"Are all these freights upon schedule?" you may ask Collins, after you meet a few dozen of them within the limits of a single-track division. He is decent enough not to laugh at your ignorance.
"Schedule?" he repeats. "It's a joke. They give our first section a time to get out on, in the time-card and then one o' them bright office-boys gets a figger out o' his head an' puts it down for an arrivin' time. He never hits it an' he never expects to. So more an' more they're gettin' to move this freight on special orders. They can better regulate it then, 'cordin' to volume of business. Mos' of the men carry the schedules of the fas' an' th' way-freights in their domes. Th' coarse tonnage stuff doesn't even get special orders. When they get enough of it, down on th' main line, they get an engine out o' th' roundhouse, give the train th' engine number, and start off. Railroad traffic along the freight end follows business conditions mighty close."
It is still daylight when we halt at a junction, across a frozen river from a city. The city is set upon a steep hillside, and its houses rise from the river in even terraces. At the top a great domed structure--the State House--crowns it. It is a still winter's morning, and the smoke from all the chimney-pots extends straight heavenward. We wait patiently upon a long siding until everything else has been moved--through fast expresses heavily laden with opulent-looking Pullmans, jerky little suburban trains, long draughts of empty coaches, being drawn by consequential switch-engines in and out of the train-shed of the passenger station. Finally a certain semaphore blade drops, we cross over to the important main line and begin pulling on a sharp curve, across the river, clear of the station with its confusion, through and past the city to a busy division yard.
In a very little time, for this is their home town, Collins and his crew are registering at the yardmaster's office. The engineer of the 1847, and his fireman, turn in their time-slips and proceed with the locomotive to the roundhouse where they make a report upon its condition. Their names are posted on the "in" list or register, and they are off duty until they are summoned by the callers at this end of the division. The despatcher has, of course, been apprised of the safe ending of the run of Third-118.
In the despatcher we have a high type of railroad official who works almost unknown to the great travelling public, and yet accepts a very great measure of the responsibility for the safe operation of the lines.
His orders, sent by telegraph and bearing that cabalistic initial signature of his superintendent, are the products of his own mind. There can be no mistake in these, and he knows it. Each message that he sends may produce disaster, and he knows that.
He is an executive of a type that is not to be passed by lightly. He has risen from the ranks of the telegraphers, most likely from some lonely country station or forlorn signal-tower, and his knowledge of railroad operation, both theoretical and practical, must approach perfection. On sunny, serene days he proceeds with the theoretical railroading; when storms or unexpected influxes of traffic come to harass the division, he will need every bit of his practical knowledge. Handling a number of special trains--freight or passenger--is a strain, and that strain is most felt at the despatcher's desk.
Now and then your morning paper tells of a railroad wreck, and laconically adds, "The despatcher was at fault." The stories of the wrecks that were forestalled by the sheer genius of the men who sit night and day at the telegraph instruments at headquarters are the stories that are for the most part untold, and that far surpass in thrill and interest the stories of the failures.
The despatcher must also be the full measure of a man. He is, like the silent figure upon the bridge of a great ship, of unquestioned authority as he sits at his desk. He may or may not have a map of the line before him as he sits there, but you may be certain that he knows where every moving train on the division is at the moment you see him, just as clearly as if it were all visible there to the naked eye in some sort of picture map. No trains proceed without his express orders. He has "reliefs" and there is no hour of day or night when one of these is not at the despatcher's desk, having the work of the line under his exact supervision.
The order that any train receives from the despatcher by means of the telegraph will, as we saw in Collins's case, direct it to proceed to a certain point on the line, and will specify every train, regular or extra, that it will meet, and the meeting point. When the train has proceeded to the end of its orders there will be more orders from the train-despatcher to be receipted for, and so it will proceed to the end of the route. It is quite possible that at any stage of the journey orders will come from headquarters nullifying those already issued, in part or entirely; and these must be accounted for in the same thorough and accurate fashion.
