of reflection, observation, and criticism from the best construc- tionists in the world have failed to develop flaws in this earliest effort of Americans at bridging the Rockies. The Rocky Mountain engineer of that day had command of practically all of the advantages that those of to-day have, save only access to Mr. Harriman's pin-money; even then the difficulties of getting a better grade than the first one across the hills proved enormous. To find the line that Berry determined he must have, he sent good men into the hills only to be told on their return that where he wanted a line there was none. But when they tried to main- tain this, the personal equation, that subtle and incalculable factor in men which in the overcom- ing of difficulties makes the slight difference be- tween success and failure, intervened. The chief engineer, undaunted, refused to abide by the 61 The Strategy of Great Railroads findings. He sent the engineers again ; the sec- ond time they brought the line he knew must be there. It involved staggering estimates. The Dale Creek crossing, just beyond Cheyenne, called for a single fill nine hundred feet long and one hun- dred and thirty feet deep. In these granite wastes the engineering figures assumed, at once, unheard- of proportions. Cubic yards went into the calcu- lations in millions instead of thousands. Two creek crossings called for eight hundred thousand yards of embankment. Two miles of new line required the moving of seventeen hundred thou- sand yards of material, and of this three hundred thousand were of solid rock. Two fills within these two miles swallowed a million cubic yards. To eliminate three heavy reverse curves and two bridges a summit cut was required, eighty feet deep and a thousand feet long. The springing charge for a single cone of rock was a thousand pounds of giant powder, and the mountain was hurled into the canon with twenty thousand pounds of black. For these unprecedented level- lings of the continental summit new devices were constantly brought into play. Time was an es- sence of the undertaking, and the American con- tractor, following loyally the American engineer, as he has always followed him, stooped like an 62 The Harriman Lines Atlas and took upon his shoulders the burden of the plans. Grading machines and dump wagons were sent into the hills in trainloads. Steam shovels, the leviathans of the railroad camp, crossed the moun- tains in processions. They scooped the borrow pits, cut the shale from the tunnels, dug the Sher- man ballast, and loaded even blasted granite upon cars out of the rock cuts. Track-laying machines flung out rails on one side and ties on the other like sandwiches. At one of the vital points, Chi- cago men, the MacArthurs, took the heavy work, and to make a three-hundred-thousand-yard fill with an embankment of one hundred and thirty- eight feet, Mac Arthur, to complete his contract on time, threw his own temporary suspension bridge across the thousand-foot canon and ran his dump cars out upon his own rails and cables. Track laying, ballasting even, was pushed across the Rockies in midwinter. At the new summit the last hill was drilled and a tunnel eighteen hundred feet long put through primitive granite. Here the Harriman engineers scaled two hundred and forty-seven feet off the highest elevation at which the road had formerly crossed the conti- nent ; then came their task of getting gracefully down the western slope of the hills to the Laramie plains. 63 The Strategy of Great Railroads There is nothing less showy in the rebuilding of the Harriman lines and nothing that is more of a triumph than this feat of Berry's in getting into Laramie. He has used here every trick in his bag, and after moving five millions of cubic yards of earth and rock to accomplish his purpose he comes down into Laramie with a forty-three- foot maximum grade eighteen miles long. So close is the cloth cut for this entire distance that not one rail-length of level track could be con- ceded for stations ; they take their chances on the grade as best they can. Providence may, indeed, some time shift the axis of the granite anticlinal now so skilfully crossed at Sherman, Wyoming, and new dispositions may be called for; but until such an upheaval takes place Berry's Laramie grade is likely to stand. The whole road from this eastern approach to the Black Hills, far out to Medicine Bow on the Laramie plains, shows everywhere the chisel and the straight-edge of the Harriman engineers. There are but two pieces of track, both very short, on the entire main line where the forty- three-foot grade is exceeded. Curvature has had to go with the heavy grades, and between the Black Hills and the Wasatch Range seven thou- sand degrees within the last five years have grad- ually disappeared. At one point the new line 64 The Harriman Lines within a distance of four miles crosses the old one seven times; the Hanna cut uncovered an eight- foot seam of coal; a Green River cut revealed wide deposits of petrified fish. First and last the contractors uncovered a little of everything in the Rockies, from oil pockets to underground rivers, but in the Wasatch Range, in boring a six-thousand-foot tunnel, they struck a mountain that for startling developments broke the records in the annals of American engineering. It was here that the underground stream was en- countered, but this was a mere incident among the possibilities in the mountain. The formation is carboniferous, thrown up in the Aspen Ridge at an angle of twenty-five degrees, and it includes shale, sandstones, oil, and coal. To bore a hole through the mountain at a depth of four hundred and fifty feet from the highest point was not diffi- cult; but the curious thing was that, after being bored, the hole would not stay straight. The mountain, reversing every metaphor and simile of stability, refused to remain in the same position for two days together. It moved forcibly into the bore from the right side, and when remon- strated with stole quietly in from the left; it de- scended on the tunnel with crushing force from above and rose irresistibly up into it from below. The mountain moved from every quarter of the 65 The Strategy of Great Railroads compass and from quarters hardly covered by the compass. Workmen grew superstitious, contract- ors suffered chills, and engineers stood nonplussed. Starting in huge cleavage planes, the shale became at times absolutely uncontrollable. Wall plates well fastened into regular alignment at night looked in the morning as if giants had twisted them ; 12x12 hard-pine timbers laid skin to skin in the tunnel were snapped like matches by this mysterious pressure. Engineers are on record as stating that in the Aspen tunnel such construction timbers were broken in different directions within a length of four feet. An engineer stood one day in the tunnel on a solid floor of these timbers, when under him, and for a distance of two hundred feet ahead of him, the floor rose, straining and crack- ing, three feet up into the air. Before the tunnel could be finished it became necessary to line over 700 feet of it with a heavy steel and concrete con- struction. Gases caused frequent explosions and only constant vigilance prevented the most serious disasters to the men. When in Valhalla the heroic spirits of the American section of civil engineers assemble it will be for the shades from the far Rockies to recount the tallest stories. Through a more forbidding country, and under difficulties no less formidable, Hood's Southern Pacific corps has made over almost wholly the 66 The Harriman Lines Central Pacific link of the Harriman lines. Across Nevada the men have taken out more than thirteen thousand degrees of curvature and three thousand feet of rise and fall. In a distance of four hun- dred and fifty miles on the old line they have built two hundred miles of entirely new road, bored two miles of tunnels, and put eight million pounds of steel into bridges. To do away once and forever with the terrific grades and curves made in pushing north around the Great Salt Lake, the Southern Pacific engineers have drawn a red line from Ogden straight across the lake and the desert to Lucin, Utah, cutting forty-four miles of track out of a hundred and forty-seven and eliminating four thousand three hundred de- grees of curvature and over fifteen hundred feet of rise and fall. They have run a trestle twenty- three miles long across Salt Lake through water thirty feet deep, taking railroad trains further from land than they have ever yet been run ; and the success of their undertaking arrested for a mo- ment the attention of the railroad men of Amer- ica. Wherever the Harriman control has been ex- ercised the policy of physical betterment has been decisive and the results are imposing. Whatever changes in control may come to the Alton, for example, it can never be forgotten that it was 67 The Strategy of Great Railroads Harriman who made of it a great railroad. Mr. Harriman has made good roads the characteristic of his system, and the roads have responded strongly to the new impulse. The enormous ex- penditure of above $100,000,000 for improve- ments in a little over three years seems to leave their treasuries overflowing. The Union Pacific now owns its Northwestern link, the Oregon Short Line, and together the Union Pacific and the Short Line own the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. In addition, the Union Pacific has cemented a kinship with the Southern Pacific by the purchase of the Huntington in- terest of $75,000,000. It stands to-day the monetary fortress of the Harriman lines, holding stocks and bonds in its treasury with a par value of $341,000,000, and they group loyally about it North and South and West to compose to-day the most powerful single interest in the transcontinental field. 68 THE HILL LINES THE HILL LINES CAN anything fresh be said about James J. Hill? What railroad man since, perhaps, the first Vanderbilt or Gould has filled so large a measure of notice ? Have we, indeed, a public man concerning whom anecdotes have been more searchingly recounted, or whose affairs have sup- plied so much material for first-page newspaper stories ? Canada gave Mr. Hill to us ; and we, in turn, have been generous with the Dominion, for we gave to her Sir William Van Home. It would be temerity to say which has the best of the ex- change; this thought only may be ventured that neither side has ever suggested trading back. The work of these two men, and what they have accomplished, is much the same. The contrast becomes noticeable only when we consider how the two have been repaid by their adopted coun- tries. They are each railroad builders, organizers, and operators, and of the first order; men whose rank in the Bradstreet of railroad men is AaAaAl. The expatriated American has been led for distin- The Strategy of Great Railroads guished services before a grateful sovereign to kneel and arise a knight of her realm. Mr. Hill's sovereign, the State of Minnesota, has periodically led her greatest son out as a public culprit, with a rope around his neck, to do penance for his ser- vices in helping, more than any other one man, living or dead, to make her all she is in wealth and development to-day. Mr. Hill, however, has probably acquired hu- mility; certainly he has long been patient of criti- cism. What is remarkable in his make-up is his boyish loyalty to his adopted country and its peo- ple, and one can speak against Minnesota or Min- nesota people only at the risk of waking Mr Hill up very seriously. Other men, tiring of continued abuse, get angry, slam their suits of project and ambition on the table, and bid good-by to the annoyances of the game; Mr. Hill only smiles, calls for fresh cards, and deals again. I have called him patient of criticism. About 1873, when still a steamboat man, he had got together $100,000. There was then in Minne- sota a little railroad called the