So much for Pittsburgh. Now consider the great new freight line leading to the east from there. Not all of that railroad has yet been built, but the greater part of it is already completed, and every part of the old road that was under tension because of freight congestion has already been relieved.
To build this new double-track railroad across 350 miles of a mountainous State, the engineers studied two points--grade and curvature. Distance was no object, for speed is the very last attainment of heavy tonnage movement. The new route consisted in part of the enlargement of the old routes, and in part of the construction of brand new line. It started east from Pittsburgh, where the great Brilliant cut-off had been built to relieve the tremendous terminal freight congestion, and followed up the valley of the Alleghany River on the route of the West Penn Road, a Pennsylvania property. The main line of the Pennsylvania comes east from Pittsburgh up the valley of the Monongahela for a distance, and then across country to Blairsville Intersection, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, where it is intercepted by the low-grade freight route.
From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the Pennsylvania's engineers were ordered to four-track the original double-track through that narrow defile in God's great world, they shook their heads dubiously; then--after the fashion of engineers--they went ahead and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same narrow pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast out a shelf on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the low-grade line.
Just beyond Gallitzin, where the Pennsylvania pierces with two great tunnels the very summit of the Alleghanies, the low-grade line takes its own course once more, breaking farther and farther away from the main line, and for long sections following the trail of the long-since abandoned Portage Railroad. The day is coming when Gallitzin Tunnels are to be left high in the air. The Pennsylvania's officers tell you that frankly.
"We have plans for a six-mile tunnel, to be handled by electric motive-power already made," said one of them, just the other day, "and every year we wait, that tunnel grows longer, the approaching grades less and less. It will cost money--money into millions of dollars--and it will earn 10 per cent on the investment."
From Gallitzin, the low-grade line delves far south to Hollidaysburgh and then follows the tracks of a former branch line up to Petersburg on the main line, which it parallels to the Susquehanna. Where the main line crosses the Susquehanna at Rockville, the low-grade freight route diverges once again and follows the west bank of the river for a number of miles, completely avoiding in that way Harrisburg and the steel-making towns to the south of it with all of their conditions of congestion. The freight route crosses the broad Susquehanna at Shock's Mills, eight miles north of Columbia, and follows the east bank of the river for twenty miles to Shenks Ferry, where it turns abruptly eastward through the rugged hills of Lancaster County to a connection with the main line at Parkesburg. From thence it follows the main line nearly all the way to Glen Loch, crossing and re-crossing it but at all times retaining its nominal grades. At Glen Loch it makes a wide detour around Philadelphia and its suburbs and reaches with a long straight "short cut" over to the main line at Morrisville near Trenton.
So much for the location of this great line of reconstruction. In grades and in curvatures it has achieved real triumphs. The great tonnage here is also always east-bound--coal and iron coming to the seaboard. Its grades also are chiefly consequential then to the east-bound movement. To that movement the heavy grades are again at the almost incredible figure of 3-10 of one per cent--some seventeen feet to the mile. That will mean more when it is understood that that figure is equal to the pull that is required of an engine to start a heavy freight train upon an absolutely level track. With such a pull, grades become as nothing, and the Pennsylvania's operating department is enabled to run 75 trains an hour over this low-grade line; hour after hour upon a 15 minutes' interval.
Ask a Pennsylvania officer what he would do with such traffic on his old main line to-day, and he will tell you that he would rather resign than tackle the proposition. The same thing is true on the New York Central lines. Like the Pennsylvania, that railroad thought a little time ago that with its four tracks it might move all civilization. Its acquisition of the bankrupt West Shore Railroad in the eighties gave it two extra tracks across New York State that for a long time were carried on the company's books as deadwood. Now they are filled with freight operation and bringing in a healthy return to their owners. The growing land is always catching up to its new railroad facilities, no matter how rapidly they may be constructed.
To-morrow?
The railroad operator does not like to think of that. He meets to-day and he plans as best he may against that to-morrow. To meet the great unknown he bids the engineers--those who construct and those who reconstruct--to him, and begs that they exercise their best wits to help him to see a little way into the dim and shadowy future.
