The Modern Railroad

Courtesy of the “Railroad Age Gazette”

The electro-pneumatic signal-box in the control tower of a modern terminal

The responsible men who stand at the switch-tower of a
modern terminal: a large tower of the “manual” type

“When winter comes upon the lines the superintendent
will have full use for every one of his wits”

Watchful signals guarding the main line of a busy railroad

The yardmaster had given the numbers of the cars that were to make Third-118, just as he received them from one of the despatcher’s assistants, to a switching foreman, who arranged them, with the quick facility that comes from long practice, into an order that would permit them to be set off at various points up the line, with the least possible amount of switching. That practical sequence worked out in pencil and paper, a stubby switch-engine effected in reality. The cars and the caboose, in proper order, were ready, with the crew, and inspected when the 1847 backed to them and Third-118 came into her being.

A yard caller had summoned the train-crew while the roundhouse caller was rounding up the two men of the engine-crew. Collins, the conductor, and his brakemen had reported at the yard-office, and were assigned to Third-118. Collins found the cars and caboose waiting just a few minutes before the 1847 had been coupled to them, with little ado and no formality whatsoever, beyond the testing of the air-brakes. Into his train-book he had entered the number of each car and the initials of the road owning it, its destination, its empty or tare weight; the weight of its load, and the sum of these or its gross weight. He sees to it that each box-car is firmly seal-locked. If not, he refuses to accept it from the yardmaster until it has been resealed, and makes a note of the occurrence. Like the engineer and the hostlers in the roundhouse, he takes no chances, no responsibilities that do not fairly belong to him.

With both conductor and engineer ready, Third-118 starts upon her day’s run. The yard operator has telegraphed the despatcher’s office that 3-118 is awaiting instructions. In that despatch he has given the locomotive number, the number and total weight of the cars it hauls, the name of both engineer and conductor. The train-despatcher enters these details of train and crew at the head of a column of his train register. On that register there are spaces for the entries of arriving and leaving times of the train as telegraphed him by the operators at each telegraph station on the division.

The train once so entered by a despatcher’s clerk, the despatcher sends a clearance card to the telegraph operator at the little yard office who repeats it back for accuracy. Then the yard operator presents that clearance order to the engineer and conductor, who read it aloud to him—also for accuracy, of course—and then sign that they have read and understood the order. The signatures are then reported to the despatcher’s office, which wires “Complete.” “Complete” goes in writing upon the copies of the order made in manifold, which go to engineer, to conductor, and to the operator’s own files. The engineer reads his order to the fireman, who repeats it back to him; the conductor follows the same routine with his brakemen. That all sounds complicated, but quickly becomes mechanical and rapid; the danger is that it may become so mechanical and rapid as to permit of serious errors passing unchecked through the routine. But the railroad has done its part. It has, for itself, taken every possible precaution against error and resulting accident.

We are privileged, and we climb into the caboose of Third-118. We hold credentials to Collins, her conductor, and they are unimpeachable. We can see that from his face as he holds his lantern over them: he would not even let us into his caboose until his own mind was set. After that there was barely time to jump aboard. The 1847 is beginning to clear the yard before we have had time for a good look at the inside of the little caboose.

“You won’t find our hack any fancy place,” says Collins. “But we’ve had it nine years now, and it seems kind of homelike to us after all this time.”

The “we” consists of Collins and his rear brakeman. The forward brakeman, who is held responsible for the front half of the train, has his headquarters in the cab of the 1847. The caboose is a home-like place, snugly warmed by a red-hot stove placed in its corner and lined with bunks made into beds, Pullman fashion; only never was there a Pullman sleeper that gave you less sense of the impressive and a greater sense of a snug cabin. Squarely placed in its centre is a sort of wooden pyramid and the steps up this lead to the lookout from where the long snaky train can be watched.

“Kind o’ ol’-fashioned, that,” apologizes Collins. “Th’ las’ time I had th’ cabin into the shops for over-haulin’, they offered to take it out an’ put in th’ ladders; but I says ‘no’; an’ this is why.”