St. Paul and Pacific that had been run probably by the legislators or statesmen of that day ; at all events, it was both bankrupt and six months behind in its pay-roll. To buy it Mr. Hill needed $500,000. No one in Minnesota would lend him so much ; probably 72 I N I B O I A fS W Ashland \:1 S ^H^ Grand Canyon ! | SANTA FE Ash Fork! X,, //Albuquerque 'N E^W <> jr.: s T T VFQ The Hill Lines no one had so much to lend. He tramped back to Canada and persuaded the Bank of Montreal, somewhat against its inclination, to let him have the needed sum. For that loan the directors of the Bank of Montreal were seriously criticised. There were men as far back as 1873 to laugh at Hill's proj- ects. These said that his ridiculous purchase would ruin not only him but his Canadian friends ; that the road never had paid and never could be made to pay. Yet that Jim Crow line of the seventies was the foundation of the Great North- ern System, with its rails spreading across Dakota and Montana and opening on distant Puget Sound the road that has never, from the first years of its organization, failed to pay regular dividends, and whose shares command a market and a pre- mium when good railroad shares go begging. Nor is this all. This great Northern System earned the money that made it possible to make a Hill line of the Burlington, with its tremendous investment of two hundreds of millions, and has made Mr. H'.ll and his friends a dominant interest in Northern Pacific. In this way Mr. Hill repaid not only his Bank of Montreal friends but that timid element among them who feared the loss of their $500,000. He has returned their money and made the men that then stood by him mill- 73 The Strategy of Great Railroads ionaires, and they are millionaires and lords of the British realm to-day. After 1873 he moved again decisively. He declared in 1879 that he meant to put the Great Northern across the continent. His friends stood surprised, and again men laughed. Hill, they said, was insane. No transcontinental road had yet been built without milking the Govern- ment; that was the primer of transcontinental railroad effort. Either the United States Treasury must be looted or an enormous grant of public lands coaxed from Congress. Did Mr. Hill, they asked, purpose to build a line with his own money to compete with these subsidized whales ? More- over, did he propose building his line north of the Northern Pacific, which was already so far north that its country would not grow wheat ? From conclusions drawn in this way it remained only to nickname the new venture, and the Great North- ern was dubbed " Hill's Folly " ; but he had set his mind to cross the continent. In 1 893, again an ominous date, he put his foot on the Pacific Coast with the only line that ever got there without the aid of a dollar of public money or an acre of public land. When he had reached his goal there came the prostration of the country's industries due to the late panic. Railroads everywhere fell into re- 74 The Hill Lines ceivers' hands. Receivers came to the Santa Fe, receivers to the Union Pacific, receivers to the Northern Pacific ; but no receiver to Hill's Folly. Mr. Hill kept his interest paid, and through the panic years made just a little money. He man- aged his road, managed his borrowing, built a little branch once in a while, and so astonished the less fortunate owners of the Northern Pacific that they came from Berlin all the way across the Atlantic to beg the owner of Hill's Folly to take hold of their road and manage it. Mr. Hill was not, even then, unknown on the Continent. He does his own financing. If he needs money he goes to London or to Berlin and gets it. He works with bankers as partners in great undertakings, but he needs no syndicates to underwrite his securities and pays none to do so, and he weathered the panic of 1893 with on ^7 that loyal band of friends behind him who, per- haps, were more beholden to Mr. Hill than he to them. This steamboat pioneer, who in so many ways suggests that earlier famous steamboat pio- neer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, is not only builder and operator but financier as well. Something more than executive ability is need- ed to succeed in fields so widely different, and to his aggressiveness as an operator Mr. Hill adds notable sagacity. His judgment has never been 75 The Strategy of Great Railroads seriously at fault in his undertakings. To a man who knew the North less thoroughly the project of putting a railroad across the continent above the forty-eighth parallel must have proved, as all predicted it would, disastrous. But Mr. Hill knew the country and its limitless possibilities. With his grasp of things he could hardly have failed in any undertaking; he would have made a great farmer or miller or merchant. Long be- fore this man put his road across the Rockies he had tramped on snowshoes over the drifts of the future wheat belt of the world, and ridden for days behind dogs across the white and silent wastes of Canada. It was not on sunny seas nor under summer skies that Mr. Hill sought fortune; but facing the wind, heading for the wilderness, plant- ing outposts of civilization in the teeth of the blizzard and the frost; and, with the North con- quered, there remained one more decisive step to connect it commercially with the corn belt and the manufacturing industries of the United States. There never was but a single justification for putting the Great Northern across the continent the timber of the Puget Sound country. Of local business on such a line there could be for many years only a little. But the full horizon of an undertaking does not open at once on the vision The Hill Lines of even the wisest of men. The operating of the Great Northern for a few years developed the im- perative need of some railroad link that should connect it directly with the industrial centres and the farming country of the Middle West. With his big railroad running from St. Paul to Puget Sound, Mr. Hill knew that if he could not haul the Washington and Oregon pine East there was really not much of anything else to haul. Nor would this traffic stand a rate heavy enough to cover bringing it East in a car that must go back to the coast empty. Thus, not only was he forced to provide a market for the Sound lumber, but likewise to provide westbound traffic for the return trip of his freight trains. Mr. Hill faced an exacting situation. His own story of the efforts he made to meet this difficulty should be printed as a treatise for young traffic managers. It is impossible for an American to read it without a thrill of industrial pride that such men as this are fellow-countrymen. To discover, to develop, and to create Oriental traffic Mr. Hill sent men to China and to Japan, and maintained them there to investigate trade conditions. He had men in the Orient whose business it was to get a manifest of every ship that cleared a Japanese or a Chinese port ; to find not alone what the exports and the imports of 77 The Strategy of Great Railroads these countries consisted of, but where the exports went. He put a traffic representative in the Orient, and covered the Eastern United States with industrial ants whose work it was to turn traffic to the Great Northern. His agents found out what the factories of New England were making, and in China and Japan his men sought an Oriental market for the stuff. Of his traffic department he asked nothing that he could not bring about himself. Distinguished Japanese guests of Mr. Hill's in 1896, building new roads in Japan, were not allowed to leave for Europe to place their orders for Belgian or Eng- lish rails until, after dinner, they had had a little talk with him about it. As they were to spend a day or two in his company he asked if he might see what could be done on American rails. So considerate a host could hardly be denied, and Mr. Hill cabled friends in London for the best quotations on Antwerp and Middleboro rails, and the best charters to Yokohama. He found the foreign rails could be delivered there at about $29 a ton. He telegraphed Chicago and told the steel men that if they would make a price of $19.50 on American rails the Great Northern would lay them in Yokohama for $8 a ton. The Chicago men made the price, and Mr. Hill's rail- roads and steamships landed in Yokohama 15,000 78 The Hill Lines tons of Chicago rails, the first American steel rails ever sold in Japan. The transaction was only an incident, but it illustrates Mr. Hill. By this time even Japanese manufacturers had been attracted by the Great Northern policies. Passing across the American continent, a party of them were gently but firmly detained by this master builder of trade, who, fix- ing on them an ancient mariner eye, asked about the poor cotton they were spinning at home the India cotton with the short staple that made the poor yarn. The Japs were disposed to stick to their cheap cotton, but they were not so easily to escape. Rather than let them go, Mr. Hill per- suaded them to try one shipment of American cotton upon his guarantee that if it should not prove profitable to mix our long-staple cotton with the short staple from India he would pay for the trial shipment himself. Such was the begin- ning of a little cotton business with the Orient. Mr. Hill was not called on to pay for the trial shipment, but since then raw-cotton exports to Japan have reached as high as 160,000,000 pounds in a single year, and of this quantity Mr. Hill's lines carry three-fourths. The story of cotton piece goods, which go to China, is much the same. When Mr. Hill reached Puget Sound we were exporting 65,000,000 yards; in 79 The Strategy of Great Railroads 1902 we exported 335,000,000 yards. To un- derstand his influence in bringing this about look up the percentage of this product that goes by way of Puget Sound. Practically all of this in- crease in cotton traffic came about through the planning of the indefatigable Mr. Hill. To appreciate, also, what this particular traffic means, consider where the raw cotton of this country comes from and where Mr. Hill's rail- roads lie, on the Canadian border. Unless he should undertake to export Florida pineapples to Siberia, how could he possibly stir up trade be- tween two corners of the world more remote from his own stamping-ground"? Moreover, a man familiar with railroad conditions in the South, if asked why freight rates on cotton are high, will answer that it is not alone because cotton is haz- ardous as a commodity and represents, pound for pound, ten times the value of corn, but that the market is a limited one; that if all the cotton lands in the State of Mississippi were cultivated they alone would supply the American cotton now used in the world. There is no incentive, unless the market can constantly be enlarged, for Southern roads to carry cotton cheaper. Here, then, comes a railroad man from the far North- west, and single-handed supplies the primary in- centive; and if the trade with the Orient ever 80 The Hill Lines becomes considerable, Southern cotton will be marketed cheaper everywhere because a man whom cotton growers never saw, and whom thou- sands never heard of, is now sending their prod- uct from Galveston and New Orleans, on the Gulf of Mexico, to Yokohama, Japan, by way of Puget Sound. Observe, too, the exceedingly delicate adjustment of traffic conditions; this happens not because there are not equally strong railroads to the coast further south, but because those roads lack the Puget Sound lumber to bring east in the cars that take the cotton west, and it costs practically as much to pull an empty car as a loaded one. The Santa Fe, therefore, prefers delivering Texas cotton to Mr. Hill's Burlington road at St. Louis to hauling it to California. But neither a fortuitous shipment of steel rails nor a modestly growing cotton business by any means solve Mr. Hill's traffic problems. It is a question of unceasing effort to build up