After a time the old freight-agent died and a new one came in his place. The new man was on his job less then three months before he arranged a new schedule in that freight-house—and dropped twenty-five men from its pay-roll. First he summoned the bookkeeping force together, and announced that it would report at five o’clock in the morning, instead of seven; of course, leaving two hours earlier each afternoon. The bookkeeping force demurred. It was not pleasant getting up before daybreak in the winter darkness of a chill northern town, and such a scheme interfered with the social plans of one or two of the bookkeepers. But the new boss only smiled and said, “Try it.”
And after they had tried it, the way-bills and the bills-of-lading were ready at seven o’clock when the handlers reported for work, and the freight-house got to work upon the shriek of the roundhouse whistle. After that, the pay-list was cut—you may be sure that a house-boss who could scheme out such a plan could weed out the shirkers and the idlers among his staff—and, better still, the consignees began to get their freight sooner than ever before in the history of that town.
Eventually—and a wonderfully short “eventually” it really was—the freight-agent climbed the ladder to the superintendent of that division and under his bailiwick came a railroad which had recently become attached to the parent system through the process of benevolent assimilation. The ordinary less-than-carload business was moved out of the freight-house of the smaller road and it was given over entirely to carriage and automobile shipments—the inland city makes a specialty of manufacturing vehicles of every sort. The division superintendent went over to the carriage freight-house and saw that it took a dozen men to man it, although it was not more than a six-car stand. Carriage bodies and automobile bodies crated are both heavy and awkward, and the boss of that house was asking for more help.
The superintendent went straight from that freight-house to a local foundry, sat there for fifteen minutes with its draughtsman and then and there evolved an overhead trolley-arrangement, very much the same as the big packing-houses use for handling heavy carcasses. A requisition for the thing went through a-flying, and now the carriage-house in that city is handled with two trained men. The scheme is fast becoming standard in the newer freight-houses and in St. Louis, the M. K. & T. has just adopted it for its splendid new terminal, whole fleets of platforms hung close to the floor and suspended from an overhead “trolley arrangement” entirely supersede the brigades of hand trucks formerly in use.
That is the point of it. There must be dozens of other cities of thirty thousand population, of sixty thousand, of ninety, of one or two or three, of five hundred thousand, where a little such method would produce similar results. In that first house, a saving of about $350 a week was made, when the young freight-agent brought some system into the dusty place. A dozen such savings or even greater, would be quite a help on the railroad’s balance sheet. At least that is the gospel which Louis Brandeis, of Boston, preached, and which attracted world-wide attention when he made the exact statement that he could save the railroads of the country a million dollars a day in the operation of their lines.
The railroads made a perfectly good legal case before the Interstate Commerce Commission—or let us assume that, at any rate, in the present instance. But one such clarifying statement as that of Brandeis’ produced more effect both upon the land and the Commissioners than all the legal briefs that together were filed in advocacy of the raises in the freight tariffs. At no time did the railroads successfully controvert Brandeis’ sweeping statement, and so they lost their fight.
And yet the railroads are accomplishing some remarkable improvements in their internal affairs—for which they are being given not an iota of credit. And one of the most interesting of these is the promotion of efficiency through organization, or better yet, through reorganization.
Along in the fifties, Herman Haupt, who was afterwards a brigadier-general of the United States army and brevetted major-general, devised the wonderful organization scheme of the Pennsylvania system, which is still in use to-day on that well-managed property. The scheme has been adopted since then by practically all the large railroads in the country. Before General Haupt evolved it, there was no real organization among the great railroads. Like Topsy, they “just growed” from the little individual horse and steam lines from which they were formed and they were even more like Topsy in some other details. But Haupt’s plan brought dignity to a great business that needed dignity—and system. For fifty years it has been accomplishing something more than merely serving its purpose. But railroad terminals and railroad equipment of fifty years ago are long since obsolete, and so within recent years the larger railroads have found their organization schemes not up with the times. The growing complexity of their work, the intricacy of their relations with the various city, state, and national governing boards, the constant tendency to enlarge and to consolidate these, have all proved fearful taxes upon the Haupt plan. Great masses of correspondence have accumulated, the whole business of conducting the railroad has been enmeshed in whole miles of red-tape—and men like Brandeis, of Boston, have been permitted to make their challenges and stand uncorrected.
Go back into the sixties for this last time, and pause for a moment at the fighting of the American Rebellion. Men in the North were beginning to hear that the Confederate army had something different, something better, in its organization than the Union army. It was an intangible something, but it seemed to make for efficiency, and, after all, that was the main thing. So after the war was history, there were far-sighted Northerners who said that it would be well to bring that intangible something into the United States army. At such a time that thing was, however, tacitly impossible, and it was dropped for more than thirty years.