“You’ve got a lot of these delegations?” we venture.
“I lose track of them,” says the general manager. “It’s all a part of the day’s work; it’s railroading.”
We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight the fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before he was there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days before that he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen hours a day. That’s railroading, too.
The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems. His biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills; and these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe its area. The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight for his road—running in strongly competitive territory—comes to this terminal. Three hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for different points, and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find any one of those cars without an instant’s delay. And still the narrow physical limitations of that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a big man.
And sometimes the big man must stoop to examine carefully into the little things. When McCrea, the present president of the Pennsylvania, was a general manager off on the western end of that system, his car was halted in the middle of the night by a bad wreck on a single-track side-line. He might have remained in his comfortable bed, but that would not have been McCrea. He got up and dressed, went outside and offered his services to the wrecking-boss. The wrecking-boss was competent and he knew it.
“There’s nothing you can do, boss,” he said.
“Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing that I can do—with a road blocked on both sides with wreckage and stalled trains and track to be laid?” said McCrea. “Well, let me tell you that there are ties down there in the ditch that will have to be placed before another train goes over here, and we might as well be beginning.”
And with that General Manager McCrea suited action to word. He went down into the ditch, picked up a heavy tie, put it over his shoulder, and brought it up into position. In an instant he was in the ranks, working to bring order out of chaos. That was the way a big man could do a little thing in a big way.
It takes a really big man for that very sort of thing. And the big man, general manager of several thousand miles of railroad, must understand the smaller men beneath him—any one of whom is apt in some future day to supersede him. Here is a man who has been known as one of the best general managers in the whole land. Soon after he was made operating head of a really big road, a certain train on which he was travelling was much delayed. The new G. M. inquired the exact reason for the trouble. He was not so much concerned for his own convenience as he was curious to know why one of the road’s best through trains should have halted until assistance should come from the nearest roundhouse.
“The fireman lost his rake,” was the somewhat perfunctory report that the G. M.’s secretary returned to him. But if that young man thought that his boss was going to be satisfied with that report, he was mistaken, decidedly.