com- modity business. He carries nails and wire, in great quantities, from Lake Erie to Hongkong for forty-five cents a hundred pounds. A city man can hardly get a keg of nails from a down- town shop to his suburban home for less than Mr. Hill carries a similar keg across a continent and an ocean, ten thousand miles. Such a rate, of course, is very low, and calls for the closest 81 The Strategy of Great Railroads figuring to leave a margin of profit. The Hill lines are compelled, to use his own forcible words, to look for anything and everything that will sup- ply westbound business, whether destined for the Pacific Coast, for Alaska, Honolulu, China, Japan, the Philippines anywhere, if they would keep their freight cars loaded both ways. Moreover, if an international traffic is to be established the first absolute requisite is permanent rates; not merely day in and out, but substantially year in and out; and Mr. Hill found that unless he could make his rates permanent he could not hope to succeed in his huge enterprise. Thus a military necessity confronted him : that of freeing himself from the uncertainty of joint rates which might be one thing to-day and a wholly impossible thing to-morrow. He needed access over his own rails to Chicago and St. Louis and to the factories and farms of the corn belt. In a word, he must be able to make his own rate from where the traffic originates to where his shippers market it. Connecting lines whose in- terests might lie to-day in a favorable joint rate to the Orient might to-morrow conclude that there was nothing in the business, and withdraw it. Mr. Hill, in order to hold his ground, saw him- self compelled to extend his lines into the lower Lake country and the Mississippi Valley. The Hill Lines The conclusion forced him into the greatest undertaking of his already remarkable career. To build such a road as he required would be a mat- ter of years ; he needed one ready-to-wear, and he needed a great deal of money to make the pur- chase. This time $500,000 would not do, nor a million, nor several millions ; he needed now hun- dreds of millions; but his credit was still good, and, taking in a reliable partner whose interests coincided with his own, he bought the Burlington Road. The story of the Burlington is in itself out of the ordinary. It has always been aggressive in its management and peculiarly successful in its ventures. Any Western railroad man esteems himself fortunate when he can get business away from the Burlington. To take a fall out of the Burlington is a feather in any traffic manager's cap, and it is odds that for some time thereafter he will be kept busy in holding his ground, for, unless a very handy man, he is likely to be thrown on the defensive at once. This curiously strong grip on business has never been advanced by the cutting of rates, but rather by a keen realization of the fact that business, like kissing, goes by favor. The Burlington management has always been characterized by astuteness, and its people have cultivated the art of making friends. Mr. 83 The Strategy of Great Railroads Perkins, who made the wonderful road what it is, never liked to have enemies or trouble. His motto was, briefly, eighty per cent, of the busi- ness and peace ; and it is astonishing how closely he approximated his ideal. Somehow, too, the Burlington Road succeeded in creating among its men an esprit de corps^ a loyalty to itself, so that former Burlington officials refer with certain pride to the old road. When one meets, East or West, on American roads a Burlington man he is con- scious, too, of a consideration of the sort that asks, Now, what can I do for you ? rather than, What can you do for me ? And, as I shall note hereafter, so widely have the graduates of the road been distributed in railroad circles that at one time, not many years ago, the executive officers of each of our transcontinental lines were Burlington men. It is not fanciful, then, to assert that, in addition to 8,700 miles of track and equipment in prime condition, Mr. Hill took over in the good-will of the Burlington, a valuable asset in itself. Geographically, Mr. Hill found that the road lay precisely fitted to his Northern needs. The Burlington, with a base on the Great Lakes, ex- tends into the Rocky Mountains. It is powerful on the Mississippi River, and on the Missouri it is first. Its mileage in the State of Nebraska alone would give it a trunk line from New York 84 The Hill Lines to Salt Lake City, and its Iowa mileage added would extend such a line to Los Angeles or Puget Sound. One arm of the Burlington con- nects Chicago and Denver ; another, striking from St. Louis and Kansas City, enters Nebraska at its extreme southeastern corner, winds through the Black Hills of Dakota and Wyoming, and crosses the Crow Reservation in Montana to unite with the Northern Pacific. Here its right of way, lying within the shadow of the Big Horn Moun- tains, drops into the valley of the Little Big Horn River and follows the fatal path that Custer and the Seventh Cavalry followed in June, 1876. It is historic ground. Amid the wastes of this far and silent desolation the traveller finds a soldiers' cemetery. A tragic feature marks its headstones ; they are nameless, for here Custer with 260 men, surrounded by the Sioux and Cheyennes, made his last stand, and none survived to tell the story. Where, long after the fight, each skeleton, bleached by the summer's sun, lay on the field, a stake was driven and a stone marks the spot. This is the link of the Burlington that connects the Puget Sound roads with the Mississippi Val- ley and the Great Lakes; with the Western smelters at Denver, in the Black Hills, at Kan- sas City and Omaha, and at Aurora, 111. ; with the cotton roads at St. Louis and Kansas City; 85 The Strategy of Great Railroads with the packing-houses at Omaha, St. Joe, Kan- sas City, and Chicago. On the Mississippi River the Burlington taps every town from Minneapo- lis to St. Louis, and it reaches a large percentage of the manufacturing industries of Illinois. But of more vital importance than all these things, the Burlington covers the lumber-consum- ing States of the country. It counts 1,400 miles of trackage in Iowa, a State that is not only the greatest consumer of lumber in the Union, but exceeds in its consumption any three States. Mr. Frederick Weyerhauser has said that he would rather have the lumber trade of Iowa than that of any three other States together. Mr. Hill is probably right, then, in saying that for the de- velopment of his natural resources, so to call them, the Burlington is of as much value to him as per- haps all other Western roads combined. With Michigan already on the point of con- suming more lumber than it supplies, the signifi- cance of his early foresight in building into the Puget Sound timber country, and later in secur- ing an outlet for its timber through direct entry into the big domestic lumber markets, becomes apparent. Of equal moment is the enormous Oriental traffic Mr. Hill had created in American flour. American flour gets only as far as the Chi- nese ports and along the coast ; local taxation pre- 86 The Hill Lines vents its reaching the interior of the empire. Even on the coast it is used rather as a confection than as a staple for bread; still, last year Puget Sound exported 2,000,000 barrels of flour to the Orient. Ten years ago Mr. Hill found Puget Sound wheat going to Liverpool by way of Cape Horn. To-day it is practically all ground at home into flour which his boats carry to China. These Sound exports of flour have in ten years increased 617 per cent. The Hill roads are putting into commission a line of new steamships for Ori- ental traffic, two of which, taken together, exceed in capacity the combined tonnage of the entire Canadian Pacific fleet from Vancouver. Land- ing, as he is, then, American flour and nails in Hongkong and, save for the present hostilities, American cotton and rails in Yokohama, bring- ing the forests of Washington to the prairie farms of Iowa, stirring up trade in every port of the Far East and in credit among the most careful bankers in Europe whose money he is borrowing on his own notes to develop the Northwest, is it possible that a charge of plotting in restraint of trade can successfully be maintained against this man ? Has Mr. Hill burned any one's refineries, blown up any rival railroad bridges, bought any lines to dismantle them, driven other railroads out of business, or wrecked them to freeze out stock- 87 The Strategy of Great Railroads holders and bondholders? It would be compe- tent, conceivably, for the managers of other rail- roads, the Canadian Pacific, for instance, to ask that Mr. Hill be restrained from further attempts at getting their trade. That which will be incred- ible to men fifty years from now is that he should have been assailed as he has been in the Merger Case by the circumstance and dignity of the United States as an industrial wrong-doer. It should console Mr. Hill, however, to reflect that in the canonization of really great men the first appropriation of public moneys is for fagots, the quarrying of the marble usually being left to the third and fourth generations. Perspective is needed for the right estimate of extraordinary men, and it is supplied by time ; our mental mir- rors are fitted to reflect the ordinary sort of mortals others blur on them. We call Mr. Hill, freely, Jim Hill, as the Genoese, perhaps, referred collo- quially to Chris Columbus. Chris was at too close range for them quite to comprehend. Spain doubtless at that day was filled with bigger men than the Italian adventurer; yet history, forget- ting their names, writes his in full. How can the story of the Northwest ever be written without the story of Hill? When he put his road across the continent he stood on end the railroad egg of the North and showed men The Hill Lines how simple and easy it was, after all. Napoleon's first question was, What has he done? That question must always be answered in attempting fairly to place Mr. Hill among the men who have developed and created American trade and indus- try. He is the last of our great railroad pioneers. We cannot hope for more men to fill such niches in our history because there are no more such niches to be filled. There are no longer within our borders railroad wildernesses to be explored ; of these Mr. Hill has thrown open the last. 89 THE FIGHT FOR PITTSBURG UNP THE FIGHT FOR PITTSBURG DURING the closing days of the final session of the Fifty-sixth Congress, William McKinley be- ing President of the United States and Joseph Ramsey, Jr., president of the Wabash Railroad, a Senator from the State of Pennsylvania and a Representative from the Pittsburg district intro- duced, by request, into their respective houses some sort of a bill or joint resolution. Couched in a few words, it provided for the revival of a bill by which Congress had once authorized the building of a railroad bridge across the Mononga- hela River into the city of Pittsburg. No attempt had been made by the original applicants for the privilege to avail themselves of it, and their per- mission had lapsed by limitation. Granted origi- nally for the construction of a steam railroad bridge, a renewal of the right was now desired on behalf of a projected trolley line. Trolley lines are everywhere and ever-ready, and resolutions in their behalf are a necessary part of current legislation. Trolley lines are more or less clamorous among the constituents of every 93 The Strategy of Great Railroads Congressman, and by resolutions of one sort or another they are usually appeased. Moreover, the introduction of a measure by request costs little. Not one joint Congressional resolution in a hundred passes ; when one does pass it is rarely heard of again. This particular measure, however, was peculiar; peculiar in the innocence of its wording and pe- culiar in the tremendous sting in its tail. It