Railway terminal

“ At large terminal stations it is frequently found more convenient for the working of the traffic to have two or more sets of waiting-rooms, etc., separating the local and long-journey passengers, and placing the rooms alongside the corresponding platforms.
Lavatories and conveniences at large stations should be provided on a liberal scale, and fitted up in the most substantial and efficient manner. Not only should they be thoroughly well ventilated, but they should have abundance of light. Nothing tends so much to ensure order and cleanliness in these places as plenty of light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every once in a while we are appalled by a terrible collision in a terminal, the result perhaps of some poor devil of an employe not appreciating fully the meaning of “all trains.” To the innocent bystander the switch engine and cars are just as much a train as the Pullman flyer with its two little green markers on the last car. ”

“ The subject of national transportation is many-sided. One aspect of it takes precedence in one community or in the opinion of one interest, while for others some different phase ranks all the rest. But every interest and every community should understand that the main need today of transportation and of the many activities connected with and dependent upon it is an increase of terminal facilities. ”

“ Again, if the cost of terminal switching does occasionally happen to be reflected in a freight rate, the genial gentlemen of the traffic department are prone to recommend its absorption. I believe as a broad proposition that the management of railroads is more scientific than that of most modern industries. I would not like, however, to file much of their terminal operation as an exhibit. A majority of the switch engines in the United States have one superfluous man in the crew. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Next, he perfected the organization of a separate Terminal Company, which was to create the terminal facilities, including a large passenger station, a bridge over the Willamette, machine-shops, freight-houses, round-houses, docks, etc., required for the three railroad systems, the Oregon & Transcontinental Company, Oregon Railway & Navigation, and Northern Pacific, which would terminate at Portland. The estimated outlay of the Terminal Company was nearly $3,000,000, which was provided for by the issue of bonds to be guaranteed by the three railroad companies. ”

“ As the train lazily rolls into the terminal station, pouches and sacks are ready for delivery and the clerks make ready to leave the car.
The instant the train stops, a portion of the mail, large or small as the case may be, is delivered into a wagon for rapid transfer to a railway post-office train about to start from another station. If the incoming train is late, it may be necessary to exact the utmost speed to reach the outgoing train, and in many cases it is always necessary to effect it rapidly. ”

“ A very important item in the construction of a large terminal station is the roof over the lines and platforms. Wrought-iron and steel can now be obtained in so many convenient sections, and at such moderate prices, that timber-framed roofs, except for very small spans, are now rarely used for railway work. ”

“ The number of employees engaged in track work by American railways averages about 150 per 100 miles of line.
Buildings. Railway operations require the use of buildings in vast numbers. Of these passenger stations and freight depots are among the most important because of their number and cost. Passenger stations vary in size and character from small combination depots used at local stations of minor importance to large terminal stations of masonry and steel, and often of almost monumental magnificence. ”

“ Plate LII, Fig. 2.— TW 100. P.T. & T.R.R. Co. Terminal Station West. Showing excavation of completion of South abutment 9th Ave. and method of Supporting Elevated Railway Column 488. July 21, 09.
Plate LII, Fig. 3.— TW 31. P.T. & T.R.R. Co. Terminal Station West. View showing excavation 9th and 10th Avenues South of 32nd St. looking West from Sta. 184. Aug. 17, 07.
Plate LII, Fig. 4.— TW 101. P.T. & T.R.R. Co. Terminal Station West. Inside of concrete form for lower-face wall, showing drains, tie rods, diaphragms and methods employed for tying in the form in addition to braces outside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A big passenger terminal is a much bigger thing than that gaudy waiting-room in which you sit, whilst your train is being made ready to take you out from the city.
Great as the room assigned to locomotives, greater must be yard-room for car-storage, in rough proportions, as the length of the locomotive to the average train length. It takes something approaching a genius to lay out the car-yards, particularly in the case of passenger terminals, which are almost invariably in the heart of great cities where land values are fabulously high. ”

“ 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 ”

“ You are sitting in the office of a big railroad president, talking straight to that big-shouldered soul himself. Outside is the shadowy roof of the train-shed of a terminal, which is filled with long lines of cars that come and go, of platforms that are black with humans one instant and quite deserted the next. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An age in which the American demands the exquisite and the monumental in his architecture, palatial homes, palatial shops, palatial hotels, demands that the railroad station be something more than the mere expression of a commercial utility. Stone, the sturdy and durable building material of all the ages, has become the expression of these buildings from without. Within, they are gay with rare marbles and mural paintings. There is nothing too fine for the railroad passenger terminal of to-day in the United States. ”

“ Frequently several railways entering a town unite and use conjointly a so-called ‘union depot.’ It follows, therefore, that terminal passenger stations are located in large cities and towns, or at ferry terminals or at important junction points of several railways. ”

“ Hill dwelt especially on the intimate relation of railway and agriculture interests. Among other things he said:
"The question of terminals means a great deal to a railroad and it is getting to be more and more full of meaning every year. Some cities, and large cities, today have all the railroads they will ever get, simply on account of the difficulty in getting terminals. I think the Northern Pacific terminals today—I think to buy them on the entire system—would cost more money than to grade the whole road, and I do not know but what it would cost more than to grade and put the rails down. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Usually the tracks enter the station in pairs with a platform between each pair of tracks. These tracks and platforms are commonly roofed over in terminal stations. Train-shed roofs are sometimes made up of large steel arches spanning the tracks without intermediate supports, and sometimes they consist of two or more spans of steel roof trusses carried by side walls and intermediate columns.
Except at combination depots and flag stations special buildings are provided for handling the freight traffic. ”

“ It is enough that the loading and unloading are rail transportation services performed at a railroad terminal as a common or public calling by one who, in rendering it, engages in the transportation of property by railroad within the meaning of the Act. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Americans, due to the liberal baggage provisions of our railroads, travel each year with increased impedimenta. Each year the task of the baggage-handlers multiplies. Making room for trunks has come to be an important terminal provision. In the large terminals, this traffic is divided, an in-baggage room receiving from incoming trains and distributing to various forms of city baggage delivery and an out-baggage room receiving and checking baggage for outgoing trains. ”

“ The layout embraces every feature and facility involved in the construction of a first-class terminal, including a depot building planned and constructed after the most modern lines, and containing every feature for the convenience, comfort, and pleasure of the traveling public; the most complete and up-to-date facilities for conducting the business of a large railroad station; a main power plant for furnishing power of every kind required for the successful operation of the station and yards ”

“ In the case of heavy through trains, where baggage runs unusually heavy, the baggage-cars are frequently detached and switched in upon special tracks that run alongside the baggage rooms.
The passenger terminal must also provide mail and express facilities among these structures, but these, as has already been intimated, are generally apart and quite separate from the passenger facilities. A power plant is another necessity. ”