“My city editor wants to know what you folks are doing to get the line open,” demanded the reporter.
The big superintendent swung in his swivel chair and faced him. It was a place where angels might well have feared to tread—a place surcharged with the electricity of fight. The superintendent’s mind was filled with the almost infinite detail of the fight, but he liked the cub reporter and greeted him with a smile.
“You can tell your city editor,” he replied slowly, “that it is as much as a man’s job here is worth for him to think that the line is going to be opened. I’d fire him if he as much as thought that it was ever closed. We don’t die. We fight. It’s a hard storm, sonny, but we make muscle in storms like this. We don’t get the line open, we are keeping the line open. D’ye see?”
In that the big superintendent had sounded one of the biggest principles of railroad operation.
The line must be kept open. That slender trail of two rails, stretching straight across the open land and writhing and twisting through the high hills, is a living organism. The railroad is no mere inanimate organization, like a store, for instance. It is a right-hand of the nation’s life; it is life. The railroad is like a great living thing, its many arms reaching long distances back into the land. You cannot cut off the living arm and then bring it back to pulsing life.
Just so the railroad arm cannot be severed—the line must be kept open. Strange things may come to pass: the right-of-way may be littered with the wreckage of trains, brought together through a defect in the physical machine of the human; unexpected floods of traffic may seek to overwhelm the outlet; in spring the power and might of flood may descend upon it; winter’s storms may seek to paralyze it; still, always the railroad must be kept open.
“We can’t lie down,” the superintendent explained to the cub reporter. “We’ve got to get the traffic through. Do you know what it would mean if we were to follow the path of least resistance to-day—to let this storm get the best of us? Let me give you an idea of just one thing. There’s food coming in here in trainload lots every night—fresh meat, fresh vegetables, fresh milk. Folks would go hungry if we were to say ‘We can’t, this storm is a gee-whilicker. We give up.’”
To keep the line open, the railroad affords every sort of protective device; it trains men for especial duties.
Take the matter of wrecks, for instance. The railroader does not like to think of wrecks, but his methods for removing them must be prompt and thorough: the line must be kept open. Each year sees equipment increasing in size and weight, and each increase brings additional problems in handling wrecked cars and engines.
Twenty years ago, the wrecking-equipment of most of the big roads was comparatively simple. It was generally built in the railroad’s own shops. To-day 60-ton cars and 100-ton locomotives require something of a wrecking crane or derrick to lift them from the right-of-way; and the wrecking-train is a device thought out and built by specialists.