THE MARINE RAILROADS OF THE WORLD Huge Fleets of Car-Floats and Powerful Tugs Operated by Railroads to Save Time and Distance in Moving Freight. By CHARLES O. CARR (Copyrighted) New York is the largest city in America, but less freight passes through its limits than through any other city on the map. Situated on an island, the metropolis has always presented a problem for the vast tonnage of "through freight" that goes by its door. To bridge the rivers that border the city for railroad trains and build tracks through its streets is impractical. That is why a great flotilla of "floats" plies New York harbor on regular schedule, transshipping ten thousand cars of freight daily. More than six thousand men are employed in the handling of the two thousand boats of various kinds that are used by the marine departments of the eight trunk lines that have terminals at this greatest seaport in the world. The "floating equipment," as it is called, includes a great diversity of craft. but with a swiftness and precision that mark the operations of a highly organiized railroad. The big car-floats play the greatest When a trainpart as burden-carriers. load of freight, destined for Brooklyn Jersey City or Hoboken or Weehawken or Long Island points, arrives at the terminal, the cars are run on the floats without breaking bulk. In three-quarters of an hour they are rolling from the floating pier bound to their various destinations. With west-bound freight the system works just as expeditiously. It rarely requires more than an hour to bring one of these big car-floats, heavily laden, from the extreme of the "lighterage limits" of the harbor and deliver it at the proper terminal in New Jersey. Then the long land journey begins, a journey that may not end until the car The smallest members of the fleet reaches the limits of the continent. are the tugboats. Some of these are large and some small, but all are mighty in their power. Battling in Winter. Some of the car-ferries will carry The average are a little more than one eight freight-cars; others can handle hundred feet long, and one-quarter of three times that many. One tug, in fair that in width, but their hearts-their weather, can easily manage two loaded powerful engines-are out of all propor- floats. But when the winter storms or tion to their bodies. The engines run summer tempests lash the harbor waters from twelve to fifteen hundred horse- into foam the motive-power must be power each. The water-tube boilers can doubled or tripled,, just as it must be sustain a locomotive pressure of 185 when a heavy train has to climb a steep pounds to the square inch. grade in icy weather. One of the powerful tugs can handle Once during last winter, the New two floats carrying twenty cars each, York marine departments of the railat the rate of twelve miles an hour ways had to face a hurricane. For some against the swift-running tides and time the wind blew at the rate of ninetycross-currents that make difficult the six miles an hour, and for a few long navigation of one of the most congested waterways of the world. moments it attained the terrific velocity of 110 miles an hour. The North and East rivers and the bay were filled with floating ice, which the wind and the waters hurled to and fro with tremendous force. There are big steam lighters that take the freight from a ship and carry it to the pier of the railroad terminal to be loaded into cars bound inland. When the freight is to be transferred to an Never in the maritime history of New ocean steamer, for shipment across the York had such a storm been known or seas, for instance, the steam lighter hauls had navigation been so dangerously difup alongside the vessel and her cargo ficult. Six hours after the storm burst goes into the hold with a vast creaking it began to abate somewhat, and the of winches and shouting of stevedores, wind dropped to seventy-two miles an hour. There it hung for twelve hours When the tide of traffic is at its flood before it vanished seaward at the rate of fifty miles an hour. the marine despatcher is an exceedingly busy man. He need not worry about two train-loads of freight meeting on a single track, but he has other troubles. The general freight-agent's office telephones, late in the afternoon, for in But despite this-the most trying conditions with which the marine departments of the railways had ever had to contend-New York City was well supplied with foodstuffs. The marine departments battled with the storm night stance, that it has promised delivery of and day, sleeplessly-in the despatchers' ten car loads of coal to a factory in offices on shore, on the boats that were Brooklyn. The freight-train on which it bombarded continuously by masses of is arriving at the New Jersey terminal is ice which were hurled against their behind time. The coal must be rushed sides. from Hoboken onto the floats and be landed in Brooklyn before six o'clock. The men stuck to their posts, fought the ice and the bitter cold, but there was no delay in getting New York's food supply landed at her water gates at the usual hour. It was the greatest triumph of marine railroading. Everything must be made ready so that there will not be a moment's delay. Delivering the goods on time is the essence of a railroad's success-the way it secures and holds its customers, the In fair weather or foul, the marine great talking-point of the freight solicidepartment