CHAPTER IV
ORGANIZED LABOR—THE CONDUCTOR
Here is another of the well-organized and protected forms of the railroad’s labor—the conductor. He will tell you that a goodly measure of responsibility rests upon his own broad shoulders. Yet your veteran railroad executive does not regard his conductor so much as a responsibility man as a diplomat. This last, after all, is his chief rôle.
You gather your brow. You do not understand.
“I thought,” you begin slowly, for you have made some sort of a study of this big game of railroading, “I thought that the traveling freight and passenger agents, all that solicitous company which travels through the highways and byways of the land, the big towns and the small, seeking out traffic, for the railroad, were regarded as its diplomats.”
You are partly right—partly wrong.
For the real diplomat of the railroad is multiplied in its service, far more than the freight or the passenger agents. The humblest and the rarest of passengers do not fail to see him. The man who rides on the railroad train for the first time in his life comes into almost instant touch with him. You yourself have seen him many times making his way down the aisle of the car; stopping patiently beside each of his passengers—we use the phrase “his passengers” advisedly—greeting old friends with cheery nods; upholding the dignity of the railroad and his own authority—quietly, but none the less surely—time and time again. Here, as we shall come in a moment to understand, is a real diplomat of the railroad—an autocrat of no small authority in those rare instances where he may fail to be a gentleman. And all this stands to the infinite credit of more than 60,000 conductors in the railroad service across the land.
We have just called him an autocrat. Remember, however, that for the safe movement of his train up and down the railroad’s busy lines he shares, in an important degree, the responsibility with the man with whom we have just ridden in the engine cab; but the engineer cannot very well make or lose business for his railroad unless he stops his train too sharply and too many times. The conductor—well, we are going to see him in his rôle of peacemaker plenipotentiary to the public. It, of itself, is a rôle where he can be and is of infinite value to the railroad.