There is not an honest-speaking railroad executive all the way across the land who cannot tell you that he would a dozen times rather deal with the average individual railroader of today than with the average individual railroader of, let us say, a quarter of a century ago. With the railroader’s boss—his grand chief and any of the smaller chiefs—well, here is a far different matter. But there has been a steady improvement in the quality of railroaders—of every sort and degree.
If you have traveled upon our steel pathways for twenty years or more you must have noticed that yourself. The transition of the rough-looking, rough-speaking, rough-thinking brakeman into the courteous trainman comes first to my mind. And if the old-time conductor with lantern on his arm has disappeared, there has appeared a diplomat in his stead, a gentleman with whom we are soon to become a little better acquainted. We still have railroad wrecks, some of them admittedly the fault of the engineer. But apparently we have ceased to have railroad wrecks due to the fact that there was a drunken man in the engine cab. The last serious wreck where this accusation was made was near Corning, New York, on the night of the Fourth of July, 1912. More than forty persons lost their lives in a rear-end collision and the railroad which paid the damages, both in money and in reputation, did its very best to follow up a suspicion in its mind that the engineer of the second train was drunk when he climbed into its engine cab. It was never able to prove that charge. And one of the best things that you may say about that extraordinarily well-organized union—the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—has been its unceasing efforts to drive out drinking among its members. Its record along these lines is of unspotted cleanliness.
Do you happen to know of Rule G, that stringent regulation in the standard rule books of the operating departments of the railroads of America, which is written not alone against the use of liquor by employees when on or off duty but also against their frequenting the places where liquor is sold? Time was when the abuse of Rule G sometimes was winked at, upon certain roads. That time has passed. Today it is perhaps the most stringently observed of all the manifold commandments in American railroading. And the influence of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers has done much toward consummating that very end.
A little while ago an engineer running on one of the soft-coal roads of West Virginia suspected one of his fellows in the engine cab of drinking. It disturbed him more than a little. Finally he went to the man.
“Jim,” said he, in the course of their heart-to-heart talk, “you’ve simply got to cut out the stuff or—”
“If I don’t, what?”
“If you don’t I’m a-goin’ to take it up at the lodge. You know the Brotherhood’s against that sort of thing.”
Jim laid his hand upon the other’s arm.
“Don’t do that,” he protested. “I’d a whole sight rather you’d report me, if you feel that you’ve got to report me, to the superintendent.”
There was no doubt in that engineer’s mind as to the stand of the biggest of the brotherhoods on Rule G. Nor is that stand based entirely on sentiment. The men who stand at the head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers never lose sight of the responsibility that rests upon the man in the engine cab. It is one of the strongest arguments which they may use in their appeals for increased wages. It is an argument which meets with ready and popular approval in the minds of the public which rides back and forth upon the railroad trains of America. And no stronger support can be offered by the strongest of their organizations than an adherence to Rule G that is practical as well as theoretical.