So it is that the railroad finds fine timber for its service. It picks and chooses. For its choice it has the pick of American timber, the ironwood of our national forests of humanity. It gathers its army of men, inspects them carefully for physical, mental and moral requirements and then it impresses upon them the necessity of good living, the absolute necessity of deference to an established and rigid system of discipline as a requirement in the successful handling of the different transportation business.
Thus we have the railroad men as the best workers of the nation. If you want proof of that, ask any of the great mail-order concerns which class of business they prefer and they will tell you without hesitation that it is the railroad man. Come closer home and ask the merchants of any community the same question. Their answer will be the same. Rigid conditions, out-of-door life, sober habits make desirable citizens out of this class of workers. There are none better anywhere.
In the train service, the ordinary route of promotion is through the freight service to the passenger. Thus, for the farmer’s boy who hankers to sit in the cab of the locomotive that hauls the Limited there is a long hard path. Chances are that at the beginning the road foreman of engines will start him at odd chores, calling crews, wiping engines, and the like, around some one of the big roundhouses. He will work hard, but here he will begin to absorb the romance of the line, the romance that, like fog and engine smoke, lies around the engine house, thick enough to cut. Perhaps after a while they will give him a little authority and make him a hostler. The “hostler” and the “stalls” in the roundhouses are quaint survivals of the most primitive railroad days, when horses were really motive power.
At odd times, night times perhaps, the boy will ride in engine cabs and gradually acquire a knowledge of one of these great machines such as no text-book would ever give him. Then comes his first big opportunity. There is a vacancy among the engine crews; the road foreman of engines gives him a good report, and he begins to have dealing with the train-master. He is made a fireman, and he travels the division end to end, day in and day out.
Now he knows why the railroad requires physical tests as well as tests of eyesight and of hearing. Even after he has taken another step in advance and been promoted to the passenger service (we will assume that ours is a bright, ambitious boy), he will only find that his labors in the engine-cab have been increased. It is no slight task, firing a heavy locomotive over 100 or more miles of grade-climbing, curve-rounding railroad. It is a task that fairly calls for human arms of steel; for some firemen handle some 17 tons of coal in a single run. The appetite of that firebox is seemingly insatiable. There is hardly a moment during the run that it is not clamoring to be fed, and that the fireman is not hard at it there on the rocking floor of the swaying tender, reaching from tender coal to firebox door.
But the day does come, if he sticks hard at it, when he becomes an engineer. He has learned the line well, during his countless trips over it as fireman. He has come to know every signal, every bridge, every station, every curve, every grade, every place for slow, careful running, every place for speeding, as thoroughly as ever river pilot learned his course. There have been many times when he has had to assume temporary charge of the engine. He is a qualified man at least to sit in the right hand of the cab, to have command over reverse lever and over throttle.
His work is of a different sort already. The hard physical labor is a thing of the past, most of the time he sits at his work. But responsibility replaces physical stress, and the farmer boy now realizes which of the two is more wearing. Upon his judgment—instant judgment time and time and time again—the fate of that heavy train depends. After he has been promoted from freight engineer to passenger engineer he has a train filled with humanity, and he knows the difference. By day the inclination of a single blade, by night the friendly welcome or the harsh command of changeable lights must never escape him. One slip, and after that—
The engineer prefers not to think of that. He prefers to think of a safe trip, terminal to terminal, to think of the long line covered, once again in safety, to think of the station at the far end of the division, where a relief engine and engineer will be in waiting to take the train another stage in its long journey across the land, to think of the home and family awaiting him. He is a big passenger man now. When he gets to the end of the run, there will be a crew to take his locomotive away to the roundhouse. He will have a bit of a wash and in a few minutes he will be bound through the station waiting-room, well dressed, smoking a good fifteen-cent cigar, quite as fine a type of American citizen as you might wish to see anywhere. You would hardly recognize in this well-dressed man of affairs, the keen-eyed, sound-bodied man in blue jeans who stood beside his engine, oil-can in hand, at the far end of the division.
The same type holds true through the man in care of the other parts of the trains. Take the brakeman—they call him trainman nowadays in the passenger service. In the old days this was a slouchy, somewhat slovenly dressed individual of a self-acknowledged independence. Time has changed him in thirty years. An increased respect for the service has taken away from him his slouchiness; a feeling that good work and hard work will take him through the ranks, through a service as conductor, perhaps to train-master, to superintendent, goodness knows how much further, has replaced that bumptious independence.