To the terminals of the Erie and the Lackawanna railroads, which are situated upon the west bank of the Hudson River directly across from the lower portions of Manhattan Island, the Hudson and Manhattan tubes, built by the vision and daring of one William G. McAdoo, whom already we have encountered in these pages, give access. The tubes also reach the old passenger-station of the Pennsylvania in Jersey City, which is still used to a moderate extent, and continue west to the main line of the Pennsylvania at Manhattan Transfer and into the heart of Newark, eight miles distant. Already they are overcrowded, particularly in rush hours; and it does not take a very great deal of vision to perceive that eventually they will have to be extended at least two miles as a subway under Broad Street, Newark, from the present rather unsatisfactory terminal at the Military Park, in that city.
The facilities are not good for reaching the trains of the Erie and the Lackawanna from those of the tubes; particularly is this true in the case of the ancient Erie terminal, where there is a long and, at times, overcrowded passageway to be traversed afoot between the platforms of the two railroads. In the concluding chapters of this book I am to indicate the regrouping of the railroads that eventually must come about, in one form or another. I may anticipate by saying that in almost any regrouping the financially strong Lackawanna will be linked to the financially weak Erie. Therefore I may be permitted to assume that the lines of these two systems, with an elaborate network of suburban branches in northeastern New Jersey, may yet be joined together somewhere just west of the Bergen tunnels in Hoboken where they now cross at an acute angle. This being done, the rest is easy. One set of tunnels would be assigned for east-bound movement, the other for west-bound; which arrangement gives four tracks in _each_ direction--enough for a really vast passenger traffic movement. Somewhere close to their eastern portals these tunnels would be depressed and continued under the Hudson River to Manhattan Island. Here they would be far apart, perhaps as much as a mile apart. Between them and running north and south upon Manhattan would be a connecting tunnel link ten or twelve or fourteen tracks in width and with long continuous platforms between these tracks. It is easy to surmise that two or three trains could easily lie back of one another at any one of these tenuous underground platforms in the Manhattan terminal. This great sub-service passenger-station would lie somewhere just west of the Seventh Avenue extension and barely north of Canal Street, in Manhattan. It is a district that has not gone ahead with the rest of New York. A huge passenger terminal within it would be of tremendous help in raising its depressed realty values, while the proximity of the station to the main trunk of the West Side subway of the Interborough and the extended Canal Street line of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit would render it wonderfully accessible to every portion of the incorporated City of New York.