If the general manager is king in modern railroad operation, the division superintendent is not less than prince. His principality is no mean state. It may consist of some 500 miles of what he modestly admits is the “best sort of railroad in all this land”; or it may be a little stretch of 100 miles, or even less, losing its way back among the hills; but it is a principality, and his rule is undisputed. If ever it be questioned, it will then be high time for him to abdicate.
Just as the division is the physical unit of railroad operation, so is its superintendent the human unit. By him the transportation organism stands or falls. If it stands, he is able to go forward; the path from his door leads to the general manager’s office. If it falls—Well, there is to-day in Central Illinois a gray-haired station-agent who once held his own principality—4,000 men to take his orders.
“We only discharge for disobedience or dishonesty,” said the president of that railroad at the time he signed the order reducing the prince to the ranks. “When we fail to get the real measure of a man, it is our fault, not his. We never turn out a man who has done his level best for us.”
This man is superintendent of one of the most prosperous of the trunk-line railroads that reach the metropolis by stretching their rails across New Jersey. His is a “terminal division,” so called, and he has assumed command of one of the busiest city gates in all America. His railroad day begins almost as soon as he is awake. There is a telegraph outfit in the corner of his bedroom, and as he dresses and shaves he listens mechanically to its scoldings—to the gossip of the division. It comes as casually to his ear as the prattle of his children; the key began to be music to him long before he left the little yellow depot where he first began to be a railroader.
“They’re in pretty good shape this morning, John,” laughs his wife. She, too, has been listening half unconsciously to the gossip of the wire. Years ago she “stood her trick” with her husband back in that little yellow depot.
“Got a coal train in the ditch up the other side of Greyport,” is his reply. “We’ll rip out that nasty cross-over up there some day, when the big boss wakes up to the cash we’ve put out in wrecks at GP.”
“Going up there?”
“Not this morning, Maggie,” he laughs. “I’ve a committee from the firemen coming in to see me. They’re nagging for a raise.” He lowers his voice, as if he almost thought that the walls had ears. “It’s beginning to grind the boys, too—butter 48 cents, eggs 45, and all their hungry kiddies. But the big boss—whew!”
He whistles, goes to his key, cuts in, and begins to give orders to the wrecking-boss up at Greyport.
“Steady, Jim,” he says, in a low voice. “You’ve got all day on that job if you need it, only watch out for the number two track with your crane. We can’t risk a side-swipe on one of our pretty trains. We’re detouring the east-bound passengers over the Central. How’s Hinckley?”