There are side-lines of less importance that sometimes do not see him for six months at a time.
Of less importance, did we say? We had better not let him hear us breathe that, for there are men in his employ who remember the first council of the operating department staff after this G. M. came to the road. They were gathered there for the time-table meeting--a general superintendent, a whole round dozen of division superintendents, serious traffic-minded folk from the passenger department, an auxiliary corps of chief clerks and stenographers. Division by division, the passenger time-table problem was adjusted. This superintendent asked a little more running time, for they were putting in a cluster of new bridges, which made slow orders necessary; another was thereupon forced to shorten his schedule, for the total running time between main-line terminals of a road in hot competitive territory could not be increased a single sixty seconds.
Finally, after a vast amount of argument, the main-line divisions were settled, and attention was given to the side-lines. The first of these ran through a section purely rural, but there was not a busier 500 miles of single track in the East.
The general superintendent called attention to it, with a laugh.
"We'll now tackle the hoejack," said he.
It was an old joke, and the division heads began to laugh. They stopped laughing the next instant. The new general manager was on his feet and pounding thunderously upon his table top. His face was crimson, as he demanded attention.
"Gentlemen," said he, scathingly, "the great railroad from which I have had the honor to come has prided itself upon being a standard railroad.
Its standard is universal wherever its cars and engines run, and its jurisdiction extends. Some of its lines are the busiest traffic-haulers in the land. The four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough for the great volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that press upon their rails. There are some side-lines, with but two or three trains a day--side-lines that reach the main-line only through other branches. But there are no hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters upon that system. Hereafter there are to be none upon this. The man who is hauling a train on the most remote corner of this railroad is doing its work quite as much as the biggest trainmaster here at the terminal. I trust you follow me?"
They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the railroads of the land.
But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular side-line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us quite aside he tells it to us:
"The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute on the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. 'Are you the general manager of this 'ere road?' he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle bucolic soul, and he says 'yes,' and offers him a real cigar. But the gentle bucolic doesn't smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up and says, 'Well, General, here's somethin' fer ye,' and shoves a paper with a big red seal into the boss's hand.
"It seems that up in that neck o' woods they get grade crossings removed as a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the constable served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight for a hearing on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in West Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn't enough traffic over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we never had an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in use. And at that the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way they rubbed it into him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a decent way--first sent a committee down to the division superintendent to request that flagman.
"He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing was right 'in the heart of the community,' as they put it themselves, and the big citizens' houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our right-of-way. Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town Hall, the boss starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in the morning before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with their rods and sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front lawns. And the next thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the flower-beds. There hadn't been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook since the last time Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk hustled down to the depot. The agent didn't ease their minds. The boss wasn't working hand in glove with him.
"When the night came for the big time at the Town Hall, it was a regular 'standing-room only' business. The boss kept in the background while the great minds of the township did their best. When it came his turn he clamped across the platform like an avenging angel. He is a big fellow, and that night he looked seven-foot-six, as he stuck his long fingers out over that intelligent body politic and asked what it meant by trying to cow the only first-class railroad that had ever had enough energy to put its rails down in that township. Then he calls up an engineer from our construction department.
"'Mr. Blinkins,' he says, in a voice that you could have heard across the public square, 'this railroad has decided to temporize no longer in this highway crossing situation on its lines. How much will it cost to put a subway under our track at this crossing?'
"The engineer dove into his drawings and said: 'It'll be quite a big job, and we'll have to cut quite a way into some of the front yards to get the foundations for our abutments. My estimate of the cost of the proposed improvement is $160,000.'
"Then it was the boss's turn again. 'Under the state law, work on abolishing a grade crossing begins by the railroad expressing its willingness,' he told them. 'The cost is divided--half being borne by the railroad, the other half being divided between the township and the State.
West Lyndonbrook's share will reach $40,000.' Forty thousand dollars--why $40,000 would have built either the new union school or the waterworks that that burg had been hankering for and thought it couldn't afford. When the boss breathed about that $40,000 it started the old feuds between the waterworks crowd and the school crowd. They forgot all about the crossing and our sin-filled railroad, and got to hammering anew on the old issue.
We slinked out while they were still at it--had the car hooked on to the rear of thirty-eight and got started while the oratory was taking a fresh turn.
"The boss? The boss is a diplomat. That's how he keeps his job."
CHAPTER XIII
THE SUPERINTENDENT
HIS HEADSHIP OF THE TRANSPORTATION ORGANISM--HIS MANNER OF DEALING WITH AN OFFENDED SHIPPER--HIS MANNER WITH COMMUTERS--HIS MANNER WITH A SPITEFUL "KICKER"--A DISHONEST CONDUCTOR WHO HAD A "PULL"--A SYSTEM OF DEMERITS FOR EMPLOYEES--DEALING WITH DRUNKARDS--WITH SELFISH AND COVETOUS MEN.
If the general manager is king in modern railroad operation, the division superintendent is not less than prince. His principality is no mean state.
It may consist of some 500 miles of what he modestly admits is the "best sort of railroad in all this land"; or it may be a little stretch of 100 miles, or even less, losing its way back among the hills; but it _is_ a principality, and his rule is undisputed. If ever it be questioned, it will then be high time for him to abdicate.
Just as the division is the physical unit of railroad operation, so is its superintendent the human unit. By him the transportation organism stands or falls. If it stands, he is able to go forward; the path from his door leads to the general manager's office. If it falls--Well, there is to-day in Central Illinois a gray-haired station-agent who once held his own principality--4,000 men to take his orders.
"We only discharge for disobedience or dishonesty," said the president of that railroad at the time he signed the order reducing the prince to the ranks. "When we fail to get the real measure of a man, it is our fault, not his. We never turn out a man who has done his level best for us."
