The modern station will make provision for numerous railroad offices--be a complete modern office-building in fact, although not emblazoning that in its architectural design--and will have lunch-stand and restaurant facilities, with their necessary addenda of store-rooms, refrigerators and kitchens, as complete as those of the largest hotels.
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.