by Edward C. Bruce.
Originally published in Lippincott's Magazine (J. B. Lippincott & Co.) vol.29 #169 (Jan 1882).
One of the most modern products of modern civilization is the railway-station. It is itself, like other outgrowths of progress, in a transition state. Its diversities are many and its development unceasing. The range of conditions is such as to prevent its ever assuming an absolutely stereotyped form. The railway penetrates day-by day new regions, with local peculiarities of climate, population, etc., which refuse to submit themselves to any cut-and-dry style of accommodation for the traveller. Besides the modifications imposed upon the old stations by increased traffic and increased luxury, provision is required for new ones by the hundred or thousand every year. 1880 saw six thousand five hundred miles added to the mileage of railways in the United States, and 1881 two thousand more than its predecessor, bringing thus the aggregate from ninety-three thousand six hundred to something over a round hundred thousand within the past year. Allowing a station to every five miles, we have an addition of some sixteen hundred of these inlet and outlet valves for the human current within a twelvemonth. Twenty thousand in all will be found duly tabulated in the railway guides.
"To take mine ease in mine inn," was the aspiration of the wayfarer of other days. The introduction of similar ease into these new inns is the problem of to-day. One would suppose it, at first thought, to be more readily solved than in the former case, as the traveller has, as a rule, a shorter time to stay, and the task of comforting and amusing him is less prolonged. So it did seem in the inception of railway-building; and meagre and bare enough were the appliances deemed sufficient thirty or forty years ago. In the rural districts, the passenger's only shelter while waiting for the train, or for a conveyance from it, was a shed open to at least two, and often all four, of the winds of heaven. In the cities, the accommodations were often of identical character. But in some of the larger towns the trains, disintegrated into their constitutent cars, were hauled to and fro into a sort of stable. The cars and their teams occupied a long area of two or more tracks, with a bleak open platform on each side, up and down which wandered their proposed occupants, like so many ghosts on the banks of Styx. Sometimes, but not often, these brick stables—which had a general resemblance to the present dépôts of the street-car lines—were jointly used by more than one railroad company, and formed the germ of the great union dépôts which have replaced them. One such existed in Baltimore, on the south side of Pratt Street, near the Basin. The Baltimore and Ohio there united with the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore; and it was quite an exhilarating sight to see the grays of the one and the bays of the other, picked animals, resplendent in lettered harness and rosettes, four of them to each car, wheel in and out at full trot,—as they had to do to overcome the curve at the entrance. This scene was a survival of the old coaching days, and marked their transition into the era of steam,—a transition now quite accomplished.
Arrived at Philadelphia in the schedule-time for the mail train of seven hours,—about three times the present express time, —the train was again broken up and hauled piecemeal by horse-power into a similar bare shed on the south side of Market Street, near Eleventh. The New York trains started, with less aid from the horse, out of an edifice of the same type two or three miles off in Kensington, or in Camden, across the Delaware. In New York, the Harlem Railroad—for, as yet, Albany and New Haven had only steamboat communication with the commercial metropolis—offered its passengers not even shelter from the rain and snow,—its trains rendezvousing, sub Jove, at the lower end of the Park, where the receiving and discharging platform was the curbstone. This, oddly enough, was an exhibition, in the heart of the chief mart, of a lower stage of development than obtained in less pretentious cities. It may be termed the bivouac type, as compared with the wigwam or encampment type, of railway-station. The hotel, dwelling, waiting-room, æsthetic type was as yet in the future.
But not very far in the future, either. After say 1855, favoring conditions rapidly brought about improvement. Travellers declined longer to have themselves gathered up out of, or dumped into, the slush, or to be left for half an hour in the dead of winter to the sole shelter of their overcoats. Hence the vast erections, architecturally ambitious on the outside, and containing inside every appliance for the comfort and convenience of the travelling world and his wife and children, with which we are familiar at the great central points. Besides the general waiting-room, with its rows of hard and immovable seats, which suggest that the acme of comfort remains to be reached, these contain news-, dining-, and retiring-rooms, with hotel accommodations either under the same roof or close at hand.
