The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Railroad Problem, by Edward Hungerford

THE RAILROAD PROBLEM

[Larger Image]

Courtesy of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway.

An interesting illustration of rail-power development. Notice the evolution of the crude steam engine of
1848 into the giant locomotive of 1913, which in turn is overshadowed by the later arrival—electricity.

Courtesy of the C. M. & St. P. Railway.

Steam, the giant power, which, by welding our states together with bands
of steel, has been a mighty factor in the unifying of the nation.

The
Railroad Problem

By
Edward Hungerford
Author of “The Modern Railroad,” etc.

Illustrated

Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1917

Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1917

Published April, 1917

W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO

To
An Old Friend, and a Good One
Samuel O. Dunn

Acknowledgment

I wish to express my indebtedness to the editors of Collier’s, Every Week, and the Saturday Evening Post for their very gracious permission to use, as portions of this book, parts of my articles which have appeared recently in their publications. To Mr. E. W. McKenna of New York is due a special word of appreciation for his helpfulness in the preparation of this book.

E. H.

Contents

Illustrations

ERRATUM

The word “telephone” on [page 182, line 2], should read “telegraph.”

THE RAILROAD PROBLEM

CHAPTER I

THE SICK MAN OF AMERICAN BUSINESS

On a certain estate there dwells a large family of brothers and sisters. There are many of them and there is great variety in their ages. They are indifferent to their neighbors; they deem themselves quite self-sufficient. But, for the most part they are an industrious family. They are a family of growing wealth—in fact, in every material sense they may already be called rich. And their great estate is slowly beginning to reach its full development.

In this family there are several older brothers who long since attained a strength and dominance over some of the younger members of the family. It is one of these brothers about whom this book is written. It does not assume to be a story of his life. That story has been told by abler pens. It merely aims to be a brief recital of his present condition. For, truth to tell, this older brother has come upon hard times. After a long life of hard work, at a time when his service should be of greatest value to the estate, he has broken down. He has begun to fail—and in an hour when the greedy neighbors grow contentious and he may be of greatest service to his own big family.

The Railroad is the great sick man of the American business family. He is a very sick man. Doctors may disagree as to the cause, sometimes as to the nature, of his ailment; they may quarrel even as to the remedies they deem necessary for his recovery. But there is no question to the fact that he is ill. Just at this time, owing to the extraordinary and abnormal prosperity that has come to the United States, largely because of the great war in Europe, he has rallied temporarily. But his illness continues, far too deep-seated to be thrown off in a moment. And the recent extraordinary legislation passed by Congress has done nothing to alleviate the condition of the sufferer. On the contrary, it has been a great aggravation.

I make no pretense as a doctor. But in the course of ten years of study of our American railroads certain conditions have forced themselves upon my attention—time and time again. I have had the opportunity to see the difficulties under which the railroads labor and some of the difficulties which the railroads have carved for themselves. I have had the chance to see how a mass of transportation legislation has acted and reacted upon these great properties. I have known and talked with their employees—of every station. And I have made up my own mind as to the great opportunity that still awaits the railroad in America. For I am firmly convinced that the great transportation organism of the United States has but scratched the surface of its usefulness. It is this last phase of the railroad that is, or should be, of greatest interest to every American.

Within the short space of the pages of this book, I am going to try to show first the financial plight that has overtaken the overland carriers of our country. I am less of a financier than physician. But the figures upon which my premises are builded have been obtained by a veteran railroader; they have been carefully checked by expert auditors and railroad statisticians, and as such they may be called fundamental.

Given first the financial and the physical plight of our railroads as it exists today, we shall come to another great phase of its weakness—the labor question. Partly because of a disposition to put off the real solution of this problem to a later and apparently easier day, and partly because of conditions over which the railroads have had no control whatsoever, this problem has grown from one of transportation to one of politics—politics of the most vexed and complicated sort. We shall look at this labor question from the most engrossing angle—the human one—and we shall try to look upon it from the economic and financial angle as well. And we shall reserve our real opinion as to its solution until we have had the opportunity to look from the depressing picture of the railroad of today to the picture—by no means conceived in entire fancy—of the railroad of tomorrow.

Upon that second picture we shall build our opinion as to the present necessities of the railroads. Because, in my own mind, it is only as the railroad seeks opportunity, as it seeks to enlarge its vision, that it will be given the chance to live as a privately owned and managed institution. It is today close to the parting of the ways, and the men who control it have come now to the point where they will have to choose—the one path or the other. It will no longer be possible to delay the decision of a really vital economic question to a later, and an easier, day.

Around the bedside of this sick man of our great estate are gathered the physicians and the nurses. They are a motley lot. One of the nurses is called Labor, and at first thought you will think him well worth watching. Another nurse is more appealing at first sight. She is a slender spirituelle thing. We call her Regulation. Perhaps she is worth watching, too. Perhaps her ways should be mended. She is not bad at heart; oh, no! but she has had bad advisers. Of that you may be sure—at the beginning.

And it is quite certain that until she does mend her manners, until Labor, the other nurse, does likewise, the caller who stands around the corner will not come in the sick room. The invalid constantly calls for him. The man around the corner is known as Capital. He holds a golden purse. But you may be quite sure that he will not come to the sick man and thrust the purse within his fingers until both Labor and Regulation have changed their manners.

There are no two sides to such an argument.

With which statement let us turn from parables and toward plainer speaking. Let us begin consideration of the plight of the railroad.

CHAPTER II

THE PLIGHT OF THE RAILROAD

Remember that the Railroad is the big man in the American business family, the very head of the house, you may say. Sick or well, he dominates his brothers—even that cool, calculating fellow whom we delight to call “the Banking Interests.” All America pays toll to transportation. And, inasmuch as the steam railroads are its dominating form of transportation, the entire country hangs upon them. In the long run this country can prosper only when its railroads prosper.

Do you wish to dispute them? Before the facts your contention will not hold very long. According to the last census more than 1,700,000 persons were directly employed upon the steam railroads of the United States; some 2,400,000 in industries bearing directly upon the railroads—lumber, car and locomotive building, iron and steel production, and the mining of coal. It is a goodly number of folk whose livelihood, or a large portion of it, comes from an indirect relation to the railroad. It has been said, with a large degree of statistical accuracy, that one person in every ten in the United States derives his or her living from the railroad.

Perhaps you are not one of this great family of 10,500,000 persons—more folk than dwell in the great state of New York, including the second largest city upon the face of the world. Granted this—then probably you are one of the 10,000,000 savings-bank depositors in the United States. If you are, you are an indirect holder of railroad securities. The savings-banks of this country have many, many million dollars of their savings invested in railroad bonds. If you have not even a savings-bank account let me assume that you have a life-insurance policy; there are three life-insurance policy-holders for every savings-bank depositor. The value of every one of those 34,000,000 policies depends on the wealth that is locked up within the strong boxes of the life-insurance companies. And a very great proportion of that wealth is expressed in the stocks and bonds of railroad companies.

Try as you may, you cannot escape the dominance of the railroad in financial and industrial America. You might have neither savings-bank account nor insurance policy of any sort, yet the railroad would touch you constantly, through both your income and your outgo. If you were a city man, it would touch you not only in the prices that you pay for milk and meat and vegetables, but for the rent of your house or apartment. As I write, the entire East is panic-stricken for fear of a coal famine, faces steadily rising prices. The production at the mines, despite a scarcity of labor, has not been far from normal. But the railroad has failed in its part of the problem—the providing of sufficient cars to transport the coal from the mines to the consumer. It has been hard put to find cars to move the munitions of war from the interior to the seaboard towns. And the coal mines, because of the lack of railroad cars, have been unable to relieve the situation. So panic has resulted. Upon its heels have come similar, if somewhat lesser panics over the congestion and lack of delivery of foodstuffs—conditions which have been reflected in rises in the prices, if not in the value of most foods. These prices already have reached higher figures than at any time since the Civil War. Today they are nearly even with those which prevailed during the dark days of the sixties. And even if they are due directly to crop shortages and abnormal exports they still are a reflex of the railroad’s intimate touch with every man, woman, and child all the way across the land.

Sitting on the porch of his home at dusk, the farmer looks out over his broad acres, sees the great industrial aids that American invention has given him for the growing and the harvesting of his crops and forgets, perhaps, that on each of these mechanical devices he has paid a toll to the railroad. But when he looks to his wheatlands he must recall that it is the railroad that carries forth their crops—not only to the cities and towns of the United States, but to the bread-hungry land, far overseas. In those markets he competes with the wheat from lands so far distant that they seem like mere names wrenched from the pages of the geography book—Argentina, India, Australia. Because of this alone, it is nationally important that the steel highways which lead from our seaport gateways inland to the wheat and corn fields be kept healthy and efficient. They have become integral parts of that broad national policy which says that the United States is no longer isolated or insular but one of the mighty company of world nations.

Will you permit me for a moment to enlarge upon this point—this competition between our farmer of the West and the farmer of the Argentine Republic, of India, of Australia, and of the nations of the Baltic Sea in the market of the consuming nations of the world? As the wheat fields of each of these nations are nearer tidewater than the wheat fields of the United States, it long ago became necessary for our railroads to lower the transportation rate for grain in order that the American farmer might not become submerged in this great international competition. That this has been done, a single illustration will show:

A bushel of wheat today is transported from the center of the great granary country of our Northwest or Southwest to tidewater—an average distance of 1,700 miles—for 27 cents. This is at the rate of .53 of a cent—a minute fraction over half a cent—per ton-mile. The average ton-mile rate in Great Britain, 2.30 cents, as applied to our average grain haul in the United States of 1,700 miles, would make the transportation cost of American wheat four and one-half times as much, or $1.21. The American farmer owes a far greater debt to the railroad than he sometimes may believe. He may have suffered under the oppressions and injustices of badly managed roads—may yet be smarting from these oppressions and injustices. But how much greater would be the oppression and injustice of a high grain rate such as I have just shown? And if such a rate were imposed upon him, would he be able in an average year to grow wheat at a profit, to say nothing of being able to compete with it in the broad markets of the entire world?

A minute ago and we were speaking of the abnormal prosperity of the railroads. The flood first descended in October, 1915. It rapidly mounted in volume. The railroads declared embargoes, first against this class of freight and then against that. Solicitation ceased. The bright young men of their traffic forces were set to work helping the overworked operating departments, tracing lost cars and the like. The backs of their operating departments were all but broken. I myself saw last winter on the railroads for a hundred miles out of Pittsburgh long lines of freight cars laden with war munitions and other freight making their slow and tedious ways toward tidewater. I saw Bridgeport a nightmare, the railroad yards of every other Connecticut town, congested almost overnight, it seemed. The New York terminals were even worse. For a long time it seemed as if relief might never reach them.

It seemed wonderful, but it was not. It seemed like millions in railroad earnings, but it was not. Translated into the unfeeling barometage of percentages it all represented but five and one-half per cent on the actual value of the railroads of the United States. And that, compared with the long season of lean years that had gone before, was as nothing.

