off between terminals, the arteries become clogged, and the system fails to perform its functions properly.”[1]
The poor loading of railroad cars added to the general inability of the railroad system to handle all the transportation needs of the war years.
The terminal tieups came about from a variety of causes. Due to shortage of ships, export freight accumulated in the North Atlantic terminals. Contractors for cantonments and shipyards ordered materials forwarded far in advance of their ability to receive and unload them. (At one time over 5,000 carloads of wooden piling were tied up in the Hog Island shipyard waiting to be unloaded.) Feverish demand for materials to keep industry going led manufacturers to purchase raw materials from unusual markets in excessive quantities, with the result that arrivals were badly bunched and unloading was slow and difficult.
In many terminals antiquated business procedures were a principal cause of congestion. Older cities such as New York had an inadequate number of team tracks where freight could be unloaded directly from the cars into drays and trucks. Most freight consigned to lower Manhattan, even in carload lots, was unloaded at freight depots and stored there until picked up by the consignee, who was notified by mail of the shipment’s arrival. Due to congestion in the mails, the notice might take 3 days to reach the consignee who then had 48 hours in which to pick up the goods.
Indescribable traffic congestion prevailed around the freight houses. Some trucks stood in line for hours or even days to pick up a few boxes of freight. One count at a Manhattan depot showed 100 drays standing in line at 7 a.m. waiting for loads. Unloading from the freight cars was often haphazard, so that a truck driver might have difficulty finding his consignment and then even more trouble getting it to the loading dock.
With freight piling up in the stations, the railroads set off incoming cars in the freight yards, and when these also filled up, on any available empty siding at small towns approaching the city. As these, too, became filled, the congestion spread outward as much as 30 or, in extreme cases, 50 miles from the city. Eventually, the railroads were forced to embargo further shipments to that city until some of the congestion cleared up.
Toward the end of the war the railroads, then under Government operation, cleared up much of the terminal congestion by instituting “store–door delivery.” Under this system, cities were divided into zones. Freight consigned to addresses in these zones was unloaded from the cars into specified areas on the loading docks, where it was picked up by registered trucks and delivered direct to the consignee without prior notice. If the consignee was not ready to accept the shipment, it was taken immediately to a public warehouse and stored at the consignee’s expense. By eliminating the free storage at the depot, this system broke the bottleneck in a few weeks. Store–door delivery also reduced the enormously inefficient waste of tracks and labor waiting for loads at the freight stations.
Unable to get long-haul freight into the cities, the railroads refused to accept short-haul shipments such as milk and produce from the surrounding country, and the food distribution system began to suffer. A few farmers who owned trucks began to drive them into the city with loads of vegetables instead of to the nearest railroad station. At the other end, wholesalers and even retailers began to send their own trucks out into the country for loads of produce. The cost per mile was more than for rail shipment, but the delay was less and terminal costs were eliminated at both ends, so they at least broke even on the business.
Birth of the Trucking Industry
Practically every large business in the cities had a few trucks for drayage and deliveries, and by 1917 most of these were power driven.[N 1] When the city terminals began to choke up, some consignees had their shipments sent to outlying towns and sent their trucks there to receive them, at the same time carrying outgoing shipments. Soon, hundreds of trucks were being used in this way, and the radius of operation was constantly increasing.
Akron, Ohio, tied up with a package freight embargo, broke the embargo by truck hauls to 14 outlying shipping points within a radius of 20 miles. A New York drug firm started making weekly deliveries to Boston in its own trucks. Cleveland manu-
- ↑ In 1917 there were 391,000 motor trucks registered in the United States, most of them used in the cities.
- ↑ The Immediate Needs of the Railroads, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 4, Jul. 25, 1918, p. 166.
