“That settles it,” he said. “We’ve got to put this fire out. I can’t risk cutting this draw out of service.”
It is a matter of record on that railroad that he climbed alone to the top of the draw and began to put out the fire with his own stout endeavors. He was not alone for long. Inspired by him, the men that gathered there—engineers, firemen, trainmen, and conductors, crawled up upon that freezing cold draw and lent him their efforts. In a half-hour the fire was out, and the stalled trains were moving again.
This, then, is the measure of the man who sits across the wide office table from you. The mollified commuters are marching out.
“You don’t encourage kicking?” you ask.
“We don’t discourage it,” he replied. He is reminded of a story and tells it to you.
“When they made Blank superintendent over there at Broad Street, in Philadelphia, he went in to make a clean record. He called his chief clerk to him. ‘Mind you, if you hear kicks, don’t let them get in one ear and out the other. You bring them in here and we’ll investigate.’ In three days the chief clerk was busy. ‘Lots of trouble with the suburban traffic to-day,’ he would say. ‘Wilmington train laid out at Grey’s Ferry; third day that’s happened.’ ‘Ugly trainman on the main line wouldn’t close the rear doors. That fellow’s unpopular.’ ‘Not enough equipment on the Central division.’ ‘No fire in the stove at Lenden Road,’—a long string of commuter troubles. After Blank had heard this for a week he began to get nervous. He called his chief clerk to him. ‘See here,’ he demanded, ‘what’s the matter with our service? Where are all these kicks coming in from?’ The chief clerk looked at him—never a snicker. ‘You said you wanted the kicks,’ he replied. ‘Well, I’ve been letting the head barber downstairs shave me after he was done with the commuters. He gets every one of the howls.’”
Sometimes the kicks represent a serious side of the superintendent’s problem. A while ago a man came to a railroad superintendent in Boston and demanded that a certain ticket-examiner in the passenger terminal be dismissed. There had been some sort of dispute and the man insisted that the ticket-examiner be discharged, nothing less. The ticket-examiner, on his part, told a pretty fair sort of story. Moreover, he said that if in the heat of the dispute he had transgressed on good manners he was frankly sorry and that it would not happen again. Back of all that he had a good record: no complaints had ever before been registered against him. The superintendent then wrote a letter to the man who had complained and stated that the offending ticket-examiner had been reprimanded and that the offence would probably not be repeated.
The conductor is a high type of railroad employee
