"You cannot hope for anything better with that Hackensack Bridge," urges the superintendent almost malevolently.
He does not tell them, but the boys out on the line know his own experience with the Hackensack River bridge. Last December and just in the evening rush-hours they found that the cabin that stands perched at the top of the trussed draw was afire. The trains bringing home the tired suburbanites were beginning to line up back of the fire for solid miles.
The tired suburbanites were saying things about this particular railroad.
It chanced that this superintendent was a passenger on one of the trains.
He went forward to the blaze. The towerman had beat a retreat. The superintendent started to climb up the ice-covered ladder tower toward the burning cabin. The towerman halted him. The wiry superintendent turned upon him with a look of infinite scorn:
"We've got to hand signal those trains across here--there's thousands of folks out here in the meadows that we can't let miss their supper--"
"I've got a family--" began the towerman.
"That's all right. I'll signal these across."
"That ain't it, boss. Back o' th' cabin's the gasolene tanks, the stuff for openin' th' draw."
The superintendent gave a low whistle.
"That settles it," he said. "We've _got_ to put this fire out. I can't risk cutting this draw out of service."
It is a matter of record on that railroad that he climbed alone to the top of the draw and began to put out the fire with his own stout endeavors. He was not alone for long. Inspired by him, the men that gathered there--engineers, firemen, trainmen, and conductors, crawled up upon that freezing cold draw and lent him their efforts. In a half-hour the fire was out, and the stalled trains were moving again.
This, then, is the measure of the man who sits across the wide office table from you. The mollified commuters are marching out.
"You don't encourage kicking?" you ask.
"We don't discourage it," he replied. He is reminded of a story and tells it to you.
"When they made Blank superintendent over there at Broad Street, in Philadelphia, he went in to make a clean record. He called his chief clerk to him. 'Mind you, if you hear kicks, don't let them get in one ear and out the other. You bring them in here and we'll investigate.' In three days the chief clerk was busy. 'Lots of trouble with the suburban traffic to-day,' he would say. 'Wilmington train laid out at Grey's Ferry; third day that's happened.' 'Ugly trainman on the main line wouldn't close the rear doors. That fellow's unpopular.' 'Not enough equipment on the Central division.' 'No fire in the stove at Lenden Road,'--a long string of commuter troubles. After Blank had heard this for a week he began to get nervous. He called his chief clerk to him. 'See here,' he demanded, 'what's the matter with our service? Where are all these kicks coming in from?' The chief clerk looked at him--never a snicker. 'You said you wanted the kicks,' he replied. 'Well, I've been letting the head barber downstairs shave me after he was done with the commuters. He gets every one of the howls.'"
Sometimes the kicks represent a serious side of the superintendent's problem. A while ago a man came to a railroad superintendent in Boston and demanded that a certain ticket-examiner in the passenger terminal be dismissed. There had been some sort of dispute and the man insisted that the ticket-examiner be discharged, nothing less. The ticket-examiner, on his part, told a pretty fair sort of story. Moreover, he said that if in the heat of the dispute he had transgressed on good manners he was frankly sorry and that it would not happen again. Back of all that he had a good record: no complaints had ever before been registered against him. The superintendent then wrote a letter to the man who had complained and stated that the offending ticket-examiner had been reprimanded and that the offence would probably not be repeated.
[Illustration: THE CONDUCTOR IS A HIGH TYPE OF RAILROAD EMPLOYEE]
[Illustration: THE ENGINEER--OIL-CAN IN HAND--IS FOREVER FUSSING AT HIS MACHINE]
[Illustration: RAILROAD RESPONSIBILITY DOES NOT END EVEN WITH THE TRACK WALKER]
[Illustration: THE FIREMAN HAS A HARD JOB AND A STEADY ONE]
That did not satisfy the man who complained. He was of the sort that are supposed to have a "pull," and he threatened to use his pull if the ticket-examiner were not discharged. He refused to accept apologies or explanations. He said he was hot. So was the superintendent. He keenly resented anything that approached interference with his discipline, and he refused to discharge his employee. Pressure was exerted, the pull was doing its fine work. The superintendent was--like every other railroad superintendent in this land--a fine diplomat. He took the man from the train gate in the terminal and gave him an equally good job in a city a hundred miles distant from Boston. He flattered himself that he had seen the last of the man with the pull.
