The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management, and Appliances

The engineer whose humanity is not hardened has his feelings harrowed occasionally by pedestrians who risk their lives on the track. Tramps and other careless persons are so numerous that the casual passenger in a locomotive cab generally cannot ride fifty miles without seeing what seems to him a hair-breadth escape, but which is nevertheless treated by the engineer as a commonplace occurrence. These heedless wayfarers do, however, occasionally carry their indifference to danger too far, and they are tossed in the air like feathers.[35] Doubtless there are those who, like the fireman who talked with the tender-hearted young lady, regret the killing of a man chiefly "because it musses up the engine so;" but, taking the fraternity as a whole, warmth of heart and tenderness of feeling may be called not only well-developed but prominent traits of character. The great strike on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy road in 1888, which proved to have been ill-advised, would have been possible only in a body of men actuated by the most loyal friendship. Undoubtedly a large conservative element in the Brotherhood of Engineers believed the move injudicious, but they joined in it out of an intense spirit of fidelity to their brethren and leaders.

The passenger-train conductor has in many respects the most difficult position in the railroad ranks. He should be a first-class freight conductor and a polished gentleman to boot. But in his long apprenticeship on a freight train he has very likely been learning how not to fulfil the additional requirements of a passenger conductorship. In that service he could be uncouth and even boorish, and still fill his position tolerably well; now he feels the need of a life-time of tuition in dealing with the diverse phases of human nature met with on a passenger train. He must now manage his train in a sort of automatic way, for he has his mind filled with the care of his passengers and the collection of tickets. He must be good at figures, keeping accounts, and handling money, though the freight-train service has given him no experience in this line. Year by year the clerical work connected with the taking up of tickets and collecting of cash fares has been increased until now, on many roads, an expert bank clerk would be none too proficient for the duties imposed. The conductor who grumblingly averred that "it would take a Philadelphia lawyer with three heads" to fill his shoes was not far out of the way. Every day, and perhaps a number of times a day, he must collect fares of fifty or a hundred persons in less time than he ought to have for ten. Of that large number a few will generally have a complaint to make, or an objection to offer, or an impudent assertion concerning a fault of the railroad company which the conductor cannot remedy and is not responsible for. A woman will object to paying half-fare for a ten-year-old girl or to paying full rates for one of fifteen. A person whose income is ten times larger than he deserves will argue twenty minutes to avoid paying ten cents more (in cash) than he would have been charged for a ticket. Passengers with legitimate questions to ask will couch them in vague and backhanded terms, and those with useless ones will take inopportune times to propound them. These are not occasional but every-day experiences. The very best and most intelligent people in the community (excepting those who travel much) are among those who oftenest leave their wits at home when they take a railroad trip. All these people must be met in a conciliatory manner, but without varying the strict regulations in the least degree. The officers of the revenue department are inexorable masters, and passengers offended by alleged uncivil treatment are likely to make absurd complaints at the superintendent's office. A conductor dreads an investigation of this sort, however unreasonable the passengers' complaints may be, because it may tend to show that he lacked tact in handling the case. But after becoming habituated to this sort of dealings, there are still left the occasional disturbances which no amount of philosophy can make pleasant. These are the encounters with drunken and disorderly passengers. The conductor, starting at the forward end of his train, finds, perhaps, in the first car one or two "toughs" who refuse payment of fare and are spoiling for a fight. Care must be taken with this sort of character not to punish him or use the least bit of unnecessary severity, for he will, when sobered off, quite likely be induced by a sharp lawyer to sue the railroad company for damages by assault. The conductor, however, if he be one who has (in his freight-train experience) dealt with tramps, is able to cope with his customer and confine him to the baggage-car or put him off the train. But a tussle of this kind is at best far from soothing to the temper, and the very next car may contain the wife of a nabob, who will expect the most genteel treatment and critically object to any behavior on the part of the conductor which is not fully up to the highest drawing-room standard. Experiences of this kind, it can be readily imagined, are exceedingly trying. The conductor cannot give himself up completely to learning gentility, for he still has need for his old severity.

The difficulty of always finding the ideal person when wanted has led to the employment of men of good address who have had little or no training on freight trains; so that we find some conductors who are able to deal with all sorts of passengers with a good degree of success, but who are far from brilliant as managers of trains, technically speaking; while others, who from their early experience have first-class executive ability, are slow in discarding the somewhat rough habits of the freight train. While there are not wanting those who strive faithfully to reach the ideal, and succeed admirably, it may be said that the average conductor retains more of the severe than of the gentle side of his character, at least so far as outward behavior goes. The rigid requirements of his financial superiors, which compel him to actually fight for his rights with dishonest and stingy passengers, make it almost impossible that he should be otherwise. Ignorant foreigners, poor women and girls who have lost their way, and other unfortunates are, however, encountered often enough to preclude the conductor's forgetting how to be compassionate.