This man is superintendent of one of the most prosperous of the trunk-line railroads that reach the metropolis by stretching their rails across New Jersey. His is a "terminal division," so called, and he has assumed command of one of the busiest city gates in all America. His railroad day begins almost as soon as he is awake. There is a telegraph outfit in the corner of his bedroom, and as he dresses and shaves he listens mechanically to its scoldings--to the gossip of the division. It comes as casually to his ear as the prattle of his children; the key began to be music to him long before he left the little yellow depot where he first began to be a railroader.
"They're in pretty good shape this morning, John," laughs his wife. She, too, has been listening half unconsciously to the gossip of the wire.
Years ago she "stood her trick" with her husband back in that little yellow depot.
"Got a coal train in the ditch up the other side of Greyport," is his reply. "We'll rip out that nasty cross-over up there some day, when the big boss wakes up to the cash we've put out in wrecks at GP."
"Going up there?"
"Not this morning, Maggie," he laughs. "I've a committee from the firemen coming in to see me. They're nagging for a raise." He lowers his voice, as if he almost thought that the walls had ears. "It's beginning to grind the boys, too--butter 48 cents, eggs 45, and all their hungry kiddies. But the big boss--whew!"
He whistles, goes to his key, cuts in, and begins to give orders to the wrecking-boss up at Greyport.
"Steady, Jim," he says, in a low voice. "You've got all day on that job if you need it, only watch out for the number two track with your crane. We can't risk a side-swipe on one of our pretty trains. We're detouring the east-bound passengers over the Central. How's Hinckley?"
He closes the circuit softly.
"Poor Hinckley," he says gently. "Do you remember, Maggie? He was married the same summer we were."
Through with his breakfast, he hurries down to the station, and before he slips aboard the suburban train that is to carry him in to his Jersey City office, he has had the wire again into Greyport. They are getting things cleaned up there a bit; a baggage-car has been sent up with a special engine for Hinckley. The superintendent turns from these. One of the little trains that come out from town in the dusk of early dawn has brought a leather bag filled with mail. He runs through it as his train slips across the meadows. By the time he is in his roomy office it is ready to be answered, a pencilled memorandum on each is sufficient guide for his chief clerk.
Throughout the morning his calendar is a crowded thing. There is a constant line of restless men sitting on the long bench just without the guarded rail of the outside office. One by one these are called; they disappear behind swinging baize doors to stand in front of the superintendent.
For the first of these there is a smile--the caller is a big shipper, big enough to go to the head of the line and have instant access to the boss.
This shipper is the sort who gives the railroad tonnage in trainload lots.
He is hot. He cannot get cars. He will begin to route over the Triple B----, even though his siding facilities are wrong for it. _They'll_ dig him out the cars he needs, they have folks over there who make it their business to find cars. And while he is on the subject it seems pretty bad to have stuff coming twelve and fourteen days through from Chicago.
Perhaps he'd better be getting after the Commission. The shipper is very hot. He expatiates upon his wrongs, hammers upon the superintendent's desk, grows scarlet in his heavy face.
The superintendent's smile never wavers. He gives close attention, does not grow excited. A few orders over the telephone, a word of explanation, the shipper smiles now. Down in his heart he begins to be sorry that he made these threats about the Triple B----.
That is getting traffic, you say, and the superintendent is an operating man. You are a bit wrong there. The superintendent is a _railroad_ man and that means that any part of the railroad business is his business. There is a man, by name A. H. Smith, who is to-day operating vice-president of the New York Central system, who held to that idea from the beginning. In the beginning, Smith was the superintendent of a little side-tracked division of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern which centred in at Hillsdale, Michigan. It was a strong competitive territory, and Smith found that the traffic that came to his road was so slight that it did not take a great deal of his time to move it. The superintendents before him had had a lot of time to speed their fast horses and fuss around their gardens. Not so with Smith. He went into the business of making traffic.
It was a decade that took keen delight in singing societies, and Smith's robust voice allied itself to every choir of importance in three counties.
He sang himself into personal popularity, he sang traffic into coming over the Michigan Southern. After a while, the folks over in the general offices at Cleveland began to take notice. The traffic folks were the first to notice, after that--well, a long story's short when you know that Smith found himself on a short cut to his present job.
The superintendent's smile remains while a solemn-faced delegation of commuters files into his room. These grave folk have been coming into town on the 8:52 almost since the road first laid its rails. It is part of their lives, and they fondly imagine that it is a big part of the road's--that the twenty-hour train over the mountains to Chicago is a matter of considerably less importance than the 8:52. The superintendent broadens his bland smile and rings for his train sheets. There are other trains than the 8:52 coming into that terminal--almost a train a minute from a little before eight o'clock until half-past nine. The superintendent's finger runs for corroboration over the train sheets.
Twenty-five days this month when 94 per cent of his suburban trains come under the protection of the big shed of the terminal right on the scheduled moment--how was that for consistency of operation?
The commuters' committee seem a little dazed. Individually, the men are expert on a good many things--printing, indictments, breakfast foods, patents, wholesale feathers; but consistency of train operation and train sheets are a bit confusing.
"The 8:52 has been late a whole lot recently," doggedly affirms the chairman. "Last Thursday we were pretty near fifteen minutes late."
A gleam of triumph comes into the superintendent's eye. He fumbles anew among the flimsy train sheets. His forefinger alights upon a line of the typewritten copy.
"Last Thursday," he comments, "you can see that we were all laid out by the Hackensack River draw. A schooner filled with brick got caught by the ebb tide and laid down on us in the open draw. What you want to see, gentlemen, is the Treasury departments down at Washington. It is outrageous that the antiquated navigation laws should be allowed to hold up business in that way."
The committee confer among themselves and decide to make the life of the Secretary of the Treasury uncomfortable for a while.