Not a bit of it. That brisk soul chanced to pass through the distant town, and gasped at sight of the former ticket-examiner still drawing pay from the railroad. He hastened into the superintendent's office in Boston and demanded that the subterfuge end--that the man be actually discharged from the road's employ. The superintendent looked at him coolly, not speaking.
The man again threatened his pull. The railroad boss looked at him through slitted eyes. It was a real crisis for him. His diplomatic smile was ready. He pointed with his lean forefinger toward the door.
"The case is closed. Good-morning," was all he said.
After that he began wondering what road would have him after that pull was exerted. He wondered for a day, for a week, then a month. Then he forgot the occurrence. The pull, like many other sorts of threats, was thin air.
Of a different sort was the problem that confronted a superintendent in Chicago. On a certain suburban train for many years the conductor had remained with an unchanged run. Gossip had come into the super's office that this conductor was systematically stealing from the company. The boss started a quiet investigation. The conductor with apparently no other income than his $3 a day, had purchased a neat home in the suburbs, had sent his boy to Yale, his girl to Vassar. That was Thrift, with a capital T. The superintendent took the case sharply in hand and summoned the conductor before him. He was one of the older sort, gray-haired, kind-faced.
"Johnson," said the boss, "you've been with the road a long time and never had a vacation. I want you to lay off a month and run over to either coast. I'll get the transportation for you."
Johnson protested. He belonged to a generation of railroaders that was not educated to vacations. The superintendent insisted and had his way, as superintendents generally do. Johnson started on his vacation, and a substitute, knowing nothing of the real situation, replaced him. The returns from that daily run doubled, and the superintendent knew that he was right.
Nowadays when a railroad finds that a conductor is stealing, it invokes the majesty of the Interstate Commerce Law and prepares to hurry him off toward a Federal prison. In that day they were content to fire Johnson; that was sufficient disgrace to the old man. The railroad could not begin to get back the money that had been trickling out throughout the long years.
But Johnson showed fight. His was an important train in the Chicago suburban service, and his passengers were important merchants and manufacturers--big shippers. They got together, under Johnson's supervision, and made the hair on the heads of the traffic men turn gray.
Those fellows were Johnson's friends, and they were not going to see the N---- turn out a faithful employee. Johnson said that he had not stolen, and Johnson was not the sort to lie. It might do the N---- good to send some tonnage over to the M----. The traffic department and the operating locked horns, as ofttimes they do on roads, both big and little. Traffic won. The superintendent lost, Johnson went back to his job, and the road put on a checking system that made its conductors wonder if they had held convict records.
That case was an exception. There are not many superintendents who are compelled to back water, mighty few Johnsons among the thousands of conductors across the land.
We are still in that superintendent's office in Jersey City. The boss's smile is gone. A big railroader just in from the line, his jeans covered with engine grease, shuffles into the place and stands before the super, hat in hand, like a naughty boy ready to be whipped. The superintendent speaks in a few low sentences to him, makes a notation on an envelope. The big man trembles in front of the little. A bit of a smile comes to the lips of the boss.
"You think of the wife and the kiddies first next time," he says.
"Good-bye and good luck to you. I'm not much for lecturings," he adds, after the man has gone. A little later he begins to explain. "That big fellow had to be disciplined. There was no two ways about it for either of us. He's an engine-man, got a good train, too; but he's been running signals. We've caught him twice on test. We can't stand for that. Suppose we have a nasty smash and the coroner's jury begins to ask nosey questions? I had to put black on his envelope."
He goes into further detail. In other days he would have been forced, in order to uphold his discipline, to suspend the engineer for from five days to two weeks--the punishment preceding discharge. There was a possibility--disagreeable to the superintendent--that the engineer's family might have been crowded for sufficient food for a fortnight. Some of those fellows live pretty close to the proposition all the while.
Nowadays the offender is demerited--once again like the schoolboy. That is what the superintendent meant by that reference to the envelope, the road's record of the man's service with it.