Some of this seems "red tape" to the men on the line, and there come times when they are a bit disposed to rebel at what seems to them useless formality. There also come times when trains crash into one another; and at those times the railroad, with its infinite system of recording its orders, is generally apt to be able to place the blame pretty accurately.
Those are the times when the system of train orders justifies its worth.
Recently the telephone has come into something more than an experimental use in despatching trains upon American railroads. Various causes have contributed to this. For one thing, the use of the telephone enables the average road to make good use of its veterans, men who would indignantly refuse to become pensioners, and yet who have come to a time in their lives when they must set their pace in gentler key. A trusted old employee, a man crippled perhaps in loyalty to the company's service, a keen-witted responsible woman, any one of these can competently handle train orders over a telephone, without having to have the education and the wonderful expertness that comes only from long experience in telegraphy; and they all become available in the despatching service.
Still another cause has contributed to the change, which is being reported each week from some fresh corner of the country--the telegraphers, themselves. Within the past few years they were able to induce Congress to reduce their day's work to eight hours. Translated, this meant that the average way-station which had been manned by one or two operators would correspondingly need two or three operators. The telegraphers, by reason of the expert training needed in their business, kept their wage-scale up, and the railroads felt that eight-hour bill keenly in their treasuries. So there may have been the least bit of retribution in their seeking the telephone as a relief. The change has certainly been made in the keen hope of effecting economy. No railroad operator would feel ashamed to admit that fine impeachment.
Modern railroading simply makes the same demand of the telephone that it makes of the telegraph--that it keep the probability of safety high. It makes the same demand of the men who maintain the signals, the track, the bridges, and other portions of the right-of-way. Let us consider them in the passing of an instant.
You know the signals along the line of the railroad--those gaunt, uncanny things that spell danger or safety to the men in the engine-cabs. A little while ago, we stood beside a man in the sun-filled tower of a great railroad terminal and watched him operate the most complicated switch and signal system in the land, watched him with the crooking of a finger upon the lever of an electric machine raise this blade, lower that, as he made new paths for the many trains, coming and going.
A plant of that sort is known as the interlocking. In its simplest form, it will guard a junction between two single tracks. The mast of the signal will rise, according to standard custom, at the right of the track in the direction of travel, and there will probably be two semaphore blades, the upper of which guards and signals the straight main-line or "superior"
track, the lower, the diverging branch, known as the "inferior" track. The blade raised--automatically showing a red light--indicates that the main line is closed to the engineer. "Stop!" "Danger!" are the words it tells him. The blade lowered, a green light is automatically displayed, and the engineer knows that he can go ahead at full speed on the main line. The road is clear for him. The lower blade gives similar indications for the branch diverging line. Normally, both blades stand at "stop" and "danger,"
and the one guarding the line for which the train is destined, is dropped only on the approach of the train, itself. In fact, to facilitate the movement of trains, these guarding signals--known to the signal experts as "home signals"--are generally interlocked with "distant signals" several hundred feet down the line, on which blades indicating the diverging tracks forecast the story that the "home signal" is to tell the engineer.
The blade raised--by night displaying a white or safety signal--on the "distant signal" indicates that the line it guards is blocked at the "home signal," and that the engineer must be prepared to bring his train to a full stop. Dropped--showing the green safety light--that particular line is open and ready, and the engineer can be prepared to pass the junction without a very great diminution of speed.
That is the fundamental rule of the signal. Some roads have experimented with other forms of indicators--disks of one sort or another, semaphore blades that turn upwards rather than drop. The devices are numerous, but the principle is the same. When the tracks begin to multiply, and the signals begin to multiply in even greater proportion, they are generally carried over the tracks on a light bridge construction--our English cousins call it a "gantry"--and a series of small semaphore masts built up from the bridge. One of these masts, or "dolls," will be assigned to each track; and if there chances to be an unsignalled siding-track of little importance passing under the bridge, it will have its own "doll" rising from the bridge although quite devoid of semaphore blades. So it is all quite as clear as print to the engineer, even when forty or fifty lights blink at him from a single bridge. The signals tell their story to him quite as simply as to the man in the tower, who is setting their blades in accordance with his carefully arranged plans.
