It was a big hay year and the farmer was not averse to turning in to do his part of the work. He liked to be with the boys he had hired and one of them had a camera that he could take "great" pictures with. He showed him some of the pictures that he took those August days on the Jersey farm.
The farmer liked them immensely.
He liked them rather less when his attorney came down from the city one day, with prints of the same pictures that had been sent him by the law department of the railroad. The farmer was given a chance to withdraw from the limelight or else stand a criminal trial for perjury, with the penitentiary's gray walls looming up behind. He took the chance. Few of the dishonest claimants will proceed after such evidence has been put before them. As for the railroad, it usually works better through getting signed confessions of guilt than by going through the somewhat intense workings of a criminal trial.
The secret service stands just back of the claim-agents. It has greater or less recognition in the case of different railroads but its work is generally much the same. It is police. Sometimes it is organized like the police department of a small city, with captains and inspectors at various division headquarters, and at other times its very existence is denied by the railroad heads. But its work is much the same. Its men, generally chosen for fitness from city police or detective staffs, sometimes root out tramps or small thieves along the line and in the freight-yards, sometimes in gay uniform patrol the platforms of crowded passenger terminals, sometimes work with greatest secrecy in "plain clothes"--which in this case may be jeans or overalls--to detect theft or treason among employees, and sometimes they receive their greatest laurels in connection with the "fake" suits that are brought against the railroad.
The secret-service works night and day. Its members, with the claim-agents, are at the scene of a serious accident as quickly as the wrecking-train itself. Together with the railroad's own corps of surgeons, retained in every important town, and chosen for absolute honesty and integrity, they form an important adjunct of the personal injury claim service.
The financial officer of the railroad is, of course, the treasurer. It is he who receives its earnings--running possibly into a hundred millions dollars in the course of a twelvemonth--and disburses them for supplies and for wages, for taxes and for bond coupons, and, it is to be hoped, for dividends. He works through appointed banks; and the bank president who can go out and capture one or two good railroad accounts for his institution has earned his salary for several years to come. The selection of the banks is one of the dramatic phases of the inside politics of railroading; it is a cause of constant wire-pullings and heartburnings.
"Do you see that whited sepulchre down there?" a big railroad head laughs to you as he points to a white marble skyscraper closing the vista of a city canyon. "This road built that temple of business. Our account is its backbone. Sometimes we deposit a million dollars a day and it is no uncommon thing for our balance there, approaching coupon or dividend times to reach sixteen or seventeen million dollars."
He laughs again, then grows confidential.
"We're in a bit of a hole," he admits. "Some of the big manufacturers downtown are organizing a bank, and it looks as if it was going to be a pretty solid sort of institution. They want a big account from us, and our traffic people are urging their cause. In the long run they'll get the account."
Then he explains to you that the railroad endeavors to hold down its bank accounts, although it must have them in a large number of different cities, to avoid the long shipments of large quantities of money. The agents and the conductors will, following a carefully arranged system, send their receipts to the nearest designated banks, mailing memorandum slips of the deposit both to the treasurer and to the comptroller. The bank in its turn, sends receipt slips to both of these officers, so the deposit transaction is hedged about with a sufficient degree of formality and detail.
When it comes to pay out its money, the railroad has no lessened degree of formality and detail. For the wages of its employees--generally the greatest of all expenditures--the railroad has proper system and order.
The paymaster makes out the voluminous pay-rolls, they are each properly attested by the heads of departments; and for his pay-roll totals, the necessary vouchers are issued to him by the treasurer. He may pay the railroad army by check or he may send his deputies out over the system in the pay-cars.
The pay-car is one of the pleasantest of the surviving old-time railroad customs. The shriek of the whistle of the engine that hauls it is the pleasantest melody that can come to the ears of the man out upon the line.
To shuffle in a long line up to its platform window where the railroad's money is being paid out in tiny envelopes, as each man signs the impressive roll, is one of the greatest joys that anticipation can hold out. As the car makes its routine trip over the line each month or each fortnight, it draws its money from the various repository banks, or else the cash is forwarded to it at division points from headquarters.
