The Young Train Master

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

“CONTROLLING IT, AS IT WERE, BY A MOVEMENT OF FINGER, STOOD JIM.”

The side fronting upon the street is usually handsomely embellished, for it is this side which the public sees as it approaches, and all railroads know that to make a good impression is to do good advertising. So with the main waiting-room, which always lies directly behind the street doors. Here marble, mosaic and gilding are always in evidence and no opportunity is lost to impress the travelling public with the wealth and magnificence of the road which it is using. On either side of the main waiting-room are smaller waiting- and retiring-rooms, there is a row of ticket-booths, a news-stand, telephone booths, baggage-rooms, a dining- and lunch-room and, of course, inevitably, the long rows of seats, back to back, where the waiting public spends so many weary minutes.

In the stories overhead are the executive offices of the various roads—as many of them as there is room for—but to these the general public seldom penetrates.

Beyond the swinging doors along the side of the waiting-room opposite the entrance is the main platform or concourse, and from it, stretching down between the tracks like long fingers, are the narrow cement platforms upon which the passengers alight or from which they mount to their trains. The tracks are laid in pairs, and a platform extends between every pair, each platform thus serving two tracks, one on either side. Overhead is the great echoing vault of the train-shed with its mighty ribs of steel, stretching in one enormous arc across the tracks beneath—a marvel of engineering skill, if not of architectural beauty.

This is what is known as the head-house plan, and is the ideal one for the passenger, since it permits him to go to and from his train without crossing any tracks or climbing to any overhead bridges. It is, however, expensive for the railroads since, of course, all through trains must be backed out and switched around until they are headed on their way again—a process which requires no little expenditure of time and energy, as well as money. However, in a great city, a right of way which would enable the through trains to continue straight onward toward their destination is frequently so expensive that it is cheaper to back them out the way they came in, and send them by a detour around the city.

And upon no one is this backing-out process more wearing than on the towerman, for the trains must be handled twice over the same track, and of course the track must be kept clear until the train is out again and safely on its way. Now there is never any surplusage of tracks in a terminal. Indeed, as one sees the tracks narrow and narrow as the terminal is approached, until they are merged into those which plunge beneath the train-shed, one is apt to think they are all too few. Yet their number has been calculated with the greatest care; there is not one more than is needed by the nicest economy of operation—nor one less. The number is just right for the station’s needs—so long as the towerman knows his business and keeps his head.

And now to return to the glass-enclosed perch where, for eight hours of every day, Jim Davis and his two assistants send the trains in and out over the network of tracks. That long row of little handles is the last word in switch-control. Time was—and is, in all but the most important stations—when the towerman opened or closed the yard-switches by means of great levers. To throw one of these levers was no small athletic feat, especially if the switch it controlled was at some distance, and to keep at it eight hours at a time reduced the strongest man to mental and physical exhaustion. When the towerman left his work at the end of his trick, he was, in the expressive parlance of the day, “all in.” Now when men are “all in,” they are very apt to make mistakes, hence in a busy terminal under the old system, accidents more or less serious were of almost every-day occurrence. Besides which, the number of levers which one man was physically able to operate was comparatively small, so that there must be many men and a consequent divided responsibility and opportunity for confusion.

The tower itself had been an evolution, for, at first, these yard-switches had been controlled by a brigade of switchmen, each of whom had two or three under his supervision, which he turned by hand whenever he saw a train coming his way. Then the hand switchmen were supplanted by a cluster of levers in a tower, operated by a single man. The tower was so located that its occupant had a general view of the yards, and the levers were connected by steel rods with the switches and signals which protected them. For every switch must have its signal—that is, a device by which the engineer of the approaching train may see whether the switch is properly set—the old standards showing yellow when the switch was open and red when it was closed—and since replaced by arms, or semaphores, which hang down when the train may pass and bar the way when it must stop.

This grouping of the levers in the tower simplified the control of the yard and placed the responsibility upon a more intelligent and more highly paid man than the average switchman, and consequently broadened the margin of safety. But terminals grew and yards grew and switches increased in number, until even this system was unable to meet the demands made upon it.