Take the season of years from 1907 to 1914—a season for which the statistical records are now complete. Despite the great financial panic of 1907, these were, in some lines of business, mighty prosperous years. The output of automobiles was to be measured not in hours but in the very fractions of minutes. You might figure the earnings of the “movies” well into the millions each twelvemonth; they were building new theaters in all the cities and the bigger towns, almost overnight it seemed. Manufacturing and selling, nationally speaking, were up to the average. Yet in those very years, it was necessary for some of our very best railroads—the best operated and the best financed, if you please—to dip into their previously accumulated assets to pay the dividends which they had promised to their stockholders, in several cases to either lower or omit dividends. And some of the best of these were also compelled to pinch their maintenance expenses to a point that brought them close to the safety line in operation, or even beyond it.

And what of the weaker roads—the roads upon which whole communities, whole states, if you please, are frequently absolutely dependent? What did these roads do in such an emergency? The record speaks for itself. The best of these second-class railroads made no secret of the fact that they were cutting down on maintenance in order to pay their dividends or the interest upon their mortgage bonds. The worst of them simply marched down the highway to bankruptcy. At no time in the history of this country has as much of its railroad mileage been in the hands of receivers as today.

If you are in that glorious company of self-appointed patriots who violently proclaim themselves at every possible opportunity “anti-railroad,” you may be asking me now why so many of our roads have entered bankruptcy. You may be asking me if it is not due in some cases to bad location, and in others to inefficient or dishonest management. I shall reply to you by saying that perhaps fifty per cent of the railroads which are in bankruptcy today are there because they never should have been constructed in the first place and because of the financial management. The lack of judgment, ofttimes the sinister motives that brought them into being are now being paid for and paid for dearly. And in the second place, I will take no issue with you as to either carelessness or dishonesty in management of some of our railroads.

“Why is it that every investigation of a railroad nowadays shows such a rotten condition throughout its affairs?” asked a distinguished economist at a dinner in Chicago last winter.

E. P. Ripley, the veteran president of the Santa Fé, answered that question.

“It is because a road is never investigated until it is morally certain that its affairs are rotten,” said he, and then told how but one or two rotten apples would send their foul odors through an entire barrel and so seemingly contaminate its entire contents. Would you blacken a whole company because a few of its members have erred? Take another instance. A club for a while shelters a genuine blackleg. Are we to say that, because of this mere fact, its other members are not as good as any of us? So it is with the railroads. You cannot point even the finger of suspicion to such properties as the Santa Fé, the Burlington, the Pennsylvania, the North Western, or the Baltimore and Ohio railroads—to mention a few out of many, many instances. These are good roads; in some instances because they have been extraordinarily well located, but in most instances because of their continuous enlightened management. Yet some of them have been hard put to it of late to maintain their dividend obligations to their stockholders. And many roads have been compelled to lower or else suspend entirely the dividends paid in the years gone before.

“How about efficiency?” you may interject.

You are not the first to ask that question. It was asked several years ago by a distinguished citizen of Boston—Louis D. Brandeis, now a justice of the Supreme Court at Washington. In the course of a rate hearing in which he appeared as counsel, Brandeis asked the question, then answered it himself.

“I could save the railroads of the United States a million dollars a day, by applying the principles of modern efficiency to their operations,” was his quiet answer to his own interrogation.

The remark was a distinct shock to the railroad executives, to put it mildly. Some of them were angered by it. The wiser ones, however, went home and sent their secretaries scurrying out after all the books on the then new science of efficiency that could be found.

The more they studied efficiency the less these wise men were inclined to anger against Brandeis. Some of them found that they had been practicing efficiency on their properties for a long time past—only they had not known it by that name. They had been rebuilding whole divisions of their lines, relocating and reconstructing them so as to lower grades and iron out curves—all to the ultimate of a more economical operation of their roads. A bettered railroad means invariably a cheaper one to operate. The saving in grades and curves—no matter what may be the initial cost—means a more than proportionate saving in fuel cost, as well as in wear and tear upon the track and cars.

Remember, if you will, that one of the biggest things that efficiency spells is economy. And economy is always a popular virtue in railroading, particularly among those gentlemen whose only interest in the railroads arises from the fact that they own them. If greater efficiency meant greater economy—well, perhaps it was just as well that that smart attorney from Boston made his remark at the rate hearing, only perhaps he might have phrased it in a little less violent fashion.

That is why a man like Daniel Willard, the remarkably efficient president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—the man who has done so much toward rehabilitating that one-time minstrel-show joke into one of the best railroad properties in the United States—spent days and nights reading every scrap about efficiency that could be brought to his attention, why he brought Harrington Emerson, one of the best-known of the efficiency experts into his own offices and staff, why, beginning with his great car and engine repair and construction shops, he is gradually extending the principles of modern scientific efficiency to every corner of the railroad which he heads. Willard’s example has been followed by other railroad executives. And it is because of these and other efficiency principles that the best of our railroads have been enabled to crawl through the hard years of the past decade, without going into bankruptcy.

It is a gloomy record—these lean years in Egypt. They came succeeding a decade of apparent prosperity for most of the railroads. I say “apparent” advisedly. For, when you get well under the surface of things, you will find that even the first six or seven years of the present century were not genuinely prosperous for the overland carriers. Dip into statistics for a moment. They are dry and generally uninteresting things but nevertheless they are the straws which will show the way the wind is blowing. Look at these:

In 1901 the net capitalization of our railroads was, in round figures, $11,700,000,000. Six years later, or at the end of the greatest period of material prosperity that the United States has ever known, this capitalization had increased to $16,100,000,000—approximately thirty-seven per cent.

A great deal has been written about railroad capitalization—a great deal without knowledge of the real facts in the case, and a great deal more with knowledge but also with malicious intent. These figures speak for themselves. Translated, they represent the expenditures of the railroads for permanent improvements and expansions during that busy seven-year period. At first glance an expenditure of more than $4,000,000,000 is staggering. Yet what are the facts? The facts are that hardly one of these roads expended enough that memorable season to keep pace with the vast demands of the freight and passenger traffic—particularly the freight—upon them. We experienced great railroad congestions during the winters of 1903, 1905, 1906, and 1907. And the loss to the large users of railroad facilities because of these earlier congestions is no vague thing; it can be figured high in the millions of dollars. And furthermore it can be said that there is no period of expansion in recent American commercial history that has not been both limited and hampered by the lack of transportation facilities. What a commentary this, on our so-called national efficiency!

Today we are just crossing the threshold of what seems to be an even greater period in the industrial expansion of the nation.[1] Yet how are our railroads prepared to meet their great problem? In 1901, as we have already seen, they met it by an expansion of their physical facilities. But in 1901 the railroads had credit. In 1916 the credit of many of them had become a rather doubtful matter. And this, of course, has been a serious detriment to their expansion—to put it mildly.

An analysis of the service, both freight and passenger, of the railroads in the year 1907, the last of the “big years” in railroad traffic, compared with that of 1914—the most recent year whose figures are available—is illuminating in estimating railroad credit today, or the lack of it. The passenger-mile—representing the progress of one train over one mile of track—is the unit of that form of traffic. In 1914 the total passenger-miles had increased to 35,100,000,000 from the total of 27,700,000,000 in 1907—or 25.7 per cent. Similarly the ton-mile is the unit of freight transportation. As the name indicates, it represents the carrying of one ton of goods of any description for a mile. In 1914 the ton-miles had grown to 288,700,000,000 from 236,600,000,000—or twenty-two per cent.

But, as the traffic grew, it was necessary that the railroad should grow. Despite supreme difficulties in finding credit it did manage to invest some $4,042,000,000 in property expansions and reconstructions during the seven years from 1907 to 1914. Yet this very money must be paid for, and, in view of the gradually impaired credit, paid for rather generously. At five per cent, this expenditure represents an added annual interest charge of $202,101,000 to the railroads of the United States, a figure whose great size may be the better appreciated when one realizes that it is considerably more than half a million dollars a day.

Against this increased outgo one must measure increased revenues for 1914 over 1907, of $452,188,000—one deals in large figures when one speaks of the earnings and expenses of more than a quarter of a million miles of railroad. Yet even increased earnings of more than $400,000,000 are not so impressive when one finds that operating expenses and taxes in 1914 were $506,888,000 higher than in 1907. And both operating expenses and taxes are far higher in 1916 than they were in 1914.

Hold this picture up to the light. I have begun to develop the huge plate for you. Now study its details for yourself. An investment of $4,000,000,000—more than ten times the cost of the Panama Canal—produced, at the end of a seven-year cycle, increased transportation earnings of more than $450,000,000; yet it required $500,000,000, or an excess in a single year of more than $50,000,000, to meet the pay-roll, material tax, and other costs of operating the railroads. And in this figure we have not taken account of that annual interest charge of more than half a million dollars a day for the huge $4,000,000,000 investment fund.

That interest charge cannot be ignored. Bankers demand their pay. Add the deficit in a single year—a normal year, if you please. Here it is—$54,698,000 plus $202,100,000—and you have a total deficit of $256,798,000. And this is but a single year. The years that preceded it were no better.

The money that went to meet these deficits was provided from some source. Where did it come from? Most of the big railroaders know. They will tell you, without much mincing of words, that it came from previous accumulations of surplus, or else from money withheld from the upkeep of the physical property of the railroads. Of this last, much more in due course. For the present moment, consider that great $4,000,000,000 expenditure between 1908 and 1914 for additions and betterments. It was none too much—not even enough when one comes to consider it beside the great expansions in service as represented by the showings of passenger-miles and ton-miles. And yet today, as we shall see in due course, the railroads stand in need of far greater development and expansion than ever before in their history. Five or six years ago that supreme railroader, James J. Hill, estimated that the railroads of America would need a further expenditure of $1,100,000,000 a year upon their properties before they would be in shape even to decently handle the traffic that would be coming to them before the end of the present decade. Hill was a master railroader who stood not only close to his properties but close to the great territory which they serve. He knew that the states of the Union which are west of the Mississippi River had been developed to only twenty-seven per cent of their ultimate possibilities. It would be hard to state the lack of development of the railroads of that territory in exact percentage. It certainly would be a figure far less than twenty-seven.

If you are a traveler at all familiar with the Middle West and the South; if you are traveling steadily and consistently these years over all of their rail routes, you must have been convinced of their appalling condition. Many of their main lines are deplorable; their branch lines are unspeakable. Branch-line service in every part of the land has been a neglected feature of railroad opportunity—as we shall see in due course. But in the Middle West and in the South they are at their worst. If they do not actually cry aloud from a physical standpoint for reconstruction, their service, or the lack of it, certainly does. Yet the people, the communities, and the industries which are situated upon them are entitled to a railroad service which shall enable them to compete upon an even basis with the communities and industries which are situated upon rich and efficiently managed railroads. I feel that this is an economic principle to which there can be no dissent. And I think also that there can be no dissent to the wretched plight of many of the roads of the Middle West and the South—more particularly the Southwest. In rough figures, the prosperous railroads of the land, representing some forty per cent of its mileage, are able to give service to their patrons; sixty per cent are unable to render a proper service.

But even in the prosperous sections of the West—of the larger proportion of the country—one who rides and sees and thinks cannot fail to be impressed with another great cost, yet to come. I am speaking of the removal of tens of thousands of highway grade crossings, in our towns and cities and in the open country. Already a good beginning has been made; but it is as nothing compared with the work which remains to be done. The coming of the automobile has hastened the necessity of the completion of this work. The railroads have contrived many ingenious and perfected methods of safeguarding their highway grade crossings. The best of them are most inadequate, however.