has to fight to maintain its tors. schedules just as the operating department struggles continuously to keep its trains on time. Fog is the great disorganizer of marine time-tables. Sometimes it blankets the waters so thickly that the most powerful search-lights cannot pierce a boat's length of it. The marine despatcher turns to the telephone. At one of the many stations down the river a red flag is run up. It is like flashing a stop signal on a railroad block. A tug dashes in and receives the orders. Then it hurries away with its clearance-card and yellow tissues instructing it to proceed to a certain point and pick up the load which is to be delivered at its specified destination at the hour and minute indicated. Then the railroad fleet must feel its way like a man in a dark room. The river is a bedlam of noise. Whistles, foghorns, tolling signal-bells, puffing engines, the washing of the water against the yards on the other side of the river. the vessels' bows. Nearly all of the railroad's floating equipment is of steel. The day of the wooden boat is almost past. Everything that is used now is built to withstand the hardest usage. And the service is continuous. This is part of the modern economy of the railroad. A tug puffs into its dock at a certain hour and minute. It finds waiting there its next crew. Hardly is one on its homeward way before the other is pulling out into the stream with a fresh batch of orders. The system of handling these big fleets of boats is modeled after the method of despatching the trains on land. The chief despatcher sits in his office, close to the water-front. Telegraph instruments chatter at one elbow and a telephone switchboard is at the other. Railroading and Navigation Mixed. The marine despatcher must understand waterway navigation. He must be wise in all the ways of the inland traindespatcher and still must know the influences of the winds and tides and weather as thoroughly as any of the captains of the tugboats. He must combine two trades or businesses in one. Meanwhile the orders have gone to A switch-engine that has been standing idly on a siding suddenly becomes active. A heavy freight-train comes bumping in. The cars are dusty and begrimed from their journey. It has hardly halted when the yardcrew begin to cut out the cars of coal and push them down to the floating dock where the tug and the big car-float is waiting to receive them. the pilot-pays his compliments to the The captain of the tug-speaking to "captain" of the switch-engine because he is two minutes late in starting. At last all is ready, the tug bellows a hoarse warning and the big, snub-nosed Once float pushes out into the stream. alongside the Brooklyn dock with his convoy, the captain goes ashore and telephones the despatcher's office for further orders, saying that he has delivered the freight on time. The despatcher tells him to steam up the river and watch the signals for orders-that the freight is arriving irregularly, and that he will have something for him by the time he is opposite the first station. His next instructions may be to pick up a float-load of cars that has to be landed on the western shore in time to be included in one of least one of them is likely to be fitted the fast freights bound for Chicago. He signals full speed ahead. There is another race against time, and within fifteen minutes after he has delivered his dozen car-loads at the Jersey terminal, they are traveling westward over the rails. and are are This sort of thing goes on day night. Although the waterways crowded and hairbreadth escapes frequent, accidents are few. The men in the marine department have to be as incessantly on the alert as those who operate the trains. Carelessness has no place at either end of the game. The value of the merchandise that is carried in the ten thousand cars that are each day hurried up and down the waters around New York runs into millions. Sixty per cent of the wheat that comes to New York is for transshipment across the seas. Twenty-five per cent of all the freight of all classes that comes to that port from inland points goes abroad. Twenty-five per cent of all the freight that the ships bring from the far and near corners of the earth is consigned to inland points. The rest of the transatlantic freight and the rest of the materials and merchandise that are poured into the boats of the railways' marine departments must be shifted from one point to another by water. It is usually a part of the bill-of-lading contract that the freight shall be delivered by the railroad, without extra charge, anywhere within the lighterage limits of the harbor. Inland shippers of freight for export prefer to send their goods via New York on account of the frequency with which steamers sail from that port to every corner of the world. When freight has to be taken from the cars in order to transport it to the steamship dock where it is to go aboard the boat that is bound for Africa, Australia, Europe, South America, or any other destination, the incoming cars are rushed into long piers that extend a thousand feet or more from the shore. The largest of these are more than 100 feet in width and eight tracks run from end to end, connecting with the railroad yards outside. Overhead there are mighty traveling cranes, fitted with folding booms. These cranes carry the freight from the cars, and transport it to the broad openings