But, like many old customs, the pay-car is disappearing. The railroads are more and more paying their men by check. It is a better system in many ways. It avoids the handling of large sums of money, and many of the men prefer not to have a roll of bills thrust into their hands. The old prejudice among them against checks is practically over. The checks are constant incentives toward saving, the small banks in the little town are shrewdly reaching for the accounts of the thrifty railroaders. There may not be much for the bank in just one of these accounts, but they can quickly multiply into considerable sums.
We have already spoken of the comptroller; he is called the auditor upon some of our railroads. The comptroller is the most passionless and unemotional of all railroad officials. He measures the worth of his fellows by cold mathematical rules, by addition, by subtraction, by multiplication, by division. Even as big a man as the president may shudder at the result of such coldly accurate measurings.
No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval of the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise, men fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight.
His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule, an auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight receipts report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of sharp-eyed young men, each also having an almighty respect for mathematical accuracy, will be up and down the line for him, catching up careless agents on the one hand, and on the other gently showing them how to keep their accounts better, and conform more carefully to the company's established standards. Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the mileage of the company's cars travelling over other roads, and the equipment of other roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the comptroller, oftener, however, directly to the operating department. All these make a considerable office--an office which usually treads its monotonous path and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well considered in the organization of the railroad.
The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels--as we have already indicated--passenger receipts, freight receipts and disbursements, and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the accounting has, of course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash fare collections made by conductors upon the trains. This would be simple enough bookkeeping if a good many years ago the interline or coupon ticket, entitling the bearer to ride upon several different roads, had not come into popularity. To apportion the revenue of a ticket between the half-dozen different lines upon which it has been used requires almost no end of system and accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting with its fellows, with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The coupons themselves are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single road--because of the freight as well as the passenger business--may be kept standing in the treasuries of several hundred other roads. It is a system quite as intricate, in itself, as the relations between city and country banking and yet it is only a single small phase of the conduct of the railroad.
The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization, make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors at the end of each day's run. He must see to it that the conductor is neither careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will bring the matter quickly to the attention of the operating department.
In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad passenger traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones across the country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles' riding at a saving over local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has complied with its provisions within the year's life of the book, he will be paid $5 rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding at two cents a mile. Sometimes these books take the form of "scrip" which is silent upon mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent portions, sold at wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five cents each.
In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where there is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have to be very careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage books. The law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to passenger receipts, for the law seems to point to even finer lines than the comptroller. He cannot even subtract the $5 which will probably return to the purchaser, and charge the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales must be credited to a separate account, and only transferred to the main receipts of the railroad as the strip is turned in for passage, a few miles at a time.
Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle that comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone will sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office, will involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the railroads.
And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation and settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the railroad. There is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an overcharge claim, the routine is comparatively simple. The audit office should have information at hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle it immediately. But if the claim is for lost or damaged freight, the thing complicates. Before the freight claim department will draw a voucher against the treasurer, it will have to assure its own conscience that the claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.
From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills--pays its men, as we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and its fire insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the twelve months of the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between receipts and expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and attested vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed the very best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt stating the precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid.
In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the mileage of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement.
Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores, and the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these the comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive performances--so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then he will show the average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon, for the railroad never forgets the cost.
It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost and revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics become graphic, and the comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office, prepares charts, in which statistics become "curves of averages" or jotted and wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning.
"Government by draughting-board," sniffs the old-time railroader as he sees these great "cross-hatched" sheets with their crazy lines of intelligence spun across them, but it is "government by draughting-board"
that has made the old-time railroader--well, the old-time railroader. The new-time railroader gives heed to those charts--the pulse readings of the creature that he is directing--guides his course in no small way by them.
They are veritable charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.
Branching, as a rule, direct from the president's office and occasionally from the general manager's, are the purchasing agent and the store-keeper, many times one and the same, or the former acting as superior to the latter. The purchasing agent has no easy role. If he is not above sharp practices--the gift of a bit of furniture or a theatre box, in the least instances--he will fulfil only part of the reputation of his office; and if he is--as many, many of them are--absolutely honest down to the keenest degree of an acute conscience, he will probably still be under the suspicion of some querulous minds. His opportunities for deceit and guile are many, so much the more must he be an honest man in every full sense of that word.