CHAPTER X
THE RAILROAD AND ITS PRESIDENT
SUPERVISION OF THE CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES--ENGINEERING, OPERATING, MAINTENANCE OF WAY, ETC.--THE DIVISIONAL SYSTEM AS FOLLOWED IN THE PENNSYLVANIA ROAD--THE DEPARTMENTAL PLAN AS FOLLOWED IN THE NEW YORK CENTRAL--NEED FOR VICE-PRESIDENTS--THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS--HARRIMAN A MODEL PRESIDENT--HOW THE PENNSYLVANIA FORCED ITSELF INTO NEW YORK CITY--ACTION OF A PRESIDENT TO SAVE THE LIFE OF A LABORER'S CHILD--"KEEP RIGHT ON OBEYING ORDERS"--SOME RAILROAD PRESIDENTS COMPARED--HIGH SALARIES OF PRESIDENTS.
All the widely divergent lines of human activity in the organization of the railroad converge in the office of its president. He is the focal point of the entire system. More than that, he is its head and front. If he is anything less, the sooner he is out of his job the better for both the railroad and himself; for, although there is a great variety of departments in the organization of steam railroad transportation and each department will have still greater varieties of activities, there is but a single activity delegated to the office that bears only the modest word "president" in gilt letters upon its door. The function of that office is to supervise. To understand that supervision better, consider for a moment the rough structure of the railroad.
Its activities are grouped into classes. The activity of soliciting business, both freight and passenger, forms the traffic department, in many ways the most important of all; for from it comes nearly all the vast revenue needed for the maintenance of the organism. The legal department looks after the railroad's rights--its franchises, its charters, the law fabric of its almost innumerable relations with the various railroad commissions, legislatures, city councils, and town and country boards. If the road be really sizable--with 8,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 miles of track--it will probably organize into separate departments the buying of its great quantities of supplies, the keeping of its intricate books, and the handling of its money. The business of building its lines and structures will need special talent for an engineering department. The department that will employ the great rank and file of the railroad's army of employees is the operating department, called by some big roads the transportation department.
There are two other great factors of conducting a railroad; maintaining its lines--the tracks, bridges, tunnels and other features of the permanent way; and keeping both cars and engines fit for service. This last work, organized as the mechanical department, will probably rank next to operating in the number of its employees, and the value of its equipment is one of the greatest assets of the railroad. It is generally expressed in great shops located here and there and everywhere, at convenient points upon the system.
Generally the maintenance-of-way department comes under operating--it is only fair that a general manager should supervise the condition of the line over which he is expected to operate his trains at high speed and in absolute safety. The same argument should hold true as to the equipment.
But right here is the great rock upon which the principle of American railroad organization splits in twain.
From the president's office downward, the system of organization may be divisional or departmental. In the former case, the division superintendent is the real unit of railroad operation: under his guidance and responsibility come not only the operation of the trains but the maintenance both of the line and of the rolling-stock. In the case of departmental organization that superintendent--and also, above him, the general superintendent--exercises no authority over the engineers of maintenance-of-way or the master mechanics of the shops along the system.
Those lines of railroad activity do not converge with that of train operation below the office of the general manager. The greatest outside power that is given to a division superintendent on a purely departmental road is a sort of cooperation with the master mechanic in the matter of the men who handle the road's motive power. This cooperation is many times intricate and involved. If the master mechanic and the division superintendent are not harmoniously inclined toward one another, and things very naturally go wrong with the motive-power, it is a difficult matter to locate responsibility.
The Pennsylvania system, which is one of the most perfectly organized in the world, is strongly organized upon the divisional system. The division superintendent upon the Pennsylvania is indeed a prince above his principality, and he is well trained for his rulership. Pennsylvania men go through the mill. It takes a pretty capable man to combine the ability for handling trains and handling men with the intricate knowledge for command over an engineering corps devoted to maintenance-of-way, as well as command over a machine-shop which may employ a thousand skilled workmen. In order to give its division heads that tremendous training, the Pennsylvania sends its men through its own West Point, the great shops at Altoona. The men who have sat in the big, roomy office in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, and who have been addressed as president, have been proud of the days when they were up in the hills of the Keystone State, standing their trick in overalls at the lathe, or carrying chain and rod over long stretches of track. To-day every Pennsylvania superintendent, possibly with a single exception or two, is a civil or mechanical engineer.