One by one he lifts its hinged steps. This is a pyramid built of lockers, a regular treasure house of railroad necessities. There are all sorts of ropes and jacks and wrenches, extra parts against every emergency. There is a food closet, and another locker filled with neat stacks of stationery.

“They give us more forms to fill out now than th’ super’s office got twenty years ago,” he laughs. “I spend more than half my time at that desk.”

The clerical work on Third-118 is considerable. Collins has to keep all the way-bills of his train—32 cars, almost $100,000 worth of merchandise, and if he makes a serious error it is apt to cost him his job. He writes a neat hand, and his records, like his caboose, are kept in ship-shape fashion. He is a careful student of the ethics and the practices of railroad management and operation. He has his own ideas on each of these, and when you get to them they are good ideas. Of such as he railroad executives are every year made in America.

We slip up the line, slowly threading our passage through the mass of passenger trains, fast and slow, that all times have the right-of-way over the third sections of rather ordinary freights. Collins sometimes thrusts his orders into our hands in order that we may see something of the great detail of this branch of operating. Each is wonderfully specific, and we know by that “complete” on the corner that it has been given in detail.

“No. 1 Engine 2236 will wait at Morris Level until 10:00 A. M. for 3-118, Engine 1847.”

The signature is that of the initials of the division superintendent, the numerals have been spelled out. It would seem as if the railroad had taken every possible precaution for safety. And yet again, remember that great accidents have happened upon American railroads just because men’s minds have perversely refused to read what eyes and ears have read. And yet there seems to be nothing to be done, more thorough than is already being done.

“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

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. Perhaps after a while they will give him a little authority and make him a hostler. The “hostler” and the “stalls” in the roundhouses are quaint survivals of the most primitive railroad days, when horses were really motive power.

At odd times, night times perhaps, the boy will ride in engine cabs and gradually acquire a knowledge of one of these great machines such as no text-book would ever give him. Then comes his first big opportunity. There is a vacancy among the engine crews; the road foreman of engines gives him a good report, and he begins to have dealing with the train-master. He is made a fireman, and he travels the division end to end, day in and day out.

Now he knows why the railroad requires physical tests as well as tests of eyesight and of hearing. Even after he has taken another step in advance and been promoted to the passenger service (we will assume that ours is a bright, ambitious boy), he will only find that his labors in the engine-cab have been increased. It is no slight task, firing a heavy locomotive over 100 or more miles of grade-climbing, curve-rounding railroad. It is a task that fairly calls for human arms of steel; for some firemen handle some 17 tons of coal in a single run. The appetite of that firebox is seemingly insatiable. There is hardly a moment during the run that it is not clamoring to be fed, and that the fireman is not hard at it there on the rocking floor of the swaying tender, reaching from tender coal to firebox door.

But the day does come, if he sticks hard at it, when he becomes an engineer. He has learned the line well, during his countless trips over it as fireman. He has come to know every signal, every bridge, every station, every curve, every grade, every place for slow, careful running, every place for speeding, as thoroughly as ever river pilot learned his course. There have been many times when he has had to assume temporary charge of the engine. He is a qualified man at least to sit in the right hand of the cab, to have command over reverse lever and over throttle.

His work is of a different sort already. The hard physical labor is a thing of the past, most of the time he sits at his work. But responsibility replaces physical stress, and the farmer boy now realizes which of the two is more wearing. Upon his judgment—instant judgment time and time and time again—the fate of that heavy train depends. After he has been promoted from freight engineer to passenger engineer he has a train filled with humanity, and he knows the difference. By day the inclination of a single blade, by night the friendly welcome or the harsh command of changeable lights must never escape him. One slip, and after that—

The engineer prefers not to think of that. He prefers to think of a safe trip, terminal to terminal, to think of the long line covered, once again in safety, to think of the station at the far end of the division, where a relief engine and engineer will be in waiting to take the train another stage in its long journey across the land, to think of the home and family awaiting him. He is a big passenger man now. When he gets to the end of the run, there will be a crew to take his locomotive away to the roundhouse. He will have a bit of a wash and in a few minutes he will be bound through the station waiting-room, well dressed, smoking a good fifteen-cent cigar, quite as fine a type of American citizen as you might wish to see anywhere. You would hardly recognize in this well-dressed man of affairs, the keen-eyed, sound-bodied man in blue jeans who stood beside his engine, oil-can in hand, at the far end of the division.

