Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

But the middle class of the railroad personnel—like the middle class of the world outside—is caught to-day, not only with responsibility for its job, but with a deal of worry too for its wallet. Salaries between the upper and lowest classes of railroad workers take a fearful fall. In theory they should form a gentle curve, a sloping sort of descent. In practice, too, they should curve. In truth they do not. They drop. I have known of repeated cases where the superintendents of railroad divisions—a railroad superintendent is supposedly the prince of a transportation principality—have actually received less than some of the locomotive-engineers who are working for them. In any such scheme of affairs the incentive or desire for promotion cannot be very great.

As a matter of fact very much of that desire or opportunity for promotion passed away long ago, which is one of the significant reasons for the sad decline of our American railroad tradition, and which is also one of the most alarming symptoms of the serious illness of our sick man of American business. He is making no provision for the future—in this serious necessity of providing good new railroading blood for oncoming years. There should be fresh generations of material for future railroad executives tramping forward, and there are none.

“Over-regulation,” says one transportation executive at once, and leaves us in the belief that here is the sole cause of this sad deficiency.

He is right—partly right. For more than twenty years the railroad business in the United States has been under constant attack—rightly or wrongly, and generally both. A business under constant attack is not one that makes a large appeal to a young man just seeking about for a future career. One of the very ablest of our railroaders, Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, recently went on record as saying that at the present time he could not recommend the business in which he has spent a lifetime as a proper opening for his son.

Add to these things the fact that the business itself has taken very little thought as to the morrow in this vital question of renewing personnel—has not only failed to establish courses in various phases of railroading in the technical schools across the land, or made any concerted effort to bring the best of their graduates to their ranks, but for years has ridiculed and humiliated these highly trained young men when they have sought to enter its doors—and one may easily perceive why the best of our young men in recent years have not gone into railroading. The automobile industry, mining, electrical work, manufacturing of nearly every sort, the professions, even retailing, have called to them, and not in vain. Each has received its fair proportion of them. But railroading has been left aside.

Here is a most serious phase of our railroad debacle. It is not one that can be quickly mended. Take the nearest “Who’s Who” and note the birth dates of the railroad men that you find there. With a few exceptions they are not young men. They are getting on in years, while those who know them personally know that their tremendously increased anxieties and responsibilities have grayed them even beyond their years.

A young man whose heart and soul alike thirsted for a better knowledge of the rail transport business recently asked a veteran railroader of my acquaintance how he could get into it. He had been offered a job in the local interchange yard, firing a switch-engine. That job had a good deal of appeal to him. He was perfectly willing to don overalls and get down to hard manual work with a shovel. But the old railroader shook his head.

“No, no, Harry, that is not the way that it is being done nowadays,” said he. “Let me advise you.”

Then he explained. Harry might and probably would develop into a good fireman, like President W——. Eventually he would probably have a fine passenger run and get as much money perhaps as his division superintendent, probably more than his trainmaster or his road foreman of engines. But that would end it. He would be a working man, albeit a well-paid working man, but nothing else—never an officer. The new caste in our railroading would hold him tightly down. Far better that he should pocket his pride as a graduate of a pretty good Eastern university and become an office-boy in some railroad office and study all the phases of the business at every opportunity that presented itself. There was chance there of his getting ahead in railroading, perhaps to the very head of it. The taint or stigma of unionism would not be upon his shoulder to draw him down in the estimation of the big men who won and control our carriers.

That was frank talk, but accurate. At last we have achieved an industrial caste. The barrier is there. The railroads suffer from it greatly, but the men who to-day control them are not going to remove it. Here and there across the face of the land you will find a few minute exceptions, a trainmaster here, a master mechanic there, perhaps all the way across the land as many as ten or a dozen superintendents who have risen from the brotherhoods. But in our big national organization these few are as nothing. The barrier is being well maintained. And as long as our railroads are owned and operated as at present, it is likely to stay put.