Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 235, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1911 — GATEWAYS OF TRAFFIC [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GATEWAYS OF TRAFFIC

FIVE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT IN THE UNITED STATES. Volume of Business Transacted Through Each, It Is Asserted, Not ' Fap Behind That of New York Clearing House. Five great gateways of traffic are situated in different parts of the

United States. Through these, generally speaking, freight moving east or west that passes from one line of railroad to another must go, says The Railway Men’s Magazine. They are Chicago, East St Louis, EEL; East Hannibal, Mo.; Council Bluffs, Mo., and Minnesota Transfer, Minnesota/ They

are known as freight transfer stations, and have been established to facilitate the interchange of traffic between different lines. In a sense, these freight transfer stations resemble somewhat the great clearing houses of the associated banks in big cities like New York and Chicago, but instead of bills and coin, they handle daily thousands of loaded -freight cars. Instead of bank checks, such as the financial clearing houses sort out every morning when they balance their accounts, the freight transfer stations have hundreds of thousands of bigger and more unwieldy pieces of paper which are called way bills, which represent the tremendous volume of merchandise in the loaded cars. Also there are the bills of lading, which answer the same purpose, but in a different way. If the value of the costly freight passing through one of these great gateways eacii day could be computed, it would not fall far behind the day’s business of the New York clearing house itself. In addition to• these five transfer stations that handle only business that passes over two or more different lines of rails before reaching its destination each of the great railroad systems has many similar transfer stations for the interchange of freight traffic between the various roads of which it is composed. A big system like the New York Central lines, for example, is made up of twelve different railroads, each a distinct corporation. For the purposes of accounting, each of these lines is treated in the books as though it were a foreign company, though the rules for the interchange of freight traffic between the various roads of a system are somewhat modified from those which govern the same work between two separate systems Interchanging business at any of the four great gateways in the west. Yet the organization of domestic freight transfer stations, such as those on the New York CentraF lines, does not differ materially from that of the railroads which meet at Chicago, East St. Louis, East Hannibal or Council Bluffs. Each system has from ten to fifty of these freight transfer stations located at the various junction points of its allied lines. The New York Central, for example, has thirty-one. There is no better place for a young man to get a thorough practical knowledge of everything connected with the actual handling of freight traffic than a freight transfer station.