Grand Central Terminal

“ Dec., 1893, to March, 1894, extra telegraph operator and special inspector of telegraph service Lehigh Valley Rd. at South Bethlehem, Pa.; March, 1894, to March 31, 1905, batteryman, maintainer, general foreman, supervisor automobile signals and assistant signal engineer same road; March 31, 1905, to date, engineer maintenance of way, Grand Central Terminal at New York; Dec. 5, 1905, to May 1, 1907, engineer maintenance of way, Grand Central Terminal and Electric division New York Central & Hudson River Rd. ”

“ For ten years we were traveling through space, getting more and more impatient and irritable by our enforced idleness; and then, when we finally land on the earth, it turns out—as you have undoubtedly heard—that all life is extinct on this planet. ”

“ Since the earth-dwellers who built all these cities must have been rational beings, it is difficult to believe that they should have gone to all this trouble of processing uranium just in order to destroy themselves. ”

“ Xram, as I mentioned before, has a theory of his own which he thinks can explain everything, the disks in the gadgets as well as the uranium explosions which extinguished life.
He believes that these disks were given out to earth-dwellers as rewards for services. He says that the earthdwellers were not rational beings and that they would not have collaborated in co-operative enterprises without some special incentive. ”

“ The state of New York, by its superintendent of public works in a complaint filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission, sought to compel the New York Central Railroad Company to provide transportation service between the public terminal of the Erie Barge Canal at Buffalo and shippers located along its tracks and along the lines of other railroads with which it can interchange traffic. ”

“ What is the significance of these gadgets, the disks in the gadgets and the word "Liberty" on the disks? Though a number of hypotheses have been put forward in explanation, consensus seems to veer toward the view that we have to deal here with a ceremonial act accompanying the act of deposition, similar perhaps to some of the curious ceremonial acts reported from the planets Sigma 25 and Sigma 43. According to this view, the word "Liberty" must designate some virtue which was held in high esteem by the earth-dwellers or else their ancestors. ”

“ This involved plans not only adequate for the present traffic but elastic enough for a development keeping pace with a rapidly growing traffic for many years. Plans for freight terminals had to be worked out in harmony with modern manufacturing and commercial tendencies, while at the same time allowing full provision for great growth of passenger transportation. And, further, due regard has been given to what might be desired in the way of future development of property for public-park and other civic purposes—something too often neglected in railroad terminal location and construction. ”

“ By this contract it was agreed that the reduced number of 'off track' stations named in the filed tariffs, which were places of business of the Columbia Terminals Company, should be designated and maintained as the only 'off track' stations of the carriers; that the Columbia Terminals Company should have the exclusive right to transport less than carload freight between the 'on track' stations and between them and the 'off track' stations ”

“ The ramps are made about 16 feet wide, and the grade approximately 15 per cent.
Terminal Stations. —For the purpose of accommodating patrons bus and express terminal stations are being installed. So far these have been established and financed by private companies. Where several bus lines or express lines radiate from a city a union depot may be expected not only to pay, but greatly to convenience the public. Small hotels and out-of-the-way places are ordinarily used when there is no central station. ”

“ Our worst troubles have come not from insufficient rolling stock or lack of efficiency in handling it, but from congested terminals. Water routes give little assistance: first, because the largest streams of traffic in the United States are not in a direction where either natural or artificial waterways can be used; second, because a waterway less than twenty feet deep cannot compete as a carrier. The waterway, too, may and often does increase rather than lessen the pressure on terminal facilities. ”

“ The downtown stations, located in the heart of each industrial district, will do the rest. The expense of building these last will be as nothing. The value of their upper floors as lofts for light manufacturing will far more than offset the cost and upkeep of the ground-floor motor-freight terminal, while the facility of movement, with its multitude of resultant economies, will make the expenditure on outlying main terminals money well spent indeed. ”

“ Exits and entrances to the trains must be built in order that incoming and outgoing streams of persons shall not conflict. All these points require careful study. It is possible to design a baggage-room so bad as to make the station all but a failure; a stuffy ticket-office that is almost an impossibility to use under pressure conditions. The good engineer thinks two or three thousand times before he begins the design of a passenger terminal.
The concourse, or head platform, that joins all the different track platforms is the main feature of the terminal building. ”

“ By paragraph 3 of section 3 of the act (section 3, par. (3) , tit. 49 USCA) , rail carriers subject to it are required to afford all 'reasonable, proper, and equal facilities for the interchange of traffic between their respective lines, and for the receiving, forwarding, and delivering of passengers or property to and from their several lines and those connecting therewith.' 'Reasonable, proper, and equal facilities' include not only trackage, but all other terminal facilities, all of which are brought under jurisdiction of the Commission. ”