The fact remains—a fact that must be particularly patent to you when you ride across Michigan, or Indiana, or Illinois, or Iowa, or any of their sister states—that here is a great and vastly expensive work awaiting the railroads of this country. In the larger cities—New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, to name a few striking examples—many millions have been expended in this work within the past few decades. While the several communities—in some instances the state treasuries—have borne a portion of these expenditures, the burden has fallen invariably upon the backs of the railroads. Fortunately the railroads which have succeeded in absolutely eliminating many of their highway crossings—and, in so doing, reducing a large part of their accident claims—have been the wealthier roads. But that is little satisfaction to a community unfortunate enough to be situated on the lines of a bankrupt road. The chances are that its grade crossings, being more poorly protected, are more dangerous.

One thing more, while we are upon this subject and are speaking particularly of this lack of development of the railroads of the West and of the Southwest. It is an interesting fact that there are but three railroads—the Santa Fé, the Union Pacific, and the Southern Pacific—which have done any considerable amount of double-tracking west of the Missouri River. Yet, as we shall see when we come to the military necessity of our railroads, it is only a double-track railroad which is competent to handle any really considerable volume of traffic. And it is equally true that it is more than foolish to attempt to build or to develop any considerable mileage of branch lines until there are double-track main stems to serve it adequately. James J. Hill had all these things in mind when he made his definite statement as to the financial needs of the railroads of the United States during the present decade. And he did not need to give consideration to the abnormal traffic which the great war has given to our railroads. The normal development of the West, its gigantic possibilities, were sufficient to convince that man of great vision, to set his ready pencil at statistics.

As a matter of fact and in view of the record of these past half-dozen years, the average well-posted railroader of today will tell you that Hill was only conservative in his estimate. But, being even more conservative ourselves, let us allow that, if the railroads had been unhampered during the past decade, they would have expended as high as $1,000,000,000 a year in permanent improvements.[2] Ten billions instead of four! Ten billions of dollars makes dramatic comparison even with our great trade balance that has accumulated during the European war—the excess of exports over imports already amounting to only a little over $3,000,000,000. And as to what it would have meant to industrial America, poured out through many channels, raw materials, manufactured goods, labor—it takes no stimulated mind to imagine. The flush period into which the war has suddenly plunged us can give a fair indication.

Now consider for a moment not the possible expansion that the railroad might have made in the last decade and did not, and see how it has failed in the ordinary upkeep of its property. This last phase of its plight bears directly upon the great railroad financial problem as it exists in this year of grace, 1916—the epochal year in which the roads need to replenish their equipment; the year in which they find the doors of the money markets, open to almost all other forms of industrial investment, all but closed in their faces. By equipment, I now speak in the broad sense of the word not merely of cars and locomotives but tracks and bridges and terminals as well—the entire physical aspect of the properties. Yet take, if you will, the word “equipment” in its narrow and technical sense. The sense of railroad necessity is not lessened.

The other day the Massachusetts Public Service Commission complained that the largest of the railroads operating out of Boston was using in its suburban service some 700 wooden passenger coaches, varying in age from twenty-five to forty years. The railroad did not deny that allegation. It merely said that it had no money with which to buy modern coaches.

Its condition is typical. Week after week in the glorious autumn of the year of grace 1916, the news columns of the commercial pages of our morning newspapers were telling with unvarying monotony of the shortage of freight cars as bulletined by the American Railway Association—100,000 this week, 75,000 last, 150,000 next—who knows? The merchant and the manufacturer know. They know in shipments of every sort delayed; in the delays running into sizable money losses week upon week and month upon month.

It may not be able to convince them that at the close of the fiscal year 1914—the period upon which we are working—there were upon the roads of the United States 2,325,647 freight cars, a number which, although greatly added to since that date, has not yet been made adequate for the normal traffic demands of the country.[3] And a large proportion of these cars are both obsolete and inadequate. In 1914, out of the 2,325,647 freight cars some 347,000 were of a capacity of but 60,000 pounds or under—a type today considered obsolete by the most efficient operating man. A great majority of this latter number of cars was of all-wood construction. If the financial condition of the railroads had permitted, they doubtless would have been replaced long since with all-steel cars of far greater carrying capacity. This situation in the freight-car equipment is reflected in larger measure in the passenger-car and locomotive situation. There are railroads in the United States that today are compelled by the exigencies of a really serious situation to operate locomotives whose very condition is a menace not only to the men who must ride and operate them but also to the passengers in the trains they haul. The annual number of serious delays that may be charged to “engine failure” is appalling.[4]

Now consider “equipment” in its broader sense. Expert railroaders will tell you that save in the case of the larger and more prosperous roads, there has been, in the course of the past seven or eight years, a serious depreciation in the maintenance of the way and structure of the railroad. In the prosperous years from 1901 to 1907 a very great improvement was made in this physical feature of the railroad. In the last of these years the American railroad reached the highest standard of physical perfection that it has ever known.

In 1907 came the great panic. It made drastic economies immediately necessary. The railroads in their anxiety to meet, first, their dividends, and second, their interest obligations, pinched maintenance to the extreme limit. This was effective in two ways: In the first place the great preponderance of roads did not have earnings to make ordinary improvements, nor credit to provide the capital charge that would apply for improved rights of way, bridges, stations, freight houses, shops, and the like. Expert track engineers say that the loss in the maintenance of line during these lean years in Egypt that have just passed will average at least $2,000 a mile. Multiplied by a total of 245,000 miles of railroad line in the United States this means that the railroads are “back” in the upkeep of their lines alone some $491,788,000.[5]

An expert railroader of my acquaintance takes this great figure—considerably exceeding the cost of the Panama Canal—adds to it as representing a carefully ascertained deficiency in the replacement of rolling stock an almost equal sum—$445,940,586. To these he further adds the dividends paid by the solvent roads out of their surpluses during the seven hard years—$784,563,406—and the depreciation of the value of the securities of the roads in bankruptcy during the same period—$719,528,328. The total of these four great items is $2,441,820,320—a sum instantly comparable with that of the national debt.

There is, however, from a bookkeeping standpoint, at least, an offset against these losses in the equipment account of $394,736,506 which has, under a wise ruling of the Interstate Commerce Commission, been charged to expenses during the seven years and set up as a reserve to meet the accruing deficiency of equipment. However, there have been no restrictions as to the maintenance of this fund, or how it should be handled. The very prosperous lines—representing some 100,000 miles, or less than half the total mileage of the country—probably have their contribution to this depreciation fund as an asset. In the case of the poorer roads—speaking financially—it doubtless has been applied to other purposes, in order to help them maintain their bare existence. It has come home to these, and with great force, that the governing conditions which make their income fixed take little cognizance of the vast annual increases in material, in tax, and in labor costs. In rough figures—decidedly rough, it seems to me—it has been estimated that the losses of our railroads during the past ten years alone have amounted to approximately one-half the entire cost of the Civil War. That figure is impressive—it is little less than appalling.

Even with the depreciation accounts of the American railroads deducted as an asset, we still have this awe-inspiring total of $2,000,000,000 confronting us. Some of this—the unpaid dividends of more than seven attenuated years—is water that will never come to the mill again. But the neglected rights of way, the ancient buildings, and the bridges needing rehabilitation on some of our railroads, the locomotives and the cars travel-racked and fairly shrieking for repairs, are all of them physical matters that must be set right before the sick man of American business can stand firmly on his feet once again. And when these things are done, the railroad will stand physically just where it stood from eight to nine years ago. And who can deny that it should stand nine years ahead of 1917 instead of nine years behind it?

CHAPTER III

ORGANIZED LABOR—THE ENGINEER

So much then for the physical condition of the railroad as it exists today—the condition that constantly is being reflected in its inability to handle the supertides of traffic that, in this memorable winter that ushers in 1917, are coming to its sidings and to the doors of its freight houses. Consider now the condition of its great human factor—its relations with its employees. I am sure that you will find this, in many ways, in quite as deplorable a condition as the track and physical equipment. It is a condition that steadily has grown worse, instead of better—and this despite a constant improvement in the quality of the individual men in railroad service.

There is not an honest-speaking railroad executive all the way across the land who cannot tell you that he would a dozen times rather deal with the average individual railroader of today than with the average individual railroader of, let us say, a quarter of a century ago. With the railroader’s boss—his grand chief and any of the smaller chiefs—well, here is a far different matter. But there has been a steady improvement in the quality of railroaders—of every sort and degree.

If you have traveled upon our steel pathways for twenty years or more you must have noticed that yourself. The transition of the rough-looking, rough-speaking, rough-thinking brakeman into the courteous trainman comes first to my mind. And if the old-time conductor with lantern on his arm has disappeared, there has appeared a diplomat in his stead, a gentleman with whom we are soon to become a little better acquainted. We still have railroad wrecks, some of them admittedly the fault of the engineer. But apparently we have ceased to have railroad wrecks due to the fact that there was a drunken man in the engine cab. The last serious wreck where this accusation was made was near Corning, New York, on the night of the Fourth of July, 1912. More than forty persons lost their lives in a rear-end collision and the railroad which paid the damages, both in money and in reputation, did its very best to follow up a suspicion in its mind that the engineer of the second train was drunk when he climbed into its engine cab. It was never able to prove that charge. And one of the best things that you may say about that extraordinarily well-organized union—the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—has been its unceasing efforts to drive out drinking among its members. Its record along these lines is of unspotted cleanliness.

Do you happen to know of Rule G, that stringent regulation in the standard rule books of the operating departments of the railroads of America, which is written not alone against the use of liquor by employees when on or off duty but also against their frequenting the places where liquor is sold? Time was when the abuse of Rule G sometimes was winked at, upon certain roads. That time has passed. Today it is perhaps the most stringently observed of all the manifold commandments in American railroading. And the influence of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers has done much toward consummating that very end.

A little while ago an engineer running on one of the soft-coal roads of West Virginia suspected one of his fellows in the engine cab of drinking. It disturbed him more than a little. Finally he went to the man.

“Jim,” said he, in the course of their heart-to-heart talk, “you’ve simply got to cut out the stuff or—”

“If I don’t, what?”

“If you don’t I’m a-goin’ to take it up at the lodge. You know the Brotherhood’s against that sort of thing.”

Jim laid his hand upon the other’s arm.

“Don’t do that,” he protested. “I’d a whole sight rather you’d report me, if you feel that you’ve got to report me, to the superintendent.”

There was no doubt in that engineer’s mind as to the stand of the biggest of the brotherhoods on Rule G. Nor is that stand based entirely on sentiment. The men who stand at the head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers never lose sight of the responsibility that rests upon the man in the engine cab. It is one of the strongest arguments which they may use in their appeals for increased wages. It is an argument which meets with ready and popular approval in the minds of the public which rides back and forth upon the railroad trains of America. And no stronger support can be offered by the strongest of their organizations than an adherence to Rule G that is practical as well as theoretical.

Responsibility in the engine cab! Who is going to deny that the engineer has a superb responsibility—from the moment when he arrives at the roundhouse and signs for and receives his engine to the moment when he “checks out” at the terminal at the far end of his run? To the better appreciate the fullness of such responsibility, one would do well to climb into the cab of one of our fast trains and watch the man there at his task. So, if you would know something of the man in the engine cab, come and ride a little way with him. It is not easily arranged. The railroaders have grown very strict in the enforcement of the rule which forbids strangers in the engine cabs. It is one of the ways in which they have been tightening their safety precautions. Yet in this one instance it can be arranged. You sign tremendously portentous legal “releases,” whose verbiage, freely translated, gives you the distinct impression that you are going to your sure doom. But you are not. You are going to ride with Jimmie Freeman, crack passenger engineer of one of the best and the biggest of our eastern railroads. You are going to have a close look at the man in the engine cab.

