The Railroad Problem. Edward Hungerford
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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.
Responsibility in the engine cab! Who is going to deny that the engineer has a superb responsibility—from the moment when he arrives at the roundhouse and signs for and receives his engine to the moment when he “checks out” at the terminal at the far end of his run? To the better appreciate the fullness of such responsibility, one would do well to climb into the cab of one of our fast trains and watch the man there at his task. So, if you would know something of the man in the engine cab, come and ride a little way with him. It is not easily arranged. The railroaders have grown very strict in the enforcement of the rule which forbids strangers in the engine cabs. It is one of the ways in which they have been tightening their safety precautions. Yet in this one instance it can be arranged. You sign tremendously portentous legal “releases,” whose verbiage, freely translated, gives you the distinct impression that you are going to your sure doom. But you are not. You are going to ride with Jimmie Freeman, crack passenger engineer of one of the best and the biggest of our eastern railroads. You are going to have a close look at the man in the engine cab.
Forty minutes before the leaving time of Freeman’s train her big K-I engine backs into the terminal from the roundhouse and is quietly fastened to the long string of heavy cars. The engineer went over the big, clean, lusterless mechanism before it left the inspection-pit at the roundhouse. It is part of his routine; part of his pride as well. And even though it cuts him out of a Sunday dinner with his folks in the little house at the edge of the town, he prefers that it be so. In his simple, direct way he tells you that he has the same satisfaction in speeding a locomotive on which, by personal inspection, he knows that every bolt and nut is in the proper position, that a crack chauffeur has in speeding a good car up the boulevard knowing that it, too, is in condition—engine, driver, axles, all the hundred and one friction parts that must work truly, even at high speed and under the great heat that high speed generates in a bearing.
For remember that Freeman’s limited is a crack train—its name a household word at least halfway across the land. He came to it five years ago—a prize for an engine-runner who had judgment, who had kept a good “on time” record for eight years with a less important passenger train; a man who knew the complications of a locomotive as you and I know the fingers of our two hands. It was not a “seniority” appointment. The “seniority” jobs come to the very oldest of the passenger engineers who, because of the very length of their service, are permitted to pick and choose the runs that would suit them best. These rarely are the very fast runs. They are more apt to be some modest local train making its way up a branch line and back, where there is little congestion of traffic and a throttle-man’s nerves are not kept on edge every blessed moment that he is on the job.
THE ENGINEER
Oiling is too important a matter to be deputed, so he attends to it himself.
Jimmie Freeman did not pick his job. It picked him. It picked him because he had nerve, a steady head, good physique, a knowledge of the locomotive and of all of its whims and vagaries. And if his is one of the hardest jobs on the big road for which he works, he is perhaps only one of a half-thousand passenger engineers it might pick from its ranks and find fully able to measure to it.
An air signal over the engineer’s head rasps twice; a starting signal. He pulls out the throttle ever and ever so little a way—a distance to be measured in inches and fractions of inches—and the limited is in motion.
“We’re sixty seconds late in getting off,” says Freeman as he replaces his watch and settles down for the forty-mile pull up to B——, the first stop and scheduled to be reached in forty-three minutes. That means, with “slow orders” through station yards, as well as one or two sharp curves and a steep grade midway, that Jimmie will have no time to loaf on the straight-aways—he calls them “tangents.”
“Green on the high,” says the fireman, as the big K-I ducks her head under a signal bridge and her pilot trucks find their way to the long crossover that brings her from the platform track in the tangle of the terminal yard over to a “lead-track,” which in turn gives to the “main,” stretching out over the sunshiny open country to distant B——.
“Yellow on the low,” calls the fireman again as the engine slips under still another signal bridge and finds her way to the long, unbroken sweep of the beginning of the “main.” Freeman repeats the signals. For his part he is supposed to read them all the way to P——, where his run ends and the limited goes, bag and baggage, upon the rails of a connecting road. He is supposed to read, the fireman to repeat. As a practical thing it is sometimes out of the question. The cab of the big passenger puller is far from a quiet place. There is the dull pound of the drivers over the smooth rails, the roar of the great fire between them, the deafening racket of the forced draft that pours into it. The cab does not lend itself to conversation. But if Freeman does not repeat the signal indications audibly he does it mentally. It is part of his job. And the mere repeating of the signal does not assure safety.
Once, a number of years ago and upon another railroad, I rode in the cab of a fast passenger train. The road ran straight for many miles and across a level country. Each mile of its path was marked by a clock signal, gleaming against the night. The engineer shouted each of those signals, and his fireman echoed them back.
“White,” he would call—for white was then the safety color, not the green that has been almost universally adopted now.
“White it is,” would come the reply. And in another mile:
“White,” and “White she is.”
And once my heart all but leaped into my mouth. The block showed red—red, the changeless signal for danger. But our engineer did not close his throttle or reach for the handle of his air brake.
“Red,” he chanted in his emotionless fashion; but the fireman altering his echo to “Red she is,” looked up for a moment into his chief’s face. The chief never moved a muscle. Sixty seconds later he shouted again.
“White.”
“White she is,” repeated the fireman, and grinned as he thrust another shovelful of coal into the fire box.
After the run was over and we sat at the comfortable eating counter of the Railroad Y.M.C.A., I asked the engineer why he had run by that red signal. He hesitated a moment.
“Man alive,” said he, “do you suppose I can afford to bring my train to a full stop every time one of those pesky blocks gives me the bloody eye? I could get the next two blocks and saw they were safe. I know every inch of the line, and knew that there was not an interlocking”—meaning switches and crossing tracks—“within ten miles of us. The block was out of order and I knew it. And I was right.”
“Suppose there was a broken rail in that block,” I suggested, “wouldn’t that break the current and automatically send the signal to danger?”
The engineer did not answer that quickly. He knew the point was well taken. Finally, pressed, he said that his was a “penalty train,” which meant that it carried the mail and excess-fare passengers and that it would cost his railroad dollars and cents if it were more than thirty minutes late at its final terminal. To have stopped this train