The heroic element is not wholly lacking in the conductor's life. The temporary guardianship of several hundred people is an important trust even in smooth sailing, but the conductor's possibilities are entirely different from the engineer's. He has so much to do to attend to the petty wants of passengers that their remoter but more important interests are not given much thought. The anxieties of a hundred nervous passengers who terribly dread the loss of an hour by a missed connection are much more likely to weigh down a conductor's mind than any thoughts of his duty to them in a possible emergency that will happen only once in five years. And yet the last-mentioned contingency is a real one. Only last year, in the great Eastern blizzard, conductors risked their lives in protecting their passengers. One spent three or four hours in travelling a mile and a half to a telegraph-office; in consequence of the six feet of snow, the blinding storm, and the darkness, he had to constantly hug a barbed-wire fence to avoid losing his way, and was on the point of exhaustion when he reached the station.

The term "station-agent" means, practically, the person in charge of a small or medium-sized station. When one of these men is promoted to the charge of a large city station, either freight or passenger, he becomes really a local superintendent, his duties then consisting very largely in the supervision of an army of clerks and laborers who must, each in his place, be as capable as the agent himself. The agent at a small station has a great multiplicity of duties to perform. He must sell tickets, be a good book-keeper, and a faithful switch-tender. He generally must be a telegraph-operator and must be vigorous physically. He must be ready, like the conductor, to submit to some abuse from ill-bred customers, and should be the peer of the business men of his town. He often encounters almost as great a variety of knotty problems as the superintendent himself, though he has the advantage that he can generally turn them over to a superior if he feels unequal to them. The practical difficulties that most beset him are those incident to doing everything in a hurry. People who buy tickets wait until the train is about to start before presenting themselves at the office. Then the agent has a dozen other things to attend to, and must therefore detect counterfeit ten-dollar bills with the expertness of a Washington treasury-clerk. Just as a train reaches his station the train despatcher's click is heard on the wires, and he must drop everything and receive (for the conductor) a telegram in which an error of a single word would very likely involve the lives of passengers. At a very small station the checking of baggage devolves on the agent, his overburdened back being thus loaded with one more straw. He is in many cases agent for the express company, and so must count, seal, superscribe, and way-bill money packages and handle oyster-kegs and barrels of beer at a moment's notice. Women with wagon-loads of loose household effects to go by freight, and shippers of car-loads of cattle, for which a car must be specially fitted up, will appear just as the distracted station-man is receiving a telegram with one side of his brain and selling a ticket with the other. The household goods must be weighed and tagged, the sewing-machine tied up, and tables repaired; the cattle-shipper must be given a short lecture on the legal bearings of the bargain for transportation which he is about to make, and his demand that his live-stock shall be carried 500 miles more quickly than human animals are taken over the same road is to be gently repressed. It is not every day that a small station is enlivened by this sort of excitement, yet it is common, and is familiar to every station agent. The variety in the duties of this position is, however, a great advantage to the ambitious young man, because it serves to give him a good lift toward a valuable business education. He can learn about the methods and knacks and tricks of many different kinds of business, and can profit by the knowledge thus gained. Thomas J. Potter, the lately deceased vice-president of the Union Pacific Railway, whose memory it is proposed to perpetuate by a bronze statue, began his railroad career as agent at a small station in Iowa. Others of equal ability and perfection of character have risen from similar places and by the same means.

The agent at a small station catches his breath between trains. There is then generally ample time for calming the nerves and preparing for the next onslaught. If he is a telegraph-operator he can chat with the operators at other stations—a common resource if the wires are not occupied with more important affairs. In the class periodicals of operators and railroad men, reference to this phase of their life may be constantly seen, and incidents of even romantic interest are not infrequent. Many of the men at small stations are young and unmarried, while at places where the business has increased enough to warrant the employment of an assistant, a young woman to do the telegraphing is frequently the first helper engaged. With this combination it is unnecessary to tell what follows. If iron bars and stone walls are things which Cupid holds in contempt, an electric telegraph wire is the thing which makes him "snicker right out," if we may use the language of the circus ring. A distance of 100 miles, instead of being a barrier, is, under these circumstances, an advantage. There is, to be sure, a slight disadvantage in the fact that any tender communication confided to the wires will be liable to fall on the ears of unfeeling persons at intermediate offices, but the overcoming of this obstacle provides the agreeable incidental excitement which is always necessary in genuine love-making. Young persons (or old, either) can study each other's characters, in important phases at least, at a distance better than at short range. The telegraphic mode of sending communications discloses one's disposition far better than does handwriting. Working on the same wire with another for a few months enables one to form judgments of that other's generosity or narrowness, serenity or excitability, industry or laziness, refinement or boorishness, kindliness of heart or otherwise, which are quite sure to be correct judgments. Judgments ripen into attachments, and romances of the wire are common.