In England and other European countries, where three classes of passengers have to be sedulously differentiated and provided with separate and distinct quarters, the provision made is necessarily more complicated. Each class has its waiting- and refreshment-rooms, the news-stand swells into a fair bookseller's-shop, and the hotel is more usually than here an integral part of the railway-building. The English sun requires wooing, and light in the vast stations of Great Britain is secured by glass roofs, that in the Carlisle Citadel Station, for example, containing three hundred and twenty-two thousand superficial feet of glass. Eight acres of summer sunshine would be far too much of a good thing on our side of the water. Our builders have but to choose how much they will let in, and arrange their side-windows accordingly, with small care for skylights.
Let us look at two or three of the very newest of our city stations. The Boston station of the Boston and Albany Railroad is the third erected on the same ground, the first having been of strictly primitive formation, and the one now superseded dating back to 1835. Excluding the train-house, which is large enough to hold sixty-six cars, the station-building proper is one hundred and forty by one hundred and eighteen feet, of three stories, fifty-one feet high in all; the material, faced brick, with granite dressings. A vestibule, forty-four feet by one hundred and twenty-five, and forty-two feet high, has a glass roof, which will not be amiss in that latitude for nine-tenths of the year. A light balcony surrounds it twenty-two feet above the pavement. The ladies' waiting-room has the ample dimensions of seventy-five by thirty-five feet, and the home-like apparatus of three great fireplaces at each end, and carven mantels of freestone. The fireplace feature is extended also to the haunt of the other sex. This saloon is joined by the newsroom and an ample dining-hall. The ticket-office and package-room are opposite, and the two front entrances have between them the drawing-room-car office and the telegraph-office. Then there are the company's offices, well out of the way of the hourly movement of the public, with toilet- and bath-rooms. The Brush electric light furnishes illumination.
Newer than this—in fact, barely inchoate—is the proposed dépôt of the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago Company, in the first-named city. It is designed to accommodate as well three or four other railways. For this reason, as well as because the West is wont to look a long way ahead, this is on a grander scale than its down-East contemporary. The out-baggage department alone, for instance, is one hundred and seventy-five by thirty feet, and three stories high, the second story furnishing offices to that tremendous potentate the baggage-master and his clerical acolytes, while the third is the supreme abode of all waifs in the shape of unclaimed baggage. The "in-baggage" room is nearly as capacious. Another part of the group of buildings, eighty by ninety feet, and five stories high, with a clock-tower two hundred feet high, is devoted, on its main floor, to the accommodation of ladies, and to a dining-room, with the upper stories full of train-despatchers, telegraph-operators, and other servants of the company. A good feature of the passenger-building proper, which is two hundred by thirty-four feet, is that it stands back thirty feet from the curb and has a covered drive-way in front for carriages. The whole of the first floor and basement is occupied by the general waiting-rooms. The style of this great edifice, which is to cost within a trifle of half a million, is pronounced "a happy combination of the Queen Anne and Eastlake." Such a definition covers a wide range,—the Queen Anne being misapprehended and misstated by most people, and the Eastlake not being an architectural style at all. It serves to exemplify, however, the extraordinary medley of conceptions through which our builders are gradually making their way to the achievement of such final result as may embody the utmost capabilities of American tastes. We must not look too impatiently for this result, but look forbearingly on all the means employed to reach it. For all we know, there may be a place in it for "walls of red pressed brick, with trimming of cut stone, and gray granite, with terra-cotta ornaments," which are all highly-available materials. In hard woods for the interior finish and hall-pavements in tile we have also promising material with a very wide field for design. The inevitable mansard, we are told, "will be made as nearly fireproof as possible." No earthly reason exists why it should not be made perfectly fireproof, unless the use of slate with a plank sheathing is considered a matter of greater moment.