Sixty demerits--dismissed. That's the rule of one big road. But the record does not always continue to be negative. Its positive side rests in the fact that for every month a man keeps his envelope clear five demerits are taken from the black side of his envelope. A trainman might have forty-five demerits against him, be on the narrow edge of discharge, and in eleven months, after turning the new leaf, have as clean a sheet as the best man on the division. This is as it should be. The demerit plan--often called the "Brown system"--represents the triumph of modern railroad operation over the old.
The superintendent may have all the advantages of a time-tried disciple and a modern record system; have the prestige and the reputation that come from the operation of 500 miles of railroad, and still have a hard row to hoe. Out in the Middle West there was, until recently, a stretch of what was known as "booze railroad." It was a division where reputations and records alike counted for naught, where discipline was a mockery.
Train-crews went from their runs direct to saloons and, what was a deal worse, began their day's work within them. The wreck record of that division that went forward to the State Commission was appalling--and half the wrecks were not reported. Yardmasters were busy day after day stowing away damaged equipment far from the curious eyes of passengers--the wrecking crews were hammering for big over-time pay. It was a thoroughly demoralized stretch of railroad.
The distressed president of the system sent East for a superintendent who had a reputation. He thought he had his man. The new broom was a book-of-rules man. He had a quarter of his operating force laid off all the time, to go before him. He was a man fond of words, and he lectured those old fellows as if they had been school children. He might have done quite as well with his division if he had been operating it from Kamchatka. The men began to call their rule-books the "Joe Millers."
The superintendent got mad and was lost--hopelessly. He began discharging right and left, and the wrath of the gods and of the brotherhoods (the great labor unions of the railroads), was upon him. The road was threatened with a big strike at the very time that it could least afford it. He avoided that strike only by acceding to the demand of the brotherhood chiefs that the superintendent's head be given to them on a silver platter. After that the "Man Without a Country" was in a more enviable position. There was not a railroad in the country that dared employ him, despite his excellent technical training. He drifted up into Canada, got a job running a state-operated line. He held that job less than a year. He was murdered of a winter's night in a shadowy railroad yard, shot down by a discharged train hand.
The grim situation on the "booze division" grew much worse. The president of that system gave the matter his keen personal attention; he began scouring the entire width of the land for material, without much success.
When he was thoroughly discouraged, a raw-boned trainmaster from a far corner of the demoralized division applied for the job of superintendent; he reckoned he could handle the situation. He had caught the president unawares standing outside of his private car. The president told him that he was superintendent.
"There was something in Matt's eye that took me," he confessed afterwards.
"You do see something in a man's eye now and then that beats a whole barrel of references."
So Matt Jones (that is nothing like his real name), took up the nastiest operating proposition in the country. He did not lecture nor discharge, not he; but the men knew that there was a boss behind the super's desk.
The fellows who began trifling with the new broom were down in his office the next morning. Jones selected the leading spirit; he had the advantage of knowing him.
"Pete," he said in a quiet way, "you've been drinking. It doesn't go. I'm not going to discharge you,"--he gave grim thought to the fate of his predecessor--"but in thirty days you are going to send in your resignation voluntarily and leave our service."
The man protested. He had not been drinking; and Matt Jones had better not try that game anyway. The superintendent wished him a pleasant good-morning and bowed him out of the office.
In five days the engineer was back, uncalled. The superintendent saw him, even though he had no more to say than he had not been drinking; that is, he had quit drinking long ago. In ten days he was back again. This time he admitted that he had been drinking up to the day that Matt Jones took office. The superintendent said nothing. He bowed the engineer out again.
A month is a short thing at the best. At the end of the twenty-second day, the engineer again found his way to the superintendent's office. He seemed like a man who had been through a sickness. Big human that he was, he began crying at the sight of the man who was a real boss.
"For God's sake, Matt, don't forget the old days up on the branch. I can't get out from the old road," he said.
"I gave you thirty days' chance to get on another road," was all the satisfaction that he got.
But on the thirtieth day the engineer went to work with a clean envelope and the new superintendent had an ally of no mean strength. The patient grinding won; complete victory was only a question of time; the president five hundred miles away began to notice. You may say what you want, railroad executives are born, not made. This reads like romance, but it is truth. Matt Jones is to-day general manager of that system, and a little while ago a New York paper said he was going to take charge of one of the big transcontinental that needs a firm hand at its reins.