The same type holds true through the man in care of the other parts of the trains. Take the brakeman—they call him trainman nowadays in the passenger service. In the old days this was a slouchy, somewhat slovenly dressed individual of a self-acknowledged independence. Time has changed him in thirty years. An increased respect for the service has taken away from him his slouchiness; a feeling that good work and hard work will take him through the ranks, through a service as conductor, perhaps to train-master, to superintendent, goodness knows how much further, has replaced that bumptious independence.

He began as brakeman on a freight. There were two, possibly three, of these men to the train, under command of the conductor, back there in the caboose, and they were supposed to distribute themselves pretty equally over the top of the train. The forward brakeman would work from the cab backward, the rear brakeman from the caboose (he also probably calls it a “hack”), forward, the remaining man when a third was assigned to the train, having the middle. It was thought and confidently predicted that with the universal use of the air-brake to freight equipment the days of clambering over the tops of the cars to man the brakes were over. Brakemen twenty years ago were dreaming of the day when they might sit in a cab or caboose and have the difficult work of slacking or the stopping of a 1,500-ton train accomplished, through the genius of mechanism, by a hand-turn of the engineer upon an air-brake throttle. But what looked so well in theory has not worked quite so well in practice. The railroads have found the wear and tear on the air-brake equipment, particularly with the steep grade lines and heavy equipment, a tremendous expense. For the sake of that and for the sake of still greater safety—following the railroad rule to use each possible safety measure, one upon the other—the brakemen are still compelled to keep to the top of the cars.

“When the train comes to a water station the fireman gets out and fills the tank”

A freight-crew and its “hack”

A view through the span of a modern truss bridge
gives an idea of its strength and solidity

The New York Central is adopting the
new form of “upper quadrant” signal

On a pleasant day this is a task that can give the average brakeman a sort of supreme contempt for the man whose work houses him within four walls. If the road lies through a lovely country, if it pierces mountain ranges, or follows the twisting course of a broad river, he may feel a contempt, too, for the passenger who observes the lovely scenes only through the narrow confines of a car window. To him there is a broad horizon, and he would be a poor sort of man indeed if he did not rise to the inspiration of this environment.

There is quite another side of this in the winter. Let wind and rain and then freezing weather come, and that icy footpath over the top of the snaky train becomes the most dangerous way in all Christendom. It consists of only three narrow planks laid lengthwise of the train, and between the cars there is a two-foot interval to be jumped. Hand-rails of any sort are an impossibility, and the brakeman now and then will receive a sharp slap in the face that is not the slap of wind or of sleet, and he will fall flat upon the car-roof or dodge to the ladders that run up between the cars. That slap was the slap of the “tickler,” that gallows-like affair that stands guard before tunnels and low bridges and gives crude warning to the man working upon the train roofs of a worse slap yet to come.

There are other dangers, not the least of these the possibility of open battle at any time of day or night with one or more “hobos,” tramps, or “yeggmen,” who seem to regard freight trains as complimentary transportation extended to them as a right, and train-crews as their natural enemies. The list of railroad men who have lost their lives because of these thugs is not a short one. It is one of the many records of railroad heroism.

Still the brakeman has a far easier time of it than his prototype of a generation or more back. The air-brake is a big help. When a train breaks in two or three parts on a grade, the pulling out of the air-couplings automatically sets the brakes on every part, and if you do not know what that means ask one of the old-timers. In the old days of the hand-brakes the very worst of all freight accidents came when a section of a freight train without any one aboard to set its brakes, broke loose and came crashing down a hill into some helpless train. Ask the old-timer about the hand-couplings and the terrific record of maimed arms and bodies that they left. The modern automatic couplings have been worth far more than their cost to the railroads.

