[CHAPTER XIX]
THE FIRST LESSON
The dispatchers’ office is, as has already been remarked, the brain of the railroad. It is there that all orders relating to the movement of trains originate; and these orders keep the blood circulating, as it were—keep the system alive. Let the brain be inefficient, and this movement becomes clogged and uncertain; traffic no longer flows smoothly, as it does when the brain is well. Fortunately, the brain of a railroad can be replaced when it breaks down or wears out, and in so far the road is superior to a mere human being, who has only one brain and can never, by any possible means, get another. And so there is about the road something terrible and remorseless.
Every one has heard the story of Frankenstein, that unfortunate scientist who conceived the idea that he might make a man; who did really succeed in manufacturing a being something akin to human shape, and in animating it with life. But, alas, he could not give it a soul, and the monster turned against its creator, pursuing him and his loved ones with implacable fury and torturing them with fiendish delight. The railroad is such a monster; made by man to be his servant, but greater than its maker; grinding out men’s lives, in its fury; wearing out their brains in its service, and then discarding them; for the road must have always the best, and the jaded and second-best must step down and out.
Nowhere is the ruthlessness of this great machine more evident than in the dispatchers’ office, for it is here that the strain is always at the highest; and it is here, too, that deterioration is at once apparent, and is swiftly and inexorably punished. A defect of judgment, a momentary indecision, a mistake, and the delinquent’s days as a train-dispatcher are at an end.
In the office at Wadsworth there were always two dispatchers on duty. One had charge of the hundred miles of track stretching eastward to Parkersburg, and the other had charge of the hundred miles of track stretching southwestward to Cincinnati. The first is called the east end and the other the west end. There are six dispatchers, each of them being on duty eight hours a day. The first trick begins at seven in the morning and lasts till three in the afternoon; the second begins at three and lasts till eleven at night, and the third begins at eleven and lasts till seven in the morning. The new dispatcher begins with the third trick, east end, and gradually works up, as the other places are made vacant by promotions and dismissals, to the first trick, west end. From there, he graduates to the chief-dispatchership, and on to trainmaster, superintendent, general superintendent, and general manager. That is the regular ladder of promotion—a ladder which, it may be added, very few have the strength to climb.
All the men in the dispatchers’ office of course knew Allan, and liked him, and he received a hearty greeting when he arrived for his first morning’s instruction. He drew up a chair beside the first trick man on the west end, popularly known as “Goody,” not because of any fundamental traits of character, but because his name happened to be Goodnough. “Goody” had reached his present position of primacy by working up regularly through the various grades, and train-dispatching had become to him a sort of second nature. He was a good-humoured, companionable fellow, with an inexhaustible fund of anecdote and a fondness for practical jokes which not even advancing years and a twinge of rheumatism now and then could diminish. It is related of him—but, there, to recount half the things related of him would be to add another book to this series.
Allan, as we have said, drew up his chair beside him and took his first real lesson in train-dispatching. He had, of course, a general idea of how the thing was done, but never before had any one taken the time or trouble to explain its intricacies to him. The dispatcher sat before a long desk, on which, beside his key, sounder, bottle of ink, pens, and so on, lay the train-sheet, upon which the movement of every train was entered. The sheet, reduced to its simplest form, appears on the opposite page.