Forty minutes before the leaving time of Freeman’s train her big K-I engine backs into the terminal from the roundhouse and is quietly fastened to the long string of heavy cars. The engineer went over the big, clean, lusterless mechanism before it left the inspection-pit at the roundhouse. It is part of his routine; part of his pride as well. And even though it cuts him out of a Sunday dinner with his folks in the little house at the edge of the town, he prefers that it be so. In his simple, direct way he tells you that he has the same satisfaction in speeding a locomotive on which, by personal inspection, he knows that every bolt and nut is in the proper position, that a crack chauffeur has in speeding a good car up the boulevard knowing that it, too, is in condition—engine, driver, axles, all the hundred and one friction parts that must work truly, even at high speed and under the great heat that high speed generates in a bearing.

For remember that Freeman’s limited is a crack train—its name a household word at least halfway across the land. He came to it five years ago—a prize for an engine-runner who had judgment, who had kept a good “on time” record for eight years with a less important passenger train; a man who knew the complications of a locomotive as you and I know the fingers of our two hands. It was not a “seniority” appointment. The “seniority” jobs come to the very oldest of the passenger engineers who, because of the very length of their service, are permitted to pick and choose the runs that would suit them best. These rarely are the very fast runs. They are more apt to be some modest local train making its way up a branch line and back, where there is little congestion of traffic and a throttle-man’s nerves are not kept on edge every blessed moment that he is on the job.

THE ENGINEER

Oiling is too important a matter to be deputed, so he attends to it himself.

Jimmie Freeman did not pick his job. It picked him. It picked him because he had nerve, a steady head, good physique, a knowledge of the locomotive and of all of its whims and vagaries. And if his is one of the hardest jobs on the big road for which he works, he is perhaps only one of a half-thousand passenger engineers it might pick from its ranks and find fully able to measure to it.

An air signal over the engineer’s head rasps twice; a starting signal. He pulls out the throttle ever and ever so little a way—a distance to be measured in inches and fractions of inches—and the limited is in motion.

“We’re sixty seconds late in getting off,” says Freeman as he replaces his watch and settles down for the forty-mile pull up to B——, the first stop and scheduled to be reached in forty-three minutes. That means, with “slow orders” through station yards, as well as one or two sharp curves and a steep grade midway, that Jimmie will have no time to loaf on the straight-aways—he calls them “tangents.”

“Green on the high,” says the fireman, as the big K-I ducks her head under a signal bridge and her pilot trucks find their way to the long crossover that brings her from the platform track in the tangle of the terminal yard over to a “lead-track,” which in turn gives to the “main,” stretching out over the sunshiny open country to distant B——.

“Yellow on the low,” calls the fireman again as the engine slips under still another signal bridge and finds her way to the long, unbroken sweep of the beginning of the “main.” Freeman repeats the signals. For his part he is supposed to read them all the way to P——, where his run ends and the limited goes, bag and baggage, upon the rails of a connecting road. He is supposed to read, the fireman to repeat. As a practical thing it is sometimes out of the question. The cab of the big passenger puller is far from a quiet place. There is the dull pound of the drivers over the smooth rails, the roar of the great fire between them, the deafening racket of the forced draft that pours into it. The cab does not lend itself to conversation. But if Freeman does not repeat the signal indications audibly he does it mentally. It is part of his job. And the mere repeating of the signal does not assure safety.

Once, a number of years ago and upon another railroad, I rode in the cab of a fast passenger train. The road ran straight for many miles and across a level country. Each mile of its path was marked by a clock signal, gleaming against the night. The engineer shouted each of those signals, and his fireman echoed them back.

“White,” he would call—for white was then the safety color, not the green that has been almost universally adopted now.

“White it is,” would come the reply. And in another mile:

“White,” and “White she is.”

And once my heart all but leaped into my mouth. The block showed red—red, the changeless signal for danger. But our engineer did not close his throttle or reach for the handle of his air brake.

“Red,” he chanted in his emotionless fashion; but the fireman altering his echo to “Red she is,” looked up for a moment into his chief’s face. The chief never moved a muscle. Sixty seconds later he shouted again.

“White.”

“White she is,” repeated the fireman, and grinned as he thrust another shovelful of coal into the fire box.

After the run was over and we sat at the comfortable eating counter of the Railroad Y.M.C.A., I asked the engineer why he had run by that red signal. He hesitated a moment.

“Man alive,” said he, “do you suppose I can afford to bring my train to a full stop every time one of those pesky blocks gives me the bloody eye? I could get the next two blocks and saw they were safe. I know every inch of the line, and knew that there was not an interlocking”—meaning switches and crossing tracks—“within ten miles of us. The block was out of order and I knew it. And I was right.”

“Suppose there was a broken rail in that block,” I suggested, “wouldn’t that break the current and automatically send the signal to danger?”

The engineer did not answer that quickly. He knew the point was well taken. Finally, pressed, he said that his was a “penalty train,” which meant that it carried the mail and excess-fare passengers and that it would cost his railroad dollars and cents if it were more than thirty minutes late at its final terminal. To have stopped this train flat at the red signal, when he felt morally certain and could practically see that the line was clear and open, would have cost fifteen minutes or more. If the practice was repeated and even his detention sheets showed that the time lost was due to stopping at a signal that was out of order, he would not be censured. Oh, no! But sooner or later there would be a new man on that run—a man who had the reputation of bringing his train in on time over his division. That was what the engineer told me that night as we munched our crullers and sipped our coffee.

Freeman tells another story. Freeman says that he never ran past a red signal in his life and that he could not have held his run on the limited for five long years if he had not been in the habit of bringing her in “in her time.” Freeman speaks a good word for the signals. You take note of it. Then you remember that in one of the innumerable cases that came up before the Interstate Commerce Commission down in Washington, the engineer of the Congressional Limited testified that in the five-hour run from the national capital up to the outskirts of New York he had to read and understand and observe exactly 550 signals. It was one of the things that he said made his job difficult.

Yet when this run today is over and we are standing with Freeman by the side of the turntable in the big and smoky roundhouse, as his big long-boned black baby is edging gently into her bunk for a few hours of well-earned rest, he will tell you frankly that he has a genuine affection for the 162 signals that stand to beckon him on or to halt him in his run of 135 miles up the main line.

“I just let myself think of another fairly fast run I had once—up on a side line, single-track at that, where there wasn’t but two interlockings the whole distance or a single block protection from one end to the other.” Then he adds, “I’d hate without the signals to pull Twenty-four at a sixty-mile-an-hour clip. To my mind they’re like watchmen, with flags or lanterns every mile up the main line. Only a watchman couldn’t see a mile and know of a break in the rail, the way that electric block knows it. Talk about a thing being human. That toy’s better than human. It has a test record of less than one per cent of failures, and in that small failure record, ninety-eight per cent of the actual failures turned the signal automatically to danger.”

On Freeman’s road they do not penalize a man for failing to make his time, by finding some other excuse and then quietly removing him from his run. On the contrary, there are maximum speed limits for every mile of the main line and its branches—ways by which the road knows that the maximums are not being exceeded. And Freeman likes to quote the big boss of one of the big roads—Daniel Willard, come from an engine cab to be president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Once, when discussing this very question, Willard said:

“If there is a rule on our railroad that delays an engineman and tends to prevent his making his schedule time we want to know it—at once. If we believe the rule is wrong we will remove it. If not, and it delays the trains, we will lengthen their running time.”

In fact, the steady tendency of all American roads during the past ten years has been toward lengthening schedules rather than shortening them. The two whirlwind trains between New York and Chicago now take twenty hours for the trip, instead of eighteen, as was the case when they were first installed. The famous run of the Jarrett and Palmer special in 1876, from Jersey City to Oakland on San Francisco Bay, in four days flat, still stands almost as a transcontinental record, while the fastest running time ever accredited to a locomotive—112½ miles an hour by a New York Central locomotive with four cars, for a short distance between Rochester and Buffalo—was accomplished more than twenty years ago.

The railroads are playing fairer with their Jimmie Freemans. The men who sit on the right-hand side of the engine cabs appreciate that. They know the responsibility that sits unseen, but not unnoticed, at the side of the man who guides the locomotive.

“We’ve passed the sixty mark,” shouts Freeman’s fireman into your ear. Above the din of the engine you catch his words as the faintest of whispers. And you look ahead at the curving track. Curving? Forever curving, and each time it swerves and the path that we are eating up at the rate of eighty-eight feet to the second is lost behind the brow of a hill or through a clump of trees, your heart rises to your mouth and you wonder if all is well just over there beyond. And then you remember that the friendly raised arm of the block semaphore has said “yes.”

The engineer’s figure is immobile but his mind is alert. His touch upon the throttle is as light as that of a child. His face, half hidden behind his great goggles, is expressionless. Yet behind those same protecting glasses the windows of his soul are open—and watching, watching, forever watching the curving track. Sometimes the track curves away from his side of the cab, and then the fireman climbs up on his seat behind and picks up the lookout. But he does not pick up Freeman’s responsibility.

Freeman has a high regard for signals. He never permits them to become monotonous.

“If ever I get that way, I’ll know it myself,” says he, “and it will be high time for me to get out.”

After all, his service on this extra-fast train may not exceed ten years. A man whose nerve was not iron and his physique steel could not last one-third of that time. According to the insurance figures of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, to which Freeman and most of his fellows belong, eleven years and seven days is the average length of service for an engineer upon an American railroad. The railroad managers figure it a little differently and place the average at something over twelve years. And out in the West, where the railroads span the mountains and thread the canyons, the man in the engine cab will rarely last more than six years.

Of course the situation varies on different railroads. Before me lies the report of the Boston and Albany Railroad—impressive because of the length of the service of the engineers of that staunch property. It is the habit of that railroad to give annual passes to the employees who have been in its service more than fifteen years. More than half of its engineers receive such passes. And early in the present year it retired from active service Engineer James W. Chamberlain, who had been in its employ more than fifty-three years. And for a dozen years past Chamberlain had been piloting two of the road’s fastest trains between Boston and Springfield. You cannot always rely upon averages.

We are within five miles of B——, where our ride in the engine cab ends. Around us is the typical vicinage of a growing American town already almost great—gas tanks, factories, truck gardens, encroaching upon these the neat pattern of new streets upon which small houses are rearing their heads—close round about us the railroad yards, vast in their ramifications and peopled with a seemingly infinite number of red and blue and yellow freight cars. There is a trail of them close beside Freeman’s arm. The trail culminates in a caboose which shows flags and we know that it is a freight that has just come scampering down the line into the yard—a bare five or six minutes leeway to get out of our way—out of the way of the trains whose delays mean personal reports and excuses to the “old man,” a practical, hard-headed railroader who has a fine contempt for excuses of every sort.

“You writer fellows like to talk about the heroes of the engine cab,” says the fireman; “the boy who is pulling that greasy old Baldwin comes nearer being a hero than Jimmie or any of the rest of the passenger bunch.”