is no exaggeration to say that there was not one chance in a thousand for it to get through both houses of Congress. The whirl, the confu- sion, and the rush of the closing of the session were all against it. Moreover, there are a dozen Senators and Representatives whose very business in the Congress of the United States is to defeat the objects sought under cover of precisely such bills genuine Congressional sleuths who, while raising their voices occasionally in behalf of the people that send them to Washington, are sleep- lessly vigilant in behalf of the friendly " interests " which they represent. A single objection raised against the waif by any stray malcontent in either house any mem- ber with a digestion temporarily disordered would have been fatal ; yet, with its purpose un- dreamed of by its legislative fathers, and in a crush in which a thousand well directed and fer- 94 The Fight for Pittsburg vently urged measures always do fail, this tramp bill slipped successfully past every peril of the closing hours of the turbulent session. It passed ; and its innocent words divided a railroad empire the long, hard fight of the Wabash to get into Pittsburg was won. The white light of publicity is supposed to burn upon all important legislation at Washing- ton, and the appetite of the press for news of this sort approaches the ferocious. Yet here was a business calculated to shake the railroad world to its very centre, and loose its bitter dogs of war from the Atlantic seaboard to the wastes of the Missouri River, done so quietly that mention of it never crept into a Washington despatch. More singular still, it must be remembered that its very introduction had depended on the good offices of a Pennsylvania Senator and a Pittsburg Congressman, both of whom were guiltless of the remotest intention of helping out the Wabash in its uphill encounter with the Pennsylvania Rail- road for a Pittsburg terminal. A century hence, when the curious traveller asks to see a monument that commemorates our labo- riously planned and jealously guarded protective policy he will, without doubt, be pointed to Pitts- burg. Pittsburg is our traffic gold mine. When it is said that Pittsburg and its district originate 95 The Strategy of Great Railroads the largest freight tonnage of any city in this country, or for that matter in the world, the pub- lic mind grasps the statement fairly well and the result is some respect for Pittsburg ; it was news to many when announced, but it was accepted calmly. There is, however, more than this to the statement. Pittsburg originates not only more freight tonnage than any one of our cities, but more than our three greatest cities, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago combined. A business man can digest even this extraordi- nary fact, but how can he keep clear-headed when told that this traffic in the Pittsburg district, taking no account of what merely passes through Pitts- burg, reaches the stupendous total of 75,000,000 tons in a single year ? Or, again, can he really grasp what is contained in the bare statement that the Pennsylvania Railroad east of Pittsburg handles 75,000 tons of freight daily for each mile of its main line, and that in one year the earnings of that portion of the system exceeded $150,000 a mile ? These figures are not in any sense news. They may be derived from official reports. But the public does not read railroad reports, and it is no reflection on its intelligence to say that it would not understand them if it did. Not even business men, in fact, understand the report of one railroad 96 W I \S CON THE The Fight for Pittsburg quite so well as the executive officers of a com- peting line. This showing affords an inkling of what Pitts- burg and the Pennsylvania road mean in the rail- road world; a suggestion of the prize that had long hung suspended before the Wabash eyes. Is it any wonder that George Gould, owning the Wabash road, determined to put $25,000,000 into an effort to secure a terminal that would open the doors of such a storehouse ? Let there be frankly conceded the worst that can be said and harsh railroad things have been said of Mr. Gould ; for example, that he is invad- ing a territory where he does not expect to de- velop one dollar's worth of new traffic yet it comes in the end to this : that, placed owner of the Wabash system, as he was, by the combina- tions going forward five years ago, if he had allowed himself to be bottled up at Toledo, at Detroit, or even at Buffalo, with Pittsburg in his grasp, he would not really have been quite so aggressive as big American railroad operators of stern necessity are. It is hardly more than five years ago that it became apparent to the Gould interests that a Pittsburg terminal would become, in truth, a strategic necessity. When, in 1 895, Joseph Ram- sey, Jr., was made vice-president of the Wabash 97 The Strategy of Great Railroads its Eastern terminals were Toledo and Detroit. In the meantime the various combinations of the Pennsylvania Railroad and those of the Vander- bilt lines were taking shape. Every day empha- sized the purpose of each railway power in the country to acquire feeders for itself and make impregnable a control that would take care of irresponsible competition. The Wabash could not at that time land freight even in Buffalo save over a hostile connection. Gradually it was being cut out of a feeder here and a feeder there until action did become imperative, and the Wabash was pushed to Buffalo. A Buffalo terminal was a bold move ; but with Buffalo once made the Gould people looked again from Toledo for new conquests, and Pittsburg, like a mirage thrown suddenly into the railroad sky, loomed upon the Wabash horizon. The railway world of the United States was in that moment at the height of an activity such as it had never known and never again within cen- turies can know. Territory was being pre- empted that never again will be open to a railroad settler ; combinations were daily being made that will govern a thousand years from now, and leases were being executed that will not terminate within thirty generations of men. What may at that time happen to these coveted properties can 98 The Fight for Pittsburg scarcely be expected to interest the powers of the present generation. But five years ago it meant that the man who wanted control of a road or needed a railroad footing in a contiguous territory must act, or for nine hundred and ninety-nine years thereafter hold his peace; Gould decided to enter Pittsburg. He had on his operating staff a man fitted for the difficult venture. Joseph Ramsey, Jr., had been for three years vice-president and general manager of the Wabash. He had entered the en- gineering corps of the Pan Handle road thirty years earlier. Within a year thereafter he had been transferred to the Dresden cut-off, and while still hardly more than a boy had, as assistant engineer, located the Bell's Gap road, a circuitous route winding about within the very heart of the Alle- ghany Mountains. His movements were as rapid as his promotions. A Pittsburger born and brought up, the Alleghanies were this man's birthright, and his early life was spent as engi- neer, superintendent, chief engineer, from division to division and from road to road, in and out of and around Pittsburg. At thirty-three, and a general manager, he had mastered as engineer and operator every problem put before him in mountain railroading, and he knew his mountains in the Pittsburg district as well as he knew his 99 The Strategy of Great Railroads trigonometry. Turning to Ohio, his activities as the chief engineer, the general manager, and the operating vice-president of various roads took him from end to end of the State, and familiarized him thoroughly with the territory from which he was destined ten years later to lead his greatest under- taking : 1898 brought him face to face with it. From any point of view the problem of getting a railroad into Pittsburg is a staggering one. The physical obstacles alone are overwhelming; but these difficulties are incalculably increased by the extraordinary intrenchment of the Pennsylvania road in its own peculiar stronghold. Financially, physically, and politically, the principal fortress of the great road is well-nigh unassailable. In- stinctively alert, and representing, as they always have represented, the highest astuteness in railway management, the Pennsylvania people had closed avenue after avenue toward their centre. The ab- sorption of small lines that might offer temptation to an invader had been carried on until railroad maps were changed faster than new ones could be printed. Nevertheless, the Wabash forces or- ganized for attack. From Toledo a single loophole left unguarded made possible a long march toward the coveted territory. In leaving Toledo eastbound travel- lers on the limited trains of the Lake Shore 100 The Fight for Pittsburg ;u,Tj road see for some distance on the right a single- track railroad often mistaken for the Nickel Plate. It is a modest coal road known as the Wheeling and Lake Erie, and it runs across Ohio from Toledo quite to the eastern boundary of the State. The Wheeling and Lake Erie was owned by Cleveland people Myron T. Herrick and his friends and was then for sale. A gap of some sixty miles from Jewett, Ohio, would extend that meandering and very quiet coal road to Pittsburg, and George Gould determined to buy the Wheel- ing and Lake Erie. It is said that the property had once been of- fered to the Pennsylvania people. Whether true or not, nothing could better illustrate the sharp, fast moves of the game then already on than the story of the purchase of the Wheeling and Lake Erie. So alive were all parties at interest in the matter, the besiegers and the besieged, that in the short interval between the time Mr. Gould deter- mined to buy the road and the consummation of his purchase he was compelled to pay more for a controlling interest in the stock than the whole road and all of its securities had originally been offered for. But with the purchase of the Wheel- ing and Lake Erie the mask, so far as ultimate intentions are concerned, was thrown off and war began. 