At the railroad station next larger in size, the work is more divided. One man sells tickets, another attends to the freight office, another to the baggage, and so on. The ticket-seller must make five-cent bargains with the same urbanity that is given to a $100 trade, and must be able to toss off the latter in two minutes if occasion requires, or to spend an hour in helping the passenger choose the best route among a score of possible ones. The fusillade of questions that must be met by the ticket-seller every time he opens his window is familiar to everyone who has ever watched a place of the kind for ten minutes. The inexperienced traveller wants to be fully posted as to the exact hour of departure of a tri-weekly stage with which he is to connect at a railroad station a thousand miles away, and the more intelligent ones demand an oral time-table covering the trains for the ensuing week on all railroads within a radius of 50 miles. Those who cannot read or understand the time-tables are too modest to ask aid, and their misfortune is disclosed only after their train has gone and they are found in tears; while those who can read the table ignore it and ask questions simply to be sociable.

The station baggage-master has an important but rather thankless place. He must handle 200-pound trunks with as much ease as though they contained feathers, and, if he break a moulding off one, must meet the reproaches of the owner, who imagines that the time available for handling the trunk was five minutes instead of two seconds. He must handle much dirty and otherwise unpleasant stuff, and on the whole pursue a very unpoetic life. He has little to do with train-handling, but he "keeps in with" the trainmen and furnishes them with a share of their entertainment. They lounge in his room sometimes and he keeps on tap a supply of jokes such as that about the new brakeman who sent to headquarters for a supply of red oil for his red lantern, and the engineer who lost time with an excursion train on the Fourth of July because the extremely hot weather had elongated the rails and thus materially increased the distance to be travelled over. When "hot boxes" (friction-heated axles) are given as the cause of a delay the real cause of which is concealed (by the conductor who is ashamed of it), the baggage-master gently punctures the deception by suggesting that perhaps a hot fire-box (in the engine) is what is meant. Whether the roguish clerk of an inexperienced general manager, who slyly induced his chief to issue an order to station agents directing that "all freight cars standing for any length of time on side tracks must be occasionally moved a short distance in order to prevent flattening of the wheels," had formerly been a baggage-master, history does not state.

The switch-tender, whose momentary carelessness has many a time caused terrible disaster, but whose constant faithfulness outweighs a million-fold even that painful record, is one of the essential figures around a station. Nothing but eternal vigilance will suffice to keep switches always in safe position, and the conscientious custodian of these always possible death-traps often takes his burden of care to his pillow. The mishaps which do occur strikingly illustrate the practical impossibility of holding the human brain always to the highest pitch. A conductor in New Jersey (trainmen have to set switches at many places where no switchmen are employed) recently caused a slight collision by misplacing a switch, and on seeing the consequences exclaimed, "I deserve to be discharged; my mistake was inexcusable." And yet an honest man of that type is the kind demanded for such a place. The interlocking of switches and signals (the arrangement in a frame of the levers moving the switches and those moving signals in such a way that the signal which tells the engineer to come on cannot be given until the switch is actually in proper position) is one of the notable improvements of the last twenty years, and is a great boon to switchmen, as well as to passengers and the owners of railroads.[36] By the aid of this apparatus and its distant signals, connected by wire ropes, the switchman's anxieties are reduced immeasurably. By concentrating the levers of a number of switches in a single room one man can do the work of several, and to the looker-on the perplexities of the position seem to have been increased instead of diminished. But the switchman's task now is of a different sort. Under the old plan he was constantly on guard lest he make a mistake and throw an engine or car off the track. Under the new, his calculations are chiefly about saving time and facilitating the work of the trainmen. Questions of danger rarely come up, being provided against by the perfection of the machinery. By long familiarity with the ground and the ways of handling the trains, the switch-tender in an "interlocking tower" is enabled to safely conduct a score of trains through a labyrinth of switches in the time that the novice would take to make the first move for a single train. Without this admirable apparatus, and skilful and experienced attendants, the business of great stations like the Grand Central at New York would be impossible in the space allowed.

