Right there is a traffic mistake. If the T. P. A. had been wise he would have swallowed his hatred of St. Louis Southwestern and recommended that you use it for that stretch from Milltown to Kickapoo. He let his zeal for his road overrun his business judgment. A good many of them do. Only the other day a man walked into a railroad station of a small city in the Southern Tier of New York State and announced that he wanted to hurry through to Binghamton.
“We have a train in five minutes, our 12:12,” said the agent, all smiles.
The man hesitated. He wanted to do two or three errands in that small city before he went on to Binghamton, and so he asked the leaving time of the next train.
“Nothing until 6:18,” the agent told him.
“That will be too late for me to get into Binghamton,” the passenger said. The agent did not reply, but turned his attention to other persons who were waiting at the ticket-window. But the man from Binghamton was still perplexed. An agent of the news company who ran the stand in that station, came over and helped him out.
“The —— (mentioning a rival and paralleling road) gets a train out of here for Binghamton at 3:30,” he explained.
The passenger thanked the news-agent, for his problem had been lightened and started out for the other station. When he was gone, the ticket-seller summoned the newsman and threatened to have him fired.
But there is a new order of things coming to pass even in this hot rivalry for getting passenger traffic. Long ago, C. F. Daly, who is to-day vice-president in charge of traffic for the New York Central lines, was in charge of the city ticket-office of the Burlington, in Omaha. Those were days when no loyal traffic-man was ever supposed even to breathe the name of a competing road. But Daly held his loyalty firm, and still went straight against that absurd rule. If a woman came into his office and, after the way of some women travellers, finally decided that she wished to travel over the rival Northwestern, he would not let her get out of his office. He would give her a comfortable seat, and perhaps a magazine or paper to read, and send one of his office-boys over to the Northwestern office to buy a ticket for her. Sometimes before the office-boy could get out of the place the woman would change her mind in favor of the Burlington. If she did not, Daly did not worry. He knew that he was of the new order of railroaders.
Come back, for a final moment, to the travelling passenger agent. He may be forgiven an over-zeal for the line which employs him, for that has been his training from the beginning, and—which is far more to the point—he is being measured by the results that he accomplishes. The road does not pay him a salary and pay his heavy expense account (which the auditor generally permits to contain various unvouchered items for entertainment) without expecting results.