The Modern Railroad

by Edward Hungerford

He laughs again, then grows confidential.

“We’re in a bit of a hole,” he admits. “Some of the big manufacturers downtown are organizing a bank, and it looks as if it was going to be a pretty solid sort of institution. They want a big account from us, and our traffic people are urging their cause. In the long run they’ll get the account.”

Then he explains to you that the railroad endeavors to hold down its bank accounts, although it must have them in a large number of different cities, to avoid the long shipments of large quantities of money. The agents and the conductors will, following a carefully arranged system, send their receipts to the nearest designated banks, mailing memorandum slips of the deposit both to the treasurer and to the comptroller. The bank in its turn, sends receipt slips to both of these officers, so the deposit transaction is hedged about with a sufficient degree of formality and detail.

When it comes to pay out its money, the railroad has no lessened degree of formality and detail. For the wages of its employees—generally the greatest of all expenditures—the railroad has proper system and order. The paymaster makes out the voluminous pay-rolls, they are each properly attested by the heads of departments; and for his pay-roll totals, the necessary vouchers are issued to him by the treasurer. He may pay the railroad army by check or he may send his deputies out over the system in the pay-cars.

The pay-car is one of the pleasantest of the surviving old-time railroad customs. The shriek of the whistle of the engine that hauls it is the pleasantest melody that can come to the ears of the man out upon the line. To shuffle in a long line up to its platform window where the railroad’s money is being paid out in tiny envelopes, as each man signs the impressive roll, is one of the greatest joys that anticipation can hold out. As the car makes its routine trip over the line each month or each fortnight, it draws its money from the various repository banks, or else the cash is forwarded to it at division points from headquarters.

But, like many old customs, the pay-car is disappearing. The railroads are more and more paying their men by check. It is a better system in many ways. It avoids the handling of large sums of money, and many of the men prefer not to have a roll of bills thrust into their hands. The old prejudice among them against checks is practically over. The checks are constant incentives toward saving, the small banks in the little town are shrewdly reaching for the accounts of the thrifty railroaders. There may not be much for the bank in just one of these accounts, but they can quickly multiply into considerable sums.

We have already spoken of the comptroller; he is called the auditor upon some of our railroads. The comptroller is the most passionless and unemotional of all railroad officials. He measures the worth of his fellows by cold mathematical rules, by addition, by subtraction, by multiplication, by division. Even as big a man as the president may shudder at the result of such coldly accurate measurings.

No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval of the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise, men fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight.

His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule, an auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight receipts report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of sharp-eyed young men, each also having an almighty respect for mathematical accuracy, will be up and down the line for him, catching up careless agents on the one hand, and on the other gently showing them how to keep their accounts better, and conform more carefully to the company’s established standards. Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the mileage of the company’s cars travelling over other roads, and the equipment of other roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the comptroller, oftener, however, directly to the operating department. All these make a considerable office—an office which usually treads its monotonous path and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well considered in the organization of the railroad.

The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels—as we have already indicated—passenger receipts, freight receipts and disbursements, and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the accounting has, of course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash fare collections made by conductors upon the trains. This would be simple enough bookkeeping if a good many years ago the interline or coupon ticket, entitling the bearer to ride upon several different roads, had not come into popularity. To apportion the revenue of a ticket between the half-dozen different lines upon which it has been used requires almost no end of system and accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting with its fellows, with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The coupons themselves are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single road—because of the freight as well as the passenger business—may be kept standing in the treasuries of several hundred other roads. It is a system quite as intricate, in itself, as the relations between city and country banking and yet it is only a single small phase of the conduct of the railroad.