One of the habitués of every station is the section-master, who looks after three, five, or ten miles of track and a gang of from five to twenty-five men who keep it in repair. He is not much seen, because he is out on the road most of the time; and his duties are not of a kind that the reader could study, on paper, to much advantage; but he deserves mention because his place is a really important one. Railroad tracks cannot be made, like a bridge, five times as strong as is necessary, and thus a large margin be allowed for deterioration; they must be constantly watched to see that they do not fall even a little below their highest standard. This care-taking can be intrusted only to one who has had long experience at the work. In violent rain-storms the trackman must be on duty night and day and patrol the whole length of his division to see that gravel is not washed over the track or out from under it. Though roughly dressed and sunburnt, he is an important personage in the eye of the engineer of a fast express train, and if he be the least bit negligent, even to the extent of letting a few rails get a quarter of an inch lower than they ought to, he hears a prompt appeal from the engine-runner. The latter could not feel the confidence necessary to guide his 50-ton giant over the road at lightning speed with its precious human freight if he had not a trusty trackman every few miles; and passengers who feel like expressing gratitude for a safe railroad journey should never forget this unseen guardian.

A number of classes of men in the railroad service must be turned off with a word for lack of space. The train despatcher, with his constant burden of care, deserves a chapter. The locomotive fireman, who has not been directly alluded to, is practically an apprentice to the engineer, and, like apprentices in some other callings, has a good deal of hard work to do. He generally has longer hours than the engineer, as he has to clean a portion of the polished brass- and iron-work of the engine. He has to throw into the fire-box several tons of coal a day, and gets so black that his best friends would not know him when washed up. Those who begin young and are intelligent, and conserve their strength, are at length promoted to be engineers. The fireman's twin brother is the "hostler," who is employed at the larger termini to get the iron horse out of its stable, lead it to the watering place and feed-trough (coal-bin), and harness it to the train.

The clerk in the freight office has almost as much variety of work as the ticket-seller, and is by no means a mere book-keeper. The workmen at the freight station are not common laborers. Their work requires peculiar skill and experience, and they have diversions worth telling of, if there were space. The men in the shops, and those who go out with derricks and chains to pick up wrecks, are an important class by themselves, and bridge-builders, gate-tenders, and various others bring up the rear.

In conclusion, railroad men as a body are industrious, sober when at work, and lively when at play, using well-trained minds, in their sphere, and possessing capacity for a high degree of further training. The public is not without its duty toward the million or so of men in the railroad service. The liability to death or maiming from accident is such a real factor in railroad men's lives that the public, and especially shareholders in railroads, are bound to not only uphold officers in providing every possible appliance and regulation for safety, but to demand the introduction of such devices. Some of the State railroad commissioners have done and are doing noble service in this direction, and should be vigorously supported by their constituencies. The demands of the public, re-enforced by the exigencies of competition, have made Sunday trains in many localities almost as common as on week-days, so that many train and station men work seven days in the week. In addition to this, holidays oftener increase their work than diminish it, so that there is room for a considerable reform in this regard.

The general moral welfare of railroad men has received much attention in late years, and affords a wide field for work by all who will. Many railroads have co-operated with the Young Men's Christian Association branches, started by a few of the employees, in building and equipping reading-rooms, libraries, etc., and the companies give many hundred dollars annually toward the support of these resorts, which serve to keep many a young trainman away from loafing places of a questionable character or worse. Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose millions came largely out of the profits of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, has set a good example to other railroad millionaires in the erection of a building for the employees of that road in New York City, whose luxuriousness is an evidence that he loves his neighbor as himself, even if that neighbor be a plain brakeman earning but low wages. That the resorts provided for railroad men are appreciated is evidenced by their records. Of the trainmen who regularly come into the Grand Central Station in New York, 46 per cent. are members of the Association occupying the building given by Mr. Vanderbilt, and 65 per cent. make use of the rooms more or less regularly. Rooms in numerous other cities also make encouraging showings.

Railroad officers, with their great advantages for enlightenment, owe it to themselves and their men to see that the thousands under them have fair opportunities for rising in the world, and that the owners of the immense corporations which stand as masters of such vast armies fully understand their measure of responsibility in the premises. Science and invention, machinery and improved methods, have effected great changes in the railroad art, but the American nation, which travels more than any other, still recognizes the fact that faithful and efficient men are an essential factor in the prosecution of that art. People desire to deal with a personality, and therefore wish to see the personnel of the railroad service fostered and perfected.