THE RAILROAD AND ITS PRESIDENT
Supervision of the Classified Activities—Engineering, Operating, Maintenance of Way, etc.—The Divisional System as Followed in the Pennsylvania Road—The Departmental Plan as Followed in the New York Central—Need for Vice-presidents—The Board of Directors—Harriman a Model President—How the Pennsylvania Forced Itself into New York City—Action of a President to Save the Life of a Laborer’s Child—“Keep Right on Obeying Orders”—Some Railroad Presidents Compared—High Salaries of Presidents.
All the widely divergent lines of human activity in the organization of the railroad converge in the office of its president. He is the focal point of the entire system. More than that, he is its head and front. If he is anything less, the sooner he is out of his job the better for both the railroad and himself; for, although there is a great variety of departments in the organization of steam railroad transportation and each department will have still greater varieties of activities, there is but a single activity delegated to the office that bears only the modest word “president” in gilt letters upon its door. The function of that office is to supervise. To understand that supervision better, consider for a moment the rough structure of the railroad.
Its activities are grouped into classes. The activity of soliciting business, both freight and passenger, forms the traffic department, in many ways the most important of all; for from it comes nearly all the vast revenue needed for the maintenance of the organism. The legal department looks after the railroad’s rights—its franchises, its charters, the law fabric of its almost innumerable relations with the various railroad commissions, legislatures, city councils, and town and country boards. If the road be really sizable—with 8,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 miles of track—it will probably organize into separate departments the buying of its great quantities of supplies, the keeping of its intricate books, and the handling of its money. The business of building its lines and structures will need special talent for an engineering department. The department that will employ the great rank and file of the railroad’s army of employees is the operating department, called by some big roads the transportation department.
There are two other great factors of conducting a railroad; maintaining its lines—the tracks, bridges, tunnels and other features of the permanent way; and keeping both cars and engines fit for service. This last work, organized as the mechanical department, will probably rank next to operating in the number of its employees, and the value of its equipment is one of the greatest assets of the railroad. It is generally expressed in great shops located here and there and everywhere, at convenient points upon the system.
Generally the maintenance-of-way department comes under operating—it is only fair that a general manager should supervise the condition of the line over which he is expected to operate his trains at high speed and in absolute safety. The same argument should hold true as to the equipment. But right here is the great rock upon which the principle of American railroad organization splits in twain.
From the president’s office downward, the system of organization may be divisional or departmental. In the former case, the division superintendent is the real unit of railroad operation: under his guidance and responsibility come not only the operation of the trains but the maintenance both of the line and of the rolling-stock. In the case of departmental organization that superintendent—and also, above him, the general superintendent—exercises no authority over the engineers of maintenance-of-way or the master mechanics of the shops along the system. Those lines of railroad activity do not converge with that of train operation below the office of the general manager. The greatest outside power that is given to a division superintendent on a purely departmental road is a sort of coöperation with the master mechanic in the matter of the men who handle the road’s motive power. This coöperation is many times intricate and involved. If the master mechanic and the division superintendent are not harmoniously inclined toward one another, and things very naturally go wrong with the motive-power, it is a difficult matter to locate responsibility.
The Pennsylvania system, which is one of the most perfectly organized in the world, is strongly organized upon the divisional system. The division superintendent upon the Pennsylvania is indeed a prince above his principality, and he is well trained for his rulership. Pennsylvania men go through the mill. It takes a pretty capable man to combine the ability for handling trains and handling men with the intricate knowledge for command over an engineering corps devoted to maintenance-of-way, as well as command over a machine-shop which may employ a thousand skilled workmen. In order to give its division heads that tremendous training, the Pennsylvania sends its men through its own West Point, the great shops at Altoona. The men who have sat in the big, roomy office in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, and who have been addressed as president, have been proud of the days when they were up in the hills of the Keystone State, standing their trick in overalls at the lathe, or carrying chain and rod over long stretches of track. To-day every Pennsylvania superintendent, possibly with a single exception or two, is a civil or mechanical engineer.
