For it is a fight and an endless fight, which the Prince Charming—he of the urbane smiles—must wage. Despite the constant consolidating processes of our railroads, there are few large territories that are the exclusive field of any one road. The most of them must fight for their business—particularly for their profitable long-distance business. The fight divides itself between the freight and passenger traffic departments. No wonder, then, that the general passenger agent must be a many-sided man.
From his district offices, there scurries forth a corps of smooth-tongued, quick-witted young men—the travelling passenger agents. These young men are skirmishers. They are up and down the steel highways of the nation, thirty days out of the month, skirmishing for business. Each carries in an inner pocket a wad of annual passes—such as might make any statesman green with envy. Those passes cover every steam line in the territory that is assigned to him and are return courtesy for the neat little cards which his road in turn issues to the traffic solicitors of other roads.
In other days these skirmishers carried forth business which sometimes approached cut-throat tendencies. The weaker lines in hotly competitive territory—lines which, running fewer high-grade trains and running them at slower speed—which were naturally at a disadvantage, sought to obtain at least their normal share of passenger traffic, by sharp work. After that their stronger brethren often showed their religious belief in fighting them by fire. Tickets were sold at less than advertised rates to certain favored individuals; sometimes a few passes, adroitly placed, did the business. In these days those sharp things are forbidden, and the young man, soliciting railroad traffic, who breaks the rules of the game runs the risk of worse than facing an angry boss, getting discharged; perhaps he can see the doors of a Federal prison opening for him.
So the fellow who skirmishes for the weak road has a hard time of it in these piping days. Passenger traffic, like kissing, seems to go by favor nowadays; and how hard the travelling passenger agent works to curry that favor! He drops off a local at some way-station, there is a smile and perhaps a cigar for the country-boy who sells tickets there, for the Interstate folk have not sent any one to prison yet for offering either a smile or a cigar. The T. P. A. knows that the local agent cannot, under the rules that govern him, recommend routes that connect with and extend beyond the line which gives him employment. Still, sometime the country agent may be approached by a man who demands that a connecting road be suggested for him, and the T. P. A. can see that man, without even shutting his eyes. If the country agent will only remember the nice T. P. A. that the Transcontinental sent in there a month before, and the good kind of cigars he dispenses, the Transcontinental may get a part of the haul on a long green ticket. Perhaps the man will be taking his wife, and there will be two of the long green tickets. Perhaps there will be a whole party to be routed over the Transcontinental—the T. P. A. can imagine almost anything as he swings overland in the dreary locals from way-station to way-station.
Sometimes a wire from his chief quickly changes his schedule. The Magnificent Knights of the Realm—or some other impressive order of that sort—are to hold their annual convention at Oshkosh, and the T. P. A. must hustle down to Bingtown to see that Transcontinental gets the haul of the delegation that will go to Oshkosh from the bustling little community. He scurries into Bingtown to locate the officers of the local lodge of the M. K. O. R. there. On the train there may be a T. P. A. from some rival system—they are all partners in misery. The Transcontinental man will probably drop off the opposite side of the train at Bingtown from the crowded depot platform—it’s an old trick of the T. P. A.—and be tearing over the pages of the Bingtown directory before that train is out of town again. Once located, the officers of that lodge of M. K. O. R. must be pleasantly instructed in the advantages of Transcontinental—the speed of its trains, the safety of its operation, the convenience of its terminals, the scenic splendors along the way, the excellence of its dining-car service; all these things are spun with convincing eloquence by the travelling passenger agent.
A few years ago, two travelling passenger agents, whose lines supplement one another to make a through route across the continent, went down into an Eastern manufacturing city to land business bound west to a national convention of one of the biggest of the fraternal orders. There were other passenger men heading toward that same territory, and the two men from the connecting lines made an offensive and defensive alliance. When they reached this town, they found that the chief officers of the local lodge were two city detectives and a police justice. All three of the city officers showed little enthusiasm about the coming convention. The passenger men took off their coats—figuratively—and pitched in.
For three days, they ran up an expense account that must have all but paralyzed the auditors of their companies, but they accomplished results. After the first day of entertainment, the police justice said that there would be an even dozen of them for the three-thousand-mile run, which was going some. Most passenger men would have rested content on those laurels, but this combination used that first day only to whet their appetites. They started briskly out on the second, a little fagged, but still in fighting trim, and by that night the two detectives united in promising one or two filled Pullmans. The third day saw the two traffic solicitors nearly dead, and the well-seasoned city officials just in fine trim. The trim must have been fine, for that night they completed arrangements for one of the biggest special train movements of that year: two hundred and fifty enthusiastic brethren went three-quarters of the way across the continent and back as a result of the work of these passenger men.
Once a travelling passenger agent went nearly too far in this entertainment business. He got business, miles and miles and miles of it, but he also got drinking far too heavily. One day, when he came into the general offices very much the worse for entertaining, he bumped into no less a man than the president of the road. That president was a strict old soul. He had church connections, and he used to lecture his Sunday School class on the evils of the liquor habit. He decided to make an example of this young whelp of a passenger agent from off the road.
But just as the sentence was about to be pronounced, the general passenger agent interfered. He went straight to the president and the wrath of an honest man was in his eye.
“We don’t intend to have drunken men working here,” the president kept saying. “It’s the example—”