In the course of time and advancement the brakeman leaves the freight and enters the passenger service. Now he is called a trainman and is attired in a natty uniform. He has to shave, to keep his hands clean, wear gloves perhaps, and be a little more of a Chesterfield. He must announce the stations in fairly intelligible tones, and be prepared to answer pleasantly and accurately the thousand and one foolish questions put to him by passengers.

As a conductor he will probably begin as Collins began, in the freight service. When he comes to the passenger-service there will be still more book-keeping to confront him, and he will have to be a man of good mental attainments to handle all the many, many varieties of local and through tickets, mileage-books, passes, and other forms of transportation contracts that come to him, to detect the good from the bad, to throw out the counterfeits that are constantly being offered to him. He will have to carry quite a money account for cash affairs, and he knows that mistakes will have to be paid out of his own pocket.

All this is only a phase of his business. He is responsible for the care and safe conduct of his train, equally responsible in this last respect with the engineer. He also receives and signs for the train orders, and he is required to keep in mind every detail of the train’s progress over the line. He will have his own assortment of questions to answer at every stage of the journey, and he will be expected to maintain the discipline of the railroad upon its trains. That may mean in one instance the ejectment of a passenger who refuses to pay his fare, and still he must not involve the road in any big damage suit; or in another, the subjugation of some gang of drunken loafers. The real wonder of it is that so many conductors come as near as they do to the Chesterfieldian standards.

In the forward part of the train are still other members of its crew, some of them possibly who are not paid by the railroad, but who are indirectly of its service. Among these last may be classed the mail clerks, who are distinctly employees of the Federal Government, and the messengers of the various express companies. If the road is small and the train unimportant, these workers may be grouped with the baggagemen in the baggage-car. If the train is still less important the baggageman may assume part of the functions of mail clerk and express messenger. If so, he is apt to have his own hands full. The mere manual exercise of stacking a 60-foot baggage-car from floor to ceiling with heavy trunks (and the commercial travellers and theatrical folk do carry heavy trunks) is no slight matter. But that is not all. The trunk put off at the wrong place or the trunk that is not put off at all is apt to make the railroad an enemy for life and the baggageman is another one of the many in the service who are permitted to make no mistakes.

When he has United States mail-sacks and a stack of express packages to handle, his troubles only multiply. His book-keeping increases prodigiously, and his temper undergoes a sharper strain. Give him all these, then a couple of fighting Boston terriers, which must, because of one of the many minor regulations of railroad passenger traffic, ride in the baggage-car—a cold and draughty car—and you will no longer wonder why the baggageman has a streak of ill-temper at times. His office is certainly no sinecure, neither is he in the direct path of advancement like his co-workers, the fireman and the brakeman.

These train-workers who are so little seen by the travelling public—baggagemen, mail clerks and express messengers alike, ride in the most hazardous part of the equipment, the extreme forward cars of the train. Read the list of train accidents, involving loss of life, and in nine cases out of ten you will find that these have headed the list of killed or injured. There work is hard, their hours long, their pay modest. They form a silent brigade of the industrial army that is always close to the firing line.

There remains in the operating service a great branch of the army that does not scurry up and down the line. Some of these men are at lonely outposts, forlorn towers hidden at the edge of the forest or set out upon the plain, where a desolate man guards a cluster of switch levers and hardly knows of the outer world, save through the clicking of his telegraph key or the rush of the trains passing below his perch. He knows each of these. If his is a junction tower or a point where two busy lines of track intersect or cross one another, it is his duty to set the proper switches and their governing signals.

It seems a simple enough thing, and it is. But even the simple things in railroading must be executed with extreme care. If the towerman set those switches and signals 319 times in the course of a day, they must be set absolutely correct 319 times. There can be no slurring in this work.

Those men in the towers have their own records of bravery. They are the sentinels of the railroad, and faithful sentinels they are. The lonely tower, like so many other scenes of railroad activity, gives long opportunity for thought and meditation; and so it is not so strange, after all, that one of them has recently given the country a most distinguished essayist upon national railroad conditions.

