A clubhouse built by the Southern Pacific for its men at Roseville, California
The B. & O. boys enjoying the Railroad Y. M. C. A., Chicago Junction
“The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company has organized a brass band for its employees”
Now you get the reason for the welcome that the railroad-owners gave this work of the Y. M. C. A. It was not the religious idea alone—men differ in their views of that sort of thing—but one of the most stringent of all railroad rules is that prohibiting the use of liquor by the men, or their frequenting bar-rooms. The necessity of that rule appears upon the face of it. But the Canadian railroad could do little toward enforcing it in a place like Kenora, before McCrea, of the New York Central, arrived there. The railroad Y. M. C. A., with its comfortable housing facilities, its vigorous stand for better morals and better men, has made that rule one of the easiest in the book to be strictly observed. That is why the railroad-owners and the railroad heads, whose religious views have sometimes been at variance with those of the Y. M. C. A., have given hearty endorsement to its work along their lines. They like the sort of man it finishes.
So the railroad Y. M. C. A. has grown. It now has some 240 branches reaching from Hawaii, in the West, to some important division points in Eastern Maine. None of these have houses that can be compared, of course, with the comfortable home at the Grand Central Station in New York. In fact, some of them are still housed in crude fashion, in an abandoned shed or depot that some railroad has fitted up as a start in the work, over some store or freight-house perhaps; but each year sees these replaced by neat homes, such as those at Harrisburgh, on the Pennsylvania; at Collinwood, O., on the Lake Shore; at Baltimore, on the B. & O.; at the St. Louis Union Station, and the Williamson, W. Va., on the Norfolk and Western Railway. On a single system—the New York Central—there are 38 associations, with 27 buildings built for the purpose and valued at $700,000, and a very active membership of 12,799 railroaders. In the national organization membership there are more than 85,000 men, representing every department of the railroad service. An average of 15,500 meals—and mighty good reasonably priced meals they are, too—is served daily, while more than 50,000 railroaders come to the club-houses each twenty-four hours.
Beyond the necessity for maintaining the moral fibre of the railroader (and it is astonishing how little maintenance such a corps needs) is the decent necessity of taking care of him in case of illness. Railroading, with all the safety devices that have multiplied in its service within the past quarter of a century, is still a hazardous occupation to the men who are out upon the line. The list of cripples, and the death-list of a twelvemonth, are still appalling things—appalling in the aggregate, fearful in any single concrete case, a case where there may be a helpless wife and little children to be brought into the reckoning.
The railroads have begun to shoulder their responsibility in this matter. Legislation has helped in the matter but to-day big carriers are preparing to do even more—to pay premiums and carry some form of casualty insurance on each of their employees, who may be engaged in a hazardous part of the work. That thing is going to do more than any other one thing possibly could do. When a big railroad realizes that its bill for premiums is going to be reduced by the addition of many simple protective devices, those devices are going to be instantly adopted. That is the way of railroads, and of business, although it is not to be charged for a single moment that the American railroads have not done much within the past 25 years toward raising the margin of safety for their employees.