Where signals are not of this interlocking type, guarding some junction, railroad grade crossing, draw-bridge or other point of possible danger, they are likely to resolve themselves into the block system. This system, in a rather crude form, with the use of operators at each block-tower or way-station, has been in development for something less than thirty years upon the American railroad. In brief, it divides a line--usually double-tracked, but sometimes used by the so-called "staff" method upon a single-track road--into sections, or blocks, of from three to five miles each. On double-track under this system, no two trains, even though travelling in the same direction are permitted in the same block. At the entrance to each block stands a tall mast with two of the conventional signal blades. The upper of these raised denotes that a train is still in the block, and an engineer must stop his train and wait till it drops, before he can proceed. The lower blade, when raised, indicates that a train is in the second block ahead, and the engineer must proceed only with caution and expecting to find that block closed against him. It is all quite simple; and if the engineers followed the signals absolutely, there never could be any rear-end collisions on lines protected by block signals. As a matter of fact, there rarely ever are, although the engineers do take chances time and time again.
"Why should I stop for that thing," said a veteran engineer on a fast express train as we went whirring by one of those upper blades raised and commanding us in a blood-red point of light to stop, "when I can look down this straight stretch and see they're clear? Like as not something's got into the mechanism of it and let her flop that way."
Do not insult the intelligence of that engineer. A little while before, he had told us, with a deal of pride, that the rolling stock of "his road"
placed end to end would reach from New York to Omaha, a distance of some 1300 miles. Keenest of the keen, he had a sort of contempt for a rule-book in such a case as that.
"Isn't it sort of positive?" we began. "Good excuse anyway--"
"It is," he shouted back, "but somehow it don't go if you fall behind on your running time. We're here to use ordinary good sense--and bring our trains in on time."
And yet the railroad has a sharp way of insisting upon compliance with that book of rules by making, once in a great while, surprise tests. A signal is set at danger, without any more apparent reason than in the case just cited; a secret watch is kept, and judgment and discipline are visited upon the heads of the engineers who permit themselves to run past it.
To operate the signals calls for one body of men, and to maintain them for faithful service against all manner and stress of wear and weather, another; just as there must be a working corps to keep the right-of-way in working order. This last is a mighty brigade of the railroad's army; for one man in every four who works for it is employed in keeping the track in order. One dollar in every six that the railroad spends goes for that purpose.
Maintenance of way on each division divides itself into a superintendent of bridges and buildings, who sees to the upkeep of those facilities; and a roadmaster, who specializes upon the track itself. This last officer, almost invariably one who has begun to shoulder himself up in the ranks of the railroad army from the very beginning, has his territory divided into sections from two to five miles in length on double-track, from four to ten on single. In command of each section a faithful hand-car and a group of more or less faithful section-hands, figured on an allowance of one to each mile of track, is a section-boss. The section-boss is a wry and a wise soul, or should be. He may not know as much about the formulas for compensating curves as that bright boy who has just come out of a "tech"
school to stand his turn at a transit, but he has a marvellous sort of intuitive sense in keeping his little stretch of track in order. He can sight his rail and discover flaws in alignment as a blind man can find surface flaws with the developed tips of his fingers, and all the while he may be growling at the railroad management for adding to the weight of its rolling-stock and "pounding the elevations out of his track."
In summer he is expert with the "track jacks" and constantly putting in bits of ballast here and there; and in the winter, when the frost and snow have made it impossible to touch the ballast, he keeps his elevations by means of "shims." A "shim" is a piece of wood, from shingle thickness to the width of two ties piled one upon the other, and is wedged between the tie and the rail till summer comes and the line can be corrected by ballasting.