“ Moreover, there is direct subway entrance to three large hotels, capable of housing as many as 10,000 persons, and to all these conveniences is added that of comfortable temperature throughout the terminal, no matter how cold the weather. ”

“ Every railroad that has any sort of ambition to be considered a trunk-line will count upon having one or two or even more terminals upon navigable streams, and at these it will protect itself by having [Pg 407] its own wharves and landing-stages—even grain elevators, if it is putting out its hungry fingers for the great traffic in food-stuffs that sweeps out over the land and water transportation routes of America. Such a terminal means a railroad fleet—ferries, scows, lighters, a little company of stout and busy tugs. ”

“ The freight terminals of a large city will be a group of plants, designed for varying purposes. The railroad handles its passenger business from a single structure, if possible. It is comparatively simple to gather all its passengers, even from a broad territory, within a great city, and so to concentrate this part of its traffic in a single well-located terminal. ”

“ Three hundred yards before the station is reached the flame-throated iron monster, uncoupled from its burden of cars, darts forward on a siding like a spirited horse unharnessed from its load, while the train glides forward with its own momentum, slowly and more slowly as the brakes are applied, until it comes to a stop under the depot shed. Hardly have the passengers poured forth when another train rolls in, and then another, the pathway in each instance cleared by those keen men at the levers in this tower-house of the yards of the Grand Central station in New York city. ”

“ Freight terminals, originally well conceived and wisely located in the heart of a city, may have become valueless for rate-making purposes under section 15a, because through growth of the city the expense of operating therein has become so high, or the inescapable cost of eliminating grade crossings so large, that efficient management requires immediate abandonment of the terminals. ”

“ With sub-stations so established, the principle of standardized interchangeable motor-truck bodies and chasses working to so definite an end, there remains little or no use for downtown freight terminals in a city like Cincinnati, save perhaps an occasional team-track yard for heavy car-load shipments. In the flats at the edge of the town the railroads can, and in my opinion eventually will, establish new and generous-sized freight-houses and other terminal appurtenances. ”

“ Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
But the first big station terminals—in our American sense that a thing big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world—were those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention. ”

“ A thousand cars are a fleabite compared with the daily movement in the busy season. The railroads of the United States carried 1,849,900,101 tons of revenue freight in 1910. At the average load of 21.5 tons per car, it would take 86,041,865 cars to move it. Nearly all of these pass through some large terminal, most of them several times in the year. There are about thirty important traffic centers ”

“ The railroads, then, have proved themselves competent and trustworthy. But if they are to furnish the necessary additions and provide new terminals, without which the traffic of the country can no more continue to move than a derelict can voyage from port to port, the money will not come, as a magician catches coins, out of the air. ”

“ It is not contended that the unification of the terminal facilities of a great city where many railroad systems center is, under all circumstances and conditions, a combination in restraint of trade or commerce. ”

“ The passenger terminals may have all the magnificence in which we have seen them, but the freight terminals are the real core of a railroad’s entrance into any town. For when you come to even the roughest figures, you find that in extreme cases—such as the New Haven’s, where there is a congested territory, closely filled with thickly populated cities and towns—the passenger receipts will hardly do more than approach a balance with those from freight. ”

“ Piers and huge railroad terminals are to be found on every side, and, more important still, they line the Hudson River for four or five miles on each side from its mouth at the Battery, to Fifty-ninth Street on the Manhattan side, and to Fort Lee in New Jersey. Similarly, but to a less extent, the East River is lined with piers while a great railroad terminal is located on Long Island Sound just beyond where the East River ends. Yet thriving as it is, this great port, compared with some other great ports, is an inefficient place. ”

“ It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic; and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves, elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.
So you see the railroad’s freight terminal in any large city is like the fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together somewhere ”

“ The public wants to deal directly with the agents of railroads over which it is shipping and receiving freight; but there can be no valid objection to those agents being joint agents. To give on joint terminals service which is really satisfactory to the public, and which is, on the other hand, economical to the railroad companies, the agents of each railroad must clearly understand that the joint terminals are a part of that railroad, and that each railroad company is directly responsible to the public for the proper handling of its business on such joint terminals. ”

“ It is not to be supposed or desired that the nation should furnish the money to provide those great harbors known as railroad terminals, although they are vastly more essential to the free movement of trade. ”

“ Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on its way toward home—the seething crowds at the Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row, the overloaded subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry and the railroad terminals focal points of great attractiveness. ”

“ Still other underground railroads have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal ”

“ The whole broad national field of railroad operation awaits the coming of the motor-truck and its detachable body into terminal handling. It is to be a great factor in the railroad of to-morrow. Come east, if you will, from Cincinnati into New York. Now we have a teaser of a problem. Far worse, even, than that of the city by the bend of the Ohio. The freight terminal problem of the island of Manhattan alone is to-day the greatest single problem of transport in all this land, if not, indeed, in all the world. ”