There is nothing cryptic in his meaning. He means that the freight engineer, pulling a less carefully maintained piece of motive power, to which had been added not only its full working capacity of cars, but as many extra as an energetic and hard-pressed trainmaster may add, up to the risk point of an engine-failure and consequent complete breakdown out upon the main line, must keep out of the way of the gleaming green and gold and brass contraption that has the right of way from the very moment that she starts out from the terminal. Yet it is the freight-puller and his train that are earning the money that must be used to pay the deficit on the limited that whirls by him so contemptuously. For that proud and showy thing of green and gold and brass has never been a money-earner—and never will be. Everyone with the road says that of her. They call her a parasite and say things about Solomon in all his glory when they look at the gay flowers in her dining cars and the rampant luxury in her lounging cars—but how they do love her! It is the parasite of which they brag, and not the dull and dusty freight.

It is forty minutes since we first pulled out of the terminal and our journey with Freeman began. And now, a few blocks away and around a sharp curve to the left, is the big and sprawling passenger station at B——, with the twilight shadows gathering beneath the roof of its expansive train shed. And Freeman has already put on the air brakes, the big engine is feeling its way cautiously through the maze of tracks and switches while once again you hear the fireman call the signals. Three minutes later the train is halted—beside the long platform under that great and smoky shed, folk are getting on and off the cars—there is all the gay confusion that marks the arrival and the departure of an important train. But there is no confusion about Freeman. With his long-nosed oil can in hand he is around the front of “his baby,” making sure that she is attuned for her next long leap up the line. Freeman takes no chances. Instead, he takes each and every opportunity for renewed inspections of his locomotive.

Responsibility in the engine cab!

One cannot deny that it exists there. One finds it hard to confound the hard fact that the engineer is worthy of a good wage—how good a wage is the only point to be determined. For responsibility must be well paid—whether it is responsibility at the dispatcher’s desk, in the lonely signal tower, in the track-foreman’s shanty, in any of the many, many forms of railroad operation where the human factor in safety can never be eliminated—where danger ever lurks, just around the corner and within easy reach of the outstretched hand. The engineer has his full share of responsibility. But he has no monopoly of it.

CHAPTER IV

ORGANIZED LABOR—THE CONDUCTOR

Here is another of the well-organized and protected forms of the railroad’s labor—the conductor. He will tell you that a goodly measure of responsibility rests upon his own broad shoulders. Yet your veteran railroad executive does not regard his conductor so much as a responsibility man as a diplomat. This last, after all, is his chief rôle.

You gather your brow. You do not understand.

“I thought,” you begin slowly, for you have made some sort of a study of this big game of railroading, “I thought that the traveling freight and passenger agents, all that solicitous company which travels through the highways and byways of the land, the big towns and the small, seeking out traffic, for the railroad, were regarded as its diplomats.”

You are partly right—partly wrong.

For the real diplomat of the railroad is multiplied in its service, far more than the freight or the passenger agents. The humblest and the rarest of passengers do not fail to see him. The man who rides on the railroad train for the first time in his life comes into almost instant touch with him. You yourself have seen him many times making his way down the aisle of the car; stopping patiently beside each of his passengers—we use the phrase “his passengers” advisedly—greeting old friends with cheery nods; upholding the dignity of the railroad and his own authority—quietly, but none the less surely—time and time again. Here, as we shall come in a moment to understand, is a real diplomat of the railroad—an autocrat of no small authority in those rare instances where he may fail to be a gentleman. And all this stands to the infinite credit of more than 60,000 conductors in the railroad service across the land.

We have just called him an autocrat. Remember, however, that for the safe movement of his train up and down the railroad’s busy lines he shares, in an important degree, the responsibility with the man with whom we have just ridden in the engine cab; but the engineer cannot very well make or lose business for his railroad unless he stops his train too sharply and too many times. The conductor—well, we are going to see him in his rôle of peacemaker plenipotentiary to the public. It, of itself, is a rôle where he can be and is of infinite value to the railroad.

Do you chance to recall the conductor of yesteryear—conceding no more than his blue cap to the growing use of uniforms in a republican country; somewhat unkempt perhaps as to clothes—yet benevolent and fatherly in his way? Did that sickly-looking woman at the end of the coach fumble and then attempt a feeble and impotent smile when he asked her for her ticket? And did he, with a sublime myopia, pass her by without demanding that bit of pasteboard? Your old-time conductor knew the difference between impostors—even in skirts—and empty-pocketed folks to whom a railroad journey might be a tragic necessity. A few years up and down the line, the constant study of the folk within his cars quickly taught him that. And it would have been a pretty poor sort of old-fashioned railroad that would not have allowed him discretion in such cases.

Your new-time railroad allows him little or no discretion in matters of this sort. Your conductor of today, finally quite at ease in the trimness of his well-set uniform, his arm-lantern gone into the scrap heap in these days of electric-lighted cars, on most railroads has practically no opportunity to use his judgment in matters that pertain to the fares. If he lets anyone ride free on his train—and the boss learns of it—he hears dire threats about the Interstate Commerce Commission, sees the yawning doors of the penitentiary close at hand.

Railroad managements have a way of using that law for the punishment of dishonest employees. So your conductor of today lacks the power of his brethren of an earlier day. They worked in a generation when the railroad still was a personal thing. Men and families owned railroads as they might own farms or banks or grocery stores. They headed their own roads and they assumed an attitude toward their men, autocratic or benevolent as the case might be, but almost always distinctly personal. The railroad as a separate unit had not then grown beyond a point where that was possible and the big boss was a real factor in the lives of his men. They might come to have a real affection for him—such as they had for Lucius Tuttle, when he was president of the Boston and Maine—and call him by his first name. No higher compliment can come up from the ranks to a railroad executive.

Today discretion is discrimination in far too many cases. So reads the Interstate Commerce Law about discrimination. It places discrimination in the same class with burglary and the shippers who had dealings with many of our railroads a quarter of a century ago are thanking all the political gods of the United States of America that this law was placed upon the statute-books; but it can be read too literally, just as the conductor of a modern train can be too sharp-sighted. Here is a case, which from too fine or technical a reading of the law might be read into discrimination; in reality it was an instance of real discretion on the part of the conductor.

A man—a nervous, tired man—was bound east through the state of New York upon the Lake Shore Limited. His destination was Kingston, which is situate upon the west bank of the Hudson River, almost half way between New York and Albany. The route of the Lake Shore Limited is down the east shore of the river, without a stop between Albany and New York. Anyone who knows the Hudson Valley well knows how atrocious are the facilities for crossing the river at almost any point between those two cities. This tired, nervous man planned to catch the last train of the afternoon down the West Shore Railroad from Albany to Kingston. Under normal conditions he had about thirty minutes’ leeway in which to make the change; but on this occasion the Lake Shore Limited was a little more than thirty minutes late and he did not alight at Albany—he had no wish to hang around there until some time in the early morning. He decided that he would go through to New York, cross the city from the Grand Central Station to Weehawken and then go through to Kingston on a night train. This meant 180 extra miles of travel; but the man was in a very great hurry and with him time counted more than miles.

As his train swept across the bridge and out of Albany the conductor came through. He was a round, genial-faced fellow, typical of that other generation of train captains that one often finds upon the older railroads of the land; and the man from Kingston halted him—told his story very much as we have told it here.

“I didn’t know but that, if you were going to stop for water at Poughkeepsie, I might slip off some way,” he finally ventured. “That would leave me less than twenty miles from home.”

The conductor did not hesitate.

“We don’t stop at Poughkeepsie—for water or anything else,” he said. “But I’ll stop at Rhinecliff for you.”

Rhinecliff is on the east bank of the Hudson, directly opposite Kingston. That seemed too good to be true—and the man stammered out his thanks.

“I didn’t think you’d stop this crack train for anybody,” he said quite frankly. “The time card doesn’t—”

“This train stops for the proper accommodation of the patrons of this road,” interrupted the conductor, “and I’m its high judge. You lost out on your connection at Albany through no fault of yours. It was our fault and we are doing our best to make it up to you.”

Consider the value of such a man to the organization which employs him. That little act was worth more to the big railroad whose uniform he bore than a ton of advertising tracts or a month’s service of its corps of soliciting agents. The Kingston man crossed the river from Rhinecliff in a motor boat and thanked the road and its conductor for the service it had rendered him. He was a large shipper and his factory in the western part of the state is in a hotly competitive territory; but the road that through the good sense of its employee had saved him much valuable time today hardly knows a competitor in his shipping room.

Discrimination? Your attorney, skilled in the fine workings of the Interstate Commerce Law, may tell you “Yes,” but we are inclined to think he is wrong, for the man was not permitted to alight at Rhinecliff because he was anything more than a patron of the road. He had no political or newspaper affiliations to parade before the conductor; he did not hint at his strength as a shipper, he did not even give his name. If there is discrimination in that, I fail to see it.

A certain man took a trip from New York to Chicago three or four years ago. He went on a famous road, well conducted, and he returned on its equally famous competitor. Each road had just conquered a mighty river by boring an electrically operated tunnel underneath it. The tunnel had been well advertised and the man, whose mind had a mechanical turn, was anxious to see both of them. In each case the train bore a wide-vestibuled day coach as its last car.

In the first tunnel through which he passed he went to the rear of the day coach with the intention of taking a look at the under-river bore. He wanted to stand at the rear of the aisle and look through the door at the electrically lighted tube. But the conductor anticipated him. He drew down the sash curtain of the car door.

“Sorry,” he said, “but the company’s rules prohibit passengers from standing in the aisles.”

One might write a whole chapter on the thoroughly asinine rules that some roads have made for the guidance not only of their employees but of their patrons as well. But this man did not argue. He bowed dutifully to the strong arm of the rule book and went back to his seat—thoroughly cowed. But how different was the case on the other railroad, by which he returned from Chicago! This second time he went to the rear of the train, recalling his first experience and the rebuff he had received. But this road and its conductor were of a different sort. This second conductor was fastening the outside doors of the vestibule at the rear of the last car and saying to the little group assembled there:

“If you will wait a minute I will give you a chance to get out on this rear platform and see the big job we’ve been working on so long. We all of us are mighty proud of it.”

How much of an asset do you suppose this conductor was to his company?

By this time the new-fangled railroad executive who reads this will be filled with disgust.

“Doesn’t he know,” I can hear him say, “that railroading has taken some pretty big strides within the past fifteen or twenty years? We’re perfecting; we’re systematizing. We’ve studied the motions of the bricklayer and we’re dabbling in efficiency. We’ve modeled our railroads after the best of the standing armies of Europe and we’ve begun to move men like units. That means that we’ve no room in railroad ranks for individualists. An individualist never makes an ideal unit and the new efficiency demands units—not thinkers!”

Does it? In the minds of a good many railroaders of the newer schools it seems to. Yet some of these very same railroaders were overjoyed a little time ago—when the half-baked Adamson eight-hour law was being jammed through Congress—to see out from the Middle West, from the rails of the Santa Fé, the Union Pacific, the Milwaukee roads, veteran conductors coming forward, who not only did not hesitate to speak their minds against the measure, but actually sought out injunctions against it. What it might cost these men in prestige and in the affection of their fellows, in possible punishments by the lodges of their brotherhoods, the outside public may never know. It can be fairly assured that the price was no small one.

