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.
The result of their work has been to put America foremost with her railroad terminals. The engineers have worked against great odds in many cases. The railroads in the beginning took little or no forethought for their terminals. They neglected rare opportunities to buy land for these facilities in the beginning, when the cities were small and the land cheap. They have paid in millions of dollars for this neglect. In some cases, the early railroads had little money to expend upon this city real estate; but in few cases did any of their managers have the gift of prophecy that made them foresee the great cities of to-day or the great tides of traffic they would be called upon to move.
Nor has this phase of the situation improved within recent years. A great railroad rebuilt its passenger terminal in an important city ten years ago and blindly imagined that the increase in facilities would carry it a quarter of a century at the least. To-day it is carrying off the remnants of that station improvement to the scrap-heap and trying to see far enough into the future to build a station that shall last it fifty years at least.
There is not an engineer employed by that railroad who will assert himself as possessed of the absolute belief that the new station will be adequate for the traffic of a half century hence, if indeed the great spreading palace of steel and marble be in existence at all at that time. All that they will tell you is to point to the fact that another one of America's greatest passenger carriers has doubled its traffic within the past ten years.
"How can we gamble with an unknown future of such dimensions?" they ask you in return.
When the Park Square Station of the Boston & Providence Railroad in Boston and the Grand Central Station in New York were built, in the early seventies, they were the first railroad passenger terminals of size that the country had seen. It was thought that _they_ would stand a hundred years as monuments to the genius of the men who designed them. To-day they are both gone, each supplanted by a station that both together might be packed within.