To fill the coal-bins of New York City alone, requires some 10,500,000 tons of anthracite yearly. Now you cease to wonder why this road has a coal traffic expert, a man of surpassingly good salary. He keeps keen oversight over the operating department in its handling of this giant traffic, sees to it that the trains come over the mountains and into the great terminals at Jersey City in good order, and that the railroad's marine department is ready with tugs and scows and lighters to handle the product as it comes in, in thousands of tons every twenty-four hours. This would all be quite simple if the trains and the boats were always running on schedule. But the unexpected constantly comes to pass in railroading, and so the railroads provide against emergencies by establishing great coal storage plants outside of New York and other large cities--communities that would be in dire distress if their coal supply were cut short even for twenty-four hours. Sometimes about 500,000 tons will be kept in a single one of these storage piles--a black mountain running lengthwise between sidings and served with giant cranes. We are back in the traffic-manager's comfortable office for a final word with him. He is fumbling with his own correspondence. It seems that a lawyer down in Washington has been saying that he could save the railroads of the land a million dollars a day in the economical operation of their property, and the railroader is exceedingly wroth at that assertion. "He speaks of pig iron, and says that we should teach our laborers the minimum movements necessary to put a single pig in a car--just as masons have been taught to handle brick with minimum effort and a maximum economy in work accomplished has been effected." The traffic-man laughs, rather harshly. "The lawyer is all right, except for two things; and his anecdote about the brick is certainly well told. Only it just happens that the railroad does not load or unload freight by the carload--that is the duty of the consignor and the consignee--and it also happens that pig iron rarely is handled "L.C.L." In carload lots it is not loaded or unloaded by hand, but by big magnets on a crane which picks up a ton of the bars at a time and thinks nothing of it."