101 The Strategy of Great Railroads No one will say that it has ever been other than a gentlemen's fight. The conditions of the inva- sion were well understood, and quarter was neither asked nor given; but the diplomacy, the fine moving, the gloving of the hand, and the iron shock of all the secret complications of the con- test cannot be and never will be written: they belong to the stories that never are told. The State of Pennsylvania is celebrated not alone as the home of one of the greatest railroads in the world but as the State with the most astonishing railroad laws, this being one of them : the direc- tors of a railroad may in session " adopt," with- out restriction, any route in the State of which they choose to make a survey, and, without doing a dollar's worth of work, they may hold it abso- lutely for a period of two years. Their record of their plans is their own privileged secret. They may meet in publicity or in seclusion and " adopt " any part of the Alleghanies they fancy, but they cannot be dislodged within two years under any circumstances, and, should they care to proceed, not then. This peculiar statute makes an attempt to enter Pennsylvania with a new railroad somewhat confusing, especially if there be powerful interests to oppose. However, the rule that works one way works the other, and the moves between Mr. 1 02 The Fight for Pittsburg Cassatt's forces and Mr. Gould's became those of experts at chess, with the Pennsylvania Railroad at times most unexpectedly calling check and the Wabash retorting with counter-check. Naturally, that which makes a leadership effec- tive in a battle under cover such as the Wabash was compelled to wage is a thorough acquaint- ance with all the factors in the contest. Ramsey, Gould's chief in the struggle, has been called, as Grant was called, a bulldog, and it is true that the two men have, in common with Americans of their peculiarly emotionless type, those quiet and impassive qualities of persistence that go to make up really dangerous antagonists. To men such as these an obstacle interposed means only that it is something to be crawled over, or burrowed under, or turned by the right flank or turned by the left, and as Grant hurled his men against the Wilderness lines so Ramsey hurled the Gould millions against the Pittsburg defences. In that remarkable city alone five million dollars were spent in acquiring terminal property, and those sixty miles of Jewett track that Ramsey built are sown from end to end with gold. A single tunnel called for a million dollars ; a second one for nearly as much. Within a distance of twenty miles there are eight large tunnels, several concrete arches with fifty-feet spans and fifty 103 The Strategy of Great Railroads heavy fills, one of them 3,500 feet long, built of 1,000,000 cubic yards of earth. In all the United States there is nothing in railroads like this sixty- mile track. When railroad men are told that James W. Patterson, Ramsey's chief engineer, has crossed the Ohio Valley with a maximum grade of seven-tenths per cent, and a maximum curv- ature of three degrees, they are first to express admiration for his achievement ; and through the most adverse topography and this low rate of the curves he has managed to preserve sixty-one per cent, of straight track. To be of value to its builders the line needed to be equipped for high tonnage. The very necessities called for a light- grade road with easy curves, and the engineers made their surveys to fit the requirements. A comparison with standard lines in the same territory will show how in 1903 railroad construc- tion has advanced over the best construction of earlier years. The Pan Handle leaving the Ohio River at Steubenville for Pittsburg, as the Wa- bash extension leaves it at Mingo, has two prom- inent summits on its line as against one on the Wabash. The heaviest grade on the Wabash is less than thirty-seven feet to the mile, against something like sixty in the first construction of the Pan Handle. In all, these forty miles of Gould track have but fifty-six curves, and so 104 The Fight for Pittsburg straight has the line been made that one may stand at the west end of the first Ohio tunnel and look through it across the trestles, over the Mingo bridge and through the tunnel in the West Vir- ginia hill. Country roads were abandoned and new ones built by the engineers; viaducts were thrown across farms and mountain streams torn from their courses to make the Jewett track. At the foot of Chapel Hill Mr. Patterson has pro- vided a fifty- feet span arch with a "barrel" 180 feet long containing the largest single mass of concrete in the form of an arch in the world. For miles through the mountains the track springs from height to height over enormous fills that often exceed a hundred feet in depth. It will not be supposed that these results have been reached without strenuous effort nor without occasional subtle entanglement for the Wabash constructionists. But they never fal- tered. Out-manoeuvred at one point, they sought another; checked at a gap, they bored a moun- tain. The most unexpected natural obstacles interposed themselves even when foresight had provided for those of human agency. Under- neath the million-dollar Green-tree tunnel a coal vein, without the knowledge of the owners of the land, had been stripped. One night a section of the tunnel floor dropped eighteen inches. It was 105 The Strategy of Great Railroads not that it cost forty thousand dollars to make good the settling; what hurt most was that it took six months' time. Bridges were called for till steel mills threw up their hands. There are on this short line without numbering either the great Mingo bridge across the Ohio with a seven- hundred-foot cantilever span or the tremendous Monongahela cantilever at Pittsburg more bridges than there are miles of track. The Mo- nongahela bridge, scene of a tragic accident dur- ing its building, is in itself most unusual. Like the Mingo bridge it provides for a double track and is built with thirty-two feet between truss centres. It stands on a one-per-cent. grade, and rises, at the low end, a clear seventy feet above full pool in the Monongahela River. The weight of this singular and enormous structure is above 7,000 tons. A mate to it, indeed, is not to be found on this side the ocean. For its only bigger brother one must go to Queensferry, Scotland, where years ago the North British Railway Com- pany flung across the estuary of the Forth River the world-famed cantilevers that are united in spans 1,710 feet long; but even this unexampled undertaking leaves the Wabash bridge, at 812 feet in a clear span from centre to centre of towers, the second longest cantilever bridge in the world ; and this is the bridge whose very per- 106 The Fight for Pittsburg mission to be, slipped past the Pennsylvania watchdogs in Congress as modestly as a mouse could slip through a hole in a barn floor. In a railroad fight, however, there is no fatal- ism, and it should not be inferred that if the Wa- bash had not won at that particular time at Wash- ington the fight would not have been fought out again there or elsewhere. The Washington blow, though a serious one to the defenders, left them undaunted, and in the Pittsburg councils they repeatedly prevented the passage of an ordinance giving to the Wabash permission to enter the city. While the battle raged in the city councils the Wabash people went ahead with their big Monongahela bridge, which without an ordinance to cross Pittsburg streets with their elevated structure must have proved valueless. Pittsburg looked on amazed at their apparent recklessness. Hostile city officials sought to en- join Joseph Ramsey and his cohorts from wasting their money on a structure across the river when they could never get into the town ; but in court the Wabash counsel pleaded the sovereign authority of Congress for its license to cross a navigable stream, and the court decided an in- junction could not issue. Appealed to the Su- preme Court, the decision in the case below was reversed, but work had been going steadily 107 The Strategy of Great Railroads on and the city of Pittsburg itself had been mean- time waking up. The tide of unprecedented prosperity which spread over the United States and reached its climax in 1901-02 swept even so highly organized and perfectly disciplined a rail- road system as the Pennsylvania for a moment completely off its feet. Traffic in ever-increasing volume overpowered its heavy equipment, and, worst of all, congested its freight yards. Pittsburg became an absolute storm centre, and loaded cars at the Pittsburg yards could not be got in or out; the situation became a traffic tragedy, resulting in the most strenuous personal effort on the part of high executive officials of the great road to bring order out of the ter- minal chaos at Pittsburg. This freight block- ade came at a time when business men were least willing to bear it. To plead that no other road under similar difficulties could do half so well availed nothing. The Wabash, gently fan- ning the flame of local discontent, appealed to the business interests of Pittsburg to bring competi- tion into the city. The Wabash issue was made of a sudden a fierce political one, and Mr. Ramsey, who probably never for a moment had doubted that, when he had once clearly demonstrated to a suspicious public that the Wabash wa& making a good-faith attempt to bring a compet 108 The Fight for Pittsburg ing line into the town, public opinion itself would force the passage of an enabling ordinance, found himself again in luck. For two years the fight had raged with greater or less fury among the aldermen; at last they began to waver. Where the Wabash had had its enemies it began to find friends, and the adverse Supreme Court de- cision had hardly cooled before a change in the Pittsburg councils' complexion gave the Wabash its ordinance so long and stubbornly held up, and the last legislative bridge was crossed. It was by no means the first time that encour- agement had been extended to the invaders by large Pittsburg interests. In the incipiency of the fray substantial promises of business had been made by various Pittsburg shippers. The very moment the news of the Gould plans to enter the city became public, rumor asserted that the Car- negie Steel Company had already contracted to give the Wabash twenty-five per cent, of its Western tonnage. The assertion has repeatedly been made and has been repeatedly denied, but it is definitely known that such a contract does exist, though perhaps its importance in the public mind is somewhat exaggerated. It has been averred that the interests in control of United States Steel will not abide by such an agreement ; though it is difficult to see how the most hostile 109 The Strategy of Great Railroads management could avoid it after Gould has ex- pended $25,000,000 to make good his end of the compact courts are somewhat jealous in guarding questions of consideration. Again, it is hardly safe to say who really is in control of United States Steel; but aside from all question of steel control, the strategy of a game of this size is infi- nitely bigger. It must be considered that if no contract existed, on the day that Mr. Gould opens the doors of his freight houses in Pittsburg for business there lie behind them fifteen thousand miles of his own rails, and that the Wabash will call for a reasonable proportion of Pittsburg ton- nage and command it. A disturbance of rates in the Pittsburg district is not calmly to be thought of in the railroad world ; it would disturb Holland more than a tidal wave. Naturally the Penn- sylvania Railroad continues to tie up every pos- sible source of business, but when the Wabash connects with the Union Railway the Carnegie local line to various industries in the district it alone will open up a share of traffic that amounts, in what were the Carnegie industries, to 16,000,000 tons annually, while the other industries the local line reaches contribute enough business to swell the figures to 40,000,000 tons. With the Wabash in the Pittsburg territory the railroad control of all this enormous business no The Fight for Pittsburg and the division of richest railroad territory in the United States becomes triangular. The Vander- bilts, the Pennsylvania, and George Gould now dominate and will dominate in New York, Penn- sylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia, with powerful arms reaching to the Mississippi Valley and north and east into New England. It may mean the closing of the map for centuries; certainly in our day the present control is likely to remain undisturbed. in THE GOULD LINES THE GOULD LINES IF there has been during the opening years of the present century a sensitive spot anywhere in the railroad situation of the United States, it may properly be termed the Gould lines. Not a deep study of railroad affairs is needed to explain why. The Gould lines are young, vigorous, and aggressive. The head of the Gould lines is said to work much of the time with his coat off; he is young himself and not afraid of draughts. His roads, then, may be said to take their cue from their owner; in the railway world the Gould lines work in their shirt sleeves, and every once in a while the question bobs up, What will they do next *? Those that picture the railroad magnate a man of elegant leisure or of luxurious ease should follow the owner of the Gould lines through a week's work at his New York desk, or note the size of the bag of papers he takes every Friday night to his country home, or count the tele- grams that he throws to an operator on each Monday morning for transmission at the various The Strategy of Great