The Modern Railroad

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.

“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.

The conductor is a high type of railroad employee

The engineer—oil-can in hand—is
forever fussing at his machine

Railroad responsibility does not end
even with the track walker

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.

This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a clean stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling it. The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local reporters each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the metropolitan district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of railroaders; up here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real to the folk of half a dozen populous counties than is the president of the road, a stuffy gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen years to the dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the townspeople to thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M. running through their “lovely little city.”

You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be entirely disappointed.

“I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the wire,” he tells you quietly. “We’ve organization on this stretch of line.” He says this with a bit of pride. “We have men and we have system. My train-masters are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected to organize beneath them.”

Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on the line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards. After that he talks over the long-distance ’phone with the G. M., four hundred miles away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters, just as the summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions and at terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the ’phone is rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made Congress pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That bill promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit by it.

The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and speaks to his chief clerk.

“W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get rattled,” he says.

That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his three hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this superintendent’s heart. If it were Europe—the troops would be drawn out, all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of the royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But it is not Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because it so excessively differs from Europe.

Only the military aides of the President lament upon the informality of his travel. Some time since a great executive was making the familiar loop throughout the West. The superintendent of a division of line the far side of the Missouri was a worrier, and was personally watching the progress. In order to facilitate rear platform oratory the President’s cars were placed at the rear of a train that hardly ranked as express. Between towns the delays grew frequent and a stuffy little aide in uniform protested to the superintendent.

“Look a’ here, sir,” he said stiffly, “why don’t you let these other trains up the line wait?” The division was single-track. “You know this is the President’s train.”

A twinkle came into the super’s eye.

“You’re wrong,” he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. “This is not the President’s special. This is train number 67 of the B—— main line, and she hasn’t many more rights on the time-card than a gravel limited. Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon Limited—there’s some train, sir. They wouldn’t lay her out. She’s double-extra first-class all the way through to the coast.”

The point of that was not lost.

An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr. Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch of line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection engine.

“Dee-lighted,” said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the big cab. The superintendent wondered what he’d think of that nifty stretch of track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as he was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution” out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way from Utica to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along thereafter without that superintendent’s vote.

All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of the best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King. When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee—the men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster’s office—to talk in whispers.

Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world—it is near kingdom in itself—miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For years there reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a great railroad system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word to be called superintendent. They called him “the lion” and did not misuse that word either. He was a lion, guardian of a great railroad gate, a stern old lion whose word and whose law were unquestioned.

But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer office began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder who the new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable—one an assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other holding similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to assume greater honor, to sit in command at the lion’s great desk.

That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the whisperings of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of them would creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone there, head in hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents gained courage; they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At other times they locked horns.

They locked horns over one great question. It was not operation that set them at odds, not a vexing practical question of how some congested yard might be lanced so that traffic should flow the more freely, or a main line section be aided to give a greater daily tonnage. Nothing of that sort for the two ambitious assistants.

A new pony inspection engine, with an observation room built forward over the boiler—just the sort that Col. Roosevelt had once used as a reading-room—was to be built for the division, and each assistant thought that he needed that engine for the dignity of his job. Each in turn went before the lion and stated his claims for the possession of the pretty toy. The old man listened with grave dignity. A week later he sent down to the master mechanic at the big Depew shops and had him deliver a brand new hand-car, with his compliments, to each.

The pony-engine went into the roundhouse until the real Prince should come. Then he sat long hours alone at his desk once more.

Finally they brought a man to him, a fine, upstanding man. The lion rose from his comfy old chair and gave greeting to the newcomer.

“I’m glad to see you,” was all he said; but to the general manager, who had come up from New York, his eyes seemed to ask: “You’ve brought the right man here at last?” He turned to the stranger.

“Would you like a pony engine to get over the division?” was his question.

“I’m willing to go to hell, and go in a caboose,” laughed the stranger.

The old superintendent grasped him by the hand.

“Thank God, they’ve sent a real man to be superintendent at Buffalo,” was all he said. That was the only recognition that he gave to one who since has become one of the master railroaders of America, but in that moment the act of succession had been consummated.

CHAPTER XIV

If the management of the road is of the divisional type, the superintendent of course is a more important executive than if it is of the departmental type. In either of these cases, as we have seen, he will probably have at least partial authority over the engineer of maintenance of way, whose force keeps the line and track structures in full repair, and also looks after ordinary construction work along the division. In the road of divisional type, he will also have partial authority over the master mechanic, in charge of the shops and roundhouses and the locomotives of the division. These last are regarded by the railroad as part of its machinery, like the planers and drills in the shops themselves; and for the care and operation of the locomotives the engineers and firemen are held responsible to the mechanical department. This is the case even upon those railroads where, under the departmental system, the superintendent has no direct authority over the master mechanic upon his division. For the conduct of the trains which their locomotives pull, both engineers and firemen are directly responsible to the operating department. The master mechanic simply sees to it that the railroad’s property is maintained to a certain degree of efficiency and that the man who operates the locomotives is capable from every point of view. A reasonable amount of deterioration is expected, and each locomotive is expected to turn in to the shops for inspection, overhauling and repairs, at certain stated intervals.

