Popular Science Monthly 



38f? 



traffic through the tunnels still left Man- 

 hattan Island like a cork in a bottle, 

 preventing the free flow of traffic by the 

 shortest and easiest route. 



Government control of railroads was 

 the corkscrew used by Director-General 

 McAdoo to pull the cork. It so happened 

 that his taking over of the roads almost 

 coincided with the worst coal shortage 

 the East had ever known and the lowest 

 temperatures in the history of the Weather 

 Bureau. Freight could be moved in the 

 Hudson and East Rivers only with the 

 assistance of ice-breaking tugs. Hun- 

 dreds of thousands of tons of coal were in 

 cars at the various Jersey terminals; New- 

 York and New England were freezing. 

 The cars could be sent through the tun- 

 nel. That is what the Government or- 

 dered done. From the Long Island yards 

 coal was hauled across the Queensborough 

 Bridge into Manhattan with less difficulty 

 than it could have been handled from the 

 piers formerly used, while trainload after 

 trainload was sent on over the Hell Gate 

 bridge to New England. 



Cutting Down the Passenger Trains 

 Freight traffic counts for everything, 



passenger traffic for nothing, so long as it 

 is necessary to rush coal and raw ma- 

 terials to the factories where munitions 

 are being made, and shells, guns, explosives, 

 aeroplanes, wheat and food supplies for 

 our army in France and for our allies 

 to seaboard shipping points and soldiers 

 to and from training camps. The 

 freight must be moved by the most direct 

 and fastest routes. Under competitive 

 conditions, the railroads could not meet 

 the demands made upon them. One had 

 not enough locomotives; another too few 

 cars; a third could haul certain classes of 

 freight only by roundabout routes; other 

 roads were competing for the classes of 

 freight that they could haul to best ad- 

 vantage. So the first result of Govern- 

 ment control was to cut down the number 

 of passenger trains. On the Pennsylvania 

 system 104 weekday trains and 51 Sunday 

 trains were cut off by a single order; the 

 New Haven annuled 82 passenger trains; 

 the Lehigh Valley's reductions in pas- 

 senger service between New York and 

 Buffalo save 75,000 train miles a month. 

 Through trains that formerly carried 

 sleepers throughout their run now hook 

 on the sleepers at bedtime. Instead of 



Clogged ! A typical scene in a New York freight terminal 



