Popular Science Monthly
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��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
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