in the side of the pier. Then the boom swings out and deposits the merchandise on the deck of the lighter or barge waiting alongside. The cranes are equipped with air brakes and are moved by electricity. At with an electromagnet for the picking up of masses of steel. New York City consumes thousands and thousands of tons of structural steel every year in the construction of its skyscrapers and other massive buildings. This steel for the most part comes from Pittsburgh or the adjacent section. Many of the girders are so long and heavy that they have to be transported on three flat cars. All of this steel must be handled by the railroad marine. The cars are run down onto the pier and the electromagnet-crane reaches out and picks up the fifty or hundred-ton girder as easily as a boy would lift a fishing-rod. It swings it along and puts it aboard the derrick-boat rocking in the water alongside quietly and easily. The derrick-boat is also equipped with powerful cranes. When it reaches the other shore the big girder is lightly raised again and deposited on the twenty-horse truck that is waiting to receive it. Locomotives-we ship many of them to all parts of the world-and other great, ungainly pieces of machinery are handled in much the same way. Of course, the locomotive must be handled more carefully, but the expenditure of effort, seemingly, is no greater. Some Gigantic Loads. To see one of these cranes tackle a mountain of scrap-iron and move it from the boat to the cars on the dock is to witness a performance that looks like black magic. Even kegs of nails-fifty or a hundred at a time-are handled in the same way. Such devices as this have made the work of the railroad marine far less worrisome and hazardous than it used to be. The loading capacity of one of these great docks is 1,200 cars of freight a day. The work goes on incessantly, smoothly, and systematically. Merchandise of every sort is handled, structural steel, bales of feathers, machinery, acids, dynamite, coal-there is hardly an article in the official classification that does not appear on the bills-of-lading between one noon and the next. Another class of machinery is used to transfer flour and grain and other sacked things. Long lines of men, each man with a bag on his back, once did this work. Now there are automatic devices like huge, endless belts that carry the sacks in a swift stream from the dock to the vessel. Sometimes as many as twenty barges will be loading at the same pier simultaneously, and as soon as they move away a score of others will take their places. The United States Navy is not more precise and swift in the shifting of its craft than is the railroad marine. The floating grain elevators are a common yet conspicuous sight about the harbor. They are sixty feet high. They whisk the wheat or corn out of a trainload of cars, and then hurry alongside of some big ocean steamer and send the golden river into its hold. The coal-barges form another distinct class. A large share of these are concerned in supplying coal to the vast fleet of steamers that sail in and out of the port of New York. When one of the transatlantic greyhounds is to be coaled there is a bit more tension than usual for both the despatchers on land and those that handled the water traffic. Boats Keep Close to Time-Card. When the big boat is reported by wireless, 600 to 800 miles east of Sandy Hook, rushing westward at record-breaking speed, the trains of cars that carry the coal for her return journey are started from the mines, hundred of miles inland. If the nee is urgent, and it generally is, they roar eastward at almost express speed. As soon as they arrive they are rushed down the long pier, and the coal pours in a score of black rivers at once into the waiting barges alongside. Half a dozen powerful tugs puff impatiently. One barge is rapidly filled. With a hoarse whoop of her whistle the tug strains at the thick hawser and hauls the heavy barge out into the stream. don, its former rival, within the last few years. In London there is not so much hurry as in New York. The boats come up the Thames at the flood-tide, anchor at its ebb, float a little farther at the next flood, and so on, or go down the same way, with little expenditure of power. In Liverpool there is more haste. An elevated railway runs along the docks. The rapid handling of freight is making Liverpool a port that will soon surpass London. In the great seaports of Continental Europe, commodities are handled less rapidly than they are in New York. In San Francisco much the same condition obtains as in New York, although on a smaller scale. Everything that goes in or out of that city, save when it comes from the South, must cross a broad stretch of water. From the South the principal shipments are citrus fruits. There is much fog, but plenty of sea room, and the traffic by water is not so crowded as it is in the waterways about New York. The water freight is handled in big units in San Francisco, however. The train-ferries that cross the arm of the sea are as big as any in the world. Some of them will handle as many as fifty-two freight-cars and two or three big engines. At New Orleans everything crosses the Mississippi to Algiers, about a mile and a half away. Cars and locomotives are coupled up on the great ferry-boats, ready to resume their journey as soon as the opposite land is reached. Lake Michigan's Record. A