[Illustration: THE OLD AND THE NEW ON THE GREAT NORTHERN--THE "WILLIAM CROOKS," THE FIRST ENGINE OF THE HILL SYSTEM, AND ONE OF THE NEWEST MALLETS]
[Illustration: THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC FINDS DIRECT ENTRANCE INTO SAN FRANCISCO FOR ONE OF ITS BRANCH LINES BY TUNNELS PIERCING THE HEART OF THE SUBURBS]
[Illustration: PORTAL OF THE ABANDONED TUNNEL OF THE ALLEGHANY PORTAGE RAILROAD NEAR JOHNSTOWN, PA., THE FIRST RAILROAD TUNNEL IN THE UNITED STATES]
On the other hand, the New York Central has also been brought into a high state of organization, and stands firmly on the departmental plan.
"We believe that our superintendents should specialize in train operation," says one of the high officers of that road. "In other words, we do not believe that a man, to get his traffic through over a stretch of line, should necessarily know to a fraction of an inch the best wheel-base for an engine of a given type or the precise construction of a truss bridge. Such requirements take away from the special training that is to-day needed for every high-class railroader. A railroader is made better by sticking to one thing and sticking to it faithfully; and our departmental method, by which the maintenance of line and rolling-stock comes under the sole supervision of men expert in those specialties, we think the best. Sometimes we develop a very wizard in traffic handling, who has never had a chance at a technical education."
And there you have the very essence of the other side of the proposition.
Between these two sides there are various shadings and gradings, but the question has never been definitely solved. It has reduced the vast complexity in the organization of the modern railroad of the larger size.
That has become so very complex it fairly cried for expert relief. One man has recently spent a busy term of years in simplifying the organization of the Harriman lines. To cut the intricate lines of red-tape in a big railroad office, to reduce to a minimum the vast needless correspondence between departments and between branches of a single department, is a problem that calls for genius--and offers for its solution no small reward.
In other days--and we refer to no ancient history, for the electric light was proved and the hundred-ton locomotive already increasing the average tonnage of the American freight train--the presidents of the biggest roads were content to worry along with one or two assistants. But two decades ago, the railroads were still simple matters; there did not exist the intimate relations between one and the others of them, as shown by stockholdings in competing and feeding lines to-day--the constant waiting of their executives upon the sessions of the different railroad commissions. These complications of American railroading have also further complicated the organizations of the different systems, and have brought a demand for executives of the keenest type. It is no slight strain that a man works under when he becomes the head of a ten-thousand-mile railroad.
So to-day the president of the railroad has fortified himself in the only possible way--by creating vice-presidencies. Each ranking department to-day is apt to be recognized in council by a vice-president; and these heads form a cabinet as informal as that of the Federal Government and, in its way, quite as important. Legal traffic, and engineering traffic each demands a vice-president at that cabinet-board, and gets him. The general manager usually is the vice-president representing operation. One big road has eight vice-presidents. It is indeed a poor property that cannot show three or four men that are the fittest to hold this title.
There is another cabinet where the president must sit, which is formal and recognized; it is the board of directors. Between it and the lesser cabinet the president must take good care that he is not ground as between millstones. The cabinet of his department heads will tell him how he can spend his money; but he must get it from the upper cabinet. It is not always harmonious pulling in the upper cabinet. Imagine for a moment the troubles that sometimes arise in the lower.
You are sitting in the office of a big railroad president, talking straight to that big-shouldered soul himself. Outside is the shadowy roof of the train-shed of a terminal, which is filled with long lines of cars that come and go, of platforms that are black with humans one instant and quite deserted the next. The room has the quiet elegance of a comfortable home library. There are long rows of books upon the shelves; a great table is set squarely in the centre. But it is business--for a ticker is slowly spelling the fate of that railroad and every other railroad, upon the endless tape; a huge map of the system--many thousands of miles of high-class railroad--lies under the glass that covers the table top.
"They don't always pull together," the president of the railroad admits, when you ask him about the lower cabinet. "Sometimes they pull apart when they have honestly different ideas as to policy, and other times--there's to be a big college football game up at G---- next Saturday. We have only two private cars for our four vice-presidents, every single blessed one of whom wants to go. I don't want to go myself, and I've contributed my car, but we're one short then, and the man that's left is going around like a boy who's had a chip knocked off his shoulder. He's just been in here, and I've settled the matter by hiring a car for his party from the Pullman folks and footing the bill myself. I sent him out ashamed of himself.