Railroads operating headquarters on his fifteen thousand miles of railroad. Every road in his system he knows intimately; steel rails were his business cradle ; he began railway management when he was fifteen years old. The hive of the Gould lines' activity is the old building on lower Broadway that has housed the Western Union for so many years. Number 195 Broadway may not stand for much among modern office buildings, but it stands for a great deal in the railway world, and, to follow the figure of the hive, it gives at times uneasy moments to railway neighbors, particularly when they find Gould bees swarming in their back yards. What, then, are the Gould lines? And what do they stand for*? No railway combination in the United States is so loaded with possibilities. A glance at its map shows its stronghold; it lies west of the Mississippi. In the corn belt the Wabash ex- tends as far north as Des Moines and Council Bluffs in Iowa. The Missouri Pacific, though it pushes into only one corner of Nebraska, pushes into the best corner; and in Kansas it doubles and branches from end to end of the State until its map becomes, in a railway sense, paramount. To the Eastern public the Gould lines are hardly known. Even in Chicago they are known only 116 The Gould Lines at a distance ; it is when one reaches St. Louis that the Gould lines are felt; in St. Louis they are very distinctly in the railway air. The Wa- bash shows strength in Illinois, and the Missouri Pacific meets it at the Mississippi with almost a dominant power in Missouri. From St. Louis, Gould lines run everywhere south and west. They thread the valleys of Arkansas, throw arms like rivers from side to side of the State of Louisi- ana, and spread in a teeming delta far out upon the plateaus of Texas. They lie under the snows of the forests of Michigan and they skirt the parching heat of the Staked Plain. The Mis- souri Pacific stretching across Kansas to Colorado meets the Denver and Rio Grande at Pueblo, and crossing the Rockies the Gould lines await the products of the irrigated valleys and climb high into the mining camps of Colorado and Utah. From even so inadequate a sketch of their Western strength some idea may be had of what comes behind George Gould when he brings his lines into Pittsburg, for example. No other rail- road power in the United States that looks to the Atlantic seaboard has, up to this time, crossed the watershed of the Rockies; but George Gould is already at the Great Salt Lake, and water drip- ping from his rails finds its way into the Gulf 117 The Strategy of Great Railroads of California. He is at Leadville above the Ar- kansas, and his roads track the big river clear to its mouth and follow its waters to New Orleans. From Omaha he tabs the Missouri River every traffic mile of the way till it mingles with the Mississippi ; and the Mississippi, all the way from Keokuk in Iowa to its mouth, is hedged with Gould roads. This is what gives the backing to the Gould system. Its mileage does not mean the densest traffic, for a division between New York and Philadelphia may stand for more business than a whole stretch of track across the State of Texas. But the history of the Eastern systems of railroads is made ; that of the Gould roads is in the making. The territory that the Eastern roads cover is de- veloped; the stronghold of the Gould lines is in its infancy. What, in another generation and in the hands of an equally able successor, may the Gould lines mean, when to-day in farthest Texas they strike, with the Texas and Pacific, the waters of the Rio Grande at El Paso, find a powerful Gulf outlet at Galveston, and spreading thence north and east, not in a single track but in doub- lings and battalions of tracks, find a harbor at Buffalo and a terminal at Pittsburgh Nor is the Western end of their territory at present the most distinctive. As far as trunk 118 The Gould Lines lines from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic seaboard are concerned the situation is so in hand, the community of interests between Mr. Morgan, the Vanderbilts, and the Pennsylvania so perfect, and the territory so covered, that new ventures in that field are to-day, with one exception, incon- ceivable. The exception is the Gould lines. Far down in the western extremity of Maryland and among the northern passes of the Alleghanies in 'West Virginia little lines may be seen breaking out like mild eruptions, so to say, on the railway map. They spring up in red streaks and patches after morning telegrams in the New York papers noting changes in control, sales of short and unimportant lines in that territory, and in con- struction news concerning the leasing of coal lands. The despatches are fugitive and scattered, but they have a common significance ; they stand for Gould blazing his trail to the Atlantic sea- board. From Pittsburg he is filling in the gaps that will put the Wabash into Baltimore. No cheap railroad there will serve ; such a line, like the Pittsburg extension, must be of the best twentieth-century railroad construction, for the competition he then pits himself against is like the white heat of steel and as pitiless. Leaving out possibilities not yet to be discussed below the 119 The Strategy of Great Railroads fifth floor of 195 Broadway consider where this definitely, and almost to-day, puts the Gould lines : At the Atlantic seaboard with a Baltimore termi- nal; at the Canadian boundary with a Buffalo terminal ; at the traffic heart of the United States in Pittsburg; in the Lake Superior country with the Toledo and Ann Arbor, where Gould car- ferries await grain from the valley of the Red River of the North and command traffic in the iron and copper countries; then in one tremen- dous sweep past New Orleans to Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico; still farther to the very southernmost terminal in the United States, La- redo, Tex.; and from there to within striking distance, at El Paso in Texas and at Ogden in Utah, of the Pacific Ocean. Certainly, for those that cherish the thought of a day that will see one transcontinental trunk line, unbroken in control, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, here is material for dreams. On the other hand, the timorous, who look with alarm on the prospect of one-man control in American railroads, will find compensation in the fact that for Mr. Gould working-days cannot pos- sibly grow forty-eight hours long, and that Mr. Rockefeller, his partner, is advanced in years. But the Gould lines to-day stand actually for so much that speculation as to their future may 1 20 MENOMINEE^ The Gould Lines be spared. They stand for a line from Buffalo to Kansas City and from Omaha to New Orleans. They stand for a line from St. Louis to Ogden and from Pittsburg to El Paso. They stand for a line, with the Mexican National, from Chicago to the City of Mexico and that the shortest line. They stand for a line from Denver to Pueblo, across Kansas, through the Indian Territory, with a wholly rebuilt, low-grade line down the Arkan- sas River and Valley to the Gulf ports. Gould lines are so thick from St. Louis to the mouth of the Mississippi that, where in the wisdom of rural legislators lines in competitive territory may not be officered by the same people, it is necessary to call in outside talent to man the executive staffs, and to the natives the sanguinary railroad spec- tacle is presented of Mr. Edwin Gould heading one line while Mr. George Gould manages the destinies of a fierce competitor. Here, then, is a system of railways with traffic possibilities as big almost as the country itself. It is not ideal as to composition; no system that has been built up line by line as opportunity of purchase or lease offered can be. It certainly is in many portions far from anyone's ideal as to physical condition; these are the accidents of empire-building without unlimited resources. What should be marked is that the later addi- 121 The Strategy of Great Railroads tions to the Gould system are of a class wholly different from the older lines. In order to get something he does need in the way of a link or a feeder, a railroad operator in building up often finds it necessary to buy something he does not in the least need. There are always branches in a railroad group that are hard to fit in anywhere as earners, and on which it seems like letting blood to spend money, and though with every tide of business prosperity in the country the railroads all get a lift, the day for picking up good things on the railroad bargain counter has largely gone by, and the big operators to-day are busy dusting up and polishing their antiques. What they need now is usually something that cannot be bought lines to round out adequately their present holdings and to increase their earn- ing power. Such needs are too definite to be served by picking up stray pieces of track, could they be had. The time has come when for these purposes links or extensions must be built, and any railroad built to-day must be built within certain definite limits as to grades and curves, or it cannot earn money. The example of what George Gould has done in modern construction in getting into Pittsburg has been widely dis- cussed. In Pittsburg last year his chief of con- struction checked out $12,000,000 of Gould 122 The Gould Lines money, placed to his private credit, so fast that he felt a personal shock in the celerity of the operation. While this was going on, Gould funds were being poured out in a stream west of the Mississippi. To avoid the terminal crush at St. Louis, Gould is completing from East St. Louis a new line to the Gulf with maximum grades of three-tenths per cent., easy curves, and an eighty- five-pound rail. This means St. Louis to New Orleans and Galveston, and with the strongest line in the field. Down the valley of the Arkansas, millions of dollars have been spent in rebuilding completely the track in the Little Rock and Fort Smith terri- tory, making it low-grade and equipping it for the exactions of heavy tonnage to strengthen the big links from the Rockies to the Gulf. From the Ozarks in Missouri, Mr. Gould is building down the White River another low-grade line that will not only supply the shortest line from Kansas City and Missouri River points to Mem- phis and New Orleans but will open up a new territory described as "magnificent." In the building up of any great system of rail- ways ambition may to a certain point be the chief factor; beyond that it becomes self-preservation. The acquiring of additional lines is in the end a necessity to provide outlets for traffic originating 123 The Strategy of Great Railroads in one's own territory or to secure feeders that will supply material needed by the territory's industries. Railroad operators are forced at times to take over competing lines that assume the attitude of black- mailers ; roads have been built with precisely such ends in view. In this way any system is liable to acquire more or less dead wood, the only salvation for such investments lying in the ever-growing needs of the country for transportation facilities, so that ultimately the least useful division takes its place acceptably in the activities of the system. In this way, too, it is a fact, and at times a serious one, that there comes about in railroad consolidation a wasteful competition between dif- ferent lines belonging to the same interests. The view here taken assumes nothing more than that public interests require not only reasonable rates but stable rates, and when, whether through secret rebates or the reduction of an open tariff to a point below a legitimate operating profit, a road cannot make money, it is in the end the public that suf- fers. Of equal disadvantage to public interests is the policy sometimes followed by the traffic manager of a small line in a system, who, in order to make a showing for his own road, so refuses to inter- change traffic with foreign lines as to be in a state of war with his neighbors. He may, for instance, 124 The Gould Lines refuse to let traffic go off his line save by the longest way, making prohibitive rates the short way, thus delaying traffic movement if nothing worse. He may in this manner make the whole system of which he is a small part suffer even in the interchange of traffic between component lines. Few systems have not felt the waste and disadvantage caused by the tendency of each manager to consult his own interests and let the system look out for itself. A system so situated becomes a house divided against itself; stock- holders suffer in earnings and shippers' interests suffer through neglect, because every economy in operating expense and in time tends ultimately to benefit the public. To meet this difficulty and to insure internal harmony in the affairs of the different American railroad combinations a new American railroad official has been called into being. He is so new that as yet no quite satisfactory title has been found for him, but such men may be termed chief traffic officers; in this capacity Mr. Bird serves the Gould lines, Mr. Darius Miller, the Hill lines, Mr. Stubbs, the Harriman lines. Their official titles may vary somewhat ; Mr. Bird is vice-pres- ident of the Gould lines, Mr. Miller is vice- president of the Burlington road, and Mr. Stubbs is traffic director of the Harriman lines. 