The great Philadelphia dépôt of the Pennsylvania Central, at Merrick and Filbert Streets, sets its face, or its façade, against Queen Anne and the late President of the Royal Academy alike. It adopts the early Gothic, with the unGothic material of red brick and terracotta. The temptation offered by terracotta for excess in ornamentation has been resisted, and over-decoration is not a feature. The ecclesiastical aspect of the structure is a necessity of the style selected, and is hardly a fault in itself. The churches are growing as varied in their architecture as in their creeds, and are ceasing to claim the mediæeval school as their exclusive province. The front has the imposing elevation of ninety feet. Within, a handsome stairway of marble leads from the ground-floor to the level of the elevated track, debouching into a stately corridor forty-five feet high, wainscoted eighteen feet with walnut, and bearing a balcony fifteen feet below the ceiling, the beams of the latter being of walnut, resting on marble brackets. All this is a key to the style and scale of the rest of the edifice, which we need not more fully describe.
A distinctive feature of this station is that the rails reach it by a viaduct traversing the city for many squares without in any way obstructing the streets. Frequent in Europe, this is an improvement long awaited in this country, and destined to become within the next decade rather perhaps the rule than the exception. Of the sunken track and station we have had instances for several years, notably in New York and St. Louis. The legislatures, and the people behind them, seconded by the obvious interest of the railroad companies themselves, are taking a more and more decided stand against crossings at grade, in and out of cities. Foreign visitors to our next great fair will be less astonished than at the Centennial by the novel spectacle of locomotives running along the streets. The requisite change will be, in the aggregate, costly; and that is a reason why it should be set on foot now that money is so unprecedentedly abundant and traffic so increasingly active. In cities occupying—as Chicago and New Orleans do—perfectly level sites, à fleur d'eau, these raised ways will be necessarily long; but it will be economy in the long run to build them, and in most cases several roads could unite and divide the expense. In Washington, which may serve as an example of places having an irregular surface, a combination of tunnels and viaducts will be resorted to, with the result, perhaps, of an underground union station near the Patent Office, and, more probably, of an elevated iron way from the Navy-Yard tunnel to the present Baltimore and Potomac dépôt. Congress might be satisfied with such an alternative to its threatened removal of that fine station and the surface-track now leading to it. Such a stretch of light iron arches would be far from disfiguring the rather blank landscape that stretches toward the river, as seen from the Capitol.
Indianapolis is a type of the Western towns created by the railway and naturally reverential and submissive to the author of their being. The thirteen or fourteen roads centring there run wherever they please around and across it. The corporation complacently looks out itself for the safety of its lieges. At one end of the union dépôt it built a long bridge of wood over the tracks, with cleats to enable horses to climb it. At the other end it dug a tunnel at considerable cost, arched with heavy masonry and lighted with gas. But there were too many accidents on the wooden bridge, and the Illinois Street tunnel, being down to the creek-level, was liable to inundation. So the people were fain to risk their necks between trains, all the same praying for the happy day when a change of heart should come over their lords of steam and put an end to the wearisome game of hide-and-seek. One influence that will tend to hasten that day in Indianapolis and elsewhere is the competition in speed between the great trunk routes. With no crossings at grade, higher speed may be carried up to the stations, there need be no slacking at way-points, and, instead of coming nearly or quite to a full stop at each crossing of another railroad, as the laws of some States require, these scenes of delay will be hurried over without an instant's pause. It is for railroad-men to figure up the economic gain accruing to them from this improvement; and they are not usually slow to perceive such gain. The first cost may be considerable, but it will be the whole cost. Iron bridges and tunnels are practically indestructible. The thirty-four miles of elevated track in New York City are free as air. Wash-outs, land-slides, and snow-drifts never stop the "L."
