To operate the signals calls for one body of men, and to maintain them for faithful service against all manner and stress of wear and weather, another; just as there must be a working corps to keep the right-of-way in working order. This last is a mighty brigade of the railroad’s army; for one man in every four who works for it is employed in keeping the track in order. One dollar in every six that the railroad spends goes for that purpose.
Maintenance of way on each division divides itself into a superintendent of bridges and buildings, who sees to the upkeep of those facilities; and a roadmaster, who specializes upon the track itself. This last officer, almost invariably one who has begun to shoulder himself up in the ranks of the railroad army from the very beginning, has his territory divided into sections from two to five miles in length on double-track, from four to ten on single. In command of each section a faithful hand-car and a group of more or less faithful section-hands, figured on an allowance of one to each mile of track, is a section-boss. The section-boss is a wry and a wise soul, or should be. He may not know as much about the formulas for compensating curves as that bright boy who has just come out of a “tech” school to stand his turn at a transit, but he has a marvellous sort of intuitive sense in keeping his little stretch of track in order. He can sight his rail and discover flaws in alignment as a blind man can find surface flaws with the developed tips of his fingers, and all the while he may be growling at the railroad management for adding to the weight of its rolling-stock and “pounding the elevations out of his track.”
In summer he is expert with the “track jacks” and constantly putting in bits of ballast here and there; and in the winter, when the frost and snow have made it impossible to touch the ballast, he keeps his elevations by means of “shims.” A “shim” is a piece of wood, from shingle thickness to the width of two ties piled one upon the other, and is wedged between the tie and the rail till summer comes and the line can be corrected by ballasting.
The section-boss must keep pace with a job that is no sinecure. If his gang, in eagerness to be on dress parade, almost throws dirt on the rear steps of the boss’s private car as it goes whizzing down the line, he must also see to it that they keep plugging at it where there is not even a locomotive whistle within sound. He must be thrifty, economical. He must remember that the humble cross-tie which once cost a quarter now costs almost a dollar, and that for one of these to be found neglected in the ditch is almost a capital crime. He must have an eye for loose spikes and angle-plates, for the big boss has hinted at the annual loss to the road in these simple factors.
At his call and that of the superintendent of bridges and buildings is a work-train, made up of a few flat-cars and discarded coaches, doing boarding-house Pullman service in their declining years, which looks after work too sizable for the section-boss and his little gang, and yet not large enough for the attention of the dignified gentlemen who are known as the reconstruction engineers. Yet some of the feats of these work-train gangs have the crackle of engineering genius. It takes brains to rip out a little timber span and replace it in the interval between two trains spaced a couple of hours apart, and in the railroad, brain work often comes from the shabby workman, from the man who graduates from the command of his own battered hand-car.
All this elaborate system of railroad operation has been built up through many years of practice. Experience has been more than a teacher in the business, which becomes yearly more and more nearly a developed science; she has been a whole faculty and a curriculum, too. Methods that promised well at the outset have been found faulty after trial, and rejected. Committees of trained experts have pondered and reported voluminously; the standard railroad codes of every sort have been born because of them. The operation of the railroad has been brought close to science. It would seem as if the entire field had been completely covered.
And yet new situations constantly arise, the like of which have never before presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves in unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track stretches through the Middle West that starve through eleven months of the year, and for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a double-track trunk-line in the East. Obviously such lines cannot be double-tracked for thirty days of business; quite as obviously the overtaxed division, its equipment, and its men must rise to every necessity of the floodtide of business. There are fat years and there are lean years. There come years of bumper crops, years when the factory lights burn from sunset to dawn, and wheels turn unceasingly, and then the superintendent wonders how his equipment and men are going to stand the strain. Engines are kept from the shops and in service; nothing that is even a semblance of a car is kept out of service; the demand for men is keen; prosperity strains the resources of the railroad.
In the lean years, engines are sometimes kept from the shops because the railroad feels that it must hold down its running expenses to keep pace with reduced revenues, and such a course it can stoutly defend as nothing else than good business. Equipment begins to stand idle. Engines are tucked away on empty sidings, boarded and forlorn; and if the year be very lean indeed, the superintendent may find it necessary to send out a wrecking crane and begin lifting empty cars off the rails and leaving them in the ditch at the side of the right-of-way, until the golden times come again. At such seasons his ingenuity is tested quite as much as in the times of floodtide. Orders come to cut expenses, and his big expense is the pay-roll. When he begins to blue-pencil that pay-roll, some one is going to be hungry. The superintendent knows that. He must move with great care in such emergencies.