125 The Strategy of Great Railroads Heading the departments of traffic, they may all be termed traffic directors. As to their authority, they are actually traffic presidents, in that their powers, as arbiters of traffic between the various lines in their combinations as well as over all, are plenary. In the judicial aspect of their railroad systems they are traffic supreme courts, umpires from whose word there lies practically no appeal, or from whom an appeal if lodged must lie directly with Mr. Gould, Mr. Harriman, or Mr. Hill. ' The authority of a man so placed is of extra- ordinary scope. Upon his dictates depends the entire income of his system. Nor is his system the only party with vital interests lodged in his hands, for it comes almost as a shock to reflect that to-day if we include the traffic officers of the Santa Fe and of the Rock Island lines it may be said that in the whole vast territory west of the Missouri River the making and unmaking of every rate is in the hands of five men. Consid- ered rightly, however, rather than being an occa- sion for alarm, this is a substantial guarantee to the shipping interests of that territory that not only reasonable but stable rates will prevail. With this nearest approach to one-man power in trans- Missouri territory that will probably be seen in this generation there still remains so great a diver- 126 The Gould Lines sity of interests between the roads themselves, as well as the territories they serve, that very keen though conservative and businesslike competition must long continue to exist as it does to-day; and people of Washington and Oregon will know that they have in Mr. Hill a vigilant railroad operator to look out for their traffic development, while Southern California will realize that the Santa Fe and the Gould and the Harriman lines will not let them suffer in the struggle to secure their share of national commerce. Shippers under such a congress of traffic chiefs are safer than they would be under twenty-five traffic managers oper- ating for periods by means of secret manipulations and breaking at other times into open rate wars. In the work of these traffic officers, lie require- ments of the highest intelligence, the widest ac- quaintance with public need, and the broadest views on questions of transportation and the de- velopment of local industries. To the traffic chief his system must look for elimination of waste, whether of time in the best routing of traf- fic or of money in unnecessary transfers and re- handling. He must determine when a rate re- duction becomes profitable and when an advance becomes necessary. Before him must be adjusted the rival contentions of subordinate managers in his own railway family, and he must keep his 127 The Strategy of Great Railroads group of roads as a unit on terms of fair dealing with foreign roads. The results already shown in this idea of unify- ing traffic management are material. In the mat- ter of interchange of loaded cars alone, between connecting lines of a system, the new plan of management has more than justified itself. When a road in a system allows its loaded cars to go unre- servedly to other roads under the same ownership the record is usually that they go to a " grave- yard." On the Gould lines the Missouri Pacific, under the old traffic conditions, unloaded its east- bound cars as a measure of self-defence at its St. Louis terminal and the Wabash reloaded the through freight there into its own cars. This entailed an expense of $2 on every car of freight rehandled. It is frequently assumed that because such a charge is absorbed by the railways this costs the shipper nothing; this is not true, but of greater consequence is the delay that the re- handling involves at overcrowded terminals. This and like wastes of time, labor, and money it is the business of a traffic chief to do away with. To take an example, not because especially noteworthy in magnitude or novelty but because it is explicit in the interchange of traffic on one railway system, the two roads last named inter- changed on the twelfth of November, 1903, 1,277 128 The Gould Lines loaded cars. The transferring of the freight being done away with, those 1,277 loads wholly escaped the deadly delays of terminal warehouse handling and were sent by a belt line as originally loaded from the one road to the other. Nor did the car equipment of either road suffer in the operation. By the simple clearing-house expedient of com- pelling each road to make good every day its debit balance of cars, loaded or empty, the equip- ment of each is kept at all times unimpaired. If the Wabash receives a thousand loaded cars from the Missouri Pacific it must surrender that day in return one thousand loads or empties. On the day instanced the transfer of 1,277 cars between only two lines of one system saved an unnecessary re- loading expense of $2,554. Applied to one day's freight transfers over all the United States the sum involved would be enormous; but this is only one of many ways in which a director of traffic makes himself felt. He sometimes finds one of his small lines routing freight in a round- about and slow way in order to get the whole haul; but a chief traffic officer with more judg- ment requires that freight shall go by the quick- est route and, in not unknown instances, even when this means that a portion of the haul must be given to a foreign line. Prompt service is put first. 1129 The Strategy of Great Railroads Such instances afford a glimpse of a broader viewpoint in railway management a viewpoint better in the end for stockholders and owners as well as for public interests that is making itself everywhere felt in railway affairs in this country. The evolution of good railway management has seemed slow and has been attended by many abuses though not more than have accompanied the development of any great modem institution, industrial or political. To-day there is less abuse in railway management than there has been in the history of railroading, and the elimination of much of it has been made possible only by mak- ing the systems bigger as the country grows big- ger. Railway men realise that their properties are always at the mercy of the people. Public interests may always be safeguarded at Washing- ton by intelligent Federal legislation ; all that rail- road men ask is that it be intelligent. At present the traffic officer who makes the rates finds himself hampered by enactments, State and Federal, so contradictory that they make it difficult to do jus- tice to any interest. It is not always, it should be marked, the rais- ing of a rate that makes trouble ; the lowering of one is frequently productive, in disturbing the delicate adjustment of traffic movement, of no end of trouble. Shippers, however, are getting 130 The Gould Lines closer to railways in reconciling differences of opinion between them; they are learning that nothing is less satisfactory than a traffic lawsuit. Between the man that sells transportation and the man that buys there will naturally arise differ- ences in view. The railways in the Northwest at one time reduced the seaboard rates on grain till Northwestern millers saw the ruin of their flour business impending. They determined to fight for their existence as millers and appealed to a great traffic expert on the Vanderbilt lines, Grammer, of the Lake Shore, to help them get up their case for the Interstate Commerce Commis- sion. Captain Grammer heard attentively and answered with a suggestion. He instanced the famous hay cases before the Commission, the un- ending wrangle and delay, and said : " Why not prepare your case and appeal with it not to a Fed- eral tribunal but directly to your railroads them- selves? And I will help you to draw your briefs." They saw the advice was good and took it, and were rewarded with a satisfactory adjust- ment of their difficulties. The matter, too, of raising a traffic rate, even when circumstances equitably and justly call for such action, has become well-nigh impracticable, and the Interstate Commerce Commission has come to believe that the sole reason for its exist- The Strategy of Great Railroads ence is to lower rates. Under such conditions a traffic officer will not undertake the responsibility of lowering a rate, even when he feels it might safely be done, because he knows that once put down to relieve a situation or develop a new in- dustry he should never be able to restore it. In the face of such conditions everything that railways buy, whether of labour or equipment, has within five years materially increased in cost, while rates have not kept pace with the ad- vances. All ingenuity in traffic management is thus reduced to economy in distributing and col- lecting commodity movement. However, the very difficulties with which rail- ways are to-day beset serve, it would appear, to bring out capability, ingenuity, and resource, and in all the activities of the every-day movement to these ends the Gould lines, in their shirt-sleeves, are markedly busy. THE ROCK ISLAND SYSTEM THE ROCK ISLAND SYSTEM WHEN the United States is reproached for shutting out foreign trade with a tariff wall, pro- tectionists reply that, since the country contains in itself all natural resources, it needs no foreign trade. Whatever may be thought of the argu- ment it must be conceded that a nation so situ- ated is uncommonly lucky. The Rock Island System, including, as it does, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Road and the 'Frisco System, may be said to constitute with its territory a railroad principality, and one which actually does somewhat approach the in- dustrial independence claimed for the nation. The Rock Island, for instance, serves more towns of 25,000 people than any other Western road, and this gives it an urban standing. It might easily pose, too, as an agricultural road. A road strong in a wheat belt is said to be well in- trenched. But what shall be said of a road whose wheat belt is bounded on the north by Canada, on the south by Mexico, on the west by the Rocky Mountains, and on the east by Ohio *? 