With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches, dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet work still demands the cunning of his hands. Here in the miscellaneous carpenter-shop he is at work upon a seat frame for a day-coach, a shade fixture, a broken chair from a dining car, a baggage truck from some station; there is plenty of work for the carpenter around a car-shop.
It is a matter of pride with the railroad to keep its passenger equipment bright and shiny and new of appearance. It is part sentiment and part good business. For a railroad cannot hope to attract passengers with dirty, unkempt, weather-beaten cars. So it is that the paint-shop is a large function of the car-shop. American railroads may not go quite as much into gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a private carriage or an automobile.
So it is that a passenger coach spends from eighteen to twenty days in the paint-shop alone, in its period of refurbishing. It is primed at first and then it receives from three to five coats of surfacer. This is all hand-work, requiring both strong muscles and infinite patience on the part of the painters. Two or three coats of the standard color of the railroad, by which its equipment is known distinctively, are given to the exterior. Lettering and striping follow, then finally two coats of fine varnish are flowed and rubbed to a high and brilliant polish.
The car is now ready for the dust and the dirt of the line. About every year it will come back again for re-varnishing and at the end of about eight years it will again undergo practically the same treatment within the paint-shop as was given it at the beginning. It will come in rusty and begrimed after many thousands of miles up and down the toilsome line. Within three weeks it will emerge from the paint-shop fresh and radiant, having obtained a new lease of life.
If the same process were to be applied to the freight equipment, the paint-shop would be of almost unlimited size. But freight-cars are not varnished. They are merely painted with the best of time-resisting pigments, usually a dull and sombre red. The freight-cars literally go through a bath in the paint-shop. Expert painters stand, like fire-fighters, with a hose-nozzle in their hands. Through the hose the paint is forced, gallons upon gallons of it; and when it is all over the freight-car is a fine, even red, just like the painters themselves. The lettering is a quick matter, with the use of stencils.
There remain two other great divisions of a central plant of this sort—locomotive repair shops and car repair shops, for the needs of the immediate divisions with their heavy traffic. These shops, extensive in themselves, present no radical differences from the usual division shops which a great railroad maintains at every division operating point in order to keep its rolling stock in the best of order. They are used to make light repairs. The master mechanic is a discerning man. He must know and judge accurately when a disabled car or locomotive should go to the company’s main shops, when the repairs can best be made at the local plant. It is one of the points upon which the economy of the shop system depends.
On this matter of shop economy whole volumes might be written, and have been written. In the beginning of shop practices there was little system in these matters, just as the shop work was reckoned far below its real importance. One of the earliest of real railroads was the Columbia & Philadelphia—nowadays one of the main stems of the Pennsylvania’s trunk line—and it was from the beginning a railroad of quite heavy traffic, double-tracked and reaching into a fat country. Yet a shop at Parkersburg, halfway up the line, employing forty men in all, was considered quite enough for the maintenance of equipment. If one of those early engines broke down at either terminal, the engineer, the fireman and perhaps the local blacksmith had to make their own repairs.
Nothing was standard, not even the sizes of such simple affairs as nuts and bolts. Years of railroading have changed all this. The master-mechanics and the master car-builders meet in annual sessions; and by means of reports from their expert committees have been evolved standards in every detail of rolling stock—standard materials, standard compositions, standard sizes, even standards in nomenclature of railroad apparatus down to the smallest parts.
Even with this assistance there still remains a mass of detail in every railroad shop; and a large clerical force is one of its greatest efficiencies. A sharp and accurate accounting is kept of the cost of repairs upon each locomotive and car, even such general shop costs as gas and heat are pro-rated against it. There is no time that the railroad cannot tell to a nicety the precise cost of each unit of its equipment.