little west of Portland, Oregon, the Two miles away the ocean greyhound railroad ferry is about two miles long, is just being warped into her dock. Her across the Columbia River. At the decks are gay with home-coming passen- Straits of Mackinac, upper Lake Michigers, but before the first has stepped ashore the barge is alongside and is pouring its flood of coal into her hold. If a railroad train is stalled or wrecked, it blocks traffic. If any of the floating equipment of the marine department is stalled or wrecked the others simply sail around it. The delay is only slight and temporary; hence the marine end of the railway keeps closer to its time-card than the land lines. gan, immense ferry-boats carry trains from Mackinac on one side of the lake to St. Ignace on the other, and sometimes a distance of fifty or sixty miles up or down the lake. At Detroit the tunnel builders have decreased the railroad ferry traffic across the river that connects the Great Lakes, although three great railroads still use the water route. The longest car-ferries are on Lake Michigan, from Manitowoc, Kewaunee. Milwaukee, Menominee, and Manistique on the west shore of the lake, to Frankfort, Ludington, Northport, Grand Haven, St. Joseph, and Benton Harbor on the east shore. Without the railway marine the congestion of traffic at New York would be so great that it would not be possible to maintain a large city, because enough food could not be furnished each day to supply the population. It is the excellence of the service afforded by the rail- These railroad car-ferries are of a difroad marine that has made New York ferent type than those that cross narCity the greatest seaport in the world rower waters. They are deep-hulled vesthat has enabled it to far outstrip Lon- sels, built of steel, and of great structural strength, for they must force their way through the thick ice of midwinter. When Lake Michigan is coated with ice from shore to shore, forcing their way through and keeping a path clear, as these vessels do for months, is a thrilling experience. Gulf of Mexico. On the Pacific side the railroad fleet is quite as large. There is even greater tonnage in the railroad marine that traverses the Great Lakes. Some of these fleets are almost exclusively for passenger-service some entirely for freight. and The routes vary in length, from the short voyages that consume a day or a night, to those that last a week, and which extend from one end of the Great Lakes to the other. In addition to the tug and barge and ferry fleet of the railroads there is yet another that is even bigger in tonnage, but one that soon passes from beyond the despatcher's ken-hull down, outward bound, on the far horizon-the fleet of These long-distance lines, unlike the great steamers owned by many railroads. car-ferries that traverse only a few miles, But from spring to Nine-tenths of all the great water are closed in winter. routes in and around the United States autumn they play a busy part in transportation. are more or less directly owned and controlled by the railroads. One railroad owns most of the coastwise steamship lines between New York and New England ports. Another controls a fleet that sails southward, and a third a line that runs to ports on the The operating methods by which they are run are the usual marine routine that prevails the world over, and do not resemble the exact, on-time-to-the-minute way in which the more easily controlled water traffic of the railways about New York and other seaports is handled. New Publications-Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines. A limited supply of the following publications is available for free distribution and may be had upon application to the Director of the Bureau of Mines, Washington, D. C. Applicants are asked to co-operate in insuring an equitable distribution by selecting publications that are of special interest. The Bureau advises that requests for all papers can not be granted without satisfactory reason, and that publications should be ordered by number and title.. Bulletin 83. The humidity of mine air, with especial reference to coal mines in Illinois, by R. Y. Williams. 1914. 69 pp., 7 figs. Technical Paper 65. A study of the oxidation of coal, by H. C. Porter and O. C. Ralston. 1914. 30 pp., 12 figs. Technical Paper 84. Production of explosives in the United States during the calendar year 1913, by A. H. Fay. 1914. 13 pp. Miners' Circular 16. Hints on coalmine ventilation, by J. J. Rutledge. 1914. 22 pp. Miners' Circular 19. The prevention of accidents from explosives in metal mines, by Edwin Higgins. 1914. 16 pp., 11 figs. Railroad Items of Interest. Grande Railroad has recently purchased New Equipment.-The Denver and Rio ten new all-steel combination mail and baggage cars and same are now in service on through runs between Denver, Salt Lake City and Ogden. The interior fittings of these cars are of steel design, with the most modern appliances for heating, lighting and ventilation. They are equipped with all-steel trucks, steel wheels and high speed brakes. The cars are of the latest type, being 70 feet long inside, 30 feet of which is taken up as mail room and 40 feet for baggage, and were built in accordance with specifications said to have been recently adopted by the Federal Government as standard for mail cars. Gas-Electric Motor Cars for the St. Louis Southwestern.-It is reported that |