He brings the modern railroad's passion for standardization down to the purchase of its every sort of supplies; for his office goes out into the market for anything, from a box of matches to a locomotive. The very fact that his department is a non-revenue department, save for an occasional sale of scrap-iron or discarded materials, only serves to put him the more upon his guard. He must not yield to the wiles of crafty salesmen. He must measure their wares by a single standard--economy, as expressed in selling-price, in durability, and in cost of maintenance; and upon that standard he must decide between them, as impartially as a justice upon the bench.
He must be guided by standard. If it be typewriters, he must struggle against the preference of this department or that for some particular machine, and bring all to the test of his three-headed economy. The successful machine will then be adopted for the system and brought as such. No small responsibility rests upon his accuracy of judgment.
His store-keeper must see to it that there is no waste of supplies. He must see to it, for instance, that the engineers are as careful in their use of oils as the clerk in that of stationery.
"We use $4,000 worth of lead pencils alone in the course of a single year," says one of them; "and if we didn't keep hammering at the boys, that figure would jump to $5,000 or $6,000 without realizing it."
He keeps check on the supplies that he issues. His stock of blank forms, alone, would do credit to a wholesale stationery house in a sizable city; for the railroad is a liberal user of printer's ink in its own devices. He must be thrifty and he must be economical; he must look to it that the railroad's money is not wasted in the purchase and use of its supplies.
Together with the general counsel, the general attorney, the claim-agent, the treasurer, and the comptroller, the purchasing agent and the store-keeper stand as guardians of the railroad's strong-box.
CHAPTER XII
THE GENERAL MANAGER
HIS DUTY TO KEEP EMPLOYEES IN HARMONIOUS ACTION--"THE SUPERINTENDENT DEALS WITH MEN; THE GENERAL MANAGER WITH SUPERINTENDENTS"--"THE GENERAL MANAGER IS REALLY KING"--CASES IN WHICH HIS POWER IS ALMOST DESPOTIC--HE MUST KNOW MEN.
The general manager operating the railroad is held strictly responsible for the economical movement of the trains and the maintenance of the property. To the greatest portion of the railroad army (nine-tenths of it employed in the operating department) he is an uncrowned king. The superintendent, as we shall presently see, is the unit of the operation of the road, just as the division over which he is head is one of the physical units that go to make up some thousands of miles of first-class railroad track. The division superintendent deals in men; the general manager deals in division superintendents; and right there is the radical difference between the two.
The superintendent must see to it that his men get a square deal. If he does not see to it in the first instance they will see to it in the last, and woe to him if such be the case. For the men who work on the steam railroad are well-paid, well-read, keenly sensitive as to their privileges and their rights. And from these men have come the division superintendents, as different each from the other as men can be grown. It is the general manager's chief duty to bring these very different men into harmonious action. That is absolutely essential to the successful operation of the railroad. The general manager must have absolute firmness with his superintendents. He can appoint or discharge them as they can appoint or discharge their trainmen--more quickly in fact, for up to the present time there is no brotherhood of railroad superintendents.
A certain division superintendent in the East had 150 miles of busy double-track trunk line under his direction. At his headquarters were a big classification yard and a coaling-station for the engine of the two divisions that intersected there. In the course of gradually increasing business, the coaling-station, which stood in a narrow ledge beside the main-line tracks and under the breast of a steep mountain-side, had to be enlarged. In so small a place, that was a difficult engineering problem.
It was necessary to build much bigger coal-pockets and while the engineers were removing the old and building the new station, temporary coaling facilities had to be provided for the busy engine point. That part of the problem--more operating than engineering--was finally solved by going across the main-line tracks and locating a temporary coaling-station there. That made a bad situation--with the heavy main-line traffic constantly intersecting with engines drilling back and forth to their coal supply, and the general manager was quick to realize it. He went up there and warned his superintendent.
"This is a danger place," he said, "and a mighty bad one at that. That tower's too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two flagmen here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard every engine that crosses these main-line tracks."
Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility for that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The division superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed.
The requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of the system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn't tell a coal-pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered that he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll--and the requisition went into the waste-basket. The division superintendent did not try to get another requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing and told the towerman in the cabin--almost half a mile away--to keep as good a watch as possible of the cross-over.
The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were half a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager's office.
"I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special signalmen," that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so cleared himself of the responsibility.
And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase, it offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the man who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them are far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek to remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.