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FAR-SEEING New Englander who comes down to New York each autumn to buy his Christmas stock looked out of the sleeping-car window one early morning, some six or seven years ago, as the night train from his town came to a slow, grinding halt, and said:

Jiminy whiz ! What are they doing here to the New York Central's old Grand Central? It looks like a mining camp."

The railroader who sat on the leathercushioned seat of the smoking-compartment hardly took the cigar out from between his lips as he replied:

They are building the greatest railway station in the world."

The New Englander laughed. You might tell that to the country folks, but not to him. He traveled. He had been in Europe long enough to laugh inwardly at the boasting ways of his own land. We had everything "the greatest in the world"-bridges, public buildings, department stores, hotels, even railway terminals. No wonder Europe smiled at us when our backs were turned! The greatest railway station in the world. Well, he had been to Boston a good many times, and they had told him that about the South Sta

tion. And he had been to the last of the big World's Fairs, and they had boasted in selfsame fashion about the wide-spreading trainshed vault of the Union Station in St. Louis. And here America was at it again. As if it could dream of the mighty London terminals of Waterloo, of Liverpool Street, of London Bridge! Why, a real traveler from the Far East had told him of the widespreading train-shed of the station at Calcutta, the most modern thing seemingly in that dank and steaming land of long agos. The greatest railway terminal in the world! America could boast.

But as season after season passed, and as the tremendous hole in the rock foundations of Manhattan grew a little larger each season, the New Englander was forced to admit that the renaissance of the Grand Central was some job." Men laid tracks only to rip them up again; they built great brick and iron structures only to tear down and throw into the scrap-heap; they shifted passengers and baggage and express here and there and everywhere; and all the while the cheery song of the compressed-air drill echoed answering choruses to the rat-a-tap of the riveters and the toilings of the steam-shovels.

Meanwhile the New Englander came and went with little or no delay to himself or his belongings. Out of seeming confusion there was underlying system, the sort of system which moves unseen and accomplishes much.

This last autumn he came to New York again. The great rock-cut excavation, extending some sixteen city blocks, was almost hidden. Above its center had risen one of the typical modern creations of the inspired type of American architect-a superb and symmetrical thing in enduring marble. The man from New England found his way through the myriad hallways of the building in a straight and simple path, just as the designers of the building had intended he should find it. But he caught glimpses of the vast reaches of the structure, the really wonderful proportions of its waitingrooms and its concourse. It was all simple, and it was settled, and it seemed as if the new Grand Central had been bending to its great work for long years. Yet the man

knew that the songs of the air-drill and the riveters and the steam-shovels had hardly ceased within the twelvemonth.

He went out of the station and straight to a near-by hotel. In the lobby of that modern and glorified tavern he met a chance acquaintance. Politics, business, a myriad things, hung pendent and unseen within the very atmosphere, but the man from New England had but one comment to make to his acquaintance.

"I have just arrived in New York through the greatest railway station in the world," he said.

To understand first the immensity of the problem that faced the builders of the new Grand Central one must go back to the very beginnings of the terminal station problem in the city of New York. The New York and Harlem was the first line to place its rails upon the island of Manhattan-away back in the year 1834. Its station, if one might call it such, first stood at the corner of Chambers and Centre Streets, within a stone's throw of the City Hall. As the town grew, reaching all the while farther north, and the railway also grew, the road retreated from its original terminal. In a little while it was starting its trains from White Street; a little later from Broome Street and the Bowery; then came the day when the railway to New Haven was also completed, and it began sharing with the Harlem road a

brand new station at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the site of the present Madison Square Garden. That was a threestory affair of brick, inclosing an open yard into which the cars came and from which they went, some to go even as far as Albany and Boston. But after a little while the town was growing closely around about Twenty-sixth Street, and citizens were demanding that the locomotives be barred from Fourth Avenue, through which the trains reached the station. Commodore Vanderbilt was beginning to dominate the New York railway situation, and he finally built an engine-house in a vacant lot alongside a cross-road which was to become Forty-second Street. Street. After that the locomotives did not often venture below Forty-second Street. Horses, four and six and eight to each dusty yellow railway coach, took the cars from Twenty-sixth Street up through the long tunnel to the engine-house and the waiting locomotive. It was a sight to see the morning express start for Boston, a regular cavalcade rolling up through Fourth Avenue.