There are even humbler positions in the operating service, each of them demanding a fine loyalty and a fair measure of ability. Even the young boy who draws a baggage-truck knows that the path of advancement starts at his very feet; and the humble track-walker feels that a good part of the railroad safety and the railroad responsibility rests upon his broad shoulders. His is also a forlorn task, as he trudges back and forth over a section of line, hammer and wrench in hand, looking for the broken rail or other defect, slight in itself, but capable of infinite harm.

By day his task is dreary and arduous enough. By night it is far more so. With his lantern in hand he must patrol the line faithfully, even if the wind howl about him and the snow come to block his progress. The passengers in the fast express trains that whirl past him and who see, if they see anything at all without, only a blotch of a tiny spark of light, do not know that it is a part of their protection. There is a deal of “behind the scenes” in railroad operation.

And so it goes. There are hundreds of hand-switchmen who make the safe path for the train and upon each of them hangs responsibility. It is a trite saying that each of them knows that, and that each lives up to the full measure of his responsibility.

The station-agent, even in the smallest towns, has a less lonely time. He comes in contact with the outside world, and ofttimes his life goes quite to the other extreme. A local train may be due within three minutes, and here comes Aunt Mary Clark, delayed until the train is already whistling the station stop. Aunt Mary is deaf and it takes her some time to buy her ticket and to ask endless questions which must bring an endless string of answers. At that very moment the agent’s telegraph sounder begins to call him. A message, upon which the safety of the operation of that train depends, is being poured into his ear, and he cannot afford to miss a single click of that instrument; the responsibility will be his if anything goes wrong in its delivery. On top of all this some commercial traveller may be clamoring for the checking of his trunk. The representative of the railroad in the small town has to keep his wits about him in such times.

Of course, if the town is of considerable size he may have a staff about him. In such a case, he may have a baggage-room with baggageman and baggage-handlers installed; he may have assistants to mind the telegraph instrument and to sell tickets, other assistants to look after the freight. He may even attain to the dignity of a station master in uniform or else have such a dignitary reporting to him.

But in the majority of railroad stations throughout the United States the station-agent is the staff; he is lucky if he has a man to “spell” him in his “off” hours. He probably is the agent of the express company in addition, and probably the agent of the telegraph company, too, which, by arrangement with the railroad, transacts a general commercial business over its wires. There are frequent instances when the local post-office is situated within the depot and the agent proves the versatility of his profession by acting as postmaster, too. He serves many masters, as you can see, and not all of these are outside of the railroad. He is not only answerable to the superintendent, in almost every case he is freight-agent, too, making out the bills of lading and figuring the complicated rate sheet. For this part of his work he is under the control of the general freight-agent. The general passenger-agent is also his superior officer. To him he must account accurately for his ticket sales, and that is not always a very easy matter. The question of passenger rates is a fairly complicated one.

Still, the agent must not only be able to figure the rate to South Paris, Me., or to Oshkosh, Wis., within two minutes, but he must make out a long and correct ticket within that time, while the railroad’s patron demands information about some branch line connection on another system a thousand miles away. The country station-agent earns every cent of his humble salary. He works long hours; and then occasionally one of the railroad’s travelling representatives will drop in upon him and casually suggest that in his leisure time he might get out and solicit a little business for the company!

There is not much loafing at the little yellow depot in the country. Sometimes a group of trainmen from some freight awaiting orders will gather there to swap stories and the keen wit of the railroad. These are the exceptions. The most times are the times of long, hard grind, work, work, work like the men out upon the trains. This railroad army is truly the army of hard work. It was gathered for labor.

Yet the station-agent leaning over his telegraph instrument in the bay of his office, and watching the Limited scurry by the little depot, and seeing the president’s big and gay private car hitched on behind, knows that that very executive in charge of many miles of railroad and thousands of men, came from another little country depot like this. The time may yet come when he himself will have a private car and a deal of authority. There is a great goal for every man in the railroad service.

CHAPTER XVI