Would the railroad executives of the Middle West have preferred that these men be units, rather than individualists? I think not. The truth of the matter is, that in its very desire to stand straight, the new school of railroading sometimes leans backward. We will grant that in the coming of the great combinations of new-time railroads it was a mighty good step to eliminate the haphazard, wasteful, inefficient old school of personal railroading. Consolidation has effected some wonderful working advantages in the operation of our giant systems, and it is a grave question whether today, with the margin between income and operating cost constantly narrowing, if the eggs were unscrambled and the famous little old roads returned, they could be operated long and dodge the scrawny fingers of receivership. Yet it is a fact that if they have gained in many ways by consolidation and centralization, they have lost something definite in the personal feeling which used to exist between their men and themselves. It was an asset that could hardly be expressed in dollars and cents.

After the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad had absorbed the famous Old Colony—down there in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts—it was five years before its conductors ceased to know it and to love it as the Old Colony. To older conductors the Panhandle and the Lake Shore are still as real and as vital as if those beloved names still appeared upon the rolling stock. Measure such an asset in dollars and cents if you can! You cannot, thank God, place a valuation upon such assets as affection and loyalty.

So to your first qualities of dignity and authority and discretion—in these days we dare not call it discrimination—supplement those of affection and of loyalty. And to these add that of ability; for a conductor’s entire work is not merely collecting his tickets and keeping the passengers of his train in good humor—though sometimes this last is a man’s job by itself. He must bear in mind that Bible of the railroad—the time card—the place his train takes upon it; its relation to every other train, regular and special, on the line. His mind must be—every minute that he is on the road—a replica of the dispatcher’s, working in perfect synchronism with that of the controlling head who bends over the train sheet back at headquarters. This work, comparatively simple on a double-track line, becomes, in many instances, tremendously complicated upon the many miles of single-track railroads that still bear a heavy traffic up and down and across America.

The “opposing trains” to be met and passed; the slower trains moving in the same direction to be overtaken and also passed; the complications of special movements—all these must be borne in accurate correlation as the conductor passes up or down the line. He may have extra cars to his train and an extraordinarily difficult crowd of passengers to handle, but he cannot for a moment ignore the most minute detail of the flimsy messages that are handed to him during the entire length of his trip. And back of his specific orders for the day he must ever carry the entire scheme of the division’s operation.

THE KNIGHT OF THE TICKET PUNCH

Courtesy, diplomacy, helpfulness are quite as much parts of his job as anything else.
He is a distinctive American figure; no railroads elsewhere have his counterpart.

So here you have the passenger conductor—a real knight of the road, if you please—careful, discerning, courageous; a rare diplomat; perhaps in this commercial day of big things the spirit of the skipper of the famous old-time clipper ship incarnate! He is worthy of the great railroad empire of the world. In Europe, the state railroads of Germany and of France, the short, congested lines of Great Britain have not his counterpart. He is a product both of our nationalism and of the hard necessity that has hedged him in. And, in passing, it is worthy of note that some of the men who sit today in the highest executive positions of the greatest of our railroads have stood their long, hard turns with the ticket-punch. A recent and a peculiarly gifted chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission—Edgar E. Clark—was for many years a passenger conductor; his pride in his calling of those earlier years is unbounded.

Here I have shown you in a word the two strongest of the four types of railroad organized labor. For while there are organizations among some other forms of the railroads’ employees, switchmen, telegraphers, and the like, it is the engineers, the firemen, the conductors, and the trainmen who hold the whiphand of authority over the railroad executive and the politician alike. They have a power that is to be feared—they have said it themselves. And the politicians, the public, a good many of the biggest railroad executives have believed it. Once in a while you will find a railroad executive—like that stern old lion, Edward Payson Ripley, who brought the Santa Fé Railroad out of bankruptcy into affluence and became its president—who states his disbelief and states it so plainly that there can be no doubt as to its meaning. For a long time Ripley has seen the handwriting on the wall. And so seeing, he has had small patience with the weak-kneed compromise that invariably has followed the so-called recurrent crises between the four big brotherhoods of the railroads and their employers. There is nothing weak-kneed about Ripley and the rapidly growing group of executives rallying about him. It must come to an issue, open warfare if you please. In such a war either the railroads or their labor will win. But upon the victory, no matter how it may go, definite economic policy may be builded. You cannot build either definite or enduring policy upon compromise. Our own Civil War and the weak-kneed years of compromise that preceded it ought to show that to each of us, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

We are just passing through one of the periodic “crises” between the railroads and their four big brotherhoods. These “crises,” which, up to the present time at least, have always ended in wage adjustments of a decidedly upward trend, are apt to be staged on the eve of an important election. They invariably are accompanied by threats of a strike—the German der Tag reduced to an American rule of terror. These threats are so definite as to leave nothing but alarm in the public breast.

Then arbitration may be brought to play upon the situation. There is a vast amount of understanding—accompanied by a still greater amount of misunderstanding. The big leaders of the big brotherhoods are no fools. They are skilled in the new-fangled science of publicity. And so are the railroads. Yet finally the men get their increased wages—or a good part of what they have asked. And finally the cost is slipped along to the public, in the form of increased passenger fares or freight tariffs. Then, sooner or later, the brotherhood railroad employee feels the increased cost of transportation distinctly reflected in his own rising cost of living. He feels it distinctly, because an instinctive idea of the manufacturer or the distributor is to add on the transportation cost to his manufacturing and selling cost, with something more than a fair margin. Thus a general increase of five per cent in freight rates may only mean that it costs a fraction less than two cents more to ship a pair of shoes from Boston to Cleveland. But the manufacturer in Boston is tempted to add five cents to his selling cost—to cover not only the increase in transportation, but other manufacturing-cost increases, less definite in detail but appreciable in volume. The wholesaler, under the same pressure from a steadily advancing cost of maintaining his business, makes his increase ten cents, and the retailer, not immune from the same general conditions which govern the manufacturer or the wholesaler, protects himself by placing an extra charge of twenty-five cents to his retail patron. If the final patron—the man or the woman who is to wear the shoes—protests, the retailer informs him that the recent increase in freight rates—well advertised in the public prints—is responsible for the new selling price. So has the increase in freight rates been magnified—both in reality and in the public mind.

It is when the brotherhood man or his wife or daughter buys the shoes that they begin to pinch—economically, at least. It is not only shoes, it is clothing, it is foodstuffs, it is coal—the pressure gains and from every quarter. Then the brotherhood man—engineer or conductor or fireman or trainman—rises in lodge-meeting and demands a better wage. His margin between income and outgo is beginning to narrow. He has a family to rear, a home to maintain—a pride in both. In the course of a short time the men at the top of the brotherhoods feel this mass pressure from below. They must yield to it. If they do not, their positions and their prestige will be taken away from them. So they get together, decide on the amount of the relief they must have, and begin their demands upon the railroads. And when the railroads, with their well-known cost sheets ever in front of them, show resistance, the threats of strike once again fill the air. Gentle, peace-loving folk of every sort become alarmed. There is turmoil among the politicians, of every sort and variety. After that, arbitration.

President Wilson in his recent address to Congress, in his accurate, authoritative way, laid great stress upon this very point of arbitration. He had laid stress upon it in the crisis of September, 1916—when it looked as if railroad union labor and the executives of the railroads had come to an actual parting of the ways—and the country was to be turned from threats into the terrorizing actuality of a strike. Only Congress, which seems rarely able to realize that it can ever be anything else than Congress and so bound to its traditions of inefficiency, chose to overlook this portion of the President’s solution of the situation. It granted the eight-hour day—so called—but it was deaf to arbitration.

Said President Wilson in his address:

To pass a law which forbade or prevented the individual workman to leave his work before receiving the approval of society in doing so would be to adopt a new principle into our jurisprudence, which I take it for granted we are not prepared to introduce. But the proposal that the operation of the railways of the country shall not be stopped or interrupted by the concerted action of organized bodies of men until a public investigation shall have been instituted which shall make the whole question at issue plain for the judgment of the opinion of the nation is not to propose any such principle.

The President is nearly always right—particularly so in domestic affairs. But never, in my knowledge, has he expressed himself with greater vigor and strength than in this particular instance. Not that the principle is apt to be popular—quite the reverse is probable. There are employers of a certain type, also employees of a certain type, whose bitterness against any fair measure of arbitration is unyielding. The great railroad brotherhoods have never shown any enthusiasm over the idea, despite the fact that the two countries in which arbitration is strongest and most successful—Australia and New Zealand—are controlled by organized labor.

There are railroad executives also who have been opposed to arbitration save where they might manipulate it to serve their own selfish ends. But these are the types of railroad chiefs who are beginning to disappear under the new order of things in America. Theirs was another and somewhat less enlightened generation—particularly in regard to social economics. And even in the railroad the old order is rapidly giving way to the new.

There is a class in America which enthusiastically receives arbitration—compulsory arbitration—and demands that it be extended in full to the railroad, as well as to every other form of industrial enterprise. I am referring to the average citizen—the man who stands to lose, and to lose heavily, while a strike of any magnitude is in progress. He is an innocent party to the entire matter. And he must be protected—absolutely and finally.

That is why we must have arbitration—compulsory arbitration, for any arbitration which is not compulsory and practically final, is useless. We have had the other sort already and it has brought us nowhere. We had arbitration of the uncompulsory sort before the critical days at the end of last August. In the final course of events both the railroads and their brotherhood employees ignored it. And the average man, the man in the street, was ignorant of the fact that it had even been tried.

After that sort of arbitration comes compromise, and compromise of that sort is a thin veil for failure. And failure means that the whole thing must be gone over once again. The circle has been completed—in a remarkably short space of time.

It all is a merry-go-round, without merriment; a juggernaut which revolves upon a seemingly unending path. Yet he is a real juggernaut. For while the brotherhood man may seek and obtain relief upon the lines which I have just indicated—how about the salaried man outside the railroad? And how about the man inside the railroad whom no strong brotherhood organization, no gifted, diplomatic leader of men protects? It is this last class—the unorganized labor of the railroad, that I want you to consider for a little time. It is obviously unfair, from any broad economic standpoint, that these men, far outnumbering the organized labor of the railroad, should be ignored when it comes to any general readjustment of its wages. Yet, as a matter of fact, this is the very thing that has been coming to pass. And today it is one of the most pronounced symptoms of weakness in the great sick man of American business.

CHAPTER V

UNORGANIZED LABOR—THE MAN WITH THE SHOVEL

In choosing the engineer and the conductor as the two very best types of organized labor upon the railroad I have had in mind the special qualifications that go with each. With the engineer one instantly links responsibility. And I think that in a preceding chapter I showed you with some definiteness that responsibility is never far from the engine cab. With the conductor one touches the diplomat of the rank and file of railroad service—one of the most frequent of the railroad’s touching points with the public which it aims to serve.

How about unorganized labor—the great groups of railroad workers who have no brotherhoods to look out for their rights or to further their interests? Has organized labor a monopoly of responsibility or of diplomacy? I think not. And if you will permit me, I shall try to show you an unorganized worker whose responsibility is quite as constant and as great as that of the men in the engine cab. This man is the one who makes the path for the locomotive safe—he is the track foreman, or section-boss. And the station agent, not of the metropolitan city but rather of the smaller cities or even the villages that multiplied many times make up the America that we all know, may yield nothing to the conductor in diplomacy. Of him, more in the next chapter.