Meanwhile the Hudson River Railroad had been completed, and its stations were on the west side of the town-the downtown station at Chambers Street, and the uptown or outer station at Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue. About war time a horse communication was established between the inner and outer stations of the Hudson River road, a practice which was common among the larger cities along the Atlantic seaboard, and which in the case of the Harlem road from Twentysixth Street down to the City Hall gave birth to the first distinctive railway in the world.

War time, with its brave and martial show of regiments coming and going through New York, first demonstrated the inefficiency of the early passenger terminals of the town. New York was growing. So was the country. Commodore Vanderbilt, whose strategy had begun with the acquisition of the Harlem road, had in turn taken over the Hudson River line and the chain of prosperous little railways from Albany to Buffalo-all as the nucleus of the first great railway system that America was to know. He first planned a railway freight station, on the site of what had been for many years St. John's Park, in Varick Street. You can still see St. John's Park, as the railroaders have known that freight station for almost half a century, down in the lower west side of New York, the bronze effigy of Commodore Vanderbilt

friends down the back street that was called Forty-second, stopping beside the enginehouses there and telling them that he was going to build the greatest railway station in the world upon that site. His friends laughed at him. It was still well outside the city. On one side of Forty-second Street the engine-houses sent up their pall of smoke; on the other gangs of horses worked in treadmills cutting wood for hungry fireboxes. People would never come up to Forty-second Street to take the cars for Boston or for Albany or Buffalo, and they all told Commodore Vanderbilt that.

But they did not know Vanderbilt. They did not know the prophetic vision of a keenheaded Dutchman who had purchased a chain of railways from the Atlantic to the Lakes, at reasonably high prices for those days, because he had foreseen that the time was coming when business economics would demand but one line from New York to Buffalo, one line from New York to Chicago. Analyzed, there was not so much prophecy about that vision as cool-headed reasoning power. New York had been coming steadily north on Manhattan island for three-quarters of a century. The City Hall was completed a century ago, and its builders, with a thrifty economy, fashioned its rear wall of sandstone because they felt that the town would never get north of that old structure. Vanderbilt's judgment was different. He put himself in touch with the engineers and architects, and in the fall of 1871 a giant structure had arisen at Fortysecond Street and Fourth Avenue, and boastful New York was talking of its Grand Central Depot. New York was in ecstasy about the building. It was the finest thing in town. Its ornate and graceful train-shed spanned thirteen tracks, and even if our fathers did wonder where the cars could come from to fill so spacious an apartment, they had to marvel at its beauty. And Commodore Vanderbilt was sure that it would serve his fine and growing railway for a full century.

In forty years the last vestige of the Grand Central Depot, a building which to a considerable portion of this land' was second in fame only to the Capitol at Washington, was gone. Workmen had torn it stone from stone and brick from brick and carted it off as waste to scrap-yards. The majesty of that lovely. vaulted train-shed had been reduced to a pile of rusty and useless iron. It had been outgrown and discarded.

In fact, within a dozen years the wonderful depot was overtaxed. Even Vanderbilt's prophetic vision could not grasp the growth that was coming, not only to New York, but to the great territory he served, and in a dozen years workmen were clearing a broad space to the east of the main structure for an annex train-shed of a half-dozen tracks to relieve the pressure upon the original station. Another twelve years and the laborers were again upon the Grand Central, this time adding stories to the original structure and trying to simplify its operation by new baggage and waiting rooms. Within the third dozen years the workmen were busy with air-drill and steam-shovel digging the great hole in the rock that was the first notice to the Grand Central that its short lease of busy life was ending. And in the fortieth year of its age they were tearing down the old stationgrown old within the span of two generations, old because it had been outgrown. To such proportions can the traffic of the north gate. of a real city come.