Rural stations, with their daily passengers numbered by the individual or the score, cannot compete in architectural grandeur or interior luxury with those of the great towns. But they have the advantage of more elbow-room. Ampler surroundings give them a wider choice of means in making themselves presentable and attractive. Turf, flowers, shade-trees, fouutains, and terraces are at their command,—all beautiful, manageable, and not costly. In England, where no one is allowed to set foot upon the rails, the stations are often in pairs, one on each side of the double track, and decoration of this kind must, consequently, be doubled. Yet it is thoroughly done. Neat gravel walks, well-shorn sod, and well-kept flower-beds appear on either hand. The slopes of embankments and excavations along the line are utilized for spade-husbandry and market-gardens, brightening at each station into plats of flowers. It will be a long time before the value of land in this country justifies the occupation of the slopes by anything but sheep and cattle—which ought not to be there, either, without a fence. Improved sightliness of the stations, however, is of easy attainment. The introduction of habits of ordinary neatness will be a first and important step, showing itself in the removal of rubbish and the smoothing of the surface of the ground. Hardy plants, of which we possess a long list, will grow, with the protection of a light enclosure: and the encouragement of a few hours' culture in the course of the year, as readily as weeds. Turf is in most places as easily at command. If the building is of brick or stone, or any unpainted material, the Virginia creeper at least, if the latitude forbids ivy, will soon clothe it. Not merely in planting would beginning be a great part of the whole work. The person in charge would acquire an interest and pride in the appearance of his little demesne, especially should the railroad company have the taste and judgment to make embellishment of this character a part of its fixed system. Some companies are doing this, and others will follow, partly because it becomes the fashion, and partly because they find their account in it. The Boston and Maine allows each of its agents ten dollars a year for the purchase of seeds, plants, etc., and offers to those whose stations are most tastefully and carefully kept three annual prizes of fifty, thirty, and twenty dollars. Nor is this one of our longest roads or one of those most favored by soil and climate. For seven months of the year its floral exhibit must be nil, except behind glass. During those months a conservatory would indeed be a charming adjunct. Farther south they diminish in number. South of the Carolinas and in California flowers will fill the circuit of the year.
What else the company would in most cases have to do is a little grading, enclosing, and tree-planting. This once well done is permanent, and requires little or no annual outlay. The protection of the roadway from wash has obliged several companies to expend large sums in terracing and covering with grass the light sands in the cuts and fills. They have thus bought some experience as farmers and horticulturists which they may put to good use when they discover the utilitarian side of a row of handsome and homelike stations. People who see such a spot every few minutes as they whirl along form a liking for the route. They speak of its ocular attractions to their friends, and these, too, in future select the path that is set with flowers. One road thus bedecked teaches the traveller to look for the same attraction in others, and these will learn that it is worth while not to disappoint him.
Two of the lines leading out of Philadelphia have entered systematically upon this path of decoration. The stations at Bryn Mawr and Ridley Park may be named as specimens of the modern style. The latter shows what may be made of an unpromising locality. It is situated in a cutting. The slopes are neatly terraced, and a tasteful bridge breaks the sky-line. At the Relay House, on the Baltimore and Ohio road, art has been far more aided by nature, the wild beauty of the site being remarkable. The large station-house is in good keeping with the abrupt declivities which surround it, and the broad and quiet stretch of meadow and water which opens beneath it to the east is in fine contrast to both. From the luxuriant parterres one steps directly upon the Patapsco Viaduct, of massive granite arches, seventy feet above the stream. The Hudson River Railway, the New York Central along the Mohawk, and many parts of the Erie, offer spots of like capabilities to the hand of embellishment. The same may be said, speaking generally, of the other routes through the mountain belt. On the plains of the West and South, except along the banks of the main rivers, nature lends little aid in the way of the picturesque. But if rock is not there in the shape of cliff and boulder, so much the less does it interfere with the cultivation of the deep and fertile soil, easy to shape and at its best for the sustenance of shrub and tree. Blue grass is indigenous and springs of itself throughout the region between the Alleghanies and the Upper Missouri. Only the lawn-mower is needed for the maintenance of a perfect sod. Certainly a plot of smooth sward, with a fine tree or two, is a great deal better undisturbed by badly-kept flower-beds and cast-iron fountains that do not play. Were such lawns as are common in every large town between the Ohio and the Mississippi the rule at the railway-stations of the same section of the Union, it would be a transformation-scene indeed, and yet one so easy to get up. The conifers, exotics there, grow finely when planted. A single adult Norway spruce would be the feature of a station summer and winter. But nowhere need it stand alone. The rest of the family are equally at command, including some of the magnificent species of the Pacific coast. Nothing tends more to give an air of comfort and cheery life to a winter scene on the open prairie than evergreens. In the East their effect is often apt to be gloomy, the need of wind-breaks not being there so striking.