The superintendent has absolute authority over the two officials who are chiefly interested in the conduct of the trains over the division—the train-master and the train-despatcher. The first of these two officers, who must dove-tail their work both night and day, has the assignment of the train crews. His opinion will be called for whenever the vexed questions of seniority and promotion arise, and he will be asked to help to plan all extra or special freight and passenger trains. To show how this is done brings us close to the question of schedules, and we may pause for a moment to consider how this important phase of the railroad’s operating is builded together.

That time-table that you have just pulled from the folder rack seems at first glance an interminable mass of meaningless figures; yet when you come to find your journey upon it, it quickly simplifies itself, and you begin to marvel at the relation the figures bear to one another, how easily you may pick your course through the long columns of numerals. The more extensive time-tables that the railroad employees carry are quite as simple, and yet they are great feats of typographical composition. In reality, both these forms of printed time-tables are but transcripts of the real time-table of the division, which is kept set out upon a great board.

This board is ruled in two directions. The regularly spaced intervals in one direction are marked as time, and represent time—one entire day of twenty-four hours. In the other direction of the board the stations are spaced in proportion to their actual spacing upon the line.

The reproduction of a portion of such a board for an imaginary division of a railroad will illustrate. This line runs from Somerset to Rockville, 120 miles; and portions of it are double-tracked, the rest single-track, as shown at the top of the diagram. On the double-track, trains going in the same direction may pass one another only at the vertical lines, which represent station passing sidings, and on the single-track sections this rule holds, with the additional one, of course, that trains running in opposite directions may also pass one another at the vertical station lines. For economy of room only the seven hours from six o’clock in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon are shown here. Following an old-time practice, odd numbers will represent up-bound trains, from Somerset to Rockville; even numbers, the down trains.

So we have an early morning accommodation passenger train, No. 1, leaving Rockville at 6:10 o’clock and proceeding at a leisurely rate of about twenty miles an hour (which makes allowances for local stops) all the way to Somerset at the far end of the division, which it is due to reach at 11:45 A. M. It is halted for any length of time only at Honeytown, where upbound No. 8—local accommodation—and upbound No. 6—fast express—will pass it. At 6:20 o’clock an upbound local accommodation of the same nature as No. 1, and hence known as No. 2, leaves Somerset and, halting only at Robbins’s Corners to permit the fast upbound No. 6 to overhaul and pass it, reaches Rockville at 1 P. M. Train No. 31, which follows No. 1 out of Rockville forty minutes later, is a milk train, and so must have a liberal allowance for stops. It proceeds only as far as Stoneville, where the dairy country ends, stops there long enough to turn and to water the engine, and then returns to Rockville as No. 32. Train No. 117 is a way-freight, and still slower. So it follows the milk-train. It is known as a “low-class” train by the railroaders. It must wait everywhere for better class trains to pass it. Train No. 118 is the same class of train, proceeding in the opposing direction. Train No. 5 is a down express.

How the real time table of the division looks—the one used in headquarters

Sometimes unforeseen demands of traffic necessitate the running of extra trains, and these may be strung across the board. This board, in reality, has all its trains placed upon it by strings and pins, to admit of the constant changes that the schedules are always undergoing, and the addition of a new train is a quick proceeding. As a matter of fact, a skilled train-master or despatcher will rarely take the time actually to string an extra train. He carries the schedule too completely in his head to admit of such a necessity.

But the extra train is best placed following, as a second section, some good passenger train, as indicated on the diagram. The regular train will then carry signals showing that it is followed on this particular day. While the train orders protect its movement in any event, as will be shown in a moment, the billing of the extra train as a second section is less of an upset to the regular operation of the division. Practised operating men found years ago that the fewer deviations made from the regular programme of the day, the higher the proportion of safety arose.

Now you begin to see the use of the train-despatcher. If the unforeseen never came to pass upon the railroad, instead of coming to pass nearly every hour, there might be no need of that officer. Each engineer, each conductor, each station agent would have his complete time-tables, and the road would run every day in full accordance with them. That was the very earliest and the most primitive way of operating railroads. Almost as early the need arose of having a special direction over the operation of the trains. Emergencies arose daily. Trains were often late; storms beat down upon the line; the snow covered its rails; what might have been, according to the time-card, an orderly operation of line, became chaos. If a train was ordered by schedule to meet a train bound in the opposite direction at P——, it might wait there for long hours, not knowing that the other engine was broken down at A——.

