The Railroad Problem. Edward Hungerford
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didn’t think you’d stop this crack train for anybody,” he said quite frankly. “The time card doesn’t—”
“This train stops for the proper accommodation of the patrons of this road,” interrupted the conductor, “and I’m its high judge. You lost out on your connection at Albany through no fault of yours. It was our fault and we are doing our best to make it up to you.”
Consider the value of such a man to the organization which employs him. That little act was worth more to the big railroad whose uniform he bore than a ton of advertising tracts or a month’s service of its corps of soliciting agents. The Kingston man crossed the river from Rhinecliff in a motor boat and thanked the road and its conductor for the service it had rendered him. He was a large shipper and his factory in the western part of the state is in a hotly competitive territory; but the road that through the good sense of its employee had saved him much valuable time today hardly knows a competitor in his shipping room.
Discrimination? Your attorney, skilled in the fine workings of the Interstate Commerce Law, may tell you “Yes,” but we are inclined to think he is wrong, for the man was not permitted to alight at Rhinecliff because he was anything more than a patron of the road. He had no political or newspaper affiliations to parade before the conductor; he did not hint at his strength as a shipper, he did not even give his name. If there is discrimination in that, I fail to see it.
A certain man took a trip from New York to Chicago three or four years ago. He went on a famous road, well conducted, and he returned on its equally famous competitor. Each road had just conquered a mighty river by boring an electrically operated tunnel underneath it. The tunnel had been well advertised and the man, whose mind had a mechanical turn, was anxious to see both of them. In each case the train bore a wide-vestibuled day coach as its last car.
In the first tunnel through which he passed he went to the rear of the day coach with the intention of taking a look at the under-river bore. He wanted to stand at the rear of the aisle and look through the door at the electrically lighted tube. But the conductor anticipated him. He drew down the sash curtain of the car door.
“Sorry,” he said, “but the company’s rules prohibit passengers from standing in the aisles.”
One might write a whole chapter on the thoroughly asinine rules that some roads have made for the guidance not only of their employees but of their patrons as well. But this man did not argue. He bowed dutifully to the strong arm of the rule book and went back to his seat—thoroughly cowed. But how different was the case on the other railroad, by which he returned from Chicago! This second time he went to the rear of the train, recalling his first experience and the rebuff he had received. But this road and its conductor were of a different sort. This second conductor was fastening the outside doors of the vestibule at the rear of the last car and saying to the little group assembled there:
“If you will wait a minute I will give you a chance to get out on this rear platform and see the big job we’ve been working on so long. We all of us are mighty proud of it.”
How much of an asset do you suppose this conductor was to his company?
By this time the new-fangled railroad executive who reads this will be filled with disgust.
“Doesn’t he know,” I can hear him say, “that railroading has taken some pretty big strides within the past fifteen or twenty years? We’re perfecting; we’re systematizing. We’ve studied the motions of the bricklayer and we’re dabbling in efficiency. We’ve modeled our railroads after the best of the standing armies of Europe and we’ve begun to move men like units. That means that we’ve no room in railroad ranks for individualists. An individualist never makes an ideal unit and the new efficiency demands units—not thinkers!”
Does it? In the minds of a good many railroaders of the newer schools it seems to. Yet some of these very same railroaders were overjoyed a little time ago—when the half-baked Adamson eight-hour law was being jammed through Congress—to see out from the Middle West, from the rails of the Santa Fé, the Union Pacific, the Milwaukee roads, veteran conductors coming forward, who not only did not hesitate to speak their minds against the measure, but actually sought out injunctions against it. What it might cost these men in prestige and in the affection of their fellows, in possible punishments by the lodges of their brotherhoods, the outside public may never know. It can be fairly assured that the price was no small one.
Would the railroad executives of the Middle West have preferred that these men be units, rather than individualists? I think not. The truth of the matter is, that in its very desire to stand straight, the new school of railroading sometimes leans backward. We will grant that in the coming of the great combinations of new-time railroads it was a mighty good step to eliminate the haphazard, wasteful, inefficient old school of personal railroading. Consolidation has effected some wonderful working advantages in the operation of our giant systems, and it is a grave question whether today, with the margin between income and operating cost constantly narrowing, if the eggs were unscrambled and the famous little old roads returned, they could be operated long and dodge the scrawny fingers of receivership. Yet it is a fact that if they have gained in many ways by consolidation and centralization, they have lost something definite in the personal feeling which used to exist between their men and themselves. It was an asset that could hardly be expressed in dollars and cents.
After the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad had absorbed the famous Old Colony—down there in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts—it was five years before its conductors ceased to know it and to love it as the Old Colony. To older conductors the Panhandle and the Lake Shore are still as real and as vital as if those beloved names still appeared upon the rolling stock. Measure such an asset in dollars and cents if you can! You cannot, thank God, place a valuation upon such assets as affection and loyalty.
So to your first qualities of dignity and authority and discretion—in these days we dare not call it discrimination—supplement those of affection and of loyalty. And to these add that of ability; for a conductor’s entire work is not merely collecting his tickets and keeping the passengers of his train in good humor—though sometimes this last is a man’s job by itself. He must bear in mind that Bible of the railroad—the time card—the place his train takes upon it; its relation to every other train, regular and special, on the line. His mind must be—every minute that he is on the road—a replica of the dispatcher’s, working in perfect synchronism with that of the controlling head who bends over the train sheet back at headquarters. This work, comparatively simple on a double-track line, becomes, in many instances, tremendously complicated upon the many miles of single-track railroads that still bear a heavy traffic up and down and across America.
The “opposing trains” to be met and passed; the slower trains moving in the same direction to be overtaken and also passed; the complications of special movements—all these must be borne in accurate correlation as the conductor passes up or down the line. He may have extra cars to his train and an extraordinarily difficult crowd of passengers to handle, but he cannot for a moment ignore the most minute detail of the flimsy messages that are handed to him during the entire length of his trip. And back of his specific orders for the day he must ever carry the entire scheme of the division’s operation.
THE KNIGHT OF THE TICKET PUNCH
Courtesy, diplomacy, helpfulness are quite as much parts of his job as anything else.
He is a distinctive American figure; no railroads elsewhere have his counterpart.
So here you have the passenger conductor—a real knight of the road, if you please—careful, discerning, courageous; a rare diplomat; perhaps in this commercial day of big things the spirit of the skipper of the famous old-time clipper ship incarnate! He is worthy of the great railroad empire of the world. In Europe, the state railroads of Germany and of France, the short, congested lines of Great Britain have not his counterpart. He is a product both of our nationalism and of the hard necessity that has hedged him in. And, in passing, it is worthy of note that some of the men