The Modern Railroad

by Edward Hungerford

His Duty to Keep Employees in Harmonious Action—“The Superintendent Deals with Men; the General Manager with Superintendents”—“The General Manager is Really King”—Cases in Which his Power is Almost Despotic—He Must Know Men.

The general manager operating the railroad is held strictly responsible for the economical movement of the trains and the maintenance of the property. To the greatest portion of the railroad army (nine-tenths of it employed in the operating department) he is an uncrowned king. The superintendent, as we shall presently see, is the unit of the operation of the road, just as the division over which he is head is one of the physical units that go to make up some thousands of miles of first-class railroad track. The division superintendent deals in men; the general manager deals in division superintendents; and right there is the radical difference between the two.

The superintendent must see to it that his men get a square deal. If he does not see to it in the first instance they will see to it in the last, and woe to him if such be the case. For the men who work on the steam railroad are well-paid, well-read, keenly sensitive as to their privileges and their rights. And from these men have come the division superintendents, as different each from the other as men can be grown. It is the general manager’s chief duty to bring these very different men into harmonious action. That is absolutely essential to the successful operation of the railroad. The general manager must have absolute firmness with his superintendents. He can appoint or discharge them as they can appoint or discharge their trainmen—more quickly in fact, for up to the present time there is no brotherhood of railroad superintendents.

A certain division superintendent in the East had 150 miles of busy double-track trunk line under his direction. At his headquarters were a big classification yard and a coaling-station for the engine of the two divisions that intersected there. In the course of gradually increasing business, the coaling-station, which stood in a narrow ledge beside the main-line tracks and under the breast of a steep mountain-side, had to be enlarged. In so small a place, that was a difficult engineering problem. It was necessary to build much bigger coal-pockets and while the engineers were removing the old and building the new station, temporary coaling facilities had to be provided for the busy engine point. That part of the problem—more operating than engineering—was finally solved by going across the main-line tracks and locating a temporary coaling-station there. That made a bad situation—with the heavy main-line traffic constantly intersecting with engines drilling back and forth to their coal supply, and the general manager was quick to realize it. He went up there and warned his superintendent.

“This is a danger place,” he said, “and a mighty bad one at that. That tower’s too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two flagmen here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard every engine that crosses these main-line tracks.”

Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility for that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The division superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed. The requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of the system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn’t tell a coal-pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered that he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll—and the requisition went into the waste-basket. The division superintendent did not try to get another requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing and told the towerman in the cabin—almost half a mile away—to keep as good a watch as possible of the cross-over.

The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were half a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager’s office.

“I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special signalmen,” that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so cleared himself of the responsibility.

And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase, it offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the man who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them are far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek to remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.

Here is the yardmaster at a great interior railroad centre—we call it Somerset for the sake of convenience. His is one of the biggest yards in all this land, and he is a man whose judgment should be solidly respected. There are four improvements in his yards that he deems absolutely necessary in the face of a rapidly increasing traffic, and for a portion of the property that depreciates rapidly under hard usage. His is a most important position; and yet as he cannot spend a cent himself for the use of the railroad, not even to buy matches, he embodies his four requests for necessities into a requisition and forwards it to headquarters—at a seaboard city. His superior officer thinks that Somerset is asking a good deal, and he cuts the request down to three items. The next link in the chain is a man—an auditor, perhaps—who happens to be imbued with a strong streak of economy at that time. Middle division has had its appropriation cut thirty-three per cent, so off comes another item from Somerset yard. After a time, the yardmaster is lucky to get one single item through—and that is sure not to be the essential item that he needed most of all. Good, plucky, valiant railroader that he is, he is sure to think the whole outfit in the general offices a set of arrant fools. Perhaps the big accident comes, and then perhaps he has full opportunity to set himself straight. It is more likely that he does not, and that he is made the target for Grand Jury indictment and a lot of other fireworks.