COMMERCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SHALLOW STREAMS 



33 



Hamburg and watched the river barges 

 come and meet the ocean steamships 

 there, and have realized that the Ger- 

 man manufacturer in Magdeburg, and 

 in the cities back of it, by this cheap 

 water transportation lands his manufac- 

 tured goods in the hold of the ocean 

 steamship for shipment to South Amer- 

 ica for just about what it costs you to 

 team your freight from your ware- 

 house down to the railroad depot, or to 

 ship it off your branch line onto the 

 main line. It is a long jump to South 

 America ; and we will never make it until 

 we can first stand on our own seaboard 

 with firm feet ready for the spring. 



The problem which we confront is 

 one which we cannot solve as Germany 

 has solved it, because in Germany hand 

 labor is cheap, everything moves slowly, 

 and the rivers are tiny little streams 

 which they have managed to develop to 

 the very highest utility. In our broad 

 and undeveloped country it will be 

 many decades before we can approach 

 the evenly carpeted perfection of the 

 banks of the Elbe,, and in the time 

 that intervenes we must make use of 

 the facilities that we have in a manner 

 to which our engineers must bring their 

 attention and their best skill. For this 

 solution we must lay down certain basic 

 principles. 



There are three counts in the cost of 

 transportation of which we must make 

 reckoning. The first of these is the cost 

 from the factory door to the river land- 

 ing ; the second is the cost of placing 

 the freight on the boat and taking it 

 off the boat ; and the third is the ac- 

 tual cost of carrying the cargo on the 

 water. The Germans have worked out 

 what is practically an ideal situation for 

 factories in their great harbors of in- 

 dustry, in which slips from the river 

 project into the land so that between 

 each two slips extends a bank of land on 

 which is a railroad track, and between 

 the railroad track and the slip on each 

 side is room for a factory or a row' 

 of factories. Each factory has at each 

 side rows of freight-handling cranes, 

 and within the building regular trolley 

 transfer apparatus. The factory can 

 thus receive its raw materials from up- 

 country by rail, take them in at one 



door, manufacture them, and hand them 

 out at the other door to a barge, or it 

 can reverse the process. Handling and 

 teaming are entirely eliminated. It is 

 probable that we will not come to any 

 such ideal solution as this for a long 

 time in our rivers. Nearly every fac- 

 troy, however, has a railroad switch, 

 and we can form an alliance between 

 the railroad and the river traffic by 

 which freight loaded at the factory into 

 a car and hauled over a belt-line to the 

 river landing can be directly transferred 

 to the boat. It is necessary, however, 

 to install some machinery for handling 

 the freight out of the freight car or out 

 of the wagon into the boat. I have here 

 the report of the Missouri Pacific Rail- 

 road, showing that in some thirty of 

 their freighthouses, representing an in- 

 vestment of $12,000,000 and as well 

 equipped as the best railway freight- 

 houses in America, it costs them not less 

 than 40 cents a ton, and often 60 cents 

 a ton, to handle what are known as 

 "house freights" -that is, package 

 freights in less than carload lots, out 

 of the freight car, by a truck, into the 

 freighthouse, and the same cost is re- 

 peated at the other end when the 

 goods are unloaded. By the use of 

 proper electrically-operated machinery, 

 these costs can be greatly reduced. The 

 actual cost of the electrical current for 

 lifting the freight out of the hold of a 

 vessel and swinging it over and lower- 

 ing- it into a car is about fifteen one- 

 hundredths of a cent a ton. With ordi- 

 narily skilled labor and the employment 

 of such devices as any traffic man can 

 work out for the grouping of packages 

 in numbers, so that two, three or four tons 

 can be swung at a load, the whole cost, 

 including the wages of the men em- 

 ployed, can be reduced to 2 cents a 

 ton, and, need, under the most unfavor- 

 able circumstances, not exceed 10 cents 

 a ton. Terminals of this sort ought to 

 be established by every city which has 

 a navigable river at its doors, and they 

 should be connected with a belt-line or 

 with the individual railroads that op- 

 erate at that town. Personally, I be- 

 lieve that the town itself should own 

 all the rails in the terminal depot, as 

 well as the machinery, and should either 