The section-boss must keep pace with a job that is no sinecure. If his gang, in eagerness to be on dress parade, almost throws dirt on the rear steps of the boss's private car as it goes whizzing down the line, he must also see to it that they keep plugging at it where there is not even a locomotive whistle within sound. He must be thrifty, economical. He must remember that the humble cross-tie which once cost a quarter now costs almost a dollar, and that for one of these to be found neglected in the ditch is almost a capital crime. He must have an eye for loose spikes and angle-plates, for the big boss has hinted at the annual loss to the road in these simple factors.
At his call and that of the superintendent of bridges and buildings is a work-train, made up of a few flat-cars and discarded coaches, doing boarding-house Pullman service in their declining years, which looks after work too sizable for the section-boss and his little gang, and yet not large enough for the attention of the dignified gentlemen who are known as the reconstruction engineers. Yet some of the feats of these work-train gangs have the crackle of engineering genius. It takes brains to rip out a little timber span and replace it in the interval between two trains spaced a couple of hours apart, and in the railroad, brain work often comes from the shabby workman, from the man who graduates from the command of his own battered hand-car.
All this elaborate system of railroad operation has been built up through many years of practice. Experience has been more than a teacher in the business, which becomes yearly more and more nearly a developed science; she has been a whole faculty and a curriculum, too. Methods that promised well at the outset have been found faulty after trial, and rejected.
Committees of trained experts have pondered and reported voluminously; the standard railroad codes of every sort have been born because of them. The operation of the railroad has been brought close to science. It would seem as if the entire field had been completely covered.
And yet new situations constantly arise, the like of which have never before presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves in unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track stretches through the Middle West that starve through eleven months of the year, and for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a double-track trunk-line in the East. Obviously such lines cannot be double-tracked for thirty days of business; quite as obviously the overtaxed division, its equipment, and its men must rise to every necessity of the floodtide of business. There are fat years and there are lean years. There come years of bumper crops, years when the factory lights burn from sunset to dawn, and wheels turn unceasingly, and then the superintendent wonders how his equipment and men are going to stand the strain. Engines are kept from the shops and in service; nothing that is even a semblance of a car is kept out of service; the demand for men is keen; prosperity strains the resources of the railroad.
In the lean years, engines are sometimes kept from the shops because the railroad feels that it must hold down its running expenses to keep pace with reduced revenues, and such a course it can stoutly defend as nothing else than good business. Equipment begins to stand idle. Engines are tucked away on empty sidings, boarded and forlorn; and if the year be very lean indeed, the superintendent may find it necessary to send out a wrecking crane and begin lifting empty cars off the rails and leaving them in the ditch at the side of the right-of-way, until the golden times come again. At such seasons his ingenuity is tested quite as much as in the times of floodtide. Orders come to cut expenses, and his big expense is the pay-roll. When he begins to blue-pencil that pay-roll, some one is going to be hungry. The superintendent knows that. He must move with great care in such emergencies.
CHAPTER XV
THE FELLOWS OUT UPON THE LINE
MEN WHO RUN THE TRAINS MUST HAVE BRAIN AS WELL AS MUSCLE--THEIR TRAINING--FROM FARMER'S BOY TO ENGINEER--THE BRAKEMAN'S DANGEROUS WORK--BAGGAGEMAN AND MAIL CLERKS--HAND-SWITCHMEN--THE MULTIFARIOUS DUTIES OF COUNTRY STATION-AGENTS.
One man in every twelve in the United States is on the pay-roll of a railroad. No wonder that that great organism comes so close to human life throughout the nation, that we seem to touch it at every turn.
This one out of twelve is the great army of industrial America. Composed of nearly 1,500,000 men, it is an army that inspires loyalty and cooperation within its own ranks, and confidence and admiration from without. To a nation whose creed is work, it stands as the uniformed host stands to a fighting nation like England or France or Germany. The army of industrial America inspires not one whit less affection than those great crops of paid fighters in Europe.