"That's Pete every time. Flares up quick, and every time he flares up I can remember when we were working the day-and-night tricks in a God-forsaken junction out on a prairie stretch of the Great West. He's like a boy in some ways--awfully fussy about the rights and prerogatives of his department; and he'll go all to pieces over some little thing if he thinks another man has stepped over on to his side of the line. But let a big situation arise--a flood that sets a whole division of our lines awash; a wicked congestion of traffic in midwinter blizzards; a nasty accident that takes away our nerve--and you ought to see Pete! He'll be handling the thing as if he were putting a ball up on the links, and he'll never lose his confident smile. That man in one such emergency is worth the hire of a dozen Pullmans."
You ask about the upper cabinet, and the president lowers his voice. The board is no matter for light conversation. He steps to the window and points down into the concourse of the train-shed.
"I happen to know that young fellow over there by the mailbox," he answers. "He's one of our travelling freight-agents. He's lucky. He works for one boss, and is responsible to him; I work for a whole regiment of bosses, and am held responsible by a group of pretty keen old citizens who gather around this table and put me on the rack.
"There are many interests in this property, and some of them are too big to sleep in the same bed. I have three directors who never speak to one another outside of this room, and rarely ever in it. There is another who represents the holdings of a road that fights this at every turn, and he hurts the property worse than any good husky plague. A big estate, with a bitter aversion to spending money for any purpose whatsoever, has another director here; and a banking interest presents a director who seconds him in every move, fool or good. That is the crowd I have got to work with when I want ten or fifteen millions to hold our own against some other fellow who is crowding us hard for business in our competitive territory or threatening to run a line into one of our own private melon-patches.
That boy down there is lucky. He has only got to get out and land a couple of hundred carloads from a shipper who hates corporations worse than politics, and who has just had a claim for spoiled goods turned down by this particular corporation. That boy has the cinch job."
This imaginary railroad president has told you of one of the vital points in the business of the railroad, the necessity for constant teamwork. A railroad head may have the genius of a Napoleon, the stubborn persistence of a Grant, or the marvellous executive ability of a Pierpont Morgan, and be worthless if his board is not working enthusiastically with and for him. It is not all pie and preserves by any means. The board may set its sweet will straight against his, and he may be forced to execute a policy of which in his own mind he has no trust. It is only once in a generation that a man like Harriman, who can bend a whole mighty directorate to his absolute will, arises. Harriman was a railroad president in the fullest sense of the word.
He rode in his car north from Ogden one day, toward the great National Park of the Yellowstone. At that time the only direct rail entrance to that splendid reserve was by the rival Hill lines. Harriman had called for a report upon the opportunities for the Southern Pacific to strike its own line into the west edge of the Park. That report was being explained to him in great detail as he rode north from Ogden. His chiefs had a hundred practical reasons against building the line. Harriman listened faithfully to the explanation, as was his way. Then he turned to one of the signers of the report, a high officer of his property.
"You have never been in the Yellowstone?" he asked.
The officer admitted that he had not.
"I have," said Harriman triumphantly, "and I am going to build that road."
That road was built and became successful from its beginning; but Harriman was a railroader with the intuitive sense that gives genius to a great statesman or to a great general. The average railroad president does not hold a controlling interest himself and he must be guided pretty carefully by the judgment of his department heads; he must win the cooperation of his board by tact and subtlety rather than by the display of an iron will; and where he leads he must take the responsibility.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, as has already been told in an earlier chapter, recently forced its entrance into New York City and marked its terminal there with a monumental station. That move was a strategy of the highest order, and was made that the road might place itself upon an even fighting basis for traffic with its chief competitor. But it cost. Two mighty rivers had to be crossed, whole blocks of high-priced real estate secured, a busy city threaded, the opposition of local authorities (who stood with palms outstretched) honestly downed. That all cost. That would have been a mighty expenditure for the Federal Government; for a private corporation it was all but staggering.
When the station was finished, a rarely beautiful thing with its classic public rooms, its long vistas, and its vast dimensions, that private corporation built, within a niche of the great waiting-room, a bronze figure of its former president, the late A. J. Cassatt, where all hurrying humanity might see it. But, though a thousand nervous travellers see that statue in the passing of a single hour, not a hundred of them will know the splendid tragedy it represents; for many of the high officers of that railroad--some of the men who caused the bronze to be erected--to this day believe that the production of that great station was the cause of the death of their chief. He had dreamed of that terminal for years; his engineer had deemed it all but impossible, and he had sent overseas for other engineers. One of these, who had conquered the busy Thames, said that he could tunnel the two great rivers. He was asked the cost, and he gave it. His first figures were staggering, but the railroad president did not abandon his hope. He summoned his board and put the problem to them.