The Modern Railroad

by Edward Hungerford

The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization, make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors at the end of each day’s run. He must see to it that the conductor is neither careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will bring the matter quickly to the attention of the operating department.

In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad passenger traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones across the country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles’ riding at a saving over local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has complied with its provisions within the year’s life of the book, he will be paid $5 rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding at two cents a mile. Sometimes these books take the form of “scrip” which is silent upon mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent portions, sold at wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five cents each.

In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where there is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have to be very careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage books. The law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to passenger receipts, for the law seems to point to even finer lines than the comptroller. He cannot even subtract the $5 which will probably return to the purchaser, and charge the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales must be credited to a separate account, and only transferred to the main receipts of the railroad as the strip is turned in for passage, a few miles at a time.

Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle that comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone will sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office, will involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the railroads.

And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation and settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the railroad. There is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an overcharge claim, the routine is comparatively simple. The audit office should have information at hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle it immediately. But if the claim is for lost or damaged freight, the thing complicates. Before the freight claim department will draw a voucher against the treasurer, it will have to assure its own conscience that the claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.

From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills—pays its men, as we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and its fire insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the twelve months of the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between receipts and expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and attested vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed the very best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt stating the precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid.

In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the mileage of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement. Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores, and the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these the comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive performances—so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then he will show the average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon, for the railroad never forgets the cost.

It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost and revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics become graphic, and the comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office, prepares charts, in which statistics become “curves of averages” or jotted and wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning.

“Government by draughting-board,” sniffs the old-time railroader as he sees these great “cross-hatched” sheets with their crazy lines of intelligence spun across them, but it is “government by draughting-board” that has made the old-time railroader—well, the old-time railroader. The new-time railroader gives heed to those charts—the pulse readings of the creature that he is directing—guides his course in no small way by them. They are veritable charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.

Branching, as a rule, direct from the president’s office and occasionally from the general manager’s, are the purchasing agent and the store-keeper, many times one and the same, or the former acting as superior to the latter. The purchasing agent has no easy role. If he is not above sharp practices—the gift of a bit of furniture or a theatre box, in the least instances—he will fulfil only part of the reputation of his office; and if he is—as many, many of them are—absolutely honest down to the keenest degree of an acute conscience, he will probably still be under the suspicion of some querulous minds. His opportunities for deceit and guile are many, so much the more must he be an honest man in every full sense of that word.