These units are not, in many roads, increased, without precise orders from the board of directors or the executive committee of the board. In order to get around this rule some niceties in reconstruction have been known. A single timber of a worn-out freight car has kept the unit and the number of the old car, and going into the new has prevented the creation of a forbidden unit.
The system upon which cars and locomotives are numbered varies greatly upon different systems. In some cases the first figures of the numbers indicate the class and style of the car or locomotive, in others they mean nothing. When a car or a locomotive is nigh worn out its number passes from it and is given to some newcomer. The old servant has a neatly painted “X” placed before its number. That “X” is its death warrant. In a little time it leads the way to the scrap heap.
The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel, a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad man sees at one time or another. It may not always be possible to trace the responsibility for such an accident. But there is a responsibility, and the men who work at forge or lathe, at press or planer feel that it is there. They form no mean brigade of this great industrial army of America.
Such responsibility continues outside of the main shops to the smaller shops, down to the roundhouse forces, by whose care and vigilance the big locomotives are kept fitted for their important work; down still farther to the car-inspectors, who, blue signal-lights in hand, creep through the long freight-yards of a winter’s night to strike the flaw in the metal, to sound the note of alarm before the worst may come to pass. Some of these last you hear in the night as you scurry across the country. As you rest in your berth, and the express is changing engines at some division point, you may hear the car inspectors coming along the train, striking with their hammers against the wheels, listening intently for the false ring by which they may detect trouble. If you trouble yourself to lift the curtain of your berth, you may see them, a grimy crew, working busily with their hammers, thrusting their torches in among the trucks to see that all is well.
Responsibility for the safety in railroad operation does not cease at the doors of the mechanical department.
CHAPTER XXV
THE RAILROAD MARINE