“Eventually isn’t to-day,” said the G. M. stanchly, “and it is on to-day that we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a train in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your office, and when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon your ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent.”
“But this one train?” protests the spokesman.
“Violates that very principle,” replies the general manager. “Not another car that does not pay its way.”
And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering sundry threats about going to the commission, the general manager stretches his leg over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a big map, in colors, of his system—miles and miles and miles of first-class railroad.
“They come to me—towns like K—— and tell me of their troubles,” he says, “as if I already did not know of them. I’ve a reconstruction plan for every ten miles of our main-line.” His finger traces upon the map to a great division point. “Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some yard, as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a good-sized side-line division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of a superintendent.
“You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would think it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and Chicago. It isn’t. It isn’t really big enough to handle our decent share of that traffic to-day. We’re trying to pour the business through it to-day, and are succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It’s a weak valve in our biggest artery, and some day it’s going to clog.
“It won’t be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of freight through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder. They got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate east-bound and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I’d been fairly down on my knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that thing. I always am; that’s part of the job of general manager.
“I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to, at this point and at that. Here’s where a couple of our biggest feeders from the north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly haulers dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where we pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and we’ve got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled. Don’t think I don’t know every bit of that. I can see necessary improvements all the way up our main line; but every one of them takes money, and just now the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and raise the money. But when we know and can’t improve—that’s railroading.”
A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite frankly at us.
“Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh,” he announces. “They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they’re entitled to a new one, costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give them every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend $100,000 because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural wonder in Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to go Stenton one better.”