Usually the tank can spare water enough for a small jet or dripping fountain. At least it can maintain a pool of water-plants to gladden the dust-dimmed eye of the weary passenger. The waste in filling tenders would do more than that. Even where water-trains are the regular thing in summer, an occasional car-load might well be so bestowed. The more marked the scarcity of water, the more grateful to the sight are the signs and fruits of. its refreshing presence. It will, on the Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific, contradict the atlas and free our minds from the idea that we are following The Dead Man's Journey,—Jornada del Muerto,—a title of such frequent recurrence on the maps of the Great Desert.
To the eastward, away from the steppes, where water is abundant and the soil evinces a laudable determination to clothe itself from its own resources and never go naked if only let alone, we see sometimes a station which has, altogether unaided, quietly donned a garb of rural beauty. We recall one such on a line traversing a rich limestone country, where excavation and embankment is quickly covered with greensward unsown. The rails, after running for several miles straight across a nearly level surface, once prairie and now covered with acacias, oaks, and orchards, turns sharply through a little pass, some twenty feet deep, walled with perpendicular strata of the bed-rock overhung with streamers of creeper, bramble, and bittersweet. This left, we are at the station. On one side of the track, in a meadow of two or three acres, is a large and limpid spring. Its waters, after running under the track, are joined by those of a smaller spring emerging from the rock under a cluster of fine walnuts. Near by, on either hand, stand two old stone country-houses, staid and cosey in their ancestral groves. Straight in front, the track and the little stream, the latter picking up more tributaries on its way, stretch side by side for three miles down toward the mountain, whose blue wall seems to bar the way, but only marks the course of the river sought alike by the rail and the rivulet. Weeping willows actually sweep the car-windows as the train hurries along, contemptuous of the fences that restrain mighty Durhams and capering colts. This is, of course, a watering-station, and the traveller has generally time to take in at his leisure the pleasant little scene around it,—the minnows and chubs shooting under the ties, the cool gray rocks here and there asserting their existence despite the repressive efforts of the long rich grass, the sloping rim of the hollow fringed with trees, the everyday life of the farm-houses plodding its rustic way as though steam were unknown, and the level landscape opening peacefully beyond into the hazy distance. The station-building is just not a disfigurement. With a healthy sense of its own irrelevance, it does not obtrude itself at all, but leaves you to fancy that the engine has dreamily strayed from the metals and carried you into a by-lane among the fields.
The in-door features of stations are less clamorous for reform than their purlieus. They are, for the most part, well warmed, capacious, and well lighted. Ventilation is about as good as that of an average city house. Neatness, if not all it ought to be, is clearly on the mend. The long pew-like rows of immovable hard-bottomed settees are not exhilarating, it is true. Perhaps they are maintained as being the most loafer-proof seat, the typical person of that genus preferring one which he can move about and wherein he can attitudinize ad lib. He probably finds himself repelled, too, by the atmosphere of these hard, unsocial benches and the blank walls surrounding them. At any rate, hangers-on rarely rise in these places to the dignity of a nuisance. It is a patent fact that the unprotected female approves of the arrangements and makes herself at home without difficulty. She is the real umpire in the case. Of course she will year by year become more exacting, as we all do. The luxuries of the waiting-room may become too seductive to be overcome on the sudden summons of the whistle, and a large percentage of passengers may be left behind at every departure of a train.