135 The Strategy of Great Railroads In the United States lies a pretty strictly de- fined corn belt. It is known as one of the richest agricultural regions in the world. Every railroad within the corn belt is rich, and the Rock Island lines are in the heart of it. That group of rail- roads in the Middle Northwest known before recent consolidations as the Granger lines has long been uniformly prosperous; but to-day, of all that group, only the Rock Island is able to carry export corn and wheat either to the Gulf over its own rails, or to the Atlantic seaboard through its Chicago gateway; it is at Chicago and within striking distance of Galveston. A third field product of primary importance remains cotton; and the Rock Island is a cotton road. Fourteen States share in the production of this crop, which ranks second among all of our agri- cultural resources. Of these States, nine are served by the Rock Island lines. What is still more unusual, one traffic territory served by the Rock Island, and somewhat vaguely termed the new Southwest, depends neither on corn, nor wheat, nor cotton alone. It enjoys a climate and a soil so patient of all of these crops that the farmer may plant, indifferently, which he pleases : cotton, or corn, or wheat. The strength of a road drawing its traffic from all of our great agricultural districts is obvious. 136 The Rock Island System Railroads of the farther Northwest depend on a wheat crop. But the Rock Island may view with less alarm the failure of a wheat crop, or of any one of our three greatest crops, because it still has the other two to depend on. Last year seventy per cent, of the total grain crop of the country was raised in Rock Island System States. Sixty per cent., or 2,000,000 car- loads, was raised in eleven States shipping largely by Rock Island lines. Fifty-five per cent, was raised west of the Mississippi River. The Rock Island brings cattle from the farms and ranges of its own territory to the packing centres of the country, reaching all of them, and when it markets the cotton of its Southern farmer it brings to him his meat grown and packed on its own lines. This very packing-house product is crated and boxed in wood cut on Rock Island lines and carried north by the Rock Island. The system reaches the only considerable timber sup- ply, save that on the Pacific Coast, now left in the United States. It penetrates not alone the Southern pine districts, but reaches the magnif- icent hardwood reserves of the Southwest, in- cluding the oak of Arkansas and the walnut of the Indian Territory. Texas does not pose as a timber country, yet the timber lands of this State cover an area larger than the State of Indiana. 137 The Strategy of Great Railroads In Alabama the Rock Island is at Birmingham, which means a terminal in an American iron and steel district second only to Pittsburg. As to precious metals, Rock Island lines are in Colo- rado, and they reach the smelters of Denver, Pueblo, Omaha, Kansas City, and El Paso. In lead the Rock Island is even more fortunate, for, with its 'Frisco System, it is, in the Joplin, Mo., district, paramount. These are certainly claims to distinction, but they do not exhaust the Rock Island list. It not only reaches and supplies all great manufactur- ing centres of the Middle West with raw ma- terial, but it distributes their wares over 15,000 miles of railroad in consuming territory. At Moline and at Rock Island, 111., are manu- factories of agricultural implements among the most extensive in the country ; they are very particularly Rock Island System industries. Kan- sas City, on the other hand, is the greatest dis- tributing centre for agricultural implements in the whole world, and it is a principal terminal of both the big roads of the Rock Island System. In the southwestern part of Missouri and the northwestern part of Arkansas lies a region espe- cially favoured by Providence in the temper of its soil and climate. It is known as the Ozark Plateau. Fruit should not ordinarily be expected, 138 The Rock Island System outside California, to interest a large railroad system. But Missouri is the home of the big, red apple, and of these it supplies thousands of car-loads to the Rock Island. Niagara County, N. Y., boasts 924,086 apple-trees, and in the whole United States there is no record to ap- proach this except in Washington County, Ark., where there were at the same time 1900 1,555,000 apple-trees; and Washington County has planted half a million apple-trees since then. The lesser fruits figure more in the traffic of the express companies, but peaches from the Ozark Plateau supply more than one thousand cars of freight every year to this railroad. The modest strawberry reddens in the winter sun at the south- ernmost corner of this delightful district. Begin- ning there, the Rock Island picks it up as the season advances, all the way up the line for the northern markets, and, incredible as it may seem, the Ozark strawberry, in addition to an enor- mous express business, supplies annually hundreds of carloads as freight. A last natural product vital to the prosperity of an American railroad remains, and to its abun- dance of riches the Rock Island adds a wealth of coal territory which, in extent and distribution, is unusual. One of its new lines, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, is distinctively a coal road, and 139 The Strategy of Great Railroads when it is considered that the coal fields of Colo- rado, Kansas, Missouri, the Indian Territory, and Alabama are all reached by the Rock Is- land, a strong position in coal resources will be granted it. Considered, then, as a combination of railroads joined into one system for industrial independence, the Rock Island lines present a front that is formidable. A traffic pre-eminence can hardly be denied to so considerable a factor among Western railroads when once its plans are realised. It is to-day that these are being shaped. The Rock Island is an infant among American rail- way systems, but it is regarded as a fairly vigor- ous one, and, with its career worked out under wise counsels, no traffic property in the country should have a more enviable future. It is only fair to say that the promise of this already shows forth in the dispositions made for executive au- thority. The Rock Island is purely a Western road, if by this may be understood that it is a Southwestern, a Northwestern, and a Southern road. It is Western as opposed to lines within its territory that seek for, or enjoy, an Atlantic seaboard terminal. The Eastern terminal horizon of the Rock Island is definitely bounded by Chicago, where it maintains relations with all Eastern trunk lines. West of Chicago, however, 140 The Rock Island System the Rock Island is practically everywhere east of Wyoming and the Rio Grande River. As if to emphasise its Western completeness it is building now into New Orleans, spending there $2,000,- ooo for terminals, and in these providing not alone for city business but, what is of more importance, for imports and exports. Anticipating the needs of five hundred years, it has acquired three miles of river frontage for its docks and warehouses, but of this abundant holding six thousand feet will take care of the needs of the present genera- tion of traffic managers, who will direct Rock Island traffic to Galveston, New Orleans, or Chi- cago as conditions imply. The completion, too, of the 'Frisco line from St. Louis into New Or- Jeans will witness the completion of the longest low-grade railroad line in the United States, being nowhere above eleven feet to the mile. A road so Western in its territorial strategy is naturally managed wholly in the West. West- ern railroad men are in themselves a tower of strength. They stand for decision, action, and organisation. They are indefatigable, construc- tive, and, above all, resourceful, and to them America owes so much of its present excellence, notable the world over, in affairs of transportation, that the only danger in paying them too strong a tribute is lest it should seem to rob Eastern rail- The Strategy of Great Railroads road men somewhat of their own high due. It is, however, undoubtedly true that poverty of ma- terial resources aids in the overcoming of difficul- ties. It stimulates mental ingenuity, and the Western railroad man has had the inestimable advantage of a stern frontier school. The oper- ating and executive staff of the Rock Island is as markedly Western as its lines. Mr. Winchell, the president of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway, who finds himself at less than forty-six under so particular an executive re- sponsibility, has behind him a Western record as continuous and rounded as that of most railroad veterans of sixty. Outside the motive power it would be difficult to name a single department of the road of which he is chief into which he could not step and perform with ease the duties of the head. Neither the auditing, the passenger de- partment, the freight traffic, nor the operating would present serious difficulties to the president, since he has built up each of such branches on several different Western roads, and the most im- portant of them on the system he now heads. Within only the last ten years he has been gen- eral passenger and ticket agent of the Union Pacific, Denver and Gulf, and of the 'Frisco road as well, vice-president and traffic manager of the Colorado and Southern, president of the Kansas 142 The Rock Island System City, Fort Scott and Memphis, vice-president of the 'Frisco System, and lastly and at once, first vice-president of the 'Frisco, of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, the Evansville and Terre Haute, and third vice-president of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway, in charge both of the operating and the traffic. To carry the load implied in positions so ex- acting as these indicates extraordinary facility in despatching work, and the men Mr. Winchell is drawing around him are much of this type : men neither young nor old, but at the best of their ex- ecutive power. Thus, one of the heads of Mr. Winchell's staff is a little younger than himself; a second has just turned forty, while the general superintendents are in their prime. On these men falls the responsibility for the building up of the Rock Island System, and no railroad work, in all of the newer dispositions of railroad management and control, will involve more hard thinking or call for a heavier expendi- ture of vital energy on the part of a few men. In the first place, the operating problems are momentous. A curious statistician has figured out that a union labour president of the Rock Island System travelling eight hours a day on a fast train would need all of sixty days to ride over his road, not to consider stopping for inspection ; 143 The Strategy of Great Railroads but railroad presidents, not yet having formed a union, work sixteen hours a day, and could, there- fore, make the trip in less. However, it would be obviously impossible for any single set of oper- ating officials to get the best results in handling so extended a mileage, and the two chief constit- uent lines of the system, that is to say, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway and the 'Frisco System, are likely to be co-ordinated in operating rather than merged. In the hand- ling of large properties railroad practice has al- ready found the limit beyond which it is not wise to extend the work of a single executive staff. If the seat of an authority be too many miles from the point of appeal on questions that call for prompt answer, efficiency becomes impaired. The railroad is no longer sensitively in touch with its customers ; the opportunity to make the road re- spond to every profitable suggestion from shipper or superintendent is lost, and with it the highest development of local traffic. But in this co-ordinating, this unifying, this assembling into a working machine of the crude materials of a railroad system lies a labour of in- finite pains. It is not like the building of one engine after the pattern of another, for each rail- road system presents, in forming, unique difficul- ties, and the builders of the newer can only choose 144 5 O U T H W Y O M I N G NEBRASKA THK ROCK. 1HNE*p ^ I N N k**^W* I S C O N S I/N i Vvtr-' H *v # ^ :&*> ^WPiD^Ot* ' w ^ ^ rlmi , S *# -*<*> \villc. errf- ( K V MEMPHIS \\ ^ BIRM