Ninety-six per cent of this army of railroaders are engaged in the business of maintaining and operating the great avenues of transportation, an overwhelming proportion in the last phase of the business. The operating department is, to the average mind, the railroad. Its members are the men with whom the public come oftenest in contact; they are the men who are oftenest called upon to hazard life and limb in the pursuit of their callings. The romance of the railroad--a romance that is told in unending prose and verse--hovers over the men who operate it. The men who labor in the shops and keep engines and cars safe and fit for the most efficient service have no small responsibilities. Moreover, their work, forging and finishing great masses of metal, is not without its own hazards. The men who give their time and talents to the maintenance of the track and the structure of the railroad have equal responsibilities. It is not doubted for an instant that both of these are important functions in the conduct of railroad transportation, and each in turn will have full attention given to it.
In a previous chapter we have considered the men who control the actual operation of the railroad, the safe conduct of its trains up and down the line. How about the privates in the ranks of this industrial army, the men, who by their loyalty and ability form the very foundations of successful operation, who also form the material from which executives are chosen every day?
There are no common laborers in this phase of railroad work. A man with stout muscles and less than the average amount of brains can ofttimes shovel ballast out with the track-gangs; there are many, many opportunities for crude labor in the heavy metal work of the railroad's shops; there are none within the scientific activity that gives itself to the running of the trains. The humblest of these folk must have a particular talent, a talent so peculiar that it might almost be described as "latent Americanism." The lowest-priced man in the train-service must understand the entire complicated theories of railroad operation to a T.
He may be the man on whom responsibility--the responsibility for the safety of not one but many human lives--may suddenly be thrust. A gate-tender at a highway crossing has not ordinarily a place of gravest responsibility; yet in some least expected hour this humblest employee of the operating department may hold the fate of human life in the balancing of his steady hands.
Americans run the American railroads. For this great service men must possess not only the mental capacity for understanding the technique of operation, but the physical strength to meet the stress of hard labor, and of every sort of weather, and of long hours spent upon moving trains.
Moreover, there is a requirement of morals--that a man must fully know and quite as fully accept the responsibility for human life that is placed in his hands. These things combined make that "latent Americanism" of which we have just spoken; and the railroad that digs deep into this mine of "latent Americanism" finds its material, not in the great cities with their vast colonies of foreigners, but on the farms of a broad, broad land. The boy standing in the pasture sees the express train go skimming past him from an unknown great world into another unknown great world, and straightway he has the railroad fever. He drives to the depot with the milk cans, and there he comes in contact with the personnel of that link of steel that stretches across the farm where he was born. It is only a little time after that before he is applying for work as a railroad man.
So it is that the railroad finds fine timber for its service. It picks and chooses. For its choice it has the pick of American timber, the ironwood of our national forests of humanity. It gathers its army of men, inspects them carefully for physical, mental and moral requirements and then it impresses upon them the necessity of good living, the absolute necessity of deference to an established and rigid system of discipline as a requirement in the successful handling of the different transportation business.
Thus we have the railroad men as the best workers of the nation. If you want proof of that, ask any of the great mail-order concerns which class of business they prefer and they will tell you without hesitation that it is the railroad man. Come closer home and ask the merchants of any community the same question. Their answer will be the same. Rigid conditions, out-of-door life, sober habits make desirable citizens out of this class of workers. There are none better anywhere.
In the train service, the ordinary route of promotion is through the freight service to the passenger. Thus, for the farmer's boy who hankers to sit in the cab of the locomotive that hauls the Limited there is a long hard path. Chances are that at the beginning the road foreman of engines will start him at odd chores, calling crews, wiping engines, and the like, around some one of the big roundhouses. He will work hard, but here he will begin to absorb the romance of the line, the romance that, like fog and engine smoke, lies around the engine house, thick enough to cut.