The baggage accommodations deserve a paragraph by themselves. Americans,
due to the liberal baggage provisions of our railroads, travel each year
with increased impedimenta. Each year the task of the baggage-handlers
multiplies. Making room for trunks has come to be an important terminal
provision. In the large terminals, this traffic is divided, an in-baggage
room receiving from incoming trains and distributing to various forms of
city baggage delivery and an out-baggage room receiving and checking
baggage for outgoing trains. The in-baggage room is always much the
largest, because of the delays that almost invariably hold trunks for a
time--short or long--upon their arrival at a terminal.
It is desirable that baggage be handled with as little inconvenience as
possible to passengers; and for this reason almost all terminals have
subways extending from the "in" and "out" rooms beneath all train-shed
platforms and connected with each of these by elevators, large enough to
receive a full-sized baggage-truck. In this way annoyance and delay to
passengers is minimized. In the case of heavy through trains, where
baggage runs unusually heavy, the baggage-cars are frequently detached and
switched in upon special tracks that run alongside the baggage rooms.
The passenger terminal must also provide mail and express facilities among
these structures, but these, as has already been intimated, are generally
apart and quite separate from the passenger facilities. A power plant is
another necessity. The buildings must be heated, cars warmed in freezing
weather long before the locomotives are attached, ice-machines operated
for the station restaurant, power supplied to elevators, dynamos, and
lesser mechanisms about the terminal. This is a feature that is not
radically different from that of other large commercial structures.
The capacity of a modern railroad is measured by the capacity of its
terminals rather than by that of its main line tracks. The railroads were
not quick to realize nor to appreciate this fact at the first. It was
finally forced upon their attention, and in that way became one of the
fundamental principles of American railroad construction and operation.
The terminal became recognized as one of the most efficient possible
solutions of the congestion problem, a little more than a quarter of a
century ago. It was then that the double-tracking and four-tracking
devices were found to measure all out of cost with the relief that was to
be derived from them. It was then that the engineers were told to meet the
situation with a relief that should be measurably low in cost.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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