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The problem of the new Grand Central was both engineering and architectural. in the case of all railway terminals of any real size, it was first necessary to solve the engineering problem. That meant first that the passenger traffic into New York from the north and east for another fifty or a hundred years must be discounted-not an easy matter, when in the case of a single famous trunk-line railway it has been found that the passenger travel has doubled each ten years for the past three decades. When the statisticians put down their pencils, the engineers whistled. To fashion a station for the traffic of 1960, even for that of 1935, meant such a passenger station as no railway head, no engineer, no architect, had ever before dreamed of building. At a low estimate, it meant that there would have to be some forty or fifty stub-tracks in the train-shed. In the great train-shed of the Union Station at St. Louis there are thirty-two of these stubtracks, and the span of that shed is 606 feet. That would have meant in the case of the new Grand Central a train-house with a width of nearly a thousand feet. The engineers shook their heads. They knew their limitations. The Grand Central was hedged in by the most expensive real estate in New York. On the open lot where Commodore Vanderbilt had seen the horse-treads cutting the wood for his locomotive stood a modern

hotel twenty stories in height, while Fortysecond Street had come into its own-one of the greatest thoroughfares in a city of great streets. To buy any large quantity of adjoining land for the new Grand Central was out of the question.

Fortunately there was a way out. There generally is. The electric locomotive had come into its own. For the operation of the congested four-track tunnel under Park Avenue from the very throat of the Grand Central's station yard up to Harlem it represented an almost ideal form of traction, largely because of its cleanliness and freedom from smoke. For the engineers who were giving their wits to the planning of a new terminal it was the solution of their hardest problem.

They would cut their train-shed of fifty tracks about in half-and then place one of these halves directly above the other. That would make a fairly logical division between the through and the suburban traffic of the terminal. In that way the new Grand Central has been planned. That one thing represents its first great demarcation from the other great passenger stations of the land. It also is the thing that pointed the way to the most wonderful development of New York's most wonderful terminal, the thing that is infinitely greater than the station itself.

If you remember the old Grand Central, you will remember the spreading railway yard at its portals—that broad, black-breasted thing which had its throat at the narrow entrance of the Park Avenue approach tunnels and widened fanlike both to the nineteen train-shed tracks of the old station and the various service sidings that led to the one side or the other. It was always an impressive place; by night, with its flashing signals of red and green and yellow, its glare of dominant headlights and the constant unspoken orders of swinging lamps; by day, a seeming chaos of locomotives and of cars, turning this way or that, slipping into the dark, cool train-shed under grinding brakes, or else starting from that giant cavern with gathering speed, to roll half-way across the continent before the final halt. To the layman it was doubly fascinating, because he knew that the chaos was really order on a scientific and tremendous scale, that the alert little man who stood at the levers of the inconspicuous tower amid-yard was the clear-minded human who was directing the working of a great terminal by the working of his brain. But

to the thinking railroader that railway yard, like every other railway yard in the heart of a great city, was a waste that was hardly less than criminal.

The coming of the electric locomotive has ended that waste in the hearts of our American cities. Concretely, in the case of the new Grand Central, it has made a splendid solution of a single growth problem in the largest city of our continent. For while the new Grand Central service and approach yards will be on a single level, considerably larger than the old-some sixty acres, all told

-they will apparently have disappeared. In that thing alone a great obstacle to the constant uptown growth of New York has been removed. Sixteen precious city blocks have been given back to the city for development. And right here the new Grand Central reaches its apotheosis of terminal importance.

If it was easy to operate clean tunnels by electricity as a tractive force and to place one train-shed upon another, it is equally easy to create and operate a roofed-over yard—and that is precisely what has been done in the case of the new terminal. Both its main approach yard and the slightly smaller network of tracks that serve the low-level suburban platforms now lie well below the established street surfaces of Manhattan. Streets that have been closed for half a century have been given back to the city, while upon them has already begun to rise the most important single building development that New York has ever known-important because it represents a single main “ up and down avenue of Manhattan on which great new buildings for eight blocks are being brought to even height and harmonious construction under the direction of one firm of architects. What that may represent as an inspiration to the city's growth and development only future generations may really know. It is already certain that it has made the new Grand Central more than a mere railway station or wide-spreading passenger terminal. And incidentally it has made it the most practical railway station from the point of view of its owners that America has yet

seen.

Mr. W. G. McAdoo, the creator of the rapid transit tunnels under the Hudson River, blazed the way when he found a terminal for his tubes in the enormously high-priced real estate of the extreme southern tip of Man. hattan Island. To have set aside a great tract exclusively for such a terminal would