Consider first, if you will, the section-boss—the man who makes the steel highway safe for you and me each time we venture forth upon it. It is obvious that no amount of brains in the engine cab, no skill, no sagacity, no reserve force, is going to compensate for a neglected track. A single broken rail may send the best-driven locomotive in the world into the ditch beside the right of way, a mass of tangled and useless scrap iron. The section foreman knows this. And knowing it does not diminish his own sense of responsibility.

Sometimes when you sit in the observation end of the limited and look back idly upon the retreating landscape you will see him, shovel in hand, standing beside the track and glancing in a dazed fashion at a fast-flying luxury which he has never enjoyed. He seems, at first sight, to be a fairly inconsequential part in the manifold details of railroad operation. Yet it would be well if you could come a little closer to this important human factor in the comfort and the safety of your trip; could understand more fully the difficulties of his work. First you would have to understand that from the very hour the railroad is completed it requires constant and exacting care to keep it from quick deterioration. Continual strains of the traffic and the elements, seen and unseen, are wearing it out. Temperature, wind, moisture, friction, and chemical action are doing their best to tear down the nicety of the work of man in building the best of his pathways. The effects of temperature—of the wonderful range of heat and cold which the greater part of America experiences and sometimes within a remarkably short space of time—are to expand, contract, and ofttimes to break the rails; to sever telegraph lines, the maintenance of which is so vital to the safe conduct of the railroad; to disrupt the equally important signal service.

A single flat-wheeled freight car went bumping up a railroad side line in Minnesota on a zero day a few winters ago and broke so many rails that it was necessary to tie up the entire line for twenty-four hours, until it could be made fit for operation once again.

Track looks tough. In reality it is a wonderfully sensitive thing. Not only is the rail itself a sensitive and uncertain thing, whether it weighs 56 pounds to the yard or 110 pounds to the yard, but the ballast and the ties, and even the spikes, must be in absolute order or something is going to happen, before long, to some train that goes rolling over them. A large percentage of railroad accidents, charged to the account of the failure of mechanism, is due to this very thing. Therefore the maintenance of track alone—to say nothing of bridges, culverts, switches, and signals—becomes from the very beginning a very vital, although little understood, feature of railroad operation.

Here then is the floor-plan of the job of the man who stands there beside the track as you go whizzing by and who salutes you joyously as you toss a morning paper over the brass rail. His own facilities for getting newspapers are rather limited. He is a type—a man typical, if you please—of 400,000 of his fellows who make the track safe for you. The brigadiers general of this sturdy corps of railroaders are the engineers of the maintenance of way. A very large road will boast several executives of this title, reporting in all probability to a chief engineer of maintenance. Reporting to these from each superintendent’s division is a division engineer—probably some chap out of Tech who is getting his first view of railroading at extremely short range. He, in turn, will have his assistants; but he is probably placing his chief reliance on his track supervisors.

Now we are coming much closer to the man whom you see standing there beside your train. These track supervisors are the field-rangers of maintenance. Each is in charge of from ten to twelve sections, which probably will mean from eighty to one hundred miles of single-track—much less in the case of double-or three-or four-track railroads. The section has its own lieutenant—section foreman he is rated on the railroad’s pay-roll; but in its lore he will ever be the section-boss, and boss of the section he must be indeed. If ever there was need of an autocrat in the railroad service, it is right here; and yet, as we shall presently see, even the section-boss must learn to temper his authority with finesse and with tact.

Here, then, is our man with the shovel. Suppose that, for this instant, the limited grinds to a stop, and you climb down to him and see the railroad as he sees it. Underneath him are four or six or eight workers—perhaps an assistant of some sort or other. Over him are the supervisors and above them those smart young engineers who can figure out track with lines and pothooks, though the section-boss is never sure that his keen eye and unfailing intuition are not better than all those books which the college boys keep tucked under their arms.

The college boys, however, seem to have the sway with the big bosses down at headquarters and the section-boss knows, in his heart as well as in his mind, that he can go only a little distance ahead before he comes against a solid wall, the only doors of which are marked Technical Education. He can be a supervisor at from $90 to $125 a month and ride up and down the division at the rear door of a local train six days a week; the time has gone when he might advance to the proud title of roadmaster—a proud title whose emolument is not higher than that of the organized brotherhood man who pulls the throttle on the way-freight up the branch. And, as a matter of fact, there are only a few roads which nowadays cling even to the title of roadmaster.

Yet this man is not discouraged. It is not his way. He will tell you so himself.

“Go up?” he asks. “Go up where?”

Let the limited go, without you. This man is worthy of your studied attention. Give it to him. You are standing with him beside a curving bit of single-track. The country is soft and restful and quiet, save for the chattering of the crickets and the distant call of your train which has gone a-roaring down the line. The August day is indolent—but the section gang is not. The temperature is close to ninety, but the gang is tamping at the track with the enthusiasm of volunteer firemen at a blaze in a lumberyard. It is only its foreman who has deigned to give you a few minutes of his attention.

THE SECTION GANG

In the section-boss and his men is vested the responsibility of making the steel highway safe. A single
broken rail may send the best driven locomotive into the ditch—a mass of tangled and useless scrap iron.

“Up where?” he asks once again—then answers his own question: “To some stuffy sort of office? Not by a long shot! I’m built for the road, for track work. This road needs me here. We’re only single-track as yet on this division; but next summer we’ll be getting eastbound and westbound, and then a bigger routing of the through stuff. Tonight the fastest through train in this state will come through here, at nearer seventy miles an hour than sixty, and my track’s got to be in order—every foot of the 37,000 feet of it.”

“That’s your job,” you say to him.

“Part of it,” he replies. “My job is seven miles long and has more kinks to it than an eel’s tail. See here!”

He points to a splice-bar, almost under your feet. You look at it. You are frank to admit that it looks just like any other splice-bar that you have ever seen; but the section-boss shows you a discoloration on it, hardly larger than a silver dollar.

“Salt water from a leaky refrigerator car did that. We’ve got to look out for it all the time—especially on the bridges.”

You choke a desire to ask him how he knows and merely inquire:

“Are you responsible for the bridges too?”

“To the extent of seeing that they are O.K. for train movement. My job includes tracks, switches, drains, crossings, switch and semaphore lamps. We get out on our old hand-power Mallet here and make every sort of emergency repair you can think of—and then some more—on telegraph wires, culverts, signals, and the interlocking. We’ve got to know the time card and keep out of the way of the regular trains. Every little while a special comes along and we have to dump our little Pullman in the ditch—without much time for ceremony. We’ve got to know as much about flagging as the trainmen. And sometimes we have to act as sextons.”

“Sextons?” you venture.

He thumbs a little notebook.

“Last year I performed the last rites over seven cows, two sheep, and a horse. My job has a lot of dimensions.”

He puts his book back in his pocket and draws out a circular letter which the general manager at headquarters has been sending out to all the track-bosses. He hands it to you, with a grin. It says:

More than any other class of employees you have the opportunity of close contact with the farmers who are producing today that which means tonnage and therefore revenue for the company tomorrow. Have you ever thought of cultivating the farmer as he is cultivating the fields? A friendly chat over the fence, a wave of the hand as you pass by, may mean a shipment of corn or cattle—just because you are interested in him. For your company’s welfare as well as your own, cultivate the farmer.

The railroad can and does do a lot of efficient solicitation through its fixed employees in the field; the opportunities of the station agent in this wise are particularly large. And there is a good deal of real sense in this particular circular. Yet the section-boss seems to regard it as distinctly humorous.

“The big boss sits in his office or in his car,” is his comment, “and I think he forgets sometimes that he was once a section man himself and working fourteen hours a day. The farmer doesn’t have a lot of time for promiscuous conversation, nor do we. We’ll wave the hand all right—but a chat over the fence? Along would come my supervisor and I might have a time of it explaining to him that I was trying to sell two tickets to California for the road. No, sir, we’re not hanging very much over fences and chatting to farmers. Under the very best conditions we work about ten hours a day. And there are times when a sixteen-hour law, even if we had one, wouldn’t be of much account to us.”

“What times?”

“Accidents and storms! When we get a smash-up on this section or on one of my neighbors’ we all turn to and help the wrecking crew. I’ve worked fifty-one hours with no more than a snatch of sleep and without getting out of my clothing—and that was both accident and storm. It’s storm that counts the most. It’s nice and pretty out here today, even if a little warmish. Come round here next February, when the wind begins to whistle and the mercury is trying to hide in the bottom of its little tube, and help me replace rails in a snow-packed track.”

Against conditions such as these the railroad finds no little difficulty in securing good trackmen. The section-boss will tell you how, until about twenty years ago, these were largely Irishmen, with a fair mixture of Germans and Scots—even a few Englishmen. The Italians began coming over in droves a little more than a quarter of a century ago and almost the first men they displaced were the Irish trackmen on our railroads. Perhaps it would be fairer to say they took the jobs which the Irishmen were beginning to scorn. The latter preferred to become contractors, politicians, lawyers. What is the use of driving like a slave all day long, they argued, when you can earn five times as much by using your wits?

Of recent years there have been few Irishmen in track service—an occasional section-boss like the man to whom we have just been talking—and with the exception of Wisconsin and Minnesota, practically none of the men from the north of Europe. Even the better grades of Italians have begun to turn from track work. They, too, make good contractors and politicians and lawyers. In the stead of these have come the men from the south of Italy, Greeks, Slavs, a few Poles, and a few Huns. These seem particularly to lack intelligence. Yet they seemingly are all that the railroad may draw upon for its track maintenance.

These were the conditions that prevailed up to the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Since that time the situation has grown steadily worse. With the tightening of the labor market, with the inadequate rates of pay in both the car and right of way maintenance departments of the railroads, the average railroad manager is hard pressed today to keep his line in order. Sometimes he fails. And a distinct factor in the run-down condition of so many of our second-and third- and fourth-grade railroads is not alone their financial condition, to which we already have referred, but quite as much their utter inability to summon track labor at any price within their possibility. It is rather difficult, to say the least, to get a section foreman at three dollars a day when Henry Ford is paying five dollars as a minimum wage in his Detroit factory and munition manufacturers are even going ahead of this figure. I myself have seen grass growing this last summer in the tracks of some mighty good roads. And weeds between the ties and the rails are all too apt to be the indication of even worse conditions—not quite so perceptible to the eye.

It is this very polyglot nature of the men who work upon the track which has operated against their being brought into a brotherhood—such as those who man the freight and passenger trains. The isolation of the section-bosses and their gangs, as well as the dominance of the padrone system among the Italians until very recently, have been other factors against a stout union of the trackmen. But the mixture of tongues and races has been the chief objection. You do not find Italians or Slavs or Poles or Greeks on the throttle side of the locomotive cab or wearing the conductor’s uniform in passenger service, although you will find them many times in the caboose of the freight and the Negro fireman is rather a knotty problem with the chief of that big brotherhood. In fact, it has been rather a steady boast of the engineers and the conductors that their great organizations are composed of Americans. That fact, of itself, is peculiarly significant.

Yet what are Americans? And how many of those fine fellows who drive locomotives and who captain fancy trains will fail to find some part of their ancestry in Europe, within three or four generations at the longest? We have shown that responsibility is not a matter of color, of race, nor of language. And it is responsibility—responsibility plus energy and ability and honesty—that the railroad seeks to obtain when it goes into the market to purchase labor.