The invention of the telegraph and its almost instant application to the railroad service made such special direction possible. So now we find the explicit directions of the schedule supplemented by even more explicit directions from the train-despatcher at the head of the train movements upon each division. Briefly stated, it may be said that the engineer and the conductor in charge of a train are first guided by the schedule, which, after many revisions, has been compiled with great care, and in reference to connecting lines, branches, and adjoining divisions. This schedule acts in conjunction with certain simple fundamental rules of operation, the A, B, C of every railroader. By one of these, trains of the same class bound north or east are given precedence, all other things being equal, over trains bound south or west. This rule is sometimes superseded by one giving right-of-way to trains bound up the line—or the reverse.

High-class trains, like the fastest limited expresses, have precedence over trains of graduated lower classes—down to the slow-moving heavy freights. When any sort of train loses a certain length of time—usually half an hour or more—it loses all rights that it might ever have had, and everything else on the line has precedence over it. A train may lose time if it has to, but there are never any circumstances that will justify it in running ahead of time.

All this is the part of railroad operation which governs the relation of one train to another. There are even simpler but not less vital rules that control its own operation. In order that the engineer who is guiding the train, and the conductor who shares the responsibility, may keep in touch with one another, the device was adopted many years ago of having a cord run through the cars of passenger trains to a bell signal in the cab of the engine. This bell signal during recent years has given way to an improved form of locomotive signal, sounded by means of compressed air in tubes throughout the train, and operated in connection with the air-brake equipment.

The air-whistle, or bell cord-code of signals, is standard upon all American railroads, and is as follows:

When the train is standing:

When the train is in motion:

There also arises a necessity for communication between men who stand outside the train and who seek to guide the movement of the locomotive. This necessity has given rise to still another code, transmitted by the hands—holding a flag, if possible—by day, and a lighted lantern at night. This signal code follows:

By use of his locomotive whistle, the engineer is enabled to acknowledge these signals, as well as to signal upon his own initiative. His code is also a standard in railroading. It follows:

A succession of short blasts is an alarm for persons on the track and calls the attention of trainmen to danger ahead.

These signal codes operate fundamentally in connection with the essential rules of schedule that we have already shown.

Suppose now that we consider the workings of all this system as it comes down to actual practice in a single concrete instance. We are finding our way to a big terminal yard in all the murkiness and cloudiness of very early morning, and once again we hunt out that urbane soul, the yardmaster. He holds in his hand the yellow tissue of an order from the despatcher of the division. In the conciseness of telegraphy it tells him to start a third section of train 118—through freight—at 6:15 o’clock. Just back of his little grimy box of an office is the big sprawling roundhouse—a dozen freighters with banked fires standing in the stalls, awaiting summons to work. The twelve engines are divided into several classifications according to pulling strength and speed, but the despatcher has designated the particular engine he wishes for third-118, and he gets it—a big lanky puller—1847. She is chosen chiefly because she has had the longest roundhouse rest, having brought in a through freight from up the line, and having been received with engineer’s report showing her to be in good running order, at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. Before the 1847 slipped from the turntable into the waiting stall, the hostlers and the wipers were at her. The hostlers had taken her over the cinder-pit and cleaned out the fire-box. Then they went over her, cleaning her, inch by inch, a mechanical inspector in their wake, testing and sounding and checking every item in the engineer’s report which showed 1847 to be in good order at the end of his run with her. There was not much chance left for any shirking of responsibility, no matter what might arise upon the 1847 on any coming day.

We turn and watch the yardmaster once again. He has the roundhouse foreman send one of the bright young boys who hang around his office night and day, and who dream of that coming hour when they will handle an 1847 for themselves, to call the engineer and fireman, whose names are posted “first out.” Or perhaps the telephone has come into play—in these days in the smaller towns there is hardly a house too humble to have receiver and transmitter hanging somewhere upon its walls. In any event the engine-crew are supposed to stay home when off duty, unless especially excused, and to live within reasonable distance—say a mile—of the roundhouse.

The caller tells the engineer and fireman to report at the roundhouse at 5:45 A. M. At that hour the hostlers have made the 1847 fit for service. Her tender has been filled with coal, her tanks with water, even her sand is packed aboard the box that stands upon the boiler and is ready to help on slippery rail and upgrade. The engineer makes keen inspection of the 1847 before he moves her a single inch, makes sure with his keen and practised eye that she is quite fit for service, pokes here and there and everywhere with his long-spouted oil-can. At a minute or two after shop whistles have shrieked “six o’clock” he pulls the 1847 out from the shadows of the roundhouse. He gets an open signal and switch to the main yard and finds waiting on a siding in that great place, the trail of freight cars and the caboose that are going with him to make Third-118.

Now come back for a moment in your thought. While we were still scurrying down to the grimy yard, the despatcher was creating Third-118. On his desk were car reports, showing what had been received and sent out, and there was enough accumulation of stuff in the yards last night to justify a Third-118. Because good railroading means yard-sidings cleared, and standing cars and freight, like passengers, kept constantly moving, he did not hesitate at ordering her out. He found that there would be 32 cars between tender and caboose, weighing approximately some 1200 tons, and so he ordered from the roundhouse an engine of a class which the mechanical department guaranteed capable of pulling from 1,000 to 1,500 tons, gross weight.