Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... THE VANDERBILT LINES On the lower river front of a little New Jerseytown, flanked on the one hand by dreaming hulks of rheumatic towboats, and on the other by the decaying buildings of a past generation, stands a forsaken hotel. Its windows, framed once to cheer, stare wide and sightless upon the street, and its heavy oak doors swing crazily to every wind; its floors creak uneasily under strange feet and its broken halls echo vacantly to living voices. Only bats and spiders and wood-worms seek its hospitality now; yet to the American railroad world this ruin ought to be of singular interest. The name of the place was once the Steamboat Hotel--the genius of its owner breaking out even then in the title he chose for his inn. But the venture was never, at its best, all that its founder hoped. What now lends strange interest to the shabby landmark is, that out of the magic of its early days have risen stately palaces, lofty facades, a dynasty of American railway magnates, the splendor of Oriental dreams, and a system of transportation unapproached in the story of the world; for under the roof of this New Brunswick ruin Mrs. Vanderbilt, it is said, saved the first eight hundred dollars that gave her husband, the Commodore, his start in the transportation business. To-day the Vanderbilts are the merchant princes of the railway world. Yesterday, on their own lines, they handled 70,000 cars; to-morrow it may be 100,000. When the founder of the system began in those early days to wrestle with problems of transportation, when he was getting his first taste of competition and rate wars and was carrying passengers by boat from New Brunswick to New York for sixpence, with their dinners (perhaps literally) thrown in--the straight tariff being two...