The day has come when the railroad has begun to take keener notice of the personnel of the men to whom is given the actual labor of keeping the track in order. The better roads offer prizes to the foremen for the best-kept sections. The prizes are substantial. They need to be. With hard work as the seeming reward in this branch of service the railroad, even before the coming of the war, was no longer able to pick and choose from hordes of applicants. A dozen years ago it began to fairly dragnet the labor markets of the largest cities; and when it gets men it has to use them with a degree of consideration that was not even dreamed of in other days.

No longer can an autocratic and brutal foreman stand and curse at his section hands. They simply will not stand for it. “Bawlers-out,” as the worst of these fellows used to be known along the line, are not now in fashion. And the track supervisor who used to stand on the rear platform of a train and toss out “butterflies” is far more careful in his criticism. “Butterflies,” be it known, are indited by the supervisor en route to call the attention of the foremen to track defects in their sections.

The Negro is still in large service in the South—below the Ohio and east of the Mississippi. He is a good trackman—and with the labor market as it stands today, drained to the bottom, it is a pity there are not more of him. Unlike most of the south-of-Europe men, he has strength and stamina for heavy, sustained work. Moreover, he is built to rhythm. If you can set his work to syncopated time he seems never to tire of it. He is a real artist. He cuts six or eight inches off the handle of his sledge hammer and it becomes his “short dog.” Gripping it at the end with both hands he swings it completely around his head and strikes two blows to the white man’s one, no matter how clever the white man may be. And he is actually fond of a bawler-out. He respects a real boss.

The hobo trackman is in a class by himself. He is not the migratory creature that you may imagine him. On the contrary, in nine cases out of ten he can be classed by distinct districts. Thus he may be known as a St. Paul man, a Chicago man, or a Kansas City man, and you may be quite sure that he will venture only a certain limited distance from his favorite haunts. In the spring, however, he generally is so hungry that he is quite willing to undertake any sort of job at any old price, provided free railroad tickets are given.

The majority of these hoboes have had experience with the shovel. Some of them know more about track than their foremen. Unless the section-boss has had previous experience with hoboes, however, he will get no benefit from their superior knowledge, but will be left to work out his problem entirely alone.

As a rule the hobo becomes independently rich on the acquisition of ten dollars. Then he turns his face toward that town to which he gives his devoted allegiance. He now has money to pay fares; but he does not pay them. Summer is on the land and he likes to protract the joys of the road; so he beats his way slowly home and leaves a record of his migration executed in a chirography that is nothing less than marvelous. The day that masonry went out of fashion in railroad construction and concrete came in was a bonanza to him. On the flat concrete surfaces of bridge abutments and piers, telephone houses and retaining walls, he marks the record of his going and whither he is bound—and marks it so plainly with thick, black paint that even he who rides upon the fastest of the limited trains may read—although it may not be given to him to ever understand.

Down in the Southwest the track laborer is Mexican, while in the Far West he is a little brown man, with poetry in his soul and a vast amount of energy in his strong little arms. The Japanese invasion has been something of a godsend to the railroads beyond the Rocky Mountains. Up in British Columbia, where John Chinaman is not in legal disfavor, you will find him a track laborer—faithful and efficient. On the Canadian Pacific seventeen per cent of the total force of trackmen is Chinese. At the west end of that Canadian transcontinental, the track gangs almost exclusively are Chinese.

The Jap is not illegal in the United States, however, and he is turning rapidly to railroading. It is only fair to say that he is the best track laborer our railroads have known. He is energetic, receptive, ambitious, intelligent, and therefore easily instructed. His mind being retentive, he rarely has to be told a thing a second time. Though small, he is robust and possessed of powers of endurance far beyond any other race. Furthermore, he is cleanly—bathing and changing his clothes several times a week. His camp is always sanitary and he prides himself on the thoroughness of his work. You may be sure he is carrying a Japanese-English dictionary and that from it he is learning his three English words a day. Track workers from the south of Europe will spend a lifetime without ever learning a single word of English.

There is another class of Asiatic workers that in recent years has begun to show itself along the west coast and this class is far less satisfactory in every way. These are the Hindus. They have drifted across the Seven Seas and marched into a new land through the gates of San Francisco or Portland or Seattle. But as yet they have not come in sufficient numbers to represent a new problem in American railroading. The Japanese already have attained that distinction.

Here, then, is the polyglot material with which our section-boss must work. His name may be Smith, he may have come out of New England itself, and his little house there beside the track is probably as neat as yours or mine. He works long hours and hard, with his body, his hands, and his mind; the men under his authority are more apt to be inefficient than efficient; his responsibility is unceasing. It is not an easy job. And for it he is paid from sixty-five to ninety dollars a month—rarely more. A locomotive engineer is paid three times as much. Yet he is protected by the eight-hour day as his standard of employment, although it is more than likely that his actual hours of work may be even less than eight. And his responsibility is little greater than that of the section-boss.

CHAPTER VI

UNORGANIZED LABOR—THE STATION AGENT

The primary schools of railroading are the little red and yellow and gray buildings that one finds up and down the steel highways of the nation, dotting big lines and small. You find at least one in every American town that thinks itself worthy of the title. And they are hardly less to the towns themselves than the red schoolhouses of only a little greater traditional lore. To the railroad their importance can hardly be minimized. They are its tentacles—the high spots and the low where it touches its territory and its patrons.

To best understand how a station agent measures to his job, let us do as we have done heretofore and take one of them who is typical. Here is one man who in personality and environment is representative and the small New York State town in which he is the railroad’s agent is typical of tens of thousands of others all the way from Maine to California. Brier Hill is an old-fashioned village of less than 10,000 population, albeit it is a county seat and the gateway to a prosperous and beautiful farming district. Two railroads reach it by their side lines, which means competition and the fact that the agent for each must be a considerable man and on the job about all of the time. Our man—we will call him Blinks and his road the Great Midland—has never lived or worked in another town. Thirty years ago he entered the service of the G.M. as a general utility boy around the old brick depot at twelve dollars a month. The old brick depot is still in service and so is Blinks.

In thirty years his pay has been advanced. He now gets $110 a month; in addition his commissions amount to $40 or $50 a month. Engineers and conductors get much more, but the station agent, as we have come to understand, is not protected by a powerful labor organization. There is an Order of Railroad Station Agents, to be sure, but it is weak and hardly to be compared with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers or the Order of Railroad Trainmen. In some cases the station agents rising from a telegraph key have never relinquished their membership in the telegraphers’ union. But, with the telephone almost accepted as a complete success in the dispatching of trains, the railroads see a new opportunity for the efficient use of men who have been crippled in the service; in some cases for the widows and the daughters of men who have died in the ranks. It takes aptitude, long months, and sometimes years to learn the rapid use of the telegraph. A clear mind and quick wit are all that is necessary when the long-distance telephone moves the trains up and down the line.

Blinks, being typical, does not belong to a labor organization. Although he was an expert telegrapher with a high speed rate, he did not happen to belong to the telegraphers’ organization. Instead there is in him a fine vein of old-fashioned loyalty to the property. He was all but born in the service of the Great Midland; he expects to die in the harness there in his homely old-fashioned office in the brick depot at Brier Hill. His is the sort of loyalty whose value to the road can hardly be expressed in mere dollars and cents.

If you would like to know the truth of the matter, you would quickly come to know that the real reason why Blinks has never joined a union is that he holds an innate and unexpressed feeling that he is a captain in the railroad army, rather than a private in its ranks. For he is secretly proud of the “force” that reports to him—chief clerk, ticket agent, two clerks, a baggagemaster, and three freight-house men. Not a man of these draws less than seventy dollars a month, so there is not much difference in their social status and that of the boss. No one has been quicker than he to recognize such democracy. He prides himself that he is an easy captain.

“We work here together like a big family,” he will tell you, “although I’m quite of the opinion that we’re about the best little collection of teamwork here in the village. Together we make quite an aggregate. Only two concerns here employ more help—the paper mill and the collar factory.”

You are a bit astonished at that—and at that you begin to think—not of the relation of the town to the railroad but rather of the railroad to the town. You ask Blinks as to the volume of the business his road does at his station. He hesitates in replying. That is rather a state secret. Finally he tells you—although still as a secret.

“We do a business of $50,000 a month,” he says quietly, “which is as much as any two industries here—and this time I’m making no exceptions of the paper mill or the collar factory.”

Quickly he explains that this is no unusual figure. And figures do not always indicate. Smithville, up on another division, is only a third as large and does a business of $20,000 a month. There are paper mills here and inasmuch as they handle their products in carload lots on their own sidings there is need of a large force around the station. On the other hand, a neighboring town of the same size shows about the same monthly revenue and needs a station force much larger than Blinks’s. For its leading industry is a paint factory, without siding facilities. Its products move in comparatively small individual boxes, requiring individual care and handling—that is the answer.

“You work long hours and hard hours?” you may demand of Blinks.

He shakes his head slowly.

“Long hours a good deal of the time, but not very often hard hours,” he tells you. “My work is complicated and diverse but it is largely a case of having it organized.”

Indeed it is complicated and diverse. There are only four passenger trains each day up and down the line, but the rush of freight is heavy, particularly at certain seasons of the year. And both of these functions of the railroad as they relate to Blinks’s town come under his watchful eye. In addition, remember that he is the express agent and is paid a commission both on the business bound in and on the business bound out of his office, as well as the representative of the telegraph company. The telegraph company pays him nothing for handling its messages, but from the express company he will probably average forty-five dollars a month, particularly as his brisk county-seat town is one in which the small-package traffic does not greatly vary at any season of the year. Down in the Southwest, where a great amount of foodstuffs moves out by express within a very few weeks there are men who may, in two months, take several hundred dollars, perhaps a check into four figures from the express company. The gateway to a summer resort is regarded as something of the same sort of a bonanza to the station agent. Still Blinks, if he would, could tell you of a man at a famous resort gateway who lost his job through it. The president of his road was a stickler for appearances. On a bright summer day when vacation traffic was running at flood tide, his car came rolling into the place. Word of it came to the station agent, but the station agent was lost in an avalanche of express way-bills. He should have been out on the platform in his pretty new cap and uniform. At least that was what the president thought. So nowadays that station agent gives all his time to the express way-bills. There is a new man for the cap and uniform, and when the president of that railroad arrives in the town he is greeted with sufficient formality.

As a matter of fact the express companies prefer to maintain offices wherever it is at all possible. The bonanza offices for the railroad agents are few and far between and when the railroad begins to find them it is apt to part. So Blinks can consider himself lucky that his commissions do not run over fifty dollars a month. That means that the express company will not attempt anything as suicidal as establishing its own office in Brier Hill and his own modest perquisite is not apt to be interrupted.

His is routine work and intricate work. He writes enough letters in a week to do credit to a respectable correspondence school and he makes enough reports in seven days to run three businesses. His incoming mail arrives like a flood. There are tariffs, bulletins, more tariffs, instructions, more tariffs, suggestions—and still more tariffs. The tariffs, both freight and passenger, are fairly encyclopedic in dimensions and the folks down at headquarters fondly imagine that he has memorized them. At least that seems to be their assumption if Blinks can judge from their letters. Every department of the road requests information of him, and gets it. And when he is done with the railroad he realizes that he is violating biblical injunction and serving two masters, at least. For the express company is fairly prolific with its own tariffs and other literature. And the telegraph company has many things also to say to Blinks there in the old brick depot.